Janet Holmes – The Handbook Of Language And Gender

Автор: Janet Holmes
Название книги: The Handbook Of Language And Gender
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 776
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

The purpose of The Handbook of Language and Gender is to provide an authoritative,
comprehensive, and original collection of articles representing the richness
and diversity of contemporary research in the area. Currently, language
and gender is a particularly vibrant area of research and theory development
within the larger study of language and society, and the contributions in this
volume focus especially on more recent trends and developments. The volume
comprises specially commissioned articles in five distinguishable but closely
related areas, identified because of their importance in current language and
gender research, and encompassing the breadth of interdisciplinary interests
of researchers and students in this dynamic area.
This collection of articles will prove a valuable resource to students of linguistics,
and especially to those interested in sociolinguistics and discourse
studies from undergraduate level upwards. A quick glance at the contents will
indicate, however, that the collection should also have much wider appeal;
it is truly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from many different academic
areas. There are articles which will be of interest to anthropologists and those
interested in cultural studies, to sociologists and social psychologists, and to
those concerned with organizational communication. There are articles which
have obvious relevance to feminists, and to those working in gender studies, as
well as to professional women, and those engaged in business and management.
Moreover, because of the more practical orientation of some of the articles,
especially in the final two sections, the collection will also be of interest to applied linguists, to those working in education and language policy, to professionals
engaged in the areas of Human Relations and Human Resources,
and, we predict, to the educated reader.
Many collections of readings on language and gender are compilations of
papers already written and published. Some consist of articles which are best
described as “classic” (e.g. Tannen 1993; Cameron 1998; Coates 1998; Cheshire
and Trudgill 1998). Many are constructed around a specific theme, such as
power (Hall, Bucholtz, and Moonwomon 1992), gender identity (e.g. Hall and
Bucholtz 1995; Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton 1999), masculinity (Johnson and
Meinhof 1997), communication (Wertheim, Bailey, and Corston-Oliver 1998),
belief systems (Warner et al. 1996), bilingualism (e.g. Burton, Dyson, and
Ardener 1994), second language education (Sunderland 1994), or sexist language
(Hellinger and Bussmann 2001). Others focus more on a specific theoretical
approach, such as social constructionism (e.g. Bergvall, Bing, and Freed
1996; Bucholtz, Liang, Sutton, and Hines 1994), communities of practice (e.g.
Holmes 1999), or interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Tannen 1994). Still others
take a predominantly descriptive approach, covering a wide range of contrasting
languages and cultures (e.g. Kotthoff and Wodak 1997; Hellinger
and Bussmann 2001).
By contrast, and as a useful complement to these varied emphases, the
papers in this Handbook provide an indication of the range of issues currently
under debate in the area, and outline the topical concerns of those working at
the forefront of research in language and gender. The main themes are indicated
by the five broad section headings, and a diversity of methodologies is
represented (discussed further below). A wide range of languages are invoked
in the different papers, in some cases as a core component of particular case
studies, in others as brief but specific examples to illustrate a more general
point. So, while most papers use English for exemplification, readers will also
find references to languages as varied as Tongan, Tagalog, French, Bislama,
Guyanese Creole, Gaelic, Dutch, German, Afrikaans, and Lakhota. Most authors
provide an indication of where their own areas of research strength and interest
fit into the wider field, and they also indicate how their own positions can be
distinguished from those of others. Hence, readers are typically provided both
with an authoritative overview of a theme or issue, and a thought-provoking
specific illustration of current research in a particular area.
2 Overview of the Contents of the Handbook
The Handbook has five sections: Part I is made up of chapters that review
aspects of the history of the study of language and gender, and provide theoretical
background to this study. The chapters in Part II deal to some extent
with negotiations of relations and the role gender and language play in such
negotiations. In Part III, the chapters are concerned with issues of authenticity (e.g. who gets to define what it means to be a “real” woman or a “real” man or
a “real” Lakhota), and the task individuals face of finding a “place” for themselves
in the complex social worlds they populate. A strong theme here is the
processes by which identities emerge, or are effaced and disappear. In Part IV,
the chapters deal with the importance, functionality, and invidiousness of stereotypes
and norms. Finally, Part V reviews issues relating to language and gender
in institutional discourse. Hence, the Handbook has an overall progression
leading from highly theoretical chapters, to those which discuss very practical
applications of language and gender research in various specific locales.
Within each section, too, the chapters are ordered in a manner that we hope
will aid readers' appreciation of the themes of that section and allow them to
select the chapters we think may be of most direct use to them, depending on
their personal goals and interests. The first and last chapters bracket each
section: in general, the first chapter is one that provides a particularly accessible
lead-in to the issues, and the last is generally one which to a greater or lesser
extent rounds off the section, and often provides a link to the next section. In
other words, there is at least one chapter in each section (the lead-in) which we
feel is a particularly approachable communication of the theme(s) of that section,
and it is intended that this will provide a useful balance to chapters that
are more demanding.
There are implications of this organization for the use of the Handbook. For
example, readers using the Handbook as a text or supplement to texts in the
classroom should find the most accessible papers can be read even by those
without a lot of background in the field of language and gender research,
while also providing a helpful basis for regrounding more advanced readers.
In addition, readers who come from outside the academy with, for example,
practical and applied interests in language and gender should find that the
initial chapter in each section will provide them with a good overview of
significant themes in research on language and gender, and give some idea of
ways to communicate the relevance of these themes to a general audience.
As is traditional in introducing such a collection, we next provide a brief
synopsis of each chapter. We hope that these will help readers of the Handbook
locate the chapters that are most likely to fulfill their immediate goals,
and also to plan further explorations to satisfy their future goals.
Bonnie McElhinny's chapter opens the volume with a survey of the study of
language and gender within the traditions and methods of linguistic anthropology.
Her analysis of the way the concept of “gender” is treated in different
approaches introduces an issue which recurs throughout the collection, and
she highlights, in particular, the problematic consequences of assuming that
gender is adequately analyzed as a simple dichotomy. Mary Bucholtz provides
a different historical and theoretical perspective, looking at how gender has been
a part of the analysis of discourse over time. Bucholtz traces the emergence of
feminist theories of gender in discourse analysis and directs our attention to
more recent moves to incorporate historicity into analyses of interaction and
social identities. Sally McConnell-Ginet reviews practice-based methods for analyzing gender identities, which have been particularly influential models
in recent research on language and gender. Because such practice-based models
are adopted by many of the contributors in subsequent sections, this article may
be of particular interest to readers wishing to gain some familiarity with major
issues in the field. Suzanne Romaine discusses work that has been undertaken
within the variationist, or quantitative, sociolinguistic paradigms, and which
makes reference to the significance of gender at the macro-level of analysis.
She reviews the descriptive generalizations (which have sometimes been treated
as predictive) ensuing from this research, and critiques its methods and the
assumptions underlying such analyses. Don Kulick provides a psychoanalytic
perspective on the study of language and gender. Assuming that gender
identities are at least partly the consequence of psychological drives to express
desire and social constraints on the expression of desire, he asks whether we
can identify linguistic routines or patterns that reveal underlying (and paradoxically,
often unspoken) motivations and constraints. Finally in this section,
Anna Livia presents a thought-provoking discussion of the way gender may
be relevant to the analysis of texts, reviewing evidence that conventions of
masculine and feminine style exist, and examining the ways in which the
conventions of the linguistic system facilitate the creation of alternative,
oppositional, or conventional identities. She also examines the role of the
translator and the metaphors used for the process of translation, along with
their implications in analyzing gender in texts.
In Part II (“Negotiating Relations”), Robin Lakoff explores the complex
relationship between women and power through a discourse analysis of written
texts taken from three major American institutions: academia (Schegloff's
arguments about the appropriate way of treating gender in Conversation Analysis),
the arts (including the distribution of talk in the controversial Mamet
play Oleanna), and politics proper (the way the print media sexualize, objectify,
and ridicule women in politics). She exposes the disruption of conventional
discourse patterns which is being caused by women's entrance into domains
traditionally regarded as exclusively male. Deborah Tannen's chapter presents
data from intra-family communication which suggests that participants
are attending to strategies which will build solidarity between them as well as
strategies that bolster, or undermine, a power differential between the interactants.
She locates her analysis of interactions in the tradition of foundational
work by Elinor Ochs on family communication and Brown and Oilman on
politeness. Susan Herring reviews issues relating to gender in mediated communication,
especially on the Internet. She shows that (despite Utopian hopes
for equality in this medium) issues of power relations resurface, reproducing the
gender norms of society at large. At the same time she also shows how women
have made places for themselves in the virtual world, and she concludes by
considering directions in which the medium and women's participation in it
might go in the future. Marjorie Goodwin's chapter provides a valuable review
of current debates in language and gender research which focus on children's
negotiation. She examines ethnographic studies of the interactive practices used by children of different social class, age, and ethnic groups to construct
gendered social relationships in and across girls' and boys' play groups. She
focuses especially on the sequencing strategies employed in children's disputes,
and on the strategies of exclusion used by girls in particular. Closing Part II,
Susan Philips presents a very approachable exploration of the relationship
between gender ideologies and power in anthropology. Combining a helpful
historical overview of how anthropologists have understood gender ideologies
with an examination of the most salient gender roles in Tonga, she gives
the reader a clear model both of how gender ideologies can be studied and
also how their routinized nature can be analyzed in terms of dominant and
subordinate ideologies.
Part III (“Authenticity and Place”) examines gender identity in the widest
range of linguistic situations. Niko Besnier's chapter discusses aspects of how
Tongan fakaleiti (i.e., roughly, a transgendered individual in Tonga) employ
linguistic and non-linguistic strategies to establish a social place for themselves
within the larger Tongan ideological system of who or what defines the
constitutive properties of “real” women and “real” Tongans. Besnier shows
how fakaleitis' code-switching between Tongan and English (which has significance
as a global language) functions to contest normative Tongan ideals
about such categories. Miriam Meyerhoff's discussion of gender and language
in Vanuatu similarly finds close and very overt associations between
having a claim to a specific place and authority to speak or to control the flow
of information. She argues that some linguistic strategies often employed by
women are a means of responding to, working with, and challenging their
exclusion from authority by the general ideology that men, and only men,
really have a claim to “place.” She also looks at continuities between historical
patterns of gendered interaction and the synchronic patterns of gendered speech
discussed earlier. Jack Sidnell examines what is required in the way of linguistic
and other social performance for a rumshop in Guyana to be constituted as
a “male-only” environment. He examines contextualization cues serving to
include men, exclude women, and to weave “male” histories into the rumshop
domain. Kira Hall considers the way gender identities have been problematized
in research on language and gender. She argues that we can only fully understand
the significance of recent theoretical shifts in the study of language and
gender if we also understand the non-peripheral nature of gender identities
traditionally treated as exceptional or deviant. Penelope Eckert's chapter builds
on her research on the interplay of gender and more locally defined identities
among adolescents and pre-adolescents. She makes the case that adolescence
is a particularly significant period (especially in the USA) for the creation and
contestation of social categories, and this is reflected in the enormous stylistic
creativity of adolescents. The kinds of linguistic styling they undertake, she
argues, reverberates through the speech community far beyond adolescent
communities of practice…