Language and Gender Flashcards
The male gaze
In feminist history the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and literature, from a masculine, hetrosexual prospective that presents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male view.
The first wave of feminism
Occuring in the 19th century and early 20th century was mainly concerned with women’s rights to vote
The second wave of feminism
occurred in the 1960s and 1970s but continued in the 80s. refers to the women’s liberation movement for equal, legal and social rights.
The third wave
Began in the early 1990s responding to the failure and backlash of the second wave. This ideology seeks to challenge the definitions of femininity arguing that the second wave over emphasises the experience of middle age or upper class white women
The fourth wave
began in 2012 and was focused on the empowerment of women and the use of internet tools.
Folkilinguistics
when ideas about language that are current in the culture eminated from historical stereotypes
Robin Lakoff (1975)
There are sixteen
Good luck
- Hedges ‘sort of’
- use polite forms ‘would you mind…’
- use tag questions ‘you’re going to dinner, aren’t you?’
- use empty adjectives ‘divine’ ‘adorable’ so on’
- 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 by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of the statement, expressing uncertainty
- 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: ‘my isn’t it cold here?’ secretly a request to turn the heat on or close a window
- speak using emphasis and use more intensified; especially, so, and very
- Lack a sense of humour; women do not jokes well and often don’t understand the punch line of jokes
Tannen - male and female language use in six contrasts
status vs support
Independence vs intimacy
Advice vs understanding
information vs feelings
order vs proposal
conflict vs compromise
Status vs Support
men see conversation as a contest, women do not think of the people they converse with as ‘trying to get one upon them’
Independence vs Intimacy
men see consulting with their partner to be ‘asking for permission’ rather than simply discussing.
Advice vs Understanding
Too many men see a complaint as a challenge to come up with a solution, but often women are looking for emotional support.
Information vs feelings
To men, talk is information and has a practical purpose
Order vs Proposal
Women hedge their orders and men feel that by doing this a woman is trying to manipulate them to do something rather than just directly asking like men would.
conflict vs compromise
women are reluctant to openly oppose others
Jennifer Coates: topic management
- 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.
Trudgill (1983)
He studied men’s and women’s social class accents and found that women’s pronunciation was closer to received pronunciation.
O’Barr and Atkins
they studied the language used in the courtroom and found female lawyers to be assertive and interruptive. They also found that witnesses of both sexes would use characteristics such as hedges and tag questions from Robin Lakoff’s weak ‘‘female’’ language proving that they were in fact typical of powerless speech.
Litosseliti
She points out that gender is not the only factor affecting language use in any conversation, and that the representation of males and females is in any given context may have more to do with traditional discourse structures than with any significant difference between men and women.
This is not to say that earlier theorists are wrong, but rather that analysis is much more complex than we may have thought previously. Race, ethnicity, age, social status, class, and sexual orientation, are all factors that might affect our language use as much as gender.
Social group power
the degree of influence an individual has amongst their peers and within their society as a whole
Fishmann
His research identified a tendency for women to collaborate more in conversation, and for men to be more individual or competitive.
The dominance model (1975)
This is the theory that in mixed-sex conversations men are more likely to interrupt than women as shown by Zimmerman and west. They report that in 11 conversations between men and women, men use 46 interruptions but women only use 2.
Additionally, they found that in their data 96% of all interruptions in mixed-sex conversations were made by men. They saw this as a sign that women had restricted linguistic freedom and that men sought to impose their dominant status by putting explicit restraints on their female counterparts.
Contested research dominance model
Geoffrey Beattie says that the problem with the study is that it might have one very voluble man which has a disproportionate effect on the total. he asks why do interruptions necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and involvement?
Beattie found that women and men interrupt with a more or less equal frequency.
The difference approach
States that men and women belong to a different sub-cultures and preferences. Therefore there language would be different in reflection of this and avoids ‘blaming’ men for being dominant and suggesting women’s speech is inferior.
