Gender (paper 2) Flashcards
GENDERED TERMS THEORY
Lakoff (1975)
- “lord and lady” implies a difference in status between the two genders
- gendered terms also include any LEXEME with the SUFFIX “ess”
eg. “princess” implies you either belong to a male or are lesser than him
GENDERED TERMS THEORY
Holmes (1986)
- gendered terms discriminate against women in the very high number of derogatory terms used to describe them
eg. “stud” for a man and “bitch” for a woman - similarly, food imagery gendered negatively for women
eg. “crumpet” or “sugar”
GENDERED TERMS THEORY
Stanley (1977)
- 220 insults to describe promiscuous (having multiple sexual partners) female and only 20 for male
- insults for females tend to have worse connotations
- insults for males often had positive connotations or when being negative, connotations of femininity
GENDERED TERMS THEORY
Tannen (1992)
- “male as the norm”
- terms such as “men” “man” and “mankind” - term for people in general is the same as that for one sex only
when a boy asserts himself he’s called a (…) verses when a girl asserts herself and she’s called a (…)
when a little boy asserts himself he’s called a “leader” but when a little girl does the same she risks being “branded”
between elementary and high school…
between elementary and high school girls self esteem drops 3.5 times more than boys
Zimmerman and West (1975)
96% of interruptions in mixed-sex conversations are by men
DEFICIT THEORY
Lakoff (1975) - deficit language
- female language seen as “deficient” when compared to the “male norm” largely due to an inequality of power
- women use intensifiers (so, very)
- frequently hedge (sort of, kind of)
- empty adjectives (divine, lovely)
- apologise more
- use tag questions
- tend to avoid coarse language
etc.
DEFICIT THEORY
O’Barr and Atkins (1980) - social class model
- challenged much of Lakoff’s work
- discovered lower class men use linguistic features similar to those spotted in female speech
- their study evidenced a “powerless language” constructed by social status
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins in the 1964 film “My Fair Lady”:
“why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
DOMINANCE THEORY
Fishman (1983) - female interactions
- conversation between the sexes sometimes fails, not because of anything inherent in the way women talk, but because of how men respond, or don’t respond
- in mixed-sex language interactions men speak on average for twice as long as women
- women do the support work in conversations such as supportive noises “mmm” and “yes” to show active listening
DIFFERENCE THEORY
Jones (1990) - “house talk”
- scandal - judging the behaviour of others, particularly other women
- bitching - women bitch as an outlet for their anger because of their restricted role and inferior social status
- chatting - the most intimate form of gossip
Milroy’s Belfast Study
- looks at men and women using non-standard forms in Belfast
- defines two types of network - open and closed
closed networks - consist of people who all know each other, they are a tight knit group (high density)
open networks - very broad, many links to people outside of the normal area are involved (low density)
Milroy - findings
- men have dense, closed networks & use a high number of non-standard forms
- women have less dense and open networks & use a much smaller number of non-standard forms
CHALLENGES: - study of Clonard women and Hammer men in Belfast challenges these findings
- due to a rise in unemployment, men had to travel out of the community to find a job and women all ended up working together in the town
- as a result men ended up with relatively open networks verses women’s quite closed networks
- SUGGESTS SOCIAL GROUP IS MORE CONTROLLING OF A PERSON’S LANGUAGE THAN THEIR GENDER
