Constructing, Deconstructing And Reconstrucing Gender Flashcards
(44 cards)
Created the ‘Language and Woman’s Place
Robert Lakoff
A way of speaking that both reflects and produces a subordinate position in society.
Robert Lakoff
According to him, women’s language is rife with such devices as mitigates and inessential qualifiers.
Robert Lakoff
Sort of , I think
Mitigators
Really happy, so beautiful
Inessential qualifiers
- Women and men talk differently.
2. That differences in women’s and men’s speech are the result of–and support- Male dominance
Lakoff’s claim
Two different, even conflicting, paradigms
Difference and Dominance
Argued that girls and boys live in different subcultures analogous to the distinct subcultures associated with those from different class or ethnic background.
Deborah Tannen (1990)
With assumption that interruption is a strategy for asserting conversational dominance and that conversational dominance in turn support global dominance.
Zimmerman and west (1975)
Argued that women and girls have different modes of moral reasoning.
Carol Gillian (1982)
Argued that framing questions about language and gender in terms of a difference -dominance dichotomy was not especially illuminating and urged researchers to look more closely at these differences.
Nancy Henley (1983)
Gender is the one between how women and men speak, and how they are spoken of.
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Made a public declaration that the use of the masculine pronouns to refer to people generically.
Department of Linguistics at Harvard University
Language and the use of language
Inseparable
Feminism and Linguistic Theory argued that the standard linguistic focus on a static linguistic system obscured the real gender dimensions of language.
Deborah Cameron (1985)
Emphasizes both the historical and dynamic character of language, and the interactive dimensions of its use.
“Discourse turn” in language and gender
In this view, gender doesn’t just exist, but it’s continually produced, reproduced, and indeed changed through people’s performance of gendered acts.
Gender as involving what people “do”
Language is never “all” that matters socially because it is always accompanied by other meaningful aspects of interactions such as:
Facial expressions, dress, location & physical contact
A system of meaning- a way of construing notion of male and female- and language is the primary means through which we maintain or contest old meanings, and construct or resist new ones.
Gender
Every contribution one makes in an interaction as part of the carrying out of one’s intentions with respect to others.
Social ‘move’
Gender Is not something we are born with and not something we have, but something we do
West and Zimmerman (1987)
Is a biological categorization based primarily on reproductive potential.
Sex
Women are not born, they are made.
Simone de Beauvoir
Found that adults watching a crying infant were more likely to hear the cry as angry if they believed the infant was a boy, and as plaintive or fearful if they believed the infant was a girl.
Condry (1976)
