Gender, Language and a Lipstick: Creating Cultural Change in a World of Paradoxes (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper addresses the paradoxes and possibilities for academic feminism in the Third Millennium drawing on feminist linguistics. It targets the role of language in the construction of social gender, focusing on data from Greek, and shows that gendering discourse can effect cultural change. It is suggested that academic feminists can be agents of cultural change when they promote feminist language reform in the service of challenging the dominant gender order.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (51)

  1. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
  2. Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2000. Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Alvanoudi, Angeliki. 2009. Teaching gender in the neoliberal university. In Teaching with the Third Wave-New Feminists' Explorations of Teaching and Institutional Contexts. Edited by Daniela Gronold, Brigitte Hipfl and Linda Lund Pedersen. Stockholm: ATHENA3 Advanced Thematic Network in Women's Studies in Europe, University of Utrecht and Centre for Gender Studies, Stockholm University Press, pp. 37-50.
  4. Alvanoudi, Angeliki. 2014. Grammatical Gender in Interaction: Cultural and Cognitive Aspects. Leiden: Brill.
  5. Boas, Franz. 1938. Language. In General Anthropology. Edited by Franz Boas. Boston. New York: D.C. Heath and Company, pp. 124-45.
  6. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford: Polity.
  7. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity.
  8. Braun, Friederike, Sabine Sczesny, and Dagmar Stahlberg. 2005. Cognitive effects of masculine generics in German: An overview of empirical findings. Communications 30: 1-21. [CrossRef]
  9. Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. First published 1995.
  10. Enfield, Nick J. 2013. Relationship Thinking: Agency, Enchrony, and Human Sociality. New York: Oxford University Press.
  11. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. 'Political correctness': The politics of culture and language. Discourse & Society 14: 17-28.
  12. Frank, Francine W., and Paula A. Treichler. 1989. Language, Gender, and Professional Writing: Theoretical Approaches and Guidelines for Non-Sexist Usage. New York: Modern Language Association.
  13. Gabriel, Ute, and Pascal Gygax. 2008. Can language amendments change gender representation? The case of Norway. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 49: 451-57. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
  14. Gill, Rosalind. 2010. Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. Edited by Roisin Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 228-44.
  15. Gygax, Pascal, and Ute Gabriel. 2008. Can a group of musicians be composed of women? Generic interpretation of French masculine role names in absence and presence of feminine forms. Swiss Journal of Psychology 67: 143-51. [CrossRef]
  16. Gygax, Pascal, Ute Gabriel, Oriane Sarrasin, Jane Oakhill, and Alan Garnham. 2008. Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beauticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men. Language and Cognitive Processes 23: 464-85. [CrossRef]
  17. Hall, Kira, and Veronica O'Donovan. 1996. Shifting gender positions among Hindispeaking hijras. In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. Edited by Victoria L. Bergvall, Janet M. Bing and Alice F. Freed. London: Longman, pp. 228-66.
  18. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2003. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  19. Hellinger, Marlis, and Hadumod Bussmann. 2001. Gender across languages: The linguistic representation of women and men. In Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Edited by Marlis Hellinger and Hadumod Bussmann. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1-25.
  20. Hellinger, Marlis, and Hadumod Bussmann, eds. 2001-2003. Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  21. Hopper, Robert, and Curtis LeBaron. 1998. How gender creeps into talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction 31: 59-74. [CrossRef]
  22. Hymes, Dell H. 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper & Row. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. The Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  23. Irigaray, Luce. 1985b. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  24. Irmen, Lisa, and Julia Kurovskaja. 2010. On the semantic content of grammatical gender and its impact on the representation of human referents. Experimental Psychology 57: 367-75. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
  25. Irmen, Lisa, and Nadja Rossberg. 2004. Gender markedness of language: The impact of grammatical and nonlinguistic information on the mental representation of person information. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23: 272-307. [CrossRef]
  26. Kramarae, Cheris, and Paula A. Treichler. 1985. A Feminist Dictionary. London: Pandora Press.
  27. Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper and Row.
  28. Lerner, Gene H. 2004. Collaborative turn sequences. In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Edited by Gene H. Lerner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 225-56.
  29. Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  30. Livia, Anna. 2001. Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  31. Martyna, Wendy. 1983. Beyond the he/man approach: The case for nonsexist language. In Language, Gender and Society. Edited by Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae and Nancy Henley. Rowley: Newbury House, pp. 25-37.
  32. Mason, Paul. 2015. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane.
  33. Miller, Casey, and Kate Swift. 1988. The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing for Writers, Editors and Speakers. London: The Women's Press. First published 1981.
  34. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
  35. Negri, Toni. 1989. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  36. Nilsen, Alleen P. 1977. Sexism as shown through the English vocabulary. In Sexism and Language. Edited by Alleen P. Nilsen, Haig Bosmajian, H. Lee Gershuny and Julia P. Stanley. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. 27-41.
  37. Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335-58.
  38. Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula. 2006. Γλώσσα-γένoσ-ϕύλo: Πρoβλήµατα, αναζητήσεισ και ελληνική γλώσσα [Language-grammatical gender-social gender: Problems, queries and the Greek language]. In Γλώσσα-Γένoσ-Φύλo. [Language-Grammatical Gender-Social Gender]. Edited by Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou. Thessaloniki: Institute of Modern Greek Studies, pp. 15-64.
  39. Pauwels, Anne. 1998. Women Changing Language. London: Addison Wesley Longman.
  40. Pauwels, Anne. 2003. Linguistic sexism and feminist linguistic activism. In The Handbook of Language and Gender. Edited by Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 550-70.
  41. Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2016. Struggling within and beyond the performative university: Articulating activism and work in an "academia without walls". Women's Studies International Forum 54: 100-10. [CrossRef]
  42. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696-735. [CrossRef]
  43. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics. In Studies in Anaphora. Edited by Barbara A. Fox. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 437-85.
  44. Schulz, Muriel R. 1975. The semantic derogation of woman. In Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Edited by Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley. Rowley: Newbury House, pp. 64-75.
  45. Slobin, Dan Isaac. 1996. From "thought and language" to "thinking for speaking". In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Edited by John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70-96.
  46. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  47. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-315.
  48. Stahlberg, Dagmar, Friederike Braun, Lisa Irmen, and Sabine Sczesny. 2007. Representation of the sexes in language. In Social Communication. Edited by Klaus Fiedler. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 163-87.
  49. Tsokalidou, Roula. 1996. To Φύλo τησ Γλώσσασ: Oδηγóσ µη Σεξιστικήσ Γλώσσασ για τoν ∆ηµóσιo Eλληνικó Λóγo. [The Gender of Language: A Guide to Non-Sexist Language for Public Greek Speech]. Athens: Syndesmos Ellinidon Epistimonon.
  50. Washington Post Staff. 2015. Full text: Donald Trump announces a presidential bid. Washington Post Staff. June 16. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text- donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad9c079cddbb (accessed on 1 June 2018).
  51. Woolf, Virginia. 2002. A Room of One's Own. London: Penguin Books. First published 1928.