Feminist Perspectives on Language

Margaret Gibbon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317880271
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Feminist Perspectives Series seeks to provide concise, accessible and engaging introductions to key feminist topics and debates. The texts in the series are designed to be used on a wide range of courses exploring feminist issues and are written by experienced teachers who are also well known in their respective fields. Each book in the series includes the most up-to-date statistics, research data, key sources and suggestions for further reading. Feminist Perspectives On Language provides an accessible introduction to this complex area. It redresses the balance of current feminist texts which tend to concentrate on discourse analysis and fail to connect with feminist thought in other disciplines such as sociology and politics. The text is divided into two parts, the first looks at language itself, how we learn language exploring such questions as; Does language free or trap us? Does our language affect how we come to understand the world around us? Is our language sexist? If so, does that reflect male dominance in society? and many more issues. Part Two explores questions of methodology and interpretation examining language in use, communication styles and the analysis of conversation.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter outline

This chapter has the following aims:

• to introduce the general aims of the book as a whole

• to introduce four different strands of feminism and the views of language associated with them

• to provide an outline of the remainder of the book

Aims of this book

This book, written for students of women’s studies, linguistics, communications and media studies as well as the interested lay reader, aims to provide an up-to-date account of developments in research focusing upon the interaction of language and gender. Such research, conducted since the early 1970s, ranges over many themes and draws on a number of disciplines. Moreover, as the title of the book suggests, there is not one but several perspectives on language within feminism. The book aims to provide a short and accessible introduction to the topic and to provide guidance for further reading for those interested in pursuing any of the lines of enquiry outlined in it.

One of my reasons for writing the book was my own uneasy feeling about the growing popularity of books telling couples, but especially heterosexual women, how to save their marriage by tuning in to the different talking styles of women and men. I felt strongly that if communication styles were different (and I wasn’t convinced of that), they were also unequal. Also, I felt that language did not play such an important role in relationships. Surely other problems explained marital disharmony: arguments about sharing of responsibility for housework and childcare, control of money, access to space and leisure, sexual difficulties, unemployment, alcoholism, violence, and many other issues seemed to figure far more than language in the conversations I enjoyed with married women friends. Focusing on communication styles seemed to me a way of avoiding the bigger issues of inequality in heterosexual relationships and in society in general. Even if, in researching the popular and academic literature on women’s and men’s conversational styles, I were to find proof of such differences, I would want to know how they come about, how they are acquired and who benefits or whose aims are served by having women and men talking at cross purposes. Thus, one of the aims of the book became the investigation of sex-difference research and its popularization, along with the desire to understand why feminists look for sex differences in linguistic behaviour at all.

Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s had fine-tuned theories of gender to show how arbitrary and constructed most differences are between women and men. Surely looking for sex differences in language use could only contribute to society’s common sense and erroneous views that women and men were just different, the basic belief underlying male domination. This system depends on reifying female–male difference and naturalizing the gendered social arrangements we come to take for granted. Why would feminists, of all people, begin research by asking ‘What are the differences between women and men?’ as opposed to ‘Are there differences between women and men?’ or ‘How do women use language to signal womanliness as defined by our culture? How do men use language to signal manliness?’

My uneasiness with the formulation of research topics means that I have foregrounded questions of methodology and interpretation in Part II of this book, which deals with language in use, communication styles and the analysis of conversation. Despite reservations about sex-difference research models, I have attempted to present the findings of such research as thoroughly and as fairly as research from the two main competing positions: the dominance paradigm, which focuses on inequality and power rather than difference, and the postmodernist perspective, which attempts to highlight the malleability of gender and thus challenge the dichotomy underlying both difference and dominance perspectives.

The aims of Part I of the book are quite different. Rather than asking questions about users of language, their behaviour, patterns of conversational interaction and so on, the first part of the book looks at language itself. We learn a language without difficulty normally – at least our first or native tongue. The dominant linguistic model argues that humans are, from birth, ‘wired’ for language. We tend to take language for granted and, despite frequent misunderstandings, slips of the tongue and unsuccessful attempts at communication, generally think of language as a simple tool we use to share information and express feelings and ideas. Or as a vehicle. Our usual metaphors for language tend to refer to everyday objects we can use and control. Metaphor is always significant. We are supposedly ‘wired’ for language. This metaphor views the human being, or the brain, as an electronic circuit board, an updating of a 500-year-old view of the human being as a machine. Language is a ‘tool’ or ‘vehicle’. We use tools to do what we want; we control them. We drive vehicles; we control them.

But what if language controlled us? What if, rather than being a vehicle we could drive wherever we wanted to go, which served us and our needs, language turned out to be a prison which limited our capacity for vision, movement, innovative thinking, imagination? Does language set us free or trap us? Does our language affect how we come to understand the world around us? Is our language sexist? If so, does that reflect male dominance in society? Is language a mirror? Or does sexist language somehow help to create sexism?

Feminists seek to change society in radical ways. To do this, we need to understand how it works, to identify sites where we can intervene to make changes. Most human interaction involves language in some way: to fail to teach a child to speak, to listen, to interact verbally with others would constitute severe neglect. We are the talking animal. Language is so central, so fundamental to social interaction, to our becoming who we are that no one interested in influencing and inflecting their society can ignore it.

Part I of this book introduces theories about language, about the relationship of language to culture and society and about how women and men are spoken of in language, in this case in English. Its primary aim is to raise awareness of language and its intricacies, to share the sense of awe it inspires in me.

Feminisms and language

Feminism is, as well as a practice, a philosophy which challenges social arrangements regarding women’s and men’s relative value, status, positions, roles and opportunities. There is not a single, unified body of feminist thought. On the contrary, feminists differ in what they focus on as central to women’s social oppression in the present and in their views of the ultimate cause of women’s exploitation, marginalization and devaluing in society. Making sense of the wide range of views, positions and counter positions can be difficult, and when we try to categorize feminists we tend to force a structure on what may better be viewed as a nebulous movement. Nevertheless, I will propose just such a schema, dividing feminists into four main groupings, each corresponding to a particular view of language. In drawing up this typology, I am more than aware that the positions within it overlap, and that many feminists support language proposals from other feminist groupings whose views they may not share on other issues. Feminists who do not believe that language reform can work, do nonetheless reform their own language and encourage others to do so, to give a simple example. Other views, however, can engender enormous resistance from opposed groups.

Liberal feminism

Detractors of liberal feminism, such as radical and socialist feminists, argue that it ‘changes the women not the world’. Rooted in eighteenth-century liberal philosophy, this type of feminism views the women’s struggle as one of equal rights with men. Noting that men enjoyed rights denied to women, early feminists fought for the right to vote and be elected to political office; to own, transmit and inherit property in their own name; for equal access to education at all levels; for employment opportunities equal to men’s; and for custody of their own children. The struggle is not over – the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified in the USA for example – but this movement does have many successes to its credit. In most Western countries today, girls as well as boys are educated, women may engage in employment without a husband’s permission, may exercise their right to vote, stand for office, lead a trade union or political party or occupy the country’s top position as head of state. Discrimination against women does, however, continue in many forms, making women’s access to such arenas more difficult. Nonetheless, in most cases, legal prohibitions have been lifted, making women formally equal to men. But which men? Men are not equal among themselves, but divided by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and so on. To which men do liberal feminists aim to be equal? Who aspires to university education when the majority of the population, female and male, are barely literate? Liberal feminism is taxed with being a white, upper- or upper-middle-class movement which serves the aspirations of a minority of privileged women. In practice, however, many of the gains achieved by such women have benefited other women too.

Women of liberal feminist persuasion tend to be active in publicly funded institutions, educational bodies, legal professions, politics and business. The business community, along with educationalists, developed assertiveness-training for women in the early 1980s. This very successful initiative targeted heterosexual women, especially, but not only, women in paid employment, and ran courses for them on effective language skills. Beneath their philosophy a deficiency model of women’s language operated: women had been conditioned to speak deferentially and to avoid verbal conflict. The workplace required more forceful speech. Therefore, to be effective in the workplace where men’s speech norms prevailed, women needed to be re-trained. This movement is discussed in Chapters 5 and 7.

Involved as they were in promoting employment equality for women, liberal feminists also focused on language reform, specifically the re-naming of job titles. As traditional male strongholds began to admit women following employment equality legislation in the early 1970s, new names were needed for women occupying jobs named for male incumbents: lady salesman would not do. Language reform is discussed in Chapter 4. While many feminists have been critical of assertiveness training (Crawford 1995 offers an excellent critique), language reform has enjoyed more general support. Debates about it tend to focus not on the principle of inclusive language, but on the rationale for it, or the view of language and its relationship to thought, perception and reality. This is discussed in Chapter 3.

Materialist feminism

Unlike liberal feminism, which focuses upon psychology, ‘conditioning’, social roles, and rights to explain women’s condition in society, materialist feminism is based on an examination of material forces, specifically the economic underpinnings of discrimination. Materialist feminists argue that women’s oppression is at root, economic. A central focus is the gender division of labour within the workplace and in the family and the social and cultural arrangements and beliefs which uphold it. The relationship between class and gender, between socialism and feminism, was of central concern to feminists of this persuasion throughout the early and mid-1980s (Barrett 1988). This movement was particularly well developed in Britain. A French variant (Delphy 1984, Delphy and Leonard 1992) differed from British materialist feminism in arguing the primacy of the division of labour within the home, over that in paid employment, and by claiming that women formed a class in opposition to the class of men on the basis of this ‘domestic mode of production’.

Neither the British nor the French groupings focused specifically on language in their own writings. However, those working within the Marxist tradition did pay great attention to ideology and cultural support for capitalism. Indeed, attention to culture increased in the late 1980s to dominate debates throughout the 1990s. While adopting language reformists’ suggestions in their own speech, most materialists argued that changing the language would not change the material conditions underlying class or gender oppression. In France, a bigger battle faced Delphy and her associates: the emergence to prominence of a radically different feminist grouping, Psychanalyse et Politique, whose views on language and its relation to gender were diametrically opposed to their own. French materialist feminists such as Delphy and Guillaumin were drawn into a debate on language in response to the writings of feminists associated with the Psychanalyse et Politique group (Duchen 1986, 1987, Guillaumin 1987, Delphy 1984, Leclerc 1974, Marks and De Courtivron 1981). This group was arguing for a distinctive woman’s language (parole de femme, parler femme) based upon woman’s experience of her body. For Delphy, there could be no experience of the body unmediated by the social construction of ourselves as gendered beings. The ‘meaning’ of a bodily experience such as menstruation, childbirth or lactation is not given by our body, but by a society in which discrimination against women is axiomatic. Material conditions, not ideas, determine how we experience events like menstruation, she argued.

Concern with ideology and the linkage between class, gender and other oppressive and exploitative social divisions led socialist feminists into critical linguistics, a branch of linguistics which examines texts to identify how social relations are inscribed in them. Recent feminist stylistics draws on such an approach to text (Mills 1995). However, a shift from a focus on written language to spoken language means that currently, the most well-known and publicly discussed views of language are those of cultural feminists.

Cultural feminism

In the 1980s a radical shift occurred in feminism. Analyses focusing on women’s subordinate status and on their oppression by men gave way to a current of feminism which celebrates women’s differences from men. Where liberal feminists had argued to give women rights to make them equal to (and more like) men, and materialists had shown how difference really meant inequality, cultural feminists focused on re-evaluating women’s particular way of being in the world. This radical feminist grouping viewed women as fundamentally different from men and aimed to have this difference celebrated. Rather than seeking to make women like men, they aimed to show that women’s ways were valuable and not to be given up. Indeed, many argued that women were morally superior to men (Daly 1978, Gilligan 1982). ‘Women’s language’, once viewed as deficient, weak and ineffective, was now celebrated as the vehicle for women’s experience, identity, values and meanings. Among linguists, research on cross-sex conversation, which showed how men dominated women verbally, gave way to research on all-female groups or to comparisons of girls’ and boys’ speech at play or in laboratory settings. This work is reviewed in Part II, Chapter 6.

In France, cultural feminism took a different slant, focused as it was on psychoanalysis and women’s writing. Whereas American cultural feminists in the main accepted that it was socialization which led to the emergence of a female sub-culture with its own norms and values, French advocates of the Psychanalyse et Politique perspective rooted their analysis in a feminist reworking of Freudian psychoanalysis, or rather of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• References
• Glossary
• Index