Communicating Gender

Suzanne Romaine

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781135679439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Tecniche di scrittura e presentazione

Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, Suzanne Romaine's main concern is to show how language and discourse play key roles in understanding and communicating gender and culture. In addition to linguistics--which provides the starting point and central focus of the book--she draws on the fields of anthropology, biology, communication, education, economics, history, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. The text covers the "core" areas in the study of language and gender, including how and where gender is indexed in language, how men and women speak, how children acquire gender differentiated language, and sexism in language and language reform. Although most of the examples are drawn primarily from English, other European languages and non-European languages, such as Japanese are considered. The text is written in an accessible way so that no prior knowledge of linguistics is necessary to understand the chapters containing linguistic analysis. Each chapter is followed by exercises and discussion questions to facilitate the book's use as a classroom text. The author reviews scholarly treatments of gender, and then uses her own data material from the corpora of spoken and written English usage. Special features include an examination of contemporary media sources such as newspapers, advertising, and television; a discussion of women's speculative fiction; a study of gender and advertising, with special attention paid to the role played by language in these domains; and a review of French feminist thought, particularly as it relates to the issue of language reform.

CHAPTER
1
Doing Gender

Language is part of man’s nature, he did not create it. We are always inclined to imagine naively that there was some period in the beginning when a fully evolved man discovered someone else like him, equally evolved, and between the two of them language gradually took shape. This is pure fiction. We can never reach man separated from language, and we can never see him inventing it. We can never reach man reduced to himself, and thinking up ways of conceptualizing the existence of someone else. What we find in the world are men endowed with speech, speaking to other men, and language gives the clue to the very definition of man. (Benveniste, 1971, p. 224)

DOING AND DISPLAYING GENDER

Our biological sex is determined at birth by factors beyond our control, yet being born male or female is probably the most important feature of our lives. The first question generally asked about a new born baby is whether it is a boy or girl, just as the first thing we notice when we see someone for the first time is whether the person is male or female. Almost every official form we fill out requires us to say whether we are male or female. Physical appearance, dress, behavior, and language provide some of the most important means of identifying ourselves daily to others as male or female. When we see a baby dressed in pink with a frilly bonnet, we conclude it must be a girl. Even though unisex fashions have made gender boundaries increasingly less rigid, gender is still one of the most visible human traits; 80% of U.S. 2-year-olds can readily distinguish males from females on the basis of purely cultural cues like hairstyle and clothing.

These clues are gender displays or indexes, whose surface manifestations may alter culturally and historically. Such displays may also be intertwined with and reinforced by other distinctions—for example, titles like Miss or Mrs., which mark someone not only as female, but also as single or married, or by different items of clothing worn by girls/boys, or married/unmarried women. Among the Bedouins of the Egyptian western desert, for example, married women wear black veils and red belts, whereas unmarried girls wear kerchiefs on their heads and around their waists.

Gender is thus an inherently communicative process. Not only do we communicate gender in these ways, but we also “do it” with our words. Because we construct and enact gender largely through discourse, this book is about the crucial role of language in particular and communication more generally in doing gender and displaying ourselves as gendered beings. If we hear someone talking about children named Tommy and Jimmy, we assume they are boys. When we read about scientists in the newspapers, most of us still have mental images of men, even though there are now many women scientists. When we hear someone describe a color as “baby blue,” “carnation pink,” “lavender,” or “mauve,” we imagine the speaker to be a woman rather than a man. When most people read a newspaper headline Doctor seduced patient, they assume the doctor is male and the patient, female (see chap. 4 for further analysis). When you read the opening epigraph to this chapter about language being part of “man’s nature,” did you think of women being included or excluded? Did “man” create language?

The use of the term man instead of a more gender-neutral term such as human(s), humanity, people, and so on obscures women’s contributions to language and its evolution. Yet even seemingly gender-neutral terms such as person, member of society, and so forth are often still interpreted as masculine by default, as in this example from sociolinguist William Labov (1972a, p. xiii), where he urged linguists to turn their attention to studying “language as it is used in everyday life by members of the social order, that vehicle of communication in which they argue with their wives, joke with their friends, and deceive their enemies.” Nowadays, such usage would be called “sexist” and many publishing houses have specific guidelines telling authors how to avoid language that either excludes women or stereotypes them in negative ways. These are conscious choices we as language users can make, and thanks to several decades of feminist reform, decisions not to make them increasingly stand out. During O.J.Simpson’s trial in Los Angeles the courtroom paused to consider whether a male defense attorney was being sexist when he accused a female prosecuting attorney of acting “hysterical” (see chap. 2). Conversely, to accuse a male of hysteria (or being a wimp), as the press did George Bush in his unsuccessful campaign for reelection to the presidency in 1992, was to suggest he was effeminate and therefore unfit for the office. In many areas of public life so-called “gender-neutral” language now prevails, university departments now have chairpersons or chairs, and some restaurants have waitpersons or waitrons (see chap. 10). Challenging naming practices symbolic of male possession and dominance of women, such as titles like Mrs./Miss, are part of women’s linguistic revolt.

The claim that language is sexist is by no means new. In 1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton rewrote the Bible to highlight the unjust ways in which women were spoken and written about. Nearly a hundred years later Dale Spender (1980a) brought the association between language and patriarchy to the media’s attention with the claim that language is man-made. Similarly, Robin Lakoff’s (1975) arguments about the political implications of what she called “women’s language” put the study of women and language on the map. Lakoff showed how language served to keep women in their place. Women inherit their subordinate place as each new generation inherits sexist words. Dictionaries, grammars, and even artificial languages have been made primarily by men. What if language were “woman-made” instead of man-made? (See chap. 10 for discussion of feminist dictionaries.)

There is still no agreement on the question of whether language is sexist, and if so, wherein the origins of its sexism lie, or on the directions reform should take. Languages may vary in terms of the amount and type of sexism they display, which implies they will require different types of reform. Although English-speaking feminists have paid critical attention to language, it has been at the very heart of the French feminist debate. If the world is constructed and given meaning through language and language is “man-made,” then our history, philosophy, government, laws, and religion are products of a male way of perceiving and organizing the world. Because this knowledge has been transmitted for centuries, it appears “natural,” “objective,” a “master” discourse beyond question. Language thus holds the key to challenging and changing male hegemony.

If women’s oppression has deep linguistic roots, then any and all representations, whether of women, men, or any other group, are embedded first in language, and then in politics, culture, economics, history, and so on. This is at least one interpretation I make of Donna Haraway’s (1991, p. 3) claim that “grammar is politics by other means.” Howard Bloch (1991, p. 4) pointed to the central role of language when he said, “misogyny is a way of speaking about, as distinct from doing something to women.” Within the approach I take here, I would claim, unlike Bloch, that speaking about as well as to women in a misogynistic way is equivalent to doing something harmful to them. The harm done does not need to be physical, but can arise from the creation of a hostile verbal environment. Indeed, this view now receives support from legal definitions of the term sexual harassment (see chaps. 7 and 8). In a 1984 report on women in the courts Robert N.Wilentz, then Chief Justice of New Jersey, noted:

There’s no room for the funny joke and the not-so-funny joke, there’s no room for conscious, inadvertent, sophisticated, clumsy, or any other kind of gender bias, and there’s certainly no room for gender bias that affects substantive rights. There’s no room because it hurts and it insults. It hurts… psychologically and economically, (cited in Troemel-Ploetz, 1991, pp. 455–456)

Yet we needn’t speak in words in order to do harm. A popular perfume advertisement showed a woman wearing a miniskirt and high heels (and presumably also the fragrance being advertised). The caption read: “Make a statement without saying a word.” The proverbial expression about a picture being worth a thousand words applies here. The ad glamorizes the woman as a sexual object, suggesting her availability, and how her attractiveness can be enhanced if she but wears the right perfume. The ad also conveys the message that a woman’s appearance and her scent communicate her sexual intent. She does not need to say anything: Her consent is implied in the way she dresses and the perfume she is being urged to put on. She has “asked for it” without saying anything (see chaps. 8 and 9).

In focusing attention on gender as a dynamic process that people index, do, display, communicate, or perform, gender itself has become a verb. This active view of gender is also consistent with bell hooks’s preference for talking about “women’s movement” (or “feminist movement”) without the definite article, rather than “the women’s movement,” to emphasize activity and becoming rather than static being. Likewise, Judith Butler’s (1993) notion of performance is central to the idea of gender as something we do (see chap. 2). Both talk and actions can be gendered. Although we sometimes think of communication in a narrow sense as being focused on language in its spoken, written, or even signed forms, my approach in this book takes a much broader view. Conversations, newspapers, television, advertisements, scientific and academic journals, literature, popular music, and movies are all forms of communication that send messages about as well as shape our understandings of gender. They are in effect all languages or discourses of gender involving more than words; they may include gestures or “body language,” images, and ways of dressing.

When we see or hear gender being indexed or displayed through any channel of communication, our stereotypes may be activated. Gender stereotypes are sets of beliefs about the attributes of men or women, such as that men are stronger and more aggressive, women are passive, talk more than men, and so on. Stereotypes are often associated with and not easily separated from other salient variables such as race, class, culture, age, context, and so forth. Stereotypes about how men and women speak reveal insights into our attitudes about what men and women are like or what we think they are supposed to be like. Perceived gender differences are often the result of these stereotypes about such differences, rather than the result of the actual existence of real differences. The linguistic basis for the media’s accusation that George Bush was a wimp rested on the claim that he used words stereotyped as “feminine,” such as “splash” of coffee and “having a chat.” The image of the gossiping woman shows how easy it is to confuse expectations with actual behavior. How is the supposedly overly talkative woman to be reconciled with women’s claims that they have been silenced? Who really talks more: men or women?

Much of the early research on language and gender devoted a great deal of energy to addressing the issue of “women’s language” using laundry lists of specific linguistic features such as hedging (e.g., it’s kind of late, you know), the use of tag questions (e.g., we’re going at 6 o’clock, aren’t we?), and so on, believed to be tied to women’s subordinate status. This approach is doomed to naiveté and circularity unless it acknowledges that the same linguistic features can, when used by different persons in different contexts and cultures, often mean very different things.

This is so because different cultures vary in their expectations about what it means to be a man or woman. Western societies have a long tradition of handbooks written by both men and women showing what women had to do to be good housewives and mothers, or what it meant to be a gentleman. Women today are still faced with a barrage of advice from women’s magazines, TV talk shows, and popular books. Certainly in the 19th century gender determined more of an individual’s options than it does today, but even now gender can affect our expectations, as well as our activities, manners, and almost everything else.

Although language is central to our constructions of the meaning of gender, much of language is ambiguous and depends on context for its interpretation, a factor far more important than gender. On closer examination, there are few, if any, context-independent gender differences in language. In some instances men talk more than women, whereas in other situations women talk more then men. As I show in chapter 6, silence can be both a sign of oppression and resistance to it. The same words can take on different meanings and significance depending on who uses them in a particular context. Imagine the words “How about meeting for a drink later, honey?” said by a male customer to a waitress he does not know, or said by a woman to her husband as they talk over their schedules for the day. Such examples suggest that we need to seek our explanations for gender differences in terms of the communicative functions expressed by certain forms used in particular contexts by specific speakers. They also point to the complexity involved in reforming sexist language. We cannot simply propose to ban words like sweetie or honey from public communication because they can be construed as offensive in some contexts. Some words such as lady (and even gender itself) are in certain contexts euphemisms, terms coined to avoid embarrassment at reference to the unmen tionable (i.e., woman and sex), whereas others are instances of public name-calling (see chap. 5). What we must try to change are the conventional uses of language in sexist ways. Otherwise, we get trapped in a circular argument: Men have power because men define meanings and men define meanings because men have power.

Many questions come to mind about how everyday talk and action get gendered. From a linguistic perspective, we must consider at the very least how sex and gender are actually marked in language (see chaps. 3, 4, and 5), how men and women speak across a range of different settings (see chap. 6), how children acquire whatever linguistic differences we may find (see chap. 7), how language can be sexist and how it can be reformed (see chap. 10). Many studies have identified systematic male-female differences in many languages. These range from differences in vocabulary, to differences in linguistic forms (e.g., phonology and syntax), to whole communicative styles, such as politeness, directness, and silence.

Although I give English more detailed treatment than other languages, I look at evidence from a number of languages, including other European languages such as French, German, Italian, the Nordic languages, as well as a variety of non-Western ones such as Japanese, Chinese, and Dyirbal, and even invented languages like Láadan. Japanese, for instance, is often presented as an example of a language showing extraordinary sensitivity to the social context in which it is used. There is also a long tradition of belief that Japanese has a true women’s language, going back to studies of the language used by ladies of the imperial court. Much of the discussion focused on certain words having to do with food, clothing, and other domestic concerns. For example, the male word for rice is mesi and the female word gugo. These forms are believed to have spread out from the court into more general usage among Japanese women. Yet alleged differences in male and female speech represent only part of the picture. We must also look at how men and women are spoken about, how they are portrayed in cultural discourses in the wider sense I referred to earlier, and how ways of speaking and acting fit into cultural beliefs about the roles of women and men.

GENDER IN CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE

It is no accident that many of those engaged in the study of language and gender are in fact not linguists by training, but practitioners of other disciplines. We can see from this range of questions I have raised that gender is so pervasive a feature of our everyday lives that we cannot study it comprehensively without reference to a number of scientific disciplines such as anthropology, biology, communication, education, economics, feminist theory, history, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Although each field of study has made important contributions to our understanding of the complexity of gender, it is all too easy to lose sight of the whole picture. We must work to make the connections between these different disciplines and not simply try to graft gender onto already existing fields of research, as suggested by titles of countless books such as Gender and X, where X can be anything ranging from anthropology to history, race, language, and so forth. Such titles suggest an additive rather than integrative perspective. In order to be coherent theoretically, the study of gender must involve a dialogue across disciplines, and that is the perspective I have adopted in this book.

Each of the disciplines I mentioned has naturally had its own concerns and tackled the study of gender in different ways. Anthropology, for instance, has been devoted to the study of cross-cultural differences in human behavior, which has led to skepticism about the extent to which men are “naturally” stronger, more aggressive and dominant than women. Indeed, one of the best ways to examine the interaction of society with gender is to look at other cultures with quite different arrangements for the sexes where the arrangements are regarded as equally as “natural” as our own. Despite prevailing beliefs in Western culture that have conceived of male superiority and dominance in both religious and scientific terms, male dominance is not universal or inevitable. There are both human and animal groups among which neither males dominate females, nor females dominate males. There are also societies in which women have both political and economic power, and cultures where there is minimal differentiation of gender roles. In short, there is an astonishing variety of family forms and child-raising arrangements.

If biology alone were responsible for behavior patterns, then we would not find such great cultural diversity. Being male or female is done differently in different cultures. In her work in Papua New Guinea, for example, Margaret Mead (1949) observed both Arapesh men and women behaving in a way we would think of as feminine by western standards. Other cultures are much less gender polarized than our own. Clifford Geertz (1995) described Balinese society as “unisex” and “egalitarian.” Men and women wear almost identical clothing, and even though each sex has different tasks, the male/female distinction is largely irrelevant in everyday life. Within Balinese cosmology male and female creative forces stand in complete and perfect unity within the supreme deity, Siwa.

Balinese society contrasts sharply with our own, where both religion and science have sought to provide support for long-standing cultural beliefs that people are either male or female, but not both or neither (see chap. 2). Some cultures readily allow individuals to assume gender identities opposite to their biological sex. On Pohnpei in Micronesia, Ward (1979) described how after a teenage girl named Maria began to behave like a boy, family and community met and held a feast to declare her a boy. They cut her hair, dressed her as a boy, and called her Mario. The Tewa people of the U.S. Southwest recognize a category of indiv...