Drag and gender theories

Question 1

Robin Lakoff (1976)

There are sixteen

Answer 1

• Hedges
• use polite forms
• use tag questions ‘you’re going to dinner, aren’t you?’
• use empty adjectives
• use hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation
• use direct quotations whereas men paraphrase more often
• have a special lexicon; women have more words for colours, sports for men
• use question innotation in declarative statements
• speak less frequency
  overuse qualifiers ‘I think that…’
• apologise more ‘I’m sorry but I think that…’
• use modal constructions ‘can’ ‘could’ ‘shall’ ‘should’ etc
• avoid coarse language or expletives
• use indirect commands and requests
• speak using emphasis
• use more intensified; especially, so, and very
• Lack a sense of humour

Question 2

Fishmann

collaboration

Answer 2

His research identified a tendency for women to collaborate more in conversation, and for men to be more individual or competitive.

Question 3

Coates: topic management

there are three

Answer 3

• men will often reject a topic of conversation introduced by women, while women will accept the topics introduced by men
• men discuss ‘male topics’ e.g. business, sport, politics, economics
• women are more likely to initiate a conversation than men but less likely to make the conversation succeed.

Question 4

Tannen - six male and female language contrasts

Answer 4

status vs support
Independence vs intimacy
Advice vs understanding
information vs feelings
order vs proposal
conflict vs compromise

Question 5

Rusty Barrett

Answer 5

Argues that African American Drag Queens adopt a “white woman” style of speaking

Question 6

Nathaniel Simmons

Answer 6

Argues that Drag Queens use performance as a space in which to blur the dominant American gender narrative binary lines

Question 7

Brathwaite

ball culture

Answer 7

Drag queens stylise their language to fit the idea of linguistic drag. Drag Queen’s particular way of speaking derives from Ball Culture, a cross dressing ball that white men hosted in the 1930s, often exlcuding black members in an underground LGBT sub culture in the United States (although it is likely to have also occured in the UK). Brathwaite suggested that ball cultures tried to figure out how to respond to a society that devalued their lives and attempted to erase their presence and therefore their language is representative of this by containing drag slang such as ‘to read someone’ in order to compare a queen’s personality or outfit to a part of the society that discriminated them.

Question 8

Judith Butler

gender performance - what is a woman

Answer 8

According to Bulter’s thesis on gender performance, gender is no way a stable identity but an identity tenuously constituted in time. In this respect a woman is a fluid social construction not an object with essential common features.

Question 9

Bell and Gibson’s sociallinguistic of performance

audience’s expectations of drag language

Answer 9

They identified that stage performance is the scheduled identification and elevation of one or more people to perform on a stage. Moreover the audience has an expectation of skill and the performer is therefore subjected to an intense audience gaze. This consists of Drag fans who expect their Queens to adhere to a certain standard of linguistic drag as the wide audience is used to the particular way of Drag Queens speech having been familair with Rupaul’s Drag Race. Therefore the audience design as Bell and Gibson termed it, plays a part linguistically, as the speakers adapt their language style largerly in response to their listeners.

Question 10

Scott F. Koesling

DISCOURSE MARKERS

Answer 10

Defines “dude” as a discourse marker that needs not identify an addressee(s), but more generally encodes the speaker’s stance to his or her current addressee(s). The same can be said for “girl” in this context as behind the scenes of RuPaul’s drag race, the contestances refer to each other as “girl” when they are both in and out of drag.

Question 11

Essing: drag slang

Answer 11

Identified that drag slang is a very prominant, distinct slang that is not only used when in Drag, but also out of Drag because it shows the belonging to a certain group, that is not only limited to a stage performance.

Question 12

Superiority humour theory

Answer 12

Focuses on the darker side of comedy. Specifically that we laugh in response to our elevation over others’ unfortunate situations or social standings.

Question 13

Relief humour theory

Answer 13

Sigmund Freud percieved laughter and humour as a form of release as a way for humans to outwardly funnel from other sources such as pent up emotions or sexual repression.

Question 14

Incongruity humour theory

expectation vs …

Answer 14

States that finding something funny revolves around derailed expectations and focuses on the conflict between what is expected and what actually happens in the joke.

Question 15

Benign Violation theory

Answer 15

A series of non-threatening violations of social norms. Essentially a joke should violate some sort of cultural practise or value, but at a safe psychological distance to where the humour doesn’t become to real for the audience

Question 16

Double entendre

Answer 16

A spoken phrase that can be understood in either two ways. The first being the literal meaning which is one of innocence, while the second figuritive meaning is often ironic or sexually risque and requires the audience to have some additional knowledge to understand the joke.

Question 17

Polysemy

Answer 17

A word with several possible meanings

Question 18

Taboo humour

Answer 18

Saying something that nobody else would say in a civilized environment in front of an audience to suprise or shock them.

Question 19

Stereotypical humour

Answer 19

Stereotypes in humour are when an exaggerated and oversimplified version of a person or group of people is used to poke fun at the original.