Language, Gender, and Sexuality

An Introduction

Scott F. Kiesling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351042406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Gender, and Sexuality offers a panoramic and accessible introduction to the ways in which linguistic patterns are sensitive to social categories of gender and sexuality, as well as an overview of how speakers use language to create and display gender and sexuality. This book includes discussions of trans/non-binary/genderqueer identities, embodiment, new media, and the role of language and interaction in sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Drawing on an international range of examples to illustrate key points, this book addresses the questions of:

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• how language categorizes the gender/sexuality world in both grammar and interaction;

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• how speakers display, create, and orient to gender, sexuality, and desire in interaction;

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• how and why people display different ways of speaking based on their gender/sexual identities.

Aimed at students with no background in linguistics or gender studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying language, gender, and sexuality for the first time.

Chapter 1

More than talking difference

This book does pretty much what you would expect from the title: It provides an introduction to the relationship between language on the one hand, and gender and sexuality on the other. When you first think of language and gender, you might think of how languages encode gender – things like pronouns and address terms like Mr. and Mrs. And when you think of language and sexuality, you might think of how sometimes it’s possible to guess someone’s sexual orientation based on how they talk.¹ While there is a section in Chapter 5 where I discuss each of these ways that gender and sexuality intersect with language, the book is about a lot more than that.

This book is about a wider collaboration between language, gender, and sexuality: Gender is implicated in all the ways that language is used and understood by humans. These connections exist because language is not grammar in a book, nor a dictionary, nor even just the words and rules in your head. Rather, language is inherently a social entity. While we like to talk about languages existing as separate entities, they don’t come into being until they are used when people talk (or sign² or write) with each other. Moreover, language is something we ‘have’ as both an individual capacity and a community; your language is partially a capacity of your mind, but it is learned through talking to others. And speakers do more than convey information. For starters, we do things with words (as the philosopher John Austin pointed out over half a century ago; Austin 1962): We order people around, request permission, insult, beg, suggest, and on and on. We also communicate our relationships with people by being, for example, polite or impolite, complimentary, joking, mean, grumpy, cheery, and so on. Finally, you have probably already guessed that language communicates aspects of our identity, for example, in the way you can hear a familiar voice and know who it is just from the voice, or hear a new voice and guess (correctly) something about that person’s identity, such as the example above about hearing a voice and guessing that someone is gay. Gender is one of those identity categories that we attach to voices almost immediately. Even more intriguing is that the way we hear voices change depending on what we know about the person. If we expect them to be smart, we are likely to hear language that makes them seem smarter. If we know someone is a woman or a man, we hear their voices slightly differently (see Chapter 7; see also Strand 1999 and Campbell-Kibler 2008).

All of this might make it seem that language simply ‘reflects’ the social world: We recognize categories of people, and language works in such a way as to reflect those categories. But the relationship between social category and language, as we will see, is much more complicated. Language simultaneously reflects the social world and helps to create that social world. In other words, it doesn’t just reflect some pre-existing gender categories that are ‘out there,’ but actually helps to create those categories for communities of speakers. Moreover, speakers use language to signal what they understand about those categories – that is, what they understand to be the kinds of people who are feminine or masculine, what counts as masculinity and femininity, and even whether there are two mutually exclusive categories that exhaustively complete the system of gender categorization.

Language is used by people to do social things in interaction, language is used to reflect the social categories people identify with, and language helps to create and define those very categories. In the main chapters of this book, we’ll explore how each of these three processes work with respect to gender and sexual identity. Before we get there, in the next few chapters we’ll get some background understandings about theories of gender and about linguistics. Chapter 2 is about language and how linguists study it. You already have a lot of ideas about language before you start studying linguistics, and if this is your first encounter with linguistics, it’s important to understand how linguists think about language and approach its study (hint: it’s not about telling people how to speak). In Chapter 3, we approach gender, sexuality, and identity as a subject on its own. There are of course whole courses and books and multi-volume encyclopedias devoted to this subject, so it will be necessarily selective and set a baseline understanding for what I mean when I’m talking about these concepts in the rest of the book. The final introductory chapter (see Chapter 5) contains a short discussion and history of the subfield of linguistics called language, gender, and sexuality. It’s a wide-ranging field at this point (see, for example, Hall and Barrett in press and Ehrlich et al. 2014), and this chapter will help to situate the field and explain why some things have been studied and some not.

Once we’re finished with those chapters and have the foundation laid, we can delve into the particulars of relationships among language, gender, and sexuality in the three main chapters of the book. Chapter 6 explores the ways in which language creates categories of gender and sexuality, and the ways that people use language to do that categorization and communicate what they expect people of different categories to be like. Then we turn to interaction, and the ways that meanings are created in interaction (also called discourse or conversation), and how those interactional meanings and moves get connected to gender and sexuality. In the final main chapter, we address the ways in which things like a person’s accent are related to their gender and sexual identities, and how these norms circulate and are perpetuated (the fields of sociolinguistic variation and perception). This three-way division into categorization, interaction, and variation is artificial – in real life, people categorize during interaction and relate the categories to the norms and expectations about the people they are talking to all at the same time. So, in the end, I’ll try to get you to think a little more about how all of these facets of language and gender/sexuality work together in language.³

What this book won’t do is exhaustively catalogue all the currents, directions, and literature in language and gender, especially any such research or arguments that aren’t in linguistics. It’s meant to be a very short, general introduction to give you an idea of what researchers know and what the conversation is like in this field, and especially to provide you with an appreciation of its diversity. In other words, it’s meant to be a good starting point for anyone who hasn’t studied language or gender/sexuality. I assume that you haven’t studied either one. So, if you’re a linguist, you might find some of the linguistics simplified, and if you are a gender/sexuality studies person, you’ll find the treatment of gender to be introductory for that field. I hope lots of people reading this are neither linguists nor gender studies majors. Whatever your field, I hope there’s a fact or question somewhere in this book that inspires you to look deeper and ask more questions about how language, gender, and sexuality are intertwined.

Who’s writing this book?

When I read a book, I always have an idea of who the writer is and what, if any, their agenda is. Even in the most dry textbooks, I will often do this (I want to know who is responsible for such aridity!), and I know from experience that especially when people read books about gender, they often guess about the perspective of the author. So I’m here to take some of the guesswork out. If you don’t care about my perspective, then you can skip this section. I especially think it’s important to say something about who I am because in many ways I am not your typical language, gender, and sexuality scholar; many, if not most, such scholars identify themselves to be in some ‘marked’ or ‘less privileged’ social category, especially in terms of gender and sexual identity.⁴ So, if I were to categorize myself in terms of such categories, I’d say that I am a White, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgendered, masculine person (or man⁵ ). It’s interesting to note that most of my colleagues in this field of study are somehow not one of those categories, and it is also interesting to note that people tend to expect language and gender/sexuality scholars to be either female or ‘Queer’ or both. My take on why that might be is that gender and sexuality is not something that people in my social identity categories are forced to think about by their social experiences as much as people in marked categories. However, I’ve always thought about gender, and I’ve always thought that doing it is difficult to manage. That might seem odd from the White, masculine, cisgendered perspective, but my own research has largely been about how these unmarked categories (like White and masculine) maintain their unmarkedness and their power, even while so many people in that category don’t feel powerful. So my research has in large part focused on White, middle-class, heterosexual men, to see how these categories might actually be relevant to their language use, and to discover how this use maintains their hegemonic, or most powerful, position as a group in society. It’s not as easy as you might think, even though most people, least of all the men, don’t notice most of the interactional effort that it takes. Even though I’m a member of this hegemonic group, I come to this field with a feminist perspective, which means that I am sensitive to these power relations and would like in some way to ameliorate the asymmetries of opportunity because of them (I’ll discuss feminism more in Chapter 3).

A word on terminology

Terms for groups of people are a fraught minefield from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that terms for identities and groups often change if members of those groups object to current usage and coin terms that they find better describe who they are. A good example is the term for people we might most accurately term ‘American Slave Descendants’ (a term introduced by Baugh 1991). This group has been referred to in many ways throughout US history, and there is often disagreement within this community itself about what the appropriate term is (as Baugh’s article describes). I’ve chosen to use the term Black (with a corresponding White, both capitalized), but none is perfect, because these categories are social creations and they try to put a huge, diverse group of people into one box. For people from a mainly Spanish-speaking cultural background, I’ll use the current term Latinx in contrast with Anglo. Trans is probably currently the fastest moving target in this area (I’ll just use the term Trans, although it is sometimes written trans*), although the acronym for LGBTQIA+ is another fast moving target (with the ‘Q’ alternately being cited as ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ and the ‘A’ as ‘ally’ or ‘asexual’). For this latter identity/community, I’ll use whatever inclusive term seems best, including ‘non-hegemonic sexuality’ and simply ‘Queer.’ I capitalize all of these categorizing terms (Black, White, Latinx, Anglo, Trans, Queer) to signal that I am referring to a named category which has a clearly thought-out referent, with all the problems of such categories, and in the case of ‘Queer,’ to differentiate it from its use as a slur (the capital is thus a kind of typographical caveat). Finally, we have to think about the terms male/female, woman/man (and related categories like boy/girl), and feminine/masculine. These all have implications for how we think about these categor...