Speaking Up

Understanding Language and Gender

Allyson Jule

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781783099627
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

From slut-shaming to the allegedly shrill voices of female politicians, from vocal fry to online misogyny, the language women use (and the language used about them) is as controversial as it has ever been. Our language use and our gender have an enormous impact on the way we understand ourselves and the world around us, and the way we are treated by society. Using the latest academic research, Allyson Jule tackles some of the most pressing issues facing feminism today, including how language use and related ideas about gender play out in the home, workplace and online. It turns out that many popular ideas about gender and language are more complicated than they first appear. This book will change the way you think about language, and give you the tools to challenge the world around you.

II

Understanding Gender and Language Use in the World

3

Gender and Language Use in the Media and Technology

Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated

acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over

time to produce the appearance of a ‘natural’ kind of being.

Judith Butler

The first two chapters (Part I) laid out some necessary understandings in regards to gender studies, feminism, and how gender and language closely connect with each other. The study of gender and language focuses on understanding the relationship between gender and language in various contexts. Modern media are such contexts, and they have much to offer the field of gender and language. It is clear that we live in a world which is increasingly saturated by media and the media’s presentations and representations of gender. In particular, one wonders how are the media’s ‘images and cultural constructions’ connected to patterns of inequality, domination and oppression (Gill, 2007: 7)?

Feminist media scholars such as Rosalind Gill (2007) have offered ‘rigorous analyses [of media] in the context of ethical and political commitments to creating a more just world’ (p. 7). Gill explains how the second-wave feminist campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s faced a significant challenge that earlier women’s movements had not experienced: ‘a world dominated by media’ (p. 9). Second-wave feminists were bombarded with representations of womanhood and gender relations in magazines and on television, in films and on billboards on an unprecedented scale. According to Gill, it is not surprising, under such circumstances, that the media became ‘a major focus of feminist research, critique and intervention’ (p. 9).

It is not hard to see that gender as social performance aligns with sexuality and sexualization. When it comes to advertising, it is no secret that hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine images sell well. If we agree that society has been patriarchal in its power relations, then we can see how women have been presented and used as an object of men’s desires. A prime example of this is the persistent use of attractive women for the purpose of selling cars. In this view, the need for a heteronormative/heterosexual gendered identity requires women to see themselves through men’s eyes and as consumers of products needed to embellish aspects of themselves that are portrayed as desirable by men. Men are also used as consumers of certain products that enhance the illusion of masculine success (e.g. car advertisements appeal to semiotics of the masculine). Conventional kinds of feminine and masculine ‘ideals’ are strongly shaped by the mass media to produce consumers for specific products. Being feminine and masculine in the heteronormative sense involves particular modes of consumption. As such, advertising creates a need for genderedness: gendered identity is singled out as what needs to be enhanced. When women and men go shopping, they must make decisions on how to genderize themselves based on the products available to them and presented to them as required. Clothing and cosmetic companies in particular depend on heteronormative gendered identities to sell their products. The media are then agents of social control that convey stereotypical and ideological values of women, men, femininity and masculinity.

Gender Identity and the Mass Media

A number of themes connect gender identity and today’s media, including the fluidity of our gender identities over time, the decline of the portrayal of traditional gender roles, the idea of gender role models, and the rise of a new ‘girl power’ (Gauntlett, 2002). Twenty to thirty years ago, analysis of popular media often told researchers that mainstream culture was a backwards-looking force, resistant to social change and able to push people into traditional categories they might be trying to leave behind. Today, researchers are more likely to view mass media as a force for change. The traditional view of a woman as housewife has been replaced by successful and ‘raunchy’ ‘girl power’ icons, and the masculine ideals of toughness and self-reliance have been shaken by a new emphasis on men’s vulnerability and sensitivities. These alternative ideas and images have created a space for a diversity of identities; yet, they also bring with them new demands and requirements.

Ariel Levy (2005) identified ‘raunch culture’ and its grip on today’s young women in particular as a new site for gender identity formation or performance. She explores the internalizing of misogyny by women themselves who not only participate in heteronormative culture but who also encourage and engage in their own exploitation. Music videos are key sites of this participation. In the 1990s Mary Pipher (1994) identified how adolescent girls internalized society’s messages about appearance and thinness. She came down hard on advertisers who push the image of attractive women to impossible standards, profiling isolated body parts (backside, legs, cleavage) to sell perfection and presenting ‘woman’ as an assembled product. Pipher believed this focus on isolated sections of the body removes any chance to personalize the female form and leads young women to believe that they are only valuable if their body parts look a particular way. For over 20 years these critiques were voiced with little effect. (One such exception is Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, for example, where the variety of women’s body shapes are celebrated as beautiful).

Presenting a stark contrast to Levy’s and Pipher’s lament over the sexual demands placed on young women by others and by themselves is David Gauntlett (2002). He sees gender role models in the media as meaningful cultural ‘navigation points’ for individual members of society. For him, the discourses of ‘girl power’ concerning sexuality and gender roles are the most prominent expressions of femininity in the mainstream media, and he believes that these expressions can be empowering to many young women.

Regardless of one’s view, it is clear that the media disseminate a huge number of messages about identity, including acceptable forms of self-expression, gender, sexuality and lifestyle. At the same time, we each have our own set of diverse feelings on these issues of gender identity, which can change as we move through different life stages. The media’s suggestions can be seductive, but only to a point. If the media is sexist, then the culture is as well. Even if we agree that many media sources sustain traditional hierarchical notions of femininity, including newer versions that may appear empowering to young women but simply perpetuate demands on women, we can’t ignore the participation and choice that women themselves make: they have agency and they choose to buy the products (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996). We can expect that the specific gender messages will be appropriated by many – maybe even most – but these messages will also be rejected by some. Nevertheless, several researchers and organizations have taken on the role of watchdog when it comes to monitoring the media’s gender messages.

For all of us, but especially for children, images and stories help influence the important developmental task of understanding what it means to be human, whether male or female. The See Jane organization, a media-watch program, was founded by Academy Award winning actress Geena Davis (The Accidental Tourist) in 2004 as a way to explore G-rated films and analyze how male/female characters are marketed. Much of the organization’s research has been carried out by Stacy Smith (2006a, 2006b) at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and explores G-rated (G for General – family viewing) movies and the portrayal of female and male characters in films marketed to children. Smith and her team explored 101 top-grossing family-rated films released from 1990 through to 2004, analyzing a total of 4,249 speaking characters in the movies, including both animated and live action films. The research found that, overall, three out of four characters (75%) are male, while fewer than one in three (28%) speaking characters are female. Fewer than one in five (17%) characters in crowd scenes are female and more than four out of five (83%) film narrators are male. Smith (2006b) also found that G-rated movies show very few examples of characters as parents or as partners in a marriage or other committed relationship.

In a 2003 American nationwide survey, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that half of all children aged 0–6 watch at least one DVD movie per day. In view of this, G-rated movie DVDs may have an influence on children’s early social learning about gender roles because children also tend to watch the same movie over and over. Other studies explore the television viewing habits among children and suggest that gender expectations can become very simplified, skewed and stereotyped (Herrett-Skjellum & Allen, 1996). Since women and girls make up half of the human race, the See Jane media watch group in particular believes the presence of a wider variety of female characters in children’s earliest experiences with the media is essential for both girls’ and boys’ development. If both boys and girls see more female characters of all types, we can experience a fuller awareness of the possible ways to be human.

In 2002, the director-actor Rosanna Arquette made a documentary film called Searching for Debra Winger about how hard it is to be a female actor in Hollywood. She wanted to answer the question: can a woman have both her art and a life? She interviewed a wide range of very successful Hollywood women, including Jane Fonda, Meg Ryan, Sharon Stone and Vanessa Redgrave. Eventually, Arquette’s search led her to the home of Debra Winger herself, an Academy Award nominee who stopped making films mid-career. Winger offered some insight into her disappearance from the silver screen, saying that she simply never really liked acting anyway. However, the other actors interviewed along the way say much more about how difficult, even impossible, it is to have both an acting career and a personal life as a woman: the demands on both personal time and appearance are unrelenting. All participants in the documentary mention the lack of roles available for women over 40 in particular and the use of younger women in roles within a very narrow definition of attractiveness: young, skinny, long hair, clear skin, perfect teeth. The demands are exhausting – if not impossible – for female actors. If women in Hollywood resist the ideal, the industry can find many others who will fit the ideal. As such, expertise and talent that grow with age are not rewarded as much as youth and youthful beauty. That said, the last 15 years have seen the emergence of women over 40 succeeding in film and television as well as featured in beauty advertisements. Perhaps this shift is related to the aging of baby-boomers themselves and, thus, the industry is keeping up with the need to appeal to a greater number of people who are growing older.

Advertising Gender

In modern industrial societies, gender identities are heavily determined by capitalist social conditions. This is an important point to understand. At the advent of television in the 1950s, women, in their roles as wives and mothers, were often responsible for most of the shopping. As a result, women became caught up in what is called consumer femininity – something that women participate in to feminize themselves and/or to perform traditional female roles. The assumption seemed to be that women in western society were to buy certain products; to do so, they had to buy into the need for the product. Advertisements from this time depicted housewives in the kitchen, for example, marveling at a new kitchen appliance. Consumer culture also affects men and their consumer masculinity when it came to advertising cars or male cologne. Consumer gender enters our daily relationships with the world and is a major influence on our patterns of behavior in society, including at work, in the home, and in our friendships and relationships with others. Consumer gender is a construction used by the mass media in which we co-participate. We spend our time and money to construct ourselves into certain acceptable versions of men or women. These gender identities require much effort and expense on the part of individuals, while generating incredible profits for industries.

Rosalind Gill (2007) explores the construction of gender identities in media discourse, noting that it is a complicated process. Her insights include the compelling view that femininities and masculinities are established, reinforced and increasingly played with more and more use of irony. In fact, many media scholars now see irony as increasingly displayed in media and are using irony as a key term in the vocabulary of media critique. Irony here is the use of ‘knowingly ridiculous representations that are based on the assumption that it’s “silly to be sexist”’ (Gill, 2007: 111). Is it possible that feminist critiques have influenced media so extensively that they have transformed its representations of identity, subjectivity and desires resulting in the media using irony as a way of both accepting the critique and for the continued purpose of selling products as gender-specific? Gender in the media exists in relation to an assumed audience so that, while media producers construct or inverse an ideal, consumers position themselves in relation to that ideal (Fairclough, 1992). This ideal is particularly visible in women’s and men’s magazines where the creation and establishment of femininity or masculinity defines what is ‘normal’ – even as this ‘normal’ becomes increasingly ironic. Mass media are propelled by the market and its views and value...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• I: Understanding Gender and Language Use
• II: Understanding Gender and Language Use in the World
• Glossary
• References
• Index