Language, Gender and Ideology

Constructions of Femininity for Marriage

Saumya Sharma

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429960376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood.

Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.

Chapter 1
Gender, feminism and femininity

Since the publication of Robin Lakoff’s seminal essay ‘Language and Woman’s Place’ (1973/1975), the field of language and gender has increasingly expanded to produce a large number of works in diverse fields relating to woman’s and men’s lives, so much so that there is now a ‘feminist linguistics’ corresponding to and also borrowing from feminist thinkers. The plethora of research on language and gender cannot be summarized in this short space, but suffice it to say that it is not restricted to women, but encompasses issues of masculinities (Connell 1987, 1995; Frosh et al. 2002) and sexualities as well. In the following pages, I’ll give a brief overview of the development of the field of language and gender, the major works and their critiques, followed by a detailed discussion of the notion of femininity, drawing on the works of sociologists, feminist thinkers and feminist linguists. I’ll then discuss the importance of feminism in contrast to the troubling notion of postfeminism, laying down my aims and approach for this book.

Language and gender: a brief overview

Researchers in language and gender usually distinguish between sex and gender, where the former is considered biological and the latter a social construct. Broadly, the studies in this field can be divided into those that treat gender as a variable (see Jesperson, Labov Trudgill in this chapter) and those in which there is an active feminist intervention in the analysis of gender. Jesperson, in his work Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922/1998), described the differences in the speech of men and women in terms of phonology, grammar, vocabulary, etc. Not only did he find tribal differences in their speech, such as the use of a different vocabulary in the Swahili system when talking of sexual life, but also in general, the quickness of women’s thoughts was matched by the use of the pronominal system (he or she), and they used a lexis that was more refined and contained more euphemistic substitutes (“the other place” for “hell”) and adverbs of intensity (“awfully pretty”, “quite charming”, “so lovely”) because of their “fondness for” hyperbole, and they left “their exclamatory sentences half finished” (Jesperson 1998: 234–7), which lent a distinct feminine touch to their speech. In contrast, men used more rugged language, replete with swear and taboo words. The field found impetus in early sociolinguistic research that was mostly quantitative, relying on the interview method as found in Labov (1966) and Trudgill’s (1972a) works. Such studies were largely correlational in nature, where the principal aim was to find differences in pronunciation largely on the basis of social class, ethnicity and biological sex – men versus women – showing the use of standard and nonstandard forms, and differences in speech styles by both or either of the genders in Norwich, Belfast and New York (Labov 1966; Trudgill 1972a, 1972b; Cheshire 1982; Milroy 1992). However, when it came to the female gender, conflicting results were found. For instance, Trudgill reported that women were more status conscious and showed a tendency to use the standard forms because of their insecure status in society as compared to the nonstandard, working-class speech that possessed “desirable connotations for male speakers” (1972a: 183), probably as a sign of masculinity. However, Lesley Milroy’s work titled Language and Social Networks (1980) challenged the notion of women being more conscious of standard forms of speech than men, identifying the role of social networks in the speech of each of the genders as a social group. However, in these studies, gender was considered a monolithic, unproblematic, given entity, and not much attention was given to the social positions, roles and other factors that required men and women to behave and talk in particular ways – for instance, professional requirements (Eckert 1989; Litosseliti 2006; Sunderland 2006a).

From the 1970s, there was an upsurge in research on gender known by various names: the deficit and dominance approaches. The former claimed to describe and establish how woman’s language was different from and deficient to men’s language, while the latter focussed on the inequalities suffered by women and their domination by men through language, with the latter being known as sexism from the 1960s. Women’s continued and systematic oppression was a sign of how they were complicit in perpetuating their plight. As Jennifer Coates states, quoting Zimmerman and West, “Doing power is often a way of doing gender” (2004: 6). One of the seminal works that was typical of the deficit approach was Lakoff’s article. Here, her aim was twofold: to establish a ‘women’s language’ by citing detailed examples of gender differences in speech and to highlight how English language was derogatory towards women in the choice and connotations of words, making her work one of the first treatises on sexism in English. Lakoff’s arguments mostly revolved round vocabulary and what is now known as discourse markers in discourse analysis – that is, hedges, particles and euphemisms (Schiffrin 1994). She put forward the following points:

1. Women showed “far more precise discriminations while naming colours” (1973: 49) – a domain that was decidedly nonmasculine and thus reinforced their subordinate status.
2. Their frequent use of tag questions was a syntactic marker of less confidence and assertion. The peculiar combination of the rising intonation for a declarative answer performed a similar function.
3. Their use of adjectives was particularly feminine (“adorable, lovely, charming, sweet, divine”), while men could use neutral words (“great, terrific cool, neat”) (1973: 51).
4. Euphemisms (passed away instead of died, put down rather than killed), hedges (words that tone down the intensity of an assertion), intensifiers and apologies were more common among women, which clearly denoted their desire to not displease anyone.
5. The particles used by them (‘oh dear’, ‘oh goodness’) were symptomatic of the discriminatory gendering process of girls and boys; “docility and resignation” (ibid.) were expected of girls, while boys could be more forceful and boisterous.
6. Many words in the English language portrayed women in a negative light when their meanings were contrasted with corresponding words for men – a process later known as semantic derogation, such as spinster/bachelor, master/mistress, widow/ widower, the use of titles, etc.

Though Lakoff wished to reveal that “linguistic imbalances” were “worthy of study because they bring into sharper focus real world imbalances and inequities” (1973: 73), yet she was criticized for her observational and anecdotal methodology of data collection, considered by many as conjectural analysis that would not promote further research in this area. She was also censured for treating the language use of women as markers of their subjugated status and for her rather vocal stance on the dominance approach (see Hall and Bucholtz 1995 for a full review; also see Cameron, McAlinden and Leary 1988). Also, her claim about tag questions lead to a number of studies that found varying or no differences (see Fishman 1980; Baumann 1976; Hartman 1976), and thus the search for real differences between the genders remained inconclusive (Crawford 1995). On the basis of their study of female witnesses in the courtroom, O’Barr and Atkins (1980) asserted that the features of women’s language were inaccurate for the social status of the participants, and their previous experiences in the courtroom played a major role in their speech. Lakoff’s work was also criticized for assuming intrinsic deficiency in women’s language and the fact that they need to appropriate men’s speech if they wish to be viewed seriously (Coates 2004).

The second dominance approach was exemplified in Dale Spender’s works such as Man-Made Language (1980), Men’s Studies Modified (1981), Invisible Women (1982) and Feminist Theorists (1983); however, Man-Made Language remained by far her most popular and anthologized work, wherein she asserted the non-neutrality of language that firstly served the interests of men and secondly was instrumental in producing and maintaining their domination, and simultaneously the verbal abuse of women because of the way language named, labelled and created reality. Like Lakoff, Spender too has been criticized for stating that syntax and semantics are man-made yet not providing enough evidence of that, and of the unclear use of the words ‘meaning’, ‘semantics’, ‘structure’ and ‘symbol’ in her work (Black and Coward 1981). In fact, her loose terminology weakens her arguments (Talbot 2010).

Another linguist in this tradition who supported her claims with rigorous empirical work was Pamela Fishman, famously describing women’s speech as ‘conversational shitwork’ (1983). In her celebrated article title ‘Interaction: The Work Women Do’, she endeavoured to analyse mixed-sex conversations of three heterosexual couples “demonstrating how verbal interactions helps to construct and maintain the hierarchical relations between men and women” (1983: 89). Her results largely supported Lakoff’s claims. She found that women asked more than double the questions as compared to men; they were five times more frequent users of discourse markers such as ‘you know’; women’s minimal responses displayed support in comparison to the lack of interest shown by men through their minimal responses. Also, men made twice as many statements as women, invariably receiving responses from their spouses; the topics initiated by women were mostly met with failure because of minimal responses by men, thereby showing that women did the hard work in conversations to maintain it. An interesting point made by Lakoff was that the success of men’s talk and the failure of women’s were not because of an inherent quality in the genders but because of the support or lack of it from the opposite gender, thus reinforcing the power imbalance in relationships and language. The dominance approach has been criticized for its marked emphasis on male domination by not providing enough contextual and specific evidence for it. Also, scholars may face ethical and interpretative problems in recording and analysing the private issues of men and women because of the nature of the research topic (Talbot 2010).

The third wave of language and gender research began round the 1980s and was characterized by the difference approach, where the focus was not so much on producing an anti-patriarchy and anti-male diatribe, but on emphasizing the difference between the two genders on the assumption that their subcultures were different. In fact, this approach was more of a backlash against the hitherto subordinate status of women. Although Coates is of the view that “the advantage of the difference model is that it allows women’s talk to be examined outside a framework of oppression and powerlessness” (2004: 6), the dimension of power was a regular feature of Tannen’s works. Tannen was influenced by Maltz and Borker’s (1982) paper on male-female miscommunication, which proposed that different subcultural upbringings were responsible for language differences between the genders; in other words, men and women talked differently because they learnt to talk so while growing up. Tannen (1990) used this argument to present a large array of data from different settings (family, business, friendship, teen talk, etc.) to show that women and men’s speech was organized in the following patterns that resulted in miscommunication:

1. Men’s conversation was oriented towards maintaining their status, even if it required one-upmanship, while women talked to support and cooperate with others.
2. Independence of opinion was a feature of men’s talk unlike women’s, whose speech indicated intimacy and sharing.
3. Men were problem solvers and generally gave advice, but women’s talk showed their need for understanding and sympathy. This was most visible in cases where women shared a problem, expecting sympathy but receiving clear-cut solutions.
4. Women would prefer to compromise than assert themselves and have a conflict of opinion, whereas men would prefer the latter.
5. Men usually talk to provide information in comparison to women for whom conversation was a means of sharing their innermost feelings and experiences.
6. Indirect requests using the ‘let us’ structure were not a part of men’s conversational repertoire, but were mostly found in women’s speech.

Tannen advocated that many misunderstandings and power asymmetries could be avoided if each gender made an attempt to understand the other’s speech style, because gender was embedded in our everyday acts and talk, and “masculinity and femininity in our ways of behaving” when “all the while” people believed that they were “simply acting naturally” (1990: 144). Thus, unknowingly, Tannen highlighted the constructivist approach to gendered behaviour and talk, the focus of recent linguistic research, indicating how it was absorbed and internalized.

Tannen (1994) followed this with another investigation that explored the ambiguity and polysemy of linguistic strategies to highlight dominance, solidarity and cultural differences in gender in mixed-sex conversations. Through a detailed examination of conversational patterns (interruptions, cohesion, silence, indirectness, verbal aggression), Tannen “argued against the misconception that a ‘cultural’ approach to gender and a ‘dominance’ approach are mutually exclusive and opposed to each other” (1994: 218) for culture serves as a unique platform for mediating relationships and creating identities along both dimensions. Writings by Jennifer Coates also fall under this tradition. Like Tannen, Coates (1996) relies heavily on empirical evidence (ethnographic interviews) to show the linguistic strategies (hedges, questions, interruptions, overlap) employed by women in their discourses of collaboration, support and friendship, and the role of narratives in constructing their personal identities. The influence of post-structuralism could be seen in her investigation of ‘doing’ gender and friendship. Though there are many studies on the female gender, this is a unique contribution after Lakoff that focusses predominantly on women’s talk. Similarly, Coates (2003) analyses the competing discourses of femininities and their construction in talk, something which will be discussed later in the book. Like the dominance approach, this one too has faced backlash for subsuming ‘power’ under ‘cultural differences’ – that is, not having an explicit focus on power. Moreover, the emphasis for miscommunication is clearly attributed to the ignorance and naiveté of the genders about each other’s interactional styles rather than any other factor such as class or race. In addition, ‘fake neutrality’ on the different styles of men and women, and a marked emphasis on difference at the cost of discovering similarities in conversation are some of the problems with this model (Talbot 2010: 107). In fact, Talbot goes so far as to say this approach presents a “static conception of distinct male and female identities” (2010: 110). Aki Uchida also provides a scathing critique, asserting that Tannen does not give empirical evidence of whether women would employ rules of same-sex conversations in mixed-sex ones and that the advocates of this approach naively propose that power does not exist in conversations between ‘socially equal’ men and women, when in reality, in the Unites States, women are not at an equal footing with men, and so power is always an issue in any conversation. Uchida also criticizes the term ‘cross-cultural approach’ as presupposing a list of comparative differences between the genders and asserts that the dynamism of gender and fluidity of conversational style is captured more neatly by the phrase ‘intercultural approach’ (Uchida 1992).

From the early days of gender research when gender was an unproblematic phenomenon and was one of the variables being researched, to the days of male bashing and the voicing of a distinct female versus male speech style, gender studies in linguistics became more refined, dynamic and elaborate, but research was still largely empirical, produced ethnographically or sociolinguistically, and though it was based on specific contexts, generalizations were common (see Lakoff and Tannen). However, with the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and her notion of performativity, the concept of gender underwent a drastic change, being viewed as an unstable, multilayered, variable site that is continuously performed and constructed. Gender was seen as a result of cultural production, and thus the focus was on how gender was created and in what contexts, rather than a gender-based speech style. As Holmes and Meyerhoff write, the perspective has now changed to analysis of “how gender is understood, contested, absorbed as a category for social membership in the very ‘local’ domains from which the analysis started” (2003: 9).

This phase has been given different names by scholars. Sara Mills (2003) uses the term third phase of ‘feminist linguistics’, while Coates (2004) calls it the dynamic approach that uses a social constructivist perspective. Baxter (2003) reserves the term ‘post-structuralism’ in naming her methodology based on this perspective. Many of the edited volumes by Hall and Bucholtz (1995), and by Bucholtz (1999) and Bergvall, Bing and Freed (1996) typify this phase in exploring the constructionist basis of women’s speech, youth identities and male-female dichotomy of language use, respectively. Scholars in this area have examined gender production in courtroom settings and its interaction with race, in public talk, dinner-time narratives and in media advertising that perpetuates stereotypical gender ideologies (Hall and Bucholtz 1995). Penelope Eckert (2000), as many others, states that gender is not a homogenous category in relation to the creation of identities while she examines the way American high school girls label themselves into different groups: ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’. Mills is of the view that in contrast to women being silenced in the dominance model, much research in the dynamic perspective focusses on how strong women are. In fact, she cites research to portray how women resist male narratives and adopt an authoritative and assertive style, like men, in dealing with police interrogations (McElhinny 1998), courtroom conversation and parliamentary debates.

Such kind of work can also be found in Wodak (1997), Mullany (2004a) and Baxter (2003), although in the writings of these authors research is conducted broadly from a critical discourse perspective. Wodak, working in the CDA tradition, has done extensive work on the intersections between language and power in the unequal admission and roles of women parliamentarians in the European Union, in the language styles of women leaders in public institutions (1997) and school meetings (1996) and in examining issues related to research on feminism, gender and CDA. Mullany also analyses gendered voices and the role of women in professional communication settings (2004a and 2004b), while Baxter (2003, 2006) employs a post-structuralist feminist discursive approach, relying on Foucault but emphasizing the multiplicity of gender positions and varying power plays displayed by women in business contexts and in classroom interactions. The focus in the aforementioned studies ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Gender, feminism and femininity
• 2 Critical discourse studies: concepts and tools
• 3 Consuming brides: discursive construction in matrimonial advertisements
• 4 The discourses of bridal care
• 5 Media, discourse and gender
• 6 Ideology, femininity and performativity: bridal psyche and responses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography