Language and Woman’s Place in Context
MARY BUCHOLTZ
Commentators on Robin Tolmach Lakoff’s work on language and gender, and particularly her critics, often seem to believe that her ideas about women, language, and feminism stopped in 1975, the year when Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) was published in book form. Yet Lakoff explicitly stated in the text that she considered that work an initial foray into language and gender issues, not a definitive statement of the ways in which language reproduces an asymmetrical gender system: “I present what follows less as the final word on the subject of sexism in language—anything but that!—than as a goad to further research” (LWP 40). In her later writings on gender, which are much less widely cited than LWP, Lakoff’s ideas on these issues continued to develop, and she built on, refined, and revised her earlier discussion. In keeping with the present volume’s goal of reassessing the position of LWP in language and gender scholarship, in this essay I enlarge the scope of this project to include a wider range of Lakoff’s work on gender. This survey, albeit brief and partial, is intended to encourage readers to explore all of Lakoff’s rich writings on gender, rather than limiting their acquaintance with Lakoff’s work to her most sensationalized and misunderstood text, LWP. By situating LWP within the context of the ongoing development of Lakoff’s thought, I argue, we are better able to appreciate her continuing contributions not just to feminist linguistics but to feminism more generally.
Even a cursory glance at Lakoff’s extensive bibliography of publications on gender makes clear that all of her work in this area demonstrates a fundamental orientation to both feminism and linguistics as bodies of knowledge that should not be restricted to the domain of academic theory. Instead, as she shows through example, both endeavors must be recognized as central to the concerns of daily life. Her efforts to make these ideas accessible to a wide audience are thus simultaneously political and theoretical—a feminist challenge to structures of inequity that restrict access in order to perpetuate the power of a select few. It is no accident, for example, that with the exception of her dissertation work on Latin syntax, all of her scholarship is written to be accessible to a lay readership without sacrificing conceptual or analytic sophistication. Even in her earliest research, Lakoff was writing against the grain of linguistic fashion by eschewing the unwieldy technical apparatus of linguistic theory that often obscured more than it revealed. Moreover, her publications appear in newspapers and magazines as well as academic venues. One of the reasons that Lakoff’s work is readily understood by the general public is that for her, feminist theory is closely tied to feminist practice. Thus in addition to publishing a detailed feminist analysis of Freud’s abuse of one of his most celebrated patients, a young woman he called Dora (Lakoff & Coyne 1993), Lakoff has also produced a client’s guide to selecting an effective psychotherapist (Aftel & Lakoff 1985); both are feminist interventions into the power imbalance of the psychotherapeutic relationship, long an intellectual interest for Lakoff.
There are other reasons why Lakoff’s books after LWP deserve greater notice within feminist linguistics. First, it is noteworthy that many of them are collaborations with scholars in other fields. Lakoff’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship has acted as an important counterpoint to the entrenchment of linguistics as an autonomous discipline that too often stands aloof from developments in adjacent fields. While some may object that Lakoff’s interdisciplinary work isn’t “real linguistics,” as with much innovative research, it has been a harbinger of larger intellectual trends that redefine the scope of the discipline. Psychotherapy, for example, is a practice constructed almost entirely through talk, and in recent years many scholars have come to recognize that understanding such talk is well within the domain of linguistic inquiry. Similarly, Lakoff’s attention to discourses of beauty in American culture (Lakoff & Scherr 1984) is a contribution both to feminism and to linguistics that anticipates interest in bodies and embodiment within studies of language. And in forging new intellectual directions, Lakoff has not worked alone. Her commitment to sustained collaborative research and writing has long been a hallmark of feminist scholarship both within linguistics and in other fields. Viewing scholarship as a social and interactive endeavor rather than the solitary work of a heroic lone researcher, many feminists advocate dialogical methods throughout the research process. Lakoff puts these principles into practice in her own scholarship by entering into intellectual partnerships with researchers from her own and other disciplines.
Yet perhaps the most important reason why language and gender scholars should be more aware of Lakoff’s complete oeuvre is that many of her writings, and especially LWP, are unmistakable illustrations of the first principle of feminism: the personal is political. This slogan of 1970s radical feminism calls attention to the ways in which individual women’s everyday encounters with sexism cumulatively create social structures that enforce the subordination of all women. Thus for women to speak out to other women about their own experiences of gender oppression is a revolutionary act of resistance against patriarchy. From this perspective, one of the most controversial aspects of LWP for later scholars, its use of an introspective methodology, may be seen as an instantiation of the same feminist tenet. Elsewhere, Kira Hall and I argue that Lakoff’s methodology was influenced by the data-collection practices that predominated within linguistics in the 1970s (Bucholtz & Hall 1995). In addition, it is important to examine the role of feminist theory in Lakoff’s approach. Thus, for example, Lakoff writes of her own ambivalent relationship toward stereotypes of gender as represented in the popular media:
I recall, as a child, worrying because I didn’t fit the pattern for which women were being ridiculed in jokes I heard on television. … It frightened rather than cheered me to realize this discrepancy between the female stereotype and myself: I feared I’d never make it. True, I didn’t (at least I hope I didn’t) remake myself to fit the stereotype, but seeing that image there continually in a thousand variations did nothing for my self-image: first, because that was the best I, as a girl, could hope to aspire to; second, and may be worse, because I couldn’t even manage that role. (LWP 83–84)
Lakoff’s invocation of her childhood memories in a scholarly text is a deliberate violation of academic discourse conventions. Like feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, it is a political challenge to norms of silence about uncomfortably intimate matters.1
In using her own experiences as a source of data, Lakoff—like many feminists in a variety of fields—was attacked as unempirical, unobjective, unscientific. If to speak out as a feminist was a risky move in the academy of three decades ago, to speak out as a woman was riskier still. In very few of the linguistic writings on gender at that time or afterward did an author locate herself so squarely within her text; other feminist scholars adopted an equally impassioned stance but one that was far more impersonal. Although personal experience undoubtedly informed these texts, it was not explicitly acknowledged, and for good reason. At that time, to reveal one’s interest in gender as personal as well as professional could call into question one’s legitimacy as a scholar. In such an environment, open acknowledgment of the force of gender ideologies in one’s own life was nothing less than a quiet act of defiance of mainstream male-dominated intellectual practice.
Moreover, Lakoff’s willingness to acknowledge her presence in the text, controversial at the time, participates in one of the most important transformations of the human and social sciences in the last quarter century. Feminist, multiculturalist, and postmodernist scholars have all made the case for knowledge claims as partial and perspectival and hence for the necessity of scholarly self-reflection on the research process. From this vantage point, Lakoff’s approach to the study of language and gender anticipated the shift toward reflexivity in scholarship in the academy as a whole.
In the same way that Lakoff’s concern with sexism in language arose from her own experiences, so too did her inquiry into other cultural systems that control women: beauty as a sexist ideal and psychotherapy as a sexist institution. Her coauthored book on the politics of beauty opens with reflections by both authors on their individual confrontations with the ideology of beauty in American culture. Likewise, her scholarly interest in therapy arose in part from her own experience as a client. Lakoff’s decision to expose her own vulnerabilities is a courageous one, designed not to put herself at the center of her analysis but to help others in similar situations to question structures of power. This explicit demonstration that the personal truly is political must certainly be seen as a feminist act.
In her later research, Lakoff continued the work she began in LWP of identifying cultural ideologies of femininity and the practices of gender inequality that result from them. Yet many readers misunderstood Lakoff’s discussion of “women’s language” to be a straightforward description of women’s linguistic practice rather than a characterization of ideological expectations of women’s speech—expectations to which many speakers conform. Although this point was made in LWP, Lakoff’s concern was the close connection between gender ideology and gender practice, and hence these concepts were often treated as equivalent in her early analysis. In her later work, however, “women’s language” is more explicitly framed as ideology as well as practice; she writes, for example, that features of women’s language represent “behavior supposedly typical of women across the majority of cultures: alleged illogic, submissiveness, sexual utility to men, secondary status” (1990: 202–203). In this and other passages, Lakoff documents the cultural power of “women’s language” as ideology even as she expresses skepticism of the stereotypes that assign it exclusively to women and endow it with negative social meanings. An early theorist of the relationship between gender ideology and linguistic practice, Lakoff continues to develop her ideas about this fundamental issue.
To be sure, as she herself acknowledges, Lakoff’s initial hypotheses about language and gender have in some cases been found to be incorrect by later researchers. Yet such analytic errors should be viewed with an eye toward the fact that language and gender did not yet exist as a field of scholarship: especially in the early stages of a field, the development of testable hypotheses can help advance disciplinary knowledge. Lakoff’s formulation of one possible relationship between language and gender gave necessary shape to the research that was later conducted; without the laying of such groundwork, linguistic research on gender would have continued as a set of disparate studies and would not have converged into a coherent field (compare the field of language and sexuality, which remained diffuse until the recent emergence of theoretical statements; see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). Thus the counterexamples of later research should be recognized as the necessary work of refining the ideas proposed in earlier scholarship. As Lakoff notes, such revision furthered not only the study of language and gender but linguistic theory more generally:
Until well into the 1970’s we were unable to comprehend the prevalence of ambiguity in language, and if we talked about the functions of tags at all, we tried to assign all of them a single function. For example, I suggested in the early 1970’s that tags represented a strategy of the conversationally less powerful. … But it was soon apparent, as we started to develop functional theories of grammar, that ambiguity was much more common in language than had been assumed. (2000: 135)
Scholars who object to Lakoff’s early speculations about tag questions or other linguistic structures ideologically associated with women’s speech tend to overlook such evidence that Lakoff continues to rethink her own earlier ideas in the light of later research.2
Perhaps the most dramatic and complex way in which Lakoff’s ideas about language and gender have shifted is not with respect to particular claims but more generally in relation to feminist theory itself. Always an iconoclast, Lakoff has never explicitly aligned herself with a particular feminist camp. Yet it is possible to categorize specific statements that Lakoff has made about gender as characteristic of particular forms of feminism. An exercise of this kind yields both insights and perils; my discussion of Lakoff’s feminism is intended to demonstrate the richness of her thought rather than to fix her within a single feminist perspective (see also McElhinny, this volume).
Lakoff’s analysis of women’s language use has been characterized by some of its critics as a “deficit” approach to language and gender, a term that continues to have a remarkably wide circulation. Yet the now-familiar alliterative taxonomy that is often used to organize language and gender scholarship—deficit, dominance, difference, and now discourse—does not only oversimplify, as those who use it readily acknowledge; it also misses an opportunity to link language and gender research to larger trends within academic feminism and thus to demonstrate the intellectual underpinnings of such work. In LWP, Lakoff’s theorizing of “women’s language” as symbolic powerlessness and her proposed remedy, to move toward a more androgynous or gender-neutral style, participates in the project of liberal feminism, which seeks to bring women into institutions dominated by men in part by eradicating gender differences in social practice. At the same time, her emphasis on male hegemony in that text and others makes it necessary to include her work within the “dominance” framework as well (in fact, before the label deficit was assigned to her research, Lakoff was cited as an example of a “dominance” theorist). Such a viewpoint is compatible with the radical feminist perspective, and indeed McElhinny (this volume) offers a possible argument for classifying Lakoff in this way.
Less recognized is Lakoff’s ongoing use of concepts usually ascribed to the “difference” approach, which, in emphasizing women’s distinctive practices as rooted in a distinctive culture, is characteristic of cultural feminism (see Tannen, this volume, for other links between Lakoff’s work and a cultural model of language and gender). Yet unlike the liberal form of cultural feminism, which espouses a “different but equal” interpretation of language use by each gender, Lakoff’s own approach is more in keeping with radical cultural feminism in that it highlights male power and celebrates women’s special linguistic abilities: “Women’s special contributions to discourse (as to everything else) are ignored, disparaged, or—if their value is conclusively demonstrated—co-opted and credited to men. … Women over the millennia have learned to use with skill what is left to them” (1990: 199). And in opposition to liberal cultural feminism, she suggests that gender difference is not rooted in different cultures, but in cultural ideologies that insist on dichotomous gender roles: “Gender differences in language use arise not because male and female speakers are isolated from each other, but precisely because they live in close contiguity, which constantly causes comparisons and reinforces the need for polarization—linguistic and otherwise” (1990: 202).
Finally, the “discourse” approach to feminism can be seen in Lakoff’s work as well. This model, heavily influenced by postmodern feminism, severs any necessary connection between gender (or sex) and social practice; all gender is performance, whether normative or not (see Barrett, Kiesling, both this volume). Yet violations of cultural norms of gender are of special interest in this framework because they vividly demonstrate that gender is a social construct rather than a natural essence. Because LWP has often been criticized as normative, it is usually overlooked that Lakoff’s work has long attended to gender transgression in language use, from her discussion of nonnormative male speech styles in LWP (Hall, this volume) to her more recent consideration of public figures as “gender-transgressive.” Thus her observation that during his presidency, George H. W. Bush was a user of “women’s language” (1990: 271–273) is in keeping with her assertion in LWP that upper-class men may use features of “women’s language” to symbolize their deliberate withdrawal from the aggressively competitive style culturally required of less powerful men (LWP 47). In later research, she comments that President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton were often seen by the public as having swapped gender styles and explains why (1995: 36; 2000: 172). Such analyses demonstrate that for Lakoff, as for postmodern feminists, the association between gender and specific linguistic features is far from inevitable, but neither is it immune from cultural challenge; as she shows, violations of ideologically normative gender practice are harshly sanctioned.
These disparate theoretical threads in Lakoff’s scholarship are worth tracing in order to demonstrate that Lakoff is not a failed feminist thinker, as some of her critics have alleged, but a serious scholar of gender whose theoretical position defies neat classification. As Lakoff showed so powerfully with the publication of LWP, it is in challenging rather than conforming to intellectual fashion that scholarship can make the most profound impact.
Given its foundational role and ongoing importance for language and gender research, it is no surprise that scholars have continued to cite LWP heavily over the years. But it is more surprising, in light of Lakoff’s continuing publications in this field, that many commentators, and especially its harshest critics, have treated the book ahistorically, not as a text written in response to a specific sociohistorical context, but as a timeless characterization of the relationship between language and gender.
Although commentators have sought, determinedly but unsuccessfully, to relegate LWP and Lakoff herself to the margins of language and gender research, the relevance of her work has not abated. Indeed, as feminism has entered the mainstream of the academy and language and gender is increasingly legitimated within linguistics, Lakoff’s long-standing concern that feminist linguistics should be directed outward, to the women and men who most need its insights, becomes ever more important. In her writings since LWP, Lakoff has expressed worry that feminist scholarship that adheres too closely to dominant norms, whether in linguistics or in other fields, can have little political effect (e.g., 1990: 209; 1995: 48). As she continues to contribute to both scholarly and public discussions of language, gender, and power, Lakoff’s work will continue to act as a “goad” not only to research but to feminist thought and action.
1. Lakoff’s shift in focus over the years from the private everyday speech of women and men in LWP to the public discourse of political and media figures in her later research is thus not as dramatic as it may seem. Now as before, Lakoff’s focus is the relationship between the personal and the political, in how women may speak and how they are spoken of within male-dominated structures of power—and how they have begun to challenge both of these aspects of “women’s language” (e.g., Lakoff 1995).
2. Although a vast number of studies have sought to test Lakoff’s assertions regarding tag questions and hedges, other characteristics of “women’s language” that Lakoff delineated, such as women’s detailed differentiation of color terms, have received very little attention. It is worth noting that the single study on this topic (Frank 1990) supports Lakoff’s hypothesis.
Aftel, Mandy, & Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1985). When talk is not cheap; or, How to find the right therapist when you don’t know where to begin. New York: Warner.
Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall (1995). Introduction: Twenty years after Language and Woman’s Place. In Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge. 1–22.
——— (2004). Theorizing identity in language and sexuality. Language in Society 33(4).
Frank, Jane (1990). Gender differences in color naming: Direct mail order advertisements. American Speech 65:114–126.
Lakoff, Robin (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper & Row.
——— (1990). Talking power. New York: Basic Books.
——— (1995). Cries and whispers: The shattering of the silence. In Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge. 25–50.
——— (2000). The language war. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, & James C. Coyne (1993). Father knows best: The use and abuse of power in Freud’s case of Dora. New York: Teachers College Press.
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, & Raquel L. Scherr (1984). Face value: The politics of beauty. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
The Politics of Theoretical Taxonomies in Feminist Linguistics
BONNIE MCELHINNY
Robin Lakoff’s book Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975) is one of the earliest, most influential, and most widely discussed contributions to feminist linguistics, but the question of how to place it within the larger context of feminist theory is far from straightforward. A decade ago I set out to compare existing feminist work in sociolinguistics with feminist work done in other related disciplines, using a modified form of philosopher Alison Jaggar’s (1983) influential taxonomy of liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminism (McElhinny 1993). Jaggar’s taxonomy has served as the structuring framework for many introductory textbooks in women’s studies. I argued then that Lakoff’s work could be labelled radical feminist. In this essay, I briefly review how I made this argument and how Lakoff’s work converges with radical feminist work in other disciplines. A decade later, I have some second thoughts about the use of Jaggar’s taxonomy, and so I will also use this essay to reflect on the uses and limits of taxonomies in labelling and classifying feminist work. Indeed, feminist analyses of sexist language, like that conducted by Lakoff, can be said to have pioneered linguistic work on labelling that suggests how categories are constructed as normative. Conflicts over category content may present themselves as debates over what labels “really” mean, but the real issue is judgements about the normativity or deviance of particular practices (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1995: 479). Taxonomic approaches to feminist theory do not simply describe existing variation, but imply a unilinear evolutionary progress in ways that attempt to place certain approaches firmly in the past and thus actively obscure the rich diversity of approaches extant in the field. In the end, rather than taking the definition of radical feminist for granted, I ask about the political uses for which that notion can be mobilized in evaluations of work like Lakoff’s.
I begin with a quick summary of Lakoff’s influential argument. For Lakoff, women’s language has three characteristics: (1) it lacks resources for women to express themselves strongly, (2) it encourages women to talk about trivial subjects, and (3) it requires women to speak tentatively. Lakoff argues that a female speaker faces a double bind. If she does not learn to speak like a lady, she will be criticized or ostracized. If she does learn to speak like a lady, she will be systematically denied access to power on the ground that she is not capable of holding it, with her linguistic behavior as partial evidence for that claim.
Not all commentators have seen Lakoff’s argument as feminist. She has been understood by some as accepting sexist notions of women as deficient (see Bucholtz & Hall 1995 and Freeman & McElhinny 1996 for reviews of the reception of Lakoff’s work). Lakoff has thus became a useful target for those interested in countering what they took to be a concise statement of patriarchal norms. This use of Lakoff was possible in part because her study was based largely on introspection and intuition. There is a remarkable similarity between Lakoff’s description of women’s language and prescriptions for women’s speech in post–World War II women’s magazines (compare Norgate 1997). In recent years, some scholars have found Lakoff’s work more helpful as a description of a particular ideology of femininity rather than an empirical description of it (Barrett 1997; Bucholtz & Hall 1995; Hall 1995).
In part, however, to blame Lakoff for having negative and conservative views is to conflate the messenger’s views with her message. One response is to assume that the label feminist masks an enormous amount of variety in epistemological focus and political strategy and to consider whether labelling Lakoff’s work as antifeminist is one way of dismissing a particular approach to feminism. The taxonomy of theories of gender in Jaggar 1983 was helpful to me and has been helpful to students to whom I have taught it, both in showing how wide the range of political strategies in feminism is and in forcing us to ask precisely what we mean by feminist.
By the lights of Jaggar’s taxonomy, I argued in 1993 that Lakoff would probably be labelled a radical feminist. Although in popular usage feminism is often modified by radical, in academic usage radical feminism describes a particular approach to feminism. Radical feminism grew out of the disaffection of women (mostly white) with sexism in the social movements of the 1960s (especially the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement). While liberal theorists divide social life into a public sphere where the state can operate legitimately and a private sphere where citizens operate without fear of state interference, radical feminists argue that “the personal is political.” Liberal feminists tend to call for reforms that allow women’s equal participation in the public sphere (in education, work-places, and political organizations), while radical feminists focus on women’s oppression through their gender and sexuality. Like socialist feminists, radical feminists call for more radical transformations of political systems; unlike them they focus on patriarchy, rather than capitalism, as the primary source of women’s oppression. Radical feminists often emphasize the commonalities of women’s experience, arguing that women are universally oppressed by a ruling class called “the patriarchy” and that because sexism, unlike other forms of oppression, is evident in every culture and every period of history, gender oppression is the original and fundamental (or root, thus radical) form of oppression.
In order to understand women’s “universal subordination” in the face of vast cultural variation in the arrangement between the sexes, many radical feminists have focused on sexuality, childbearing, and childrearing as the elements of women’s oppression. Other radical feminists explore the ways that women are subordinated by direct physical coercion (e.g., rape, incest, domestic abuse) and by indirect physical and psychological coercion (e.g., pornography and narrow notions of beauty).
Perhaps where radical feminist thought is most relevant for linguistics is in its portrayal of the psychology of women. The radical feminist notion of false consciousness suggests that “women’s minds as well as women’s bodies are under constant attack” and “women’s perceptions of reality are systematically distorted or denied” (Jaggar 1983: 114) in ways that cause them to believe that they benefit from prevailing cultural structures. In Mary Daly’s widely read radical feminist manifesto Gyn/Ecology, for example, she argues that men control women’s thought and that women are therefore unable to express their experience: “The words simply do not exist. … Women struggling for words feel haunted by false feelings of personal inadequacy, by anger, frustration, and a kind of sadness/bereavement. For it is, after all, our ‘mother tongue’ that has been turned against us by the tongue-twisters” (Daly 1978: 330, cited in Jaggar 1983: 114). Daly’s work has deeply influenced such feminist linguists as Dale Spender (1980) and Julia Penelope (1990). Spender argues that “the English language has been literally man made and that it is still primarily under male control” (1980: 12). Likewise, Penelope argues that “the experiences described by English are those of men, who have controlled the development and grammatical explanations of English” (1990: xxxv) and that “the language itself is hostile to women’s perceptions and thinking” (1990: xiv).
Lakoff’s argument is similar to these early radical feminist studies. All tend to portray women as helpless victims of a patriarchy that forces them to act in passive, irrational, ineffective ways or evaluates their actions as passive, irrational, or ineffective (see McConnell-Ginet, this volume). By portraying women as victims, such studies attempt to save them from being blamed for their behavior. Some of what is now understood as the rhetorical excess of radical feminist work can be much more readily understood if one considers how small the numbers of women in such key institutions as law, medicine, and business were in the early 1970s (Blum 1991: 204).
Nonetheless, even if women’s exclusion from powerful institutions has affected the shape of institutional discourse, control over ordinary speech cannot be and has not been nearly so complete (Cameron 1985: 111). By overemphasizing the power that men have over women, and by failing to acknowledge that women have any source of resistance, this style of feminist argument accords existing patriarchal institutions more power than they already have. This strategy depreciates the amount of power that women have succeeded in winning and minimizes the chances of further resistance (Jaggar 1983: 115). It also fails to see the ways that some women benefit from the power of hegemonic men and the ways that some subordinate men are disadvantaged by hegemonic masculine norms.
The label of radical feminist may always be a rather uneasy fit for Lakoff, in significant part because she has not, to my knowledge, ever described herself as such. Labelling Lakoff’s work as radical feminist was and is a frankly political move. It attempts to reunite linguistic work with larger currents in feminist thought. It makes it possible to understand the influence of her work on feminists, to see it as political and critical in response to accounts that questioned this in the light of ongoing, heated debates in linguistics and elsewhere about which intellectual and political strategies feminists should adopt.
In the 1980s, radical feminism became associated in the eyes of many with a universalizing, theoretically naive antiporn activism and was increasingly portrayed as the politics of white women. One failed attempt to rehabilitate radical feminism carefully distinguished it from cultural feminism (Echols 1989), a distinction reprised in sociolinguistics as the dominance-versus-difference debate (see Talbot 1998 for a summary). Echols (1989) suggested that after 1975 radical feminism was eclipsed by cultural feminism, just as social transformation was replaced by a kind of personal transformation easily coopted by consumer capitalism (see Bell and Klein 1996 for critiques). Other key works willing to recognize the contributions of radical feminism, but eager to consign it to feminism’s past, also appeared in the 1980s. The best-known and most carefully developed of these was the taxonomy I still found useful in 1993: Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983).
As late as the early 1990s, it was possible to conclude that a slightly watered-down version of radical feminism was the prevailing feminist paradigm in sociolinguistics. Or at least, so I concluded. Although I am about to critique the use of feminist taxonomies, I will offer a few words in their (and perhaps my younger self’s) defense. Taxonomies can be useful in processing the ever-burgeoning literature in feminist and gender studies, especially for relative newcomers to feminist theory, like students and many sociolinguists. They also can serve a helpful comparative role, in highlighting disparate emphases in different disciplines. However artificial the boundaries between feminist theories might be, however much they leave out the novel approaches that do not fit their categorizing criteria, it was and is still striking to me how different feminist work in sociolinguistics seems from other feminist disciplines in which Jaggar’s taxonomy has been applied. Even using fairly generous criteria for inclusion, I found virtually no liberal feminist studies and only a few socialist feminist studies in 1993. In the past decade, this has changed very little. In 1993, I also concluded that there were few published sociolinguistic studies influenced by postmodernism. In the past decade, this has changed quite a lot. Many publications influenced by postmodern social theorists have appeared in the past decade (see McElhinny 2003 for a review). The comparative approach that a taxonomy allows forces us to ask what it is about either the study of language as object or the institutional structures of linguistic enquiry that pulls us toward certain kinds of theoretical frameworks.
A decade ago I perceived labelling the work of Lakoff and others as radical feminist as a way of trying to determine what kind of feminist work was and was not being done in sociolinguistics in order to decide what needed to be done next. Indeed, one effect of a taxonomic approach is to suggest that each subsequent theory is proposed in order to remedy apparent deficiencies in earlier theories. If one adopts the objective stance of some forms of science and social science, this progress is seen as unproblematic—it mimics the orderly march of science (see, e.g., Jaggar 1983).
In anthropology, however, there is a long-standing discussion about the ideological uses of cultural taxonomies. One of the distinctive devices of much anthropological discourse was and to some extent is the denial of coevalness, “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (Fabian 1983: 31). Fabian calls this phenomenon chronopolitics. In such a context, cultural taxonomies cannot be neutral; they are immediately yoked to evolutionary schemata. Alhough they seem to be constructed as mere classificatory devices, the taxonomist in fact takes a position on a temporal slope. Her position is generally construed as the more progressive, innovative, or appropriate one.
More recently, a discussion about taxonomies has sprung up in feminist thought. King (1994: 59) argues that “feminist taxonomies work as little machines that produce political identities.” She points out that although Jaggar claims that her taxonomy reflects the historical development of feminist theory, it actually does so only roughly. Radical feminist thought is constructed by Jaggar as preceding, and being eclipsed by, socialist feminist thought, which is thus constructed as a remedy for the deficiencies of that theoretical approach rather than competing with it. Further, King argues that Jaggar’s book is intended to reduce and conquer diversity by organizing feminist theories into mutually exclusive, fundamentally incompatible genera. But Jaggar herself is forced to admit, at least implicitly, that sometimes the boundary between different theories is hard to draw, as can be seen with Lakoff. What is more to the point than trying to label Lakoff’s work is the attempt to try to contain it and permanently fix its position in sociolinguistic history (see also Bucholtz, this volume). The effect is to lose some of its richness. A label can highlight certain similarities with other work; it also inevitably paints over or ignores certain differences. A label is thus best understood not as inaccurate but as always incomplete.
The use of a taxonomy is politics in the guise of objectivity. Knowledge production in capitalist economies, like other kinds of production, is driven by the attempt to establish new developments and new markets. Labelling Lakoff’s work as radical feminist was, in part, a way to try to demarcate academic generations and to mark work associated with socialist and perhaps especially postmodern thought as newer. In the rush to innovate, there is always a danger in seeing continuing problems as outdated. In a focus on difference we can overlook what we owe to earlier approaches.
If we cannot use taxonomies, then what can we resort to? Anthropologist Ann Stoler (2002: 206) advocates using working concepts, that is, concepts that we work with to track variation in their use and usefulness and that work to destabilize received historical narratives. What this means in practice is not completely clear, but perhaps a model lies in recent work on how meaning is negotiated in and through keywords, in works such as Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini Briggs’s (1997) analysis of genocide and Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet’s (1995) analysis of jock. In each of these analyses, the meanings and uses of certain terms are carefully linked with certain groups and social formations.
Our own scholarly practices must be subjected to the same political and critical attention and analysis as other practices are. The place that anyone, including Lakoff, holds in feminist theory will depend on the theoretical position, empirical interests, and social networks of the researcher using others’ work.
Barrett, Rusty (1997). The “homo-genius” speech community. In Anna Livia & Kira Hall (eds.), Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 181–201.
Bell, Diane, & Renate Klein (eds.) (1996). Radically speaking: Feminism reclaimed. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex.
Blum, Linda (1991). Between feminism and labor: The significance of the comparable worth movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Briggs, Charles, & Clara Mantini Briggs (1997). “The Indians accept death as a normal, natural event”: Institutional authority, cultural reasoning, and discourses of genocide in a Venezuelan cholera epidemic. Social Identities 3: 439–469.
Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall (1995). Introduction: Twenty years after Language and Woman’s Place. In Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge. 1–24.
Cameron, Deborah (1985). Feminism and linguistic theory. London: Macmillan.
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“Women’s Language” Revisited
SALLY MCCONNELL-GINET
In 1973, as I was planning my first course on language and gender (“Language and the Sexes”), I read Robin Lakoff’s “Language and Woman’s Place” (1973). I was infuriated. I interpreted her as claiming that women in general were wimps, unwilling and unable to take a stand, vague and imprecise, deferential to men, and reduced to saying silly euphemisms, such as fudge, when things got really bad. In 1975 when the book, Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), containing that article and “Why Women Are Ladies” appeared, I wrote an essay (McConnell-Ginet 1975) that expressed my dismay at what I saw as Lakoff’s devaluation of women and their capacities, linguistic and otherwise. I still have the copy of the book that I scribbled on in preparing that review. It is full of exclamation points, “Nonsense,” and many “Yes, but …” entries. Although Lakoff clearly shared my own goal of promoting gender equity, she seemed to me to ignore not only many women but also successful strategic uses of language by women on whom she did focus (upper-middle-class Americans of European descent).
It is undoubtedly relevant that I allied myself with the interpretive semanticists against the challenge of the generative semanticists, a group of influential young linguists that included Lakoff. This group was drawing attention to ways in which social and communicative contexts affected the linguistic forms people used, and there was a rush to include all sorts of contextual factors in grammatical rules. I thought then (and still do) that although contextual factors are fundamental to understanding how language is used, their role in the grammar is sharply constrained. Most important generalizations about how language functions, I contend, are not grammatical but arise from putting grammar together with distinct theories of social life and human communication. I part company, however, from those who hold grammar to be the only appropriate subject matter for linguistics. In my view, theories of how language works in society and culture are also appropriate grist for the linguist’s mill. I suspect I came to that view in part through engagement with work like LWP. I agreed with many of the general claims Lakoff made about ways in which language could contribute to women’s social disadvantage. Nonetheless, I was unhappy with many specific claims and with what I understood as her explanatory framework, for both linguistic and, as noted above, feminist reasons.
In the intervening years, I have come to realize that my first reaction to Lakoff misjudged her enterprise. Like many others, I had seen her as engaged in an empirical characterization of the speech of actual women and of gendered restrictions on the use of particular linguistic resources. In this way of construing her work, there certainly were major problems. It was by no means clear, for example, that most women used the various features she had tagged as part of “women’s language” (WL) or that men who employed those features were viewed as speaking “as women.” But as Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (1995) made clear, such a flat-footed interpretation of Lakoff’s work misses the point. Lakoff was trying to explore language ideology and its connections to gender ideology and gender arrangements. Her WL includes a range of linguistic resources that language users draw on in presenting themselves as women or, although this point was only implicit in LWP, in hearing others as women. Crucially, she was also drawing attention to some ways in which women’s apparently problematic status as speakers contributed to their overall social disadvantage, including their subordination to men.
Lakoff’s proposals had the immediate effect of prompting others to explore ways in which gender identities and relations interacted with language. Many began by looking at the array of linguistic forms that LWP had associated with WL. In addition to richly elaborated color vocabularies (magenta, puce), diminutives (panties), euphemisms (substitutes for profanities like piffle or heck and expressions like go to the bathroom instead of “vulgar” or tabooed expressions such as pee or piss), and a generally superpolite style of speech, Lakoff saw WL as characterized by such resources as the following:
• tag questions (This talk about war in Iraq is frightening, isn’t it?)
• “uptalk” or rising intonation on declaratives (A: When will dinner be ready? B: Six o’clock?)
• various kinds of hedges (That’s kinda sad or It’s probably dinner-time)
• “empty” boosters (I’m so glad you’re here)
• “speaking in italics” (frequent tonal accents)
• indirection (saying, e.g., Well, I don’t really understand it to convey dislike of a film)
All of these can be used to express some aspect of the speaker’s position on or stance toward the basic content conveyed, what is called idea positioning in Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003, chap. 5. Idea positioning can involve the speaker’s degree of commitment to or confidence in the propositional content conveyed, the speaker’s degree of interest or involvement in what is said, or the degree to which the speaker is serious or playful or whatever about the content. WL, according to Lakoff, had the effect of undercutting the positions that women might be trying to take. Even features such as euphemisms and politeness particles, while not obviously markers of idea positioning, could often be interpreted as diminishing the force of what was said, rendering it powerless. At the same time, Lakoff argued, to eschew WL was hard for women who wanted to be judged as acceptably feminine.
I read LWP as implying that WL itself was inherently problematic, unable to launch ideas and projects with any degree of success, and that women using it did so because of psychological hangups, most notably their putative insecurity. (Lakoff spoke of women’s apparent “unwillingness to assert an opinion” [LWP 50] but saw the explanation as lying in learning the lessons of “femininity” too well.) Many later discussions (e.g., Crawford 1995) associate LWP with a “deficit” view of women’s speech, in which both the language used and the women using it are seen as deficient. Although Lakoff tries at points to indicate that she does not see women themselves as deficient, such readings of LWP are not unwarranted. There is talk of “empty” adjectives in WL (e.g., That’s a fabulous dress you’re wearing) but no attention to the possibility that such “neutral” forms as terrific might be equally empty. The “feminine” domain of color and its associated terminology are characterized as “trivial” and “unimportant” but sports and its jargon, quintessentially “masculine,” go unexamined. Such asymmetries suggested to me and other readers that Lakoff was uncritically buying into evaluations of WL and its users that had more to do with the sexist assumptions of a male-dominated society than with any actual appraisal of the effects of the use of particular components of WL or the motives of those using those components, what they might be trying to do. (The possibility that a woman and a man might be judged differently when using the same form is relevant here, but this possibility is not explored in LWP.)
The very idea of WL seemed to me to assume that the various features Lakoff pointed to would co-occur as elements of a single “language” or system, ignoring the fact that speakers might draw on some but not all of these resources and that different women might avail themselves of different components of WL. Furthermore, talk of WL arguably obscured the fact that the use of such resources was by no means constant across situations and settings even for speakers who did indeed draw on them. Nonetheless, there was something powerful in the “language” metaphor, the idea that women might learn at a young age ways of speaking distinctively different from those that their male peers were acquiring. Certainly, women beginning to move into positions of authority in workplaces were often struck by the conflict between modes of talk needed there and those they and their mothers might employ at home or at dinner parties. And they often encountered hostility and resistance from coworkers, not only men but also other women, if they spoke (and acted) as if entitled to exercise authority. Lakoff put it eloquently:
So a girl is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. If she refuses to talk like a lady, she is ridiculed and subjected to criticism as unfeminine; if she does learn, she is ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part in a serious discussion: in some sense, as less than fully human. These two choices which a woman has—to be less than a woman or less than a person—are highly painful. (LWP 41)
Lakoff goes on to offer a plausible analogy between women’s linguistic double binds and the forced bilingualism of many other subordinated groups. For both women and these other groups, the language associated with their most fundamental sense of identity is looked down on by dominant groups (compare the situation of Spanish speakers in much of the United States or, even more dramatically, of speakers of African American Vernacular English; see Mendoza-Denton’s and Morgan’s essays in this volume). Lakoff’s picture of women as forced to struggle with a new language in order to succeed resonated with many women’s experience.
Much subsequent research on language and gender explored use of the various features Lakoff had assigned to WL. One strand investigated the extent to which these features signaled gender identity. Dubois and Crouch (1975), for example, found that male conference attendees used more tag questions in their comments than female participants. And William M. O’Barr and Bowman K. Atkins (1980) report a study in which WL features were statistically more strongly associated with the “powerless” (as defined by status in the courtroom setting they studied) than with women as such. Although they did not look at the effects of individual features of WL, O’Barr and Atkins also report experimental work that suggests, as Lakoff had hypothesized, that speech with many WL features did seem to weaken the force or credibility of what was said (at least for speakers giving testimony in a courtroom).
But idea positioning is not all that the WL features might do. One of the major claims of LWP was that these features not only reduce the force of their users’ discourse contributions but at the same time position those users as women (or perhaps, as nonmasculine men; see also Hall, this volume). In other words, they enter into what is called subject positioning in Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003, chap. 5. As we talk with one another, we are always adopting particular subject positions, such as teacher or pupil or friend or supplicant or benefactor. And we are also assigning positions to the others with whom we are talking: we may condescend or defer to them, express solidarity with them or claim distance from them, and so on. Although she did not put it this way, Lakoff’s most original insight may be that idea positioning is a major component of subject positioning. The fundamental mechanism through which WL was said to feminize its users was by positioning the ideas and projects advanced as only tenuously held. A woman speaking WL was positioning herself directly as only half-heartedly pushing her ideas and thereby indirectly helping position herself as a woman. The idea of what Elinor Ochs (1991) dubbed the “indirect indexing” of gender is already there in LWP. At several points, Lakoff makes clear that she sees most WL forms as having as their primary function something other than marking gender. For example, she says that “these words aren’t, basically, ‘feminine’; rather, they signal ‘uninvolved,’ or ‘out of power’ “ and “they are often considered ‘feminine,’ ‘unmascu-line,’ because women are the ‘uninvolved,’ ‘out of power’ group par excellence” (LWP 47). The term woman’s language, however, obscured the indirectness of the link to gender identity. O’Barr and Atkins, for example, imply that WL would have to be either “women’s” or “powerless” language, without considering that it might be both—that is, it might index gender in part through indexing lack of power. As the quoted passages make clear, Lakoff did indeed see that WL could be both.
Another research strand that arose in response to LWP looked at alternative functions for the components of WL. In particular, a number of investigators suggested that these forms could also be used to good effect for social positioning that was not explicitly gendered. Tags, for example, might be used to invite another’s participation in the interaction or to mark social solidarity with other interlocutors. Drawing on naturally occurring data, Janet Holmes (1982) and Deborah Cameron, Fiona McAlinden, and Kathy O’Leary (1988) showed that many uses of tags were best explained in these ways. (Their studies also found men more likely than women to use tags to express uncertainty.) I pointed to similar positioning functions for “uptalk” and “speaking in italics” (McConnell-Ginet 1978, 1983). These and many other studies stressed the importance of investigating which functions particular forms serve in particular contexts, noting that there is not a one-to-one mapping between linguistic forms and their functions.
The form-function problem in the study of language and gender went even deeper. As Deborah Tannen (1994) and others note, many linguistic resources relevant for constructing gendered identities can serve multiple functions in a single utterance. For example, sir may express both (genuine) respect and socially required deference. Alternatively, the speaker may have one function in mind but those interpreting may assign another: I use rising intonation to invite you to express your opinion (or to inquire indirectly about motives for your earlier contribution), but you interpret me as deferring to your thinking on the matter we’re discussing (or as so lacking in confidence that you feel justified in insisting on having your views prevail).
Even where the focus was on idea positioning, there were many challenges to Lakoff’s implied claim that WL components consistently undermined their users’ effectiveness. Pamela Fishman (1980) argues that many WL features arise as strategies for coping with conversational problems created by uninterested or otherwise dismissive male interlocutors. Penelope Brown (1980), though dealing with a very different population, explores how polite language is called on strategically, to help speakers accomplish their ends, given their place in the social hierarchy. My own work, especially that already cited, has always emphasized speakers’ strategizing and ways in which choices from the WL repertoire can advance speakers’ goals. And Holmes (1995) demonstrates the efficacy of various WL components for enabling women to accomplish important things in their communities. At the same time, many of these authors explicitly acknowledge that women are handicapped if strategies that serve them well in one kind of context are imported into a different setting, which is certainly part of what prompted Lakoff’s analysis of the double bind some women face. Women are also sometimes handicapped by being heard through distorting gender and language ideologies that, for example, may misinterpret open-mindedness as insecurity or lack of conviction.
There is no question that LWP started much productive exploration of language and gender issues. I have focused on WL in connection to speakers’ gendered identity, ignoring Lakoff’s important discussion of sexist talk about women. I’ve done this because it was the idea of women as weak and ineffective speakers that annoyed me so thirty years ago. I now, however, appreciate some of the insights that underlay Lakoff’s talk of WL: that idea positioning is central to gendered subject positioning and that our talk indexes gender indirectly. With hindsight (including three decades of research on language and gender), it is easy to see some of what Lakoff overlooked. But LWP was and continues to be a work of paramount importance to language and gender studies in particular and to the wider field of language in social life.
Brown, Penelope (1980). How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, & Nelly Furman (eds.), Women and language in literature and society. New York: Praeger. 111–136.
Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall (1995). Introduction: Twenty years after Language and Woman’s Place. In Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge. 1–22.
Cameron, Deborah, Fiona McAlinden, & Kathy O’Leary (1988). Lakoff in context: The social and linguistic functions of tag questions. In Jennifer Coates & Deborah Cameron (eds.), Women in their speech communities. London: Longman. 74–93.
Crawford, Mary (1995). Talking difference: On gender and language. London: Sage.
Dubois, Betty Lou, & Isabel Crouch (1975). The question of tag questions in women’s speech: They don’t really use more of them, do they? Language in Society 4:289–294.
Eckert, Penelope, & Sally McConnell-Ginet (2003). Language and gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fishman, Pamela (1980). Conversational insecurity. In Howard Giles, W. P. Robinson, & Philip Smith (eds.), Language: Social psychological perspectives. Oxford: Pergamon. 127–132.
Holmes, Janet (1982). The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal 3:40–65.
———. (1995). Women, men, and politeness. London: Longman.
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———. (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper & Row.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1975). Our father tongue: Essays in linguistic politics. Diacritics 5:44–50.
———. (1978). Intonation in a man’s world. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3:541–559.
———. (1983). Intonation in a man’s world. In Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, & Nancy Henley (eds.), Language, gender, and society. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 69–88. (Revised version of McConnell-Ginet 1978.)
O’Barr, William M., & Bowman K. Atkins (1980). “Women’s language” or “powerless language”? In Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, & Nelly Furman (eds.), Women and language in literature and society. New York: Praeger. 93–110.
Ochs, Elinor (1991). Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 335–358.
Tannen, Deborah (1994). The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Gender and discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 19–52.
Picking Up the Gauntlet
ANNA LIVIA
I read Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) in 1975. I was nineteen years old, studying French at University College London. Before the end of the year, I had formed the London Women and Language Group with fellow linguists Linda Shockey, Trista Selous, and Eva Eberhardt. We were inspired and infuriated by Lakoff’s insights into women’s conversational practices, which seemed destined only to make us appear powerless and airheaded. We began to scrutinize our own language for traces of such weak speech as “What a divine idea!” and “What a lovely steel mill!” We expunged the word lady from our vocabulary, and we learned to tell jokes. At the time, Lakoff’s most important insights concerned the way women spoke and the disparate way women and men were referred to.
Fifteen years later, I arrived in Berkeley, California, to start a graduate degree in French and met the illustrious Dr. Lakoff, teaching two floors below in the linguistics department. I became her student, we became friends, and she became Robin. The world had changed too. Lakoff recalls, “In the 1971 mayoral campaign in San Francisco, the sole woman candidate was repeatedly referred to as Mrs. Feinstein, never Feinstein, when her opponents were regularly referred to by first and last names or last names alone: Joseph Alioto or Alioto, not Mr. Alioto” (LWP 61).
Well, Feinstein and Alioto are still very much on the political scene. Feinstein is the better known of the two, as a U.S. senator, while Alioto is merely a former mayor. Both Feinstein and Alioto are frequently referred to by first name. Indeed, Feinstein’s Web site encourages us to “breakfast with Dianne.” There is no hint of a lowering in status in this invitation to meet the senator: it is, rather, an illusion of equality offered to the California voter, to let us imagine for a second that we might share her status and be allowed to call her Dianne, as she calls us Anna or Robin.
These are changes predicted in LWP. In this essay I examine some of the less-well-studied insights contained in Lakoff’s early analysis of gender and language. Many of the issues that linguists and cultural critics are grappling with in the second millennium were previewed in some way in her book, including phenomena like transsexual speech, cross-expressing (men talking like women and vice versa), media representations of gender, and whether language can be changed by feminist will.
As Lakoff remarked back in 1975, “Social change must precede lexical change” (LWP 68). It is, Lakoff argued, fruitless to try to correct a social inequity by changing linguistic disparities (LWP 39). Instead, she advised us to view language as a clue to the external situation (69). Any type of language is fair game for this type of analysis, not only the attested speech prized by sociolinguists like William Labov. As Labov (1984: 29) states in an article on sociolinguistic methodology: “We place a very high value on records of vernacular speech which show a minimum shift or accommodation of the presence of an outside observer.” However, as Lakoff observes, valuable information is also contained in literary and media representations of speech, albeit of a different kind: “The speech heard in commercials or situation comedies mirrors the speech of the television-watching community: if it did not, it would not succeed” (LWP 40). This constructed speech provides clues to sociolinguistic phenomena like insecurity and prestige and can give insights into the linguistic attitudes of viewers.
Lakoff develops this point further when discussing the influence of the media, arguing that stereotypical images are often more influential than statistics (LWP 83). Women seen on the media have many traits of women’s language built into their speech, which has of course been constructed for them by a team of writers. Female viewers pick up on these traits and seek to emulate the characters in their turn. This circuit of influence and reaction is difficult to analyze without close scrutiny of media images.
Indeed, this insight has been utilized by some speech pathologists involved in training male-to-female transsexuals to speak like women. Joan Erickson of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois (personal communication) advises the transsexuals who consult her to study the language of the women on the popular TV series Friends. Although this language is highly exaggerated, scripted to avoid (or play up) many naturally occurring linguistic features like interruptions and overlaps, it can serve as a blueprint for the kind of vocal traits transsexuals may wish to emulate. Alison Laing, who runs classes for male-to-female transsexuals, uses many of the examples of stereotypical women’s speech discussed in LWP. Her training video, Speaking as a Woman with Alison Laing (1992), shows her demonstrating the correct, feminine use of tag questions like isn’t it?
As Lakoff so aptly put it back in 1975, stereotypes are important “first, because, for a stereotype to exist, it must be an exaggeration of something that is in fact in existence and able to be recognized; and second, because one measures oneself … according to how well or poorly one conforms to the stereotype one is supposed to conform to” (LWP 94). Evaluating not only the persuasive power of the stereotype but also its use as an analytical tool is one of the less recognized insights of LWP. It is, however, an insight that has been extremely useful in my own work on literary linguistics.
Literary and linguistic analyses have traditionally been considered two separate, even incompatible fields. The constructed, nonspontaneous dialogue of a film script tells us little of the way people really talk, but it often represents an ideal to which speakers aspire. It allows us to see what expectations different speech communities have, and what patterns are deemed appropriate for each sex. Whether or not particular individuals respect the stereotypes, they are familiar with them as competent users of the language, and the ways in which people flout the conventions provide rich material for analysis.
If we take two examples from novels for children aged eight to fourteen, we will see that even children as young as eight years old are expected to be familiar enough with the stereotypes that when they are not followed, these young readers know what to expect. In Nina Bawden’s Granny the Pag, eleven-year-old Cat’s grandmother scolds the school bully in the following words: “If you bully my granddaughter, I will not only inform the authorities, your parents and your teachers, but I will myself personally throw you so hard into the middle of next week that you may never come back” (1996: 30; original emphasis). The promise to tell the bully’s parents and teachers is an unexceptional, entirely orthodox warning, but the threat of physical violence moves the remark into a more masculine frame, reinforced by its unhedged, unequivocal phrasing.
Cat’s grandmother’s so is not the feminine, intensive so cited by Lakoff, the so of “I like him so much” (LWP 80), where the hearer is left wondering exactly how much fondness is being expressed, but a fully finished equation: so hard … that you may never come back. This is not how a grandmother is supposed to speak to a child, even a bully, and it marks this character as unfeminine and socially aberrant. The reader is being prepared for a challenge to the grandmother’s status as Cat’s guardian: women who speak this way are unfit to look after children. It is no surprise to learn that this same immodest grandmother rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle through the middle of London.
A rather different example is to be found in Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy Castle in the Air (1990), which tells the story of a young carpet seller named Abdullah who sets out to rescue a group of enchanted princesses. Abdullah consistently uses flowery, feminine speech. When addressing his magic carpet, Abdullah exclaims, “O most excellent of carpets, o brightest-colored and most delicately woven, whose lovely textile is so cunningly enhanced with magic, I fear I have not treated you hitherto with proper respect” (1990: 54). If we look at Lakoff’s nine-item checklist of traits of women’s language (LWP 78–81), we see that Abdullah uses at least four of them: superpolite forms (O most excellent of carpets); exaggeratedly correct grammar (I fear I have not treated you hitherto); empty adjectives (most excellent, brightest-colored); hedges (I fear). Given these manifold and overt signs of femininity, the reader is not surprised when it is Abdullah’s beloved, the princess Flower-in-the-Night, who hatches the plot that will ultimately save the imprisoned princesses.
What is particularly significant about these examples is that they come from books for children. Although Lakoff was the first to articulate the most common traits of “women’s language,” they are in fact conventions that every competent speaker of English may be assumed to have absorbed. If this was not the case, both Abdullah and Cat’s grandmother would be incomprehensible as characters.
Lakoff insists on the futility of expending too much energy on changing language rather than the society from which it comes. The battle to create and popularize a neutral pronoun to replace generic he is a case in point. She goes so far as to say that, unlike other linguistic disparities that discriminate in favor of men and against women, this issue is both less in need of change and less open to change. Indeed, as she puts it, “an attempt to change pronominal usage will be futile” (LWP 71). However, I believe we should consider Lakoff’s prediction of the ultimate outcome of the pronominal battle as a gauntlet thrown down before us rather than as a dismissal of the battle’s validity. Lakoff mentions in passing the important option of singular they but pays it scant attention, remarking only that it is “a usage frowned on by most authorities as inconsistent or illogical” (LWP 70). She recognizes that the problem itself is not trivial, as it has caused too much anguish to too many women, but advises her readers to attempt to change only what can be changed.
In fact, singular they has made great headway in the last quarter century, as Dennis Baron reports (1986: 194). (See Livia 2001a for a book-length consideration of pronominal experiments.) It is hard to know what will prove futile and what can be changed. If we believe that in order to eliminate generic he, we need to create and circulate an entirely new pronoun, we may indeed renounce the attempt. What we have found instead, in the twenty-first century, is that they will do, and does do, the trick quite nicely. It turns out to be a question of expanding popular usage into more formal speech, a phenomenon that accounts for much language change through the ages.
Nowadays, no one gibbers much at the sight of someone … they. In fact, the August 15, 2002, edition of the Berkeleyan, official staff newsletter of the University of California at Berkeley, features four different strategies for avoiding generic he:
(i) Staff choose the program they want to attend. (1)
(ii) The ombudspersons hope to expand staffers’ ability to prevent or deal with difficult situations on their own. (5)
(iii) Another advantage offered by electronic publishing is interjournal linking whereby a reader can navigate via hyperlinks to any journal article cited by the authors of the research he or she is reviewing. (6)
(iv) “To see the look of appreciation on someone’s face when you return their stolen wallet was very gratifying.” (8)
Example (i) uses they to anaphorize a grammatically singular noun with plural meaning (staff), while (ii) pluralizes that noun (staffers) to justify the use of the plural pronoun they. In (iii), the antecedent noun is singular (the reader) and is anaphorized by a choice of masculine or feminine singular (he or she); while (iv) offers the now classic someone … they. One must conclude that singular they is no longer frowned on, even in academic contexts. Feminists have picked up Lakoff’s gauntlet and provided a panoply of responses to the supremacy of generic he. The attempt has proven far from futile, but the strategies that have been most successful have involved using the already existing resources of the language rather than creating an entirely new pronoun.
Although Lakoff addresses the specific question of women’s speech, she leaves enough clues in the text about men’s speech and the consequent societal positioning of men for us to be able to reconstruct some of her ideas on that topic. In her references to men’s speech, Lakoff always demonstrates how their conversational style reflects their class position. She observes, for example, that upper-class British men are allowed to use a typically feminine vocabulary, to be finicky about nuances of color in the way that women are, “without raising doubts as to their masculinity” (LWP 47). This implies that among other social classes, men who are articulate about color tones are marked out as homosexual.
Lakoff hypothesizes that upper-class British men are not required to demonstrate any commitment to the work ethic. As gentlemen of leisure, they have the economic wherewithal to pursue any interests, even the most trivial (like interior decorating) and need not demonstrate any aptitude for money-making tasks like business or politics (LWP 47). In fact, their inability to pursue these more material goals is offered as proof of their leisure status. We could in fact turn this around and say that men of leisure as a group are perceived as nonmasculine. As the working-class hood Pat remarks in Mehdi Charef’s novel Le Thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (Tea in the Harem of Archimedes), “C’est tous des peds, les bourgeois” (All middle-class men are faggots) (1983: 178). We might disagree with this statement, but we can also use it to infer a number of things about Pat’s social class, attitude to society, and personality. The fact that the remark is meaningful to us shows that it refers to a recognized stereotype.
Lakoff also comments on the enactment of masculinity in middle America. Here it is literacy and culture that are seen as suspect in a man (LWP 80). Suspicion is also triggered if men are too grammatical or polite in their speech (LWP 84). In contrast, masculine men are required to know how to swear, tell dirty jokes, and speak familiarly of the workings of their car engine. In America, it seems, real men must play down their schooling and play up their blue-collar associations.
Lakoff throws out these insights without much elaboration, in her usual unassuming manner. Her speculations about gender and class turn out to be astonishingly accurate. My research on collocations of class and masculinity in French discourses of sexuality shows that we cannot understand the workings of gender if we consider it on its own, removed from other essential demographics like class, race, and age (see Livia 2001a, 2001b, 2002). Speech conventions are different for upper-class and middle-class men, as Lakoff suggested. On one end of the class scale, upper-class masculinity is so similar to femininity as to be indistinguishable from it to all but its closest adherents. The politeness, good grammar, and interest in nonprofitable pursuits that are coded feminine are all coded upper-class too. These social signifiers are so familiar that they may be used by members of liminal communities (as well as by writers of fiction) as common currency in the construction of identity.
In the summers of 2000 and 2001, I conducted field research in Paris and in the city of Lille in northern France. I was specifically looking into representations of masculinity among lesbians and their interpretation by in-group members. The starting point for this research was the descriptions of desirable characteristics featured in the personal ads in Lesbia magazine, the French lesbian monthly. While many ads ended with the exclusionary coda “lesbiennes masculines s’abstenir” (masculine lesbians need not apply) or variations on this wording, on closer analysis it was evident that the exclusion applied only to lesbians who affected working-class masculinity. Thus lexical items connoting working-class masculine status, like camion-neuses (truck drivers), catcheuses (wrestlers), and armoires (wardrobes—implying that the person is built like a heavy piece of furniture) were used as descriptions of lesbian undesirables, whereas lexical items connoting upper-class masculine status, like dandies, Romaine Brooke lookalike, garconnes (tomboys), described highly prized lesbians.
When I asked what characteristics were associated with masculine lesbians, my respondents mentioned swilling beer, speaking ungrammatically, using slang, having bad manners, and having low educational status. To be masculine was to be working-class. Upper-class masculinity, then, was not recognized as masculinity. Since the representations of masculinity cited by this liminal community were quite orthodox and corresponded closely to Lakoff’s descriptions, it may be assumed that for the wider community, too, masculinity implies working-class masculinity. Expanding on this finding to look at other social demographics such as race, I found that blackness is typically interpreted as masculine and whiteness and Asianness as feminine (Livia 2002).
It is part of the extraordinary prescience of LWP that its impact has been felt far beyond the confines of women’s language in calling into question all naturalizing discourse, be it about gender, race, or class (see also Morgan, this volume). The many theoreticians who have picked up Lakoff’s gauntlet over the years and answered her soft-spoken challenge to normative values attest to the enduring importance of LWP.
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