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Part I
Undoing gender studies
Theoretical positionings
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1The rise and fall (and rise) of Mars and Venus in language and gender research1
Jennifer Coates
Editor’s introduction
Leonie Schmidt
A significant area in which gender is constructed is language. There are unambiguous markers of gender that languages affix to speech acts. Most of these may be found in grammar, such as gendered personal pronouns or gendered adverbs. Discussions about the linguistic dominance of the male forms, for example the use of ‘he’ to refer to a person of unknown gender such as ‘the reader,’ and their verbal exclusiveness were taken up by second-wave feminists. They suggested a gender-inclusive or gender-neutral language that would avoid precise gender-specific ascriptions in written and oral communication; for example, through replacing ‘he’ with the singular use of ‘they.’ However, gendered language use also marks the way speakers express themselves in conversations, the way they behave while talking to others, and their conversational strategies in manners that display their identification with, usually, one gender identity. These gendered (socio-)linguistic phenomena are not limited to Roman, Germanic, and Slavic languages, but may be found in languages and speech acts all over the world.
Linguistics is the first discipline to turn to when searching for answers to questions about gender and language. The answers the discipline has been offering have varied significantly over time and place – in fact, research into language and gender has been crucially shaped by paradigm shifts in gender theory over the past decades. The way language systems and pragmatics have been researched has reflected the move away from an assumption of gender dualism toward the notion of plural gendered identities in gender studies. This development has not only opened up new categories in language and gender research, but it has also brought to the surface long-standing normative ideas in the field of linguistics.
Jennifer Coates’s contribution to this volume traces this development of language and gender research since the 1970s. Pointing out both the progress that has been made and the potential for backlash in “The rise and fall (and rise) of Mars and Venus in language and gender research,” the author links developments in gender research with the history of ideas in linguistics. Moreover, she highlights why it may not yet be productive to do away with gender binaries entirely but how they could still be useful for furthering feminist goals and gender equality on a political level.
Author’s introduction
Jennifer Coates
In this chapter I examine the ways in which conceptualizations of gender have changed over the past 35 years and explore the manner in which this has impacted upon language and gender research. Ideas of gender have shifted constantly as competing social scientific theories have come in and out of fashion. I argue that, in addition to these academic models, the popular myth of “Mars and Venus” has been equally as significant for linguistic research. This myth argues that divisions between women and men, between the feminine and the masculine, are fundamental to the operation of contemporary societies. Children learn to take their place in society as apprentice women or apprentice men, and one of the key ways in which they learn to perform femininity or masculinity is through language. As a result, in all societies, certain linguistic forms and strategies become marked for gender.
My aim in this chapter is to examine some of these linguistic markers, and to show how sociolinguists have focused on different markers at different times, as interest in different aspects of language has evolved and as different theoretical frameworks have evolved to make sense of the linguistic patterns found. At the same time, I want to show the way in which the Mars and Venus myth has waxed and waned over time in language and gender research, and how this waxing and waning correlates with changing concepts of gender.
I wrote this chapter because it seems important to acknowledge how much language and gender studies have changed since the 1970s, when I started to work in the area. From a rather static view of women and men as different (and unequal) has developed a sense of gender as fluid and multiple. The original male–female binary has been replaced by a complex and shifting landscape inhabited by cis-gender, trans-gender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. The new challenge to the binary is made explicit in the phrase ‘non-binary,’ a phrase which gained international prominence after a 20-year-old student said to President Obama during a Q & A session, “I’m coming out to you as a non-binary person” (April 23, 2016).
The second reason I wrote this chapter was to argue that, however much progress certain social and political subgroups have achieved in terms of disrupting binary understandings of gender, it remains the case that dominant discourses, worldwide, continue to represent gender as binary. These discourses have to be recognized and challenged if we are to succeed in defeating sexism and misogyny.
Introduction
In this chapter I look at the ways in which conceptualizations of gender have changed over the past 35 years and will explore the ways in which this has impacted upon language and gender research. Ideas of gender have shifted as competing social scientific theories have come in and out of fashion; moreover, sociolinguists have been slow to pay attention to these theories. But I will argue that just as significant for linguistic research has been the myth of Mars and Venus. By ‘the Mars and Venus myth,’ I mean the popular idea that people can be divided unproblematically into two groups known as women and men. The human tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions may be traced back to the works of Aristotle (384–322BC). His Table of Opposites listed binaries such as In–Out and Odd–Even as well as Male–Female, and was hugely influential on subsequent thinking.
Evidence of the power of this myth was the phenomenal success of John Gray’s book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, first published in 1992. In his introduction, Gray claimed: “Not only do men and women communicate differently but they think, feel, perceive, react, respond, love, need, and appreciate differently. They almost seem to be from different planets, speaking different languages and needing different nourishment” (Gray 1992: 5). Despite these claims having no basis in fact, millions of people bought the book and claimed to find it helpful in their relationships. The book clearly tapped into something important in Western consciousness.
Twenty years later, language and gender researchers are well aware of the dangers of binary thinking, but even so we need to acknowledge the fact that myths are highly functional: they help us to deal with the complexity of everyday life. The Mars and Venus myth encapsulates the fact that divisions between women and men, between the feminine and the masculine, are fundamental to the operation of contemporary societies; all societies promote communities of practice in which norms of femininity and masculinity are established and perpetuated (Ochs and Taylor 1995; Abu-Haidar 1995; Tenenbaum 2009; Eckert 1996; Maybin 2009; Swann 2009). Children learn to take their place in society as apprentice women or apprentice men, and one of the key ways they learn to ‘do’ femininity or masculinity is through language. As a result, in all societies, certain linguistic forms, certain linguistic strategies become marked for gender. Gender may be indexed directly or indirectly through the use of these linguistic markers (Ochs 1992).
My aim here is to look at some of these linguistic markers, and to show how sociolinguists have focused on different markers at different times, as interest in different aspects of language has evolved and as different theoretical frameworks have evolved to make sense of the linguistic patterns found. At the same time, I want to show how the Mars and Venus myth has waxed and waned over time in language and gender research, and how this waxing and waning fits in with changing ideas of gender. This chapter will demonstrate that the label “language and gender” covers a wide range of research from discourse analysis and social psychology to pragmatics and cognitive linguistics; what all this research has in common is that it deals with language and its relationship to the social variable, gender. At the risk of presenting an over-tidy picture, I will summarize the way in which language and gender research has developed, dividing my summary into three sections which correspond with three phases in language and gender research: the first will discuss language and gender research in the 1970s and early 1980s; the second will focus on the 1980s and 1990s, an era when the Mars and Venus myth was at its height; while the third will explore the waning of the Mars and Venus myth in the face of challenges from postmodern critiques of binaries and essentialism.2
These three phases correspond with changing conceptualizations of gender. In the first phase, gender was conceptualized in biological terms, with the binary expressed as male/female. In the second phase, gender was conceptualized in cultural terms, with the binary expressed as masculine/feminine. In the third phase binaries have been deconstructed, with gender expressed as multiple (multiple masculinities and multiple femininities). At the same time there has been a queering of gender, with a new understanding that gender and sexuality are inextricably linked.
Phase 1 (1970s and 1980s)
In the early years of language and gender study (i.e., in the early 1970s), the term used by sociolinguists to refer to what we now call ‘gender’ was ‘sex.’ In linguistics, the term ‘gender’ was reserved for “a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes [such as nouns and adjectives] displaying such contrasts as masculine/feminine/neuter, animate/inanimate, etc” (Crystal 1980: 158). Linguistic analysis of ‘language and sex’ was oriented to the binary male/female, a binary based on biology rather than on culture. For example, Peter Trudgill, who carried out research on social class stratification in Norwich in the 1970s, observed that there were some interesting links between ‘sex’ and pronunciation. Later, in 1983, he published an article called “Sex and Covert Prestige” in which he states that “we present some data which illustrate quite clearly the phenomenon of sex differentiation in language in one variety of British English” (Trudgill 1983: 169). My early publications also refer to ‘sex’ rather than to ‘gender.’ The subtitle of the first edition of Women, Men and Language (1986) was “A Sociolinguistic Account of Sex Differences in Language,” and the subtitle of the book I co-edited with Deborah Cameron in 1989 (Women in their Speech Communities) was “New Perspectives on Language and Sex.”3 For English sociolinguists of the 1970s, ‘sex’ simply denoted ‘gender.’
In the UK, there was growing interest in the subject of language and ‘sex differences’: it became very popular with students and, as a result, from the mid-1970s most sociolinguistics courses included the topic. Unfortunately, the ambiguity of the word ‘sex’ could lead to misunderstandings: on a British Council trip to Bulgaria in 1980 I gave a public lecture at Sofia University on “Language and Sex,” which drew a huge audience, many of whom had come for the wrong reasons!
Early sociolinguistic research exploring the role of ‘sex’ in language use adopted a quantitative approach. This seems in retrospect to be an inevitable first step, as linguistics was a new academic discipline in Britain which was trying to position itself as a science in order to acquire some of the prestige attached to scientific subjects. This differed from continental Europe, where linguistics was already an established discipline, with de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique generale (1916) revered as a seminal work. By contrast, in Britain it was not possible to study linguistics as an undergraduate subject until the 1970s, and the confused identity of linguistics is demonstrated by the fact that departments could be found in Faculties of the arts and humanities or in social science, or in cognitive science. The new branch of linguistics, sociolinguistics, had to try extra hard, as it explicitly brought human beings and social life into the linguistic picture. Thus a quantitative approach fitted better with the idea of ‘linguistic scienc...
