Blueprinting Studies of Gay Men’s English
WILLIAM L. LEAP
I own two copies of Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975). The first is a relatively new edition, part of a book order from a recent course in gender studies. The second copy is much older. Its now-browned pages give off a faint musty smell and the binding makes crackling sounds. This is a first printing, and it was one of the first books on language, sexuality, and gender that I added to my library. Today, it is surrounded by many other volumes addressing similar themes. But in 1975, when I purchased this copy, it occupied a more solitary place on the sociolinguistic bookshelf because of its subject matter and because of the approach to research that it details. Both of these anomalous qualities attracted me to LWP, and, as I explain below, they have continued to provide valuable orientation for my own work with language and sexual sameness.
Prior to the publication of LWP, there had been some discussion of “women’s language” and “men’s language” in the anthropological literature, but frequently these sources simply repeated the idea that in a given (and usually non-European) cultural context, women (as a group) use language differently from men (as a group) (see Trechter, this volume, for further discussion). Typically, these sources cited specific items in inflectional morphology or word-order patterning as evidence of the differences. Some of them suggested that women might command their own “dialect” of the “local language” in question or that women might even constitute a separate speech community. In the main, the focus in these discussions was the issue of sex differences in language. Certainly, this was an important point, but its discussion left unanswered many of the questions that more recent research and political interests obligate linguists to address.
Like these earlier sources, LWP also directs attention to linguistic reflections of female-male sex differences. But Lakoff’s discussion of those reflections did not center on “language-as-structured” so much as on “language-as-situated” within the material conditions and practical workings of ideology, in terms of which speakers of the language in question constitute their everyday lives. Today, we recognize this argument as a fundamental stance in cultural studies, and the similarities are striking between the discussion of language in LWP and in Paul Goodman’s Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry (1973), Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977), and other classics in cultural studies from this period. Lakoff did not make use of a cultural-studies vocabulary when framing her reflections on the material and ideological quotidian, but she built her argument within a similar frame of reference, raising questions about the social and cultural factors that determine (in the sense of Williams 1977: 85) linguistic practices and about the erasure of voice and its connections to inequality, dominance, and limited opportunity.
Of course, subsequent research has refined some of Lakoff’s initial claims about the interplay of language, context, and politics that gives rise to “women’s language.” For example, we now have a sharper sense of why a woman’s use of tag questions may reflect her “not being really sure of [her]self, … looking to the addressee for confirmation, … having no views of [her] own” (LWP 49) within a particular conversation. But refinements are not refutations. Lakoff never claimed that LWP offered the final statement regarding the relationship between language, gender, and sexuality in everyday life; she intended only to introduce arguments that others might continue to explore. Nothing in what we have now learned about language, sexuality, and gender has undermined the vision embedded in Lakoff’s initial argument: “to provide diagnostic evidence from language use for one type of inequity that has been claimed to exist in our society: that between the roles of men and women” (LWP 39). And nothing has detracted from the inspiration that Lakoff provided to the rest of us by articulating this vision so straight forwardly in 1975.
Many of Lakoff’s examples were derived from her own experience with the regulatory power of language or from her own readings of the regulatory messages underlying the linguistic experiences of others. In one sense, there was nothing unique in this practice. Linguists had been using personal experiences and reflections to guide their studies of linguistic structure and pattern since the heyday of phonemic analysis, if not before (see also Lakoff’s introduction to this volume). But using the self as an informant raised all sorts of questions about objectivity, reliability, and replication, and Lakoff addressed this point explicitly in LWP:
The data on which I am basing my claims have been gathered mainly by introspection: I have examined my own speech and that of my acquaintances, and have used my own intuitions in analyzing it. I have also made use of the media.
… [Those] familiar with what seem to [them] more error-proof data-gathering techniques … may object that these introspective methods may produce dubious results. But … any procedure is at some point introspective. … [And] if we are to have a good sample of data to analyze, this will have to be elicited artificially from someone; I submit I am as good an artificial source of data as anyone. (LWP 40)
The position that Lakoff detailed here was at odds with the neopositivist linguistic practice so vigorously promoted by generative grammar and mainstream sociolinguistics during the 1970s, and when it first appeared LWP received much criticism for its so-called failure to maintain rigorous standards of proof. But subjective reading is a hallmark feature of cultural studies, and hence another example of LWP’s important connections to this intellectual domain. Moreover, a responsible use of researcher positionality is equally central to current-day interests in language, political economy, and ideology and to studies of language, sexuality, and gender that are informed by those interests. In that sense, Lakoff’s work foregrounded what, for many of us, has become a valued approach to real-life linguistic description (see also Queen, this volume).
Lakoff’s understanding of language outlined in LWP, her proposal to use linguistic data as “diagnostic evidence” for broader conditions of inequality, and her willingness to use her own experience as part of her database—and to be quite up-front about doing so—are three ways in which this book has been important to my work with gay men’s English and to the broader study of language and sexual sameness with which that work is closely associated.
Initially, I was attracted to Lakoff’s decision to use certain structural features associated with women’s use of language as the entry point for her discussion, and I tried to follow her lead in my earliest work with gay men’s English. Quite quickly, I realized that the structural features that were relevant to gay men’s linguistic practices could not be understood independently of social and cultural contexts or of the workings of power that unfold there. Lakoff had said as much in LWP, but I did not take that part of her message to heart when writing my own book, Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (1996). As a result, while acknowledging the need to consider differences in linguistic practices (see, e.g., pp. xvii–xxii), I chose to focus the discussion in Word’s Out primarily on linguistic domains accessible to me (a white, middle-aged, academic, partnered resident of Washington, DC) and to leave discussions of language use in other domains to researchers already situated there. By adopting this position, I was endorsing Lakoff’s argument that “I am as good an artificial source of data as anyone” (LWP 40). But because the data were largely derived from my own domains of experience, adopting this position also meant that the database for this project became deeply embedded in whiteness and the middle class.
Critics have rightly complained about the absence of voices of color in Word’s Out’s arguments and examples, and work by E. Patrick Johnson (2001, 2004), Philip Brian Harper (1993), Martin F. Manalansan (1994, 1995), and other scholar/activists has begun to bring those voices into the discussion of “gay English.” My recent work in Washington, DC (Leap 2002a, forthcoming), and in Cape Town, South Africa (Leap 2002b, 2004), now incorporates a much broader perspective on language, race, and class, and certainly benefited from doing so.
But reading Word’s Out as a book about whiteness and white privilege does not erase its usefulness as a discussion of the political and ideological dimensions of this component of gay men’s language use. In fact, reading Word’s Out strictly in terms of its limited framework will situate the book’s discussion more clearly within the relevant social context; doing so will also encourage interested readers to consider how social context situates their interests in gay men’s English and, I hope, invite them to pursue their own interests accordingly. Presenting a suggestive argument in hopes that others will develop it further was a central theme in LWP and was a part of Lakoff’s argument that I did remember to take to heart.
More important to Word’s Out, and to my subsequent work with gay men’s English (Leap, 1997, 1999, 2002a, 2002c, forthcoming), was the prominent position that Lakoff gave to her own experiences and perspectives in her database. As I mentioned earlier, this was something that I did frequently in Word’s Out and that has also been a topic of criticism. But I do not regret adopting this position, and I continue to maintain it. As a gayman who enjoyed the benefits of male privilege in academe by keeping my sexuality deeply hidden from public discourse (OK, may be the masquerade wasn’t that effective, but I worked hard for many years to maintained the formalities of the closet), then reacted in anger when faced with the AIDS pandemic and the public indifference in response to it, I bring to the table a familiarity with gay terrain, private and public, that is as credible, in its own way, as that of many other gay men of comparable location and background. If I am asking other gay men to talk personally and powerfully about language in daily life, how can I not impose the same requirement on myself?
Would I have written Word’s Out as I did, and made use of my own gaycareer as a database, if LWP had not served as the project’s phantasmic original? I don’t know. But just as is true for many other scholars, I do know that LWP provided a useful blueprint and strong incentive as I began my own exploration of language and (homo) sexual experience. It is heartening to know that a revised edition of LWP is now available and accessible to younger scholars; it is an honor to be able to make a small contribution to that end.
Goodman, Paul (1973). Speaking and language: Defense of poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harper, Philip Brian (1993). Black nationalism and the homophobic impulse in response to the death of Max Robinson. In Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 239–263.
Johnson, E. Patrick (2001). Feeling the spirit in the dark: Expanding notions of the sacred in the African American gay community. In Delroy Constantine-Simms (ed.), The greatest taboo: Homosexuality in black communities. Los Angeles: Alyson Books. 88–109.
——— (2004). Mother knows best: Black gay vernacular and transgressive domestic space. In William L. Leap & Tom Boellstorff (eds.), Speaking in queer tongues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 251–277.
Lakoff, Robin (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper & Row.
Leap, William L. (1996). Word’s out: Gay men’s English. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1997). Performative effect in three gay English texts. In Anna Livia & Kira Hall (eds.), Queerly phrased. New York: Oxford University Press. 310–325.
——— (1999). Language, socialization, and silence in gay adolescence. In Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, & Laurel A. Sutton (eds.), Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. 259–272.
——— (2002a). Not entirely in support of queer linguistics. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts, & Andrew Wong (eds.), Language and sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 45–64.
——— (2002b). “Strangers on a train”: Sexual citizenship and the politics of public transportation in apartheid Cape Town. In Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV (eds.), Queer globalizations: Citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism. New York: New York University Press. 219–235.
——— (2002c). Studying lesbian and gay languages: Vocabulary, text-making, and beyond. In Ellen Lewin & William L. Leap (eds.), Out in theory: The emergence of a lesbian and gay anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 128–154.
——— (2004). Language and (homo) sexual citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. In William Leap & Tom Boellstorff (eds.), Speaking in queer tongues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 134–162.
——— (forthcoming). Gay city: Sexual geography, the politics of space, and the language of sites in Washington, DC. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Manalansan, Martin F., IV (1994). Searching for community: Gay Filipino men in New York City. Ameriasia Journal 20:59–74.
——— (1995). “Performing” the Filipino gay experiences in America: Linguistic strategies in a transnational context. In William L. Leap (ed.), Beyond the lavender lexicon. Newark, NJ: Gordon & Breach. 249–266.
Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and language. London: Oxford University Press.
Sexuality and Class in Language and Woman’s Place
RUDOLF P. GAUDIO
It’s no wonder I became an academic. As an Ivy League–educated gayman who came of age just a few years after Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975) was published, I couldn’t possibly have gone into hairdressing or interior decorating. What a waste of a good education, and what would my parents tell their friends? Nor could I enter the more manly professions of banking, law, or medicine, where I’d have to repress my emotions, hide my knowledge of color terms, and tell dirty jokes during happy hour. Fortunately, the unmacho world of academia offered me a place where I could use words like fuchsia and taupe, lovely and fabulous without having to worry about my reputation. I could be polite and employ a wide range of intonational patterns and still keep my job. Academic men were like priests, you see (which is what I’m sure I would have become if my father and grandparents had never left southern Italy); having given up the swaggering competitiveness of the real world for careers of the mind and soul, they could afford to come across as a bit womanish. This was important to me because, as a post-Stonewall homosexual, I had rejected the American masculine image (but not my class privileges), and I was naturally sympathetic with the goals of the women’s liberation movement. In addition to letting me talk as queerly as I wanted, academia allowed me to have prestige, liberal ideas, and a steady if modest income, and no one would question me or my parents about my sexuality—at least not openly.
The preceding account of my professional history is clearly tongue-in-cheek, but it is not entirely baseless. A similar characterization might be offered of Language and Woman’s Place. After three decades of research and writing on language and gender—much of it inspired by LWP—critics of the book have identified its shortcomings and refuted many of Lakoff’s claims, yet its exploration of the linguistic and psychological ramifications of sexual inequality still conveys powerful truths. By this I do not mean simply to endorse Lakoff’s claims as true in a positivistic sense, but rather to highlight the ongoing political and philosophical importance of the kinds of questions she encourages us to ask. In addition to the book’s opening line—"Language uses us as much as we use language” (LWP 39)— one of its most enduringly instructive passages is this: “Stereotypes are not to be ignored: 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, for better or worse, according to how well or poorly one conforms to the stereotype one is supposed to conform to” (LWP 94). I highlight this passage because the problem of facts versus stereotypes lies at the heart of the challenges I have faced not only as a gay male reader of LWP but also as a student and teacher of language and gender. Like many others, I have sometimes discounted Lakoff’s emphasis on stereotypes as detracting from the empirical accuracy of her work, but a careful reading of the way Lakoff selects and treats certain stereotypes offers insights into her relationship with the progressive sociopolitical movements that were active in the time and place in which she wrote. While the rhetoric associated with those movements might seem dated now, the goals they sought to achieve—and Lakoff’s particular focus on the role of language in pursuing (or impeding) those goals—are no less relevant for activists and scholars engaged in the progressive struggles of our day.
I first taught LWP in the winter of 1997 when, as a neophyte assistant professor at the University of Arizona, I assigned the students in my undergraduate “Gender and Language” class the task of writing a three-page essay critically evaluating Lakoff’s arguments. One of the best essays was written by a male student who came out in class as gay several weeks later in the semester. Although “Mark” appreciated the pioneering work Lakoff had done in calling attention to the connection between language and gender inequality, he disagreed strongly with her representation of gay men. Whereas Lakoff’s references to “homosexuals” are brief, sporadic, and matter-of-fact, Mark’s criticisms were defensive and occupied a significant portion of his essay; although he did not say so explicitly, he seemed offended by the wayshe equated gay men’s speech with that of women. I gave him an A on his paper, but in my comments I felt compelled to defend Lakoff by reminding him that she had written the text in a different era and that women, not gay men, were the focus of her argument. Yet as a graduate student my own initial response to LWP had been very much like Mark’s. In my marginal notes I had underlined and commented on Lakoff’s references to “homosexual” men with far more consistency than I devoted to any other theme, and I was intensely critical of the wayshe seemed to affirm the stereotype of gay men’s effeminacy.
The disjunctures between my responses to LWP at two different stages in my academic career reveal strengths and weaknesses in the book’s rhetoric that make it both risky and valuable to use in undergraduate classes. On one hand, my coolly professorial response to Mark’s passionate rejection of LWP’s portrayal of gay men belies Lakoff’s claims about both gay and academic men as “reject[ing] the American masculine image” (LWP 44), for what could be more hegemonically masculine than my use of the language of scientific objectivity to discount an argument that was motivated (I assumed) by the writer’s emotion? The irony in this case is that while I was using the language of science to defend LWP, Mark’s arguments were scientifically unassailable: there is no empirical evidence for Lakoff’s assertions about gay men’s speech, and even many claims she makes about women’s speech have been disproven or remain statistically unverified. One way to avoid this problem would have been for Lakoff to mitigate her assertions but that would have contradicted one of her main arguments, namely, that women are too inclined to mitigate! Lakoff’s assertiveness can thus be seen as a performative instantiation of her commitment to speaking (and writing) less like a “lady” and more like the men whose power she sought to share. If ganders such as Noam Chomsky and Erving Goffman can theorize without backing up their claims with empirical facts, why can’t the goose?
On the other hand, the fact that both Mark and I myself as a graduate student responded so passionately to Lakoff’s depiction of “homosexuals” as “ladylike” indicates that the negative connotations of that image still wielded power over us. More than twenty years after LWP’s publication, and in the immediate wake of political movements like ACT UP and Queer Nation, Mark read the book’s stereotypical representations of gay men’s speech not as a historical artifact but as a contemporary-sounding expression of homophobic prejudice. To paraphrase the passage I quoted above: both for Mark and for me as a grad student, two twenty-something gay men in the 1990s, the stereotype of the swishy homosexual remained a powerful image that we continued to measure ourselves by—hopefully insisting that we did not, and would not, conform to it. The fact that we not only disagreed with Lakoff’s repetition of that stereotype but also took offense at it was due to our fear that, given the book’s exalted status and wide audience, it would only reinforce that image in the mind of the general public and there by perpetuate our suffering. Indeed, because Lakoff frequently does not distinguish normative gender stereotypes from claims about how real women and men talk, there are always a few students in my undergraduate classes who accept her assertions as factual—despite my own attempts at qualifying them or the astute criticisms of fellow students like Mark.
Contemporary readers can productively address the rhetorical problems in LWP by approaching the text dialogically, in the sense described by Mikhail Bakhtin (1986). While Bakhtin focuses primarily on the artful use of language and voice in nineteenth-century European novels, a similar literary-historical consideration of the sociolinguistic stereotypes that Lakoff chose to analyze reveals her critical engagement with the ideologies, movements, and slogans that were salient in the time and place in which she wrote. For example, as many critics have noted, many of Lakoff’s claims about women’s and men’s linguistic behavior reproduce stereotypes that were prevalent among conservative, middle-class, white Americans in the post–World War II era. Although the empirical validity of those stereotypes was always dubious, Lakoff’s account of the psychological and social harm they inflicted on women of her generation and social class remains compelling. Another sign of Lakoff’s involvement in the sexual politics of her era is her assertion, quoted above, that (male) homosexuals “reject the American masculine image.” Such a rejection was in fact one of the stated goals of the gay liberation movement, which was especially strong in the San Francisco Bay Area where Lakoff lived and worked (and still does). Unfortunately, although drag queens, transgendered women, and other unmasculine types were at the forefront of numerous gay liberation protests in the late 1960s, and although gender nonconformity has also been at the heart of such movements as the Radical Faeries, ACT UP, and Queer Nation, gay men’s commitment to the goal of rejecting hegemonic masculinity has never been as strong or monolithic as Lakoff suggests: think of obsessively muscular gym clones and gay activists in business suits, not to mention Mark’s and my own initial hostility toward the image of effeminate homosexuals.
A more surprising assertion in LWP is that male academics have similarly rejected the “American masculine image” and that they too speak “women’s language.” Although this claim is even more empirically dubious than Lakoff’s portrayal of gay men—she cites the hypothetical, and implausible, example of a (presumably heterosexual) male professor exclaiming, “What a lovely hat!” (LWP 47)1—its inclusion in LWP highlights the political-economic and ideological dimensions of the relationship between gender and language. In particular, while gay men’s rejection of hegemonic masculinity is implicitly attributed to the stigmatization they endure because of their supposed propensity for stereotypically feminine activities, academic men are described as a politicized class that has “ostensibly at least, taken itself out of the search for power and money” (LWP 47). As a result, Lakoff concludes, “academia is a more egalitarian society than most, in terms of sex roles and expectations” (LWP 82). If this conclusion seems idealistic, it is also unsurprising given the time and place in which Lakoff issued it—as a young professor at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the most famously radical campuses in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, the idealism that infuses Lakoff’s analysis leads to confusing implications, for according to her, whereas academic men employ “women’s language,” academic women do not! The reason Lakoff offers for this is that, because academic men are generally unconcerned with the real-world pursuit of wealth and power, academic women are less inclined to feel insecure in their male colleagues’ presence and are therefore “less apt to have to resort to women’s language” (LWP 82; see also discussion in Hall, this volume). Yet if “women’s language” is, as Lakoff argues, a reflection of speakers’ insecurity, it is not clear why it would be used by academic men, whose day-to-daylives do not normally require them to subordinate themselves. Answering this question requires a more systematic comparison and analysis of actual situations of language use than Lakoff provides, due to her reliance on the abstract generalizations and introspective methodology that were—and to a great extent still are—standard in theoretical linguistics.
As a gay male academic whose professional life has included several experiences of antigay prejudice and who well understands the degree to which academics of both sexes are financially undercompensated compared to, say, doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives, I am sympathetic to Lakoff’s claims about the relative nonconformity of gay and academic men to hegemonic gender norms. However, although many of my hetero-sexual male colleagues are firmly supportive of feminism, gay rights, and economic justice, there is no objective comparison between the social, political, and economic disfranchisement faced by gay men (and other queers) and the sociopolitical status of professional academics, which far outstrips their merely middle-class salaries. And while unsympathetic listeners might occasionally characterize the linguistic performances of some erudite or politically progressive male professors as “unmasculine,” “womanish,” or “wimpy,” the use of such gendered epithets needs to be analyzed critically as the expression of a cultural ideology that construes a certain misogynistic, homophobic stereotype of working-class heterosexual male behavior as iconic of American masculinity at large. The fact that such epithets are today being deployed by politically conservative elites, especially the warmongering supporters of President George W. Bush, underscores their ideological function.
A critical, dialogical analysis of the ways gay and academic men are represented in LWP reveals Lakoff’s incipient engagement with what subsequent scholars have called the performative coarticulation of gender with other key modes of social organization, especially sexuality and class. (Lakoff’s intermittent references to her own whiteness and to the black civil rights movement suggest that race and ethnicity are also relevant, but that is beyond the scope of this essay; see also Livia, this volume.) If Lakoff’s failure to fully problematize this coarticulation were to imply an uncritical endorsement of gender, sexual, and class inequalities, I would have to agree with the sentiment (but not the misogynistic word choice) of a gay male colleague who has described Lakoff as a “succubus” who seduces naive readers into espousing an outmoded, binaristic model of gender and language (Kulick 1999: 606). But that characterization is clearly unfounded: it overlooks Lakoff’s explicitly progressive intentions, and it fails to examine her claims in light of the time and place in which she wrote. The fact that Lakoff does not adequately historicize her arguments is unfortunate, yet that is true of most linguistic theorizing from the 1970s, and to a great extent even today. And like many of her linguistic colleagues, past and present, Lakoff does not systematically distinguish empirical facts from normative judgments, whether these take the form of conservative stereotypes or radical slogans. This oversight leads not only to her emphasis on gender binarism but also to her overly optimistic view of gay men and male academics as feminist—and feminine—partisans in the struggle against patriarchal oppression. As a gay male academic who happens (or at least imagines himself) to embody some of the sociolinguistic and political generalizations about “unmasculine” men contained in LWP (and whose fears of being identified as such have greatly receded since I first read it), I wish I could agree with her progressive portrayal of me and my sexual and professional brothers. But alas, that coalition—however ascendant it might have seemed in the early 1970s—has yet to achieve the institutional power that the activists of that era were seeking. Yet who can fault Lakoff, or any of us, for hopefully imagining otherwise?
1. My sense of this example as implausible—or at least highly marked—has been confirmed by several straight and gay male informants.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986). The dialogic imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Kulick, Don (1999). Transgender and language. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5:605–622.
Lakoff, Robin (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper & Row.
The Importance of Linguistic Stereotype for Lesbian Identity Performances
ROBIN QUEEN
When I was six, I believed that I had been born a boy. It wasn’t that I questioned my apparent girlness, nor was I unhappy being a girl. I just assumed that the delivering doctor had performed a medical intervention because my parents really wanted a girl and were disappointed when a boy emerged. I was happy that I had become what my parents wanted, but I thought that a bit of boy must have lingered inside me. I understood that my longing to be loud and obnoxious, always right, physically powerful, and often very dirty was not quite in line with what my body seemed to predict for my behavior, and so I simply believed that my body and my gender didn’t quite map onto each other. A year or so later, having figured out the implausibility of my story, I created an older brother, who encouraged me to play football, go on bug-hunting adventures, find the scariest hills for riding my bike, and cuss like a sailor. Through this fictional older brother, I remained able to explain why I didn’t really act like other girls I knew.
By the time I crossed that heterosexual threshold known as junior high school, I desperately wanted to be an unequivocal girl. Even though my upbringing as a middle-class Southern girl should have made me a shoo-in, I never quite seemed to pull it off. I blow-dried and curled my hair, wore mascara, wobbled on one-inch Candies shoes, carried my books cradled in my arms rather than slung at the hip, and tried hard not to cuss. Once in a while I wore a skirt. At the same time, I couldn’t tell the difference between midnight red and savage red nail polish, chose my lip gloss based on flavor rather than color, and often forgot (as I still do) whether chartreuse was in the green or the pink family. My attempts not to cuss were more or less futile, and I was far more interested in playing football with the boys than in watching or cheering as they played football without me. I (and my parents) felt tortured by my apparent failure at being a girl. It took some time for me to realize that rather than being a failed girl, I was a failed heterosexual girl. I was, however, a rather successful lesbian.
At the risk of indulging in a bit of myopia, I offer my experiences as an illustration of one of the more vexing problems of addressing the interplay of sexual identities and gender identities. Couple this general problem with the somewhat more specific problem of figuring out where language fits within such a vortex of identity management, and the task of working out the interactions between language and the social facts surrounding gender and sexual identities can seem insurmountable. Given that recent research (e.g., Bucholtz, Liang, & Sutton 1999; Kroskrity2000; Eckert & Rickford 2001; Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity 1997) has repeatedly shown that the indexical power of language is highly local, deeply context-bound, fluid, and ever-shifting, it might seem as if generally tying language to lesbian identities (or to any particular identity) is largelya fool’s errand.1 Yet I would argue that it is precisely such generalizations that are critical to understanding how speakers juggle their multiple identities as well as the linguistic cues that may be tied to those identities. Thus, I follow Robin Lakoff in Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975) in asserting that “one measures oneself, for better or worse, according to how well or poorly one conforms to the stereotype one is supposed to conform to” (LWP 94). In the remainder of this essay, I follow Lakoff in other ways as well, exploring how various analytic and methodological arguments found in LWP reveal surprising insights into the linguistic resources speakers might use for revealing and performing a lesbian sense of self and into the linguistic resources that may be used to represent lesbians. Before going too much further into these issues, however, it is important to digress slightly into a discussion of what I do and don’t mean when I use the term identity.
My desk dictionary provides the following definition of identity: “The fact or condition of being the same or exactly alike.” This definition highlights the seemingly unavoidable focus on sameness, and the static categorization implied therein, that underlies the strongest critiques of using identity to identify or explain social phenomena. Identity labels often fail because they can’t possibly capture the nuances and intricacies involved in the emergence and performance of our social selves. We orient around differences as well as similarities, and we blend multiple aspects of ourselves into social selves that shift according to context, situation, and desire.
It is, however, important to reconcile the undeniable flexibility with which we adjust ourselves in the social world with the equally undeniable observation that we orient, make judgments about, and sort ourselves and others based on social categories. How else could I have had the sense that I was a failed girl or that my sister was a stunning success? By using social categories like “lesbian” or “woman” for exploring the connections between language use and specific ways of orienting the self in the social world, I intend “an internal organization of self-perceptions concerning one’s relationship to social categories … that also incorporates views of the self perceived to be held by others” (Stein 1997: 211). I find this description useful because it leaves room for exploring the importance of intragroup as well as intergroup variation. The social category “woman” thus becomes something other than a category that sits in contradistinction to the category “man.” Multiple ways of inhabiting “woman” open up, and understanding the category and people’s orientation to it no longer depends on the assessment of success or failure to adhere, but rather on the kaleidoscopic means through which people take the category on while at the same time relying on stereotypical configurations of it (see also Bean & Johnstone, this volume).
Of the many lesbians to whom I have spoken about their perceived relationship to the social category “woman,” none has ever claimed that it was a category that did not apply to her.2 Most have expressed the essentialness of a deep connection to the category “woman,” both for themselves and for those whom they love. Many expressed far more affiliation with women of all sorts than with men who shared their sexual identities as “queers,” and they often noted that gay men were culturally so different that there was really no basis for interaction beyond very specific kinds of political action. Bearing this affiliation in mind, my use of the term lesbian is intended to highlight the salient ties to a specifically female gender identity and to a specifically same-sex sexual identity (see Epstein 1991 for a discussion of the differences in sexual orientation, sexual identity, and sexual preference). As for the place of language within this morass, I follow current sociolinguistic norms in assuming that variability in language constitutes a social practice that is tied to the creation, maintenance, and performance of social selves (Eckert 2000; Milroy & Gordon 2002; Ochs 1992). I also assume, following Lakoff, that it is explicitly the stereotypical associations made between language and social categorization that allow language variation to function in this way, recognizing of course that these associations easily shift both in their social meanings and in their overall constitutions.
Lakoff based her insights on introspection and intuition, with the stipulation that they were founded on white, educated, middle-class women’s speech and on media representations. Bucholtz and Hall (1995) have noted that her choice of method was well within the boundaries of linguistic practice at the time (and it still is in several areas of linguistics) and thus is not in and of itself open to reasonable critique. Lakoff herself rebuts critiques of this method by noting that all methods are introspective in one way or another and that, though partial, her choice of data source “is still of use … in providing a basis for comparison, a taking-off point for further studies” (LWP 40; see also Leap, this volume). However, it is possible to make a much stronger counterargument to critiques of Lakoff’s method. It provided an analytic window that constructed and constrained “woman’s” linguistic stage, offering a set of features that operated stereo-typically and en masse to help index “woman.” Although it may seem counterintuitive, this method ultimately encourages multiple stances to the category itself. For instance, the stereotypical user of this package was posited as a middle-class, white, presumably heterosexual woman, a characterization that serves to highlight intricate patterns of gender, sexual, ethnic, and social-class identities. The linguistic resources Lakoff bound together commented just as strongly on racial, social-class, and sexual-identity stereotypes as they did on gender. They also became a codified trope available to a wide variety of speakers who want to take a stance vis-à-vis the category “woman” (Barrett 1997; Hall & Bucholtz 1995; Queen unpublished ms.).
I have found that the exploration of language use among lesbians is made easier by considering how language is presented in representations of lesbians and how those representations take linguistic stances that incorporate elements of Lakoff’s linguistic package. In general it seems clear that representations of lesbians creatively adopt and reject different elements of this package, often combining them with other linguistic packages that reveal further stereotypes, such as those tied to masculinity. In Queen 2001, I demonstrate how the television situation comedy Ellen linguistically distinguished lesbian characters from nonlesbian characters through the same linguistic patterns that were used to distinguish male characters from female characters more generally. Similarly, data from the characters in the zine Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist showed an intricate interplay between multiple linguistic tropes of gendered and sexual identities, many of which revolved around competing models of femininity and masculinity (Queen 1997).
Though similar in some ways, these two sets of representations differed in being geared to radically different audiences, and the means through which lesbians were linguistically represented in each tended to reflect the expectations of their audience. Ellen, shown on network television during primetime, was clearly aimed at a general audience, while Hothead Paisan, which was available primarily through subscription or in bookstores oriented to queer audiences, was clearly aimed at a queer, primarilylesbian, audience. The linguistic representations on Ellen engaged in what Irvine (2001) and Gal and Irvine (2000) have called fractal recursion, in which the oppositions between groups may be projected onto seemingly similar intragroup differences. This means of representation, particularly in media outlets not aimed specifically at a lesbian (or otherwise queer) audience, tends to present lesbians as the masculine counterpart to heterosexual femininity from within the social category “woman.” For example, since the early 1990s, it has been exceedingly rare to find an overtly masculine woman portraying an explicitly heterosexual woman. Hothead Paisan, however, represents multiple lesbian and transgendered identities, while the portrayals of heterosexuals are caricatures of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity with predictable (i.e., stereotypical) patterns of language use. In both of these cases, the lesbian characters are represented as un-equivocally female, and in both cases stereotypes about the linguistic creation and expression of gender are central to those representations.
Performances of femininity and masculinity play themselves out on lesbian bodies and in lesbian mouths, and for many lesbians the appeal of masculinity is specifically in being masculine women (see Halberstam 1998). Masculine women tend to be read, at least initially, as lesbians, while feminine lesbians tend to be read as heterosexuals (and something analogous seems true of gay men as well). Having learned to recognize femininity and masculinity in the South, I have often found myself doing a double-take when I see a midwestern woman, whose semiotics scream “dyke” to me, begin talking to her husband as he steps out of the minivan. This causes my partner, a native midwesterner, unending amusement; however, it also illustrates how strongly stereotypes of gender expression guide our assessments and categorizations of those who enter our social worlds, even as those assessments remain tightly bound to local contexts, interactions, and moments in time. It is hardly surprising that queers and non-queers alike look to stereotypes of gender as a means of constructing, performing, and orienting around myriad acts of social and linguistic identity. Similarly, it is unsurprising that queer theoretical inquiry has largely emerged out of the exploration of the ways in which gender itself is called into question by those for whom gender and sexual identities, orientations, and practices are not in the stereotypical alignment.
Lakoff’s focus on the overt description of stereotypical features of “woman’s language” has thus been immensely useful for me as I have worked to understand more about the place of language in the expression of lesbian identities. She made it clear that the issue of “woman’s language” (and the issue of how language is used to represent women) has less to do with the actual social category “woman” and much more to do with assumptions about gender in the social world. She recognized that there would be differences in the degree to which different women made use of the features she identified. For instance, she hypothesized that academic women would be less likely to use these forms with the same frequency or in the same combinations than would nonacademic women (LWP 82). She presented an early shift in the analytic landscape of language by arguing that the social category “woman” is constructed both through conventions of language (e.g., representation) and through conventions of language use. Although she came to her description as a generative semanticist, she also provided a way of thinking about “woman” as a social rather than demographic (and hence discrete) category. This conceptualization complemented and enhanced the burgeoning field of sociolinguistics, which tended (and in some cases still does) to assume that social categories existed independently of speakers (cf. Eckert 2000). In opening up the study of language and gender to include the meanings associated with being “woman,” Lakoff also opened up the possibilities for thinking about sociocultural variations on gender identities that moved beyond the strict binarity of woman/man. And in presenting “woman” as tied to stereotype, she indicated the limitations of relying solely on quantitative analysis for an understanding of the ties between language and gender, noting that “a stereotypical image may be far more influential than a (mere) statistical correlation” (LWP 83). Understanding the influence of stereotypes has not only helped me explore the ways in which such stereotypes are tied to the linguistic expression of lesbian identities. It has also helped me reconcile my early confusion about being a girl, and it has allowed me to find a space for being a lesbian who loves cats but owns no flannel shirts.
1. In fact, some have argued that it is such a fool’s errand as to be unworthy of pursuit (e.g., Kulick 2000).
2. I was lucky to interview a number of lesbians in northeastern Ohio as part of a long-term research project concerned with the place of language in the projection of lesbian identities. I offer great thanks to the thirty lesbians who spent the time to educate me on just how important being women was to their sense of being lesbian.
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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. 1–18.
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——— (2001). Sexual identities, language, and popular culture: The case of Ellen. Paper presented at the 29th Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Lansing, MI, October.
——— (unpublished ms.). The days of our lives: Language and the commercial imperative on a daytime television drama.
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Lakoff’s Queer Augury
RUSTY BARRETT
A few days before I was to finish third grade, a tornado destroyed my family’s home in Arkansas, and we had to move to a new house across the street from the scariest girl in school. One day that summer, she tied her younger brother to a tree and spent the afternoon throwing a small axe at him like a knife thrower at the circus. When I screamed for her to stop before she hurt him, she simply glared at me and said, “Go to hell, you motherfucker.” When I ran to tell my mother what was happening at the neighbor’s house, I was careful to say “H-E-double-hockey-sticks” rather than utter the word hell (which I knew to be a “bad” word), but I said mother fucker with no self-censorship, having never heard the word before. My mother was on the phone as I ran in, and she laughed hysterically, telling her friend what I had said. For the next several days I heard my parents repeating the event to all their friends and laughing about it. My personal terror and concern for the boy across the street went largely ignored and the focus of the event (for my parents at least) seemed to be the fact that I had said the “F-word” for the first time and that a girl had learned the word before me. I demanded to know what the word meant. Not wanting to tell me about sexual intercourse, my parents told me that it meant “to love someone.” “But I love my mother, so I must be a motherfucker,” I protested. The reply, “No, fuck means to love Mommy like Daddy loves Mommy,” left me utterly bewildered. I was angry and confused by the fact that I had not been taken seriously simply because I didn’t know a particular grown-up word—a word I still didn’t understand.
I saw my first Shirley Temple movie later that summer, and I was enthralled. My fascination was not with Shirley Temple herself, but with the way that she was treated by the adults around her. They talked to her as if she were an equal, and she seemed to hold power over them in some way. I may have been just looking for justification for something I wanted to do anyway, but I convinced myself that the best way to gain respect from adults would be to act as much like Shirley Temple as possible. That evening, when my father took me to purchase school supplies, he asked if I liked a particular set of pencils. Seizing my chance at gaining adult respectability, I looked him in the eye and said, “Oh, Father, they’re lovely!” My father stood in shock for a moment, showing a fear I’d never seen in him—a fear that could only come from seeing the son who bears your name voluntarily perform a Shirley Temple impersonation in the middle of a crowded Wal-Mart store. He grabbed me tightly by the shoulders, lifting me off the ground. Trying to remain calm, he said, “Don’t ever use that word again. That’s a girl’s word.” I knew what word he meant, but I felt as though I had been tricked by some horrible grown-up conspiracy. How could my utterance of fucker (which was obviously something adults didn’t want me to fully understand) produce laughter, but a seemingly harmless word like lovely create such fear and rage. I understood for the first time what it means to be used by language.
Robin Lakoff begins Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975) by noting that “language uses us as much as we use language” (39). Lakoff’s assumptions foretell many of the theoretical foundations of queer theory that would emerge some twenty years later. Judith Butler’s (1990: 136) view of gender as a “performance without an original” is strikingly similar to Lakoff’s view of how one “becomes” a lady through a particular linguistic performance. Lakoff highlights the incredible power of social normativity in regulating the ways in which we use language and the ways in which language uses us. A crucial (and often neglected) point in Lakoff’s arguments is that social norms precede the linguistic forms that reflect social inequalities:
The speaker of English who has not been raised in a vacuum knows that all of these disparities exist in English for the same reason: each reflects in its pattern of usage the difference between the role of women in our society and that of men. If there were tomorrow, say by an act of God, a total restructuring of society as we know it so that women were in fact equal to men, we would make certain predictions about the future behavior of the language. One prediction we might make is that all these words, together, would cease to be nonparallel. … If their peculiarity had nothing to do with the way society was organized, we would not expect their behavior to change as a result of social change. (LWP 74; original italics)
Lakoff’s prediction is founded on the assumption that the social determines the linguistic, specifically claiming that language change follows (rather than causes) social change. In contrast, by accepting the linguistic turn (the idea that social reality is created through the use of language), queer theorists often assume that forms of social domination emerge through the performative power of language. Both Lakoff and Butler recognize the relationship between identity categories and individual expressions of identity. Lakoff argues that it is through behaviors such as using women’s language that a “woman” becomes a “lady,” while simultaneously demonstrating that the category ‘lady” is an imagined euphemism. Apart from the assumptions about the relationship between the social and the linguistic, Butler’s view of gender as performative is quite similar to Lakoff’s original proposal.
Butler takes the notion of performativity from J. L. Austin’s (1962) theory of performative speech acts (see Meyerhoff, this volume). Rather than simply convey meaning, performative utterances cause an actual change in the world. Regardless of speaker intent, the felicity conditions proposed by Austin for particular performatives are only relevant in so far as the listener recognizes that the conditions have been met. This is true both for behavioral performatives (like women’s language) and for identity labels (such as lady or queer).
The relative importance of speaker and listener can be seen in my experiences of being used by language as a child. Both cases can be seen as performative language. My failure to recognize the term mother fucker as an obscenity indexed the identity of a naive and inexperienced child, while my use of lovely was an instance of nonnormative gender behavior, indexing an identity lacking in masculinity. Neither of these identities is one that I intended to conveyor create, but they were clearly felicitous performatives given the reactions of the listeners involved. The fact that unintentional performatives may be felicitous makes it clear that the listener’s assumptions about “citationality” and authority are the crucial factor in determining whether or not a performative succeeds.
Studies in linguistics have demonstrated that a listener’s stereo types about a speaker are capable of overriding speech perception. Donald L. Rubin (1992) and Nancy Niedzielski (1999), for example, both demonstrate that listeners will perceive their native dialect as “accented” when they assume that the speaker is from a different dialect or is a nonnative speaker. Thus, it seems clear that the felicity of a performative is dependent on the listener’s recognition of the citation and perception of the speaker’s authority. Because the listener’s perception will always be regulated by social normativity, a seized citation will only succeed as a new performative when the social context has become one in which listeners are willing to accept the performative as felicitous. Thus, debates over identity categories and offensive or sexist language can be seen as attempts to gain the listener’s acceptance of a social reality in which the performative is actually valid (or has ceased to be valid). As Sally McConnell-Ginet (2002: 158) suggests, the process of “defining is an attempt to direct thought along certain theoretical lines, to push a particular strategy for political action.”
Lakoff understood the primary role of the listener and recognized that listeners use their inherent knowledge of social norms when they interpret the meaning of utterances. In fact, one of her main points about linguistic theory is that Chomskyan linguistics fails to take the importance of social normativity into account in its models of language as a cognitive system. As she expected, Lakoff’s imagined future world of gender equality has not emerged since the publication of LWP (see also Livia and Holmes, both this volume). Even so, there have been sufficient changes in the use of many of her examples to see how Lakoff’s predictions about the social preceding the linguistic have been fulfilled.
Many of Lakoff’s examples seem archaic thirty years later. The term lady doctor (LWP 54) sounds condescending if not outright silly. Similarly, saying that a woman is a professional (LWP 59–60) no longer automatically conveys that she is a prostitute. One of the primary accomplishments of the feminist movement has been the acceptance of women as professionals in a variety of careers. Speakers now accept the validity of professional as a citation that can refer to women in the same way that it refers to men. A doctor who happens to be a woman is now more likely to be referred to as a doctor, suggesting that listeners now recognize doctor as an equally valid citation regardless of whether the referent is female or male. Interestingly, the parallel term male nurse is still common, suggesting that nurse continues to be perceived as referring to women. Terms for women that refer to marital status, however, have not fared so well in the last thirty years, and the move to use Ms. as a title for women has met with limited success (Holmes 1994; Kelly 1998; Lakoff 1990; Penelope 1990). In all of these cases, the linguistic change over the last thirty years has followed changes (or lack of change in the case of male nurse) in social norms.
The success of instilling new citations has been successful only in cases when there are corresponding changes in social norms. Even in cases where a nonsexist term has been accepted, the continued presence of sexist societal norms may force the term to be reinterpreted in a sexist manner. The evidence suggests that Lakoff’s predictions were correct in recognizing the ways in which societal norms constrain the possibilities for language change.
In stark contrast to Lakoff, Butler (1993, 1999) argues that because the performative nature of language creates social reality, it is possible to change society through the intentional “misuse” of a citation such as queer to refer to anyone with a nonnormative gender or sexual identity. In Butler’s view, the repetition of queer in a redefined context exposes the heteronormative character of society and eventually leads to more acceptance for nonnormative sexual and gender identities. Much like the case of Ms., the recent debates about queer can be seen as an attempt to convince listeners that the term meets the felicity conditions of citationality and authority.
In his critique of queer linguistics, Don Kulick (2002) focuses on the validity of the citation, claiming that queer has no “real-world” referent because the range of identities falling under the queer umbrella do not form a coherent social group. Kulick claims that the absence of a “real” queer social category leads queer to be used as a stand-in term for gay and lesbian, which he sees as a more realistic social category. Yet a gay and lesbian identity can be no more or less “real” than a queer identity, as all identity labels reflect imagined communities that exist primarily in the minds of speakers.
While Kulick questions queer’s citational validity, William Leap (2002) argues against the performative power of queer with regard to speaker authority. Leap feels that the use of queer as a label for individuals who may not self-identify as queer denies those individuals the right to self-naming. Because the majority of “gay” men identify as gay rather than queer, Leap sees queer as an attempt to gain authority over those who self-identify as gay by imposing an identity(and corresponding identity label) that they may very well reject. For those who choose to refer to themselves as gay, the use of queer disrespects their personal preferences for describing their own identities. Leap (2002: 61) holds that queer theorists don’t have the authority to invent and impose identity labels because it is “ethically unacceptable” to usurp the authority for self-naming. Although it should not be surprising to find that a recently introduced term is not in widespread usage, this fact forms the basis for Leap’s claim that using queer is an attempt to gain authority over individuals who wish to be called “gay men.”
The reactions of both Kulick and Leap demonstrate that speaker intention has little impact on whether or not a performative is felicitous. As listeners, Kulick and Leap view queer as infelicitous based on their individual understandings of the social norms that restrict citationality and authority. Listeners often reject or redefine proposals for language change based on an a priori acceptance of social norms. Reclamations like queer are always contested not because they have no rational basis, but because of the gut reaction to the words’ citational history as a potential form of hate speech.
As an acceptable identity category queer seems to be infelicitous for many listeners, but in academic contexts terms like queer theory continues to be accepted and widely used. Few would question scholars’ right to choose the name for their own theory. Thus, queer in queer theory is subject to a different set of social norms that queer as a more widespread identity category. The case of queer supports Lakoff’s prediction that social norms constrain the possible directions of language change.
The potential rejection of queer as an identity category does not mean that the “queer experiment” has been a failure. Criticisms of queer theory often seem to assume that widespread acceptance of queer as an identity label was the primary motivation for the original reclaiming of the term. Butler (1993, 1997) is quite clear that the primary goal of queer was to question the role of authority and normativity in the formation of identity categories by proposing a reclaimed label for a community defined on the basis not of shared social practice, but of shared rejection of (hetero) normativity. Whether or not queer succeeds as a new identity label, it has validated theoretical stances that question the meaning of identity labels and the inherent exclusivity of identity categories. The “queer experiment” has tested our potential for controlling the ways in language uses us. In this sense, queer theory follows the tradition so eloquently established by LWP.
The unintentional performatives of my childhood suggest that regardless of our intentions, speakers cannot always control the ways in which they use language. The inclusion of language change in struggles for social and political change emerges from our desire to assert control over the language that defines our identities. The queer fulfillment of Lakoff’s prediction suggests that the degree to which we can assert this control is constrained by the degree of success in the struggle for social equality. By raising discussion about the ways in which social inequalities are reflected and reproduced through language, the work of both Butler and Lakoff becomes a strategy in the struggle for social change.
Although language change does not create social change, the examination of inequalities in language structure may become an important tool in struggles for social change by stimulating symbolic discussions of social injustice. As much as we use language, we cannot depend entirely on language in the struggle for social change. As much as language uses us, the discussions sparked by Language and Woman’s Place continue to be a crucial component in the realization of social change.
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