Language, Gender and Feminism

Theory, Methodology and Practice

Sara Mills, Louise Mullany

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415485951
• eBook ISBN: 9781136708756
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Gender and Feminism presents students and researchers with key contemporary theoretical perspectives, methodologies and analytical frameworks in the field of feminist linguistic analysis.

Mills and Mullany cover a wide range of contemporary feminist theories and emphasise the importance of an interdisciplinary approach. Topics covered include: power, language and sexuality, sexism and an exploration of the difference between second and third wave feminist analysis.

Each chapter presents examples from research conducted in different cultural and linguistic contexts which allows students to observe practical applications of all current theories and approaches. Throughout oral and written language data, from a wealth of different contexts, settings and sources, is thoroughly analysed. The book concludes with a discussion of how the field could advance and a overview of the various research methods, pertinent for future work in language and gender study.

Language, Gender and Feminism is an invaluable text for students new to the discipline of Language and Gender studies within English Language, Linguistics, Communication Studies and Women's Studies, as well as being an up-to-date resource for more established researchers and scholars.

1 Contemporary issues in language, gender and feminism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203814666-1

Feminism is for Everybody

hooks 1990

Introducing the field

The initial development of language and gender studies as an area of academic enquiry in its own right is generally accepted to have begun in Western cultures in the mid-1970s. There are some earlier examples, such as Otto Jespersen’s (1922) consideration of ‘deficiencies’ in women’s language, along with collections outside academia of proverbs and folk linguistic beliefs about women’s talk in many different languages, including stereotypes of women being terrible gossips and talking far too much (see, for example, Sunderland 2006). However, the 1970s are viewed as the time when linguists began to explore the interplay between language and gender in a systematic way and most importantly from an explicitly feminist perspective.

Academic studies do not exist in a vacuum, and research questions and areas of investigation are clearly shaped by the social, political and economic issues circulating within particular societies where research is taking place. There are firm links between the formation and subsequent developments within the field of language and gender studies and developments within ‘feminism’ as a political movement.

During the same time period, there was also an observable ‘linguistic turn’ in disciplines across the social sciences, arts and humanities. It was realised that an intimate link between language and ideology existed, and that by studying language use, one could discover a great deal about the ways in which societies function and the way that individuals and groups construct identities and cultures. Social relations are mediated through language – everything we do and think, we do through language – and thus analysis of language can be seen as a clear index of the way individuals negotiate with social forces. The linguistic disciplines where language and gender studies now currently thrive (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics and linguistic anthropology) were becoming established as legitimate linguistic sub-disciplinary areas in their own right during the 1960s and 1970s. The combination of the broader socio-political landscape in terms of gender politics and the rapid expansion of linguistic studies producing empirical investigations of real-life linguistic data resulted in the well-established field of language and gender studies that exists today.

There are many different types of ‘feminism’ in circulation, and researchers may conceive of ‘feminism’ in differing ways, depending upon their political perspective(s). Arguably, though, academic feminism as a whole, in its most general sense, can be seen as possessing two unifying factors:

1. It is a political movement which focuses on investigating gender, that is, the way that women and men come to construct themselves, their identities and their views of others as more or less feminine or masculine, straight or gay.
2. It is a movement which has the overall emancipatory aim of redressing gender inequalities (cf. Christie 2000).

However, it is important to point out right at the beginning of this volume that language and gender studies do not have to be feminist in orientation. Jespersen (1922) provides a good example of this. Leading language and gender researcher Deborah Cameron (2006) has pointed out that non-feminist studies will present descriptive linguistic accounts of gender and language, often detailing processes of language shift or change (for example, Labov 1972; Trudgill 1974; Milroy 1987), or present descriptions of how women and men use language in specific locations at particular points in time (Trudgill 1974; Bradley 1998; Cheshire 1998). The key difference between this knowledge-gathering research and ‘feminist’ research is that the latter has a specific political purpose by focusing on gender as a social, political and ideological category.

It should be noted that the term ‘feminism’ is one which has tended to be somewhat downplayed in some areas of academic research over the last 10–15 years. Whilst there was a period during the 1980s and 1990s in many parts of the Western academic world when feminism was thriving and was positively evaluated by many (Whelehan 1995), there has been a backlash against feminism within these cultures and it is now often difficult to use the term feminism easily. McRobbie (2009), for example, believes that feminism has been undermined, partly because of a backlash against feminism but also, paradoxically, precisely because it has been partly integrated into mainstream agendas: she argues pessimistically that ‘for feminism to be taken into account it has to be understood as having already passed away’ (McRobbie 2009: 12). We would argue that this is not necessarily the case; the fact that feminist demands are still voiced, even if they are not explicitly termed feminist, can be viewed as an indication of the way that feminism has become part of common-sense assumptions and thus part of the mainstream in many Western societies.

In other cultures, for example Japan, feminism has not had a positive evaluation at any stage and has often been opposed (Nishimura pers. com. 2009). In some Arab cultures, feminism has been seen as a Western import and has been resisted by many (see Sadiqi 2010; Sadiqi and Ennaji 2010). In developing countries, it is difficult to expound critiques of gender relations without taking on Western models, and this leads to some difficulties in adopting the term feminism. Sunderland (2009) reports that in African contexts, feminism is too frequently derided as being anti-family and anti-male, though on the positive side a journal has recently emerged entitled Feminist Africa. In China, Yang (2007) reports that the concept of ‘women’s liberation’ was hugely popular during the Maoist regime, but now there is much resistance to it. There has been a return in popular culture to openly espousing essentialist biological differences and resistance to ‘liberation’ (though Yang is careful to point out that Maoist ‘liberation’ was a top-down discourse that had very little to do with really improving women’s lives). At the time of writing, feminism and/or women’s liberation are contested terms, which are opposed in various locations around the world. This has led some researchers and publishers in the field to be tentative about using the term feminism.

For us, we feel it is politically important to continue to use the term feminism overtly within the field of language and gender research and beyond. We do the research we do in order to change the way that women and men think about the language that they use and the way that others represent women and men in language; ultimately this has an impact on the way that women and men are treated and the way that they think about themselves. Feminism is central to these research goals. Overall, we define the specific political purpose of feminist linguistic studies as producing work which investigates the role that language plays in creating, sustaining and/or perpetuating unequal gender relations and discrimination against women and gay, lesbian and transgendered people. Our commitment to this position runs throughout the book.

Litosseliti (2006 a: 21) argues that we need to recognise that campaigns around language have to be posed alongside other campaigns; it is not sufficient simply to campaign about language. Effective change has to come at both the personal and the institutional level. A focus on language has to be part of a focus on gender inequality in general, and viewed in the context of wider social and institutional change. For example, a change in the language used in rape reporting and court examination of rape victims needs to materialise within the context of legal and social changes. Such changes would involve, most notably, a more realistic correlation between crime and convictions. Changes would also involve the provision of better support for victims and the inclusion on the agenda of male rape. Empirical language analysis regarding how rapists and their victims are perceived and treated can then reflect as well as help consolidate the legal, institutional and social developments in this area. Thus, feminist linguists need to continually assess how their analysis of discrimination in language meshes with other campaigns. Research with an interdisciplinary focus, where questions of gender politics are placed at the centre of the project, can greatly aid this process and help to ensure that academic research is directly aligned with the most up-to-date political developments in the society under study.

Feminist language and gender researchers are thus advised to consider very carefully the research questions and topics that they choose to pursue. There is a primary need to embrace real-world problems and concerns regarding gender relations in the society under study. Studies should focus on challenging gender norms and exposing how power and privilege have become naturalised in the contexts where research is taking place. The overarching aim is that the research findings can go some way towards fulfilling the political goal of aiming to redress gender imbalances and move a step closer towards bringing about gender emancipation and equality. Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003 a: 10) emphasise the inextricably related issue that researchers should be ‘directed by the needs and interests of the communities of speakers studied’, as opposed to producing research simply for the sake of ‘academic appetite’. This type of research commitment has sometimes been referred to as ‘advocacy research’ or ‘standpoint’ research, defined as the principle that academic research should be ‘with’ and ‘for’ the community under study instead of simply producing work ‘on’ particular subjects (Cameron et al. 1992: 15). From a feminist linguistic perspective, the production of new linguistic knowledge is ideally required to sit alongside broader political principles and goals. Adopting the advocacy position may involve engaging in a careful and sometimes difficult process of negotiation with those being researched in order to decide upon investigations that could be of practical relevance to them and/or of mutual benefit to both parties. We will discuss these issues at length in Chapter 5 when we focus more specifically upon feminist linguistic research methodologies and methods.

There have been differing levels of explicitness regarding the overarching political goals of research produced in recent language and gender studies. There have also been different outcomes for feminist language and gender projects in terms of how much attention researchers pay to outlining how their findings can be utilised to contribute to fulfilling broader feminist goals in wider society and/or how they can be of benefit to those who have participated in the research project itself. Cameron (2005, 2009) posits that an observable dip in attention to social activism within recent language and gender research can be partially accounted for by broader theoretical shifts. She draws attention to a transition from the dominant focus of research which tended to ask the explicit political question ‘what is to be done?’, that is, how do we go about bringing social change to redress issues of gender inequality, which she aligns with modernity, to instead a postmodern focus on ‘who am I?’ The latter question has brought with it a significant shift to a focus on ‘identity’ research. This ‘identity turn’ has been dominant not just in language and gender studies, but also across the humanities and social sciences. It is combined with a theoretical shift to viewing identity as socially constructed. As a consequence, the focus has arguably shifted from one of collective political action towards one of individualism and a focus upon self-identification. Lazar (2009: 397) has characterised this as a shift from ‘we-feminism’ to ‘I-feminism’. It is connected to a much broader shift in the socio-political landscape, and although significantly different in terms of political intention it can be seen as potentially related to the conditions where unhelpful notions such as post-feminism, based on an obsession with individuality and self-improvement, have emerged. This, in combination with the dominant focus on small-scale, qualitative studies in local contexts, has led Cameron (2009) to ponder the following, challenging question:

Have contemporary researchers, with their theoretical focus on agency, identity and the details of local practice, moved away from ‘classical’ feminist concerns about the institutionalising, especially in domains such as education, politics, work and religion, of ideologies and practices that reproduce gender inequality at the level of the whole society? (Cameron 2009: 8)

This so-called ‘identity turn’ and the transition from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ theorisation are crucial to contemporary feminist linguistic thinking. These considerations and debates inform our thinking throughout this book. Identity research is embedded within every chapter of this publication, but identity does not constitute the whole of our focus. Some gender and language volumes published over the last 10 years or so have dedicated a specific chapter (or chapters) to identity (see, for example, Talbot 1998/2010) or whole volumes to gender and identity (see Bucholtz et al. 1999). In the light of the above arguments, we have chosen not to take this approach here as we believe that feminist linguistic research is most effective when questions of identity are integrated with attempts to answer the broader ‘we-feminism’ questions of collective political action.

Studying language, gender and feminism

Since its inception in the 1970s, the study of language and gender has grown exponentially and it now has a clearly established institutional status. For instance, there are a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on language and gender in universities throughout the world. The subject area of language and gender also occupies a place in some pre-university school curricula; for example, in the UK A-level system (for students aged 16–18). Feminism should be present as a fundamental component of such courses, but the level of explicitness of a feminist focus may well vary from programme to programme. Language and gender studies also has its own international, peer-rev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Contemporary issues in language, gender and feminism
• 2. Why we still need feminism
• 3. Theorising gender
• 4. Feminist linguistic approaches
• 5. Methodological approaches
• 6. Sexuality
• 7. Sexism
• 8. Future directions
• Notes
• Websites of organisations and other sources
• Bibliography
• Index