Unit 4: Doing and Styling

Question 1

“Doing Gender”: Gender and Interaction

Answer 1

Generalizations about tendencies of one gender to do something over an “other” gender are problematic unless critically examined
- “the fact that the question is even posed is itself part of gender ideology” (Kiesling 2019)

Question 2

Confirmation Bias

Answer 2

Confirmation Bias: disproportional tendency of observers and bystanders to noice traits and behaviours that confirm their internalized beliefs and prejudices
- driving factor behind discursive behaviours
- any outliers taken to be “the exception that proves the rule” or rather just an outlier
- people see what they want to see

Recall the Hall of Mirrors (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet)
- results of studies + popular belief leads to a perception of seemingly strong evidence despite modest/contradictory results
- perceived result/features is then incorporated into ideologies on language and gender

Question 3

Gender and Interaction Parameters

Answer 3

Gender and Interaction Parameters:
1) Who is present?
2) Who is talking?
3) What is the division of turn-taking?
4) Who is heard?

Question 4

1) Who is present?

Answer 4

Conversations require the presence of their participants
- both physical and mental presence enable the communication of individual ideas
- the right to be part of a convo/communicate individual ideas historically and systematically interacts with gender

Question 5

1) Who is present?
Linguistic Economy
&
Economy of Ideas

Answer 5

Linguistic Economy: who gets to speak

Economy of Ideas: who gets to put their ideas on the table in situations when public affairs are decided

Question 6

2) Who is talking?

Answer 6

The basic trend in society is for higher-status speakers to speak more than lower-status speakers

HOWEVER: female physicians (high-status) frequently interrupted by male patients (lower-status) (West 1984)
- men = more likely to occupy higher-status positions
- men = more likely to presume that women occupy lower-status positions, even if they do not (eg: both are physicians)

“The link between the stereotypical gender pattern and the amount of talk is an indirect index” (Konnelly 2020)
- index: symbol that points to or indexes to some element in the context in which it occurs
- indirect index of power; gender interacts with power and informs perception of who hold status

Question 7

2) Who is talking?
Interruptions

Answer 7

Interruption: denying someone the opportunity to speak is an (arguably abusive) display of dominance and power
- at the very least, is an attempt to gain power

Question 8

3) What is the division of turn-taking?

Answer 8

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974)
Model of ‘ordinary’ turn-taking
Turns: constructed of linguistic units called utterances: sentences, clauses, phrases, words. Intonationally, grammatically and pragmatically complete

Transitions: (between one speaker and another) correspond to transitional relevant places. When one turn-taker has put forth an utterance, the opportunity is given for the next to put forth another

Question 9

3) What is the division of turn-taking?
Simultaneous Speech (overlap and interruption)

Answer 9

Simultaneous speech that do not correspond to transition-relevant places:
1) Overlap
a. backchanneling, minimal responses (eg. uh-huh, yep, I see…)
b. still roughly corresponds to a transitional-relevant place
c. signals high involvement with the content of the previous utterance

2) Interruption
a. penetrates the boundaries of an utterance
b. does not correspond to a transitional-relevant place
c. forces other participant to give up the floor

Question 10

4) Who is heard?
Uptake and Discourse Updating

Answer 10

For a speech act to be successful and for an utterance to be transmitted, listeners must provide the following:

Uptake: comprehension of the speaker’s meaning (locutionary force: literal meaning) and intention (illocutionary force: request)

Discourse updating: taking the speech act as serious/consequential, as having done something (perlocutionary force: understanding and acting)

If one or both fail, then the person communicating is not heard and their speech act fails

Question 11

4) Who is heard?
Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary Force

Answer 11

Example: “will you pass the salt, please?”
Locutionary Force: a speaker’s literal meaning/content of the utterance
- (eg: i ask if the listener is willing to pass me the salt)

Illocutionary Force: a speaker’s intent/intent of the utterance
- (eg: i want the salt, i make the request hoping to receive the salt)

Perlocutionary Force: the impact or effect of putting the utterance forth
- (eg: i get x to pass me the salt // the listener passes the speaker the salt)

Question 12

4) Who is heard?
Ideological Blinders

Answer 12

“Ideological blinders may also block the intended comprehension or uptake a woman needs in order to be understood” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2013)
- interaction between gender and being heard is indirectly indexed
- power and power ideologies = more direct influence

Question 13

Speech Events, Activities and Genres

Answer 13

Speech Events: involve models requiring a highly standardized and/or ritualized form of language
- (eg: courtroom language)

Speech Activities: a category of speech similar to speech event but without grounding in a specific ritual
- eg: lecturing, complaining, joking…

Speech Genres: groupings of speech events with stylistic commonalities
- eg: formal vs informal

Question 14

Gossip

Answer 14

“Women gossip, men ‘talk shop’”
- same speech event with the same social weight tends to bear the label “gossiping when women do it more often than men
- related to the idea of “idleness”
- women are being idle
- men are engaging in work, and therefore are being productive

Question 15

What is style?

Answer 15

Style: systematic pattern of performance
- imbues behaviours with social meaning
- highlights social distinctions
- style: “not a façade behind which the ‘real’ self stands, but the means by which we present ourselves or ourselves-in-making to the world” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2013)

Question 16

Style: Direct Indexing

Answer 16

“Gender is always a doing” (Butler 1990)
- language is one of many stylistic tools we rely on in our expression of gender, along with
- clothing, hair, grooming patterns, interests, hobbies…

• a performance, or “doing” in this sense is not inauthentic
  
  • direct indexing:
  • in the linguistic expression of gender identity, an individual draws upon linguistic resources that index meaning
  • the systematicity of a certain style can be observed by the ways in which gender-indexed linguistic resources are combined

Question 17

Indexicality

Answer 17

Stylistic resources are attributed meaning by associating them with real-world items and concepts. The systematic use of these resources is then recognized as a style and the social meaning of them is interpreted as the whole system.

• most gendered linguistic resources only indirectly index gender (eg: uptalk -> tentativeness -> feminine)
  
  • chain of causality determined by archetypes

However, resources are interpretable only insofar as the system in which they appear—resources have larger social contexts in which they are interpretable (language, culture…)
- when these become associated with a social category, social meaning is established

Question 18

Indexicality

Answer 18

“Categories of people get marked as aggressive, as complainers, as sycophantic, as competitive, as empathetic. And the moves associated with those styles are more quickly ‘recognized’ in people known or believed to be members of those categories. With each recognition, the category story is enforced” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2013)
- cyclical relationship ; the style of another is associated by perception and preconceived notions