Review Discourse And Gender

REVIEW DISCOURSE AND GENDER

A.    Book Identity

Title                             : The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Edited by                      :  Shari Kendall And Deborah Tannen

Publisher                      : Blackwell Publisher

Print publication date     : 2003

Page                            : 548-561

Introduction

This book said the study of discourse and gender is an interdisciplinary endeavor shared by scholars in linguistics, anthropology, speech communication, social psychology, education, literature, and other disciplines. Many researchers have been concerned primarily with documenting gender-related patterns of language use, but the field has also included many for whom the study of language is a lens through which to view social and political aspects of gender relations. Regardless of the vantage point from which research emanates, the study of gender and discourse not only provides a descriptive account of male/female discourse but also reveals how language functions as a symbolic resource to create and manage personal, social, and cultural meanings and identities.

1 The Field Emerges

                                       

The first part appeared in Language and Society in 19731, Mary Ritchie Key's Male/Female Language, and Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley's edited volume Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. The pioneering works emerged during the feminist movement of the 1970, as scholars began to question both the identification female norms as human norms, and the biological determination of women's and men's behavior. A conceptual split was posited between biological. "sex" and sociocultural constructs of "gender."' Early language and gender research tended to focus on

(1) documenting empirical differences between women's and men's speech, especially in cross-sex interaction;

(2) describing women's speech in particular; and, for many,

(3) identifying the role of language in creating and maintaining social inequality between women and men.

1.1  Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place

The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers.
This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.

1.2 The personal as political

The personal is political, also termed the private is political, is a political argument used as a rallying slogan of student movement and second-wave feminism from the late 1960s. It underscored the connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures.

Fishman argues that women's supportive role in private conversations reflects and reproduces sex-based hierarchies of power within the public sphere. (Tannen 1990 suggests a concomitant explanation for the linguistic imbalance: the central role of conversation in establishing intimacy among women, in contrast with the primacy of copresence and shared activity in creating intimacy among men.)

1.3 Lakofi in current research

Nonetheless, as Bucholtz and Hall (1995: 6) note, Lakoff's description of gender-related language "continues to be accepted by diverse groups of speakers as a valid representation of their own discursive experiences." Although her account of "women's language" does not represent the way each individual woman speaks, it nonetheless represents the norms by which women are expected to speak, or what Bucholtz and Hall call "the precise hegemonic notions of gender-appropriate language use," which represents "the idealized language of middle-class European American women." Thus Lakoff remains an invaluable tool for current studies of gender and discourse.

2 Cultural Influences on Gender, Language, and Society

The early focus on women's speech, sex discrimination through language and asymmetrical power relations was maintained in two influential edited volumes: Mc Connell-Ginet et aL's Women and Language in Literature and Society (1980) and Thorne et al.'s Language, Gender and Society (1983). However, several chapters in these volumes represent another major strand of research in discourse and gender, one that emphasizes the complexity of the relationship among gender, society, and language. This work is strongly influenced by the theoretical perspectives of Erving Goffman and John Gumperz.

2.1 Gender differences as communicative strategies

Goodwin found that girls and boys in same-sex play groups created different social organizations through the directive-response sequences they used while coordinating task activities: the boys created hierarchical structures, whereas the girls created more egalitarian structures. For example, the boys negotiated status by giving and resisting direct directives (Gimme the pliers!), whereas the girls con- structed joint activities by phrasing directives as suggestions rather than commands (Let's go around Subs and Suds). Goodwin points out that the girls can and do use the forms found in boys' play in other contexts (for example, when taking the role of mother in playing "house"), emphasizing that gender-related variations in language use are context-sensitive.

(as Lakoff predicted), although both women and men used hedging particles in cases ofgenuine doubt, only women used them to hedge the expression of their own feelings (I just really am sad then because of it, perhaps) (Brown 1980: 126). In contrast, Brown claimed, the men's communicative style was characterized by a lack of attention to face, and the presence of such features as sex-related joking and a "preaching /declaiming style" (1980: 129).

Humans are "rational actors" who choose linguistic options to achieve certain socially motivated ends in particular circumstances (1980: 113).

2.2 Male-female discourse us cross-cultural communication

 Deborah Tannen regards men and women as belonging to two different cultures. The juxtaposition of power on the male side and solidarity, on the female side is the key difference between their communities. Other differences in attitudes and values are results of this contrast. Gender is not just biological sex. In linguistics, genderlect refers to an acquired form of speech behaviour that individuals learn from early on. Children learn how to behave from parents and, more importantly, from their peers. Interaction in same-sex groups of children can explain or hint at the psychological behaviour that members of each sex develop. In the male community, power and status are important values that every man will endeavour to attain and maintain. Men perceive life in hierarchies, and continuously struggle to show or defend their status in society. In communication, too, one is always one-up or one-down. Furthermore, men value independence, their language creates distance.
The female world differs in attitudes and values. Women live in communities.

3 The Field Develops

Throughout the next decade, scholars refined and advanced our understanding of the relationship between gender and discourse. Research focused on talk among women (e.g. Johnson and Aries 1983; Coates 1989); narrative (Johnstone 1990); language socialization (e.g. selectiolls in Philips et al. 1987, and Schieffelin and Ochs 1986); language among children and adolescents (Eckert 1990; Goodwin 1990; Goodwin and Goodwin 1987; Sheldon 1990); and language and gender in particular contexts such as doctor-patient interaction (Ainsworth-Vaughn 1992; West 1990). Numerous journal articles were supplemented by edited collections (Todd and Fisher 1988; Cameron 1990; Coates and Cameron 1989; Philips et al. 1987); monographs (Cameron 1985; Preisler 1986); and introductory textbooks (Frank and Anshen 1983; Coates 1986; Graddol and Swann 1989).

3.1 Tannen's You Just Don't Understand

The publication of You Just Won't Understand in 1990 can be seen as ushering in the next phase of discourse and gender research, based on the attention this book receivedboth within and outside the field. During much of the 1990s, it sewed (as Lahff had before) as the point of departure for numerous studies, both as a touchstone for developing further research and as a bete noir against which to define arguments. Written for a general rather than an academic audience, this book combined a range of scholarly work with everyday conversational examples to illustrate the hypothesis that conversations between women and men could be understood, metaphorically, as cross-cultural communication.

3.2 Gender-related patterns of talk

            Research tells us that communication styles of men and women differ dramatically. Women’s language tends to be more indirect and subtle than men’s language. Pitch and intonation differences often reveal the sex of the speaker. Culture, as well as biology, is an important factor in determining voice use. Women tend to tag declarative answers by adding yes/no rising intonations that make statements sound like questions. Women use hyper-polite forms that may involve more word usage. Women include modifiers and query tags, often avoiding definitive statements. Metaphor and superlatives, such as “Nothing is working” characterize women’s language, and men mistakenly take these expressions literally since male language is more absolute and female language more abstract.

3.3 The "difference" and "dominance" debates

.

Thus researchers working in a linguistic tradition do not evaluate one style as super- ior to the other, but emphasize the underlying logic of both styles. Nonetheless they recognize - and demonstrate - that gender-related differences in styles map produce and reproduce asymmetries.

Discourse. The distinction has been used primarily to fault the "difference" approach for, purportedly, not incorporating power into the analysis of gender and discourse.

4 The Field Explodes

4.1 Heterogeneity in gender and discourse

In the 1990s, research on gender and discourse expanded in many directions from its earlier focus on "women's language" to include the language of men and of other social groups who had not been widely included in earlier studies. In addition, re- searchers increasingly considered the interaction between gender and other social identities and categories.

the field followed the perhaps inevit- able progression from prototypical to less typical cases, including those which Bucholtz (1999b: 7) describes (positively) as "bad examples": people who assume social and sexual roles different from those their cultures legitimize

4.2 Language and masculinity

Through this analysis, attention to the existence of various intertexts across which discourses and meanings coalesce, circulate, become reified, and are shared, and in which gross out becomes a discourse inflected with masculine meaning.

4.3 The language of African American and Latina women

Recent research addresses the discourse of African American women (Bucholtz 1996; Etter-Lewis 1991; Etter-Lewis and Foster 1496; Foster 1989, 1995; Morgan 1991, 1999; Stanback 1985) as well as Latina women (Mendoza-Denton 1999; Orellana 1999). Morgan 11999: 29) describes three interactional events with which, barring a few exceptions, 'women who have been socialized within African American culture are familiar and found that the Spanish-English bilingual girls engage in complex and elaborate negotiations about the rules of the game of hopscotch.

5. Analyzing Gender and Discourse

As our understanding of the relationship between language and gender has progressed, researchers have arrived at many similar conclusions, although these similarities frequently go unrecognized or unacknowledged. This section presents some of the most widely accepted tenets - and the most widely debated issues - that have emerged. Points of agreement include.
 

⇉The social construction of gender

Social constructivists propose that there is no inherent truth to gender; it is constructed by social expectations and gender performance.

Learning Objective

Explain Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity

                               

·         Social construction is the notion that people's understanding of reality is partially, if not entirely, socially situated.

·         Gender  is a social identify that needs to be contextualized.

·         Individuals internalize social expectations for gender norms and behave accordingly.

·         Social constructionism is the idea that social institutions and knowledge are created by actors within the system, rather than having any inherent truth on their own.

·         Gender performativity. Gender Performativity is a term created by post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, which has subsequently been used in a variety of academic fields that describes how individuals participate in social constructions of gender.

·         Essentialism the view that objects have properties that are essential to them.

·         Social constructionism is the notion that people's understanding of reality is partially, if not entirely, socially situated.

·         Gender is a social identity that needs to be contextualized. Individuals internalize social expectations for gender norms and behave accordingly.

·         Gender differ by gender (sex). That gender (sex) is the biological and behavioral gender is a social construction. Sex is sex distribution were determined biologically and attached to a specific gender.

The process of social construction that is built into various levels: at the level of the family, formal education/schools, communities, and at the State level.

                                                                 

⇉The indirect relationship between gender and discourse

Because the relationship between gender and discourse is indirect, individuals may not be aware of the influence of gender on their speaking styles. For example, in interviews with four prominent Texan women, Johnstone (1995) found that the women proudly acknowledged the influence of being Texan but denied that their behavior was related to gender. Yet, in discussing her success as a litigator, one woman said (among other things): "I try to smile, and I try to just be myself!' Tannen (1994~2: 16) notes that

⇉Gendered discourse as a resource

⇉Gendered discourse as a constraint

⇉ Gender dualism

Conclusion

Research on language and gender has increasingly become research on gender and discourse (although variationist studies such as Eckert 1989, 1998 demonstrate a promising symbiotic relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods). A movement toward the study of language within specific situated activities reflects the importance of culturally defined meanings both of linguistic strategies and of gender. It acknowledges the agency of individuals in creating gendered identities, including the options of resisting and transgressing sociocultural norms for linguistic behavior. But it also acknowledges the sociocultural constraints within which women and menmake their linguistic choices, and the impact of those constraints, whether they are adhered to or departed from. In a sense, the field of gender and discourse has come full circle, returning to its roots in a Goffman-influenced constructivist framework as seen in the groundbreaking work of Brown, Goodwin, Lakoff, and Goffman himself.