The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Jo Angouri, Judith Baxter, Jo Angouri, Judith Baxter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781315514833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

S hortlisted for BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) Book Prize 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this dynamic and growing area of research. Covering cutting-edge debates in eight parts, it is designed as a series of mini edited collections, enabling the reader, and particularly the novice reader, to discover new ways of approaching language, gender, and sexuality.

With a distinctive focus both on methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the Handbook includes 40 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. Each chapter provides a concise and critical discussion of a methodological approach, an empirical study to model the approach, a discussion of real-world applications, and further reading. Each section also contains a chapter by leading scholars in that area, positioning, through their own work and chapters in their part, current state-of-the-art and future directions.

This volume is key reading for all engaged in the study and research of language, gender, and sexuality within English language, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, applied linguistics, and gender studies.

1

Introduction

Language, gender, and sexuality: sketching out the field

Jo Angouri

The LGS journey from essentialism to poststructuralism

A field’s footprint and vitality are typically assessed through volume of scholarly activity, ongoing societal interest, and significant evolution of thought; language, gender, and sexuality (LGS) is a case in point. From the study of grammatical gender to the descriptive use of language by biologically defined wo/men, to critical analyses of ideologies and power asymmetries, linguists turned to gender from the very early days of the discipline as a whole and in all its branches, from general linguistics to psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Since the 1990s, sexuality has also become a core part of the field.

The aim of this introduction is to set the scene, providing a commentary on the scope of this volume, its organisation and contents. I start with a short overview of developments within the field since its inception in the mid-1970s to establish the rationale for the distinctiveness of this volume and our decision to take a research methodological focus. I will sketch a blueprint for the novice or experienced reader. The volume aims to help LGS researchers to theorise the whole research process from inception to impact with the emphasis on the design and affordances of theories and methods. These are not neutral products of academic labour; they are products of their time and hence need to be contextualised. The volume provides a permanent resource and complements other works in the field.

Gender is the central node in the LGS triad and undoubtedly a core social category for lay people and scholars alike. This simultaneous coexistence of first (lay people) and second-order (scholars) concerns has been central in LGS scholarship, although not always addressed in those terms (Ehrlich et al. 2014; Freed 2003). It is, however, a particularly relevant angle as lay people and scholars engage with the same phenomena but through different conceptual and analytical processes and for different purposes.¹ In 1953 Schutz raised the issue of a mismatch between the common-sense orientation of a group’s first-order constructs and the second-order constructs of the expert (social scientist). Schutz writes: ‘The thought objects constructed by the social scientists refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man [sic] living his [sic] everyday life among his fellowmen [sic]’ (1953: 3).

The ideologies and hegemonies associated with ‘common sense’ have been deeply embedded in LGS since its inception. Since the pioneering work of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (1975), describing, analysing, and critiquing ‘common -sense’ positions, such positions of asymmetry and struggle have preoccupied linguists interested in gender, and, more recently, sexuality.

Lakoff’s work is particularly significant, for it firmly established the interconnection between language, gender, and power struggle; it is justifiably cited as a core milestone in the establishment of the field. The 1975 publication opens with the following statement: ‘language uses us as much as we use language’ (1975: 3). This, in my reading, foregrounds the dynamic balance between (sociopolitical) structure and (individual) agency. Lakoff’s work has been criticised for its methodological approach and essentialist stance (e.g. in response to the 1973 publication, Dubois and Crouch 1975). She drew on anecdotal data and a process of contrasting the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ as homogenous entities. Those criticisms reflect the evolution of thinking in our field given that Lakoff’s position was consistent with the training of linguists of the time and of the political context. Lakoff, who started as a syntactician, is writing in the 70’s in a political environment where the feminist movement (women’s liberation or rights movement) (for an overview see Schulz 2017) is raising awareness of the impact of patriarchy in everyday life and is calling on the oppressed to challenge the status quo by making the private public, and the personal collective. ‘The personal is political’, as the famous saying goes. Lakoff’s work provided the field with an agenda which is still relevant (see Lakoff 2004), addressing issues of epistemology, methodology, and application to real-world concerns.

Early LGS work is usually placed somewhere under the widely cited ‘deficit– difference–dominance’ axis (typically used to refer to work between the 1970s and the 1990s) and juxtaposed to ‘discourse’ approaches (the 1990s onwards and under the influence of the ‘discourse turn’ in social sciences – Angouri and Piekkari 2018 for an overview). This timeline and labelling are analytical artefacts which have been useful in illustrating the field’s move from essentialism to poststructuralism and the meta-language that continued emerging as the field developed. Labels, and terminology more generally, are useful artefacts for a retrospective reading of earlier scholarship; they do not neatly correspond to distinct phases of the field. They also imply a linearity, which is misleading as the ‘edges’ between, and within, those stages are fuzzy. They, however, provide a useful chronological order and ease of reference and help to position developments on a temporal axis.

The period of the field from the 1970s to the 1990s was concerned with explaining stylised linguistic behaviour associated with biologically defined women and men. Scholarship of the time took gender as a predetermined category on the basis of biological sex and looked into differences which were associated with the societal expectations projected onto wo/men. Gender, and sexual orientation to some extent, were framed as social categories defined on a set list of predetermined characteristics and typically represented as independent from other facets of peoples’ multiple identities. This conceptualisation of identity drawing on the enactment of binary realities (e.g. gender seen as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ biological sex) took a rather essentialised approach which became a point of debate with later studies in the field. While some studies looked at data from the prism of variation in socialisation (difference), others looked at it as an indication of the patriarchal social order (dominance). The difference/dominance debate is a product of social and political thinking of its time and it is well covered in the literature. Chapters of this Handbook will provide their readings of the relevance of the beginning of the field (see Litosseliti, this volume).

At the same time, this early scholarship set the foundation for doing much more than merely describing linguistic features associated with wo/men; it provided the tools for looking into the ways in which power is enacted in and through language and challenged the social ‘consequences when grown women were “girls” and when the masculine pronoun was “normal” to refer to everybody’ (Lakoff 2004: 18). The field’s strong orientation towards making research relevant beyond academia is also noted with publications that bring the relationship between gender and language to the public eye. Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation (1990), is a significant landmark of its time. As the field grew, LGS turned to poststructuralism and embraced social constructionism. Scholars criticised approaches to identity in general and gender identity in particular. I turn to this next.

Identity to desire and beyond

Projecting generalised characteristics onto different groups, be they women, students, or squash players, is a common topos in categorisation processes. Categorisation is ubiquitous in daily life and, despite being demonised for stereotyping, it corresponds to dominant master narratives that circulate in different sociopolitical contexts, popular media, and domains of human activity. As such, it is a complex process and one that provides users with useful ‘shorthands’ to an otherwise complex picture. From a second-order viewpoint however, identity scholars quickly turned to critiquing a static and narrow view of identity on the basis of fixed and decontextualised characteristics. Instead, they put forward a view of identity as situated, fluid, and dynamic (Baxter 2003; Holmes 2006). This approach provided conceptual tools to look into the different layers of identity work, involving both the situated interactional order as well as the interrelationship with societal, political, and historical contexts (Angouri 2015). Seeing identity as a ‘construct’ brought individual agency to the fore which enabled the field to look into the micro-moment of interaction. This ‘construction’ metaphor however also brought to the fore perceptions of equality in (self/other) identity ascription – ‘I (the speaker) am empowered to make an identity claim’.

Identity ascription, however, is very rarely down to the agency of the speaker, alone, to achieve. Depending on where we are, who we are with, the expected performances of our roles and so on, we negotiate identity claims and navigate differences. What is unmarked (seen as ‘normal’) in a particular community is associated with a set of behaviours visible to its member. Each context we find ourselves in comes with power asymmetries which predate the individual encounter. Systems of power circulate and are perpetuated in the media, work, education, family/caring, etc. Achieving unmarked identities, therefore, is subject to a delicate equilibrium between the social order and individual agency. Deviating from the social norms – and social imaginary – has immediate tangible and situated consequences for the individual. Consider women migrating to countries where gender equality is supposedly greater compared to in the country of origin; Piller (2016: 138) provides a compelling account of professional women who saw their positioning reverting to the traditional gender order after migrating to Australia, drawing on research with women from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. These women are homogenously positioned and portrayed in the media as agentless, subordinate to their male family members, and devoid of other professional or personal identities. This strips away individual self, excludes women from the labour market and other symbolic capital (language resource and citizenship), and results in women being in a worse position compared to their pre-migration state.

In the early part of the poststructuralist period of the field, the work of the theorist Judith Butler made a significant impact on gender studies and on LGS in particular. Butler draws on Austin’s (1962) and Searle’s (1969) theory of performative acts. To Butler, performativity is an authoritative power discourse created through stylised acts that are repeated; through the process, a relationship between the individual and the audience is constructed in reaffirming or challenging norms which are socially conditioned and in permanent flux. Butler’s theory of performativity has been significant; it moved the field from focusing on gender identity through the study of difference to the complex ways in which interactants mobilise resources in context. This can challenge or perpetuate the social order and dominant norms; our practices are always read as ‘gendered’ (on the omnirelevance of gender, Butler 1990 and Holmes 1995). The concept of performativity has also been used widely in the field, sometimes erroneously interchangeably, with the Goffmanian performance. Despite their both sitting under the poststructuralist spectrum, their interchangeable use causes lack of conceptual clarity. Goffman’s theory of performance (1959), according to which society is analogous to a theatre scene where people perform different public acts, is often used in theorising on gender roles in different domains of activity. Goffman’s emphasis on stigma and the social cost of non-conforming to societal expectation also found fertile ground in LGS, and particularly as the field started becoming more inclusive and opening up issues around, and research on, sexuality.

Although language and gender scholarship had not turned its gaze beyond heteronormativity before that time, in the 1990s sexuality started becoming a core part of the research agenda (see Cameron 2005; Livia and Hall 1997). Research on language and sexuality continued to attract growing interest, first through engaging with lesbian and gay language (Kulick 2000), and subsequently critiquing binary oppositions and the concept of fixed sexual identities and turning to an identity-view vs. a desire-view of sexuality at the turn of the century (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall 2004; cf. Cameron and Kulick 2003). Desire, both as an abstract concept and as erotic desire, started preoccupying the field. Primarily associated with psychoanalysis, the turn to desire provided an opportunity to bring to the field new tools in the transition beyond the structural approach to the study of language, still dominant for linguists at that time. Psychoanalysis, and specific approaches such as the Lacanian line of thought, provided a theoretical toolkit and meta-language to move beyond the legacy of the Saussurian tradition, which is based on the linguistic sign, the relationship between a signified (concept) and the signifier (sound image or linguistic form). Acco...