Gender

GENDER AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY

Said Rasooli

Adam and Eve

Man on earth.

_________________

Language ideology

Cameron (1995): A set of representations through which language is imbued with cultural meaning for a certain community.

Judith Irvine (1989): the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.

Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes (2006): ingrained, unquestioned beliefs about the way the world is, the way it should be, and the way it has to be with respect to language.

Other definitions of ideology

Ideologies are social constructs, ways of understanding the world that emerge from interaction with particular public representations of it. Ideology is a belief system which is explicitly or implicitly opposed to “truth”, and more specifically to “science” (Cameron 1995).

Common themes in language ideology

Where languages come from “origin of language”

Why languages differ “language difference”

How children learn language “child language acquisition”

How language should be properly used “language use”

What are these representations rooted in?

MythReligionPolitical ideology (communism, nationalism)

Challenging the ideologies

Many social and political movements such as feminism have challenged established ideologies, and some have promoted “verbal hygiene” (Cameron 1995) which actively intervenes in language use with the aim of conforming language to some idealized representation.

Questions about gender and language identity

How has the relationship between language and gender been represented in different times and places, and what purposes have been served by representing it in particular ways?

Has political (feminist) intervention succeeded in changing the repertoire of representations?

How and to what extent do ideological representations of the language/gender relationship inform everyday linguistic and social practice among real women and men?

Language AND ideology

Pronouncements on the "proper" uses of language at one level express the desire to impose order on language, but at another level they express desires for order in other spheres. Putting language to rights becomes a surrogate for putting the world to rights.

e.g. the persistent equation of grammatical

"correctness" with law-abiding behavior, and of failure to follow prescriptive grammatical rules with lawlessness or amorality.

Some examples

Policewoman or police officer A black American or an African American A disabled or a “differently-abled” person Persian or Farsi The Caspian Sea or Mazandaran Sea Arab States or Arab Countries Indexes or indices A Briton or an Englishman, a Scott, a

Welshman/woman, an Irish

Language use and the individual

Raymond Williams: "a representation of language is always a representation of human beings in the world”

Susan Gal (1995: 171): “ideas about what is desirable in language are always systematically related to other areas of cultural discourse such as the nature of persons, of power, and of a desirable moral order."

Grammar Quiz

Being a feminist, _____ was resolved to give women equal rights as men.

he she

Being a feminist, ____ was hopeful that women will have the same rights as men.

he she

Gender Gender is not something we are

born with or something we have, but something we do (West and Zimmerman 1987).

Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000): labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender can define our sex.

Gender is something we perform (Butler 1990).

Gender is the social elaboration of biological sex. Gender builds on biological sex, it exaggerates biological difference, and carries biological difference to domains in which it is completely irrelevant.

Gender does not naturally flow from our bodies, and Our sex characteristics do not determine occupation, gait, or use of color terminology.

While there is no biological reason for women to be shorter than their male mates, an enormous majority of couples exhibit this height relation.

Views about gender

Otto Jespersen (1922: 246): “women exercise a great and universal influence on linguistic development through their instinctive shrinking from coarse and vulgar expressions and their preference for refined and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions"

Sherzer (1987) The assumption that women's

language proceeds from women's nature is culturally very widespread, but there is considerable cross-cultural variation in precisely what "women's nature," and therefore women's language, is taken to consist of.

Are all woman’s languages refined?

In the Papua New Guinea village of Gapun, however, a distinctive genre of speech called a kros in Tok Pisin, which is a tirade of obscene verbal abuse delivered in monologue, is represented by villagers as a primarily female genre (Kulick 1993).

Has reticence been always a virtue for women? Cultural representations of gendered

speech may change over time. The court lady was expected to hold

her own in verbal duels and witty exchanges which took place in public and in mixed company.

The "silent woman" ideal with which we are now more familiar emerged with the rise to prominence of the European bourgeoisie.

A Godly Forme of Household Gouemmente (1614)

Husband Be "entertaining“ Deal with many men Be skilful in talk

Wife Boast of silence Talk with few Be solitary and withdrawn

Are all women feminine?

There is intra- as well as intercultural variation in the representation of language and gender.

The effect of the interaction of class and gender representations is to define low-status women as "unfeminine”.

A “fishwife” and a clerk’s wife.

An Asian woman and an Western woman.

Compliments come with a string attached.BeautifulKindModestCharmingLovableAttractive

Nice

PassionateQuietReservedCaringSympathetic

Tender

Jespersen (1922: 246) may praise the "refinement" he attributes to women speakers, but this quality is readily invoked to exclude women from certain spheres of activity on the grounds they are too refined to cope with the linguistic demands of, say, military service.

The Fall of Women’s language

Women are linguistically inferior to men

A deviation from the (implicitly masculine) norm

“deficit model” - women unsuitable candidates for positions of public authority and responsibility

late twentieth-century equivalents of conduct literature

Drop the Womanese

"swoopy" intonation, expansive body language, allowing oneself to be

interrupted, phrasing commands in the

form of questions, adding question tags to

statements, producing declaratives with

rising intonation

The Rise of Women’s language

In the new “deficit model” it is the men who are represented as deficient for TWO main reasons: The changing nature of work in global

economy where service workers are required to engage intensively in interaction with others.

The nature of personal life has changed in late modern societies in which a high degree of self-reflexivity and willingness to reflect on one’s experience is required.

Womanese and communication Katriel & Phillipson’s (1981)

informants defined communication as “honest, serious, problem-solving talk within significant relationships.”

Women are drawn into this because of the logical association of women with good interpersonal relationship.

Gender and modern societies In late modern societies the

public/private boundary is increasingly blurred. Ways of speaking traditionally associated with the private sphere (e.g. emotionally expressive ones) are now equally favored in public contexts and economic transactions (e.g. service encounters), while the conduct of domestic, sexual, and other intimate relations is no longer just a matter for private contemplation, but a major preoccupation of the popular media.

Super-person

The Communication Ideology is not primarily concerned with gender, but it is engaged in constructing a new model of the “good person” who has the feminine and masculine elements: the enterprising, self-aware, interpersonally-skilled individual.

And the male?

The successful males are those who selectively use female qualities to their advantage, while still remaining men. However, such good qualities are considered natural/unmarked for women thus bringing them no credit.

Bill Clinton Tony Blair Obama

Conclusion In my view, the way out of this

contradiction is to bear in mind that human beings do not "behave," they act. They are not just passive imitators of whatever they see and hear around them: they must actively produce their own ways of behaving - albeit not always in a fully conscious and deliberate way and never, as Marx said in another context, "under conditions of their own choosing.“

Deborah Cameron