Gender- Models Flashcards
What is gender?
The characteristics that a society or culture defines as masculine or feminine
Gender differences are attributed to cultural upbringing and are labelled a social construct, therefore many people argue that gender is performative.
What is sex?
Biological differences between males and females like hormones, chromosomes, and sex organs.
Sex differences are defined by biology.
Deficit theory
Focuses on identifying the limitations and shortcomings of individuals or groups.
Proposes that women have a different speech style which is lacking in some way compared to male speech.
What are the four models of gendered language
Deficit
Dominance
Difference
Diversity
Jespersen (1922)
Published a set of ideas about women’s language, mainly that:
Women talk a lot
Women are emotional rather than grammatical
Women tend towards hyperbole
Women have a smaller vocabulary
Lakoff (1975)
Believed women’s language is weak due to their enforced place in society.
Men’s language is the normative that women are measured against, and found deficient.
Found that people’s view of themselves, society, and each other causes the differences in language.
Lakoff’s features of women’s language
Hedging
Super polite forms
Tag questions
Avoidance of slang and expletives
Hypercorrect grammar
Upspeak
Limitations of the deficit model
O’Barr and Atkins (1980)
Fishman (1977)
O’Barr and Atkins (1980)
Recorded 150 hours of courtroom footage
Found female lawyers to be assertive and interrupting, typically masculine features.
Also found witnesses of all genders would use Lakoff’s weak language features when on trial.
Concluded that weak language traits are more powerless traits than female traits.
Fishman (1977)
Re-assessed markers of female uncertainty like tag questions to be means of keeping conversations going, rather than uncertainty. This was labelled ‘conversational shitwork.’
Suggested that women do more ‘shitwork’ to keep conversations going whereas men tended to control the conversation to reinforce their dominance.
Dominance theory
Proposes that because women have a traditionally less powerful position in society, their language is less assertive and confident.
Zimmerman and West (1975)
Reinforcing the dominance model by finding that in mixed sex conversation:
Men interrupted women more, with 96% of interruptions from men
Women were silent for longer periods and more often than men
Greif (1980)
Found parents interrupt daughters more than sons
And fathers do more interrupting than mothers
Beattie (1982)
Criticised Zimmerman and West, questioning the meaning of interruptions and whether they actually reflect dominance.
Recorded that women and men’s interruptions were more or less equal, with no statistical difference.
Difference theory
Idea that men and women use language for different purposes and have cultural differences which cause this.
Tannen
Challenged the deficit theory and believed women’s use of language was natural/innate, with women using more hedging and men using directives.
Argued women are therefore inherently cooperative, reflected in their language use.
Report vs Rapport talk
Suggests women use language to build relations whereas men use language to negotiate status.
Cameron (2009)
Criticised difference theory, suggesting that:
Patterns suggested by research are not dominant in all cultures and not clear cut differences.
The difference between language within a gender group is as large as the gender difference between the two groups.
Diversity theory
Suggests that gender is only one of many factors influencing language use.
Assumes gender is a social construct, and that there will be more diversity in language between two people of the same gender than different genders.
Butler (1990)
Gender Performativity theory:
Idea that gender is not an inherent identity but a series of performed acts which create the illusion of a stable gender.
Shaped by cultural norms and expectations, individuals unconsciously ‘do’ gender through behaviour and speech.
Hyde (2005)
Suggested males and females are similar on most psychological variables like self-esteem, mathematics and comprehension.
Larger differences appear in motor skills and aggression.
Suggests research should focus on both differences and similarities.
