Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

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JENNIFER M. WEI

Conventional ideas of gender can be seen from three major perspectives: biological, social, and cultural. That is, we are born with a set of genes that determine our biological sex—either male or female in most cases. A male brain is larger than that of a female but that does not make much difference to its overall capacity. Men are also said to be more visual and spatially oriented while women are more audio and emotionally oriented. According to a recent study based on a large corpus of English, the researchers Newman, Groom, Handelman, and Peenebaker (2008, p. 211) found that, with respect to social interaction, “Women used more words related to psychological and social processes. Men referred more to object properties and impersonal topics.” It can be said also that society sets gendered expectations or gendered roles for boys and girls, men and women, and husbands and wives, roles that we internalize and with which we socialize as we go through schooling, working, and living in a society. We learn that, in most societies, women are thought to be cooperative and family oriented while men seem more aggressive, competitive, and career oriented. Gender also plays a role culturally, as different cultures and histories can influence how certain gender traits, especially notions of masculinity and femininity as well as sexuality, will interact in our lives.

Seeing gender or gendered behaviors and expectations as embedded in contexts, histories, and cultures helps us remain aware of the dynamics and indeterminacy of this topic. The conventional idea of gender as a fixed and dichotomized category prescribed by a set of patriarchal values might still have strong meaning for some people, allowing them to manipulate and advance a political agenda in some contested contexts, but convention has been challenged by scholars in fields of applied linguistics and discourse analysis. These scholars point out that individuals retain agency in enacting and negotiating gendered roles and expectations in mundane interactions with others. Not all interactions have a gendered dimension, of course; nor do actions and intentions necessarily bring individuals the expected results. A society might change its ideals about gendered roles, such as being a good mother and father or a filial son and daughter, as it evolves from a traditional society to a modern one. In fact, in most developed countries, birth rates have decreased as people no longer see traditional familial rituals such as marriage and giving birth as necessary rites of passage. Nor do individuals in these countries necessarily turn to traditional family and family members as their main or only sources of emotional and financial backup and support in times of trouble. With old familial values being replaced by more global and modern ones such as consumerism and individualism, customs associated with gendered expectations are also changing.

Different cultures also modify their ideals of a gendered trait—masculinity and femininity to start with—through time. These ideals are not always in harmony with each other, nor do they stay in fixed contrast to each other. One example of how a culture can change its ideas or ideals for developing men as men and women as women comes from Chinese culture as observed by Brownell and Wasserstrom (2002, p. 34). According to the authors,

Scholarship on Chinese gender seems to indicate that, before the period of extended contact with the West, (1) gender concepts were anchored in beliefs about family structure and social roles more so than in beliefs about biological sex (and even beliefs that we might call “biological” were based on classical Chinese medicine, not Western science); (2) “men” and “women” were plural categories rather than unified categories opposed to each other; (3) “manhood” and “womanhood” were not directly linked to heterosexuality, and reproducing the lineage was a more important aspect of sexuality than individual pleasure.

Did contact with the West bring changes? Are any of the gendered traits more susceptible to change while others are more resistant? Did other forces such as modernization or nationalism reinforce or relativize Chinese ways of thinking and enacting gendered relations? Again, the authors conclude that

Chinese gender maintained its own distinctive character—in particular, sexuality did not occupy the central role that it does in Western gender. Sexuality seems to have regained importance in the 1990s, but concepts of femininity and masculinity still seem to be primarily anchored in the roles of mother/father and wife/husband. The main change since the Qing is that femininity and masculinity are less anchored in the roles of daughter/son. (p. 34)