7.1 Language and Gender Notes

Language and Gender

Reminders

• Final exam: June 21, 9-11am
• Review sheet posted on Quercus
• Course evaluations: Please fill them out!

Language: Three Sets of Questions

• How are meanings made?
• What does it mean to speak a language? Does it impact the way I see the world?
• How do we learn a language?
• How are interactions socially and culturally shaped?
• How do differences or inequalities (e.g., gender, race, age…) get created, reproduced, or challenged through language?

Poll Questions and Responses

• Q1: The Friends video accurately displays the differences between men and women's interaction styles.
  • True: 26%
  • False: 18%
  • Sometimes: 56%
• Q2: Who gossips more?
  • Women: 44%
  • Men: 2%
  • Women and men gossip an equal amount: 54%
• Q3: Who generally talks more?
  • Men: 7%
  • Women: 51%
  • Men and women talk an equal amount: 42%
• Q4: Who is more competitive in conversations?
  • Women: 16%
  • Men: 39%
  • Women and men are equally competitive: 46%

Critique of Poll Questions

• Questions only give women and men as options, neglecting other gender identities.
• Questions ignore individual variation (introversion/extroversion).
• Context is ignored (e.g., competitive in what sense, topic of conversation).
• The inquiry uses gender stereotypes to imply rigid distinctions between male and female behaviors.
• Questions assume men and women communicate uniformly, which linguistic anthropology disproves.
• Improved method should consider diversity, intersectionality, and the role of power.
• Questions may reinforce misogynistic norms.

This Week’s Questions

• What is gender?
• How does it relate to language?
  • Language itself
  • Discourse about gender
  • Everyday interactions
• What can linguistic anthropological research add?
• How do we separate myth (= powerful but factually incorrect language ideologies) from reality?

Learning Objectives

• What does it mean to say that gender is a social construct?
• How do gender and language interconnect?
• What can linguistic anthropological research teach us about language and gender?

How Do We Think About Gender?

• Sex and gender are concepts influenced by cultural and social norms and practices.
• Gender is built upon culturally and historically specific practices that amplify, simplify, and give meaning to perceived or actual biological differences.
  1. Gender is learned
  2. Gender is collaborative
  3. Gender is performative (something we do, not have).
  4. Gender involves asymmetry

Markedness

• Ask “what is being taken for granted?” or “What is the implied default here?”
• Not about prestige necessarily, but about what is considered the “default.”
• "Masculine ways” of speaking are often considered the unmarked way.
• Grammatical categories and pronouns (he, she, they, guys?).
• Kiswahili, for example, makes no gender distinction in personal pronouns

Indirect Indexicality

• “How might certain styles, forms, or discourses be pointing to gendered norms or codes?”

Tannen’s Difference Between “Rapport Talk” and “Report Talk”

• Based on her own experience and anecdotal evidence.
• Gendered differences were assumed rather than investigated.
• Empirical studies disproved many of these stereotypes.
• Questions in Monday’s poll were proven to not hold ground
• Talkativeness: students were shown to talk an equal amount
• Cooperativeness: girls frequently engage in competition, often have hierarchies.
• Illustrates that particular behaviours are learned

How to Challenge These Stereotypes

• Studies of specific contexts, and start from the interactions rather than assuming gender differences.
• Do men and women speak differently?

How to Study Language and Gender?

• Focus not on pre-existing differences but on actual practice, to then see if there are differences that fall along gender lines.
• A focus on specific activities or communalities of practice in researching language and gender shifts the research question away from what the differences are between men’s and women’s speech – a question that makes unwarranted assumptions about the existence of differences and also serves to perpetuate and exaggerate the dichotomous nature of gender categories – to research questions involving when, whether and how men and women’s speech are done in similar or different ways. (McElhinny 2003 in Ahearn 2012)

Gossip

• The discussion of people, who are known to the participants but who are not currently present, in which the focus is on critically examining these individuals’ appearance, dress, social behaviour, or sexual mores.
• Affirms solidarity of in-group by constructing absent others as ‘out group.’
• Penelope Eckert’s study of high-school students demonstrated that:
  • Gender stereotypes do not hold ground
  • In some cases, gossip was a gendered practice: because of social class background and upbringing, certain young women were more likely to engage in gossip.
  • Remember: we are socialized into particular kinds of behaviours.

Cameron’s Re-Analysis of Student Paper

• The student claimed that:
  • Young men in this conversation display heteronormative behavior
  • Through topics of discussion, such as sports
• Cameron’s claim:
  • Her student provided only a partial analysis
  • The young men in this interaction engaged in gossip – talking about others who aren’t there
  • They achieved normative gender identities by using linguistic practices stereotypically associated with femininity.

Language, Gender, and the Power of Discourse

(Toxic) Masculinity?

• What ideas of masculinity do we hold?
• When a man is told to “be a man,” what does this entail?
• How do those expectations affect young kids?
• Gender as learned
• Gender as collaborative
• Gender as performative
• Gender as asymmetry
• Dude, you’re a fag
• The worst insult
• Particular displays of ”ideal masculinity”
• Uncertainty and fear to deviate from societal expectations

Do Men and Women Speak Alike or Differently?

• No single answer applicable across all contexts
• Depends on who is speaking to whom, when, where, and to what audience
• Language and gender are related in complex and variable ways; cannot be reduced to simplistic and dualistic/binary generalizations.

Why are these ideologies so recognizable to us?

• Stereotypes and categorizations provide us with shortcuts in determining what people are like and how we should treat them.
• Why should we care if one or more of our gendered language ideologies might be inaccurate or at least overly simplistic?
  • There are many real-world implications of inaccurate language ideologies – in the workplace, family life, court cases.

Final Exam

• 10 Multiple Choice Questions (10 points)
• 4 Definitions (and examples) (20 points)
  • 2-3 sentences max.
  • Provide examples where possible
• 4 Short answer (bullet pointed) (40 points)
  • Pay attention to what we are asking
  • Don’t “dump” everything you know
  • Answer in bullet points.
  • Provide examples when possible
• 1 Essay Question (30 points)
  • Brainstorm on scrap paper
  • Explain concepts used
  • Connect argument, concepts and examples

Key Terms

• Anthropological understandings of sex and gender
• Gender as a social construct
• Gender as learned
• Asymmetry
• Gender as performative
• Markedness
• Indirect indexicality