Constructing, Deconstructing And Reconstrucing Gender Flashcards
Created the ‘Language and Woman’s Place
Robert Lakoff
A way of speaking that both reflects and produces a subordinate position in society.
Robert Lakoff
According to him, women’s language is rife with such devices as mitigates and inessential qualifiers.
Robert Lakoff
Sort of , I think
Mitigators
Really happy, so beautiful
Inessential qualifiers
- Women and men talk differently.
2. That differences in women’s and men’s speech are the result of–and support- Male dominance
Lakoff’s claim
Two different, even conflicting, paradigms
Difference and Dominance
Argued that girls and boys live in different subcultures analogous to the distinct subcultures associated with those from different class or ethnic background.
Deborah Tannen (1990)
With assumption that interruption is a strategy for asserting conversational dominance and that conversational dominance in turn support global dominance.
Zimmerman and west (1975)
Argued that women and girls have different modes of moral reasoning.
Carol Gillian (1982)
Argued that framing questions about language and gender in terms of a difference -dominance dichotomy was not especially illuminating and urged researchers to look more closely at these differences.
Nancy Henley (1983)
Gender is the one between how women and men speak, and how they are spoken of.
-
Made a public declaration that the use of the masculine pronouns to refer to people generically.
Department of Linguistics at Harvard University
Language and the use of language
Inseparable
Feminism and Linguistic Theory argued that the standard linguistic focus on a static linguistic system obscured the real gender dimensions of language.
Deborah Cameron (1985)
Emphasizes both the historical and dynamic character of language, and the interactive dimensions of its use.
“Discourse turn” in language and gender
In this view, gender doesn’t just exist, but it’s continually produced, reproduced, and indeed changed through people’s performance of gendered acts.
Gender as involving what people “do”
Language is never “all” that matters socially because it is always accompanied by other meaningful aspects of interactions such as:
Facial expressions, dress, location & physical contact
A system of meaning- a way of construing notion of male and female- and language is the primary means through which we maintain or contest old meanings, and construct or resist new ones.
Gender
Every contribution one makes in an interaction as part of the carrying out of one’s intentions with respect to others.
Social ‘move’
Gender Is not something we are born with and not something we have, but something we do
West and Zimmerman (1987)
Is a biological categorization based primarily on reproductive potential.
Sex
Women are not born, they are made.
Simone de Beauvoir
Found that adults watching a crying infant were more likely to hear the cry as angry if they believed the infant was a boy, and as plaintive or fearful if they believed the infant was a girl.
Condry (1976)
Provides a dramatic example of children’s coming to perform gender.
Voice
In what age do boys and girls exhibit the same play behaviors?
Two
It is reinforced from culture to culture and community to community.
Separation
Points out that schools provide a sufficiently large population that boys and girls can separate.
Thorne (1993)
Argues that Because of separation, girls and boys develop different verbal cultures- different ways of interacting, verbally and different verbal cultures.
Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker (1982)
Is an extraordinarily powerful force in the maintenance of gender order (Connell, 1987).
Concentration of Desire or Cathexis
Does not end with childhood or adolescence but continues to be transformed as we move into the market place -to act like secretaries , lawyers, managers, etc.
Gender Development
First Fundamental principle of gender
Gender is learned
Second Fundamental gender principle
Gender is collaborative.
Third Fundamental Gender Principle
Gender is not something we have, but something we do.
Fourth Fundamental Gender Principle
Gender is symmetrical.
Said that gender is a just as system to justify inequality.
Kate Bornstein (1998)
Emphasizes that children have a very clear knowledge of their gender by the time they are three years old.
Eleanor Maccoby (2002)
Does not simply prescribe that male and female should be different, it insists that they simply are different.
Dominant ideology
Provides a particularly powerful force in gender enforcement as people tend to compare themselves not with people of other gender but with people of their own.
Recursiveness
Division of Labor
Women;s function is for the ______.
Men’s to the ______.
Domestic
Public realm
Is not just a matter of widespread ideas but includes the organization of social life more generally.
Hegemony
Has a theory of hegemony which focuses on this location of power in everyday routine structures, emphasizing that the most effective form of domination is the assimilation of the wider population into one’s worldview.
Anton Gramsci (1971)
Two kinds of masculinities
- Physical masculinity -working class
2. Technical masculinity - upper-middle class
Is a term used to refer to human activity when emphasizing the conventional aspect of activity and its relation to social structure.
Social practice
