Gendered Variation Flashcards
Dominance theory - Pamela fisherman
Studied 52 hours of mixed gendered interaction and found that women do more ‘chores’ in conversations which Pamela described as ‘shit work’.
Women made more effect to create an inclusive conversational atmosphere, encouraging male participation. Men tend to be come more involved if they liked the topic then they dominated after.
Dominance theory - dale spender, don Zimmerman, candace west
Men are more likely to interrupt than women are when in a mixed-sex communication.
Dominance theory - Dale spender
Spender suggests that women are trapped in a world of language that is not of their making, because men had historically controlled the meanings, to the extent that even the most taboo word in the language and therefore by women, referred to as part of their own bodies.
Difference theory - Deborah tannen
Tannen posited the idea that there are male and female ‘cultures’ with their own rules, shared meaning and ways of doing things men and women are socialised to see themselves as having different roles and positions in life.
Difference theory - peter trudgill
Suggests women tend to value aspects of that embody ‘overt prestige’ showing more affinity with social conformity and standardised forms of language. But men tend to value aspects of life that embody ‘covert prestige’.
Difference theory- Maltz and broker
Argue that women and men also have different discourse norms since they typically acquire communicate competence in single sex groups.
Julia Stanley
It’s thought that the English language itself is structured to create power imbalance between men and women. Linguistic determinism, the language you speak determines your thoughts and feelings. Language is patriarchal. ‘He’ is an absorbing pronoun. Children are socialised to believe in superiority of males.
Gender marked terms: family man, fireman, workman.
Women are semantically invisible. Women in response then made ‘Womxn’ which was created by radical feminists to take ‘man’ out of ‘woman’.
1. Men themselves have recognised the consequences of leaving women out of language used to describe all the most important areas of public life.
2. Men themselves can become bitterly distressed when they are made invisible by language in this way.
Goodard - terms of endearment
Terms of endearment - banes to people that are used that we know or dont know meant to be seen as friendly/light hearted but may not come across that way.
- pet.
- sweetheart
- flower
- Petal
- kid
- sugar
Hoey
Movie titles - semantic undercoat to words in general
- daddy daycare
Goldberg - perceptions of gender
Perceptions of gender
As children learn to speak, they absorb the values, assumptions, and expectations of the adults who surround them through the words they are given to learn.
Julia Stanley - sexual words
There are more words generally available you describe men over women. Only 26 sexual words against men were found and 220 sexual words against women.
Sue lees - derogatory terms
Argues that men control female sexual behaviour by the use of derogatory terms - in particular, the word slag.
Robin lakeoff
Concluded women were at a disadvantage by having to adopt forms of language that made them sound unconfident. For example, hedging, polite forms, tag questions, empty objectives, direct quotation etc.
