Unit 3: Politics of Categorization and Labelling Flashcards
Categorization and Gender Categories
“Gender is a system of categories, and language is a system for categorization” (Kiesling 2019)
- language categorization works with gender categorization
- no directional causality: they feed into each other equally
- conjointly create and maintain gender categorization systems across society
What are categories?
Categories:
- classifications of entities based on assumed or perceived commonalities
- typically defined relative to a point of background of contrast
- the choice of commonalities or contrast is typically arbitrary
Categories:
distinctions between social categories are arbitrary
- based on history and society rather than biology or language
Gender Categories in Language
Many ways to encode gender categories:
- pronouns (they, she, her, him, ze…)
- certain professional titles (eg. chairman, stewardess…)
- grammatical agreement (il est beau, elle est belle)
- honorifics (sir, madam…)
- labels (non-binary, woman, man, transgender, cisgender…)
Cues like these offer a glance at gender-based power asymmetry expressed through language
- cross-linguistic exhibitions of (cis)sexism; general trend appears to privilege the masculine
Gender Categories in Language: Early Research
Early Research: explored ways in which language structures expressed sexist attitudes in society,
- eg: generic he: “every student must bring his book”
- gender distinctions in professional titles: fireman/firefighter, waiter/waitress
- modificational gendering with stereotyped occupations, such as male nurse, women doctor
Gender Categories in Language: Contemporary Research
Contemporary Research: efforts that mark gender morphologically
- use of underscore in Slavic languages to differentiate between genders
- use of x or e in Spanish eg: amigux, amigue (friend) — gender neutral
Objective: to undermine the masculine form as the default, unmarked form, which positions women and non-binary people as marked exceptions, somehow different, odd or less human in comparison
Polar Opposites
(Equipollent)
Equipollent: two concepts are treated in par with each other
- used frequently in phonology: [+/- voiced], [+/- nasal]…
- features are polarized: mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive; everything fits into one category or another
- eg: binary gender: [+/- adult], [+/- female]
Privative Features
Privative Features: generic background of field membership, with marked categories that differ from the generic field
- the generic default category lacks the distinguishing feature that the marked category has
Category Relations
Polarized oppositions can be treated privatively—eg: the generic human (man) is often defined by what it lacks:
- femaleness — a womb
- youth — sexual immaturity
Other categories are treated as marked (not equal) and contrasted against the default background category
False Generics
False Generics: descriptions of individuals that aren’t inherently masculine, but that still support a default male interpretation in the context of their use (Treicher & Frank 1989)
- “the settlers and their wives”
- “three Brazillians and a woman”
- “when we woke in the morning, we found that the villagers had all left by canoe in the night, leaving us alone with the women and children”
Think ancient Greece “citizenship”
Sub-Category Erasure
Sub-Category Erasure: marking the distinctiveness of a marked category in a field results in the near erasure of the default category as a category itself—instead, the default is “normal”
- eg: queer people have a lifestyle or sexual preference; straight people don’t
- eg: trans people have ‘preferred pronouns’; cisgender people don’t
- people of colour have race and culture; white people don’t
Generic categories end up implying other aspects of identity that are taken for granted and are not overtly described (Kiesling 2019)
This differs from the exclusion of marked categories when talking about the default—doubly affects racialized women:
- the default women = white
- the default black person = a man
Category Asymmetry
Category Asymmetry: once categories are available and salient against some background field, we often superimpose these categories in other ways, resulting in linguistic asymmetries/gender differentiation
Physical appearance is highly gender-differentiated
- women: described as beautiful, pretty
- men: described as handsome, good-looking
Frequency by which a term is used
- some subcategories are elaborated specifically for women more than for men
- many female-specific terms that have no male equivalent; women’s appearance = more commented on in more contexts
- eg: waist size — socialized to be gender exclusive
Implicit Associations
Implicit Associations: unconscious (often stereotypical) associations we have with categories of people
- “routinized, automatic associations between concepts, such as between social categories (eg: men) and personality traits (eg: assertiveness)” (Rudman & Glick 2008)
- people who consciously reject racial, sexual or gender stereotypes often still suffer from implicit associations
Conceptual Baggage
Conceptual Baggage: the linguistic realization of implicit associations (McConnell-Ginet 2008)
- often, the manifestation of this baggage happens covertly, as a secondary meaning transmitted during a communicative event
Labelling Practices
Labelling Practices: labelling is (linguistically speaking) part of a highly complex history and socialization
- how we compartmentalize the world is not straightforward, and we don’t always agree on how we do that
- normative models are often reflected in the ways in which we label others
While the importance of normalizing the scope of gender labels may be trivial to some, it holds much significance for others
- not having to think about labels is a privilege
- not having to think about other linguistic forms of categorization is a privilege
It is a privilege to exist at the level of everyday linguistic interaction
“Trans People’s Linguistic Self-Determination” (Zimman 2017)
Lal Zimman (2017)
Linguistic Self-Determination: centres the desires of individuals regarding how others should refer to them
Self-identification = closely related to self-determination, which in trans communities encompasses both the individual’s right to identify their own gender identity and their right to modify and present their body in a way that reflects and personalized sende of self
