GENDER

Language and Gender (also known as ‘Gender and Language’ or ‘Feminist Linguistics’) is a relatively new

field within sociolinguistics, usually said to be marked by the publication of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975.  Two aspects emerged in language and gender research; first, how women and men talked (and by extension, wrote), and second, how women/men/boys and girls were represented in language – as a code, as discourse, and in actual texts.

‘Gender’ has now stabilized as a term to distinguish people in terms of their socio-cultural behavior, and to signify masculine and feminine behaviors as scales or continua rather than as a dichotomy (Holmes 2001).

History of the area

There were three field in recent decades: variationist, and more particularly, ‘interactional’ research. The latter is characterized by a range of theoretical perspectives: deficiency, dominance, cultural difference and social constructionism.

Variationist studies

Classic variationist studies looked for evidence of sex-preferential speech in large-scale English-speaking populations such as New York, Detroit, Norwich, the Wirral, Belfast and Sydney. Traditional variationist studies conceptualize ‘sex’ as a fixed and universal variable determining people’s use of language alongside other equally key categories such as class, age and ethnicity. Variationist research on gender today can be more aptly described as ‘sociolinguistic’.

Interactional studies

This study focused on the distinctively gendered ways in which people interact in various social and professional contexts. Three early but still highly influential theories (deficit, dominance, difference) all emphasized the notion of a gender dichotomy.

Deficit theory

Lakoff’s (1975) ‘deficit’ theory posited that from an early age, girls are taught how to use a separate ‘woman’s language’: they are socialized to use language in a ‘ladylike’ way.

Dominance theory

Lakoff’s (1975) thesis that women constructed their own subordination through their language use was a forerunner of ‘dominance’ theory. This had two distinct, parallel branches: language as social interaction, which considered how gender inequalities were constructed through routine interactions between men and women, and language as a system focusing on ‘sexism’ within the language.

Spender (1980) She noted three further ways in which the language sustains this andro-centric perspective:

1.       linguistic marking of terms to denote women (e.g. manageress, stewardess),  

2.       semantic derogation (the way terms for women like mistress have become ‘derogated’ or debased over time; also see Schulz 1990),  

3.       lexical gaps (the lack of a woman-centred lexis to describe certain female experiences in positive ways, such as childlessness or remaining a single woman).

Cultural difference theory

Coates (1988) argued that women’s talk should be ‘re-valued’ in much more positive ways by feminist linguists as different but equal, as complementary to men’s, not deficient.

Main current issues

Social constructionism and the ‘post-modern turn’

Social constructionist theory (e.g. Bergvall et al. 1996; Butler 1990; Crawford 1995; also see Norton, this volume) suggests that males and females are not born, or even simply socialized into a pre-fixed gender identity, but they become gendered through their interactions. According to this view, individuals don’t have gender, they do gender through repeated behavioral and linguistic interactions. This post-modern perspective argues that males and females do not have an individual essence, character or ‘core’ (Crawford 1995); there are no intrinsic male or female characteristics, only ones that are brought into being through repeated bodily or linguistic actions.

Gender and sexuality

The focus of much recent ‘gender and sexuality’ research has been upon ‘hetero-normativity’, the system that naturalizes and rewards a particular kind of heterosexuality – complementary, monogamous and reproductive male/ female partnerships – as the basis for a stable society.

The salience of gender

Such participants need to refer to their own or other people’s gender specifically (for example, by terms such as ‘women’, ‘ladies’, ‘mothers-in-law’, etc.) within an observed conversation as evidence of their orientation to this category. Holmes suggests that there is evidence from a range of social contexts that women are still discriminated against and that this discrimination works at both a local level through people’s interactions, but also less visibly at a structural level through institutional and state practices.

Future trajectory and new debates

The first is the possible challenge posed by a resurgence of biological explanations of gender, spearheaded by the Darwinist science of evolutionary psychology. Positive evaluations of women’s talk perpetuate a restrictive, essentialist, gender difference perspective. A second new direction in the field is a proposal to extend the well-established concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CofPs; Wenger 2000) within language and gender research in order to enable an ‘articulation between the local, the extra-local and the global’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007: 28).

Summing up

Lakoff’s (1975) basic conception of a unified ‘women’s language’ to today’s elaborate theoretical configurations of a socially constructed gender. The field has been driven by a dual mission both to capture ethnographic evidence to argue that gender makes a difference within many linguistic interactions, and to challenge from a feminist standpoint the gendered inequalities that are routinely enacted through language in many contexts.