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.
