International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
LANGUAGE
Contemporary research on language and gender takes into account an awareness of culture, multilingualism and gender, on language performance, preference and development. Notions of language as performance have transformed the Saussurian perspective of language as structure (text-based and linear). Linguistic accounts of language use and acquisition, whether generative or socio-cultural, presuppose that the complexity of language, as a means of positioning, is always made most evident in the interaction between people. Recent debates suggest that interaction is understood as a constructed engagement, not only in terms of the elaboration or restriction of codes deployed by speakers or writers, but also in terms of the subject's positioning vis-a-vis the discourse performed by (Coates 1986) or enacted upon subjects (see Bernstein 1975). Gender is a fundamental feature of positioning. Subjectivity and subject positioning have been well interrogated and elaborated in literary studies which, perforce, focus closely on language use. Yet linguistic and educational accounts of language learning and signification appear not to have taken advantage of these insights. Those accounts that do exist draw upon existing structural or constructivist accounts of the construction of knowledge, identity and power.
Typically three broad areas of research are apposite in understanding language and its implications for gender: language and cultural studies, education, and sociology. Even surveys of literacy have begun to interrogate more carefully the relation between gender, literacy acquisition and academic performance (see Wilson and Pillay 1995, for example). Broad sociological surveys are often complemented by smaller studies (situated mostly in schools) that indicate how these findings come to be manifested in dayto-day practice. Wing (1997), for example, discusses the relationship between gender roles, boys' and girls' language, and classroom behaviour, while Balfour analyses boys' and girls' reading and interpretation strategies. Jones et al. (1997) have explored gender roles and typing in educational and literary texts, while Stokoe (1997) explores the methodological difficulties associated with research on gender and language.
In general such studies suggest that boys' and men's talk deploys syntax, vocabulary and meaning in ways qualitatively different to the ways girls' and women's talk is deployed. Further, the language reserved for interaction within gender groups has been shown to differ, qualitatively, from the language employed by either group for interaction between gender groups. Finally, the deployment of language to delimit gender roles and typing is is accompanied by behavioural patterns that serve to mark and maintain patriarchal hegemony through a complex process of positioning and signification.
It is clear that the role of gender in language is regarded, unsurprisingly, as part of any agenda in which the deconstruction of power is central. Thus within the research community the study of language and gender tends to derive from feminist theories and/or post-colonial theories in which language is seen as the most generalised means used to (dis)empower or (dis)possess subjects regarded as deviant from predetermined and seemingly natural configurations of normativity (whether as sexual, political or economic) (see Spender 1980). Thus de Klerk's (1997) study of the role of expletives in the construction of masculinity explores the connections between the use of expletives (not far from the concept of 'symbolic violence' defmed by Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) and class, suggesting that language, aggression and violence are enacted simultaneously but in different ways depending on the social class and gender of the subject. With respect to the study of language education, genre theorists, critical pedagogues and socio-linguists (see Cameron 1997), all regard learning language from infancy onwards as the primary means by which knowledge, values and normative behaviour come to be constructed. Thus language is the primary means through which (gender) difference and identity is constructed, reinforced, maintained and policed. This has been well documented in relation to language, class and power (see Honey 1997). Philosophers point to a similar trend regarding the enlightenment legacy of rationalism, the language of which is revealed to be masculine and patriarchal.
While many studies focus on the relationship between gender and education, or identity, or race, there are still relatively few studies that have addressed the relationship between language and masculinity (especially from a masculinities studies perspective) per se. There is some scepticism among scholars regarding the necessity of a 'masculinities' perspective on language performance, given the richness of research already undertaken by feminists and linguists who have studied both boys'/men and girls'/women's talk (see Lakoff 1975; Poynton 1985).
References and further reading
Balfour, R. (2003) 'Between the lines: gender and the reception of texts in a rural KwaZulu-Natal school', Gender and Education, 15 (2): 183-200.
Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission, Vol. 3, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by R. Nice, London: Sage.
Cameron, D. (1997) 'Performing gender identity: young men's talk . . . ', in S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhoff (eds) Language and Masculinity, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 8-26.
Coates, J. (1986) Women, Men, and Language, 2nd edn, London: Longman.
de Klerk, V. (1997) 'The role of expletives in the construction of masculinity', in S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhoff (eds) Language and Masculinity, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 144-8.
Honey, J. (1997) Language is Power: The Story qf Standard English and its Enemies, London: Faber & Faber.
Jones, M.A., Kitetu, C. and Sunderland, J. (1997) 'Discourse roles, gender, and language textbook dialogues: who learns what from John and Sally?' Gender and Education, 9 (4): 469-90.
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Women's Place, New York: Harper and Row.
Poynton, C. (1985) Language and Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spender, D. (1980) Man Made Language, London: Routledge.
Stokoe, E. (1997) 'The evaluation of two studies of gender and language in educational contexts: some problems of analysis', Gender and Education, 9 (2): 233-44.
Wilson, F. and PiUay, P. (eds) (1995) Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Wing, A. (1997) 'How can children be taught to read differently: Bill's New Frock and the "hidden curriculum'", Gender and Education, 9 (4): 491-504.
