Discussion Details
| Title: | Review of 'La Realización de Quejas en la Conversación Femenina y Masculina' |
| Submitter: | Virginia Acuña Ferreira |
| Description: | Read Review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-3639.html
Dear Zahir Mumim, Thank very much for your detailed review of my book, 'La realización de quejas en la conversación femenina y masculina. Diferencias y semejanzas en el habla cotidiana de las mujeres y los hombres'. In this message, I would like to clarify some important points made on it, following the order in which they are commented. Summarizing the book, it is stated that “Acuña Ferreira aims to dispel stereotypical opinions about common characteristics of women’s speech (i.e. euphemistic) and provide more empirical notoriety to prominent traits of men’s speech (i.e. aggressive)”. I find it necessary to explain more precisely what led me to collect and analyze data of complaints about third persons both in female and male conversations, i.e., to clarify the aims of the book. In the General Introduction, I explain that language and gender studies have given much attention to popular beliefs and social stereotypes about "women’s language", because these devaluate formal characteristics of the way women (are supposed to) speak, such as the use of euphemistic words, but also certain content features of female talk such as the practice of gossip and other similar conversational genres focused on third parties discussion. Following, I stress that many language and gender studies have challenged this devaluation of female speakers resulting from stereotypes, arguing, for example, that women are not euphemistic but polite and gentle, or that they are not “malicious” in talking about other people but they use gossip to obtain information, to manage conflicts indirectly, to construct intimacy and to express moral and emotional support… However, this tendency to “celebrate” women’s discursive practices (Johnson, 1997) has been criticized as it contributes to reinforce popular beliefs on gender differences between women’s and men’s talk; for instance, research which defends gossipy practices among women does not consider the possibility that similar discursive activities can also be found in talk among men. Language and gender research, it has been claimed, has given little attention to “men’s language” and has made too emphasis on “gender differences” (Johnson, 1997), what unavoidably leads to a strong reification of social stereotypes. In response to these problems, the present book aims to highlight that women’s and men’s talk in same-sex interaction can show differences but also important similarities, in order to weaken the extreme polarization of their characteristics that results from social stereotypes, and that has been often reinforced by language and gender research. To illuminate this point, the book focuses on complaint discourse about third parties as one of the wide range of gossipy activities that have been attributed to women in many languages and cultures in a pejorative way. Drawing on the collection and analysis of data from female and male conversations among Spanish/Galician bilingual speakers, which were obtained through observant participation in “natural” settings, the book is oriented to demonstrate that both conversation in female and male groups can focus in the practice of this stereotypically “feminine” discursive activity, and thus be commonly oriented to the construction of solidarity and emotional support. Such similarities, it is argued, could be overlapped by certain differences in content and style, as women’s and men’s complaints can refer to different matters, and be expressed according to social norms on appropriate “feminine” and “masculine” ways of speaking. At the same time, the analysis is intended to offer a detailed description of the characteristics and kinds of discursive work involved in complaint activities. Regarding Chapter 1, it should be clarified that this chapter is offered as an overview of language and gender research as the field to which the book should be more specifically appointed; it has been written and organized to explain how interest on language and sex/gender emerged with social stratification studies that discovered the importance of sex as a social variable in the use of standard/vernacular grammatical forms and patterns of pronunciation, the so-called “gender sociolinguistic pattern” (Fasold, 1990), and how thereafter the field exploded with the development of pragmatics and discourse analysis, orienting to a search for “gender differences” in discourse; such differences, however, are searched and explained from two main different angles or points of view, according to many other handbooks and articles on the field (e.g. Talbot, 1998; Kendall & Tannen, 2001; Mills, 2003): that of the so-called “dominance” paradigm, in which differences are primarily seen as mirroring gender inequalities, and that of the “difference/cultural” paradigm, in which they are seen as a consequence of women´s and men´s socialization in different cultural groups. Each paradigm puts emphasis on aspects of gender as male dominance and female subordination versus gender as culture, but they are commonly based on a search for differences in women’s and men’s communicative behavior that has defined several decades of research in the field, and which has been more recently criticized as offering a too simplistic picture of reality, and an extreme polarization of female and male communicative patterns. This is argued at the end of the chapter, but it is important to stress that this way of organizing and explaining several decades of language and gender research is based on most recent reviews of the field (Talbot, 1998; Kendall & Tannen, 2001; Mills, 2003; Sunderland, 2006). Thus, this is a chapter in which the author “tells the story” of language and gender studies until the 90’s, and finally evaluates their development as excessively focused on “gender differences”, in agreement with other overviews appeared in the last years. Also, the author supports the notion of “linguistic sexism” and studies on it, as a really controversial area, which has been severely questioned and criticized. Having stressed the excessive focus on “gender differences” as an important problem after many years of language and gender research, Chapter 2 remarks the need for a new theoretical conceptualization of gender which allows more dynamism and flexibility in the description of women´s and men´s discursive styles. This theoretical framework is the constructivist/performative approach, in which gender norms and stereotypes about women´s and men´s talk are seen as resources for the construction of multiple gendered identities in interaction. The main difference in comparison with previous approaches to “gender differences” is that women and men are not seen as a kind of robots who produce “feminine talk” and “masculine talk”, respectively, always in concordance with gendered norms, stereotypes and expectations, but they can be “creative” and mix features from one type and the other in different ways, depending on the particular context. Thus, from this perspective it is possible to explain, for example, women´s employment of linguistic devices linked to “men´s language” and vice versa. It is one of the frameworks that are currently being explored in the field. In addition, it is important to indicate that Chapter 2 also includes a review of studies on the links between women and gossip, starting from a comment on the proverbs that establish them in different languages and cultures, and continuing with a review of feminist approaches to “women´s gossip”, defending its important social functions; following, these approaches are criticized to the extent they do not consider “men´s gossip” and thus reinforce the stereotype, as it was briefly explained in the General Introduction. On the other hand, studies that tend to “celebrate” women´s gossip are also criticized as they do not take into account certain varieties or subgenres, such as bitching (Guendouzi, 2001), which functions among women as a discursive form of competition for “social capital” that contributes to the reproduction of sexism (Jones, 1980). In sum, feminist approaches to this issue are criticized because of their exclusive focus on women´s gossipy practices, and because they tend to overlook their negative aspects (see also Acuña Ferreira, 2004). Having established these problems, the rest of the chapter focuses on Günthner´s analysis of complaint stories about third parties as a narrative genre closely tied to gossip and women, and the establishment of the hypotheses which gave rise, from this author’s speculations, to the constitution of a corpus of complaint activities about third parties in men´s and women´s everyday talk and its analysis in the following chapters (3-6) of my book. Regarding the final evaluation, the review continues “The introduction of the book clearly establishes current problematic issues regarding the analysis of women’s speech by providing examples of stereotypical women’s speech characteristics, such as frivolousness and lack of authority, which are often intuitively accepted by the general public”. I must insist that this book is focused on the stereotypical relationship between women and gossip, or “talk about third parties” (Guendouzi, 2001), and this is what is advanced and emphasized in the General Introduction, to be more extensively explained in Chapter 2. Overall, I miss some reference to the gender- specific attribution of gossip in this review, as this is an essential issue in the book; in Chapter 2, stereotyped images of talk among women as “gossip” are contrasted with stereotyped images of talk among men as “shop talk” (see e.g. Romaine, 1999), i.e., as “serious” conversation on politics, sports or economy. While the book addresses gender stereotypes about language use in general, and descriptions and characterizations of female and male talk in language and gender research, the stereotype of the gossipy or nagger woman is the point of departure for the analysis of data here offered, and the reason why it is considered that men´s complaints about third parties demonstrates an important similarity with women´s talk that should be remarked. In respect to the extensive discussion of Lakoff’s pioneering work in Language and woman´s place (LWP) that is offered in Chapter 1, the review also comments: “I argue that Lakoff’s assumptions may be linguistically applied to not only the approaches of domination and difference, but also to the constructivist approach, in order to integrate the coherence of discourse interaction”. I agree that LWP can be actually seen from different theoretical perspectives, i.e., though it has been generally appointed to the “dominance approach”, because Lakoff’s particular insistence on social norms about “talking like a lady” as a mechanism of social control on women´s subordination and inequality, her overall description of “women’s language” is also of interest, of course, for the “difference paradigm” and the “constructivist framework”. But this something that is recognized in the book; in the final part of Chapter 1, both “dominance” and “difference” approaches are criticized because of their opposition when they should be seen as complementary; on the other hand, when explaining the constructivist framework in Chapter 1, I stress that Lakoff’s Language and woman´s place is currently greatly valued as a guide or point of departure for the analysis of feminine speech and the display of gendered identities. Finally, I would like to stress, once more, that the book focuses on stereotypes of female conversation as gossip and talk about third parties, oriented to the construction of support and solidarity, in contrast to stereotyped views of male talk as “shop talk”, oriented to competition for expertise and status; these stereotyped images of female and male conversation are taken as the background against complaint activities about third parties are emphasized as something done both by women and men in the data collected and analyzed, as a communicative activity that is practiced both in female and male conversation to achieve similar communicative goals (affiliation, support, solidarity), drawing on a wide range of common devices; Chapters 3-5 are intended to show the three basic kinds of discursive work involved in complaint discourse, i.e., the dramatic staging of the events, the moral censure of third parties’ behavior, and the display of emotions; by combining extracts from both female and male talk in the analysis here offered, these chapters are also intended to illuminate that female and male participants draw on the same resources. The exception, the “gender difference”, is addressed in Chapter 6, where it is argued that female and male participants construct specific styles for emotions display, based on certain linguistic devices for displaying affect that are framed as “feminine” and “masculine”. Sincerely, A. Virginia Acuña Ferreira University of Vigo References Acuña Ferreira, V. (2004). “Complaint stories in male contexts: The power of emotions”. Spanish in Context 1, 181-213. Fasold, R. W. (1990). The Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Guendouzi, J. (2001). “You’ll think we’re always bitching”: The functions of cooperativity and competition in women’s gossip”. Discourse Studies 3, 29- 51. Johnson, S. (1997). “Theorizing language and masculinity: a feminist perspective”. En S. Johnson & U. H. Meinhof (eds.), Language and masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell, 8-26. Kendall, S. & D. Tannen (2001). “Discourse and gender”. En D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen & H. E. Hamilton (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 548-567. Lakoff, R. (2004 [1975]). Language and woman’s place. Text and commentaries. Ed. M. Bucholtz. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press. Mills, S. (2003). Gender and politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press. Romaine, S. (1999). Communicating gender. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Talbot, M. (1998). Language and gender. An introduction. Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press. |
| Date Posted: | 18-Oct-2011 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Discourse Analysis
Sociolinguistics |
| LL Issue: | 22.4071 |
| Posted: | 18-Oct-2011 |
