Gender and Language Theory and Practice

Lia Litosseliti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780340809594
• eBook ISBN: 9781134121731
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The book introduces both theoretical and applied perspectives, identifying and explaining the relevant frameworks and drawing on a range of activities/examples of how gender is constructed in discourse.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I covers the historical background to the study of gender and language, moving on through past theoretical approaches to a discussion of current debates in the field, with particular emphasis on the role of discourse analysis. In Part II, gender is examined in context with chapters focussing on gender and language in education, the mass media and the workplace. Finally, Part III briefly looks at key principles and approaches to gender and language research and includes activities, study questions and resources for teachers in the field.
Rich with examples and activities drawn from current debates and events, this book is designed to be appealing and informative and will capture the imaginations of readers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines.

i	THEORIZATIONS OF GENDER AND LANGUAGE

1	Putting gender and language on the map

There is no neutral discourse: whenever we speak we have to choose between different systems of meaning, different sets of values.

(Coates, 1998: 302)

This chapter introduces some key assumptions about language and about gender. It describes early (feminist and non-feminist) approaches to gender and language, and moves on to discuss sexist language. This includes examples of sexist usage, lexical gaps and asymmetries, connotative differences, and the use of generic expressions. It also examines different ways of describing and classifying women, which can result in their invisibility and stereotyping. This is followed by looking at language change and linguistic intervention (e.g. using sex-neutral vocabulary, reclaiming words, creating new terms and guidelines for non-sexist language use). The chapter concludes with a summary of concerns for feminist linguistics.

A VIEW OF LANGUAGE

In the Introduction, a shift in assumptions about language is mentioned, which is also relevant for our understanding of gender and language: the shift from the view that we use language in certain ways because of who we are, to the view that who we are is partly because of the way we use language. This perspective assumes that language does not simply reflect social reality, but is also constitutive of such reality, in other words, it shapes how we see ourselves and the world. If language use is constitutive rather than indexical, then it has the potential to help establish and maintain social and power relations, values and identities, as well as to challenge routine practice and contribute towards social change.

Question 1

In what ways can language shape how we see ourselves and the world?

To address this question, one can consider, for example, why one person's ‘terrorist’ is another person's ‘freedom fighter’; the contexts in which one would use the terms ‘liberal’, ‘collateral damage’ or ‘axis of evil’; what people mean by ‘woman of colour’, ‘hooded youths’, ‘male nurse’, or ‘spinster’; and how much information is conveyed (or not) by the term ‘domestic violence’. In addition, violent, shocking, or high impact events, for example, war, provide vivid and highly charged contexts where language is paramount. During the Second World War, the Japanese were constructed as the dehumanized enemy, described as ‘specimens’ to be ‘bagged’. In Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide, the Tutsis were described as ‘cockroaches’, the target of ‘bush-clearing’ by the Hutus, who were ordered to ‘remove tall weeds’ (adults) and ‘shoots’ (children). The killing of people in wars has typically been re-conceptualized as ‘action’, ‘severe measures’, ‘evacuating’, or ‘rendering harmless’. In many cases, ‘war’ has become ‘conflict’, ‘killing fields’ have become ‘free fire zones’, and ‘killing civilians’ has become ‘collateral damage’ (Bourke, 1999, 2001). These re-conceptualizations help constitute particular versions of events, such as a bombing, and particular social and power relations, such as those between ‘us’ and the ‘other’ (whoever the doer(s) and the receiver(s) of an action may be). Similarly, in terms of gender, the use of phrasing such as ‘male nurse’ or ‘female doctor’ or ‘lady doctor’ effectively constitutes particular versions of the social world, where it is necessary or important for speakers to index gender in that way.

The view of language not as a fixed or closed system, but as dynamic, complex and subject to change, assumes that every time we use language, we make meaningful selections from the linguistic resources available to us (Antaki, 1994). This is hardly a straightforward process, not least because these selections are embedded in a local/immediate, as well as broader/institutional and socio-cultural context (Antaki, 1988, 1994; Fairclough, 1992). Consider, for example, a public debate on the topic of abortion. The language that may be used to write or talk about this topic must be viewed in the context of the particular social occasion (e.g. at school, in parliament, in the media); of the medium (e.g. spoken, written); of who argues (e.g. a doctor, a legislator, a campaigner); for what purpose(s) (e.g. to convince, to change a situation) and from what perspective. The range of perspectives on abortion may vary according to the participants' age, sex, education, race, class, or religion, but also their expectations, experiences, knowledge, expertise, and involvement. Different perspectives will also reflect and promote different assumptions (or discourses, as we will see in Chapter 3) around gender, for example, about women's position in a society, their relative power in terms of decision-making, the role of parenting, a society's views about sex, and so on. It then becomes obvious that in order to understand the role that language plays in establishing and maintaining any social relations, including gender relations, we have to look outside of language itself, at the wider social processes in which language plays a part (Graddol and Swann, 1989).

SEX AND GENDER

The terms sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably as synonyms. Language and gender theorists have generally made a distinction between sex as physiological, and gender as a cultural or social construct. According to this distinction, sex refers to biological maleness and femaleness, or the physiological, functional, anatomical differences that distinguish men and women, whereas gender refers to the traits assigned to a sex – what maleness and femaleness stand for – within different societies and cultures.

Gender can then be seen as a broader, a more encompassing and complex term. As Graddol and Swann (1989) state, the many different life experiences of women and men cannot be simply explained by biological differences between the sexes. Biological differences cannot account for the fact that a person may be more or less ‘feminine’ and more or less ‘masculine’. Further, the many variations of maleness and femaleness over time/from one generation to the next, across cultures, and across contexts, show that the traits assigned to a sex by a culture are socially determined and learned, and therefore alterable (Wodak, 1997; Talbot, 1998). Current theories of gender recognize not only that behaving as men or women within a society will vary from one situation to the next, from one social grouping or community to another, and according to different goals, aims, and interests, but also that people are active agents involved in their own ‘gendering’ or ‘doing gender’ (see Chapter 3).

The distinction between sex and gender is important and political. Biological explanations of socially constructed differences between men and women are often used to justify male privileges or reassert traditional family and gender roles, for example, women's so-called ‘natural’ role as mothers and nurturers (see Talbot, 1998, for other examples). Unsurprisingly, feminists have strongly criticized biological explanations of ‘natural’ differences between the sexes for perpetuating gender myths, stereotypes, and imbalances that are ultimately damaging for both women and men.

Question 2

Identify other examples of biological explanations of gender differences. What are their possible effects and implications?

In addition to assumptions about women as carers/nurturers and men as providers, other examples relating to Question 2 may include ‘men as active’ vs ‘women as passive’, ‘male rationality’ vs ‘female emotionality’, men as more suitable for certain jobs than women and vice versa, and the pay gap between male and female employees (see also Chapter 2, Beyond difference, p. 40).

Theorizations of the distinction between sex and gender have developed in recent years. As we will also see in Chapter 3, rather than simply talking about a biological sex and a social gender, we have come to ask more complex questions about the processes of gendering, questions of agency in these processes, and questions around gender ideologies. In addition to discussions of gender as context-dependent femininities and masculinities and not as a set of traits characterizing women and men, recently there has also been discussion of sex as a less clear-cut dichotomy. The latter can be seen in cases of inter-sexed infants – born as both male and female, or as neither, or as indeterminate – who tend to develop the gender identity of the sex assigned to them at birth (Giddens, 1989; Lorber and Farrell, 1991; Bem, 1993; Bing and Bergvall, 1996; Cameron, 1997). For a discussion of how some societies (often in industrialized parts of the world) are less likely to assign binary biological categories than others, see Epstein (1990), Jacobs and Cromwell (1992), and Hall and O'Donovan (1996). Some theorists go even further, to suggest that the concept of two sexes is ‘unreal’ and purely a cultural construction or perception in discourse (Butler, 1990). The result of such debates is that assumptions about dichotomies in relation to both sex and gender are being challenged.

Question 3

Consider the following topics being debated in some European countries at the time of writing:

■ the preaching, by some Christian groups, of sexual abstinence to teenagers;

■ boys' academic under-achievement;

■ the ban on wearing Islamic head-scarves in French schools;

■ single-sex schools;

■ the pay gap between women and men in paid employment;

■ the availability of contraception to girls and boys under 16;

■ the provision of maternity and paternity leave for employees.

First, would it be possible in each case to talk about the sexes (men, women, boys, girls) without saying something about gender?

Second, would it be possible to talk about gender without saying something about race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, education levels, and the geographical/historical/political/social context pertinent to each of these issues?

PRE-FEMINIST LINGUISTICS

Early pre-feminist linguistic research moved between the view that women's and men's language signals biological differences, and the view that it symbolizes social gender roles, whereas feminist linguists have argued for the latter (Cameron, 1997).

The former approach can be found as early as 1922, in the work of Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen. Jespersen made claims about certain gender differences (discussed in Cameron, 1990): women using more adverbs of intensity (e.g. ‘awfully pretty’, ‘terribly nice’) due to a tendency to hyperbole; women not finishing their sentences, due to not having thought out what they are going to say; men being linguistic innovators (e.g. coining new words) and women having a less extensive vocabulary than men. While there are various reasons for criticizing such claims – especially their reliance on ‘folk linguistics’ (widely held beliefs about language) and stereotypes rather than rigorous systematic research – it should be noted that not much else was written on the subject at the time.

This is in contrast to the enormous amounts of gender and language research that we have seen since the early 1970s, up to today, and with it, a wealth of different approaches, assumptions and methodologies (see Chapters 2 and 3). It is worth pointing out here that different methodological and analytical assumptions about sex and gender, about language and its different aspects, and about notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, will produce different research in terms of both results and claims. This is important for understanding that, generally speaking, early research on gender and language focused on gender from the perspective of the speakers' biological sex. For example, language variation studies focused on sex-preferential linguistic usage, that is, men and women's tendencies to speak in their own and different ways. These ways sometimes involved phonological gender differences and sometimes gendered conversational styles (see Trudgill's (1974) work on sociolinguistic variation in Norwich; Cheshire's (1978) research on dialects; Labov (1990) for a discussion). Trudgill found that in many styles (e.g. both casual and formal speech) women used fewer nonstandard forms than men, and that the use of non-s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theorizations of Gender and Language
• Part II Gender in Context
• Part III Researching Gender and Language
• References
• Index