Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

A contrasting interaction between gender and sexuality can be found in Cameron and Kulick (2003) postulating why English speakers often use gender where bodily configuration is at issue and sexuality is often understood simply as sexual identity whereas sex still covers the full terrain. They offer the following explanations:

Partly, this may be because some speakers still cling to traditional beliefs (e.g. that the way women or men behave socially and sexually is a direct expression of innate biological characteristics). But it may also be partly because the phenomena denoted by the three terms—having a certain kind of body (sex), living as a certain kind of social being (gender), and having certain kinds of erotic desires (sexuality)—are not understood or experienced by most people in present‐day social reality as distinct and separate. Rather they are interconnected. (pp. 4–5)

In this entry, we examine how language can play a role in various gendered interactions by referring to lived experiences from various cultures and societies (as opposed to representations or artifacts). Data and analyses mainly come from the fields of variational sociolinguistics, discourse analyses, and cultural studies. All of these disciplines stress the importance of interdisciplinary studies on how language can be used and analyzed to understand gendered interactions in a specific context. This does not mean that a specific linguistic item—a phonological variable, a lexical choice, or a syntactic feature—has determining effects for how gender can be enacted in a specific interaction. Instead, precisely because gender is embedded in a complex web of communicative interaction, a specific use of language rarely yields clear‐cut pragmatic or strategic effects. Polysemy and indeterminacy must be dealt with, and they thrive not only in how an individual can or will interpret an interaction but also in how they tie in with other social variables such as power or ethnicity, which are seen differently in various cultures.

It has been argued that discussions of gender should be located within particular communities of practice (Eckert & McConnell, 1992). That is, by studying gender in interaction and studying the local meanings attached to interactions, within and among communities, a more flexible understanding of gender can be developed—an understanding that allows for variability of meaning. Language researchers do not always agree on whether gender is the only determining factor for how and why men and women speak differently; some argue that power and domination might be better descriptors for difference. That is, women adopt a more subversive way of speaking to reflect their subordinate position (mostly socioeconomically speaking) in a society. Other researchers suggest that the same gendered language can be adopted by either sex for strategic and political purposes.

Observations by Lakoff provide background by listing characteristics of gendered language (1990, p. 204):

1 Women often seem to hit phonetic points less precisely than men: lisped s's, obscured vowels.

2 Women's intonational contours display more variety than men's.

3 Women use diminutives and euphemisms more than men (“You nickname God's creatures,” says Hamlet to Ophelia).

4 More than men, women make use of expressive forms (adjectives, not nouns or verbs, and in that category those expressing emotional rather than intellectual evaluation): lovely, divine.

5 Women use forms that convey impreciseness: so, such.

6 Women use hedges of all kinds more than men.

7 Women use intonation patterns that resemble questions, indicating uncertainty or need for approval.

8 Women's voices are breathier than men's.

9 Women are more indirect and polite than men.

10 Women will not commit themselves to an opinion.

11 In conversation, women are more likely to be interrupted, less likely to introduce successful topics.

12 Women's communicative style tends to be collaborative rather than competitive.

13 More of women's communication is expressed nonverbally (by gesture and intonation) than men's.

14 Women are more careful to be “correct” when they speak, using better grammar and fewer colloquialisms than men.

Other linguists offered a more interactional view of “gendered” talk. Eckert and McConnell (2003) use the concept of positioning, and Tannen (1990) writes about report versus rapport (i.e., women tend to use conversation to establish intimacy and relationships, while men use it to provide information and to seek independence and status). In addition to social practices, positioning, and styles, researchers such as Gal (1991) have suggested that we should not be accounting for these linguistic differences from a one‐dimensional gender factor. She uses silence as an example to encompass the complexity of how the meanings of “powerless” can be changed when silence is used in a different context at different times. For example,

The silence of women in public life in the West is generally deplored by feminists. It is taken to be a result and symbol of passivity and powerlessness; those who are denied speech, it is said, cannot influence the course of their lives or of history. In a telling contrast, however, we also have ethnographic reports of the paradoxical power of silence, especially in certain institutional settings. In episodes as varied as religious confession, exercises in modern psychotherapy, bureaucratic interviews, oral exams, and police interrogations, the relations of coercion are reversed: where self‐exposure is required, it is the silent listener who judges and thereby exerts power over the one who speaks (Foucault 1979). Silence in American households is often a weapon of masculine power (Sattel 1983). But silence can also be a strategic defense against the powerful, as when Western Apache men use it to baffle, disconcert, and exclude white outsiders (Basso 1979). And this does not exhaust the meanings of silence. For the English Quakers of the seventeenth century, both women and men, the refusal to speak when others expected them to marked an ideological commitment (Bauman 1983). It was the opposite of passivity, indeed a form of political protest. (Gal, 1991, p. 175)

The interactional aspect of “gendered” talk as exemplified by the above example helps us see that the use of “silence” is not a direct index of femininity, but rather represents a kind of stance (subject position) that is taken up by (or imposed on) a variety of less powerful people in society, including, but not limited to, women (see Jaffe, 2009, p. 13). The stress on agency, context, and ideology is very important in understanding how gender is embedded in language variation and social practice. Another intergender and intragender language use is provided by Bucholtz (2009), who analyzes a single slang term popular among many Mexicans and Mexican Americans— guey ([gwej], often lenited to [wej])—and argues that, though the term frequently translates as “dude,” the semantic multivalence of guey allows it to operate (often simultaneously) as a marker both of interactional alignment and of a particular gendered style among Mexican American youth (p. 146). That is, her subjects do not use guey because they are male, nor do they use guey in order to directly construct a masculine identity. Rather, they are using this term along with other available semiotic resources, such as prosody, gesture, posture, clothing, topics of discourse, and telephones and cameras, to establish both status and solidarity in relation to their social group and to index a cool, nonchalant stance all the while (see Bucholtz, 2009, p. 164).

Other scholars, such as Hall and Bucholtz (1995, pp. 183–4), link gendered language to different factors such as the speaker's agency, age, educational background, and ethnicity, and—to the perennial fascination of college students—have even interpreted meanings of gendered language through the prism of the phone sex industry in San Francisco. Hall argues that: