Language and Gender

Linking the linguistic to the social - Gender in grammar (2)

• Especially problematic when referring to nouns wih a pronoun
• e.g. “le professeur” can refer to a woman, even if it is a masculine form, but one tends to switch to a feminine pronoun (elle)
• In English, cats are usually referred to as “she” and dogs as “he”
• Speakers assign masculine respectively feminine attributes according to grammatical gender

Organizing talk - Introduction (1)

• Men are encouraged to talk on all occasions, speaking being a sign of masculine intelligence and leadership
• The ideal woman is submissive and quiet, silent in her husband‘s presence
• e.g. Araucanian culture of Chile: at gatherings men do much talking, women sit together listlessly, communicating only in whispers or not at all

Organizing talk - Introduction (2)

• A person‘s contribution to an ongoing discussion is determined not simply by the utterance the person produces, but by the ways in which that utterance is received and interpreted by the others in the conservation
• The right to speak depends on the right to be in the situation, and the right to engage in particular kinds of speech activities in that situation

Organizing talk - Introduction (3)

• Example:
• Joking about men‘s impatience with discussing relationships has already made it to the top among discourses of gender, but joking about women‘s impatience with babies has not

Organizing talk - Men vs. Women

• Men
• Most technology is designed by men
• It is primarily men who have the authority to engage in conversation that effect large numbers of people
• Perform speech acts that change people‘s civil status

• Women
• Women in medical practice, schools, social work, etc.
• Cannot be priests in the Catholic Church, but the Protestant ministry is feminized
• No woman has ever given a state of the union address in the US