Gender and Sexuality - English Language

Deborah Cameron (2008)

The myth of Mars and Venus, criticised the idea that males and females have innate differences in speech and language

Janet Hyde (2005)

The gender similarities Hypothesis

• Argued that there are substantially more similarities than differences in male and female language

• variation is due to other contextual factors (age, social class, occupation or sexuality)

Universalising

Giving a universal character or application to something (especially something abstract) - Generalising

• harmful in genderlect as it reinforces stereotypes and leads to assumptions

Sara Mills

Heterogeneity NOT Homogeneity

• Women (and men) shouldn’t be seen as a homogeneous group but as a diverse group, subject to a range of influences

• Age, class, race, sexual orientation and education all act as determining factors

Bing and Bergvall

Troublesome dichotomies

• distinct categories of ‘day’ and ‘night’ but the boundaries between them are indistinct

• they are bipolar categories that language imposes, the reality is a continuum

• This same idea can be applied to gender - someone being more masculine/feminine

Essentialism

Any specific entity has a set of characteristics/attributes which makes it what it is, necessary to identity

Essence is prior to existence

• social categories of masculine and feminine are bipolar

• biological and social essentialism

Social Constructivism

Meaning is created through social interaction

Gender therefore isn’t a fixed or innate fact, but instead varies across time and place as society and culture create gender roles

• These roles are appropriate or ideal as behavior for a person of a specific sex

Austin (1962)

Speech Act Theory

• speech does not always describe or report so it cannot be verified or proved false

• some utterances are performative

Judith Butler (1990)

Performativity can also be applied to gender, through our behavior and language choices we ‘do being a man/woman’

• identity is an effect rather than a cause

• constructed nature of gender - oppressed identities of those who don’t fit into the artificial normative heterosexuality

Deficit approach

Female language is the lesser and weaker version of male lanuage

Dominance approach

Men’s language dominates women

Difference approach

Men and women use language differently due to their different cultures

Jesperson (1922)

Male language forms are the ‘norm’ and the language of others (including women) were ‘deficient’

Lakoff (1975)

Language and women’s place

• male language described as stronger, more prestigious and more desirable

• she proposed that women’s speech can be distinguished from men’s

Dale Spender (1980)

Man-made language

• men not only control women, but also the language system

Ardner and Ardner (1975)

Women’s conversational behaviour is less assertive and less confident BECAUSE they occupy a less powerful position in society

Fishman (1983)

Conversational Shitwork

• women have to do the majority of ‘conversational shitwork’ because men in their dominance are less concerned to do so

Zimmerman and West (1975)

• same sex convos = interruptions are evenly distributed

• mixed sex convos = interruptions carried out by men

Deborah Tannen (1980)

Differences in male and female attitudes are cultural

• they grow up with different ideas about themselves, their place in the world and the functions of conversation

• coined the term ‘genderlect’ to describe these differences in male and female communication

Cheshire (1989)

Young females use more standard prestige than young males, differences are already evident in childhood.

Pilkington (1990)

Women in same sex talk are more collaborative than men were in all male talk

Kuiper (1991)

Male talk in members of a rugby team

• men were likely to pay less attention to saving face

• instead used insults to express solidarity

Cheshire (1982)

Varitation is controlled by both social and linguistic factors

• Boys = norms central to ordinary culture, transmitted through the peer group

• Girls = a personal process less controlled by ordinary culture

O’barr and Atkins

Differences are situation specific

• relies on who has the power and authority in a conversation rather than the gender of those involved

Beattie (1982)

Challenged that interruptions only signify dominance, also could signify interest and involvement

Holmes (1984)

Tag questions

• either modal or affective (speaker’s degree of uncertainty or attitude to the addressee)

Holmes (1990)

Hedges

• multifunctional depending on situation, context and intonation

• could signal uncertainty in some cases but also signal politeness and a positive attitude towards the other speaker in conversation

Judith Baxter (2002)

Elements of both cooperative and competitive talk in teen single sex conversations

Illbury (2020)

Social groups influencing identity online

• tweets of 20 white gay men used to find patterns

• language use found to be derived from African American vernacular English to be ‘sassy’

• “performing different identities and communicate certain social meaning”