Talking Gender and Sexuality
Aalborg, 5-6 November 1999
| ABSTRACTS
(alphabetical) Talking Gender and Sexuality Aalborg, 5-6 November 1999 |
|
Didar Akar & Isýl Bas
Bogazici Universitesi, Turkey
Host"il"ing "Woman": Construction of Gendered Identities in a Radio Talk Show
Much of the research on gender in discourse investigates how men and women are represented in oral and written texts. This has been done most extensively through conversation analysis and, to a lesser extent, through text analysis especially on news coverage in media. However, there are hardly any studies based on radio shows where gender differences are constructed in conversation involving both direct personal interaction and public discourse.
Our presentation will focus on the construction of gendered identities in a radio talk show in Turkey. In this program, the interaction between the host and his audience takes place through live phone calls. So while the conversation evolves between two people, there is a significant silent third party, the audience listening to the dialogue which becomes a crucial factor in shaping the conversation. Another particularly interesting aspect of this program is that while the host is among the most popular media personages in Turkey, his discourse is distinctively characterized by aggressiveness and hostility towards the audience and especially toward his callers who are young women in the age group16-20. The fact that his callers are exclusively women is undoubtedly part of his project as his team screens calls by men. Even though in his dialogues with his callers, the host clearly aligns himself with the existing patriarchal norms towards women's status, it is worth noting that the callers are aware of it and even comply with these structures of negative representation. Hence, they become not only the "signifiers" of patriarchal discourse but also the producers of signification. By concentrating on this two-way construction of negative representation in relation to women's gender, we will be able to demonstrate that construction of gendered identity in language is a dynamic and performative engagement including both sexes. Our argument will be based on recorded samples of the show and on discourse-based interviews with the host and his team.
Bethan Benwell
Dept of English Studies
University of Stirling, Scotland
Ironic Discourse: Masculine Talk in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines
Irony is often said to characterise the discourse of the "New Lad", and certainly the pages of men's lifestyle magazines offer irony in abundance. In this paper I shall explore the notion that irony is strategically employed in the constitution of a specific masculine identity. It is frequently claimed that irony is a prominent feature of the postmodern condition, with its slippery ability to disclaim allegiances to particular political or critical positions, and certainly within men's lifestyle magazine we can see how irony functions both to give voice to reactionary and anti-feminist sentiments and to continually destabilize the notion of a coherent and visible masculinity. The paper will focus on the ironic dialogue forged between text and reader and will engage with close linguistic analysis of instances of irony.
Janet Bing
Department of English
Old Dominion University, USA
Brain Sex: How the Media Reports and Distorts Brain Research
Scientific research on the brain is regularly reported in the popular media. However, newspapers, magazines, and trade books often simplify, exaggerate and misrepresent brain research in order to suggest that male and female differences are essential, categorical, and unchangeable. Such articles reinforce what Bem (1993) calls biological essentialism, gender polarization, and androcentrism. Following claims about brain differences, some of these articles and trade books generalize from biology to social policy, arguing that women are biologically unsuited for certain 'male' preserves.
In the past, scientists have repeatedly provided 'facts' to prove the biological inferiority of women and people of color; current facts come from brain research. This article compares how scientific evidence is reported in the media to the research published in scholarly journals. For example, in one experiment, 11 women and 19 men had different brain activity for a simple rhyming task (Shaywitz et al., 1995). This 'remarkable' difference was reported in the media as a 'war between the sexes' in articles with titles such as 'Why men and women cannot be like each other.' Some books and articles argue that women should be excluded from mathematics, engineering, and highly paid competitive positions on the basis of their different brains.
It is not surprising that articles for popular audiences overlook facts and evidence showing similarities between males and females while emphasizing evidence of differences. What is be surprising is the extent to which the scientific community and general public consistently disregard evidence that conflicts with prevailing beliefs, a phenomenon that Schaff (1984) calls cognitive dissonance (Schaff 1984). The final portion of the paper argues that traditional rational arguments against biological essentialism are probably less effective than reframing issues in ways that avoid cognitive dissonance.
Danie Breytenbach
Technikon, South Africa
Talking Gender and Sexuality: A Non-Verbal South African Communication Perspective
In spite of divergent opinions on the nature and demands of South African society there should be consensus at least that everyday conversation is a fertile breeding ground for distorted communication. After all we do have a heterogeneous society with eleven official languages and different cultures. It appears especially in the mass media that the climate for communication is unfavorable and there is a great deal of anxiety about the quality of communication messages. It is possible to "get away with murder" in communication and the sharing of meaning among cultures is, in effect non-existent. As far as the latter is concerned it appears that a workable approach to improving communication in South Africa, would be to create a better understanding of those verbal and non-verbal indicators that have a direct bearing on communalising meaning between genders within a specific multilingual and multicultural society.
It is against this background that certain aspects of the sharing of meaning will be examined in this paper on the basis of physical appearance, gender and sexuality. All things considered, one's physical appearance is the first non-verbal feature to see the light in any communication transaction. When a woman meets a man for the first time she first looks at his general appearances, then his bodily build and then she makes eye contact. When a man meets a woman for the first time, he first look at her breasts, then her body and then he makes eye contact. When approached from the point of view of communication science, one could argue that apart from general physical attractiveness, specific characteristics of bodily appearance such as gender, sexuality, body hair, body shape, size and body odor and personal artefacts like clothing, play a meaningful role in everyday communication.
Regarding gender physical attractiveness, Berko, Wolvin and Wolvin (1985:95) mention informal research done at a speaking contest where it was found that, all things being equal, the more attractive the contestant, the greater his or her chance of winning would be. Relatively recent findings show that women who are seen as attractive receive more invitations, influence men more easily, and even receive lighter sentences in court than women who are not seen as attractive (Adler, Rosenveld & Towne 1986:117). Recent studies indicate that when recruiting employees in the private sector relatively tall men were favored whereas relatively tall women were often labeled "clumsy" and "awkward". In fact people who are shorter than the so-called average, experience some form of discrimination or other in almost every walk of life (Knapp 1980:107).
This paper will investigate how both genders interpret non-verbal communication during interaction and the role that sexuality plays in the communication process.
Charlotte Dalsgaard
Harbohus Organisationsudvikling, Denmark
Language and Gender in Organisations
Language forms our manner of speech, and the way we feel and think. Language influences our concept of life and what can be achieved.It is therefore of interest to study the way we speak of gender in organisations.
A part of the process of change in an organisation's development is to create a common language which can describe the common vision and which can coordinate a common understanding.
When we speak of gender in organisations we often base it upon a description of abilities. Women are often conceived as being nimble-fingered, patient, accurate and fast at repetitive work. Men, on the other hand, are characterised as physically strong, technically adept, independent and flexible. In this approach it is implicit that if men are, for example, independent, then that women are not. Thus a dividing line is established between the masculine and the feminine.
In this paper I wish to take a first step in a new direction where I can open up for the full range of language's variety and where I can create the attitudes which can overcome the established masculine / feminine line. This implies working to establish a language in organisations which gives the possibility to recognise gender as multi-faceted, situation dependent and which is construed discursively. My aim is to seek variety.
In the paper I will shown to be inspired by the work of Cronen and Lang as well as Gherardis, but I will also make use of material from interviews from twenty female employees from a printing company in North Jutland, together with their charge-hand and work-leader, both of whom were women. The interviews used are carried out in preparation for an intervention study under the KARLA Project ("Gender as a human resource in the work life" is a research project under the national research programme on human resources in the work life, 1996-2000, in Denmark).
Sigurd D'hondt
IPrA Research Center, Linguistics (UIA/GER)
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Religious and Gender Identities in Conflict: An Example from Africa
In my presentation, I analyze an extract from a brief gossip session involving three male adolescents that took place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on a form of Conversation Analysis that integrates sequential analysis and categorization analysis 'in a single take' (as Rod Watson has put it), I investigate how the participants to this occasion jointly construe a gender identity as they comment on the alleged pregnancy of (and alleged abortion committed by) a female passer- by of roughly the same age. Of particular interest is the identity work engaged in by one of the participants when trapped in an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, the categorical implications of the gender identity assumed in the course of the gossip session and, on the other, the exigencies of a religious identity claimed earlier in the course of the same encounter. An analysis of participants' attempts to neutralize this apparent contradiction reveals that they simultaneously attend to the reified character of the social world -- that is, they fashion the identities they work out for one another as the outcome of a 'pre- existing' social arrangement that 'constrains' their situated practices -- and carve out for themselves an 'interactional space' where heterodoxy vis-à-vis this reified social world is permitted (one of the procedures for doing so being irony).
Ann-Carita Evaldsson
Department of Communication studies
Linköping University, Sweden
'Boys Against Girls' - 'Girls Against Boys'! Frames and Framings in Foursquare Games within a Schoolbased Peerculture
This paper is an attempt to extend studies on gender and games within same-gender (and same-ethnicity) groups by exploring preadolescent boys and girls social interactional practices (verbal and bodily) in foursquare games within a mixed gender (and multiethnic) schoolbased peergroup. For the present analysis video-recorded instances are selected from repeated performances as "boys against girls". By directing attention to children's social interaction in the midst of gaming, and the ethnographic framework in which the playing occurs, the present study explores the type of frames and framing of experiences that repeated game-encounters provides for the participants themselves. Following Goffman (1961: 27) and Goodwin (1985:315, 1995; see also Evaldsson & Corsaro 1998) I conceptualize games as situated activities. The notion that situated activities have frames (Goffman 1961:26-34, 1974), and that participants frame events in the midst of games, permits participants to transform events, roles and identities within the present, to selectively use rules, previous events and play with experiences from outside the game in the actual game event. By focusing on boys and girls social interaction in repeated game-performances, I demonstrate how boys and girls use relevant cultural resources (i.e. playground space, game rules, gender roles, bodily experience, interactional history) to negotiate, transform and even playfully challenge traditional (gender) roles and identities. Thereby presenting crosscutting variations and sources of commonality across gender groups, meanwhile they construct gender distinctions and within gender variations. The methodological approach and the findings provides empirical support for general theoretical and methodological claims regarding the interactional accomplishment of and fluctuating meaning of gender and the need to situate children's activities in particular settings.
References:
Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merill.
Goodwin, M. (1995). Co-Construction of Hopscotch In Girls Hopscotch. Research on Language and Social Interaction. 28, 3: 233-260.
Kim E Stanley Farah
Dept of Communications
Brigham Young University, USA
Co-Opting the Collectivist Mass Media Message: How Young, Educated, Chinese Women Use Individualism in Their Discourse about the One-Child Policy
In 1979, the Chinese government instituted the One-Child Family Policy to control population growth and raise the quality of life among the Chinese people. The policy was touted as "for the good of the country as a whole" yet it appeared to contradict with traditional Chinese values. In the past, Chinese women who gave birth to many children, particularly sons, were considered "hero mothers". How have Chinese women reconciled this apparent shift in values? How do they derive self-esteem under this new criteria? And how has this effected their concept of motherhood?
This study explored the relationship between mass media messages of China's One-Child Family Policy and the way young, educated Chinese women used language to talk about motherhood. In-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight Chinese women were conducted in Nanjing and Hefei. In addition, mass media messages on television and street signs were studied through a translator. The messages were all collectivist, "having one child will result in a stronger China", but the women were individualistic in the way they related the policy to themselves. Most of the women felt the policy gave them greater opportunities to pursue a career and education. One said the policy freed her from being a "parasite" to her husband. And still another said because she could now provide for more than one child she should be allowed to have as many as she wanted.
The women's responses point to a shift in China's cultural dimension away from collectivism towards individualism. In many ways it mirrors the feminist movement of the 1970's in the United States.
Débora de Carvalho Figueiredo
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil
Gender Representations in the Discourse of Appellate Decisions on Rape Cases: A Critical Discourse Analysis Investigation
Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), gender studies and feminist legal studies, this paper aims to discuss how women and men are described in the discourse of appellate decisions on rape cases. These descriptions both reflect and reconstruct common images of male and female social and sexual roles (such as "the real victim", "the fiend", "the good girl", the prostitute, the suffering man, etc.), and rest on a view of sexuality that usually links female sexuality to passivity, emotional unbalance and hysteria, and male sexuality to wildness, strength and action. In order to carry out the discussion, the lexical choices used to describe the appellant (the rapist), the complainant (the "victim"), and the event are investigated in 50 British appellate decisions on rape trials. Partial results so far point out to the hypothesis that the way assailants and victims are depicted by the judicial discourse of appellate decisions indicates not only the criminal justice system’s way of seeing gender relations and gender roles, but that these descriptions are ultimately connected with the legal evaluations of cases of sexual violence against women, and with the length of sentences given to sexually (and many times physically) aggressive men.
Andrew Fish
Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies
Aalborg University, Denmark
Negotiating the Unmentionables: The Power of the Unsaid in Gendered Literary Conversation
In Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), gendered conversation often centres on 'the unsaid', the unmentionably 'unpleasant', which must be infered by characters on one level and readers on another if the dialogue is to make sense. Inferences occur on the basis of what is said and on a context stretching back into an ideology involving very fixed ideas about gender and sex. The dialogue is presented as intentional and telementational, and the fictional interlocutors communicate via inferences as human agents with a clear sense of identity rooted in the norms of their society. Yet at the same time, intention and meanining are portrayed as formed by societal forces extending far beyond the individual agent. Thus, individual agency might be viewed as intentional in one frame and non-intentional in another.
Speaking characters are thus presented as inhabiting temporary subject positions in a narrow range of possibilities defined by the social comtext and its underlying ideologies. In The Age of Innocence, we see how a clear-headed understanding of the socially-determined self allows a relatively inexperienced young woman to control her 'wayward' husband through the power of conversational inference. Conversely, her husband is portrayed as a captive of the ideology inferred by his own speaking positions.
To counter the claim that these are atypical problems of a bygone and sexually neurotic age, I also examine conversational extracts from Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye. In this autobiographical novel, the 'unmentionables' (specifically, the female genitalia) are not just mentioned, but are also in focus. Again, however, the inferences that are central to the dialogue examined rely on a new set of 'unmentionables', and a modern ideology of heterosexual normalcy. Most interesting, perhaps, is the possibility that the author is aware of this....
Kirsten Gomard
CEKVINA
Århus University, Denmark
'Doing Gender' and 'Doing Politics'. How to Create a Loser
This presentation is part of a larger project which compares eleven Danish television debates leading up to the 1993-referendum about the Edinburgh Amendments to the EU-Maastricht Treaty and featuring nine political parties and two non-party campaign organizations. Analysing the working conditions and the contributions of female and male party and amateur politicians in terms of visibility, authority, and control with methods derived from sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, it is found that the female party and amateur panel leaders and some of the subordinate female panel members are subject to working conditions that are in subtle ways less favourable than those of other panel members and leaders. Low status is being created for them in the interaction, in particular by the chairman, and in some cases also by their colleagues on the panels. Thus they have to work particularly hard to achieve visibility, authority, and control. I shall present my methods of analysis and the results of one of the eleven panels, that of the non-party campaign organization "The People's Movement against the EU".
Marjorie H. Goodwin
Department of Anthropology
UCLA, California, USA
Morality and Exclusion in Girls' Social Organization
Proposals that there are strong gender differences in moral development began with Piaget's work on children's games positing a "less developed" legal sense in girls than boys and continued with Gilligan's portrayal of females speaking "a different voice." My presentation challenges such stereotypical notions of girls' concerns by examining the embodied multi-modal forms of argumentation which occur in the midst of girls' games as well as the practices of exclusion which girls employ, in the midst of activities such as games, insult sequences, gossip, and telling stories. The study is based on fieldwork conducted among a range of peer groups: fifth grade working class 2nd generation Latina and Asian girls in a downtown Los Angeles school, girls (followed over three years) of diverse ethnicities and social classes in a school in a middle class neighborhood of LA, and working class African-American girls in a Philadelphia neighborhood.
Carolyn Hair
Media Arts Research
Southampton Institute, UK
Talking Gender on the Talk Show: The Construction of Gender on Vanessa
In this paper I propose to discuss the gendered talk and space of the daytime talk show. These programmes are different from previous TV talk formats in that they are based on audience participation. Thus I shall discuss the triangular relationship between the predominately female audience, host and guests and its construction of the fourth dimension at home. Historically the talk show is a 'feminine' genre, targeted for the female viewer in the daytime slot and critics have pointed to the 'feminine' mode of discussion it presents. The talk show blurs the distinction between the public/private domain whereby the most intimate, personal issues explode into the public space. Language usage differs in public and private contexts and the resultant tension manifests itself in the conversationalisation of television talk (Fairclough, 1995).
Using critical discourse analysis I intend to investigate the interrelationship between language and power, ideology and subjectivity in order to identify the way in which gender relations are played out on the gendered talk show. Vanessa with its female presenter will be drawn upon as it is one of the more sensational of the British versions, focusing on traditionally 'feminine' topics. My analysis will reveal the way power relations operate and how the particular interaction on the talk show works within the studio space.
Arguments surrounding the talk show forum - a gendered community - as a new 'feminised' public sphere will be developed. The talk show constructs the public sphere as spectacle as opposed to rational critical debate. In this space gendered relations are reinforced and reproduced, yet the plurality of voices and lack of resolution renders the talk show, a site of potential resistance.
Kristin Halvorsen
Dep. of Applied Linguistics
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Hot metal? Masculinities and Male Practices in The Full Monty
The motion picture The Full Monty was released in 1997 and received favorable critiques and large audiences all around the world. It is a film celebrated as new and challenging in terms of its representations of everyday men with everyday challenges. It's story about a motley crew of unemployed men in working class Sheffield (UK) who decide to put on a strip show, lends itself to a discussion of masculinity and of male practices. My point of departure is precisely the concept of practice and its constitutive function in relation to discourses, or systems of power/knowledge. I analyze practices, conversational and others, among the men in this movie, and I ask how these can be seen to function in the construction of masculinities and a male community. I find a double answer to this question. The plurality of masculinities and practices present, the representations of the vulnerable body and of the vulnerable man, makes this film an interesting and in many respects challenging text within its popular cultural genre. However, simultaneously, I find the film to be insufficient both as a genuine approach to difference and plurality and as an attempt to redefine the contents of masculinity. Despite its inclusion of a variety of male subject positions, it fails to acknowledge the hierarchy of masculinities that exists. Marginal masculinities are still marginal, and axes of difference such as sexuality and race are silenced in favor of gender and class. Despite its inclusion of potentially subversive practices, the film carefully redefines the contents and consequences of these, and the men can safely maintain their position as 'real' men. In other words, the content and possibilities of the masculine have been slightly stretched, but their position within the larger structure of difference and dominance remains the same.
Alexa Hepburn
Psychology Division, School of Sciences,
Staffordshire University, UK
Deconstruction, Discursive Psychology, and Feminist Psychology
This paper reviews and develops arguments in support of the claim that a poststructuralist theoretical perspective can inform critical feminist analysis. This argument is set in the context of feminist psychology, where there has been a general move away from what are classified as postmodern 'relativist' theoretical and analytical perspectives. This paper argues instead that deconstruction, as developed by Derrida, and discursive psychology, as developed by Edwards and Potter (1992), can assist in identifying the linguistic structures of exclusion employed in the service of patriarchal ideologies. Three sections illustrate this argument. The first explores Derrida's work on deconstruction and its ability to inform feminist debates. The second section explores key aspects of discursive psychology such as indexicality, stake and cognition and reality. Section three comprises a short piece of analysis of teachers' talk about school bullying, designed to illustrate the central arguments developed in preceding sections - that deconstruction and discursive psychology are important for feminist practice in psychology as they can provide us with the means to deconstruct the oppositions and 'realities', and examine the discursive strategies, that are organising gender stereotyped constructions. It is concluded that future work in feminist psychology can gain a greater understanding of the political effects of the deployment of discursive strategies which are oppressive to women through the employment of deconstruction and discursive psychology.
John Heywood
Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language
Lancaster University, UK
In a hoarse whisper, I asked, "Can I be your cocksucker?" "You sure can." "What am I?" "My cocksucker." Cum 83:57. Speech Representation in Non-fictional Narratives of Male Homosexual Experience from Straight To Hell Magazine (1973-93)
Language may construct sexuality and sexual practice in two distinct ways, as the medium in which sexuality, sexual identities and practices are categorised, and as the vehicle through which liaisons can be negotiated, desires articulated, pleasure intensified, roles performed, and power relations constituted. While the discursive construction of sex and sexuality has been intensively investigated in recent years, the performative functions of language within sexual practice are relatively unexplored.
Access to sexual negotiations in 'real life' is hard to obtain. The anonymous narratives in Straight to Hell Magazine function both as pornography and as an archive of participant-observer records of, prototypically, casual sexual encounters with men not self-identifying as 'homosexual'. While highly mediated, the represented speech they contain provides insight into how their writers construct the kinds of sexual negotiation they claim to be worth reporting. Mainly using NRSA, IS and DS, variations in detail and modality also create degrees of apparent fictionalisation.
Sexual encounters can range from being performed non-verbally to being almost entirely structured and constituted through speech. These narratives similarly vary in the extent to which they deploy speech presentation. Minimally, single Direct Speech 'quotes' function to provide closure. Maximally, represented conversations occasionally entirely displace sexual activity as the focus of a story. The conversations cluster into 'pick-up strategies' and 'sex talk', the initial and subsequent conversational stages through which sex is negotiated, sexual identities and practices produced, and roles performed. Using analytical techniques drawn from Stylistics and CDA, this paper analyses four representative narratives where conversation is foregrounded, arguing that they reveal a preoccupation with the pragmatic strategies involved in the joint discursive construction and performance of masculine identities and power.
Celia Kitzinger
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University, UK
Feminism and Conversation Analysis
Feminism is a political movement committed to social change. In seeking to understand women's oppression and to explore strategies of resistance to change, feminists have used a wide range of different research theories and methods (experiments, surveys, psychometric testing as well as qualitative approaches). Conversation analysis, however, has been relatively little used, and has even been described as insufficient for or incompatible with feminist goals. By contrast, this paper presents a compelling case, illustrated with examples from my own data, for the value of CA in developing feminist theory and practice. My first example draws on the feminist literature on date rape and assertiveness training and illustrates what feminists can learn from the CA literature on dispreferreds about the way in which refusals are normatively done. Crucially, CA shows that refusing does not involve "just saying no" and, indeed, need not include the word 'no' to be understood as refusing. The implications of this for feminist work on sexual coercion are explored. My second example draws on the lesbian feminist literature on "coming out" (i.e. disclosing to others that one is lesbian). An exhaustive trawl through this voluminous literature has not revealed one single study based on the analysis of actual coming out data (as opposed to, for example, to interviewees' retrospective accounts of coming out). Using tape-recorded instances of coming out, I illustrate how CA can offer important insights both into how coming out is done and into how responses to these coming outs are managed and negotiated. I discuss the ways in which a CA analysis of these data illuminates the workings of heterosexism in action. In conclusion, feminists have long agreed that power and oppression are not simply external structural constraints, but play themselves out in the ordinary talk and action of social actors through whose ordinary taken-for-granted intentions the social world is produced and reproduced. Conversation analysis offers us an important way of understanding sexism, heterosexism, power and resistance in everyday life.
Don Kulick
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University, Sweden
Language and Sexuality
My keynote paper attempts to develop for the study of language the relevance of the insight, first articulated with clarity by Gayle Rubin, that sexuality is importantly different from, and not reducible to, gender. Through a close reading of some key texts in the field of language and sexuality (in particular, William Leap's 'Can there be a gay discourse without a gay language?', and Anna Livia & Kira Hall's introduction to the volume Queerly Phrased), I argue that current approaches to language and sexuality are flawed and theoretically untenable. I propose that we stop thinking about 'language and sexuality' and rephrase our inquiries, instead, in terms of 'language and desire'.
Charlotte A, Kunkel, Joyce M. Nielsen & Glenda Walden
Department of Sociology
Luther College, USA
Gender Performance and Heteronormativity in Everyday Life
We conceptualize 15 years of students' gender norm violations as disruptions in the performance of gender, reflecting the theoretical influence of "doing gender" and "gender trouble." Qualitative analysis of students' discursive reports indicates that "doing gender" is doing heterosexuality to a greater extent than most gender theories recognize. The single most frequent reactions to gender transgressions is to sexualize nonsexual acts in binary, homo/heterosexual terms, a process best captured by queer theory's concepts "heteronormativity" and "heterogender." We find that heteronormativity itself is gendered. Women's transgressing is most often heterosexualized, men's homosexualized. These themes are developed with examples of students compensating for their actions by appearing more feminine or masculine than usual, disclaiming homosexuality, and reporting hyper-heterosexualized and homophobic reactions. These findings and their interpretation raise issues about how gender theorists, especially those that attempt to explain gender stratification, conceptualize gender and its relations to sex and sexuality. We offer a new, more comprehensive and empirically based definition of heteronormativity.
Marianne LaFrance
Department of Psychology
Yale University, USA
Why Do Women Smile More Than Men?
For many who study gender, the key question is how is it that people 'do gender' (West & Zimmerman, 1987). In other words, the issue has less to do with what sex people are, than how gender is dynamically enacted in the give and take of social interaction. Talk constitutes one way people 'do gender' (Johnson & Meinhof, 1997); nonverbal behavior is another (Henley, 1977). According to the infamous Oscar Wilde, it may only be women who 'do' gender. He wrote, "A man's face is his autobiography; a woman's face is her work of fiction". My aim in this paper is to show that Oscar Wilde got it half right: women's facial expressions are performances, but then again so are men's.
In this paper, I summarize the literature on the gender aspects of facial expression. Specifically, this paper will present a meta-analysis of gender differences in smiling. One hundred and forty three research reports providing 347 effect sizes were reviewed based on a total of 59,076 participants. While women smiled more than men (d = .40), our analysis of multiple moderators showed that smiling is exquisitely sensitive to social context. From the perspective of our Demand Expressivity Theory, women¹s tendency to smile more than men (or for that matter, men¹s tendency to smile less) is substantially due to prevailing gender norms for expressivity. In addition, these particular "ritualized repetitions" (Butler, 1993) are done by whomever has the responsibility to do the socio-emotion work in face-to-face contact.
In sum, this meta analysis moved the discussion of sex differences in smiling beyond single or static explanations. Instead, it showed that smiling is clearly a gender-linked nonverbal behavior and that its display depends very much depends on a complex array of interactional processes such as whether gender is salient, what socio-emotional demands issues are at hand, and which cultural groups are participating.
Håkan Larsson
University College of Physical Education and Sport
Stockholm, Sweden
Governmentality and the Concept of Equal Opportunities In Sport
What has sport, and the language of sport, to do with the construction of sex/gender in late 20th century society? This paper is about changing discourses in the work for equal opportunities between women and men in the Swedish Sport Federation, from the perspective of 'governmentality'. In this paper, I argue that sport, and the language of sport, is a major producer of sex/gender, discerning, and even highlighting, sex/gender differences. Since women took up competitive sport during the 60s, there has been a vivid equal opportunities discussion in sport. It seems to me as if female participation in this traditionally male dominated arena is related to a wider need to redefine the concept of "woman" (as well as the concept of "man" in the 90s), in order to function in relation to liberal and neo-liberal discourses of government. Female participation in sport was in the 60s legitimised by a discourse telling that women are essentially the same as men, and that social factors (sex roles) previously had prevented women from enjoying sport. This, however, put the heterosexual matrix, using the words of Judith Butler, under severe strain. In the 80s, another discourse occurred, stressing the differences between women and men, although maintaining the right for both women and men to do sport. In sum, there has been a gradual change in the construction of sex/gender from practice (labour division, here the sporting man and the non-sporting woman) to body/bodily appearance and meaning (two competition classes, "naturally" divided by sex, and women being more socially inclined, men being competitive). Sport, as well as modern sport science, focusing on the variable of "sex" and sex differences, produces both the object and subject of "woman" and "man", thus making them governable.
Jill Lewis
Nordic Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Research (NIKK)
University of Oslo, Norway
Of Lions and Domestic Cats. Didactic Dilemmas: Talking Sex in HIV Prevention Initiatives
Sex education and HIV prevention education in the West faces a range of resistances to behaviour change, and sexually safe practices are not becoming normalised as fast as the spread of HIV and STDs warrants.
Sex education is a ‘talked’ practice, which invokes certain kinds of language, framed by certain kinds of contexts.
This presentation wants to raise questions about the disembodiments of ‘sex education talk’ and about the ways that familiar language organises gender beliefs and invokes subjective positionings that lean gendered sexuality towards risk behaviours.
It will draw from experiences in an ongoing, three year Nordic / Baltic project working in Estonia, LIVING FOR TOMORROW: Youth, sexual health and the cultural landscapes of gender and sexuality in Nordic/Baltic/N.W. Russian times of transition. An HIV/AIDS era initiative – an action / research initiative that began in 1998.
The processes of implementing cross-cultural sexual safety education focusing centrally on gender encounters various narratives of gendered expectations that normalise heterosexual sexuality as persistently resistant to / uninterested in safer sex practices. These ideas are surfacing mid-project, at the end of an ‘action’ phase of working with adults and teenagers in Tallinn, so in this presentation I would like to focus on certain ways people talk about or express their assumptions about gender and sex. I want to explore questions, in discussion with other participants, about the ways narratives and scripted embodiments of gender block behaviour changes - based on framings of conversation and verbal workshops within the project.
I work from literature, gender studies, and AIDS prevention educator backgrounds (not language theory or linguistics per se), and have been involved in HIV prevention work with young people in various contexts since 1986.
Susan Mandala
Royal Holloway
University of London, UK
Women, Men and Advice-giving: Challenging the Notion of Women's Solidarity Talk
It is often claimed that female-female spoken interactions are characterised by mutually supportive and affirming discourse strategies. In this paper, I challenge such claims, showing that when it comes to the giving and receiving of advice during casual and informal conversations, female-female exchanges, like male-male and mixed exchanges, are fraught with conflict. The findings are based on 40 naturally occurring advice-giving encounters that occurred within ongoing casual conversations between a variety of British English speakers in a number of different settings and circumstances.
Paul McIlvenny
Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies
Aalborg University, Denmark
Performativity, Power and Talk Practices: Critical Reflections on 'Un/Doing' Gender and Sexuality
My paper seeks to investigate the possible interplay between three domains: conversation analysis and its various studies of talk-in-interaction, gender/queer studies and the notion of performativity, and post-structuralist objections to traditional notions of the subject, language and power.
In one of the latest challenges to our understandings of gender and identity, queer theorists (for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) have borrowed Austin's original notion of linguistic performativity, melded it with a Foucaultian conception of the discourses of sexuality, in order to comprehend the ways in which gendered and sexed bodies are discursively constituted. Yet the speech act theory of performatives has been heavily criticised: for its lack of attention to sequence, for its individualistic focus on single utterances originating from an intentional subject, and by post-structuralists for the hierarchical separation of 'real' performatives from 'theatrical' citations. Alternatively, radical gender theorists such as Judith Butler argue that gender performativity comprises not singular 'acts' but a stylised citational practice, a chronic reiteration without an original, by which discourse produces the phenomena that it regulates and concomitantly reproduces hegemonic heterosexist gender norms. Gender congeals through performative practices, though performativity is itself vulnerable to excitation, recitation or mis-citation, resulting in an 'undoing' or a displacement of gender.
Rather than recoup the term 'performativity' for a lavender linguistics (Livia & Hall), I consider whether or not this anti-essentialist notion of performativity is congruent with constructivist notions of 'doing' gender that have been proffered within conversation analysis. It is disconcerting that the general field of conversation analysis, an important and productive methodology for attending to the details of everyday life, the transparency of the natural, moral order and the shared practices by which that order is rendered accountable in talk, has had very little to say about gender, and next to nothing about sexuality, 'race', class, and the normalising of dominance and oppression. The result in many cases has been an overriding concern with 'doing' conformity to constitute 'the social order'. But there is some research that does engage with gender: for example, the theorising of Candace West et al. By re-reading the work of West & Zimmerman and the early studies of 'inter-sex' by the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, as well as the findings of the 'ethnosexologists' Kessler & McKenna, I wish to query their accounts of gender/sex/sexuality as social practice. It is fruitful at this juncture to ask what ideological baggage conversation analysis brings with it, particularly with regard to power, agency, subjectivity and normativity. I argue that conversation analysis already has a politics, and is one of many cultural ideologies/technologies for performing, defining, as well as describing, social life.
I relate these critical reflections to other emerging approaches to studying language use, gender and sexuality that are indicative of two further contemporary theoretical realignments, namely the 'communal turn' (communities of practice) and the 'corporeal turn' (embodiment). By engaging in this debate, I hope to find suggestive new directions for conversation analysis by bringing it and post-identity gender theory into dialogue.
Andreas Onoufriou
University of London, UK
Young Cypriot Students Talk about Sexual Identity - Telling the Story of the Self
The politics of the construction of gender identities in late modernity refer to a dynamic and non-dichotomous notion of embodiment where identity is a durable but not immutable form. Identity becomes a complex play, a shifting concept, a product of flux, splits and fragmentation. The work of M. Foucault on the construction of the subject shows how the body is not a natural entity but is socially produced through regimes of knowledge and power. The body is neither pure subject or pure object, Butler supports this idea by suggesting the concept of performativity. The performative nature of identities means that one needs to question how identities continue to be produced, embodied and performed effectively, passionately and with social and political consequence. Furthermore she argues that gender is an effect performatively produced. She also raises questions about the politics of speech, she points out that the subject in speech is not simply its own speech but it speaks a life of discourse and it is installed, as it were, in a life of discourse that exceeds the subject's own temporality. Taking to consideration the above theories I attempt to explore young Cypriot student's ideas on sexual identities. How do they understand themselves as sexual beings, their desires and experiences as produced within the historical present in modern Cyprus.
The following paper draws on the narratives of sixteen young Cypriot students where they explore ideas on masculinities, femininities, the negotiation of sexual life styles like the possibilities of experiencing intimate relationships. Young Cypriots experience conflicting sociocultural values like "institutionalized heterosexuality" and "unthinkable homosexuality" which constrain them from adopting new forms of identities. Marginal identities therefore cannot take place in isolation from dominant forms of identities. Potentialities for resistance are limited according to Cypriot students since dominant forms of speech and conduct are situated within a specific cultural milieu of power relations. This cultural milieu has its own historicity such as national conflicts (Cyprus problem), influential role of the Orthodox religion and the political debate regarding the legalization of homosexuality. The analysis of the study is based on grounded theory and discourse analysis.
Ingrid Piller, Hamburg University, Germany
Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, USA
Bilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender as a New Field
Starting from the monolingual bias of much language and gender research and the gender-blindness of much bilingualism and second language learning research, this paper will draw up a basic plan for a new interdisciplinary field: bilingualism, second language learning and gender. While previous work on bilingualism and gender focused on issues of language choice and language use from a 'language-explained-by-gender' standpoint (e.g. Burton, Dyson & Ardener, 1994), this paper will employ a more contemporary perspective, examining the interaction between language and gender and the (re)construction of gender through language in the process of L2 learning and participation in new social practices. Treating gender as a social construct is of crucial importance in explaining the double oppression of female L2 learners and speakers: existing ideologies institutionalize cultural and social statuses and serve to 'naturalize' not only white male dominance but also the dominance of speakers of a majority language. Thus, as argued previously by Ehrlich (1997), 'differential' outcomes may be explained by differences in 'gendered' social practices, such as access to the target language and opportunities created by its use, as well as the nature of interactions in the target language.
Marko Salonen
Dept. of Sociology & Social Psychology
University of Tampere, Finland
Analysing the Debate over Sex Laws in Finland
Discursive studies of gender and sexuality can be understood as two separate approaches to the study of language:
1) Discourses and modes of talk are taken as preconceived resources of language, which come alive in interaction (e.g. ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and discourse analysis). Language in use is understood to constitute relationships based on gender and sexualities. Discourses are mediators between subjects and agents who use language resources to construct different positions, different sexualities and gender.
2) In foucauldian influenced approach discourses work outside of agents own space. They are taken as powerful weapons, which point out and build subjectivities, gender and sexualities. Through discourses language makes some things seeable and others invisible. The object of analysis is how some discourses have been made up and what they have become to mean in discursive practises.
I have connected these two approaches in the study of normative sexuality, which is based on data of parliamentary debates over sex laws in Finland 1970. I show how members of parliament debate over protection age for children using discourses of individualism and nationhood as argumentative means to persuade that a certain age is (not) to be accepted for certain type of sexual behaviour.
I argue that to understand how sexuality is made normative, discourses understood as resources need further analysis from other perspectives, too. My case is that individual and nation can be understood as renewed discourses, which by renewal make up future resources for other debates. And here the discourse of individual is most of all gendered discourse. This becomes clear when the use of the individual discourse means protecting girls and controlling boys. Still, it is the same with the discourse of nationhood as it in real use is constructed as heterosexuality of the same-aged.
The study therefore proposes different approaches of gender / sexuality and language to be used together in order to make fuller analysis of discourses surrounding gender and sexuality.
Janet S. Smith
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis, USA
The Speaking Patterns of Japanese ‘True Love’: Love’s Dialogue as Seen in the Romance Novel
Studies of Japanese gendered language rarely intrude on Japanese men's and women's more private moments together. And, in fact, outside of the great literary tragedies, Japanese romantic love faces some obstacles. First, the most highly valued affective pair bond has not historically been that between the romantically involved couple, but rather the parent (mother)-child bond (Ôno 1981). Second, Japanese social actors conceptualize seishin 'spirit' a maturity as properly subordinating kokoro 'heart' and ninjô 'spontaneous feeling' to giri 'duty, obligation' (Moeran 1986). And third, it is general thought that, at least in their marital lives, Japanese men and women do not hold romantic love but rather practical considerations and complementarity within family units to be at the core of the bond between them (Coleman 1991, Iwao 1993). Nonetheless, in the post-War era, women (and to some degree men) are in the process of re-evaluating the husband-wife relationship in terms of its relation to romance (Hendry 1981).
In this paper, evidence concerning Japanese men's and women's romantic expressivity is drawn from romantic category fiction (love stories), which provides a rich source of data concerning how couples falling in love are imagined to think about and to speak their feelings. This paper reports a linguistic analysis of the dialogue between male and female protagonists in a set of twelve romances drawn from the three major subgenres of Japanese romance fiction ((Shibamoto) Smith 1996). Their verbal interactions are traced from first meeting through the happy (or unhappy) end to their romance in order to elucidate gendered patterns in spoken words of love, at least as they are conventionally conceptualized and inscribed in fictional form. Such an analysis aims to link the dialogue found in romantic texts to gendered language use as indexical of normative masculinity and femininity as well as to normative heterosexual expressivity.
Liz Stokoe & Janet Smithson
Institute of Behavioural Sciences
University of Derby, UK
Making Gender Relevant: The Construction and Negotiation of Gender Categories in Discourse
In this paper, the links between gender and language are explored from a discursive position. Rather than attempting to characterise gendered ways of interacting, as previous researchers have done, we explore the ways in which people talk about gender. In particular, we interrogate the ways in which gender is oriented to in discourse and how it is negotiated as a salient social category.
Two data sets were drawn upon with which to explore these issues. First, the small-group seminar discussions of University students were recorded whilst carrying out a particular activity. Second, focus group interviews were carried out with young adults that explored their employment and family orientations. The transcribed data was analysed using a micro-level method that combines conversation and discursive analysis. Our focus was upon how the participants negotiated issues about gender as they arose in discussion. It was found that gender was occasioned as a contrastive category such that characterisations of men and women could be made. Gender stereotypes were often produced as unchallengeable facts as part of a rhetorical strategy to support or contest arguments. We also examined the ways that students and young people positioned themselves as ‘non-sexist’. Moreover, we found that the participants encountered an ‘ideological dilemma’ between making generalisations about gender and maintaining a commitment to equality. Overall, it was found that orienting to gender was not done unproblematically in the discussions but required careful interactional management.
We propose a new framework for exploring issues of gender and language: the ‘discourse’ approach. In so doing, we shift away from the other approaches that have dominated the field: the ‘deficit’, ‘dominance’ and ‘difference’ frameworks. In the ethnomethodological tradition, gender is explored as a participant’s, rather than an analyst’s, category. This approach complements and extends recent critical developments in the field that examine how gender is ‘done’ in interaction; how gender identities are constructed socially at the discursive level. We argue that by adopting this new understanding of the links between gender and discourse, a richer, more nuanced theory of gender and discourse can be achieved.
Jenny Sundén
Linkoping University
Department of Communication Studies, Sweden
@gender (Fe)male: Performing Textual Bodies in the Net
While the Internet is often presented as a disembodied medium, various forms of bodily presence are continually introduced where people meet on-line. This paper explores notions of embodiment in text-based on-line worlds (MUDs) by focusing on the creation of 'characters' (on-line personas), and in particular on how gender and sexuality are being performed in these texts. (How) do concepts like gender and sexuality apply to the non-physicality of MUDs? Which images of male and female bodies are salient in these spaces?
The discussion will be divided into two sections. First, after a brief introduction to MUDs and MUD culture, a theoretical approach to the construction of gender on-line will be formulated. One common perspective in research on bodies and gender in on-line spaces proceeds from a clear separation between a 'real' physical body and its 'virtual' gender. Gender is understood as the textual on-line incarnation, whereas sex refers to the material body left in the physical world. As opposed to this translation of the sex/gender dichotomy onto virtual worlds, I argue that not only gender, but also sex, is being written on-line, even though sex in this case must be understood as immaterial.
Secondly, some preliminary findings after one year of fieldwork in a particular MUD, here called WaterMOO, will be presented. Locked into the physical invisibility of oneself, as well as of others, the participants are confronted with a highly complex communicative dilemma: How do you approach someone you cannot see? Instead of using the Net as a place for liberating transgressions and textual (de)constructions of the physical body, WaterMOOers tend to use the text to put the gendered body back into the picture. This section is concentrating on in what ways these bodies are being formulated, as well as outlining key issues for further research.
Liisa Tainio
Department of Finnish
University Of Helsinki, Finland
Gender and Sexuality in Elderly Couples' Talk
This paper analyses the ways in which couples display their identities as aged persons and as representatives of their gender in conversation. My data consists of conversational interviews that were originally made to collect colloquial speech and tradition from the Finnish countryside. The method used is conversation analysis. The spouses talk as couples in spite of or even because of the institutionality of the conversation. They orient to each other e.g. by recounting memories together, by querying each other for missing words or details and also by completing and correcting each other during the interaction. Their social identity as spouses also becomes relevant when they for example quarrel or tease each other during the conversation. In my presentation I analyse a sequence of interaction where the spouses tease each other by hinting at the sexual quality of their relationship. The topic is courting experienced by them in their youth. The couple and the two interviewers negotiate the status of both the female and the male interviewees as active participants during the interaction and in the framework of the recounted memories.
During the teasing sequence the participants construct the (sexual) agentivity of men and women in general and the wife and the husband in particular. The traditional view of women as sexually passive during courting is questioned by the aged couple. Although the interviewer puts men in general in the semantic role of an agent while the implied semantic role of women is that of an object, the semantic roles are reconstructed in the syntax of the couples' turns. In analysing the linguistic choices used by participants it is possible to discuss not only the question of agentivity but also the questions of the social roles of e.g. interviewer/interviewee, adolescents/aged persons, women/men that become relevant in the course of the interaction.
Patricia A Vermillion
Queen Mary and Westfield College
University of London, UK
Variation of the Style and Sound of Gender: 'A Case Study in Search for What to Search for'
This qualitative case study locates linguistic features particular to the homosexual primary speaker, supporting research in characterising a linguistic subgroup in English distinguished by sexuality. The study analysed one homosexual male's speech and his colleagues/partner (8 speakers, inclusive) according to five linguistic features typically associated to women's speech, including tag questions, hedges, and minimal responses, and associated with homosexual speech, including elongation of vowels and stress variations. A comparison was drawn between the homosexual primary participant 1. in the informal domain and 2. the professional domain, and with the other speakers including 3. heterosexual male speakers, 4. heterosexual female speakers and 5. one bisexual male speaker. The findings showed the primary participant having more similarities with the female's speech than the male's speech, but remaining unique. Specifically, tag questions stress variations and hedges were used more by the homosexual primary participant in both domains in comparison to the female and male speakers in the formal domain, having a closer mean frequency score to the female speakers. Minimal responses were used less than the heteroseuxal males but more than the heterosexual females. Elongated vowels were similar to that of the female speakers but the mean frequency decreased in the formal domain, maintaining a difference but converging toward the use of the male speakers. Stress variations were used more by the primary participant in comparison to the male speakers, but less than the female speakers. Results imply a separate speech community, which further subdivides the 'sex' subgroup. This study may aid further research on queer speech by supplying linguistic variables to investigate in the future, as well as posing past and present socio-grouping questions.
Sue Wilkinson
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University, UK
"I'm a Lancashire Lass": Shifting Identities in Lesbians' Talk about Breast Cancer Risk
This paper is concerned with the issue of identity-construction in talk about risk. It explores how shifting identities are presented, managed and negotiated within the interactional context of lesbians' talk about the causes of breast cancer, and the notion of breast cancer risk. In the mainstream social science literature on "lay aetiology", such talk about cause and risk is analyzed as reflecting speakers' "beliefs" or "opinions" about the causes of health and illness, and as revealing their "perceptions" or "understandings" of risk. Further, individuals' assessments of risk are often considered in relation to their "identity" - i.e. (relatively) fixed, stable individual characteristics or group memberships.
By contrast, this paper takes a discursive perspective on notions of risk and identity. From this perspective, talk about cause and risk is retheorized as a conversational resource (rather than as providing evidence of underlying cognitions); and identity is retheorized as an interactional accomplishment (rather than as a set of individual characteristics or social group memberships). In this way, talk about cause and risk can be seen as implicated in the process of identity-construction, as doing some crucial identity work. I will look at how identities are constructed and reconstructed within the concrete interactional setting of one particular data extract, in the course of which, participants can be seen to invoke - and make relevant - identities based on gender, age and social class as well as on sexual identity. I will explore how these shifting identities are presented, managed and negotiated in the context of this discussion, in an attempt to tease out the interactional business they seem designed to perform. I will end with some brief comments on the implications of taking a discursive perspective for mainstream areas of social science research.
[Last edited: 02 November 1999]