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Author: Lia Litosseliti | Jane Sunderland

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Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture The series includes contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction — disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. The book series complements the Journal of Language and Politics, edited by Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton

General editor Paul Chilton and Ruth Wodak University of East Anglia/University of Vienna Editorial address: Paul Chilton School of Language, Linguistics & Translation Studies University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK P. [email protected] and [email protected]

Advisory board Michael Billig

Jacob L. Mey

Loughborough University

University of Southern Denmark

Jan Blommaert

George Lakoff

University of Gent

University of California at Berkeley

Pierre Bourdieu †

Jim R. Martin

Collège de France

University of Sydney

Bill Downes

Luisa Martin-Rojo

University of East Anglia

Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Mikhail V. Ilyin

Christina Schäffner

Polis, Moscow

Aston University

Teun A. van Dijk University of Amsterdam/Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Volume 2 Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis Edited by Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland

Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis Edited by

Lia Litosseliti Royal Holloway, University of London

Jane Sunderland Lancaster University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender identity and discourse analysis / edited by Lia Litosseliti, Jane Sunderland. p. cm. (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, issn 1569-9463; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sex role. 2. Gender identity. 3. Discourse analysis. I. Litosseliti, Lia. II. Sunderland, Jane. III. Series. HQ1075.G428 2002 305.3-dc21 isbn 90 272 2692 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 213 6 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2002021585

© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Table of contents Chapter 1 Gender identity and discourse analysis: Theoretical and empirical considerations Jane Sunderland and Lia Litosseliti

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Theorising Gender and Discourse Chapter 2 Yes, but is it gender? Joan Swann

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Chapter 3 Rethinking politeness, impoliteness and gender identity Sara Mills

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Chapter 4 Stunning, shimmering, iridescent: Toys as the representation of gendered social actors Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Theo van Leeuwen

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Discourse and Gendered Identities in the Media Chapter 5 Consuming personal relationships: The achievement of feminine self-identity through other-centeredness Michelle M. Lazar Chapter 6 ‘Head to Head’: Gendered repertoires in newspaper arguments Lia Litosseliti

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Table of contents

Chapter 7 Is there anything “new” about these lads?: The textual and visual construction of masculinity in men’s magazines Bethan Benwell

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Discourse, Sexuality and Gender Identities Chapter 8 The case of the indefinite pronoun: Discourse and the concealment of lesbian identity in class Elizabeth Morrish Chapter 9 Erotic discourse strategies in powerless women: Analysing psychiatric interviews Branca Telles Ribeiro

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Discourse and Gender Identities in Education Chapter 10 From representation towards discursive practices: Gender in the foreign language textbook revisited Jane Sunderland, Maire Cowley, Fauziah Abdul Rahim, Christina Leontzakou and Julie Shattuck Chapter 11 “What’s the hottest part of the sun? Page 3!” Children’s exploration of adolescent gender identities through informal talk Janet Maybin

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Gendered Discourses of Parenthood Chapter 12 Pregnant self and lost identity in Ana Blandiana’s ‘Children’s Crusade’: An ironical echo of the patriarchal pro-natality discourse in communist Romania Daniela Sorea

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Chapter 13 Baby entertainer, bumbling assistant and line manager: Discourses of paternal identity in parentcraft texts Jane Sunderland Subject Index Name Index

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Chapter 1

Gender identity and discourse analysis Theoretical and empirical considerations Jane Sunderland and Lia Litosseliti Lancaster University, UK / Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis is a new collection of work by researchers in the area of gender and language. It illustrates how a discourse approach to the study of gender and language can facilitate the study of the complex and often subtle ways in which gender identities are represented, constructed and contested through language. In the last Wve years several new overviews and edited collections on gender and language have come onto the market.1 Like these, the focus of Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis is largely gender and language use, rather than language as an abstract system. However, in this volume, processes of communicating and interpreting gender in discourse are addressed explicitly throughout, issues of identity foregrounded, and relationships between gender, gender identity and discourse are explored in diverse and often new contexts. The contributions explore the workings of gender in particular domains and genres, both spoken and written. Chapters variously focus on advertisements, toys, newspaper debates, ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazines, the classroom, the school, psychiatric interviews, language textbooks, a party, poetry and parentcraft texts. The collection also reXects current understandings of both gender and discourse. Individually and collectively, the contributions exemplify the importance of context and situated meanings, and reXect and develop a view of gender as crucially Xuid and dynamic. The collection also points to the need for a sustained feminist vigilance about all aspects of gender. The focus of this book is not the unproductive and conservative idea of ‘gender diVerences’, but rather the notion of continuous construction of a range of masculine and feminine identities within and across individuals of

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Jane Sunderland and Lia Litosseliti

the same biological sex. The collection thus reXects the shift from ‘diVerences’ to discourse and the associated discoursal shaping of gendered identities and relations. Where gender diVerences are explored, this is done with a view to challenging existing ‘givens’ and the generalisability of empirical Wndings. While early feminist work needs to be acknowledged for the signiWcant foundations and impetus it provided, we do not see ourselves as being antifeminist in challenging it. In implicitly or explicitly challenging previous approaches to enhance and advance feminist debate, the book simultaneously builds on these approaches. Further, the contributors’ commitment to feminist principles is diverse but always evident. In addition to reXecting and developing current theoretical tendencies, Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis also puts forward new theorisations (e.g. Swann’s critical exploration of possible ‘warrants’ for making a claim about gender); new methodological approaches (e.g. Sunderland, Abdul Rahim, Cowley, Leontzakou and Shattuck, who investigate the gendered discursive practices surrounding the use of textbooks); new analytical frameworks (e.g. Mills, who challenges Brown and Levinson’s approach to politeness); and fascinating new data from key epistemological sites (e.g. Benwell’s analysis of ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazines, and Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen’s work on toys). Cross-disciplinarity is also reXected in these pages. Contributions are informed by linguistics, education (Maybin), psychology (Telles Ribeiro), literature (Sorea), media studies (Litosseliti, Benwell, Lazar), and semiotics (Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen). DiVerent crosscultural perspectives are represented, with data gathered from Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Romania and Singapore, as well as the more frequently mentioned cultural contexts – though we regret not having gone further in this direction. Jaworski and Coupland describe discourse analysis as “a committedly qualitative orientation to linguistic and social understanding” (1999:36). The data and analysis reported in the contributions are almost entirely qualitative, and the Wndings are sometimes explanatory and sometimes illuminative (Mason 1996). Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis will we hope be a valuable resource for gender and language scholars, and other social scientists. As teachers in the area of gender and language, we also hope that this book will be relevant to the many university and college departments in which ‘language and gender’ courses are taught, and to courses such as sociolinguistics, language and the media, language and society, and of course discourse analysis, in which discourse and gender issues are often salient. The book does not oVer

Gender identity and discourse analysis

an introduction to discourse and gender. Rather, it critically engages with what have been long-running and on-going debates in these Welds, and introduces fresh perspectives. It thus complements introductory textbooks such as Talbot’s Language and Gender (1998) and Goddard and Patterson’s activity book (2000) of the same name. Jaworski and Coupland observe in The Discourse Reader that: The ability to reXect critically on and analyse discourse will increasingly become a basic skill for negotiating social life and for imposing a form of interpretative, critical order on the new discursive universe (1999:38).

Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis aims to play its own part in enhancing critical understanding of and debate on discourse, and, in particular, discourse’s important (we would argue) relationship with gender.

‘Language and Gender’: The early days Seeing gender and language through a discourse lens has in one way united the two ‘prongs’ of early feminist gender and language study. In the 1970s and 80s, most concern with language and gender fell broadly into one of two camps, corresponding broadly to parole: gender and language use (with the focus being on gender diVerences), and langue: gender (bias) in a language (usually English) as an abstract system (with the focus being on individual words). Discourse, relevant to both, was still waiting in the wings. LakoV’s early work in both camps, in the form of Language and Woman’s Place (1975), is rightly acknowledged as both ground-breaking and seminal. Later practitioners of the study of gender and language use were concerned, variously, to expose male dominance in all its linguistic forms (hence the critical ‘dominance approach’, exempliWed by Fishman (1983) and West and Zimmerman (1983)), and to re-evaluate any gender diVerences as ‘cultural diVerences’ (Maltz and Borker 1982) – either from a liberal perspective (of which Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand (1990) is the obvious and best example), or from a celebratory one (e.g. Jones 1980; Holmes 1995). These two diVerent feminist approaches (‘dominance’ and ‘difference’), in which there was at times a tendency to represent masculinity and femininity as a gender ‘binary’, were, arguably, necessary products of their time – given the existing ‘deWcit’ models of women’s language that had previously been inscribed (Jespersen 1922; Trudgill 1972; and even to an extent LakoV 1975),

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and the wider political agenda for women at that time (Cameron 1992). Those who critiqued gender representation in the English language as an abstract system in the 1970s and 1980s, like the ‘male dominance’ theorists of gendered language use, were similarly concerned to adopt a feminist approach and expose bias. This was shown to take three related forms. First, some grammatical uses rendered women relatively invisible (the masculine ‘generics’ such as he, man and chairman); secondly, there were words in the lexicon which represented women in a trivial or stereotypical manner (a blonde, manageress – for which spellcheckers now suggest alternatives); and, thirdly, still other lexical items served to degrade women (bitch, tart). Spender’s pioneer (though, in retrospect, problematic) work Man Made Language (1980) did much to popularise these Wndings outside academic circles, especially in the UK. Running parallel with these studies were attempts to create and campaigns to use ‘inclusive’, ‘alternative’, ‘non-sexist’ language items. Checklists and guidelines were produced for writers and organisations, though many items in these have since been dismissed in some circles as ‘political correctness’ (Dunant 1994). In the 1990s, and even in the 1980s (while the above approaches were still regularly being drawn on in the interpretation of Wndings of studies of ‘gender diVerences’), both prongs in the study of language and gender came under attack – from feminist, linguistic and early post-structuralist perspectives (e.g. Black and Coward 1981). The idea of ‘gender diVerences’ in language use was criticised for several reasons. It underplayed the importance of context, variation and what Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1999:193) term ‘intragroup diVerences and intergroup overlap’ (the groups here being women and men). Ironically, the idea of ‘gender diVerences’ was conservative in that in rooting out diVerences rather than (in addition) investigating and acknowledging similarities, it inherently represented gender (masculinity/femininity) in binary opposition (which, as Cameron (1992) points out, is something that vive la diVérence proponents also love to do). Further, the idea of ‘diVerences’ seemed sometimes to be put forward as a form of cultural determinism, the implication being that the way women and men spoke was shaped by whether they were female or male. This rendered gender the equivalent of sex, and made it appear to be a convenient independent sociolinguistic variable like age. Not only did this imply Wxedness, with little or no room for human agency, it also suggested a one-way ‘gender then language’ process. Crucially (though there were exceptions), this approach did not allow the possibility of language shaping gender – or, at best, did not admit to the full potential of this.


The ‘language as sexist’ prong of language and gender studies has faded in the last two decades (though see Pauwels (1998) and Mills (forthcoming) for reconceptualisations). It was soon realised that a word could not unproblematically be derided as sexist since it could in principle be ‘reclaimed’ by a given speech community (queer probably being the most famous actual example). Similarly, a superWcially gender-neutral word such as people could be used in a sexist way: in an article in The Independent (5/1/90), for example, Richard Adams wrote: The commons were popular with Newburians and other locals. People took picnics, ‘walked out’ with their girls, picked bluebells and primroses in season (see Cameron 1994, for other examples).

Additionally, identiWcation of ‘sexist’ words did not allow for the fact that these could be used ironically or in other non-literal ways, or that both sexist and non-sexist words could be interpreted in a whole range of ways. Perhaps most importantly, the role of context or ‘situatedness’ as key to both the production of a given utterance and its interpretation was underestimated. Interestingly, the identiWcation of ‘sexist’ words did allow for theorising linguistic agency, in the form of language shaping thinking (the main objection to sexist language, of course; see Schneider and Hacker (1973) for an early empirical study). It also allowed for individual and collective agency, in the form of conscious promotion of non-sexist and gender-inclusive language. However, it underplayed the possibility of resistance to (including subversion of) sexist language independent of feminist intervention. One reason for the problematic nature of early language and gender studies was that the theorisation of gender itself within many areas of linguistics lagged behind the theorisation of gender and feminist epistemology in some other social sciences (Bucholtz 1999). For a long time even feminist linguistics tended to follow such understandings of gender as “the culturallyshaped group of attributes given to the female or to the male” (Humm 1989:84). With the wisdom of hindsight, problems with this now seem manifold (who is giving? how? how do the ‘recipients’ respond? are ‘the female’ and ‘the male’ actually monolithic categories?) A simple distinction between ‘biological sex’ and ‘social’ or ‘socialised’ gender is now recognised as inadequate, if agency and diversity are to be properly acknowledged, and if, crucially, language is seen as shaping or constructing gender, not simply as a characteristic of it. Moving away from a theoretical essentialism that saw gender as a set of

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behaviours imposed upon the individual by society, and gender as a masculine/feminine binary, has meant that gender is now viewed by many feminists as itself a potential site of struggle (see Swann, this volume; also Bergvall, Bing and Freed 1996). And, theoretical challenges to the earlier ideas of gender underlying investigations of both language use and of language as an abstract system have meant a gradual dovetailing of the two areas in a new acknowledgement of the importance of discourse, and of how “language eVects gender” (Bucholtz 1999:6; our italics). A discourse approach to gender and language aims to accommodate ideas of individual agency, and of gender (identity) as multiple, Xuctuating, and shaped in part by language. This (in some ways post-structuralist) understanding crucially represents gender as variable, but, equally crucially, as both social and individual. In the ‘Introduction’ to her own edited collection, Gender and Discourse (1997), Wodak characterises gender, for the analyst, as the understanding of “how what it means to be a woman or to be a man changes from one generation to the next”, but also shows how this varies too with language users, i.e. “between diVerent racialised, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as for members of diVerent social classes” (1997:4). The contributions in this book, both individually and as a collection, aim to enrich the understanding of this variability.

Identity, identities, masculinities and femininities The notion of identity is a slippery one, often used but rarely deWned, varying from one discipline to another, and an on-going subject of academic endeavour. Gee (1999:39) observes critically that “some people … tend to reserve the term ‘identity’ for a sense of self that is relatively continuous and ‘Wxed’ over time”. Ivanic (1998) writes that though identity is a useful term, since it is the everyday word for people’s sense of who they are, it is “misleadingly singular” (1998:11). She continues: The plural word ‘identities’ is sometimes better, because it captures the idea of people identifying simultaneously with a variety of social groups. One or more of these identities may be foregrounded at diVerent times; they are sometimes contradictory, sometimes interrelated: people’s diverse identities constitute the richness and dilemmas of their sense of self (1998:11).

Where do identities come from? Ivanic notes that social constructionists see


identity as “the result of aYliation to particular beliefs and possibilities which are available to them in their social context” (1998:12), but that this is not a question of determinism: these beliefs and possibilities can be resisted. Giddens (as paraphrased by Jaworski and Coupland 1999) similarly conceptualises identity as a series of choices one continually makes about oneself and one’s lifestyle, thus as a process, rather than a state or set of personal attributes. We share this view of a given individual’s multiplicity of identities, and of aYliatiation and choices (though not ‘free’ choices). However, we would argue that identities also come from the attributions or ascriptions of others – though ascription may contribute to a resulting identity very diVerent in nature to that intended by the ascriber. Identities can thus be seen as emerging from an individual’s diVerent sorts of relationships with others (perhaps within a Community of Practice; see later), and as (at least potentially) changing as their relationships change. Accordingly, (gender) identity can be seen as multiple and Xuid, and never complete: “the emergence and re-emergence of the self” (Jaworski and Coupland 1999:412–413). The notion of ‘essential identities’, such as ‘woman’, has long been challenged, or ‘decentred’. With this decentring has come the notion and study of the multiplicity of gender identities: diVerent femininities and masculinities, evident across populations and cultural contexts, but also within individuals. This can be seen in terms of practices: Johnson characterises masculinity and femininity as “on-going social processes dependent upon systematic restatement”, noting that this is sometimes referred to as “doing identity work” (1997:22). It can also be seen as one’s sense(s) of oneself/selves as woman or man. Advertisements, for example, often show the same woman ‘having it all’, in domestic, maternal, professional and/or romantic roles. A given actual woman’s identities may however be more complex. At work, for example, she may identify herself as a ‘competent teacher’, but if expected to carry out the traditionally feminine ‘caring’ role of ‘pastoral care’, may feel she is a ‘putupon employee’ or ‘victim of gender stereotyping’. The multiple nature of masculinity has been theorised and explored in relation to language relatively recently (e.g. Connell 1995; Johnson and Meinhof 1997; Segal 1990). It has been argued elsewhere (Sunderland 1995, 1998; Chodorow 1978) that in some ways and in some contexts the boundaries and ‘morphology’ of masculinity are more rigid than those of femininity. The prevalence of anti-sexist and ‘equal opportunities’ discourses in the Western world may, for example, create a greater Xexibility of identity or

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range of identities (though not necessarily more economic opportunities), for girls and women than for boys and men. The ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse represents men as suVering from a sense of being ‘deprived’ of both the expectation that they will be the family breadwinner, and of the opportunity to be so (see for example Litosseliti, 2001). To the extent that, and where, such a crisis exists, it is indeed a crisis of identity – the most obvious contradiction being between ‘being a man’ and ‘being the breadwinner’, when these two identities of masculinity co-occur for a man but do not correspond to that man’s lived experience. Ivanic (1998:11) notes that an individual’s multiple identities are unlikely to be equally salient at any particular moment in time: rather, one or more may be foregrounded at diVerent times. It is quite possible for an individual not to be conscious of a particular identity until it becomes contextually salient. For example, a white woman may not experience a sense of ‘whiteness’, and indeed ‘otherness’, until she attends a women’s meeting in which every other woman is black. Identities can also be contradictory, and contradictory identities (as well as identities which are less than comfortably juxtaposed) can be seen in several of the papers in this volume: the lesbian teacher (Morrish), the ‘caring, people-centred businesswoman’ (Litosseliti), the new mother who is simultaneously ‘managing’ (in one sense) and being ‘linemanaged’ by her male partner (Sunderland).

Discourse and discourses The notion of discourse, like that of identity, is used in diVerent senses in diVerent disciplines. Mills writes: The term ‘discourse’ has become common currency in a variety of disciplines: critical theory, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, social psychology and many other Welds, so much so that it is frequently left undeWned, as if its usage were simply common knowledge. [‘Discourse’] … is often employed to signal a certain theoretical sophistication in ways which are vague and sometimes obfuscatory (Mills 1997:1).

Thus, although discourse serves as one of the organising themes for this book, it has to be acknowledged that there are several diYculties, both analytical and theoretical, with discourse as a concept. Discourse is in fact a highly contested term – and, like work on identity,


new work on discourse is continually appearing. A basic, linguistic understanding of discourse is that it is language beyond the sentence, and most analysts agree that discourse includes the idea of stretches of text, spoken and written (though sometimes the term is used to refer only to speech). From a more interpersonal focus, discourse is not only suprasentential but also functional in terms of language use (Edmondson 1980:272). Used in this way, the term points to language which communicates a meaning in a context, for example, spoken interaction between people and groups of people in real social situations (Cameron 1998). It thus takes its meaning from knowledge about that context. More generally, discourse can also be used to refer to language characteristic of diVerent social situations, such as classroom discourse or advertising discourse. However, from a diVerent, ideological, social theory perspective (which is also of interest to many linguists), discourse has been theorised as a form of social practice (Fairclough 1992) and “the sort of language used to construct some aspect of reality from a particular perspective, for example the liberal discourse of politics” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:63). Discourse in this sense is centrally associated (though not unproblematically) with Foucault, who contrasts discourse with language. In an interview, he said I am not so interested in the formal possibilities oVered by a system like language. Personally I am rather haunted by discourse, by the fact that particular words have been spoken; these events have functioned in relation to their original situation (1989:25).

Discourse in this sense then, is, as Foucault puts it elsewhere (1972), not only a form of knowledge about cultural ways of thinking and doing, but also a form of practice (an ‘event’). Equally importantly, it is historical but of continuing relevance (“have been spoken”, “have functioned”). Foucault continues the interview: “my object is not language but the archive, that is to say the accumulated existence of discourse” (1989:25). Something has warranted comment; it has been and is (now) something which can be talked or written about; discourse surrounds and penetrates it, and emanates from it. Cameron (2001:15) refers to the “ ‘social voices’ available to the people whose talk analysts collect”; the key term here is available. Without a particular discourse articulated by these ‘social voices’, something cannot be talked about. Discourse can then be a countable noun, and ‘discourses’ now frequent social theory. A ‘discourse’ is perhaps seen most simply as a recognisable way of seeing the world. This is however to oversimplify, since it allows for neither

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social change, human agency nor practice. Foucault famously illustrates ‘discourses’ in relation to the act of sex, around which, starting in the seventeenth century (and continuing through today), there was both censorship of “the words that rendered it too visibly present” and “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex” (1976:17–18). The censorship in this example is a reminder that discourses are often institution-related, and it is this which helps endow them with their potential for power. Foucault encapsulates the importance of social, and necessarily historical conditions thus: My problem could be stated as follows: How does it happen that at a given period one could say this and that something else has never been said? It is, in a word, the analysis of the historical conditions that account for what one says or of what one rejects, or of what one transforms in the mass of spoken things (1989:58).

(The ‘mass’ can extend to ‘written things’.) Foucault’s stress on the importance of timeliness in the emergence of a ‘new’ discourse is relevant both to contemporary discourses such as ‘feminist’, ‘anti-racist’ and ‘environmentalist’ discourses, and, though rather diVerently, to Wrst language acquisition: when, for example, do small children become aware that a particular topic is ‘legitimate’ as a subject worthy of talk? The idea of discourses has been widely taken up by linguists concerned also with social theory. Kress observes how discourses provide “a set of possible statements about a given area, and organise[s] and give[s] structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to be talked about” (1985:6–7). Gee similarly notes that discourses “constitute the recognisability and meaningfulness of our public acts” (1992:110). He exempliWes this in relation to gender by suggesting that a particular woman might be recognised as a businesswoman, church member, or Planned Parenthood counsellor by “carrying out performances that are recognisable within and by these Discourses”. (The idea of performance is an important one, to which we will return.) Gee does not however actually identify ‘these Discourses’ – his list is of roles, or perhaps attributed identities. However discourses can be identiWed here: for a woman to be recognised as a businesswoman there must be a preexisting, perhaps dominant ‘discourse of commerce’ (as opposed to one of ‘communal sharing’); as a Planned Parenthood counsellor, a ‘discourse of fertility control as beneWcial’ (as opposed to a ‘God’s will discourse’); as a PTA member, a discourse of ‘parental involvement in school aVairs’ (as opposed to an ‘autonomous school management discourse’). In Foucauldian terms, these


discourses must have already been ‘spoken’; each pre-existing discourse must already have its own set of values and presuppositions and also its ‘rules’ (what Foucault calls rules “of formation, existence, co-existence”) for the production of possible and legitimate, and non-legitimate, associated utterances (1989:46). Examples of explicitly gendered discourses abound. One of the most ubiquitous is what Adrienne Rich (1980) has called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, perhaps best exempliWed by tabloid newspaper articles on gender relations which make claims such as ‘The mature woman feels free to fantasise about men of any age group’ (Daily Express, 21/4/2000). Other gendered discourses have been identiWed and ‘named’ by Coates (1997), Hollway (1984), and Kitetu and Sunderland (2000). Coates identiWes as two ‘competing’ discourses of femininity a ‘dominant’ maternal discourse, “which says that children are ‘marvellous’, as part of which all mothers take pride in their children’s achievements” and a ‘subversive’ maternal discourse, which includes expression of negative feelings about their children (1997:294). Hollway (1984) identiWes three discourses of heterosexuality: ‘have and hold’ (i.e. get your man and keep him), ‘male sexual drive’ (i.e. men can’t help themselves) and a ‘permissive discourse’ (i.e. the validity of sexual activity outside monogamous marriage). Kitetu and Sunderland (2000) point to various discourses of gender which are drawn on in discussions of girls’ education; these include ‘equal opportunities’, ‘vive la diVérence’ and ‘privileged femininity’.2 Discourses of gender can be conXicting, of course, as illustrated by those girls who, despite national and institutional ‘equal opportunities’ discourses around education, are nevertheless silent and passively resistant in class against a background of more powerful cultural discourses about the importance of silence in women, and the inevitability for them of marriage (Ogbay 1999). Discourses exist then in relation to other discourses, and Foucault refers not only to the “great anonymous murmur of discourses held today” but also to the “set (l’ensemble) of discourses actually pronounced” (1989:27, 45). This ‘set’ refers to a complex of related social and discoursal practices, found in both public and private texts, which can be seen as hierarchical. Relatedly, the ‘order of discourse’ is now an important category for Critical Discourse Analysis (see later), recently conceptualised by Chouliaraki and Fairclough as “the speciWcally discoursal organisational logic of a Weld – a Weld seen speciWcally in terms of its discursive practices” (1999:114). A simple example can be found in Sunderland (this volume). She identiWes a ‘part-time father’ order

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of discourse, which is ‘supported’ by the three discourses of ‘father as baby entertainer’, ‘father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ and ‘father as line manager’. There is textual evidence of these discourses in contemporary parentcraft literature, these discourses being largely (but not entirely) mutually supporting.

Discourse and text The word text is sometimes seen as speciWcally written language. In this book, however, text includes both talk and writing, and extends beyond monologue to dialogue between people. The contributions exemplify this diversity. Written texts explored include advertisements encouraging educated people to marry and have children (Lazar), media texts containing gendered arguments (Litosseliti), parentcraft texts (Sunderland) and an ironic poem around biological reproduction (Sorea). Spoken texts include the classroom talk of a lesbian teacher of linguistics (Morrish), the talk of the teacher around gendered textbook texts (Sunderland et al.), the talk between a female manic/ depressive patient and her male psychiatrist (Telles Ribeiro), talk between University colleagues which includes what is perceived as a case of extreme gender-related impoliteness (Mills), and the talk of pre-adolescent girls and boys with each other and with the researcher (Maybin). We are, however, making a distinction between text and discourse – in contrast to some approaches which view the two as synonymous – a distinction which is important for analytical purposes. In its ‘social practice’ sense, discourse is the broader term, deWned by van Dijk as “text in context” (1990:164). Fairclough in his earlier work describes text as a physical object crucially existing in relation to discursive practices and social practices (1992). Text is seen by Talbot as “the fabric in which discourse is manifested” (1995a:24), and as containing formal features which are ‘traces’ of how the text was produced, and ‘cues’ for how it can be read or heard (1999:154). Text can then exist physically (e.g. marks on paper) or in the memories of people (e.g. of previous conversations). Discourse, in contrast, is less easily identiWed and profoundly amorphous, necessarily unconstrained by boundaries of space and time. It can be seen as a process: of production and interpretation by given people in given contexts, and as “interaction itself: a cultural activity” (Talbot 1995a:25). Discourse analysis necessarily involves analysis of the text as product, but if the ultimate concern is language in a social context, such


analysis alone can only ever be of limited value. Is there even such a thing as ‘a text’ (alone)?

Discourse as both representational and constitutive It is a central claim throughout this volume that the idea of discourse as social practice oVers a way of seeing how we experience the world, in part through the representational capacity of language. Gendered representations, which abound visually in Wlms and most advertisements, also exist in the written texts of songs, newspapers, novels and advertisements, the spoken texts of talk, and in physical objects, such as toys and clothes (Hall 1997; see also Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen, and Lazar, this volume). In that these representations always relate to something already existing, they can all be seen as forms of ‘recontextualisation’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). However, as suggested in our section on ‘Discourse and discourses’, discourse in a social practice sense is not only representational but also constitutive: not only a form of knowledge about cultural ways of thinking and doing, but also, more powerfully, a potential and arguably actual agent of social construction. In Foucault’s words, discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972:49). Discourse can be seen to give meaning to an experience, or articulate our ways of seeing the world; to return to Kress’s deWnition, to “organise[] and give[] structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to be talked about” (Kress 1985:6– 7; our italics). The category ‘woman’ can be seen as organised and given structure by discourse, as socially and discursively constituted, since evident physiological diVerences (eye colour, for instance) do not in themselves lead to similar categorisation. The discourses identiWed by Hollway (1984), Coates (1997), and Kitetu and Sunderland (2000) can then be seen as not only representing gendered social practices, but also maintaining them, re-constituting them in slightly or radically diVerent ways, or even spawning new, alternative discourses – though the potential for new liberating discourses for women must always be limited by women’s social position. This constitutive capacity of discourses is drawn on in the majority of the contributions to this volume. Most contributors do not, however, subscribe to a view that the social is entirely discursively constituted. As Chouliaraki and Fairclough write, “Social questions are … in part questions about discourse – for instance, the

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question of power in social class, gender and race relations is partly a question of discourse” (1999:vii; our italics). The precise workings of discourse remain somewhat obscure; this is the subject of ongoing theorisation, but also needs empirical exploration. We, like others in the Weld, would maintain that discourses uphold, reconstitute or produce social practices in open and crucially non-deterministic ways. Some degree and form of agency always needs to be allowed for. Fairclough in particular stresses the importance of collective, social and individual agency, struggle and resistance (1992:56), which can include resistance to certain discourses, and the corresponding deployment of (then privileged) other discourses. Such resistance may be behavioural, verbal, or saliently nonverbal, as in the case cited of female students who resist education not by being disruptive but by simply not responding and rendering themselves linguistically and even physically ‘invisible’ (Ogbay 1999). One means through which discourses operate is intertextuality, i.e. the property texts have of being full of ‘snatches’ of other texts (Kristeva 1986), which may be explicitly demarcated or implicitly merged in, and which the text may seamlessly assimilate, explicitly echo (ironically or otherwise) or confront. Taking an intertextual perspective ensures recognition of the historicity of texts, so important to Foucault: how they always constitute ‘responsive’ links within existing “chains of speech communication” (Bakhtin 1986:94). A distinction can be made between ‘manifest intertextuality’ (e.g. reported speech) and ‘interdiscursivity’: “the mixing together of diVerent discourses and genres” (Fairclough 1992). As Jaworski and Coupland point out, “most texts are not ‘pure’ reXections of single discourses” (1999:9). Discourses can thus appear within other discourses: Chouliaraki and Fairclough give the example of feminist political discourses which “have internalised Marxist and postmodernist discourses, incorporating some of their concepts but appropriating them in ways which accord with their own logics” (1999:136). Many texts are thus interdiscursively constituted and can be interdiscursively reconstituted. Even a short stretch of speech or written text can carry associations from a variety of discourses; this is polyphony, multi-voicedness, or hybridity (Fairclough 1989, 1992). This open-ended capacity of discourse to recontextualise and be recontextualised (with the attendant notions of mimicry, appropriation and colonisation) is crucial to Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999) developing theorisation of discourse. Discourse is still, however, not central to language and gender studies as a whole – and many of those who discover ‘language and gender’ anew are


still attracted by the idea of unearthing some particular gender diVerence in some particular context. A discourse-as-social practice approach to the study of gender and language is, however, growing in signiWcance, as evidenced by the collections of, for example, Bergvall, Bing and Freed (1996), Hall and Bucholtz (1995) and Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton (1999).

The importance of context and ‘Communities of Practice’ We, like others, see the relationship between context and discourse as a dialectical one, in that each can shape the other. At diVerent times, diVerent features of context will be more relevant than others. Litosseliti (this volume), for example, draws attention to ways in which the newspaper debate genre can, to an extent, give rise to particularly adversarial and particularly gendered discourses. Context can include linguistic co-text; genre; social situation, including speciWc (gender) relations between participants, and speciWc physical considerations; and cultural assumptions and understandings. From a critical perspective, for both the analyst and the language user, the context of a given text includes those discursive practices which pertain to the text in question, and the relevant social practices (Fairclough 1992). We illustrate this in our later section on ‘Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA)’ with the case of the children’s best-seller Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling 1997). Looking at context entails an emphasis on speciWcity and complexity (see Cameron 1998b). SpeciWcity, as regards gender, means looking at particular men and women in particular settings, as is done throughout this collection. Complexity refers to the way in which gender interacts with other aspects of identity – such as ethnicity, age, class, disability and sexual identity – and with power relations. In this collection, other aspects of identity in interplay with gender include age (Maybin’s study of pre-adolescent girls and boys), nationality (Lazar’s work on pro-birth Singaporean advertisements, and Sorea’s analysis of a Romanian ‘pro-natality’ poem), and sexual identity (Morrish’s take on the identity of the lesbian teacher). Looking at context has also come to mean looking at situated or local meanings, i.e. those assigned by participants within a given context to a given set of contextual features. This is convincingly shown in Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s (1995) study of the schoolgirls of ‘Belten High’. Their

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analysis of these girls’ discourses and identities draws on and develops the idea of a ‘Community of Practice’ (diVerent in several ways from a ‘speech community’). Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992a:64) deWne a Community of Practice as an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavour. As a social construct, a Community of Practice is diVerent from the traditional community, primarily because it is deWned simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages.

Examples of CofPs given by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet include a choir, a family, a friendship group and an academic Department. In a Community of Practice, language, together with other practices, is crucial (see also Holmes and MeyerhoV 1999; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999; Bergvall 1999). In this conceptualisation, individuals participate in multiple CofPs and individual identity is an eVect of the multiplicity of this participation. Gender is accordingly produced and reproduced through membership of diVerent CofPs, and through diVerential forms of participation in a CofP. In this collection, the language users who are the focus of the work of Maybin, Litosseliti and Mills (schoolchildren in the same class, correspondents in broadsheet newspaper arguments, and members of a University Department, respectively), can be seen as clear examples of members of shared CofPs (see also Morrish, this volume). The contribution of the concept of the CofP to language and gender studies has rightly been widely welcomed: Holmes and MeyerhoV for example describe it as “a corrective to unsatisfactory approaches to language and gender” (1999:180). A further analytical focus now available is thus “people’s active engagement in the reproduction of or resistance to gender arrangements in their communities” (Eckert and McConnellGinet 1992b:466; our italics). Local or situated meanings are, however, sometimes hard for a researcher to identify, even with the help of participants. In particular, it is hard to know which contextual features are salient, to individuals or to a group. Even when gender seems a salient category to the researcher, it might not seem so to the participants (see Swann, this volume, for a discussion of warrants for claims about gender; also Wetherell 1998, SchegloV 1998, and Weatherall 2000, for an important debate). Emphasising the importance of context and accordingly of local meanings may mean that gender stereotyping outside a particu-


lar context becomes less possible. However, making academic generalisations about gender also becomes problematic, though by no means paralysingly so (see Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1999) for a discussion of ‘New generalisations and explanations in language and gender research’). Understandings of local meanings in the talk of women and men, boys and girls (such as those documented in this volume by Sunderland et al., Maybin and Telles Ribeiro), will always need to be drawn on in the development of such generalisations. Chouliaraki and Fairclough observe that while we should not lose sight of how local communicative interactions “work within social structures, social relations and social processes which transcend their local character”, we should at the same time remain sensitive to their “peculiarity and speciWcity … to what in particular is going on within them” (1999:74).

Reader response and identity The notions of social and linguistic construction, constitution and ‘shaping’, unlike that of determinism, are not Wnal or absolute ones. This is important particularly for our understanding of the ‘eVect’ (or lack of eVect) of written (and, by extension, spoken) texts. In literary theory, and more widely, it has been recognised that textual analysis – however rigorous, detailed and comprehensive – does not allow for and cannot predict ‘reader response’ (Mills 1994). For CDA, too (see next section), “a text does not uniquely determine a meaning, though there is a limit to what a text can mean” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:67). While recognising that a text cannot have an inWnite range of meanings, and without going along with a full-blown ‘death of the author’ approach (Barthes 1986), it is not diYcult to recognise that people will have diVerent aVective and cognitive responses to the same text. In particular, some will like it, some will not; some will interpret it in the way the writer perhaps intended and hoped, while others will not; some – the ‘resisting reader’ (Fetterley 1978; Cosslett 1996) – will recognise the presuppositions and reject them; some will ‘appropriate’ the text for their own ends, to the point of ‘reading against the grain’. We can take this further, into identity construction. Chouliaraki and Fairclough note that “People … establish their identities and their diVerences through the diverse ways in which they interpret texts, and more generally incorporate them into their own practices” (1999:14): a person for example cannot talk about something they have read or heard (the ideational aspect of the talk) without representing and con-

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structing themselves in some way, and thus constructing their relations with their interlocutor(s) (the interpersonal aspect of the talk). Even a silent ‘recipient’ of a text can thus be seen as actively receptive. Her or his measure of agency – while listening, while reading, and importantly, afterwards – always requires acknowledgement. The same is true of ‘eVects’ of discourses as cued by texts. Though discourses, especially dominant, privileged discourses, can shape our lives, this does not mean that people simply submit to them. Rather, we would argue, through our language and other social practices, we can and do rework and often contest the assumptions embedded in discourses. As we illustrate in this volume (e.g. Sorea, Morrish), even privileged discourses are not invincible. And as we participate in resistant discourses, we become part of a process of changing perceptions of experience, forming new perceptions, reconstructing our own and others’ identities and developing new social practices (see Horsman 1990, and Weedon 1987, for a discussion of this process).

Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) Given the complexity of discourse, discourse analysis can also have diVerent meanings. Cameron refers to it as an ‘umbrella term’ (2001:7), and in her recent Working with Spoken Discourse (2001) includes sections on the ethnography of speaking, pragmatics, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis. Most of the contributors in this volume see speakers and writers as having agency, discourse as constitutive, and discourse analysis accordingly as an attempt to identify and describe regularities in the methods used by participants as they construct the discourse through which they establish the character of their actions and beliefs in the course of interaction (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984:14).

Some contributors (e.g. Benwell, Sorea, Litosseliti) additionally base their analysis on an explicit recognition that most texts are in some way intertextual, and look at the inXuence of one text, or genre, on another. Most are concerned more broadly with both discursive and sociocultural practices (see Litosseliti 2002, and this volume, for a discussion and exempliWcation of such a synthetic framework for analysis), and adopt a critical stance towards the discourse they are analysing (notice that this is not the same as ‘doing Critical


Discourse Analysis’). We would argue that critical awareness of language use is an important step in the challenging of those routine linguistic practices which engender inequalities. At word-level, this awareness, together with active contestation, has been exempliWed over the last three decades by feminist linguists in the (albeit problematic) advocation and active use of alternatives to sexist language items (Pauwels 1998; Mills, forthcoming). A wider critical perspective on language both allows for and indeed requires acknowledgement of the possibility of women and men articulating both diVerent and the same (gender-related) discourses. It also requires the possibility of (written or spoken) articulation of gendered, even sexist discourses which might or might not include overtly sexist language items. Together, these possibilities allow the langue and parole ‘prongs’ of early gender and language study to become one in discourse. Several contributors (Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen, Lazar, Sunderland) do explicitly follow critical discourse analysis (CDA). This is not surprising, given the feminist slant of this collection. As Wodak points out, “Many proposals and basic assumptions of feminist linguistics relate to and overlap with principles of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis” (1997:7).3 Among these shared proposals and assumptions we would include identiWcation of ‘hidden agendas’, and, relatedly, of what is not said that from a certain (feminist) standpoint most certainly should have been said. CDA is of course itself a developing Weld, one which grew out of systemic functional linguistics, interpreted diVerently by analysts from diVerent (though usually progressive) standpoints. For van Dijk, CDA is “primarily interested and motivated by pressing social issues, which it hopes to better understand through discourse analysis” (1993:280). More generally, it is concerned not only with social injustice, inequality, power and power struggles, but also with exposing the often subtle role of discourse in the construction and maintenance of injustice, inequality and domination. (Cameron also refers to this as “CDA’s concern with the ‘hidden agenda’ of discourse” (2001:123)). For Fairclough (1989:5), ‘critical’ is used “to show up connections which may be hidden from people – such as the connections between language, power and ideology”; Lazar (1993) refers to this as a process of demystiWcation. This can be seen particularly as demystifying something which may have become ‘naturalised’, i.e. seen as something that has always been, was ‘meant to be’, or cannot be altered. As Cameron points out, such naturalisation often serves particular interests (2001:123), and in so doing acts against the interests of others. In that discourse may be a powerful way of

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(though not unproblematically) inXuencing the minds and practices both of powerless and powerful groups, there is a clear need for ‘exposure’, through detailed analysis. An inXuential contribution to CDA has been Fairclough’s (1992) threedimensional conceptualisation of discourse, i.e. text, discursive practice and social practice. This goes some way to providing a “language[] of description for sociologically relevant analysis of language” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:99). To illustrate the relevance of this conceptualisation to gender, we apply the framework to the best seller and award-winning children’s book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling 1997), a book which has been very popular with boys and girls alike. This diagram, including the words in bold font, is from Fairclough (1992:73); the words in standard and italic fonts are ours. It represents at least some of what would need to be considered as potentially relevant in carrying out a full critical discourse analysis of this book. SOCIAL PRACTICE Within a UK context: expectation of 100% literacy; schools relatively well-resourced; free and compulsory education; some gender ‘boundaries’ more rigid for males than females in occupational and social life; boys’ leisure activities less text-based than those of girls DISCURSIVE PRACTICE (production, distribution, consumption) Children’s book awards; ‘boys’ reading failure’ widely publicised; ‘Literacy Hour’ in primary schools; boys as less willing than girls to read books which have a protagonist of the opposite sex; more male protagonists in children’s books than female protagonists. TEXT Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Figure 1. An exempliWcation of Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional model of discourse as applied to a commercially successful children’s book. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone can of course be analysed as text alone, from a range of diVerent perspectives and with a range of analytical frameworks. However, a critical discourse analysis would also consider


the discursive practices surrounding the book, i.e. that it is widely bought by both boys and girls, and by parents for both boys and girls (and is, relatedly, an award-winner), and that one of the reasons for its particular success is likely to be that Harry, the male protagonist, appeals to both boys (often reluctant readers of Wction) and to girls (who, unlike boys, will read books in which the protagonist is of the opposite sex) (Swann 1992; White 1990). This analysis however only makes sense when seen in the still wider cultural context of parts of the ‘Western’ world in which social practices are in some ways restrictive for males. For example, whereas girls can be ‘tomboys’, girls and women can wear trousers, play football and rugby, and every profession includes some women at high levels, boys cannot with impunity be ‘sissies’, boys and men cannot normally wear skirts, play netball or skip, and men only very exceptionally work in pre-school care or as dinner ‘men’ in schools. And it is these apparently more rigid boundaries of masculinity than of femininity (Sunderland 1995; Chodorow 1978) that may well deter boys from reading Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables or Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch, but not girls from reading Harry Potter. An analysis only of the text of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would not allow for this sort of social understanding. Critical discourse analysts explicitly acknowledge the impossibility of impartial observation – for all analytical approaches. If language choices are sociologically and ideologically shaped, then analysts’ own understandings and interpretations of social interaction are also inextricably partial. The diVerence between the discourse analyst and the ‘everyday’ social interactant must however be her or his degree of self-awareness. The special role of critical discourse analysts here should perhaps be that, as van Dijk claims: [they should] take an explicit sociopolitical stance: they [should] spell out their point of view, perspective, principles and aims, both within their discipline and within society at large (van Dijk:1993:280; our italics).

A critical (feminist) discourse analysis by deWnition then cannot remain descriptive and neutral, since the interests guiding it aim to uncover or make transparent those social processes and mechanisms that can perpetuate injustice, inequality, manipulation and (sex) discrimination in both overt and subtle, pernicious forms (Fairclough 1989; Wodak 1989), and those that promote and reproduce androcentric views of life, including deWning appropriate behaviour for and desirable attributes of women. In this collection, the authors (not all of whom follow CDA) signal their political standpoints with diVerent degrees of explicitness.

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As regards the actual hands-on details of discourse analysis (critical or otherwise), theory is often vague, and theoretical work frequently does not aim to provide clear methodological guidelines, making life hard for students of discourse analysis (but see Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999:60) for a framework for CDA). For the linguist, however, it is always legitimate to ask what linguistic items actually count as or contribute to (a) discourse, and how. From a critical standpoint, linguistic choices must be important. As Cameron points out: CDA makes use of the insight derived from traditional, structure-oriented linguistics and sociolinguistics, that meaning is about contrast. When someone expresses an idea in form X (using these particular words and this particular grammatical structure), it is signiWcant that they are not expressing the idea in form Y or Z, though Y and Z would also have been possibilities (2001:51).

What is of interest thus potentially includes (a) recurring lexical items (e.g. ‘sexist’ language items in a tabloid newspaper text), (b) lexical absences (van Leeuwen 1996, 1997), i.e. lexical items which were not included, but logically and syntactically could have been, and from an indicated critical standpoint would be expected to have been, and (c) ‘one-oV’ words or phrases salient in content. These are exempliWed, in particular, in Sunderland’s paper on parentcraft texts (this volume). Discourse analysis has opened up the possibility of exploring a virtually inWnite range of spoken and written text types. This diversity of data is a welcome contribution to our resources for understanding the workings of gender – and we feel privileged in this collection to be able to include a diversity and wealth of fascinating and revealing data from a range of epistemological sites. Many of these sites, as we suggest in the section ‘Organisation of the Book’, are ‘epistemologically key’ for the on-going project of the study of changing gender identities and relations.

Identity and discourse How are relationships between discourse and identity best conceptualised? As Cameron points out, “Whatever else we do with words, when we speak we are always telling our listeners something about ourselves” (2001:170). The same is true of writing – though there is perhaps scope for more subtle mediation here. More speciWcally, from Chouliaraki and Fairclough: “in communicative


interaction people do not represent the world abstractly but in the course of and for the purposes of their social relations with others” and “you cannot semiotically construct (represent) reality without simultaneously identifying yourself and relating to other people in particular ways” (1999:41, 50). Relationships clearly exist between the narrowly ‘linguistic’ understanding of discourse, i.e. suprasententiality + use (Edmondson 1980:272), and identity, for example in the relationship between ethnicity and language choice (e.g. bilinguals will choose one language over another in a given context), or gender and choice of language features (a given woman may, or may not, try to ‘speak like a lady’). But by now it should be clear that we are following the understanding that there can also be a more powerful relationship between identity and discourse: that “speakers’ identities emerge from discourse” (Bucholtz 1999:4; our italics). In the words of Jaworski and Coupland, the ways we speak, and the way we speak to and about others, “turns individuals into subjective selves … various private and institutional discourses are constitutive of us and others as social subjects … these discourses fabricate our subjectivities” (1999:412– 413). Identity is, however, a two-way process: the result of joint production (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:41). As suggested earlier, the way we speak both to and about others, can be seen as aYliation, and this is important both for ourselves and for our contribution to existing discourses; but the way we are spoken about, attribution, can be important too. Horsman (1990) represents the dialectical process of identity construction as follows: who we are is being constantly shaped by the taken-for-granted concepts and assumptions embedded in discourses, and vice versa. Thus conceptualised, the role of discourse and its meaning-making is central to identity. Shotter and Gergen (1989) see identities as embedded within discourses, which are enabling and constraining: … cultural texts furnish their ‘inhabitants’ with the resources for the formation of selves; they lay out an array of enabling potentials, while simultaneously establishing a set of constraining boundaries beyond which selves cannot be easily made (1989: Preface).

Individuals can be more or less active in this process (and also can be represented as more or less active). An individual’s own discourse in this sense can be seen as mediating their own and others’ identities. The idea of discourse mediating identities is a wide-ranging and powerful

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one. To take Hollway’s (1984) discourses of sexuality, for example, the ‘Have and hold’ discourse (i.e. ‘how to get and keep your man’), which underpins almost the entire content of British magazines for young women, may mediate a feminine identity which goes beyond heterosexuality. It may also mediate associated identities involving notions of monogamy; the ‘art of seduction’; a privileging of male over female company; and a willingness to act against the interests of other women if this is what getting and keeping your man takes. Correspondingly, Hollway’s ‘male sexual drive’ discourse, evident for example in claims or implications that women by their dress or behaviour are often responsible for rape and sexual harassment, can be seen as having the potential to shape or mediate the identities of some women, perhaps those who are concerned about their ‘reputation’, and some men, perhaps those who are inclined to use the phrase ‘she led me on’. Like other identities, gender can be mediated through both ‘dominant’ and ‘subversive’/alternative discourses of, inter alia, femininity. For example, a woman who sees herself as a mother who puts her children at the centre of her world, i.e. who adopts the dominant discourse, and who gives up work to look after a new baby on a full-time basis, may Wnd it very diYcult to cope with a slowly but surely emerging identity of ‘career woman’: if she returns to work, the baby will have to be looked after by someone else (the ‘subversive’ discourse). Chouliaraki and Fairclough see some issues of identity as being particularly characteristic of ‘late modernity’, which they see as “pervasively undermin[ing] individual and collective identity” (1999:83). They observe: … struggles over the construction of identities are a salient feature of late modern social life. These are substantively matters of identiWcation in discourse – struggles to Wnd a voice as part of struggles to Wnd an identity. Late modernity is characterised by an enhanced reXexivity (for example, in the construction of identities) which is in part linguistic reXexivity – awareness about language which is self-consciously applied in interventions to change social life (including one’s own identity) (1999:83).

In looking at these struggles and interactions, it is important always to allow for both agency (Shotter and Gergen’s ‘enabling potentials’) and constraints on agency, and accordingly on the power relations between the ‘discourse users’. A focus on identities, as on discourses, accordingly entails an exploration of those power relations, including those associated with institutional domination.


Identity and performativity A focus on gendered identities is central to current theorisations of gender as socially and discursively constructed, a continual process of negotiation and modiWcation. However, gender can also be conceptualised as ‘performance’. This is not a question of ‘either/or’, but may be a question of theoretical primacy. The idea of gender as performance (deriving from speech act theory), in the sense that one ‘performs’, displays, or enacts one’s gender, was developed by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), “to open up the Weld of possibility for gender without dictating what kind of possibilities ought to be realised” (Butler 1999:viii), and to ask “how do non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis?” (1999:xi). Seeing gender as performance has been widely and diversely taken up by others (it is considered by several contributors in this book) and indeed revisited by Butler herself (1999). Butler retrospectively characterises the notion of performativity in her 1990 work as follows: In the Wrst instance, the performativity of gender revolves around … the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its eVects through its naturalisation in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration (1999:xiv).

Performativity, i.e. doing or performing one’s gender in one way at any one time, is a useful concept. Exemplars to date have been the drag queen, typically a gay man who enacts a highly exaggerated representation of femininity which bears little relationship to the appearance of any actual women (Barrett 1999), and the telephone sex worker who uses a ‘feminine’ and ‘powerless’ language style to construct the particular version of femininity that she thinks her customers expect (Hall 1995). Such ‘performances’ are what Bucholtz (1999) refers to as ‘identity as improvisation’, and while the drag queen can be read as mocking women, even misogynistic, s/he can be also/simultaneously seen as subversive and disruptive in her/his active demonstration of gender as an artiWce: that ‘gender displays do not necessarily correlate with anatomical sex’ (Barrett 1999:315). Butler points out that drag should not be seen as a paradigm of subversive action, but rather as an example: a way to challenge the ‘naturalised knowledge’ that if a man is dressed as a woman, then we ‘know’

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(through often erroneous cultural inferences) what the reality is (and vice versa). Drag both exposes and disturbs social categories. ‘Reality’ is less Wxed than generally assumed; gender ‘reality’ is tenuous. At the same time, Butler remains concerned to relate such understandings to political action and the rights of women and sexual minorities: “Although this insight does not in itself constitute a political revolution, no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real” (1999:xxiii). Butler’s (now famous) original claim is that performativity constitute[s] the identity it is purported to be…. There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (1990:25).

It is not, however, simply a question of identity or performance: Cameron’s chapter in Jaworski and Coupland’s Discourse Reader (1999) is entitled ‘Performing gender identity’; one of Barrett’s (1999) sections is called ‘Polyphonous identity and acts of performed identity’. Associated with performativity is the productive concept of the indexing of identity through linguistic and other forms of performance; Rowe (2000), for example, illustrates convincingly how gay men may use language to index a gay male identity in talk – when they wish to do so, and by using stereotypical forms of ‘Gayspeak’ which may not correspond at all to the way they talk when they do not wish to perform such identity-signalling. Importantly, as Barrett observes: In identity performance, out-group stereotypes concerning the behavioural patterns of the group associated with the performed identity are likely to be more important than actual behavior or the group’s own behavioral norms (Hall 1995) …. Thus the language used in a performed category is likely to diVer from the actual speech of those who categorise themselves as having that identity (1999:318).4

However, even without drawing on notions of theatricality, much of everyone’s communication can be seen as “a ritualised process which allows the participants to construct and project desirable versions of their identities, in a succession of performances targeted at speciWc audiences” (Jaworski and Coupland 1999:407; see also Johnson 1997) – not that a given performance guarantees a given interpretation. ‘Constructing oneself’ (or indeed others) may also sometimes be linguistic ‘performance’. However, this raises questions not only about terminology but also about choice and intentionality.


When a woman is talking about the activities she does with her children, has she been able to select freely what identity to construct for her hearers? (Butler now notes her own curb of her “occasional voluntarism” (1999:xxv).) Is this woman intentionally constructing herself as a good mother? Similarly, if the same woman is also an academic who is talking about the importance she places on her students’ ability to, say, analyse data, in what sense is she now also performing/constructing herself and her academic identity, or using language to index this? And through this talk can she also be said through attribution to be constructing (present or absent) others (who may draw on rather diVerent discourses of motherhood, and of academia), in an evaluative, even deserving-of-criticism way? It is hard to draw a clear distinction between ‘intentional’ theatrical performance, and linguistic construction/indexing in talk. Interestingly, Butler now notes (with ironic self-criticism?): my theory sometimes waZes between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that a reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions (1999:xxv).

And, we can add, of language which does not Wt into the ‘speech act’ category. One other question is whether we are all automatically performing or constructing our gender all the time; if so, we are presumably also simultaneously performing other identities (e.g. our ethnicity) and at times the performance of one identity must then be privileged over that of another. But, as Swann (this volume) asks, “How does the analyst know?” Butler cautions that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies”, and that “no single account of construction [i.e. for gender, and race/ethnicity] will do” (1999:xvi). However, the details and differential workings of performance and construction await further theoretical and empirical exploration.

Organisation of the book The chapters in this book exemplify speciWc ways in which examination of the discourse of a particular spoken or written text or set of texts can be fruitful for the study of gender identities. All exemplify the importance of context and situatedness. Physical contexts (domains) include the classroom (Morrish,

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Sunderland et al.) and the psychiatric interview room (Telles Ribeiro). Text types produced within diVerent contexts include Lazar’s advertisements, Benwell’s ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazines, Litosseliti’s broadsheet newspaper columns, Sorea’s poem, and Sunderland’s parentcraft brochures and manuals. We see all of these as ‘key sites’ of epistemological interest which provide revealing data for feminist linguistics. There is diversity of theoretical assumptions, data, and analytical approach, but unity is also evident in the concerted focus on discourse and on identity. The ways these are theorised and investigated vary, but all contributors share a concern with the social. The Wrst section, Theorising Gender and Discourse, is largely concerned with conceptualising and exploring the gender/language/discourse relationship. While recognising their strengths, Swann, Mills, and Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen challenge early conceptualisations of gender and oVer more complex, sensitive and productive ones. Taking as given that the languagegender and discourse-gender relationships are Xuid and context-speciWc, Swann asks critically how far down the post-modernist road we can, and should go, and explores what we can say in general, if anything, about the relationship between gender and language. In doing so, she also usefully identiWes and draws on diVerent ‘warrants’ which have been used for making claims about this relationship. Mills provides a model of gender enactment, focusing on a case study analysed through a gender-informed understanding of the discourse of (im)politeness, located within a particular Community of Practice – a University Departmental party. Rather than using Brown and Levinson’s idea of positive and negative face, Mills looks at the question of women and politeness through a ‘relevance’ lens. Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen’s concern is the representational capacity of discourse. They introduce the concept of ‘toys as text’, and in doing so explicitly extend the notion of discourse to semiosis. Looking intertextually at books and comics related to particular dolls as well as the dolls themselves, they focus on the gendered meanings of these related ‘texts’, looking speciWcally at diVerentially gendered social values associated with these representations. The remaining sections cover a wide spectrum of four selected epistemological areas. These are the media (section 2), sexuality (section 3), education (section 4) and parenthood (section 5). In many ways highly institutionalised (thus, characteristically, of particular interest to CDA), each of these ‘areas’ has the potential to oppress or liberate. The contributions within each section relate to diVerent epistemological sites within the relevant area (though sev-


eral contributions in fact pertain to more than one area). Any spoken or written text concerning people (and few do not) must be gendered in some way, regardless of whether the ‘actors’ in it are of the opposite sex, and regardless of whether it uses ‘gender-neutral’ terms such as people, or genderspeciWc terms. Some epistemological sites and the data they oVer may however be more revealing than others in terms of what their texts and discourses can and do teach about gender. We hope readers will share our conviction that the sites explored here are well chosen for the insights they aVord, through their often unusual and often telling data. Section 2, Media, focuses on multi-media advertisements, broadsheet newspaper columns, and relatively recent men’s magazines such as GQ. Lazar shows speciWcally how through advertisements in Singapore, heterosexual feminine identity is constructed in relation to the complex notion of consumer as part of the country’s eugenic birth policy. Litosseliti examines the particular ways in which gender identity, and pre-established notions and assumptions about gender, are at work in constructing moral arguments in newspaper columns. Benwell shows that, despite ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazines originally being seen as a new departure for men and for gender relations, close scrutiny of their use of irony, their representations of ‘masculine hegemony’ and ‘otherness’, and their use of ‘focalisation’, show their linguistic/semiotic construction of masculinity to be at least in part traditionally oppositional to both femininity and homosexuality. In Section 3, Sexuality, constructions of both homosexuality and heterosexuality are represented. In dealing with the situation of the lesbian teacher, Morrish retains a Wrm grip on the notion of disadvantage as well as identity, exploring the lesbian teacher’s highly developed and highly situated linguistic strategies of ‘concealment’ and ‘disguisement’ within her professional practice, and how these position both her students and the lesbian teacher herself. Ribeiro’s interview data constitutes a case study of a manic/depressive woman and her (male) psychiatrist. Using GoVman’s idea of ‘framing’ as the linguistic negotiation of identities, and by looking at the discourse strategies employed by the woman to achieve recognition, reciprocity and understanding from the psychiatrist, Ribeiro explores the paradox for psychiatry which results from the discoursal incompatability between such strategies and the professional ‘inquiry’ frame, part of which is to see women as both dependent and unreasonable. The focus of Section 4 is Education. Having concluded that the familiar

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practice of studying ‘gender bias in the text’ is theoretically limited, and, relatedly, that it takes more than textual bias alone to shape femininity and masculinity, Sunderland, Abdul Rahim, Cowley, Leontzakou and Shattuck look instead at the discursive practices around the textbook texts used by the language teacher in class, recognising in particular that a text in which gender is very traditionally represented can always be discoursally ‘rescued’ in talk, in ways which can draw on useful pedagogic practices as well as shape progressive debate. Maybin’s paper on children’s talk represents a refreshing departure from an examination of ‘public’, institutionalised classroom discourse. Using her data of boys’ and girls’ talk, she explores ways of ‘inhabiting’ one’s gender and the creation in talk of discourses of masculinity and femininity. Section 5, Parenthood, includes analysis by Sorea of a literary text, a satirical poem, and work by Sunderland on a non-literary set of ‘informational’ texts on parentcraft. Both are centrally concerned not only with gender identities, but also with gender relations in two very diVerent sets of social practices: the former between women and the masculinised totalitarian state, the latter between ‘Western’ female and male parents living under capitalism in conditions of relative aZuence and economic stability. Sunderland’s paper also raises the issue of ‘whose expertise counts?’ As Cameron points out, with reference to Foucault in the modern age … a great deal of power and social control is exercised not by brute physical force or even by economic coercion, but by the activities of ‘experts’ who are licensed to deWne, describe and classify things and people (2001:16).

In their diVerent ways both papers illustrate and indeed reveal the discourses which construct maternity and the sometime incompatible identities which mothers must negotiate. Sunderland also shows how ‘identity discourses’ of fatherhood may not be compatible with those of motherhood; Sorea how those of autonomous motherhood conXict violently with those of patriarchal totalitarianism. They also both show how though motherhood and fatherhood may be intensely personal identities, they are simultaneously gendered institutions intimately bound up with, and vulnerable to, the workings of the wider society (cf. Rich 1976). It is perhaps not a coincidence that of the nine contributions which make up (and are distributed across) sections 2 to 5, Wve are concerned with sites related to the act of sex in some way. Sex is only in one sense a biological act. The discourses in these texts are also, crucially, about social relations


and identities (cf. Foucault 1976), in particular, gender relations and identities – making texts related to sex particularly fruitful for the study of the linguistic construction of these. Texts about homosexuality frequently ‘disturb’ in that they render conventional assumptions about gender problematic, but many texts with an apparent heterosexual but non-conventional focus on sex have the potential to do the same. Texts relating to sex are thus arguably sites of epistemological interest par excellence for gender studies and for feminist linguistics.

Conclusion As a result of new understandings and theoretical developments on which these and other studies draw, gender can be seen as profoundly variable, and, even within an individual, multi-faceted and shifting. Gender study in linguistics has accordingly undergone a radical shift of focus from ‘gender roles’ and ‘gender diVerences’ to a focus on variable identities (femininities and masculinities) and on gender not only as an individual, or even social attribute, but also as contextualised, changing sets of practices. Discourse analysis of particular spoken and written texts can illuminate the range of ways in which gender identities are represented and constructed, performed and indexed, interpreted and contested. If Volosinov (1973) is correct, and the “dialogical interactions of everyday life” do indeed “constitute a sensitive barometer which registers subtle processes of social change before they solidify into fully Xedged social forms” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:118), then the discoursal constructions and representations of gender identity shown in this collection point in some interesting and extremely diverse social directions. Adopting a discourse approach to gender makes it diYcult to make global statements about women’s and men’s language. This ‘diYculty’, a necessary eVect of analytical sensitivity, is something we see as productive. However, we hope we are not guilty of what Chouliaraki and Fairclough describe as ‘discourse idealism’: seeing the social as nothing but discourse (1999:28). As Cameron reminds us, “there are varying views on whether and to what extent social reality is ‘discursively constructed’ ” (2001:17). (See Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) for a discussion of other ‘moments’ of the social, and of ‘articulation’ of these.) We need to ask whether an emphasis on constructive and creative diver-

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sity, and always ‘looking laterally’, may lead to the creation of a Weld with (ironically) a loss of identity, or at least to a Weld with diminished critical edge. ‘Language and Gender’ as a still young and shifting Weld must be concerned about this. Its current creativity needs not to become politically self-defeating. An obvious concern for new language and gender study is the contribution of, and its contribution to, feminism. Whereas the early ‘gender diVerences’ and ‘sexist language’ prongs of the Weld had as a central focus the various ways women were disadvantaged by language, the notion of disadvantage in some current work is sometimes more subtle, but is sometimes simply not in evidence (and accordingly not contested). This is in some ways understandable. If in a given cultural context or Community of Practice, even a feminist study has found no evidence of disadvantage of women, this is to be celebrated. In particular, if gender similarities and apparent equalities are found by a study revisiting the ‘gender diVerences’ paradigm, which set out to look for diVerences, this should be as worthy of public documentation as if diVerences and inequalities had been found, if not more so. ‘Disadvantage’ is a problematic concept, and one that is sometimes perceived by the researcher more than by the participants of her study. However, the 1970s feminist suspicion of any ‘gender diVerences’ in a given context surely still has something to oVer, since ‘diVerent but/and equal’ has rarely if ever translated from slogan to lived experience. While always recognising the importance of complexity, speciWcity, context and Xux, then, and indeed the very serious dangers of essentialism,5 feminist linguists would do well to retain at some level the twin notions of diVerence and disadvantage, in conjunction with that of identity. New progressive discourses of gender cannot be straightforwardly produced under conditions of extreme social repression of women. Under such conditions, struggles over discursive practices need to be part of wider social struggles, for example for the existence of laws ensuring equality of access to education (see Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). Where is the study of gender and language going? Already, rightly, extending to masculinities, the Weld is now also characterised by a large amount of work on Queer linguistics. The focus of study here tends to be on gay men rather than gay women (see, for example, the programme of the 2000 International Gender and Language Association (IGALA1) Conference). However, this ‘branch’ of study is largely managing to avoid the pitfalls of an approach which endlessly compares ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ speech in women or men, within diVerent contexts (see e.g. Baker 2002).


The roots of these and other relatively new directions can be traced back to the empirical studies and various theoretical paradigms in language and gender research of the previous three decades, against which background new paradigms can be developed, new data collected, new analytical frameworks used and new conclusions reached. It is a tribute to the vigour of the previous work in the Weld that these new directions are possible. However, sexuality is larger than gay identities, and gay identities are about women as much as men. Forward-looking work in this collection, and others, rightly includes but goes beyond sexuality. Like its objects of study, work on gender, on identity and on discourse is never still; the ‘discourse analysis and gender identity’ project never complete. The question ‘What is the way forward for discourse analysis, in relation to gender and language study?’ can still be asked, either from a standpoint of disinterested curiosity or from one of a commitment to feminism. This collection suggests the importance and indeed appropriacy of critical analyses (whether or not these are located within CDA) to the study of gender and language. A familiar critique of such approaches, which comes particularly from Conversation Analysis, is that they do not take readers’ interpretations into account, but rely too much on those of the analyst (SchegloV 1998; but see also Wetherell 1998) – in some ways paradoxical for an approach essentially concerned with, and about people. CDA has however taken such criticism on board – at least rhetorically. Chouliaraki and Fairclough, for example, acknowledge that “a great deal of critical discourse analysis – including some of Fairclough’s own work – has been analysis of texts in abstraction from interactions” (1999:46), and go on to recommend that discourse analytical research should be seen as only one aspect of research into social practices working together with other social scientiWc methods, particularly ethnography…. [E]thnography can illuminate multiple aspects of a practice…. It also provides an invaluable context for assessing the articulatory process in the practice and the speciWc function of discourse in it (1999:62).

The challenge for language and gender study which draws on discourse analysis would then seem to be, while empirically embracing the idea of valuing the interpretation of a text by those to whom it is addressed, or by those who read it anyway, to ensure that a study compromises neither in its close analysis of that discourse, nor in its work to relate this to wider, invariably gendered, and potentially damaging, social arrangements.

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Notes 1. These include: Bergvall, Victoria, Janet Bing and Alice Freed (eds). 1996. Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. London: Longman. Bucholtz, Mary, A.C. Liang and Laurel A. Sutton (eds). 1999. Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Deborah (ed). 1998. The Feminist Critique of Language (2nd edition). London: Routledge. Cheshire, Jennifer and Peter Trudgill. 1998. The Sociolinguistics Reader Volume 2: Gender and Discourse. London: Arnold. Coates, Jennifer (ed). 1998. Language and Gender: A Reader. London: Routledge. Hall, Kira and Mary Bucholtz (eds). 1995. Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. London: Routledge. Johnson, Sally and Ulrike Meinhof (eds). 1997. Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kotthof, Helga and Ruth Wodak (eds). 1998. Communicating Gender in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Livia, Anna and Kira Hall (eds). 1997. Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality. Oxford: OUP. Mills, Sara (ed). 1995. Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Longman. Romaine, Suzanne. 1999. Communicating Gender. London: L. Erlbaum. Sunderland, Jane (ed). 1994. Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Talbot, Mary. 1998. Language and Gender: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Wilkinson, Sue and Kitzinger, Celia (eds). 1995. Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth, (ed). 1997. Gender and Discourse. London: Sage. 2. These names are of course interpretive and given by the analysts. As Chouliaraki and Fairclough note: “(there is no closed ‘list’ of … discourses, and there are relatively few that have stable names either for analysts or for participants); the important point is that [a discourse] is recognisable as [a particular type of language]” (1999:56). 3. Arguably, however, there is no ‘clear blue water’ separating Critical Discourse Analysis from other kinds of Discourse Analysis. We endorse Jaworski and Coupland’s view that “in all but its blandest forms, such as when it remains at the level of language description, discourse analysis adopts a ‘critical’ perspective on language in use” (1999:32). 4. And, as Barrett (1999:318) further observes: Audience assumptions and expectations may crucially help to coconstruct a performance that successfully conveys a particular identity regardless of the accuracy of the linguistic performance when compared to the behavior of the ‘authentic’ holders of the identity in question (Preston 1992).


5. As regards sexual minorities, but the same applies to women, Butler writes: “Even as I think that gaining recognition for one’s status … is a diYcult task within reigning discourses of law, politics and language, I continue to consider it a necessity for survival” (1999:xxvi).

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cation”. In Language and Social Identity, John Gumperz (ed), 196–216. Cambridge: CUP. Mason, Jennifer. 1996. Qualitative Researching. London: Sage. Mills, Sara (forthcoming). Third Way Feminist Linguistics and the Analysis of Sexism. Cambridge: CUP. Mills, Sara. 1997. Discourse. London: Routledge. Mills, Sara. 1994. Gendering the Reader. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ogbay, Sarah. 1999. Gendered perceptions, silences and resistance in two Eritrean secondary schools: Reasons for girls’ lower performance than boys. PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Pauwels, Anne. 1998. Women Changing Language. London: Longman. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence”. Signs 5 (4):631–660. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton. Rowe, Clarissa. 2000. ‘True Gay–hegemonic homosexuality?’–representations of gayness in conversations between gay men. MA dissertation, Lancaster University. Rowling, J. K. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. SchegloV, Emanuel. 1998. “Reply to Wetherell”. Discourse and Society 9(3):413–416. Schneider, Joseph and Hacker, Sally. 1973. “Sex role imagery and use of the generic ‘man’ in introductory texts”. American Sociologist 8:12–18. Segal, Lynne. 1990. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London:Virago. Shotter, John and Gergen, Kenneth (eds). 1989. Texts of Identity. London: Sage. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge. Stubbs, Michael. 1983. Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Sunderland, Jane. 1998. “Review of Bergvall, Victoria, Bing, Janet and Freed, Alice (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research (Longman 1996). Sociological Research Online 3 (2): http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/2/sunderland.html. Sunderland, Jane. 1995. “ ‘We’re boys, miss!’: Wnding gendered identities and looking for gendering of identities in the foreign language classroom”. In Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Sara Mills (ed), 160–178. Harlow: Longman. Swann, Joan. 1992. Girls, Boys and Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Talbot, Mary. 1998. Language and Gender. London: Polity. Talbot, Mary. 1995a. Fictions at Work – Language and Social Practice in Fiction. London: Longman. Talbot, Mary. 1995b. “A synthetic sisterhood: false friends in a teenage magazine”. In Gender Articulated, Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds), 143–165. London: Routledge. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand. London:Virago. Trudgill, Peter. 1972. The Social DiVerentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Dijk, Teun. 1993. “Principles of critical discourse analysis”. Discourse and Society 4 (3):249–283. van Dijk, Teun. 1990. “Social cognition and discourse”. In Handbook of Social Psychology


and Language, Howard Giles and W. Peter Robinson (eds), 163–183. Chichester: Wiley. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1997. “Representing social action”. Discourse and Society 6 (1):81– 106. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. “The representation of social actors”. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge. Volosinov, Valentin. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, L. and Titunik, I. New York: Seminar Press. Weatherall, Ann. 2000. “Gender relevance in talk-in-interaction and discourse”. Discourse and Society 11 (2):286–288. Weedon, Chris. 1987. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Wetherell, Margaret. 1998. “Positioning and interpretative repertoires: conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue”. Discourse and Society 9 (3):387–412. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don. 1983. “Small insults: a study of interruptions in cross-sex conversations between unacquainted persons”. In Language, Gender and Society, Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramare and Nancy Henley (eds), 102–117. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. White, Janet. 1990. “On literacy and gender”. In Literacy for a Changing World, Francis Christie (ed), 143–166. Victoria, Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Wodak, Ruth. 1997. “Introduction: some important issues in the research of gender and discourse”. In Gender and Discourse, Ruth Wodak (ed), 1–20. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth. 1989. Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Theorising Gender and Discourse

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Chapter 2

Yes, but is it gender? Joan Swann Open University, UK

Introduction Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the Wrst book focussing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women’s language and men’s language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. (Blurb for Bergvall, Bing and Freed 1996)

Rethinking language and gender research has been very much in the air over the past few years. Bergvall, Bing and Freed (1996) is one of a number of books (I do not think it is actually the Wrst) that sets out to challenge earlier research practices and the theories (implicit or explicit) that informed them. There is a danger of caricaturing earlier traditions in order to establish the novelty of what we do now – by no means all earlier work on language and gender proposed a strict dichotomy between female and male language users. The general picture that emerged from reviews of such work was always one of general tendencies that admitted of some variability: female speakers tended to use language in one way, male speakers in another.1 Nevertheless, there has been a general shift that might best be characterised as running from relative Wxity to relative Xuidity in terms of how ‘language’ and ‘gender’ are conceived and how the two are seen to interrelate. I shall refer to the current, relatively Xuid, position as broadly postmodernist, in the sense that it is part of a more general intellectual trend towards the questioning, if not the subversion of any notion of discrete categories of identity that has been associated with postmodernist thinkers.2 I am using this term for want of a better one, and do not mean to imply by this

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that all contemporary language and gender researchers explicitly acknowledge a common theoretical base in postmodernism, or even that they all acknowledge an explicit theoretical base. Academic ideas and traditions are notoriously leaky, and the ideas I discuss here seem to me to be widespread and not just to apply to fully paid-up postmodernists. Recent preoccupations in language and gender research have to do with diversity (diVerences amongst women and amongst men), context (seeing language/meaning as context-dependent, and gender as a contextualised social practice) and uncertainty/ambiguity (in terms of the meanings of what speakers say and do). The respects in which this is a shift from a more Wxed view of language and gender can be exempliWed by considering research on classroom language. Such research, carried out since the late 1970s, suggests that there are diVerences in girls’ and boys’ speaking styles. These lead to boys dominating classroom interaction. Girls provide more interactional support, but this in eVect leads to them ‘giving away power’ in mixed-sex contexts (for a review see Swann 1992). There are clear practical implications arising from such research: the 1980s saw the development of a number of equal opportunities and anti-sexist initiatives designed to redress the inequalities that had been documented. Such generalised patterns of diVerence and disadvantage are, however, challenged by more Xuid models of language and gender: these would point to the need for contextualised interpretations of language use, which may throw up ambiguities and analytical uncertainties; to diVerences between girls and between boys (not all girls are ‘supportive’); and to the resultant fragmentation of formerly Wxed social categories such as ‘girl’ or ‘boy’. The practical implications of such a shift are by no means clear. In working with such models I have found myself getting ‘stuck’ on a number of issues, and I want to work through some of these in the remainder of this paper. My interests here are quite practical. I am interested in the empirical analysis of language: in how an analyst approaches an utterance or text, how they interpret this, and what ‘warrants’ (to borrow a term from conversation analysis) they draw on (implicitly or explicitly) to support their interpretation. In particular, I want to consider whether the models of language and gender I have outlined above allow an analyst to make any general statements about gendered language use; and whether it matters if they don’t. The points I am making can be related to recent commentaries on ‘critical’ approaches to language analysis. Emanuel SchegloV (1997), for instance, in a paper entitled ‘Whose text? Whose context?’, argues against what he terms the ‘theoretical imperialism’ of critical researchers who analyse texts from their

Yes, but is it gender?

own ideological perspective rather than seeking to understand speakers’/ participants’ orientations. And Michael Stubbs (1997) criticizes the reliance of much critical discourse analysis (CDA) on small amounts of data that may (even if unwittingly) have been selected to support the analyst’s viewpoint. While both SchegloV and Stubbs are concerned with how analysts may produce a valid interpretation of data, their approach to this question and the solutions they propose are somewhat diVerent. I shall return to their work below. The discussion in the remainder of this paper will apply, at some level, to all aspects of written and spoken language, but I shall focus primarily on the study of spoken interaction, which is the area I am most familiar with as a researcher.

Problematizing ‘language’ The analysis of ‘gendered language’ has traditionally been bedeviled by what is sometimes known as the ‘form/function’ problem. For instance, Wndings that male speakers interrupt female speakers more than vice versa were based on studies of linguistic forms: interruptions were usually identiWed as speech that began before a previous speaking turn was complete, or almost complete (precise deWnitions varied from one study to another). What was important, however, was not the identiWcation of diVerences in the use of certain linguistic forms, but the functions that could be ‘read oV’ from these. Seeing certain types of overlapping speech as interruptions suggested that these were hostile incursions into another speaker’s turn (e.g. Zimmerman and West 1975; West and Zimmerman 1983). The problem here was that it was possible to attribute diVering functions to the same, or very similar linguistic forms. Thus large amounts of overlapping speech were seen as supportive in informal talk between women (Coates 1996). Janet Holmes’ research on a corpus of New Zealand data diVered from earlier formal studies by taking an explicitly functional approach. Holmes recognised that the same linguistic form could have diVerent functions, and looked at how these functions were distributed between female and male speakers. Her discussion of tag questions (Holmes 1984) provides a useful illustration of this approach. Tag questions (of the form ‘It’s hot in here, isn’t it?’) have been controversial in language and gender research. While Robin LakoV (1975) speculated that women used these forms more than men, Wnd-

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ings from subsequent empirical investigations have been inconsistent (e.g. Baumann 1979; Dubois and Crouch 1975; Preisler 1986). Holmes identiWed distinct functions of tag questions in her data, and showed that women and men used these diVerently: for instance, women used more tags that could be interpreted as facilitative or supportive. While this is, in many respects, an improvement on earlier formal studies, the functional approach itself is not without problems. Deborah Cameron et al. (1988) tried to replicate Holmes’ functional classiWcation of tag questions in an analysis of British conversational data. Their Wndings were sometimes inconsistent with those of Holmes but, more importantly, they found it was not always possible to assign tag questions unambiguously to one category or another. Tag questions were often ambiguous and they could have more than one function simultaneously. (For a more complete account of Holmes’ functional analysis, see Holmes 1995.) These Wndings are in line with the more recent approaches to language I mentioned above, which see meanings, or functions, as relatively unstable, potentially ambiguous and heavily context-dependent. One of the clearest statements of this position comes from Deborah Cameron in Feminism and Linguistic Theory (1992). Cameron explicitly rejects the ‘Wxed code’ model of language that she claims underpins much traditional linguistics as well as certain feminist accounts of language. She proposes, as an alternative, ‘integrational linguistics’ (Harris 1981), a model in which language is regarded as a communicative phenomenon, rooted in context and used creatively by speakers: ... language is radically contextual. It is not just a matter of context aVecting the system, the system has no existence outside a context. Thus language cannot be abstracted from time and space, or from the extralinguistic dimensions of the situation in which it is embedded. Just as modern biologists regard even simple organisms’ behaviour as produced by incredibly complex interactions of genetic and environmental phenomena, so even the simplest linguistic exchange involves a constellation of factors – linguistic, contextual, social and so on – which is always more than the sum of its parts. And this also implies, of course, that meaning is radically indeterminate and variable (Cameron 1992:192; italics as in original).

This suggests, to Cameron, that some women’s feelings of ‘alienation’ from language derive, not from the language system itself, but from their exclusion from certain linguistic practices that have traditionally been dominated by men.


While Cameron is concerned with language and (feminist) politics, her statement, in emphasising the indeterminacy of language meaning, also has implications for the language or discourse analyst. If one accepts such a Xuid conception of language and meaning, for instance, what implications does this have for the authority with which analysts interpret texts? How do analysts establish the meaning of an utterance? Is one interpretation as good as any other? The reliance on context is also problematical: for the analyst, what should count as relevant context, and what sort of warrants do analysts need to make inferences about this? Such problems relate not just to how one handles language, but also to gender, which I turn to below.

Problematizing ‘gender’ Like language, gender as a social category has come to be seen as highly Xuid, or less well deWned than it once appeared. In line with gender theory more generally, researchers interested in language and gender have focussed increasingly on plurality and diversity amongst female and male language users, and on gender as performative – something that is ‘done’ in context, rather than a Wxed attribute.3 The whole notion of gender, and identity in general, is challenged when this is seen, rather like language itself, as Xuid, contingent and context-dependent. This is mainly an alternative theoretical conception of gender, though there are also suggestions that identities are loosening, so that in many contexts people now have a wider range of identity options.4 ‘Traditional’ research on gender and spoken language has been challenged on several counts. Shân Wareing (1996), for instance, took issue with the methodology adopted in some earlier studies, arguing that rather large generalisations about female and male language use had been made on the basis of inadequate evidence. If one accepts this critique, an implication might be that such studies could be improved upon: research using (say) larger samples, or a wider range of contexts, could produce more reliable evidence of the relationship between gender and language. Recent conceptions of gender/ identity, however, go several steps further: they would seem to call into question any generalized claims about language and gender. Such ideas are prevalent amongst contemporary studies (see, e.g., the papers in Bergvall, Bing and Freed 1996; Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton 1999; Hall and Bucholtz 1995; Johnson and Meinhof 1997; and Wodak 1997). As an illustration, Bergvall, Bing and Freed’s (1996) Rethinking Language and Gen-

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der Research, which I cited above, has an explicit emphasis on challenging ‘traditional’ binary distinctions between female and male language users, and a focus on the diversity of women’s and men’s experiences. Hall and Bucholtz’s (1995) Gender Articulated focuses on women. As in Bergvall et al. there is an emphasis on diversity amongst women and on the Xuid nature of social identity: the collection takes Robin LakoV’s early work as a canonical text for its starting point, but claims to be moving from ‘Woman’s Place’ to ‘Women’s Places’. Johnson and Meinhof’s (1997) Language and Masculinity has, overall, a Xuid conception of masculinity; in a similar vein to the other volumes, it focuses on the variable nature of masculine identities. Sally Johnson, one of the editors of Language and Masculinity, gives a clear statement of this position: Work within pro-feminist approaches to masculinity has explored men in terms of ‘multiple subjectivities’, and this has led writers to abandon the idea of ‘masculinity’ in the singular, in preference for the pluralized ‘masculinities’. The concept of ‘male power’ is then dislodged by the notion of ‘hegemonic’ or ‘hierarchical’ masculinities, perhaps best characterized as those forms of masculinity able to marginalize and dominate not only women, but also other men, on the grounds of, say, class, race and/or sexuality (Connell 1987). According to this view of masculinities, where gender identities and power relations are seen as highly contextualised practices, it becomes rather more diYcult to make clear and generalizable statements about how men are or what they do (Johnson 1997:19–20; note, the Connell referred to is Bob Connell’s work on gender and power; see also Connell (1995) on masculinities).

Johnson’s emphases here on the pluralisation of gender and on gender as a contextualised practice have major implications for the language analyst. Pluralization, on its own, is the lesser challenge. Relating gender to social attributes such as class, race and sexuality suggests a focus on interactions between diVerent aspects of identity: rather than looking at the language of ‘men’, we can look at ‘working class white heterosexual men’ ... or whatever. But this on its own leaves the boundaries between diVerent social identities fairly stable and untroubled. Seeing gender as a contextualised practice is a more important theoretical shift. If gender identity is something that is done, in context, this begs the question of how an analyst is able to interpret any utterance in terms of masculinity (or working class, white, heterosexual masculinity). How does the analyst assess whether a speaker is doing gender, or another aspect of identity? How does this relate to any one of a number of other things speakers and listeners may be doing in an interaction? (There are


similar problems in assessing whether a speaker is carrying out certain activities associated with gender – e.g. doing power.) The situation is compounded in that, with this more fragmented model of identity, there is no need to stick to ‘established’ categories such as gender, class, race, sexuality: a whole set of identity features (being a manager, someone’s mother, a sensible person) is potentially relevant; furthermore, a speaker may be stacking a number of complementary identities, or trying to balance sets of competing identities. The analyst, then, faces a major task in deciding what aspects of identity are relevant – or, slightly paraphrasing Nicholson (1990), in determining what aspects of ‘diVerence’ make a diVerence.

Interpreting ‘gendered language’ I want to examine below some of the challenges produced by this shift in conceptions of language and gender for the language analyst. As a starting point, it seems useful to consider the warrants actually used by researchers, both historically and at present, to draw inferences about language and gender. Across a whole range of empirical studies, it is possible to identify a series of warrants for gender; that is, a series of decision procedures adopted by analysts that justify interpreting data (an utterance, or a linguistic construction, or a set of linguistic features) as, in some way, gendered. I have set out below those that occur to me, and I shall work through each of these in turn.

Warrants for gender in language and gender research –

– – – – – –

quantitative and/or general patterns (derived from correlational studies of language use, large (computerised) corpora or other systematic comparison between the language of diVerent social groups) indirect reliance on quantitative/general patterns ‘participants’ orientations’ as evident in the text speakers’/participants’ solicited interpretations analysts’ theoretical positions analysts’ intuitions speakers/participants are female, male (or whatever)

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Quantitative and/or general patterns By this I mean work that attempts a systematic comparison between some aspects of language used by female and male (or diVerent types of female/ male) speakers. The comparison need not involve quantiWcation but frequently does so. A great deal of work that identiWes generalised diVerences between female and male speech has been carried out within what Deborah Cameron and Jennifer Coates (1988) termed the ‘quantitative paradigm’: this refers to traditional ‘variationist’ studies of (usually) pronunciation or grammatical features that chart the distribution of these features across social groups and across contexts. Variationist studies are able to identify systematic diVerences between social groups in terms of their language use. Earlier studies have usually taken social class as their primary social division, and have compared the speech of women and men from ‘the same’ social class. One of their most important (and certainly most discussed) Wndings is that women tend to use more standard or ‘prestige’ features of language, and men more non-standard or vernacular features (see, e.g. Labov 1966; Macaulay 1978; Newbrook 1982; Trudgill 1974; Wolfram 1969).5 More recent variationist studies have qualiWed some of these highly general Wndings, relating language use not just to gender per se, but to women’s and men’s lifestyles, the social networks they form part of, and the activities they engage in, as well as to more complex interactions between gender and other aspects of speakers’ identities (e.g. Eckert 1998; Holmes 1996; Horvath 1985; Milroy 1980, 1992; Thomas 1988). While quantiWcation has frequently been associated with variationist studies, many studies of interactional or conversational features (such as interruptions) have adopted quantitative methods to allow comparison between women’s and men’s language use. An example from the classroom is Jane Sunderland’s (1996, 1998) study looking at the distribution of diVerent kinds of speaking turn between girls and boys. Vivian de Klerk (1997) has also drawn a quantitative comparison between girls’ and boys’ reported use of expletives. Other studies of interaction have established general diVerences between female and male speakers without employing quantitative methods – e.g. Jennifer Coates’ claim, made on the basis of systematic study of audiorecordings and transcripts, that “while women talking with women friends tend to adopt a collaborative Xoor, men talking with male friends stick to a one-at-a-time Xoor” (1997:108). Computerised corpora allow the quantitative analysis of huge volumes of


data so that analysts can see patterns in the distributions and associations of certain words and phrases; in the language used in diVerent types of text; and in the language used by diVerent types of speaker/writer. The use of electronic spoken language corpora to investigate language and gender is still relatively undeveloped. One or two studies, however, while not focussing primarily on gender, have Wndings of relevance to language and gender researchers – e.g. Rayson, Leech, and Hodges’ (1997) study of social (including gender) diVerentiation in the use of English vocabulary; and McEnery, Baker and Hardie’s (1999 and 2000) studies of the use of swearing and abuse in British English. Michael Stubbs (1996) provides good illustrations of the possibilities of corpus-based methods for ‘socially-oriented’ linguistic research, although the examples that are most relevant to gender focus on written texts. An analysis of two short texts – the Wnal messages of Baden-Powell to guides and scouts – revealed that, alongside conventionally ‘sexist’ language, words such as happy and happiness had diVerent collocations, or associations, in each text: for instance, guides were frequently exhorted to make others happy, whereas scouts were more frequently told to be happy themselves. Stubbs was also able to compare the collocations of happy and happiness in these two texts with those in a much larger computerised corpus of spoken and written English. The value of all the work I have discussed in this section is precisely that, if decision procedures are followed correctly, it allows systematic and potentially large-scale comparison between the language used by diVerent groups of speakers. Such work should also, in principle, be replicable (similar studies carried out in similar contexts should obtain similar results).6 There are, however, acknowledged problems in the interpretation of generalised/quantitative patterns. I referred above to the fact that female or male speakers’ use of certain linguistic features may be associated with some other factor (e.g. employment) rather than, directly, with gender. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998) point to the need to take into account a variety of data in the search for general patterns, to consider ‘exceptions’ (e.g. in variationist research, cases in which women’s language is not more standard than men’s), and to relate observations of language behaviour to the practices of particular communities. On its own, the establishment of general patterns in the distribution of linguistic features is a limited and potentially reductive exercise which tells us nothing about how language is used by women and men in speciWc contexts, nor about what speakers are doing as they talk.

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Indirect reliance on quantitative and/or general patterns By ‘indirect reliance’ I mean the fact that some small-scale and/or contextualised studies are explicitly reliant on general patterns derived from individual larger studies, or from the general ‘body of work’ on language and gender. Small-scale/contextualised studies may go on to qualify or question general patterns while still deriving their raison d’être, in part, from the prior existence of these patterns. An example of this comes from my own earlier work on classroom talk. In one study, a colleague and I questioned traditional patterns of ‘male dominance’ in the classroom, pointing out (for instance) that ‘dominance’, where it existed, was accomplished interactionally by all participants; and that this accomplishment drew on context-speciWc interactional resources (Swann and Graddol 1988; Swann 1988). However, beginning to approach the data in terms of dominance (i.e. seeing this as an issue worth developing further and perhaps qualifying) depended on the existence of a substantial body of evidence of male dominance in the classroom and elsewhere.

‘Participants’ orientations’ as evident in the text A useful statement of this position comes from the conversation analyst Emanuel SchegloV, whose criticism of ‘theoretical imperialism’ I referred to above. SchegloV (1997) is concerned to demonstrate that a text (he focuses on spoken interaction) may be understood ‘in its own terms’ and that its meaning may be revealed by close formal analysis. He argues that any aspects of context that are seen to be relevant to an interaction (including the social characteristics of participants/speakers) should derive from the orientations of the participants/speakers themselves, and not from those of the analyst. SchegloV is actually talking about something more limited than the expression ‘participants’ orientations’ may suggest. He is referring to just those features that are made visible (or audible) in an interaction.7 SchegloV’s position contrasts with that of quantitative researchers, but also with that of any critical researchers who seek to interpret a text in terms of gender unless there is some explicit warrant for this in the text itself. SchegloV’s examples are, in fact, concerned with gender. In one of these, he quotes an extract from a conversation between four people: Michael and Nancy, Shane and Vivian, who are having dinner together:


1. Shane: [· hehh huh · hhhh Most wishful thinkin 2. → hey hand me some a ’dat fuckin budder will you? 3. (0.8) 4. ?Shane: °° Oh::yeah °° 5. (1.1) 6. Nancy: → C’n I have some t[oo 7. Michael: [mm-hm[hm: 8. Nancy: [hm-hm-^h[m [^he-ha-]ha · hehh] 9. Vivian:→ [Ye[h [I wa]nt ] some too] 10. Shane: [N[o:. ] [ ( )11. Shane: No. 12. (0.2) 13. Shane:→ Ladies la:st. (SchegloV 1997:181–2; see Appendix for transcription conventions)

SchegloV points out that Shane’s initial request for the butter (line 2) is directed towards Michael. Michael passes the butter to Shane, and this process is tracked by Nancy and Vivian. Nancy’s, and then Vivian’s requests for the butter (lines 6 and 9) are directed towards Shane. Shane’s ironic rejection of their requests is justiWed by the comment ‘ladies last’ in line 13. SchegloV argues that this may be interpreted in terms of gender because there is evidence that the participants themselves are orienting towards gender – Shane’s explicit reference to ‘ladies’. SchegloV concedes that gender may be relevant without being explicitly named in this way but argues that such an interpretation would still depend upon participants’ (demonstrable) orientation towards gender. SchegloV raises interesting questions about how an analyst can determine the salience of ‘contextual’ features such as gender, but his solution itself raises further questions. For participants in an interaction, for instance, what is left unsaid may be as important as what is actually uttered, but SchegloV’s framework would rule out anything not visibly (or audibly) attended to in the interaction. The focus in this case on a single utterance is also problematical. Shane’s interjection of ‘ladies last’ suggests that gender is a potentially salient category for Shane – it is something that may be invoked, or foregrounded. Because Shane utters the phrase in this context, this means he also assumes his co-conversationalists will recognise gender as (potentially) salient. However, the interactional scope of ‘ladies last’ remains unclear: does this mean that gender is a continuing interactional theme, attended to by Shane (and other

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participants)? Or does Shane’s remark represent a sudden shift – an attempt to recast the interaction in terms of gender? The analytical limits imposed by SchegloV make it diYcult to address such issues. A further problem resides in the priority SchegloV accords to participants’ (or, in this case, one participant’s) apparent orientation to gender. This raises the question of who has the power to attribute meaning in a text. Do participants need explicitly (or even knowingly) to put gender on record for gender to be seen as important in an interaction? Shane seems here to be commenting on (and so oVering an interpretation of) his own actions – but is his interpretation any more valid than that of another participant, or an overhearer – or, of course, an analyst? SchegloV’s paper has provoked considerable debate in Discourse in Society, the journal in which it was published. Commentators such as Margaret Wetherell (1998) and Michael Billig (1999a) have pointed out that analysts necessarily impose their own concerns on data (e.g. in selecting extracts for analysis and bringing particular analytic concepts to bear on these). Billig argues further that, rather than being ideologically neutral, conversation analysis conveys a ‘non-critical’ view of the social world: its ‘foundational rhetoric’ (including the way speakers and conversations are conceptualized) represents a world characterised by equality and participation (this point is disputed by SchegloV – for the full debate see SchegloV 1999a and b and Billig 1999b). Wetherell suggests that, in combination with certain post-structuralist traditions, conversation analysis may contribute to a more complete analysis that takes into account the broader ‘interpretative resources’ speakers have at their disposal – including “the conversational or discursive history which makes this particular conversation possible” (1998:403). Wetherell’s own concern is with the role of discourse analysis within social psychology: her illustrative data come from talk elicited in a group interview focussing on aspects of masculinities. In this case, she illustrates how young male speakers negotiate multiple and conXicting identities for one member of the group, and how these are related to the ‘interpretative repertoires’ available to the speakers (see also SchegloV’s rejoinder to Wetherell – SchegloV 1998). In a later paper in the Discourse and Society debate, Elizabeth Stokoe and Janet Smithson (2001) discuss the role played by analysts’ ‘background’ or ‘common sense’ knowledge in interpreting conversational data. They argue that such knowledge is an important, and valid, interpretational resource that allows analysts to comment on the wider social signiWcance of the highly localised


‘working out’ of gender – although this necessarily involves analysts in going beyond speakers’ own demonstrable orientation to gender.

Speakers’/participants’ solicited interpretations A strict adherence to SchegloV’s framework would rule out actually consulting participants on their interpretations of their own and others’ utterances. This approach has, however, been used within interactional sociolinguistics, most notably by John Gumperz and his associates. (See, e.g., Gumperz (1982) for discussion and illustration of the value of soliciting both participants’ and others’ interpretations of utterances – in this case in relation to research on codeswitching and intercultural communication.) Within language and gender research, Jane Sunderland’s study of discourse in modern language lessons provides an illustration. Sunderland was interested in what she termed a ‘telling case’ – a single instance when gender became overt in an interaction (in this respect it is similar to SchegloV’s ‘ladies last’ example). In one of the lessons studied by Sunderland, a teacher had asked for volunteers to perform a German dialogue. It was the boys’ turn to perform, but no male volunteers were forthcoming. Three girls then called out, in succession, ‘We’re boys’, thereby gaining an opportunity to perform. Sunderland points out that the episode was treated as quite unremarkable by all those involved. A friend to whom she mentioned the incident suggested that the girls’ calling out was purely instrumental, and that if the teacher had said she wanted two dogs to perform the dialogue, the girls would have claimed to be dogs. Consultations with the girls, some of the boys and the teacher, however, suggested more interesting interpretations – for instance, there were some disagreements between participants about the meaning of the utterance; there was, however, an agreement that it was possible for girls to call out ‘we’re boys’, but that a reversal of this – for boys to call out ‘we’re girls’ – would be unacceptable. On the basis of her consultations, Sunderland claims that the utterance is highly gendered, and also a “potentially gendering use of language” (1995:163). Clearly it would be a mistake to think that, in commenting on an interaction they have taken part in, participants are providing direct access to their original understandings or responses. ReXecting on an interaction is quite a diVerent activity from taking part in this as a speaker/listener. Participants will also be tailoring their comments to a particular audience (the researcher) and a perceived purpose. It is clear from social psychological research that the

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beliefs and attitudes expressed by individuals are variable and context dependent, and sometimes appear contradictory (e.g. Potter and Wetherell 1987). Participants may also (as in Sunderland’s research) disagree about the meaning of an utterance – and patterns of disagreement may themselves be interesting. Participant consultations, then, cannot be expected to lead to a deWnitive interpretation of an utterance. They do, however, provide a broader interpretational base than can come from an analyst working alone, and so may provide a stronger warrant for making claims about gender.

Analysts’ theoretical positions Analysts’ interpretations are always informed by some sort of theory or position on language and how it works, and/or on gender and how it works. However, there are diVerences in the extent to which particular theorists, or theoretical positions, are explicitly drawn on to validate certain judgements, or interpretations of data. Early variationist work has been criticised for being relatively weak on social theory, for instance. By contrast, work carried out in more critical traditions often makes an explicit appeal to one or more social theories. Mary Bucholtz (1996) draws on the framework of Black feminist theory – in particular the work of Patricia Hill Collins (1990) – in her analysis of the language use of contributors to a US radio panel discussion of race relations. Bucholtz intends to illustrate how a close textual analysis can serve as a vehicle for the exploration of social theory; and how Black feminist theory may shed light on African American women’s everyday linguistic practices. The relevance of Collins, for Bucholtz, is that she “locates potential commonalities in the experiences of African American women that in turn may give rise to a particular collection of shared perspectives towards those experiences”; such perspectives are “produced and tested through a Black feminist epistemology, or theory of knowledge, that functions as an alternative to dominant ways of thinking” (1996:268–9). There are four elements to this Black feminist epistemology: 1. the dialogic evaluation of knowledge claims, in which truth is arrived at through discussion with others; 2. an ethic of personal accountability, which holds all individuals responsible for moral behaviour; 3. an ethic of caring, often manifested as aVective involvement in interaction;


4. concrete experience as a criterion of knowledge, which is prized at least as highly as the authority of the scholar or expert. (Bucholtz 1996:269) Bucholtz concedes that there is a danger of essentialism in this claim, but suggests that “overstated accounts” of unity may be necessary to create a space in which diversity may be explored (p. 270). Bucholtz’s own empirical study focuses on a radio panel discussion of civil unrest following the acquittal of four policemen charged with beating up an African American man. She argues that two Black women on the panel subverted certain panel discussion norms (e.g. by asking questions that challenged the moderator’s role in the discussion) and that this practice both illustrated and could be explained by Collins’ theory. Challenging the moderator, for instance, could be seen as emphasizing the dialogic evaluation of knowledge claims and the personal accountability of knowledge producers. The value of this and similar studies resides in their attempt to link speciWc linguistic practices with broader social theories. A particular theoretical perspective may also provide useful analytical insights. At issue, however, is the level and type of evidence required to substantiate (or challenge) a theory. Small-scale studies of highly contextualised practices are at best suggestive in this respect. Stubbs’ concern about critical discourse analysis, which I mentioned above, seems particularly relevant here: there is inevitably a danger of researchers, however unwittingly, tailoring their interpretations to support certain theories.

Analysts’ intuitions Intuitions have played an important role in linguistic research, particularly in research concerned with aspects of linguistic structure (such as syntax, semantics). In order to test the grammaticality of a particular form, researchers may draw on their own intuitions as members of a speech community, or they may consult the intuitions of other speakers. One of the earliest language and gender researchers, Robin LakoV, explicitly appealed to her intuitions as a member of a (North American) speech community in arguing for the existence of a set of linguistic features that were associated primarily with women (LakoV 1975). At the time LakoV made this claim there was still relatively little in the way of empirical research on women’s (or men’s) language. Her work proved useful as a stimulus for further studies (although, as I mentioned

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above, her intuitions have not been consistently supported by such studies). Researchers today would be unlikely to make explicit use of intuition to support an empirically based claim about women’s/men’s language use. Intuition is, however, necessarily used (though not always acknowledged) in attributing meanings to particular texts or utterances. Attributing functions, or meanings to tag questions, or overlapping speech, or particular phrases (‘ladies last’) depends, in part, on analysts’ intuitions. This practice is based on at least a tacit assumption that analysts will hold these in common with others – that the interpretation is a plausible one, and not idiosyncratic. ‘Intuition’, in the sense in which I use the term here, has something in common with Stokoe and Smithson’s (2001) admittedly rather broader notion of the ‘background knowledge’ analysts may draw on to support the interpretation of conversational data.

Speakers/participants are male or female The weakest warrant that one could have for interpreting a piece of language data – say, an interaction – in terms of gender, and one that few language and gender analysts would explicitly appeal to, is that the speakers or participants involved simply happen to be female, or male (or working class, male ... etc). However, in the case of certain forms of research – particularly research focussing uniquely on female or male speakers – it is not always clear what other plausible warrants are available. I mentioned earlier Jennifer Coates’ comparison between the conversational styles of female and male speakers. Coates is rather better known for her work on informal talk between women friends, involving detailed studies of narratives, of turn-taking and conversation management, and of the use of certain conversational devices such as hedges and questions (see Coates 1996 for an overview). The research tells us a great deal about the structure and functions of informal conversation, and has enabled Coates to challenge some established ideas about aspects of conversation management. There has been an issue, however, about the extent to which this is women’s talk. At one level, it clearly is, since the participants in Coates’ research are all women. She does point out that they are a particular group of women, with certain social characteristics (e.g. British, middle class). But without some form of comparison with male speakers it is diYcult to be sure that the conversational styles Coates identiWes are distinctive to women. (Coates’ subsequent comparison with male speakers does in fact provide some evidence of diVerences in conversational style.)


Scott Kiesling (1997), in a study of men’s talk in a US fraternity, was concerned with diVerences in the strategies employed by the men to ‘do power’ in interactions. Kiesling illustrates, from an election meeting, how speakers construct powerful identities (appealing to factors such as specialist knowledge, seniority or status) to support their judgements about the suitability of diVerent candidates. Kiesling focuses on power as something that is frequently associated with masculinity, but is able to demonstrate how each man adopts a unique discursive strategy in order to create and demonstrate power. In common with other recent work the study emphasizes diVerences between forms of masculinity, and how these are constituted in relation to one another and not simply in opposition to femininity/ies. These insights are valuable in their own right, but the study raises issues about the identiWcation of the men’s behaviour as masculine at all. In the absence of some form of comparison with women’s behaviour, or some other independent warrant, it seems that this is men’s talk largely because those doing the talking are men.

Discussion and conclusions The shift in conceptions of language and gender that I referred to earlier in this paper would support a focus on highly contextualised research intended to document the localised ‘working out’ of gender, or an aspect of gender. It is worth conceding, Wrst of all, that this does not always follow in practice. For instance, Vivian de Klerk’s (1997) study of girls’ and boys’ use of expletives (see p. 50) is a quantitative piece of work that draws statistical comparisons between the reported swearing behaviour of female and male students in diVerent types of school in South Africa. The study appeared in Johnson and Meinhof’s Language and Masculinity, but its approach seems barely consistent with Johnson’s diVerentiated and contextualised model of gender/ masculinity: individual contributors, then, do not always practise what their editors preach. On the whole, however, there does seem to have been a shift towards more localised studies (I shall use this term as a shorthand) consistent with a more general shift in models of language and gender. With regard to the warrants discussed above, far less reliance is placed on quantiWable and/or general patterns and the warrants drawn on are less powerful in terms of allowing researchers to make any generalised statements about language and gender. In the case of highly localised studies it

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becomes hard to say anything that goes beyond this interaction, these speakers, this context. Localised studies are framed by the earlier research that established patterns of gender diVerence: they may constitute a reaction against the sometimes overstated claims of earlier work, but they are also dependent upon this. They are of interest partly because they are able to qualify, or complexify, or introduce counter-examples. Part of the interest of Kiesling’s paper, for instance, is that it is read against a backdrop of beliefs about male power. Kiesling focuses on the local ‘working out’ of power relations between men. However, there is only so much mileage to be got out of a focus purely on localised research. Researchers, or at least the research Weld, need also to go beyond this, and attempt some refurbishment of the backdrop. Despite the current emphasis on context and performativity, I do not think language and gender researchers actually do dispense with gender as an a priori explanatory category – and probably they cannot. Claims about gender (or masculinity/femininity, or an aspect of masculinity/femininity) as a contextualised practice necessarily depend upon prior assumptions about the relevance of gender (masculinity/femininity). The danger is that researchers may make such assumptions without an appropriate warrant to support them. We need, I think, some sort of pragmatic eclecticism: a wider range of warrants and associated research methods drawn on as and when to target speciWc questions and issues; and a more explicit acknowledgement of the possibilities and limitations of all methodological choices. This would include direct, even quantiWable comparisons across groups and contexts so that we can more clearly establish commonalities and diVerences between these. Quantitative approaches may also complement an analysis of more contextualised examples – e.g. employing large corpora to check the representativeness of data, or throw up general patterns, alongside a more contextualised analysis to show how these patterns are worked out in practice, draw attention to complexities, get into cracks that aren’t visible in the larger analysis, explore counter-examples ... etc. Janet Holmes (1996) discusses the value of such a combination of methods in variationist research. Quantitative studies, she argues, make important contributions to the search for general (even universal) sociolinguistic processes. They also provide a background for more detailed qualitative research. Holmes illustrates this latter point with reference to a survey of language use in New Zealand. The survey drew on quantitative methods to establish general patterns of variation in the language use of diVerent social groups (e.g. female


and male speakers, Maori and Pakeha speakers). Further complementary research could then look at individual speakers’ language choices in speciWc interactions. As an example, Holmes provides an analysis of a joking interaction between two young Maori men. Several features – e.g. use of syllabletimed speech – were drawn on to emphasize the young men’s adherence to Maori culture (in this case the young men were joking about tricking a female relative who worked outside the Maori community). Holmes comments that the earlier quantitative analysis had demonstrated an association between syllable-timed speech and young Maori speakers – and that this enabled a more conWdent interpretation to be made of the use of this feature in this particular context. A further example of a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches comes from a study by Rupert Wegerif and Neil Mercer of children’s use of collaborative or ‘exploratory’ talk in the classroom. The study was not concerned with gender issues, but may nevertheless be of interest because of its attempt to combine (computerized) corpus-based methods with the qualitative exploration of transcripts of children’s talk. Wegerif and Mercer (1997) were interested in the quality of children’s talk before and after an intervention in which they were taught the use of certain features of exploratory talk.8 Transcript evidence suggested that, after the intervention, the children’s talk changed – for instance they spent more time discussing problems and considering alternative solutions before eventually agreeing on their answer. Wegerif and Mercer point out, however, that the evidence they were able to present in support of this claim might not be seen as convincing because it consisted only of one or two brief extracts from transcripts. Using a computerised concordancing program enabled them both to extend their initial analysis and to present complementary evidence. The value of a concordancing program for Wegerif and Mercer, as for other researchers, is that it allowed them to move between diVerent levels and types of analysis – listing certain expressions (in this case words associated with verbal reasoning, such as cos or because, if, so) in smaller or larger amounts of linguistic context; homing in on certain examples for more detailed (more contextualised) analysis; abstracting and quantifying certain usages of words over a whole transcript or series of transcripts. Wegerif and Mercer restricted their use of concordancing to their own small corpus of classroom data, but in principle patterns from small-scale studies may be compared with those in much larger corpora.9 I suggested above that de Klerk’s (1997) approach to the study of reported

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swearing practices seemed inconsistent with Johnson’s highly contextualised model of language and gender, proposed in the same edited volume. It may be argued more generally that generalised/quantitative and localised/qualitative approaches are necessarily underpinned by fundamentally incompatible models of language/gender, which would rule out their combination in the way I have suggested.10 I think, however, that researchers need to be more Xexible and ‘open’ in their approach to models of language and gender. Language and gender are multi-facetted, their interrelationship is highly complex and it operates on diVerent levels. On this last point, for instance, while language and gender are clearly contextualised practices, neither is context bound: both language and gender necessarily transcend speciWc contexts – to make a rather obvious point, if they did not, communication, along with any form of identity construction, would be impossible. Language and gender may, then, legitimately be viewed from diVerent perspectives: a pragmatic combination of methods and approaches, along with an acknowledgement of their possibilities and limitations, might allow us to focus on diVerent aspects of the relationship between language and gender, or have a wider range of things to say about this.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Martyn Hammersley, Theresa Lillis and Janet Maybin from the Open University, to Jane Sunderland from Lancaster University and to Lia Litosseliti from Royal Holloway University of London for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. For reviews of relevant studies see for instance Coates (1993) and Graddol and Swann (1989). 2. For interesting material on postmodernism and its relationship to feminist issues, see the studies in Nicholson (1990). 3. On gender and performativity, see Butler (1990, 1999). 4. I have discussed brieXy gender and identity hopping in relation to computer-mediated communication in Mesthrie et al. (2000); see also McAdams (1996) and Turkle (1995). 5. Feminist linguists have criticised the methodology employed in traditional variationist studies, focussing on aspects of data collection (e.g. the use of ‘sociolinguistic interviews’); the basis on which women and men are assigned to social class groups; and the interpreta-


tion of gender diVerences in terms of (for instance) women’s greater conservatism or status-consciousness – see Cameron (1992); Coates and Cameron (1988); Coates (1993); Graddol and Swann (1989). 6. The value of replicability as a warrant was emphasised by Michael Stubbs at a recent BAAL/CUP-funded seminar on analysing talk (18/19 October, 1999: Open University). 7. Martyn Hammersley (personal communication) comments on SchegloV’s position: ‘The oddity is that it is nothing to do with taking account of participants’ perspectives but rather of focussing entirely on what interactants formulate themselves as doing in the course of doing it. In other words, the model is of the person as interactant, and is an abstraction. In a way, the conversation analyst could be said to be reading his/her peculiar orientation into the behaviour of the participants; though this is not simply invention.’ 8. Exploratory talk is deWned by Wegerif and Mercer as ‘talk in which reasons are given for assertions and reasoned challenges made and accepted within a cooperative framework oriented towards agreement’ (1997:277). 9. Stubbs (1996), whom I referred to earlier in connection with corpus-based research, provides further examples of making comparisons across diVerent sets of data. 10. The problems and possibilities of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches have been the subject of ongoing debate in several academic areas. For an overview of this debate within classroom-based research see, for instance, Edwards and Westgate (1994).

References Bauman, Marie. 1979. ‘Two features of “women’s speech”?’. In The Sociology of the Languages of American Women [Papers in Southwest English IV], B.L. Dubois and I. Crouch (eds), 33–40. San Antonio: Trinity University. Bergvall, Victoria L., Bing, Janet M. and Freed, Alice F. 1996. Rethinking Language and Gender Research: theory and practice. London and New York: Longman. Billig, Michael. 1999a. ‘Whose terms? Whose ordinariness? Rhetoric and ideology in conversation analysis.’ Discourse and Society 10 (4):543–558. Billig, Michael. 1999b. ‘Conversation analysis and the claims of naivety.’ Discourse and Society 10 (4):572–576. Bucholtz, Mary. 1996. ‘Black feminist theory and African American women’s linguistic practice’. In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: theory and practice, V.L. Bergvall, J.M. Bing and A.F. Freed (eds), 267–290. London and New York: Longman. Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A.C. and Sutton, Laurel A. (eds), 1999. Reinventing Identities: the gendered self in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 1992 (2nd edn). Feminism and Linguistic Theory. Basingstoke, Hamps.: Macmillan. Cameron, Deborah, McAlinden, Fiona and O’Leary, Kathy. 1988. ‘LakoV in context: the

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social and linguistic functions of tag questions’. In Women in their Speech Communities, J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds), 74–93. London and New York: Longman. Cameron, Deborah and Coates, Jennifer. 1988. ‘Some problems in the sociolinguistic explanation of sex diVerences’. In Women in their Speech Communities, J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds), 13–26. London and New York: Longman. Coates, Jennifer. 1993 (2nd edn). Women, Men and Language. London: Longman. Coates, Jennifer. 1996. Women Talk. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Coates, Jennifer. 1997. ‘One-at-a-time: the organization of men’s talk’. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhof, (eds), 107–129. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Coates, Jennifer and Cameron, Deborah (eds), 1988. Women in their Speech Communities. London and New York: Longman. Collins, Patricia H. 1990. Black Feminist Thought. Boxton: Unwin Hyman. Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dubois, Betty Lou and Crouch, Isabel. 1975. ‘The question of tag questions in women’s speech: they don’t really use more of them, do they?’. Language in Society 4:289–94. Eckert, Penelope. 1998. ‘Gender and sociolinguistic variation’. In Language and Gender: a reader. J. Coates (ed), 64–75. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1998. ‘New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research’. Language in Society 28:185–201. Edwards, A and Westgate, D.P.G. 1994. Investigating Classroom Talk. London: Falmer Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graddol, David and Swann, Joan. 1989. Gender Voices. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, Kira and Bucholtz, Mary. 1995. Gender Articulated: language and the socially constructed self. New York and London: Routledge. Harris, Roy. 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth. Holmes, Janet. 1984. ‘Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence: some evidence for hedges as support structures’. Te Reo 27:47–62. Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Holmes, Janet. 1996. ‘Women’s role in language change: a place for quantiWcation’. In Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference, April 19–21 1996, N. Warner, J. Ahlers, L. Bilmes, M. Oliver, S. Wertheim and M. Chen (eds), Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Horvath, Barbara M. 1985. Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Sally and Meinhof, Ulrike H. (eds), 1997. Language and Masculinity, Oxford: Blackwell Pubishers. Johnson, Sally. 1997. ‘Theorizing language and masculinity’. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhof (eds), 8–26. Oxford: Blackwell Pubishers. Kiesling, Scott F. 1997. ‘Power and the language of men’. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhof (eds), 65–85. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.


de Klerk, Vivian. 1997. ‘The role of expletives in the construction of masculinity’. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhof (eds), 144–158. Oxford: Blackwell Pubishers. Labov, William. 1966. The Social StratiWcation of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. LakoV, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row. Macaulay, R.K.S. 1978. ‘Variation and consistency in Glaswegian English’. In Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English, P. Trudgill (ed), 132–143. London: Edward Arnold. McAdams, Mindy. 1996. ‘Gender Without Bodies’. CMC Magazine , March 1 1996. McEnery, Tony, Baker, Paul and Hardie, Andrew. 1999. ‘Assessing claims with corpus data – the case of swearing’. In Corpora Galore, J. Kirk (ed), Amsterdam: Rodopi. McEnery, Tony, Baker, Paul and Hardie, A. 2000. ‘Swearing and abuse in modern English’. In Practical Applications of Language Corpora, B. Lewandowska and P.J. Melia (eds), Hamburg: Peter Lang. Mesthrie, Rajend, Swann, Joan, Deumert, Andrea and Leap, William L. 2000. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Milroy, Lesley. 1987 (2nd edn). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley. 1992. ‘New perspectives in the analysis of sex diVerentiation in language’. In Sociolinguistics Today: international perspectives, K. Bolton and H. Kwok (eds), 163–179. London/New York: Routledge. Newbrook, Mark. 1982. Sociolinguistic ReXexes of Dialect Interference in West Wirral. Reading: Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Reading. Nicholson, Linda J. 1990. Introduction to Feminism/Postmodernism, L.J. Nicholson (ed), 1–16 New York and London: Routledge. Potter, Jonathon and Wetherell, Margaret. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology. London: Sage. Preisler, Bent. 1986. Linguistic Sex Roles in Conversation: Social Variation in the Expression of Tentativeness in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rayson, Paul, Leech, GeoVrey and Hodges, Mary. 1997. ‘Social diVerentiation in the use of English vocabulary: some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2 (1):133–152. SchegloV, Emanuel A. 1997. ‘Whose text? Whose context?’. Discourse and Society 8 (2):165–187. SchegloV, Emanuel.A. 1998. ‘Reply to Wetherell’. Discourse and Society 9 (3):413–416. SchegloV, Emanuel A. 1999a. ‘“SchegloV’s texts” as “Billig’s data”: a critical reply’. Discourse and Society 10 (4):558–572. SchegloV, Emanuel A. 1999b. ‘Naivete vs sophistication or discipline vs self-indulgence: a rejoinder to Billig’. Discourse and Society 10 (4):577–582. Stokoe, Elizabeth H. and Smithson, Janet. 2001. ‘Making gender relevant: conversation analysis and gender categories in interaction’. Discourse and Society 12 (2):217–244. Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Stubbs, Michael. 1997. ‘Whorf’s children: critical comments on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)’. In Evolving Models of Language: papers from the Annual Meeting of the

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British Association for Applied Linguistics, 1996, A. Ryan and A. Wray (eds), 100–116. Clevedon: British Association for Applied Linguistics in association with Multilingual Matters. Sunderland, Jane. 1996. Gendered Discourse in the Foreign Language Classroom: teacherstudent and student-teacher talk and the social construction of children’s femininities and masculinities. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Lancaster. Sunderland, Jane. 1995. ‘“We’re boys, miss!”: Wnding gendered identities and looking for gendering of identities in the foreign language classroom’. In Language and Gender: interdisciplinary perspectives, S. Mills (ed), 160–178. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Swann, Joan and Graddol, David. 1988. ‘Gender inequalities in classroom talk’. English in Education 22 (1):48–65. Swann, Joan. 1988. ‘Talk control: an illustration from the classroom of problems in analysing male dominance of conversation’. In Women in their Speech Communities, J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds), 123–140. London: Longman. Swann, Joan. 1992. Girls, Boys and Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Thomas, Beth. 1988. ‘DiVerences of sex and sects: linguistic variation and social networks in a Welsh mining village’. In Women in their Speech Communities, J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds), 51–60. London and New York: Longman. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social DiVerentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wareing, Shân. 1996. ‘What do we know about language and gender?’ Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 11, CardiV, 5–7 September 1996. Wegerif, Rupert and Mercer, Neil. 1997. ‘Using computer-based text analysis to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods in the investigation of collaborative learning’. Language and Education 11 (4):271–86. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don H. 1983. ‘Small insults: a study of interuptions in cross-sex conversations between unacquainted persons’. In Languge, Gender and Society, B. Thorne, C. Kramarae and N. Henley (eds), 103–117. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Wetherell, Margaret. 1998. ‘Positioning and interpretive repertoires: conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue’. Discourse and Society 9 (3):387–412. Wolfram, W. (1969) A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Wodak, Ruth (ed), 1997. Gender and Discourse. London: Sage Publications. Zimmerman, Don H. and West, Candace. 1975. ‘Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation’. In Language and Sex: diVerence and dominance, B. Thorne and N. Henley (eds), 105–129. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.


Appendix: transcription conventions used by SchegloV [^he-ha-] [I want ] · hhhh

left brackets represent onset of overlap; right brackets represent point of overlap resolution

wishful

underlining represents stress, usually via volume

h represents aspiration, sometimes hearable breathing, sometimes laughter etc; when preceded by a superimposed dot it represents inbreath

(0.8)

numbers in brackets represent silence in tenths of a second

°° Oh::yeah °°

the degree sign represents signiWcantly lowered volume; colons represent lengthening of the preceding sound (the more colons, the greater the lengthening)

[hm-hm-^h[m

the circumXex represents a sharp upward pitch shift; a hyphen represents the cut oV of the preceding sound

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Chapter 3

Rethinking politeness, impoliteness and gender identity Sara Mills SheYeld Hallam University, UK

Introduction In this chapter, I aim to bring together new theoretical work on gender from feminist linguistics with new theorising of linguistic politeness.1 I aim to clear some theoretical space for thinking about both the terms gender and politeness, and thus much of the paper is given over to a critique of theorising on this subject. My argument is that we need a more Xexible and complex model of the relation between gender and politeness. Theorists in gender and language research cannot continue to discuss gender simply in terms of the diVerential linguistic behaviour of males and females as groups; we need to be able to analyse the various strategies which gendered, raced and classed women and men adopt in particular circumstances and with particular goals and interests. Thus, I am not arguing that no generalisations can be made about gender; context-sensitive empirical studies would be able to yield useful data, but we would have to be wary about using these data to comment on women or men as a whole. As I show later, there are generalisations which can be made about the employment of stereotypical behaviour at certain moments in interactions, but even here, stereotypical behaviour cannot be said to have one function or one interpretation. We need to question whether there is one stereotype for feminine and masculine behaviour. (See Liladhar 2002; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999; Holmes and MeyerhoV 1999.) In terms of the analysis of politeness, I would argue that we need several analytical changes: Wrstly, we need to see politeness as occurring over longer stretches of talk; secondly, it should be seen within the context of a ‘Community of Practice’, rather than as simply as the product of individual speakers,

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and Wnally, we need to be aware that there may be conXicts over the meanings of politeness. By focusing on the analysis of an incident in which I was involved, in the Wnal part of this paper, I try to formulate the ways in which I think the theorising of gender and politeness might proceed, and in particular I focus on the way that impoliteness is dealt with in interactional terms. A more pragmatic focus on impoliteness enables us to view politeness less as an addition to a conversation, something which is grafted on to individual speech acts in order to facilitate interaction between speaker and hearer (which is at least implicit in Brown and Levinson’s 1978 model), but rather as something which emerges at a discourse level, over stretches of talk and across communities of speakers and hearers. This, therefore, constitutes a discourse analysis of politeness, rather than a linguistic analysis of politeness. Thus, rather than identifying the Face Threatening Acts performed by individuals and the politeness repair work deemed necessary to contain their force, as Brown and Levinson (1978) have done, I will be focusing instead on the eVect of impoliteness on groups and the way that gender plays a role in assumptions about who can be impolite to whom, and who needs to repair the damage. I will suggest that, using Relevance theory to examine the way that male and female interactants make sense of an event in speech, we may be able to see gendered protocols at work (Sperber and Wilson 1986). In viewing a range of diVerent interactions we can analyse the diVerent strategies adopted by various women rather than attempting to make generalisations about the way that all women respond to rudeness or are themselves impolite.2 In this way, we can map out parameters for strategic intervention to repair interaction and suggest ways in which they may be contextually gendered, without making assumptions about the necessary pairing of language items with a speciWc gender.

Feminist linguists and communities of practice Gender has begun to be theorised in more productive ways, moving away from a reliance on binary oppositions and global statements about the behaviour of all men and all women, to more nuanced and mitigated statements about certain groups of women or men in particular circumstances, who negotiate within certain parameters of permissible or socially sanctioned behaviour (Coates and Cameron 1988; Johnson and Meinhof 1997; Bergvall, Bing and Freed 1996). Rather than seeing gender as a possession or set of behaviours which is imposed upon the individual by society, as many

Rethinking politeness, impoliteness and gender identity

essentialist theorists have done (see Butler 1990; Fuss 1989, for an overview), many feminists have now moved to a position where they view gender as something which is enacted or performed, and thus as a potential site of struggle over perceived restrictions in roles (Crawford 1995). That is not to suggest that anyone can say/do/be anything, as several feminist theorists have interpreted Judith Butler as stating in her work on the performativity of gender (Butler 1990). My position is a modiWed form of Butler’s theories on gender identiWcation which acknowledges the force of stereotyping and perceptions of sex-appropriate roles, yet sees also that it is possible to challenge and contest those stereotypes, or change their meaning or function (see Bell et al. 1994). Of particular interest is the notion of Communities of Practice (CofP), developed by Wenger (1998), and developed in relation to language and gender research by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet to particular eVect (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1998; 1999). In this view, feminist linguistics should be concerned less with analysing individual linguistic acts between individual (gendered) speakers than with the analysis of a community-based perspective on gender and linguistic performance, which in the case of politeness must therefore involve a sense of politeness having diVerent functions and meanings for diVerent groups of people. A CofP is an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavour. Ways of doing, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavour (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1998:490).

The crucial dimensions of a CofP are that it will have “mutual engagement; a joint negotiated enterprise; and a shared repertoire of negotiable resources accumulated over time” (Wenger 1998:76, cited in Holmes and MeyerhoV 1999:175). Thus, each community will develop a range of linguistic behaviours which function in slightly diVerent ways to other Communities of Practice. However, we need to modify this notion of CofP slightly, since although there may be broad agreement as to the norms operating within that group, there will also be diVerent ‘takes’ on those norms, and gender may play a signiWcant role here in determining what each participant views as appropriate. For example, lesbians within a CofP may decide to play with and ironise stereotypical elements of ‘feminine’ speech as part of their production of a lesbian speech style (see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume), whilst heterosexual women in that community may be using the same elements in an

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unironised way, as Robin Queen has noted (Queen 1997). This notion of a CofP is particularly important for thinking about the way that individuals develop a sense of their own gendered identity, because it is clear that individuals belong to a wide range of diVerent communities with diVerent norms, and they will have diVerent positions within these groups (both dominant and peripheral). Thus, rather than describing a single gendered identity which correlates with one’s biological sex, it is possible within this model to analyse a range of gendered identities which will be activated and used strategically within particular Communities of Practice. As noted by Sunderland and Litosseliti, there may be a clash between the gender identity which one is ascribed by others, and one which one has adopted for oneself. This more productive model of gender makes it more diYcult to make global and hence abstract statements about women’s or men’s language; however, it does allow for variations within the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ and allows for the possibility of contestation and change, whilst also acknowledging the force of stereotyping and linguistic community norms. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet state: An emphasis on talk as constitutive of gender draws attention away from a more serious investigation of the relations among language, gender and other components of social identity: it ignores the ways diVerence (or beliefs therein) function in constructing dominance relations. Gender can be thought of as a sex-based way of experiencing other social attributes like class, ethnicity or age (and also less obviously social qualities like ambition, athleticism and musicality) (1998:488, 489).

Thus, we do not need to lose sight of the way that stereotyping operates within communities, rather, the stereotypes of gender, race and class diVerence will be more or less salient dependent upon the CofP, and each CofP may develop diVerent positions in relation to these stereotypes (see Bucholtz 1999). It may also be the case that certain activities within those Communities of Practice might be coded or recognised as stereotypically masculine or feminine and thus certain types of linguistic activity may be considered by males and females as appropriate or inappropriate within interaction and sanctioned by the group as a whole. Alice Freed suggests in her analysis of the types of speech which are produced by close friends that certain styles of interaction are coded by the participants as feminine or masculine; thus, because of the context and the


perception that intimate conversation is feminine, the males in her study seemed to be behaving like stereotypical females (Freed 1996). This does not seem entirely satisfactory since it is clear that some males would perhaps see this as an occasion to mark their speech in hyper-masculine ways. In certain recordings of conversation sessions which some of my undergraduate students undertook at the University of Loughborough, in 1993, this was clearly the case. The male students in question saw intimate speech situations as stereotypically feminine and therefore spent a great deal of the time drawing attention to the fact of being recorded and addressing sexist comments to the person who was recording the interaction. Cameron (1997) too has shown that single-sex heterosexual male groups may use this seemingly feminine speech setting of informal gossiping to co-construct their heterosexual masculinity against a supposed homosexual male other. Furthermore, not all linguistic communities would code this type of relaxed conversation as feminine. However, the notion of gendered domains is important here, enabling us to describe the way that gender impacts at the level of the setting and context, rather than simply at the level of the individuals involved in the interaction. When this new more complex theorisation of gender is extended to the analysis of linguistic politeness, it results in a move away from stereotypical assumptions that have dominated discussions of women’s use of politeness, in most of the standard analyses of gender and language from LakoV (1978) through to Holmes (1995). It is clear that we need to acknowledge the extent to which our notion of ‘women’ is classed and raced, particularly when we are considering linguistic politeness. As I will argue later in this paper, politeness is already gendered, classed and raced, so that stereotypically it bears a signature of middle class, white femininity, and this trace lingers on in the way that individuals react politely or impolitely, in the way that they react to politeness and impoliteness, and also whether they recognise an utterance as polite or impolite. This stereotyped connection between gender and politeness leads to certain expectations by members of Communities of Practice about what linguistic behaviour they expect of women and men.

Theorising power Essential to feminist thinking about gender diVerence has been a particular model of power relations. Much early feminist thought presupposed that

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there was a more or less simple correlation between males and power and females and powerlessness (LakoV 1978; Spender 1980). Whilst Foucault’s formulation of power relations has been inXuential in this area, and many feminists have urged that we need to think through power relations in a more complex manner to avoid such a simple binary opposition, there is still little work which details how to analyse seemingly well-established structural inequalities and at the same time individual transgressions and contestations of those inequalities (Foucault 1978). If we consider Foucault’s notion of the dispersion of power, that is, the spread of power throughout a society, rather than the holding and withholding of power by individuals, we will be able to move towards an analysis which will see language as an arena whereby power may be appropriated, rather than power relations being seen as frozen societal roles which are clearly mapped out for participants before an interaction takes place. In engaging in interaction, we are also at the same time mapping out for ourselves a position in relation to the power relations within the group and within the society as a whole. This is what I would like to call ‘interactional power’, to diVerentiate it from those roles which may or may not be delineated for us by our relation to institutions, by our class position, and so on. It is possible for someone who has been allocated a fairly powerless position institutionally to accrue to themselves, however temporarily, a great deal of interactional power by their verbal dexterity, their conWdence, their linguistic directness (those more stereotypically masculine/competitive/report talk attributes), as well as through the use of the seemingly more feminine linguistic display of care, concern and sympathy, described as co-operative strategies or rapport talk (Coates 1996; Tannen 1991). It may be argued that since power and masculinity are correlated (however complex that relation is), that interactional power can only be achieved by using masculinist strategies in speech; however, one’s position within a speech community may be advanced by using a range of diVerent strategies, including the seemingly more co-operative/rapport ones, depending on the CofP. Competitive talk is not always valued by Communities of Practice which may code it as too direct, bullying and overbearing. For example, a secretary in a university department may be able to use a fairly direct form of address to those in positions of power over her, because of her access to information upon which they depend; conversely, lecturers who need this information and who are reliant on her will need to employ politeness forms which would normally signal deference (Mills 1996). Thus, positions of power mapped out by one’s role in an institution may not relate directly to the interactional power that one may gain through one’s


access to information, one’s verbal skill or one’s display of care and concern for other group members.3

Contesting Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness Brown and Levinson’s (1978) model of politeness has inXuenced almost all of the theoretical and analytical work in this Weld. They argue for a pragmatic analysis of politeness which involves a concentration on the amount of verbal ‘work’ which individual speakers have to perform in their utterances to counteract the force of potential threats to the ‘face’ of the hearer. Face is a term drawn, via GoVman, rather loosely, from a Chinese word and concept, to describe the self-image which the speaker or hearer would like to see maintained in the interaction. Brown and Levinson state: “face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction” (1978:66). A threat to a person’s face is termed a Face Threatening Act (FTA), and Brown and Levinson argue that such threats generally require a mitigating statement or some verbal repair (politeness), or breakdown of communication will ensue. They analyse politeness in two broad groups: a. positive politeness, which: anoints the face of the addressee by indicating that in some respects, S[peaker] wants H[earer]’s wants (e.g. by treating him/her as a member of an in-group, a friend, a person whose wants and personality traits are known and liked) and b.

negative politeness, which: is essentially avoidance-based and consist(s) … in assurances that the speaker … will not interfere with the addressee’s freedom of action (1978:75).

Positive politeness is thus concerned with demonstrating closeness and aYliation (for example, compliments) whereas negative politeness is concerned with distance and formality (for example, hedges and deference). Many theorists have criticised Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness, mainly for its overgeneralising of Eurocentric norms; several theorists have criticised both the overextension and the limitation of use of the term ‘face’ in

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Brown and Levinson’s work. (Mao 1994, Boz forthcoming). Brown and Levinson’s model also seems unable to analyse politeness beyond the level of the sentence. Culpeper has criticised their model for being unable to analyse inference, which he suggests is the level at which a great deal of linguistic politeness and impoliteness occurs (Culpeper 1996). As Holmes notes, politeness cannot be said to reside within linguistic forms. Thus, a statement such as ‘Do you think it would be possible for you to contact Jean Thomas today?’ would be interpreted by Brown and Levinson as polite if used by a boss to her/ his secretary, since mitigating features are included in this direct request which might constitute an FTA; however, this might in fact be interpreted as impolite, if it were said by a boss to his/her secretary if they usually have an informal style of communicating, and this is not the Wrst time that the request has been made. Thus, the very features which Brown and Levinson would argue seem to indicate politeness may in fact be used to express impoliteness. Brown and Levinson’s model can further be criticised for the fact that it assumes that it is possible to know what a polite or impolite act means. It is thus a model of interaction which is focused on production, i.e. which conXates the intentions, or the perceived intentions, of the speaker with that of the meaning of the interaction as a whole.4 I would argue that it is only individuals interacting within Communities of Practice who will be able to assess whether a particular act is polite or impolite, and even then, such interpretations may be subject to disagreement. Brown and Levinson’s model is also unable to analyse variables such as gender in the complex way that I have suggested is necessary; although they assert that status and gender diVerence are important, analysts using their work tend to exclude the analysis of gender or to elide gender with power. The Cross Cultural Linguistic Politeness Research group was set up to discuss some of these problems and to develop new ways of analysing linguistic politeness.5 One of the contributions of the group so far has been to observe that politeness is not very observable except when there are violations of perceived politeness norms. The essence of politeness is that it appears to be invisible. A further observation is that politeness is not only a set of linguistic strategies used by individuals in particular interactions, it is also a judgement made about an individual’s linguistic habits; thus it is a general way of behaving as well as an assessment about an individual in a particular interaction. Thus, if a person whom we would normally categorise as very polite is impolite in a particular instance, this might have greater force than a less oVensive statement by someone whom we would categorise as habitually impolite.


Thus, politeness should be seen as a set of strategies or verbal habits which someone sets as a norm for themselves or which others judge as the norm for them, as well as being a socially constructed norm within particular communities of practice.6 Holmes seems to aYrm this in that she talks about ‘polite people’ as those who avoid obvious face-threatening acts ... they generally attempt to reduce the threat of unavoidable face threatening acts such as requests or warnings by softening them, or expressing them indirectly; and they use polite utterances such as greetings and compliments where possible (Holmes 1995:5).

However, this view of ‘polite people’ does not relate those polite acts to a community which judges the acts and the people as polite, and thus is again an example of the disembodied, abstract analysis which is often determined by the use of a Brown and Levinson framework. An important element in the assessment of an act as polite is judging whether an utterance is appropriate or not, either in relation to the perceived norms of the situation, the CofP or the perceived norms of the society as a whole.7 There is obviously a great deal of Xexibility in these norms and the potential for misunderstandings and misapprehension of politeness is large. For example, a woman lecturer may use mild swear words and a range of informal expressions with the intention of setting a University seminar group at ease, thus creating an atmosphere of informality and openness (that is, paying positive politeness to the face needs of the group) but this may be interpreted by some of the group members as impolite, ingratiating or patronising, if they have particular views of the language which is appropriate to (women) staV members or to what they consider a relatively formal setting such as the seminar. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s work, Janet Holmes argues that in general women are more polite than men: Most women enjoy talk and regard talking as an important means of keeping in touch, especially with friends and intimates. They use language to establish, nurture and develop personal relationships. Men tend to see language more as a tool for obtaining and conveying information (Holmes 1995:2).

Holmes’ empirical studies seem to back up this global view of women’s language, inXuenced by Jennifer Coates’ (1996) and Deborah Tannen’s (1991) work on co-operative and competitive strategies, and thus Holmes asserts that, therefore, women are generally more polite than men, as they are more

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concerned with the aVective rather than the referential aspect of utterances, since “politeness is an expression of concern for the feelings of others” (Holmes 1995:4). Holmes suggests that women are more likely to use positive politeness than men; thus she is asserting that “women’s utterances show evidence of concern for the feelings of the people they are talking to more often and more explicitly than men’s do” (Holmes 1995:6). However, as I mentioned in the Introduction to this chapter, the notion that women as a group speak in diVerent ways to men is something which I would like to contest. What seems to be playing a role in these assertions by Holmes is a stereotype of white middle class women’s speech, since at the end of her book she claims that women’s politeness strategies are qualitatively diVerent to masculine speech and lead to better interaction. It is this positive evaluation of the speech styles which suggests it is a stereotype of women’s speech at work, since stereotypes are by their very nature enmeshed in notions of judgement. I aim to challenge Holmes’ stereotypical notion that women globally are more polite than men through analysing one particular instance of linguistic impoliteness and the complexity of interrelation between perceptions of community norms and gender stereotyping.

Impoliteness Much of the thinking about linguistic politeness has focused on politeness in isolated speech acts, without considering those acts in relation to what would constitute impoliteness. As politeness is an entity which is very diYcult to deWne or describe, focusing on impoliteness may be slightly easier, since normally at least some of the participants are aware when a breach of perceived norms has taken place. Third parties may be approached to discuss someone’s impoliteness and it generally involves some sort of repair to the interaction and to the relationship if the impoliteness is considered exceptional. Indeed, a great deal of interactional work goes into the assessment of impolite acts, involving retelling anecdotes and inviting judgements of the excessiveness of the impoliteness, in order to bolster the sense that one’s assessment of the impoliteness is justiWed (or not). Culpeper has attempted to come to a deWnition of impoliteness as the opposite or reverse of politeness (Culpeper 1996). He analyses several contexts of linguistic use – a documentary programme on army training, and literary drama – where he isolates certain examples of impolite linguistic


behaviour. In his analysis of the army training documentary, he lists the instances of impoliteness by the trainers to the recruits. However, I would argue that within that particular CofP, this is not classiWed as impolite, although it would be within almost any other community. The dominant group in the interaction, the oYcers, has managed to achieve a situation where the seeming excessive impoliteness (barked orders, ritualised insults) is considered to be the norm. Thus, if we simply analyse impoliteness in the apparently decontextualised way that Culpeper does, we will be unable to grasp the way that politeness is only that which is deWned by the CofP as such, and even then it is something which may be contested by some community members.8 Thus, I would suggest that impoliteness only exists when it is classiWed as such by certain, usually dominant, community members, and/or when it leads to a breakdown in relations.

Analysis of an impolite incident I would like to focus on an incident which occurred at a University Departmental party and which involved myself, a female research student (my supervisee) and a new male member of staV, a poet.9 Using anecdotal evidence in this way is problematic, as the critiques of Deborah Tannen and Robin LakoV ’s work have demonstrated, but Cameron argues that anecdotes can “condense a great deal of taken-for-granted cultural wisdom into a very small amount of surface production” (Cameron 1998:447; see also Mitchell 1984). However, this anecdote is used mainly because of the insights I have gained through analysis of the long-term eVects of the incident, rather than simply focusing on an isolated example of impoliteness in data. This analysis is not intended to make generalisations about impoliteness – this case study serves to demonstrate that gender plays an important role in certain types of interaction. The way that gender works in each interaction may diVer markedly from this. Focusing on an interaction where diVerent views of what actually happens is complicated, but I think it illustrates some of the diYculties in assigning clear values to elements within a conversation in relation to politeness. A University Departmental party is a CofP with diVerent norms to the work environment; it is a complex and sometimes rather tense environment where the interpersonal and institutional relations between staV in a Department are played out and negotiated. Linguistic behaviour which might be considered impolite within the oYce or teaching situation, may be considered

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diVerently when uttered at a staV party. A Departmental party is usually an arena where a certain amount of banter between social equals occurs; banter, and this type of public verbal play in general, seems to be a genre which is coded by many women as a masculine way of interacting, but which female members of staV may also engage in equally (Labov 1972).10 However, as Clare Walsh has shown, women often use styles of speech in their interventions in the public sphere which are coded as masculine, but they run the risk of being judged as transgressive or abnormal for engaging in them (Walsh 2001). In the incident in question, a new male member of staV who had not been introduced to either myself or the research student before approached us; this person, like us, is white and middle class and probably roughly the same age as myself, but older than the research student. She and I tried to be positively polite and friendly by saying “Hi there” and asking the person how he was. Since the party was well underway, I had to think up some form of appropriate phatic communion.11 Banter was not an option, since I did not know the person. Since this person is a poet I asked: “What sort of poetry do you write?” He replied, “Name me six poets”. This response confused me. Relevance theory helps us to understand the way that we understand or gloss potentially opaque statements (Sperber and Wilson 1986). If I wished to continue to classify what we were engaging in as polite small talk, then I would have to comply and provide a list of poets. I would thus have to assume that there was a longer-term relevance to his request for the names of six poets, which would become apparent as the conversation unfolded. However, I did not wish to be forced to answer this question, which I felt was oVensive and which I read as his attempt to state that he would not talk about his writing as I knew nothing about poetry. Under this interpretation, he was in fact implying that I could not name six poets. Proxemic cues, including body stance, eye contact, facial expression and his tone of voice, all led me to interpret the relevance of his statement to my question as impolite. (What has since become clear is that the male staV member was extremely anxious about the Departmental party, and had inferred that my politeness and friendliness towards him, because he considered them to be excessive, were in fact patronising and therefore insincere, and impolite.12) A further interpretation which I have only come to recently is that this conXict developed precisely because of gender stereotyping: a famous male poet found himself in conversation with a female professor in his Department and she started the conversation with a gambit which suggested that she had never heard of him. His aggression and impoliteness stemmed from


this diYculty in accepting a relatively powerless position where gender was enmeshed with power diVerence.13 Thus, this incident is not about misunderstanding, as Tannen would assert, but about conXict, as Cameron would argue (Tannen 1991; Cameron 1998). I would argue that gender played a part in our attempts at making sense of each other’s seemingly inexplicable interventions. As Cameron states: … gender is potentially relevant (to understanding conXict-talk) to the extent that it aVects the context-speciWc assumptions that the man and the woman bring to bear on the work of interpreting one another’s utterances. If there is a divergence of interpretation between the parties … a satisfactory explanation must be sought not in gender-preferential responses to a particular linguistic strategy, but at the level of assumptions and inferences which are speciWc to the situations these conversationalists Wnd themselves in (Cameron 1998:448).

In this case, the conXict seems to involve the assessments each of us made as to the level and sincerity of politeness on the one hand, and to the overall relevance of the utterance to the conversation as a whole on the other. These assessments and interpretations of the interaction are inXected with gender stereotyping and assumptions. After our brief exchange, the research student, who saw that I was in diYculties, and I, both attempted to try to change the subject and to resolve the diYculty. However, the male staV member then made comments, including overtly sexual comments, which we both considered impolite, and was verbally aggressive. Rather than simple banter which plays around with what is acceptable, sometimes overstepping the limit of acceptability for the purposes of humour and camaraderie, this incident did not feel to us as if it could be classiWed as banter and therefore positively polite, but instead had to be classiWed as oVensive and impolite.14 What is also important is that the male member of staV was behaving in a stereotypically masculine fashion, drawing attention to our femaleness and sexuality. This felt like aggression and not banter, primarily because we did not know him. If this behaviour had come from one of our male colleagues with whom we felt at ease, we would not necessarily have considered the incident impolite, but would more readily have excused it on the grounds of drunkenness and personal style. As it was, neither the student nor I responded with what we considered impoliteness, but continued to use positive politeness strategies, suggesting that we talk on other subjects, or explicitly drawing attention to the fact that we seemed to be misunderstanding one another, perhaps stereotypically ‘feminine’ responses

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to threatening behaviour. Because of these strategies we were locked into the interaction; we could not simply walk away. We tried to assuage him and calm him down. Thus, all participants in this interaction were inferring politeness or impoliteness in relation to norms which they thought existed within that particular CofP, and these norms I would argue have something to do with gendered domains and stereotypes of gendered behaviour. An initial coding of an utterance as impolite or polite leads to a range of diVerent behaviours for each participant. For myself and the research student, it led to a range of ‘repair’ behaviours, a stereotypically feminine response, perhaps, whereas for the male staV member, it led to an increase in insulting terms, as if perhaps these were implicit from the beginning. By this I mean that the way that the conversation developed into an excessive display of insult and sexual antagonism perhaps means that these elements of conXict were already embedded within the initial interaction where there might appear to be a certain ambiguity about whether the male member of staV intended to be polite or not. Cameron (1998) argues that whereas Deborah Tannen considers that men and women simply misunderstand each others’ intentions, and have diVerent speech styles which lead to breakdowns in conversation, in fact, the conXict between men and women is one of social inequality and diVerential access to resources and goods within the public sphere; this is what leads to conXict. Here, conversational breakdown is seen as an instantiation of a wider conXict over power. One could argue that this person gained some interactional power through this type of behaviour, since he had insulted a person who was senior to himself in institutional terms (and my status was something which was brought up later in the interaction) and also had insulted someone to whom he should have had some responsibility since she was a postgraduate student within the department. However, we would need to be careful about the elision of interactional power with masculinist stereotypical behaviour, which, in many contexts, such as this one, does not necessarily bring any form of power to oneself. The question of a person’s commitment to a particular speech act is important here. Walsh has argued that we need to be able to discuss the notion of inferred sympathy or politeness which we assume is behind a particular speech act (Walsh 2001). The student and I as participants in a particular CofP inferred a certain degree of commitment to this person’s speech acts. What is interesting is that those who tried to help resolve the problem suggested that we should not attribute commitment by him to his speech acts on lines which seemed strikingly gendered; that is, he is a poet (and presumably male poets


have a certain type of behaviour which is seen to be acceptable), and that he was drunk and therefore should not be held responsible and committed to what he said.15 Further gendered stereotypes were brought in: we were told that we should simply accept this behaviour because “that’s just the way he is”, and that this sort of incident had happened before. Having worked with extremely impolite, `masculinist’ females as well, it is worth considering the very diVerent ways in which females are judged for directness, verbal aggression and impoliteness. Thus, this impolite behaviour was judged to be not serious or problematic, because those who were trying to resolve or minimise the diYculty, for the best of motives, that is, in the interests of departmental harmony, were drawing on gendered stereotypes of what was appropriate behaviour for men and women. What is interesting about this incident, and which is illustrative of the need for new models of politeness and impoliteness, is the long term eVects of the incident: all of the people who attended and the rest of the Department were drawn into various behaviours and either tried to resolve or worsen the perceived breach. Several male and female members of the Department refused pointedly to speak to the member of staV; several meetings were held between senior staV and the research student, where the research student tried to make a formal complaint.16 After several weeks of not communicating with the person, I decided to try to resolve the matter by talking to him explicitly about the event and suggesting that we begin to speak to each other again. Generally, I would characterise both myself and the research student as strong speakers who are conWdent in the public sphere. Thus, this may seem to be a fairly stereotypical feminine response to the situation, or even perhaps an admission of some fault on our part. This is also why I feel that it is important to analyse politeness and impoliteness over long stretches of interaction, because it is quite clear that there are several points in the interaction where the meaning of certain acts began to change their meaning for me and therefore required a diVerent response. However, resolving breaches seems to me a fairly powerful move to make, and strategic use of stereotypical gendered behaviour cannot be considered in the same way as other less foregrounded gendered behaviour. This type of strategic use of stereotypical behaviour requires us to analyse more carefully the notion of the meaning of such behaviour. The impoliteness towards the research student and me was beginning to reXect more on us than it did on him; I did not wish to be cast in the role of victim and he showed no awareness of the distress his verbal attack had caused, particularly to the research student. This strategic use of feminine co-

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operative strategies should be seen as a way in which behaviour by women cannot be equated with stereotypes of behaviour, and even those stereotypes can be used for our own ends. However, whilst I felt that I was resolving the situation by drawing on these feminine norms strategically, this is not to say that other members of the Department, or indeed the new staV member himself, interpreted them in this way.

Conclusions Analysis of this incident shows that gender in an interaction is not simply about the gender of the speaker or hearer; this particular CofP is coded by many of the participants as masculine because banter is considered to be the normal mode of interaction; however, what was interpreted as impoliteness on a male’s part is condoned more, since this Wts in with the stereotypes of masculine interaction. A seemingly feminine response to the situation, that is, one which attempts to resolve the situation, cannot be simply coded as powerless, since in fact this is what brings the incident to a close. However, even though this is a strategic use of femininity, it may still be classiWed by others as a weak form of behaviour. Stereotypically masculine speech styles may be condoned more when they are employed by men than women, because these accord with notions of the habitual styles of men and their use of politeness. However, we should not assume that interactional power is necessarily achieved by the use of masculinist speech such as banter and impoliteness. Thus, when analysing politeness and impoliteness in relation to gender, it is not enough to simply analyse males’ and females’ use of seemingly selfevidently polite strategies within particular interactions; what must be focused on is the gendered domains of speech acts like politeness and the perceived norms of the CofP. Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness must be adapted or perhaps even fundamentally revised, so that we are able to consider more fully the context within which utterances take their meanings. A model of politeness must be able to account for the way that individuals come to a judgement of an utterance or series of utterances as polite or impolite, and the way that this judgement is not a once and for all act, but that it is something which takes up a great deal of interactional work with others. Furthermore, the power of feminine and masculine strategies of speech must also be considered in relation to what is achieved in the long term within the interaction. What I am


arguing for in this paper is a greater complexity in the analysis of gender, politeness and impoliteness which perhaps can only be achieved through turning from the sentence level to the level of discourse. The notion of CofP can provide a framework for analysing the complexity of judging an utterance as polite or impolite, and it can also enable us to see that within diVerent Communities of Practice, individuals may perform their gendered identities in diVerent ways.

Notes 1. I would like to thank the following people who have commented on draft versions of this paper: Tony Brown, Clare Walsh, Janine Liladhar, Reina Lewis, Manana Tevzadze, Corinne Boz, Jane Sunderland, Lia Litosseliti, Keith Green, Peter Jones and the members of the Cross Cultural Linguistic Politeness group who commented on a draft version of this paper which I gave at Nottingham Trent University, November 1999. I am also grateful to those who commented on versions of this paper which I have given at the Loughborough University Social Sciences Women’s Group, February, 2000; 1st International Gender and Language Association Conference, California, May, 2000, and Gender and Language Conference, Utrecht, May, 2000. This chapter is part of a wider study entitled Rethinking Gender and Politeness (Cambridge University Press), which I am working on at the moment. 2. Ehrlich’s (1999) article on the diVerential behaviour of a female tribunal judge and a female complainant in a sexual harassment/date rape trial is an excellent analysis of the way that women may be part of diVerent Communities of Practice and therefore will behave linguistically in very diVerent ways, but that they may decide to call on their shared biological sex for particular strategic reasons. 3. Although this is a possible role for secretaries to adopt within certain particular institutional contexts, it is interesting that not all secretaries do so. 4. This distinction between an analyst imposing a meaning on an utterance and an analyst attempting to discover the meanings which interactants give to an utterance is one which Bucholtz (1999) deWnes as the distinction between sociolinguistics and ethnography. 5. The Cross-cultural Linguistic Politeness Research Group, composed of linguists from Britain, China, Georgia, Italy, Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands, has been collaborating on rethinking the models which are currently in use for the analysis of linguistic politeness. We meet regularly to discuss the research of the participants and also to discuss new research in this area. One of the main discussions so far has been on the contestation of the notion of face, and we are currently working on Communities of Practice and politeness. Details of the group can be found on the website http:\\www. shu.ac.uk\schools\cs\linguistics and also on the website: www.linguisticpoliteness. eclipse.co.uk by contacting Sara Mills at [email protected]. See ‘Politeness & Context’, a

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special issue of Working Papers on the Web, edited by the group: www.shu.ac.uk/wpw/ wpw.htm (2002). 6. These individual norms, of course, cannot be arrived at except through the particular CofP and the wider social norms held within that society which that community will take a position in relation to. It is one’s judgement about what a certain level of politeness means in relation to one’s gendered, classed and raced identity which determines what style of politeness will be adopted. 7. The notion of appropriateness is a very diYcult one to engage with, as Walsh (2001) has noted. It is generally drawn on as a way of avoiding analysis of the structural inequalities in conversation which lead to certain notions of appropriateness being formulated which favour the dominant group’s norms. However, it remains a useful term to use with caution when discussing the way that individuals come to an assessment of their own and other’s utterances in relation to a set of perceived group norms. It should be noted also that individuals may have misguided notions of what is appropriate within a particular group (see Bucholtz 1999, on peripheral group members). 8. For example, in the army training example, it might be the case that one of the recruits considered the level of impoliteness as over-aggressive and therefore might lodge an oYcial complaint about it. A participant at a conference on Language and Gender in Utrecht, 2000, stated that when he did his year’s army training, he found the level of impoliteness personally threatening and oVensive. My point is that despite classifying this style of speech as impolite, nevertheless he recognised that it was ‘appropriate’ to the context and did not in fact complain to the authorities about it. 9. I should make clear that this analysis is not an attempt to ‘get back’ at the person involved; I am simply interested in the aftermath of the event within that CofP and what it tells us about politeness and impoliteness. Even after two years, the incident still has eVects on the Department and is still discussed. Indeed, this article is part of that process of understanding the event. There are clear diYculties in working on this material since I am making this incident public and presenting a particular view of the event. The male member of the staV involved in the incident has received a copy of each version of this paper, and I asked his permission to publish it. I also requested comments on his interpretation of the incident. He prevented me from publishing an earlier version of this essay in the Departmental web-journal: Working Papers on the Web. I should make very clear that the views expressed here about the meaning of the incident are mine alone. 10. Many of the female university lecturers to whom I have spoken about banter have stressed the fact that they see ‘doing’ banter and verbal duelling with male colleagues as a necessary but rather tedious element in their maintaining a position within the Departmental hierarchy. They see it almost as a precondition of being accepted as a ‘proper’ university lecturer that they can adopt this masculinist way of speaking. It is not something that they necessarily want to do, but it is a style of speaking that many of them felt that they could use eVectively. 11. If the incident had taken place earlier it would have been possible for me to draw on a whole range of other items of small talk, such as comments about the house where the


party was being held, or even the weather, but the timing of the interaction precluded the use of these. 12. It is diYcult to work out what the other participant considered happened during this interaction. This is one of the diYculties of discussing this incident, since, in essence, all I am reporting on is my perception of events, and my surmises about the other person’s motives. However, I would argue that this is not unusual in conversation. Despite several attempts to discuss this issue with him, he has not responded. However, another member of the Department who has attempted to be ‘objective’ about this interaction made comments to me which lead me to assume that this is roughly how he interpreted our actions. This may however be a post hoc rationalisation on that member of staV’s part or indeed on the part of the new member of staV (just as my analysis may well be). 13. Part of my working out of my gendered identity through language is a rejection of the necessity to simply adopt wholesale stereotypically masculine norms of speech in the workplace, as McElhinney has shown is the case for women police oYcers, and as Walsh has demonstrated in her analysis of women in the public sphere (Walsh 2001). However, like all identities, there is an interplay between the stereotypically masculine (banter), the stereotypically feminine (politeness, sympathy) and many other elements which go to make up an identity at any given moment. 14. Banter also is only an appropriate speech style to those who know each other well, and may be misinterpreted when used between relative strangers; it may also be used strategically by those strangers who wish to be impolite because of this ambiguity about whether it is a signal of intimacy and therefore positive politeness or impoliteness. 15. I would agree that alcohol aVects what we say to people, and when we judge that someone is drunk we also adopt diVerent strategies towards them and perhaps judge their utterances in diVerent ways, particularly in relation to truth and commitment. However, that cannot lead us to assume that the speech acts of those who are drunk should not be counted as having no eVect or force. Furthermore, the way that drunkenness is judged as appropriate or inappropriate for men and women was striking here. (See Clark 1998, for a discussion.) 16. When the staV member was informed that the research student was considering making a complaint, he left a note in her pigeonhole which said ‘Sorry’. No formal complaint was made.

References Bell, D, Binnie, J. Cream, J. and Valentine, G. 1994. “All hyped up and no place to go”, Gender, Place and Culture, 1 (1):31–48. Bergvall, Victoria. Bing, Janet and Freed, Alice (eds) 1996. Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, London : Longman. Boz, Corinne. (in progress) “Politeness and linguistic universals”, PhD thesis, SheYeld, UK: SheYeld Hallam University.

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Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen 1978. “Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena”, In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Goody, E.(ed), 56–311, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. “Why be normal? Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls.” Language in Society, 28(2):203–225. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 1998. “‘Is there any ketchup, Vera?’: gender, power and pragmatics”, Discourse and Society, 9(4):435–455. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. “Performing gender identity: young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity”, In Language and Masculinity, Johnson, Sally and Meinhof, Ulrike (eds) 86–107, Oxford: Blackwell. Christie, Christine. 2001. Gender and Language: Towards a Feminist Pragmatics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clark, K. 1998. “The linguistics of blame: representations of women in The Sun’s reporting of crimes of sexual violence.” In The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, 2nd edition, Cameron, Deborah (ed), 183–197, London: Routledge. Crawford, Mary. 1995. Talking DiVerence: On Gender and Language, London: Sage. Coates, Jennifer and Cameron, Deborah. eds (1988) Women in Their Speech Communities, London: Longman. Coates, Jennifer. 1996. Woman Talk, Oxford: Blackwell. Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. “Towards an anatomy of impoliteness,” Journal of Pragmatics, 25:349–367. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1999. “New generalisations and explanations in language and gender research”, Language in Society, 28(2):185–203. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1998. “Communities of practice: where language, gender and power all live,” In Language and Gender: A Reader, Coates, J. (ed), 484–494, Oxford: Blackwell. Ehrlich, Susan. 1999. “Communities of practice, gender and the representation of sexual assault,” Language in Society, 28(2):239–257. Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freed, Alice. 1999. “Communities of practice and pregnant women: is there a connection?”, Language in Society 28 (2):257–271. Freed, Alice. 1996. “Language and gender research in an experimental setting,” In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, Bergvall, Victoria, Bing, Janet and Freed, Alice (eds), 54–76, Harlow: Longman. Fuss, Diana. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism Nature and DiVerence, London: Routledge. Holmes, Janet and MeyerhoV, Miriam. 1999. “The community of practice: theories and methodologies in language and gender research”, Language in Society 28(2):173–185. Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness, London: Longman. Johnson, Sally and Meinhof, Ulrike (eds) 1997. Language and Masculinity, Oxford: Blackwell.


Johnstone, B, Ferrara, K, and Mattson Bean J. 1992. “Gender, politeness and discourse management in same-sex and cross-sex opinion poll interviews,” Journal of Pragmatics, 18:405–430. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. LakoV, Robin. 1978. Language and Woman’s Place, New York: Harper and Row. Liladhar, Janine. 2001. Making, Unmaking and Re-Making Femininity, unpublished PhD thesis, SheYeld, UK: SheYeld Hallam University. Mao, L. 1994. “Beyond politeness theory: “face’ revisited and renewed”, Journal of Pragmatics, 21 (5):451–486. McElhinny, Bonny. 1998. “‘I don’t smile much anymore’: aVect, gender and discourse of Pittsburgh police oYcers”, In Language and Gender: A Reader, Coates, J. (ed), 309– 327, Oxford: Blackwell. MeyerhoV, Miriam. 1999. “Sorry in the PaciWc: deWning communities, deWning practices,” Language in Society, 28(2):225–239. Mills, Sara. 1997. Feminist Stylistics, London: Routledge. Mills, Sara. 1996. “Powerful talk”, unpublished discussion paper, Loughborough, UK: Loughborough University. Mitchell, R. Clyde. 1984. “Typicality and case study”, In Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct, R. Ellen, (ed), London: Academic Press. Queen, Robin. 1997. “I don’t speak spritch: locating lesbian language”, In Queerly Phrased: Language Gender and Sexuality, Livia, Anna and Hall, Kira (eds) 233–242, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rundquist, S. 1992. “Indirectness: a gender study of Xouting Grice’s maxims,” Journal of Pragmatics, 18: 431–449. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language, London: Routledge. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell. Tannen, Deborah. 1991. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, London: Virago. Walsh, Clare. 2001. Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations, Harlow: Longman. Watts, R. 1992. “Acquiring status in conversation: ‘male’ and ‘female’ discourse strategies”, in Journal of Pragmatics, 18(5):467–505. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Chapter 4

Stunning, shimmering, iridescent Toys as the representation of gendered social actors Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Theo van Leeuwen University of Birmingham / CardiV University

1. Introduction Here are four representations of social actors designed (in principle) for children (Figure 1). Theoretically, any child could choose to play with any of them. In reality, however, boys tend not to play with Ken, girls tend not to play with Jacqueline. We heard from a father that he would be horriWed if his 10year-old boy chose to play with Barbies. The wonderful French Wlm, ‘Ma Vie en Rose’, directed by Alan Berliner, shows extremely well the conXict suVered by parents confronted with the choices made by their son in terms of his gender identity. And this in fact was his choice of the toys (mostly Barbies or similar dolls) he played with: his world was Barbie’s pink world – a girl’s world. Toys, like Barbie and Ken, or Action Man, represent social actors through their design, movement, colour schemes, among other things, and these are always conditioned by the social contexts and ideologies of the time of production. For Hall (1997:61) representation is the process by which members of a culture use signifying systems to produce meaning… Objects, people, events in the world do not have in themselves any Wxed, Wnal or true meaning. It is us, in society, within human cultures, who make things mean, who signify. Meanings, consequently will always change, from one culture or period to another. Representation involves making meaning by forging links between three diVerent orders of things: what we might broadly call the world of things, people, events and experience; the conceptual world – the mental concepts we carry in our heads; and the signs arranged into languages (and other modes), which stand for or communicate these concepts.

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Figure 1. Ken and Barbie’s pictures taken from Barbie’s catalogue; The Rock and Jacqueline’s pictures taken from toy boxes

Stunning, shimmering, iridescent

Toys, according to Hall’s statement, then, are representational in the sense that they signify what society is like: its roles (power relations inscribed in social roles), technologies (representation of tools and instruments – toy cars, trains, computers, telephones, etc.), identities and practices. Roland Barthes (1993:53) suggests that toys are a ‘microcosm of the adult world’ and that they always mean something: … this something is always entirely socialised, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life. Toys basically represent the institutions of our societies: the Army, Broadcasting, The Post OYce, Medicine (miniature instrument-cases, operating theatres for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (dryers for permanent waving), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), and Science (Martian Toys).

and we would add, the Family and gender relations. Jacqueline and The Rock, for example, are wrestlers and are designed for boys – in shops they are placed with Action Man, cars and other boy’s toys. They have male and female attributes that boys have to deal with – being strong, adventurous and powerful. Their physical features (large muscles, Jacqueline’s big breasts) connote exaggeration on the verge of distortion. Their almost naked bodies assert their sexuality. Ken and Barbie, through their dress code, posing and looks in general, by comparison, are representatives of conformity, socially desirable activities such as going to work, going shopping, etc. Our aim in this paper is to begin to discuss how toys (and the texts and images that accompany the material objects) are semiotically signiWcant and how some of their meanings are actualised. We will focus on aspects of design, on some images through which advertisers market their products and Wnally on the language produced to sell some toys. Since toys are resources that children use to understand the world, it is important to explore some of these meanings. 2. Why toys? We see images of toys everywhere – in adverts, in the media, on television, in Wlms and in texts. They are produced according to social meanings which vary historically and culturally and, therefore, they convey diVerent messages to children about the social world and the social practices that surround them. Tin Soldiers, for example, popular in the 19th Century, signiWed the heroicisation of ‘great’ generals, or admirals, during a time when ‘patrio-

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tism’ was a social value (this value was also constructed through practices of war and associated national songs and narratives of war). Tin Soldiers seem not to be popular anymore. Construction toys, Meccano and later on Lego, appeared during the era of constructivism and signiWed standardisation, universality, uniformity and objectiWcation (the toy does not produce any aVective reaction but creates possibilities for multiple combinations). In general, therefore, the materiality of the objects (what they are made of) such as metal, plastic, wood or soft materials, and what they represent, reveal cultural references. Toys, therefore, are intimately related to ‘what goes on’ in society, its ideologies and values. Historically, toys have been seen as, or used as, single models of the real world – from dolls, horses, and balls to trains, cars, construction toys and games. In post-modern societies, however, toys are not only replicas of the real world, they are in fact a central mass medium for contemporary social life, either as models (replicas), miniatures or interesting objects (with or without any reference to the real world) or as integrated parts of other mass media. The Star Wars phenomenon is a good example. The Wlm, which was re-launched in 1999, triggered a whole commercial project and if you visit any toyshop today, you will see whole sections dedicated to Star Wars paraphernalia. Toys are also a very important medium through which children learn to interact with others and with social meanings. To play is always to play with something or with someone, and the toys are means through which interaction is accomplished. Another aspect of the toy world is that learning is bound to the concept of playing. (Aristotle was the Wrst to document a distinction between play and work.) When Western adults work, they generally use ‘tools’ (interestingly, ‘toy’ and ‘tool’ is the same word in German – zeug), but to work with tools is more important/acceptable and more prestigious than to play with toys. We now see the advent of the computer game used in schools even for very young children as a tool for learning – edu/(enter)tainment is the new educational concept. Play in the techno-world has moved from hands/ body to the Wngertips/brain and the values and practices of work and play become blurred. Toys also continue to be important for adults. Many people collect toys, or keep cuddly ones from their childhood, and even buy new ones, relating to these objects in special aVective ways. Teddies or soft animals, for example,


are secretly or explicitly kept in bedrooms, are taken to the workplace, or put in cars. Toys are in this sense also an adult phenomenon. In conversations about toys, many adults tend to remember events connected to their own childhood and somehow seem to recall a lost time. At the same time, many adults feel embarrassed when talking about their toys, and this seems to be linked to the relative values of work and play that Aristotle referred to. This brings us to the industrial/commercial aspect of Toys. According to Sutton Smith (1986:2), in the States alone, “some 800 companies sell about 150,000 diVerent kinds of toy products (with about 4,000 new items every year) and employ about 60,000 people”. These numbers, when considered in conjunction with the points mentioned above, are signiWcant enough for us to start seriously considering toys as signiWcant cultural assets.

3. Toys as semiotic meaning potential Toys are essentially multi-modal – they are: –

three dimensional objects that can be read and interpreted as texts (by texts, in an extended semiotic sense, we mean the concrete material object produced in discourse, the structure of messages which has a socially ascribed unity (Hodge and Kress 1988:6))

and –

objects to be manipulated and used.

Kress (1993:174) suggests that all texts ‘equally code the ideological positions of their producers. The everyday, innocent and innocuous, the mundane text is as ideologically saturated as a text which wears its ideological constitution overtly’. Toys as semiotic signs are therefore located in discourses of gender, age, and social class among others. They also have the basic features of what Scollon labels ‘mediated discourse’ (2000:5): –

–

toys are interdiscursive, ‘positioned within multiple, overlapping and even conXicting discourses’ – the discourses of the family, the school and advertising; they have intertextual links with other mass media, especially with classical and modern narratives of all sorts – books, Wlms, and comic strips

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among others. In many cases, it is diYcult to guess what appeared Wrst – the toy as an object, or stories about a person or a thing that eventually becomes a toy. Teddy Bears, for example, were designed Wrst as toys and then many diVerent stories, retold in diVerent media, were produced after the toy (Grey, M. and G. 1995). An inverse process occurs currently with contemporary Disney Wlms, which are the sources of many new toys; and –

they are dialogical – a means through which diVerent kinds of ‘conversations’ can be established.

The meaning of toys is hence a combination between what the toys themselves ‘are’ (the meanings provided for children by the toy industry) and what children ‘do’ with the toys, or the ways they use them. We assume that when children play, their meaning making is not necessarily the same as that which the toy maker ‘designed into’ the toy. Children can accept, reject or transform the oVered meanings. The signs oVered can be reinterpreted/re-appropriated and recreated by the child in play, with other signs (including signs from other modes such as speech, facial expressions, gesture, dress). In other words, toys are a code, a language with which children can construct their own scripts/ narratives, so as to incorporate the globally distributed signs into the speciWc contexts of their own world, the school, for instance, or the family (Vandenberg 1986; Sutton-Smith 1986). For example, a Playmobil character constructed as a ‘Wre Wghter’ becomes a baby that can be put to bed (with the Wre Wghter’s stretcher as the bed). We can therefore say that toys are both already produced communications and tools to produce communications with. We can draw analogies between toys as communicative systems to language as a system – both produce ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings (Halliday 1985). We interact with the objects according to these three dimensions. Toys as a semiotic system project the relations between the producer of a sign or a complex sign and the receiver/reproducer of that sign. [Toys also] project a particular social relation between producer, the viewer and the object represented. (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996:41)

And Wnally, toys can be textualised in many diVerent ways through stories, Wlms, cartoons, pictures, adverts, etc.


4. Toys and gender – visual representations What kinds of dolls exist? Which ages, ethnicities, professions and so on, are available as toys and which are not? How are boys and girls, men and women represented – old ones, young ones, male ones, female ones, black ones, white ones? What are they like? What can they do? Who gets included and who excluded in the toy world? What are the potential social meanings which speciWcally diVerentiate girls’ and boys’ toys and what are the values attached to these representations? Certain roles in society, like practices of domesticity (the house and the woman as a housekeeper, for example) are over-represented, while practices of ‘fatherhood’ are basically absent in the toy world. Old age is another social category that is rarely represented in the world of Western toys. We assume therefore that the resources used by the industry are informed by certain preferred meanings, as Hall (1997) suggested, which will in turn be informed by a certain view of the social order. We asked ourselves: what are the potential social meanings which diVerentiate girls’ and boys’ toys and what are the values attached to these representations? Butler (1990, 1999) points out that gender is performative, brought into being by the repeated performance of social actors. Gender is not something we have or are but rather something we perform. According to her, we constantly negotiate and are able to challenge our gender positions in relation to conceptions of femininity and masculinity: Gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free Xoating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive eVect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed. (1990:24, 25)

Although we agree with the statement above and the notion of performativity in gender, it seems that Butler excludes semiotics from her considerations: gender can also be represented in terms of ‘identity’ – what you are or what characteristics you have. The boy in the French Wlm we referred to above, by playing with Barbies, was ‘performing femininity’, since he was not able to go to school dressed as a girl, or have a girl’s hairstyle. Barbies and other toys, in contrast, are already gendered before children do anything or anything is

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done with them. In some cases, gender is represented through unchangeable features (the feet of Barbie are sometimes designed exclusively for high heeled shoes, for example), in other cases, through changeable features (hairdo, clothes). These features were our starting point. For us, toys, as objects, are Wxed representations that are not negotiable. The real question is, however, whether, what extent and how children (and parents) align with given gendered meanings. This is a very important question that needs further research. In the next sections, we will elaborate on some of the ways gender is represented in toys.

4.1 Design and movement Gender can be implicitly constructed in toys representing human beings simply by the way the doll moves. Dolls may or may not be designed kinetically, that is, they may or may not have parts that move or be made to move. The representation of action diVers considerably from toy to toy. Some toys are designed for action, others for posing. This is very important in terms of gender representation. Dolls for boys are visibly diVerentiated from girls’ dolls. Action Man, for example, stands by himself without falling over, he can hold objects, his head can move sideways, his legs can open. His muscled body and powerful hands are his main distinguishing features. Girls’ dolls like Barbie on the other hand, cannot stand by themselves, they cannot hold anything in their hands, their legs cannot open wide and their heads move in any direction (Figure 2). Both the movement of the head (especially from side to side and up and down) and the possibility of bending the knees make it possible for the girl’s doll to be put in ‘submissive positions’ – head slightly bent at an angle. Action Man in contrast can hold his chin up, in a proud posture! His head moves only sideways (Figure 3). Such diVerences hardly need further elaboration. They capture the most basic, essential elements for gendered body language as it permeates contemporary Western popular culture. The action potentials of these dolls are to the language of action what simple line drawings are to the language of visual communication: representation reduced to the bare essentials, the basic outline, like for example a drawing of a face that consists of a round line with two dots for eyes and a semi-circular line for a mouth. This is one of the key lessons of the kinetically designed toy: movement is ‘programmed in’, the ‘social’ becomes ‘genetic’, ‘baked in’.


Figure 2. Pictures from the Barbie catalogue.

Figure 3. Picture taken from the Action Man catalogue.

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The pictures found in magazines and on the boxes of toys convey the same message in terms of movement . Barbies stand as if unable to move. In reality, Barbies need a support even to stand. On toy boxes and catalogues, Barbies are static, placed in spaces related to domestic life (the house, the garden, the shop), while Action Man is generally placed outdoors – near wild nature, ready for action. Action Man is, in fact, always on the go and he is placed in speciWc contexts involving exterior settings, danger and movement. As with the kinetic design, this visual representation of the toys locates females and males in diVerent spheres and conveys gendered meanings. Using Hallidayan Systemic theory to analyse visual communication, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) say that visual representations realise modality in diVerent ways in the visual medium. For them, one of the crucial issues is the question of the reliability of the message. Is what we see or hear true, factual, real or is it a lie, a Wction, something outside reality? Modality in images therefore refers to the truth-value or credibility of statements about the world. Visual images can represent the world as though it is real, naturalistic or as though it is fantastic, imaginary. Naturalistic reality is deWned on the basis of how much correspondence there is between the visual representations of an object and what we normally see of that object with the naked eye. (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996:160)

They continue: Modality clues are motivated signs – signs which have arisen out of the interest of social groups who interact within the structures of power that deWne social life and also interact across the systems produced by various groups in a society. (1996:159)

We attach more credibility to some kinds of messages than to others. Photographs, it is said, do not lie, but how the photographer edits and mediates reality through her own point of view is another matter. Kress and van Leeuwen claim that a social semiotic theory of truth cannot establish the absolute truth or untruth of representations. It can only show whether a given proposition is represented as true or not. Modality in this sense is essential in accounts of multimodal representations like toys, since they can represent people, places, things as though they were real or fantastic, caricatures or perfect copies of the ‘real’. Reality is deWned on the basis of how much correspondence there is between the visual representation and what we nor-

Stunning, shimmering, iridescent 101

mally see of that object with the naked eye (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996:159). Kress and van Leeuwen also put forward the idea that one of the ways reality is modulated in visual communication is through colour, focus and depth (perspective), which may be idealised to a greater or lesser degree. Colour plays a role in all coding orientations. You can have abstract colour (e.g. uniform pinkness for faces, or green-ness for grass). You can have naturalistic colour. And you can have sensory colour – colour becomes sensory to the degree it ‘exceeds’ naturalism. As there are diVerent dimensions of colour: colour may be sensory in one respect (e.g. saturation), and abstract in others (e.g. modulation – Modriaan’s paintings, for example). Colour is also a source of pleasure and produces (or not) aVective meanings. We all recognise the emotive and sensual value of colours. Through diVerent shades, the principle of pleasure is enacted. We react positively to colours that attract us. And colours in general are loaded with social signiWcation.

4.2 Colour and gender Colour can be an important signiWer of gender. Think of the traditional opposition between pink and blue in babies’ clothes, or the greys and browns that dominate men’s clothing and the pastels and brighter hues that are associated with women’s clothing. A look at toys and the way they are packaged, catalogued and advertised shows that there is still plenty of ‘feminine’ pink around. A Barbie catalogue includes pink furniture (in the ‘Bridal Boutique’), pink dresses, a pink ‘Motor home’ as well as a lot of pink in the lettering and in the background of both pictures and text. Even the Barbie web page has a pink background. So, in our western society, pink has (acquired) a deWnite, and further, association for what it is to be female. However, there is not just one tone of pink. There are all kinds of mauves, pinkish purples, bluish purples, ranging from pale to hot and brooding, and from light to dark menacing – hardly surprising given that there are diVerent kinds of ‘femininities’. Other colours, like blue for boys or dark colours for men, attach values to the idea of ‘masculinity’. In contemporary popular culture these values are not explicitly codiWed. They appear just to emerge from our experience of the kind of things that are pink or mauve in nature and in culture, Wne-tuned by the symbolic overtones of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ and of ‘pale’ and ‘intense’ which can create ‘dark’ and ‘light’, and ‘pale’ and ‘intense’ kinds of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinities’.


A comparison of two colourful, glossy Playmobil catalogues, one dating from 1993 and one dating from 1999, reveals some striking diVerences. In the 1993 catalogue the majority of the illustrated toys related to everyday real life (farm life, home life, holiday activities, road building, the police, the ambulance, and so on), and pinks, mauves and purples, were almost entirely absent. The only exceptions were the pirate ship, the circus, and a 19th century Victorian mansion: there was pinkish purple in some of the pirates’ clothes, and in the Xowers on the desert island; there was pinkish purple in the outWt of the snake charmer and the tasselled cloth on the elephant’s back. And there was pinkish purple in the coat of the Victorian gentleman, and in the background behind the mansion. In the 1999 catalogue the real world has made way for the world of the imagination: the enchanted forest, the 19th century expedition in the jungle, the Wild West, the fairy tale palace. And pinks, mauves and purples of diVerent degrees of darkness and intensity dominate the catalogue throughout. However, if we start looking at these two worlds, the more realistic and the fantastic world, we begin to notice interesting contrasts – the boys’ worlds tend to be darker and more intense. Almost invariably they evoke mystery or danger – they are there in the sky behind an elk confronted with a pack of wolves, in a violent thunderstorm, and in the enchanted forest. The fairy tale palace, contrastively, has more pinks and is brighter. The sense of mystery and adventure is lost, replaced by a sense of romance. The colours of the palace resemble the pastel pink and blue colours of Bosch’s ‘Earthly Paradise’ painting (reproduced in Murray, P. and L., 1963:224) which evoke a sense of tranquillity, stillness – and femaleness, we could ask? Moving back to the Barbie catalogue, it now becomes clearer how the diVerent shades of pink are used: light pinks, for instance, in connection with innocent childhood (‘Shelly Playhouse’) and family life (‘Motor home’). Darker shades are connected with teenage Barbie, and can be seen in the bathroom, in the ‘Bridal Boutique’, in the scene where Barbie, in her ‘hot pink’ swimming costume, drives her ‘sun wheeler’ to the beach, ‘ready for some fun in the sun’ – in short, whenever the possibility of sexuality intrudes. Pinks, mauves and purples are relatively rare in nature, seen on Xowers or gemstones, or in patches of colour on tropical birds. This rarity is the key to their meaning potential. A single semantic factor is always present when they are used: ‘unusual-ness’, ‘out-of-the-ordinary-ness’ (hence their use in the special ceremonial dress of bishops and kings). Context, and degree of dark-


ness and intensity, will then narrow this meaning further, for instance in the direction of mystery, or danger, or sexuality. Yet it is possible that all of these resonate intertextually in the background of any given narrower interpretation: in the world of children’s toys, sexuality will also be mysterious and dangerous, for instance, and danger also sexually exciting. And as the same pinks, mauves and purples not only saturate toy catalogues, but also the sets of television programmes and the interior decoration of public and private spaces, the same attitude perhaps pervades the whole of a post-modern society, which is both fraught with risk and saturated with sexuality.

5. Texts and toys We want to consider now how at the textual level, gender distinctions are realised. The written examples were taken from toy boxes, catalogues and from the Web. We will brieXy discuss how ideational meanings, through classiWcation and evaluation, make gender distinctions explicit in the discourse of advertising. Generally, dolls are named and therefore classiWed in terms of social roles. Toys for boys have some bizarre classiWcations, but implicitly, these locate the pseudo-actors in professional or action-oriented settings. Action Man is, variously, Dr. X, Pollar, Polar Mission, Bowman, Roller Extreme, Bungee Jumper, Ninja. These classiWcations point to power relations (Dr.), to super skills (Roller Extreme, Bungee Jumper) or to supernatural power (Ninja). In all of them, therefore, some kind of power is conveyed. Girl dolls, on the other hand, are classiWed according to ‘female’ professions and roles, but no super human evaluations or location in prestige social practices are attached to the classiWcations: they are shoppers, ballerinas, mothers, nurses, hairdressers and the contexts in which they are placed are generally within the domestic space or on Florida beaches (we wonder why!). Again, the naming is odd, comical in fact, but points to romantic, idealised constructions of womanhood, like the pinks in houses and furniture. Barbies, for example, can be named: Blushing Orchid Bride, Country Rose, Harpist Angel, Illusion, Rose, Summer Dream, Symphony in Chiffon, and Summer Splendour. The texts below are another example of how through evaluations and the construction of action in discourse, textual representations signal gender


diVerence. Consider the following texts (from http://www.actionman.com and http://barbie.com): Blushing Orchid Bride™ Barbie® Wedding Flower Collection Blushing Orchid Bride Barbie doll is the third Limited Edition porcelain doll in the Wedding Flower Collection. Celebrating the beauty and meaning of the orchid in the wedding ceremony, she wears a soft, blush satin bridal gown with train and layers of sparkling tulle edged with ribbon. Iridescent lace covers the bodice, which dramatically tapers into long petals simulating an orchid. Her delicate, hand-painted face is framed by a blush veil, which Xows in two layers from a double circle of simulated pearls, matching her jewelry and even the tiny simulated pearls on her gloves and in her bouquet. Autumn Glory™ Barbie® Enchanted Seasons Collection Autumn Glory Barbie doll from the Enchanted Seasons Collection is a stunning tribute to the wonders of fall. Her Wtted, metallic appliquéd bodice transitions to a long, chiVon gown shimmering in hues of copper and auburn, adorned with fall leaves, and accented with hints of purple and gold. Her earrings are shaped like graceful golden leaves. Atop her long, auburn hair sits a dark, wine colored hat, embellished with feathers and leaves, adding the Wnal touch to this wondrous autumn portrait. Austrian Barbie Grüss Gott (Greetings) from Austria! Austrian Barbie doll is as lovely as the country she represents in her Xoral-print skirt, attached oV-white blouse, and felt-like jacket trimmed in green with beautifully embroidered Xowers on the lapels. Her accessories include an eyelet edged rose-colored scarf, white stockings, black shoes, ‘pearl’ ear studs and a ‘pearl’ ring. Her colorful authentic Austrian costume reminds us of the vibrant colors of the beautiful country containing snow-covered Alps, lush green forests, and cheerful alpine Xowers.

Contrast those with the following: Action Man Bungee Action Man is the greatest hero of them all! Action Man leaps into the unknown with his fabulous bungee jumping kit, which includes a two-stage harness, grappling hook and super-cool sunglasses.


Action Man Arctic Diver Action Man is the greatest hero of them all! Action Man goes into action once again, this time on an exciting deep-sea mission, with cool breathing apparatus and fantastic, realistic underwaterdrill. Action Man Sky Diver Action man is the greatest hero of them all! Now Action Man leaps to glory with a magniWcent sky dive! He opens his glorious parachute and descends safely to earth wearing his practical Xight suit and open-face helmet.

The Barbie texts, possibly addressed to an adult audience of collectors (given lexical items like ‘iridescent’, ‘tulle edged’, ‘tapers’) are ideationally construing a relational and mental world: the doll is, wears, represents, and the reader is ‘reminded of’. The long nominal groups are positively evaluating what Barbie is: an occasional participant in the processes. Either parts of her body or parts of her clothing are the ‘identiWed’ in the relational processes: the lace, the hand-painted face, her bodice, her earrings, etc. This means that she is represented as static, not in control of what is happening to her body. The Action Man texts, on the other hand, construe the world in terms of actions: Action Man ‘leaps’, ‘goes into action’, ‘ opens’, ‘descends’. He is the main actor in the material processes described and he is in control of his actions. Barbie (and her clothes) are mainly appraised/appreciated (see White 1999; Martin 2000) in terms of aesthetic values – blushing, stunning, shimmering, iridescent, soft, sparkling, delicate graceful – while Action Man is evaluated according to social judgement: super cool, exciting, fantastic, practical, fabulous, grappling, realistic. The generic structures of Barbie and Action Man texts are also very diVerent – Barbie texts could be included in a catwalk genre, where models are described and adults are interested in attributes and features of the doll. The Action Man texts, by contrast, could belong to a TV ad type of genre, addressed to a child interested in imaginary play. Now consider the following text: Stunning Californian man is as lovely as the State he represents in his shimmering black Caterpillar boots, felt-like crimson-hued designer pants and sensual cut-away vest, with silver and orange abstract design. The chest-hugging vest tapers dramatically to emphasise his narrow waist. His accessories include a gold diamond studded ring, wafer thin gold watch with white gold strap, a solid


shimmering gold necklace and an earring shaped like a graceful rose petal. His delicate painted face conveys the Wrmness of his personality. Atop his beautifully coiVured jet-black hair sits a dark wine coloured hat embellished with swan’s tail feathers adding the Wnal touch to the wondrous portrait of American manhood.

The incongruity is produced by applying the same kinds of lexical and transitivity choices found in the Barbie texts to a male social actor toy. This exempliWes how ideational meanings, evaluations and generic structures, used from a certain ideological point of view, represent a distinctly gendered world.

5. Conclusions In the world of toys, gender divisions continue to be enacted – men have to do with the public domain, are action-oriented and have superior powers; women’s worlds are linked to the house, are appreciated in terms of aesthetic values and are generally involved in the nurturing professions – even the Playmobil teacher is dressed in pink! Although, as Sutton Smith (1986) suggests, most people regard toys as trivialities which are not to be taken very seriously, toys are repositories of social values and may constrain the way the child views the world. From the analysis above, we hope to have demonstrated that toys are closely related to many larger cultural patterns in society in general and continue to transmit a damaging, gendered and unequal world – female dolls are represented as physically constrained in the ways they move, they are romanticised (through colour codes, through language, and sometimes sexualised in speciWc ways), and are basically anchored on a ‘real world’ of domestic doings. They are also conventionally restricted to certain activities and social roles. Boys’ toys and their related representations construct action, danger, risk and power. The world of toys and its many representations therefore construct human beings in very diVerent ways – the ‘real’ world and the ‘imaginary world’ is diVerent for boys and girls. If boys and girls are exposed to such a diVerent version of the world from very early on, their identities might also be constructed (though in diVerent ways) on the basis of this diVerence. And this is frightening.


Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank PLAYMOBIL for their kind permission to use the ‘Big Move’ visual. The authors also wish to thank Mattel, for three images of Barbie and one of Ken; Jakks Pacif INC for two images of Wrestle Mania toys (The Rock and Jacqueline), and Hasbro for two images of Action Man. Every eVort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked, or if any additional information can be given, the authors will be pleased to make the necessary amendments at the Wrst opportunity.

Note This paper is one of the results of the research project Toys as Communication, carried out by an interdisciplinary team, under the leadership of Professor StaVan Selander, University of Stockholm, and Wnanced by the Bank of Sweden. The other members, from Denmark and Sweden, are from the Welds of sociology, social psychology and play research.

References Barthes, Roland. 1973. Mythologies. St. Albans: Paladine. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music and Text. London: Fontana. Bernstein, Basil. 1981. “Codes, modalities and the process of cultural reproduction: a model”. Language and Society 10:327–63. Butler, Judith. 1990, 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. and Van Leeuwen, T. 2001. “Baby’s first toys and the discursive constructions of babyhood”. In Folia Linguistica XXXV/1-1, 157–182, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Featherstone, Mike. 1993. Consumer Culture & Postmodernism. London: SAGE Publications. Fleming, Dan. 1996. Powerplay. Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grey, Margaret and Grey, Gerry. 1994. Teddy Bears: The Collector’s Guide to Selecting, Restoring and Enjoying New and Vintage Teddy Bears. London: The Apple Press. Hall, Stuart (ed) (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, in association with The Open University. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1985/1994. Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Hodge, Robert and Kress, Gunther. 1988. Social Semiotics. London: Polity Press. Kline, Steven. 1993. Out of the Garden. Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. London:Verso.


Kress, Gunther. 1993. “Against arbitrariness: the social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis”. Discourse and Society 4 (2):169–192. Kress, Gunther and Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Martin, James R. 2000. “Beyond exchange: appraisal systems in English”. In Evaluation in Text, Hunston, Susan and Thompson, GeoV (eds), 142–175. Oxford: OUP. Murray, Peter and Murray, Linda. 1963. The Art of the Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson. Scollon, Ron. 1998. Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction: a Study of News Discourse. London: Longman. Scollon, Ron. 2001. Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. London: Routledge. Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1986. Toys as Culture. New York: Gardner. Vandenberg, B. 1986. “Play Theory”. In Fein, G. and Rivkin, M. (eds) The Young Child at Play, Reviews of Research 4. Washington D. C: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NEYC). White, Peter. 1999. “An introductory tour through appraisal theory”. (www.gramatics. com/appraisal)

Consuming personal relationships 109

Discourse and Gendered Identities in the Media

110 Michelle M. Lazar

Consuming personal relationships

Chapter 5

Consuming personal relationships The achievement of feminine self-identity through other-centeredness Michelle M. Lazar National University of Singapore

Introduction This paper examines the achievement of a distinctly feminine identity in the course of heterosexual relationships that span courtship, marriage and motherhood. The study is part of a larger research project that I undertook on a critical discourse analysis of the co-constructions of heterosexuality and gender relations in a Singaporean national advertising campaign. This was a campaign that was launched by the government as a result of a pro-natalist fertility policy that was actively pursued from the late 1980s. At this time the government had noted a steady decline in the national birth rate, which, if left unchecked, was foreseen to adversely aVect Singapore’s economy and administration in the future. Amongst the various measures undertaken in order to rectify the situation,1 the government started a multi-media advertising campaign aimed especially at better-educated2 Singaporeans in the reproductive age bracket. These ads have attempted to persuade this group of women and men to get to know one another with the aim of getting married and starting a family. These ads, which span a period of more than ten years, altogether constitute a narrative discourse of heterosexual sociality (Lazar 1999), which is as ‘compulsory’ for women (Rich 1980) as it is for men. Both are expected to follow the same ‘stages’ (viz. singlehood, couplehood, marriage and parenthood), and in the same chronology towards the ultimate goal of procreation. Although women and men are similarly subjected to this heterosexual order, their respective subject positions therein are markedly dissimilar.

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In this paper, I explore what it means to be a ‘woman’ (as opposed to a ‘man’) within this heterosexual order. I argue that implicit in the main conceptualisation of heterosexual femininity in the ads is the principle of other-centredness. By this, I refer to the systematic cultivation of an acute consciousness and devotedness to men (boyfriends and husbands) and children in the achievement of a woman’s own self-identity (Lazar 2000). What this means is that women’s energies in realising their personal interests, including the pursuit of a career outside the home, are channelled towards seeking fulWlment almost entirely in and through others. Heterosexual femininity in these ads, in other words, is based on consuming personal relationships. ‘Consuming’ is here understood in two interrelated senses: (1) within the genre of advertisement, the subject position oVered to the target women audience in this case is predominantly that of potential consumers of love and personal relationships; and (2) within the type of discourse of gender relations that will be discussed below, love and personal relationships are set up as the absolute, all-consuming priority in women’s lives. The central thesis of the paper is that the achievement of feminine selfidentity through other-centredness in the ads is rooted in a discourse of conservative gender relations. Although from the line of argument so far this may come as little surprise, the claim in favour of conservatism requires some elaboration. Firstly, it is important to note that the ads are not uniformly or monologically conservative. Along with gender conservatism, there co-exists in the same set of ads a discourse of egalitarian gender relations, which appears to support women’s agency in areas of personal and career choices. This is important, as the female target audience of the ads are educated young women, who hold professional careers and have a progressive outlook on gender roles and relations. The presence of the egalitarian discourse, therefore, oVers recognition of this class of modern Singaporean women, and is a shrewd attempt at making the ads relevant to this group. Owing to constraints of space, however, for present purposes I shall concentrate mainly on the conservative discourse in the ads. Placing the spotlight on conservatism is in itself a worthwhile undertaking because for all the dialogism that appears between egalitarianism and conservatism in the ads, the latter it seems has the upper hand. The conservative discourse co-opts elements of the egalitarian discourse by keeping women singularly focused and emotionally dependent on personal relationships with men and children. This paper, therefore, aims to examine in some detail just how the dominant conservative discourse works to accomplish this.


Secondly, an other-centred femininity is considered part of a conservative arrangement between women and men because of the asymmetrical representation of women vis-à-vis men in the ads. As I have shown elsewhere (Lazar 1993, 2000), men’s involvement with women and children does not entail a suppression of their own self-interests. Indeed, heterosexual masculinity thrives upon the other-centredness of women, as it helps men further their own personal and career goals. In the present study, my interest is primarily in the construction of heterosexual femininity, but this is undertaken on the assumption that representations pertaining to women and men constitute two sides of the same coin. Hence, an other-centred heterosexual femininity is not achieved in isolation, but in relation to its self-centred masculine counterpart in heterosexual sociality. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to address the two equally, the enactment of women’s other-centredness obviously involves men, and so part of the dynamic between women and men will become evident (below) in the analysis of heterosexual femininity. The analysis of discourse that will be undertaken is a multi-semiotic one. Halliday’s functional grammar (1994) will be selectively used for the analysis of language structures. Concurrently, for analysis of the visual structures in the ads, I selectively draw upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual grammar, combined with insights from GoVman’s (1979) work on advertisements. My aim is to examine how clusters of linguistic and visual features are deployed in constructing a world in which other-centredness becomes a naturalised essence of heterosexual femininity. The analysis is divided into three segments dealing with the achievement of feminine other-centredness in the ‘stages’ of courtship, marriage and parenthood, respectively. The titles of three of the ads appear in the headings of the three successive segments. The titles, in a nutshell, highlight the prioritisation of love and personal relationships for women (and set up women’s subject position as consumers of love) in the various stages of heterosexual sociality. Each of these ads will be discussed in some detail in the three respective segments, together with a number of the other ads in the campaign.3 (The titles and brief descriptions of these are provided in the Appendix.) The ads are of both print and televisual media.4

‘True love’: Women in courtship In courtship, feminine other-centredness is accomplished through the positioning of women as deeply invested in romance.5 At Wrst glance, it may

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appear that women and men have an equal investment in romance. For example, the opening of one ad begins with We fell in love. Just you and I. (Then Something Wonderful Happened, TV, emphasis added). The pronouns here that jointly refer to the female and male protagonists in the ad represent the two as co-participants with mutual investments in romance. In other ads too (e.g. Make Room For Love (Print) and True Love (Print)), the prevalent use of such pronouns as us/our/we and you (plus the indeWnite noun someone) in constructions of romantic love creates the impression of a shared or universal appeal. However, on closer analysis we Wnd that the construction of romance is far from gender-neutral or symmetrical. Rather, (i) it is biased in targeting mainly women and not men, and (ii) it presents a framework for couplehood that further naturalises and justiWes the enactment of asymmetrical conservative gender relations. Before demonstrating the gender-bias in the construction of romance, I want to brieXy consider why the bias in address is signiWcant. Targeting and drawing women into the realm of romance is a way of co-opting self-determined, career-minded women into re-directing their main energies upon men as their central focus.6 The construction of emotional dependence on men assumes centre-stage for women in a way that is absent in the representation of women for men in the same set of ads. Why then is there a need for the ads to appear as if they are universal if their targets chieXy are women? The idea that both parties are equally invested in romantic love, I would suggest, has a persuasive eVect that may serve as an incentive for women to ‘buy into’ it themselves. For example, the attempt at universalism seems to account for the presence of a brief duet in the soundtrack of True Love (TV). The soundtrack in the ad is sung almost entirely by a female vocalist, except in the Wrst chorus – Hey, I looked all my life for you. Now you’re here – where combined female and male vocals is present. The second time the chorus is sung, however, the female voice returns solo. A small detail like this, of including a brief duet in an otherwise solo number, is presumably intended to reassure women that men are co-participants in romance and feel the way women do. Let us now consider in greater detail how the gender-bias in romance is implied, by focussing on the ad True Love. In this ad, gender-bias is evident in several ways. Although both the female and male protagonists are co-present in the shots that depict romance, it is the woman’s facial expression and body posture that are more saliently represented. For example, in the Wnal scene of the TV version of the ad, the woman is represented facing the camera in a close-up shot with a dreamy expression on her face. She is represented tilting


her head at an angle to look up adoringly at the man, closing her eyes, and slowly re-opening them to gaze smilingly upon him. In contrast to the detailed depiction of the woman’s expression, the man’s facial expression is obscured by the angle at which he stands to the camera. This particular scene is chosen and enlarged to form a solo shot in one version of the print ad, and it appears as the Wnal still in yet another print version with a corresponding caption The Future appearing beneath it. Moreover, this is not the only shot in the second print version of the ad in which the romantically portrayed couple stand in an asymmetrical relation to the camera. In two other shots in this same ad version, labelled The Wonder and The Joy, the woman’s facial expression is more visible than the man’s. As in The Future, The Joy displays a similar technique: the front of the woman, albeit at an angle, is shown facing the camera, whereas it is mostly the man’s back that is visible to the camera. In The Wonder, the bodies of both the woman and the man are facing the front, but the man’s face is mostly hidden in shadow. In these two shots, the facial expressions of the woman reXect the respective captions (The Wonder and The Joy). In other words, the deWnite article in the captions refers to her wonder, her joy; and likewise, her future. Another, especially striking, indication that the ad fundamentally implicates women (not men) in the construction of romantic love is that the ad is speciWcally presented from the perspective of the female protagonist. At one point in the TV ad, as the couple are slow-dancing, the woman is shown looking away from her dance partner in an expression which GoVman (1979:57, 65) describes as ‘licensed withdrawal’. By this he refers to the representation of women mentally drifting or psychologically going ‘away’ from the present occasion whilst still being in close physical contact with a man. In the ad, the woman’s going ‘away’ is signiWcant on two counts. First, it is consonant with the dream-like mood created of romance (i.e. muted physical background, and slow dance music and movements), and it is noteworthy that it is she, particularly, who reXects that mood. Second, her mental escapade is revealed to us in the form of Xashbacks of events leading to the couple’s present embrace. In other words, the reminiscences of their romantic encounter are presented from her point of view; it is her experience of romance that is being projected in the ad. Also, it seems no coincidence that the voice on the soundtrack of the TV version is a woman’s, and the lyrics are sung in the Wrst person, i.e. from the point of view of the woman herself: Am I really here in your arms? Its just like I dreamed it would be. What we have here, then, is a

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representation of the woman’s state of mind as she negotiates between reality and fantasy.7 The appeal to romance in addressing women sets up a framework within which asymmetrical gender relations are both expected and accepted. Consider the bloc of hypotactic elaborating clauses in another ad, Make Room For Love (Print), in which the focus on the romantic ‘other’ is gradually built up: Falling in love. (cl.6) Having someone to love and care for us. (cl.7) Someone who shares our hopes and dreams, (cl.8) who’ll stay by our side through the good times and the bad. (cl.9) Someone special who’ll make our life more complete. (cl.10)

In clauses 7–10, someone (who from the visual images clearly is a he) is always in Actor position, whilst the woman occupies the recipient role; the one who is loved and looked after by her man. Although the representations in the verbal copy appear to be in women’s self-interest, it may be argued that these paradoxically contribute to the making of an other-centred feminine subjectivity within a naturalised conservative gender order. These representations add up to a construction of emotional reliance upon men, who are needed to make women’s lives more complete (see cl.10). The conventional meaning of ‘complete’ is to be whole, total. But in this instance, the use of the comparative premodiWer implies that being complete is actually less than complete, and that a woman needs to depend on a heterosexual ‘other’ in order to gain a fuller sense of wholeness. Further, the verbal representations in clauses 7–9 are underscored visually by representations of the woman as recipient of male chivalry. Corresponding with the contents in each of the three clauses, the woman is portrayed with the man protectively holding her around her shoulders; being sheltered under an umbrella held by him; and letting him guide her step, respectively. In regard to the last, the couple are represented as walking alongside each other, but the man’s body is thrust a little more forward than the woman’s, which suggests that he is guiding her, and that conversely she is keeping in step with him. These instances of gender asymmetry assume a status of acceptability and naturalness on the basis that they constitute innocuous romantic gestures when, in fact, these are ideologically invested ways of ‘doing’ couplehood.


‘Love matters most’: Married women Romantic love as an other-centering mechanism carries over from couplehood into married life for women. This is strikingly diVerent in ads that address men, for whom marriage is represented in pragmatic rather than romantic terms, and for whom self and career interests prevail. For women, however, love occupies centre-stage, and with that an acute consciousness of the male other. The notion of love is Wrst generally established in the ads that address women through the lexical repetition of love. An obvious example is found in the iterative strategy: he loves me, loves me, loves me (Love Matters Most, TV). Apart from functioning as a verb, the item appears also in its variant forms as an adjective and a noun: loving partner, loving one-man show (adjectives); and true love, love and marriage, love and companionship, love matters most (nouns) (True Love and Love Matters Most, TV and Print). Against this general landscape of love, the lexical juxtapositioning that occurs in loving partner8 and love and marriage bridges marriage and love. The notion of love that is developed in relation to marriage, however, is not a replication of the one in couplehood. Indeed in Love Matters Most (Print) there is an attempt to re-make romantic love from a dream-like or fantasy model to a realistic model that is appropriate in so far as marriage is concerned. Consider the opening lines of that ad: When it comes to love and marriage (cl.1) it’s all too easy (cl.2) to spend our lives waiting for somebody (cl.3) who’s just too good to be true (cl. 4) to appear and whisk us oV our feet (cl.5)

The idiomatic expressions (too good to be true; and whisk us oV our feet) plus the intensifying adjectives (too easy, just too good...) work together to reject as unrealistic the construal of a story-book version of romantic love. Yet further along in the same ad, the idea of love is re-established, through evocation of another kind of love that is oVered as realistic and authentic. In the ad, the classiWers real and genuine in real happiness and genuine lasting love and companionship express an authentic type of happiness and love. Indeed, there appears to be an equation between happiness and (heterosexual) love that is implied by the shared authenticity. The implication of these classifying adjectives is that there exists an inauthentic type of love that

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needs to be avoided; holding out for somebody who’s just too good to be true (cl.4) belongs to that class. The construal of authentic (as opposed to inauthentic, unreal) love appears to be a way of getting women to commit to the idea of an enduring (lasting) love and with it, as we shall see, a keen sense of other-centredness – minus undue expectation or pressure on men. Related to the construal of authentic love is the rejection of women passively awaiting romance to happen: to spend our lives waiting for somebody (cl.3); and to appear and whisk us oV our feet (cl.5). Instead, in what happens as an egalitarian move, women are encouraged to be more assertive in seeking out a suitable partner. Consider the following clauses that appear later on in the same ad: Qualities that don’t cost a cent, and can be found all around us – if we only care to look. Here women are positioned as the Actor in material processes, which suggest purposeful activity. Note also the adjunct only which emphasises that women are responsible for their search. However, within the overall construal of romance in a discourse of conservative gender relations, the active participation of women appears to be a way of gaining women’s complicity in the enactment of romance. That is, getting women to make romance happen, and thus align themselves within this framework for living their personal lives. Women may be invited to actively search for a partner, but this is participation within a pre-deWned, circumscribed situation whereby women take up the position of someone who is understanding, loving, and content not to challenge men. In other words, the active participation of women is encouraged for the maintenance of gender asymmetry. Let me now expand on the conservative other-centred position that is set up for women in the construal of a committed love. This is a position in which women are wholly content with loving and being loved, and are encouraged to overlook men’s shortcomings. The superlative in the tagline and the title of the ad Love Matters Most, in a nutshell, says it all. Further, a series of contrastive relations are set up in the television ad that teaches women to consistently overlook and accept imperfections out of love for their men. The contrastive structures are found in the soundtrack for the ad, taken from Denise William’s popular hit ‘Let’s Hear it For the Boy’. 1. [My baby may not be rich. He watches] every dime. But he loves me, loves me, loves me. 2. And maybe he sings oV key. But that’s alright with me. 3. Maybe he’s no Romeo. But he’s my loving one-man show.


There are two parts in the contrastive structure: the Wrst part, through modality of probability (maybe) tentatively sets out what is taken to be the imperfections of a particular man of whom the song is sung. However, the second part of the structure, introduced by the adversative conjunction, consistently overrides the criticisms by shifting the attention away from the statements and Wxing it in the domain of an accommodating love. It is worth noting that the represented ‘shortcomings’ are in themselves rather trivial. It seems to me that in choosing to represent men’s shortfalls in a light-hearted, superWcial way through this pop song, substantive issues concerning power asymmetry in gender relations that do pose problems for the target women audience are swept aside.9 Indeed, part of the appeal of romantic love, broadly, is that it appears to allow for the fudging of issues of serious discontent. What is set up in these clauses, instead, is a systematic mode of thinking and feeling that asks women to overlook any misgivings on the grounds of love (cf. the idiomatic expression ‘love is blind’). Furthermore, the superWciality that makes light of the man’s shortcomings in the ad actually makes him appear endearing, so that not to excuse him would be, otherwise, a reXection on women’s own lack of graciousness and reasonableness.

‘Then something wonderful happened’: Motherhood In this Wnal section, I turn to the construction of women’s other-centredness in relation to men and children in the context of the nuclear family. As in courtship and marriage, the ads focus on personal relationships as the means for the achievement of feminine self-identity. In this stage of the narrative, the type of love constructed moves away entirely from the romance model to, broadly, a maternal one, in which women derive self-fulWlment vicariously through the happiness and fulWlment of their loved ones. Already in the Wrst instance of expecting a baby, women’s experience of would-be-motherhood is deWned vis-à-vis their husbands. Consider the following two scenes in the ad Then Something Wonderful Happened (TV), where the would-be-mother is represented as responding directly to her husband’s evident interest in having the baby. In the two scenes, the pregnant belly of the woman is the prime object of her husband’s gaze and actions towards her. In the Wrst scene, the husband’s gaze is eye-level with his wife’s abdomen as she emerges from a gynaecologist’s oYce. The shot cuts to a close-up of the woman’s face as she slowly meets her husband’s gaze. Whereas

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his gaze is full of eager expectancy, her look is less certain, pensive, and searching. In other words, her own feelings and thoughts about having a child are unclear to us, but her locking eyes with him suggests a willingness to engage with him in terms of his evident interest. The reactive (as opposed to the active or initiative) position of the woman in relation to her husband is manifest also in a later scene in the same ad. In this other scene, triggered by her husband’s excitement in listening at her pregnant belly, the woman responds through a conWguration of reciprocal transactional processes, whereby she looks and smiles upon him (reactional processes) and tenderly kisses his forehead (actional process). Whilst all these processes are other-directed, her own reaction about having the child is left unrepresented. What is represented, however, is her joy as a would-be-mother that is experienced on account of his paternal interest. The only time a woman is represented as claiming motherhood as a selfdetermined choice is verbally in the ad Babies and Careers: I want to be a mother. My life would be incomplete without kids of my own. Notwithstanding the reason she gives for wanting children, she is represented here on her own terms, without reference to her husband. Clearly identiWed in the Wrst person singular (possessive) pronoun, the woman is represented as the Senser, who desires motherhood, and she explains the consequence that would have on her life otherwise. However, one clause later, her wish gets subsumed within our wish, i.e. making sure that this is also what her husband wants. We want someone else to make our lives complete. To Wnally make us a family and bring new meaning to our lives.

The shift in pronoun from singular to plural, in other words, signals the othercenteredness characteristic of would-be-motherhood, as discussed above. It is important to bear in mind that such other-centredness is problematic insofar that men are not likewise represented as acutely conscious or considerate of their partners. Moreover, as shown in relation to the ad Then Something Wonderful Happened, other-centeredness of women entails a submergence of their own dispositions on becoming mothers within their husbands’ expressed desire for fatherhood. What may appear as a joint decision by couples to have children, therefore, may belie divergent and potentially conXicting views held by each party, and one party may be ‘pressured’ into having the baby. Burgoyne (1987) has found, for example, that men in partnerships with highly career-oriented women, or who wish to use commitment to parenthood as a means of cementing an insecure relationship, are particu-


larly anxious to become parents more so than their partners. Both of these are borne out in the story-line of Then Something Wonderful Happened (TV), which depicts the marital strain experienced by a couple on account of their respective career demands. It is the man’s idea and dogged interest that they should have a baby as the way to salvage their marriage, and although the woman’s own feelings are clearly ambivalent (as discussed above), she falls in step with his wishes. Other-centeredness applies not only to relationships with husbands, but extends also to mothers’ relationships with their children. In the ads, one of the most powerful other-centred gestures mothers can express is looking to the interest of an only child by producing siblings for that child to grow up with. Consider the following extract from Lonely Child (TV): You may give your child the best things money can buy (cl. 1) But the most precious gift of all is a brother or a sister (cl. 2) The most precious gift you can give your child is a brother or sister (cl. 3)

What we Wnd in the above is the construction of a ‘good’ mother; someone who has the child’s best interest at heart. The adversative conjunction in clause 2 suggests to mothers that they may be somewhat misguided, and directs them to choose what is set up as ‘the ultimate’ that mothers can give to their only child. The full impact of the verbal text is best understood in the light of the visual portrayal of the child in the ad. In the visual image, the child is portrayed as aimless and miserable in spite of being surrounded by toys of various kinds (cf. clause 1 above). The dissatisfaction of the child is conveyed in two concurrent grammatical structures: although the boy is in Actor position holding a toy motor car in one hand, he is at the same time a Reactor in a non-transactional reactional process, who looks away from the immediate scene into the mid-distance. Similar to GoVman’s ‘licensed withdrawal’, the child is physically present in the scene, yet is mentally ‘absent’ from it. His sullen facial expression and listless body posture, moreover, suggest that he is not looking at anything in particular outside the picture frame, but is merely bored and unhappy. If the child is unhappy, then the implication is that the mother has not been other-centred enough, not giving enough. It is in this visual context that clauses 2 and 3 in the above extract are grounded, in which the onus is placed on mothers to ensure the happiness of the child by agreeing to have another baby. From the point of view of the construction of other-centeredness in this discourse, this is a rather interesting expectation: women are encouraged to have more children, notwithstand-

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ing how they themselves might feel (cf. the discussion above in relation to men), but out of a sense of maternal duty towards their children. The onus on women is particularly emphatic in the print version of this ad: But there’s one precious gift, which only you can give – a brother or sister. Only accentuates the obligation women have as good mothers to keep their child happy by giving him/her a sibling. The end segment of the TV version of the ad concretely plays this out through the deployment of a transactional action process, whereby the mother, the Actor, gives a new-born baby, the Goal, over to the delighted boy, the BeneWciary.10 Less dramatically, women are represented also in a range of gendered tasks that emphasise their other-centredness. Visually this is manifested in transactional actional structures in which the mother is the Actor, and her family, the Goal (see 1–3 below) or BeneWciary (see 4–6 below).

1. The mother holds on to the Xoat of her young son as he attempts to swim at the beach (Fam, Fam, Fam,11 TV) 2. The mother towel dries the wet hair of her young son at the beach (Fam, Fam, Fam, TV) 3. The mother is backstage with her young daughter, getting her ready to go on to the stage to present a bouquet of Xowers to the guest of honour in an auditorium (Because That’s Your Family, TV). 4. The mother cheers on her son, who is running a race (Because That’s Your Family, TV). 5. The mother claps her hands in support of her children’s eVorts at a fancy dress performance, and for putting up an informal musical recital for her and their dad (Because That’s Your Family, Print). 6. The mother bakes cookies in the kitchen for her family, who come in playfully to ‘steal’ them from the cooling tray (Fam, Fam, Fam, TV). The gendered nature of the mundane care-giving tasks the mother performs is emphasised in contrast to what the father is shown doing at the same time, if also present. To take the Wrst example above, whilst the mother is represented as watching over the safety of her young son at the beach by holding on to his Xoat, the father, although also represented as an Actor, is engaged in an activity entirely diVerent in nature from the basic care-giving function performed by the mother. The father performs a popular, entertainer role whereby he plays with and makes funny faces at the child (and the child’s siblings) (Lazar 2000; Sunderland, this volume, also makes a similar point).


The care function performed by mothers is not only diVerent from the roles performed by the father in the same settings, the mother, moreover, is sidelined by the father’s presence. Unlike the father, the mother is rarely the focus of the children’s attention. In the example above, for instance, the focus of the child’s attention (Senser) is the father (Phenomenon); neither he nor his siblings appear to be conscious of their mother’s presence. Likewise, in example 3, the little girl after presenting the Xowers to the speaker onstage runs directly into her father’s arms, oblivious of her mother walking after her; and in example 6 above, when the father and children after playing together peer into the kitchen, the shot cuts to reveal the cookies on the cooling tray as the Phenomenon of their gaze, and not the person who baked them. It appears, therefore, that the other-centredness of mothers is taken for granted as part of their maternal ‘nature’ and, therefore, as something quite unremarkable. Feminist scholars (e.g. Oakley 1974) have long criticised assumptions about the naturalness of motherhood along with the construal of motherhood being the greatest achievement of women’s lives, as these contribute to the perpetuation of women’s disadvantaged status in relation to men (Lupton and Barclay 1997). Part of being other-centred, moreover, is represented as contentedly watching from the margin the bonding that goes on between the father and children, with the implication that women derive happiness and fulWlment indirectly through witnessing the happiness of others. The spectator role of the mother is realised by transactional reactional structures, where she is the Senser watching her husband, her children, and the interaction that transpires between those two, without being included in their activities. In example 1, for instance, the mother’s spectator role is realised by shifts in gaze between the father and the children. She looks at one and then the other, forming a vector linking the two. In other words, she is shown reacting to one in relation to the other, highlighting the relationship that obtains between the father and the children. Moreover, each time that she looks upon her husband, she either smiles or laughs encouragingly at him. Likewise, in the ad Then Something Wonderful Happened (TV), the woman, standing in the background, watches her husband lift their baby from the bath. Her eye and head movements form a vector towards the husband, which then shifts to the baby, before resting on him again. At the same time that she returns the gaze to him, this is matched by verbal reiteration of the mental process in the clause I watch your whole face Wll with joy. Visually, too, the Wnal shift in gaze is accompanied with a smile. Although in Wlm and media studies, ‘the spectator’ position (typically


occupied by males) is associated with dominance, this arguably is not the case in the representation of these mothers. Although a parent herself, the woman’s ‘maternal gaze’ is at the same time supportive of the parental bonding of the ‘other’ as it allows a diminishing of the self.

Conclusion The primary subject position oVered to women in the ads is that of consumers of all-consuming personal relationships, i.e. it is an identity founded upon other-centredness. This is a subject position that is implicated both by the genre of advertisements and the discourse of conservative gender relations. Although contemporary advertising, and consumer culture in general, are increasingly in the business of making acceptable the evocation of dreams and desires that suggest ‘emotional fulWlment in narcissistically pleasing oneself instead of others’ (Featherstone 1991:27), there is an opposite ‘take’ on the focus of the self vis-à-vis the other in the present national ads that address women as potential consumers. The ideal that is ‘sold’ to Singaporean women in these ads is that of other-centredness, the cornerstone in the discourse of conservative gender relations. As we have seen, the principle of other-centredness is a constant across the stages of courtship, marriage and motherhood in this conservative discourse. This principle ensures the disciplining of heterosexual femininity as a Wxed and unitary identity across women’s life stages, carrying with it such normative values as ‘good’, ‘desirable’, and ‘socially approved’ that serve well the interests of the state. The notions of love, which fuel other-centredness, however, change in complexion depending on the diVerent stages in the narrative. The adaptation of love to the stages in the narrative is necessary for the accomplishment of the state’s ultimate goal of procreation. In courtship, modern educated Singaporean women – for whom the traditional pressures of marrying solely for economic security are no longer relevant – are invited to partake in a sentimental version of romantic love: ‘to fall in love’. In marriage, the fantasy aspect of romantic love gives way to a ‘real’, hardier love that is constantly accommodating of her man. In deciding on becoming mothers, we have the development of a self-eVacing, self-sacriWcial love. This love takes precedence over women’s own preferences and attitudes concerning procreation; having a baby and nurturing the family are represented as women’s maternal obligation.


The formation of one’s self-identity is by no means an autonomous project divorced from relationships with others. However, the problem with the heterosexual feminine identity in the ads is that it is construed wholly through emotional dependency and obligation to others. The concentration of women’s energies upon others in this way undoubtedly beneWts the state, men and children, whilst at the same time curtailing the range of life choices and priorities of women themselves. The evocation of love and the idealisation of other-centredness in the national advertising campaign is an arguably potent strategy. Where women may experience discontent at the socio-political level, this may be very diYcult to articulate and challenge especially when women, at the same time, are profoundly bound to others in a labour of love.

Notes 1. The measures included setting up a government match-making agency called the Social Development Unit (SDU), Wnancial incentives, and priority admission to schools for children of graduate women. 2. The Singaporean leadership is strongly eugenicist. It believes that the better-educated produce more intelligent oVspring, necessary for the continued vitality of the nation. For details see Lazar (1993, 2001). 3. Altogether there are 23 ads in the campaign, the majority of which appear in both print and televisual media. In this paper, I cite eight of the ads (yielding a total of 19 print and TV versions altogether), which I have found to be more than adequate for purposes of demonstrating the point about women’s other-centredness. 4. The print ads appeared in the main daily, local popular magazines and the SDU magazine (titled LINK). The television ads were aired during prime time, especially on Singapore’s English language channel. All ads were in English except for one in Mandarin. 5. A number of feminist accounts are available on the topic of romantic love and gender relations, for example, Christian-Smith (1990), Modleski (1982), Pearce and Stacey (eds) (1995), and Radway (1987). Although there are diVerent ‘takes’ on the subject, the general consensus from the point of view of ideology is that ‘romantic love as we know it is a set of ideas and practices which beneWt men at women’s expense’ (Langford 1996:29). 6. An article in a popular women’s magazine, for example, notes that educated Singaporean women of today typically are both Wnancially and emotionally independent (Tan 2001:191). 7. The choice of an (Yes/No) interrogative mood and the modal adjunct really in the Wrst clause express her uncertainty and disbelief that the present state, which is deictically referred to as here, is ‘real’. Her ground for disbelief becomes clear in the second clause in which she compares their present embrace to a dream – it’s just like I dreamed [...]. The


use of the comparison entails that the embrace indeed is real and not a dream, although it is telling that she has had romantic fantasies about the moment. Together the clauses convey a blurring between reality and fantasy: it is suggested that a fantasy can become a reality, and that reality is grounded in fantasy. Furthermore, caught in the nexus is a sense of timelessness: Feel[s] like [I’m] frozen in time. Again the use of comparison implies that in reality this is not the case, although this is her perception. Her experience of timeless quality is consonant with the ethereal, decontextualised representation of the setting. 8. In the Singapore context, ‘partner’ refers speciWcally to spouse, and does not have the wider sense it has in the West. 9. It is a well-known fact (noted by political leaders, academics and the media) that educated Singaporean women and men have quite divergent expectations of the other when it comes to the selection of a partner. Whilst Singaporean men, known for their chauvinistic attitudes, generally prefer women who are not their intellectual equals and who would make submissive wives, educated Singaporean women expect parity in all aspects of their relationship with men. 10. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual grammar does not have the category of BeneWciary. I have imported this category from Halliday’s (1994) transitivity analysis. 11. ‘Fam(ily), Fam(ily), Fam(ily)’

References Burgoyne, Jacqueline. 1987. “Change, gender, and the life course”. In Social Change and the Life Course, G. Cohen (ed), 33–66. London: Tavistock. Christian-Smith, Linda. 1990. Becoming a Woman through Romance. London: Routledge. Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. GoVman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. (2nd edn.) London: Edward Arnold. Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Langford, Wendy. 1996. “Romantic love and power”. In Women, Power, Resistance: An Introduction to Women’s Studies, T. Cosslett, A. Easton and P. SummerWeld (eds), 23–34. Buckingham: Open University Press. Lazar, Michelle M. 1993. “Equalising gender relations: A case of double-talk”. Discourse & Society 4 (4):443–465. Lazar, Michelle M. 1999. “Family life advertisements and the narrative of heterosexual sociality”. In Reading Culture: Textual Practices in Singapore, P.G.L. Chew and A. Kramer-Dahl (eds), 145–162. Singapore: Times Academic Press. Lazar, Michelle M. 2000. “Gender, discourse and semiotics: The politics of parenthood representations”. Discourse & Society 11 (3):373–400. Lazar, Michelle M. 2001. “For the good of the nation: ‘Strategic Egalitarianism’ in the


Singapore context”. Nations and Nationalism 7 (1):59–74. Lupton, Deborah and Barclay, Lesley. 1997. Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences. London: Sage. Modleski, Tania. 1984. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women. London: Methuen. Pearce, Lynne and Jackie Stacey. 1995. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence Wishart. Radway, Janice. 1987. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. London:Verso. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence”. Signs 5(4):631–60. Tan, Wyn-Lyn. 2001. “Take your pick(y)!”. Her World 2:190–195.

Appendix A Brief Description of the Family Life Ads Cited in this Paper Make Room for Love (Print and TV) A senior colleague (Mrs. Tan) advises her younger female colleague (Lin) to balance her career with a family; Lin is told that pursuing a career alone is inadequate, she ought to ‘make room for love’ in her life as well. In the print ad, Lin is pictured walking arm in arm with a man under an umbrella. True Love (Print and TV) A chance meeting between a man and a woman leads to a blossoming of love and, it is suggested, eventually marriage. In the TV ad, the story of their encounter and their developing relationship is recalled for us through a Xashback of the woman. Love Matters Most (Print and TV) A happy young couple are expecting their Wrst baby. The wife is appreciative of her husband’s gestures of love towards her and their unborn child. In the TV ad, the scenes unfold to the soundtrack of Denise William’s ‘Let’s hear it for the boy’. Then Something Wonderful Happened (Print and TV) This is a story of a newly-wed couple, who are drifting apart as a result of the demands of their respective careers. The husband decides that having a baby would save their marriage. Babies and Careers (Print only) This is represented as a personal account of a young married woman, who is considering becoming a mother. She describes how balancing a career with maternal responsibilities is achievable. Lonely Child (Print and TV) An only child is pictured amid many toys, but is clearly miserable. In the TV ad, he visibly cheers up when his mother brings home a newborn baby – a sibling – for him. Fam(ily), Fam(ily), Fam(ily) (Print and TV) A family is engaged in a number of leisure activities, where the father is prominently portrayed in a popular and playful role almost ‘as one of the kids’, and the mother occupies a supportive role and takes care of the less


popular chores. (The Print ad appears in two separate versions.) Because That’s Your Family (Print and TV) The children in a family undertake a range of activities, which surprises and delights their parents and evokes in the parents a sense of pride. (The Print ad appears in three separate versions).


Chapter 6

‘Head to head’ Gendered repertoires in newspaper arguments Lia Litosseliti Royal Holloway University of London, UK

1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to explore the discourse practices and strategies, as well as themes and ideologies, which speakers draw upon in arguments that make moral claims and express, sustain, or challenge particular moral positions. In particular, I look at examples of arguments in a broadsheet newspaper column in the UK, focusing on the ways in which moral arguments (that is, moral judgements, appeals to values, claims about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) are articulated by both male and female arguers. I am interested in exploring how arguers construct values and identities through discourse, with constant reference to the immediate and broader sociocultural context of the particular communicative event. In other words, in addition to the linguistic and rhetorical form and content of arguments, I also focus on the symbolic signiWcance of approaches to argument, particularly how arguments are shaped by the participants’ understandings of gender and morality. In theoretical terms (see section 3), this is an interdisciplinary discussion rooted in a linguistic perspective. My aim is to add to theories of argumentation by establishing a link between theories on gendered morality and theories of argumentation, by looking at how gendered morality is at work in argumentative texts. The analysis illuminates some of the ways in which moral and gendered standpoints are constructed in arguments – primarily by favouring one rhetorical route over another, and by evoking speciWc repertoires from social life.

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In section 2 below, I brieXy introduce the terms and underlying concepts about language and argument on which I am drawing. These provide a backdrop for the following sections: the framework for analysis (section 3), and the analysis and discussion of public argumentative texts (section 4).

2. Exploring argument-morality-gender relationships through a discourse lens 2.1 A view of language One fundamental assumption in this paper, and throughout this volume, is that language use eVectively shapes how we see ourselves and the world. It is a means of establishing and maintaining relations, values and identities1, but also of challenging routine practice and contributing towards social change. A related assumption is that the selections language users make from the linguistic resources available to them are both meaningful and dependent on the communicative event (Antaki 1994; Fairclough 1992). Language is not a Wxed or closed system, but dynamic, complex and subject to change. As a result, any spoken or written text is inseparable from its immediate, institutional and sociocultural context (a view generally accepted in this volume). For example, an argument about euthanasia must be seen in the context of the particular social occasion (e.g. at school, at home, in the media, spoken, written), who argues (e.g. a patient, doctor, legislator), for what purpose(s) (e.g. to convince, to change a situation), in what place, time, culture frames. The participants’ age, gender, race, class and religion, but also their expectations, knowledge, expertise, and involvement, will shape argumentation in complex ways. In Wetherell and Potter’s words, meaning always ‘depends on the local and broader discursive systems in which the utterance is embedded’ (Antaki 1988:169). Discourse theories oVer ways of seeing how we give meaning to experience through language, by variously treating discourse (a) linguistically, as text with patterns and rules of coherence, (b) sociologically, as conversational interaction that works as social ‘glue’, and (c) as the manifestation of cultural ways of thinking and doing, and thus fuel for critical theory (Antaki 1994). In this paper, I move across these concentric ‘circles’ of discourse analysis (a discussion of discourse analysis can be found in Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume).

‘Head to head’

2.2 A view of argument Argument is a pervasive feature of social life. Control over persuasive discourses is highly valued in most social contexts, and is often associated with power or status. Learning to argue involves the learning of communicative skills that are crucial for adult life (how to resolve conXict, how to control distress resulting from aVronts/assaults on personal face, how to compromise and co-operate, etc.) and can also enhance the capacity for critical thinking (Andrews et al. 1993). Argument can be narrowly deWned as “a connected series of statements intended to establish a position (whether in speech or writing), sometimes taking the form of an interchange in discussion or debate, and usually presenting itself as a sequence or chain of reasoning” (Andrews et al. 1993:16). In the context of this paper, I must, however, emphasise an understanding of argument as not a straightforward process from claims and premises to supporting evidence and conclusions, but rather as a context-situated ‘battle’ between discourses. The notion of intention also becomes crucial; it is intention that links argumentation with context and action with meaning – who am I speaking as? who am I speaking for? for what purpose? how can I be eVective? Rhetoric, which is concerned with eVectiveness and with increasing the degree of conviction in beliefs, is embedded in arguments. The language of argument will therefore reXect and reinforce the rhetorical purpose – be it to clarify a position, win/persuade, resolve/‘unload’ frustrations and feelings, and so on. Purpose (the ‘why’) is only one aspect of context which impacts on argument content. The place and time of argument, and the speakers’ roles, attitudes, ideologies and identities are also crucial. Other signiWcant issues include whether the arguers are being truthful and co-operative, whether they have a stake in what is being discussed, who is allowed to argue, which issues are on the political agenda and which issues are not made available to all participants in a community. Finally, diVerent forms of argument, in speech and in writing, will fulWl diVerent functions and will impose restrictions on the content and process of argument. This is important for this paper, as I examine examples of argument from newspaper columns, which present a very speciWc genre2 with distinctive features and expectations. For example, media arguments tend to favour adversarial over ‘connected’ language, and this can be limiting for participants who value consensus and co-operation in interaction (see sections 3 and 4).

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2.3 A view of moral argumentation I describe ‘moral argumentation’ as the process of argument which involves the explicit or implicit evaluation of moral beliefs (ideas and values) and ideologies: those appealing to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in any given social context (Litosseliti 1999). Moral argumentation is implicated in various dimensions of human life. At the same time, it is a terrain characterised by ambiguity and one inevitably raising the question of moral relativism, i.e. what counts as moral and according to what criteria. These elements make moral argumentation a diYcult area for systematic inquiry by linguists, and as a result it has been of greater interest to philosophers and psychologists, especially cognitive psychologists and moral development theorists. But the very subtlety and ambiguity of moral argumentation makes it an area that is both loaded with meanings and in need of exploration (Litosseliti 2001, 2002). I believe it is necessary to examine the construction of moral arguments from a linguistic as well as a social theory perspective. This is because a moral argument does not simply address what is recognisable as a ‘moral topic’; it typically draws upon socioculturally established (or recognised as such) moral beliefs and ideologies, whether the topic in question is immediately recognised as moral or not. As this paper illustrates, moral argumentation is nuanced and implicit, as it draws on naturalised ideologies that appear to be common sense. Moral evaluations “hint at values rather than make them explicit, and they tend to assume that these values are known and shared in the given context” (van Leeuwen 2000: 70–71), and so their power of representation and shaping of the social world is particularly signiWcant.

2.4 A view of gender In recent years, feminist research within the broad Weld of Feminist Ethics has challenged traditional moral theory and its assumptions about women’s ‘inadequate’ moral development. The most notable example of such research is Carol Gilligan’s controversial work identifying two gendered moral orientations, a feminine ‘ethic of care’ and a masculine ‘ethic of justice’. While the former describes contextual and narrative thinking about moral problems, with an emphasis on responsibility and care of others within relationships, the latter involves a formal and abstract way of thinking around moral issues, based on systems of rules and a ‘universal’ sense of justice that overrides the particulars of a situation.

‘Head to head’

If moral orientations are gendered in any way – this potentially leading to men and women being disadvantaged in contexts where diVerent values are assigned to diVerent orientations, e.g. the public arena vs. the domestic sphere – then this must be reXected and constructed in the discourse of moral arguments. An examination of this discourse will not simply pinpoint potential gender tendencies in communication, but should help understand communicative non-success (Grimshaw 1990) engendered by unrecognised or dismissed gender tendencies in the production and interpretation of discourse. Such tendencies are both extensively argued and contested in the burgeoning language and gender literature (although not within argument theory). This literature points to growing awareness that the language we use can exclude certain forms of experiencing – female, as well as male. For example, if inclusive rather than oppositional language has more connection with personal experience (Belensky et al. 1988), then we should ask whether focusing on adversarial language in argument excludes connected understanding. As Tannen (1990) and others suggest, women are thought to use ‘connected’ language, which is characterised by listening rather than initiating, by ‘rapport’ rather than ‘report’ talk, and by promoting involvement rather than isolation. But “focusing on the oppositional nature of language by emphasising the importance of argument may not be the way to include these new emergent understandings which can enrich our common culture” (Boulter and Gilbert, in Costello and Mitchell 1995:97). As emphasised elsewhere (Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume; Litosseliti 2002), it is important to treat gendered dichotomies with caution, not only because they represent diVerences as binary and Wxed, but also because the traits historically associated with women have been relegated to inferior status, and their sophistication and complexity may have gone unrecognised. I refer here to stereotypical representations (in both speech and writing) of women as nurturing, passive, sensitive, intuitive, irrational and selXess; and men as rational, active, independent and Wrm. The association of emotion with women, “so that qualities that deWne the emotional also deWne women” (Lutz 1990:69) is particularly relevant to this chapter, and I discuss it later (section 4). I am therefore interested to look at the relationships between assumed gender orientations and the use speakers and writers make of these assumptions in their arguments. Instead of simply seeing men and women as producing diVerent forms of argument, I focus on the ways in which the argument

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produces and sustains gender and gender identities. In section 4, I show that arguers tend to produce as well as resist particular versions of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’, what they understand as gendered ways of arguing (e.g. regarding the use of emotion and personal experience). In doing so, their arguments are characterised by varying approaches to morality, particularly in the use of identiWable moral repertoires (e.g. the relationships between the individual and society).

3. A discursive framework for analysis The framework for analysis of the texts discussed in this paper draws on a combination of theoretical Welds, and is consistent with the approach to language and argument discussed in 2.1 and 2.2, namely: the essential action and purpose orientation of discourse; the strategic nature of the choices made by language users; the interconnectedness of text and context; and the view of discourse as a social practice in itself, reXecting and constructing social reality. I take on board the view that arguers choose from a range of available linguistic resources and cultural themes, and that such choices construct one version of social reality rather than another, that is, they make claims to a certain vision of the world (Antaki 1994). In my analysis and discussion of the data, I have taken a discourse analytic approach, revolving around a wider cultural and ideological reading of the context in which the texts occur (as, for example, seen in Fairclough 1992; Kress 1989; Potter and Wetherell 1987). Such an approach aims to examine and problematise both the text organisation, i.e. the linguistic practices or conversational and rhetorical strategies, and the text content, i.e. the culturally charged repertoires3 and emerging or salient themes. While the former involves looking at the ways arguers use linguistic resources to achieve diVerent aims and eVects in their arguments, the second entails identifying and exploring the attitudes and beliefs invoked in discourse and understanding the consequences. The two are mutually reinforced, and given the view of argumentation as an in-context negotiation of discourses (2.2), both orientations are important for the analysis. Diagram 1 below summarises this approach. The double arrow illustrates that text organisation and text content are mutually constructed: themes (and values, ideologies, identities) emerge and are shaped through the diVerent ways of language use, while language use (linguistic organisation of the mate-

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rial) constantly constructs, negotiates and changes these ways of seeing the world.

Text Organisation Linguistic Practices / Rhetorical and Conversational Strategies – How are argument positions and claims grounded or legitimated (e.g. appeals, authorities cited)? – What kind of linguistic tactics are mobilised (e.g. text structures, lexical choice, use of metaphor)

Text Content Repertoires/ Themes – What argument positions and claims are put forward? – How is the world represented and constructed (knowledge, assumptions, attitudes, values, beliefs) and what are the consequences of those representations? – What identities and relationships are set up for those involved?

Diagram 1. Framework for analysis of texts.

This analysis involves identifying patterns and developing tentative interpretative schemes which may be abandoned or revised. As Antaki (1988) points out, discourse is oriented to particular functions, which in turn throw up a mass of linguistic variation. This means that, rather than language reXecting underlying attitudes which are either consistently prejudiced or ‘tolerant’, people use language variably (i.e. constructing diVerent versions of the world) as the discursive context changes. This is important for the discussion of linguistic features and cultural themes that follows: my aim is not to show that these are unique to moral arguments, rather that they fulWl diVerent roles, linguistically and socially, when employed in arguments that interpret

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the moral domain. As I discuss elsewhere (Litosseliti 2001), the diversity and inconsistency of moral belief and behaviour is such, that it is simply not feasible to make claims about what Bellah et al. (1985) describe as a ‘common moral vocabulary’ among people. Discourse analysis, as “a committedly qualitative orientation to linguistic and social understanding” (Jaworski and Coupland 1999:36), is appropriate for addressing such questions.

4. Public argumentation: Constructing morality and gender identity in newspaper columns Newspapers are a prime public site for moral arguments and for constructing values and ideologies. As Fairclough (1995) observes, analysis of media language is an important element within research on processes of social and cultural change, such as changes in cultural values, power relations and social identities, and the transition from a ‘modern’ to a ‘postmodern’ society. When focusing on public arguments, one must be aware that the distinction between a public and a lay/private argument is bound up with power. The distinction gives leverage to social actors in certain positions who are permitted to have access to knowledge and the authority to articulate it, while for those in other social positions, lack of knowledge can have the eVect of reducing them to silence. In the data presented below, those who argue are highly educated, articulate, and in positions of authority (doctors, senior business people, journalists, editors, academics and authors). This is important, given that the more opportunities people have in education and the more authority they have by virtue of their social positions, the more responsible they can be assumed to be for the implications of their discursive and other practices. The texts presented in this section are part of data from a broader project on moral argumentation in various contexts (Litosseliti 1999). They were selected between October 1995 and February 1997, a time when the U.K. press aired widespread public debates about morality and education, especially following the government’s proposals in 1996 for a national ‘moral code’ for schools. The proposals extended to a moral debate on the ‘strengthening of society’ and, increasingly, moral panics about the nature and priorities of contemporary society. The data consist of debates in the ‘Head to Head’ column, published weekly in the broadsheet daily Guardian newspaper. Each column typically

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presents two opposing views on an issue of current aVairs, which take the form of a series of letters exchanged between two arguers. The diVerent positions are summarised in the headline, and the text is usually accompanied by pictures of the participants facing each other in an adversarial way. The original headlines and summarised positions accompanying each text, as published, are: 1. Staking their claims ‘What are the moral duties of business? To care for the world, or simply to make proWt? In a vigorous exchange of letters, Anita Roddick of the Body Shop and Sir Stanley Kalms of Dixons spectacularly fail to agree.’ 2. Hope to die ‘Annie Lindsell is terminally ill and wants the right to die. Dr. Andrew Fergusson is opposed to euthanasia. On the day of the London symposium on the subject, they clash over choosing death rather than life.’ 3. Only two can say ‘Marriage: who needs it? We all do, it’s a moral strength, thinks sociologist David Marsland. Nonsense, retorts the unmarried journalist, Julia Langdon. If two people lack the will to stay together, you can’t force them.’ 4. Flesh and the devil ‘Eleven dead from E.Coli, not to mention BSE. Who’d eat meat? No one should, it’s cruel, says actress Margi Clarke. Oh lighten up, chef Shaun Hill retorts. Organic meat is humane – and tastier than veggy stodge.’ 5. The long good buys ‘It’s time to polish oV the Christmas shopping. Oh no! We’re being turned into shopaholics, says Big Issue editor John Bird. But I adore it, replies Linda Grant, author of a novel on shopping and politics.’ The texts are examples of male-female argument, revolving around foci of contemporary controversy. The texts also illustrate well the changes that have been taking place in the mass media landscape in Britain, namely ‘conversationalisation’ and ‘marketisation’ (Fairclough 1995). The shift in the mass media towards entertainment and the consumer model is evident both in the set up of the Head to Head column and in the use of language within the texts. For example, the column is designed to attract readers, by focusing on controversial issues and dilemmas (e.g. euthanasia) debated by well-known people (e.g. Anita Roddick). Its layout polarises the two positions, by visibly separat-

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ing the participants’ contributions, assigning one to ‘YES’ and the other to ‘NO’, and by having pictures of them opposed to one another. Similarly, we see polarisation in the headlines (see also Tannen 1998) with adversarial descriptions of the debates (“spectacularly fail to agree”, “they clash”) and provocative, often colloquial, statements and generalisations (“simply to make a proWt”, “nonsense, retorts the unmarried journalist”, “it’s cruel”, “oh, lighten up”). Another prominent feature of conversationalisation and marketisation is the mixing of professional/public and casual/private talk, often accompanied by sensationalist or emotive language (for example, Clarke’s references in Column 4 to “veal crates”).

4.1 Gendered repertoires and identities at work Initial analysis of the texts involved identifying the thematic focus of each column (e.g. euthanasia) and the diVerent argument positions (for/against) or evaluative commentaries made regarding the topic (Costello and Mitchell 1995). These positions were of two types: in support of a topic and opposed to a topic. This is not typical of most arguments (especially spoken arguments), which usually exhibit an enormous amount of overlapping between agreement and disagreement on a topic (Andrews 1995). However, these texts provide constructed examples of argument, in that they work on the assumption that the arguers disagree, and, more importantly, are expected to make their disagreement publicly clear, within the narrow boundaries of the genre (written, public and adversarial newspaper text). The analysis of the texts focused on mapping out the content and the organisation of discourse, as indicated in Diagram 1 (section 3). In terms of text content, particular data-generated repertoires emerged, namely, the Moral Decline Repertoire, the Individual vs. Collective Repertoire, and the repertoires of Care and of Rationality – all of which I discuss below. Consistencies in text organisation, that is, linguistic ways of conveying repertoires, also became evident: for example, use of value-words, emotive language, metaphors, appeals to facts and to personal experience, to tradition/custom, as well as to other authorities in order to ground claims and legitimise repertoires. As my aim here is not to discuss the detailed and lengthy text analysis (which can be found in Litosseliti 1999), I will provide one example of the process of mapping out text content and text organisation, and their interdependence (Table 1). The following table contains parts of the analysis of the Wrst column, ‘Staking their claims’, between Anita Roddick (of the Body Shop


cosmetics chain) and Stanley Kalms (chairman of Dixons, the computer and electrical appliance stores). The text extracts are on the left, with analytical comments on the right. This allows for a simultaneous examination of content and organisation, and aptly demonstrates how the repertoires identiWed are instantiated by mobilising combinations of the textual features listed. The letters appearing next to each person’s name (a, b, c), indicate whether extracts were taken from his/her Wrst, second or third response. Table 1. Example of analysis of text content and text organisation. Text From ‘Staking their Claims’

Comments

Anita Roddick (AR), a): I’ve seen the future and it frightens the life out of me…When I look at the behaviour of multinationals, that’s what scares me…To me, journeying provides insights. That’s what makes me happy – when I see employees involved, when the connection between life and work appears seamless. Is your apparently money-based view of business really so narrow?

Casual talk / Personal Appeals to own feelings and to personal experience Juxtaposition/Contrast (AYrmation of DiVerence) Repertoire of Care (accentuated by lexical choice and rhetorical question)

Stanley Kalms (SK), a): On the other hand my tribe goes back several thousand years and we have accumulated quite a lot of carefully documented wisdom. So I start from a sound ethical base – age-old values and proven rules of social obligation. No need to make them up on the hoof – instant ethics can be tiresome.

Real/Rational/Proven vs. Personal/ Felt/Emotional dichotomy Contrast Authorisation (legitimation by ref. to the authority of tradition, proof). Irony Repertoire of Rationality Individual vs. Collective Repertoire

Anita, our diVerences may not be so sharp but I can’t tell from your scattered thoughts. I believe in a focused, rational approach in which man has it within himself to improve. But it needs a reasoned acceptance of the real world. Might I suggest to you that Margaret Thatcher would be a better role model than Don Quixote.

Trivialisation (‘scattered’) Real/Rational/Proven vs. Personal /Felt/ Emotional dichotomy Repertoire of Rationality Use of generics ‘man’/ ‘himself’ Analogy. Ironic usage

AR, b): Now I know where you’re coming from. I’m the irrational female imposing my world view on employees, ignorant of how markets work.

Gender interpretation of the above dichotomy (Gender Stereotyping/ Gender as binary)

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SK, b): Your attempt to monopolise the “caring” market fails. I also care but in an ordered and studied manner, not merely based on public relations geared to selling my products. Your cliché-ridden response is disappointing, albeit predictable. Let me pose you a quiet question – can’t you accept that your frenetic, self-righteous approach may not always be the best way to draw attention to issues that actually concern us all? AR, c): Prince Charles, the Church and even the TUC challenge business leaders like you and me. As John Monks said recently: “There is no point in teaching moral purposes at schools when there is injustice and lack of moral purpose in the workplace.” How will you use your last words? More macho, retro-posturing, or will you focus on the real world – the one shared by Unipart, Co-op Bank, Nat West and BT, who relish the stakeholder challenge and welcome the debate it creates about their broader social role? SK, c): At Dixons we are not governed by abstract theories but simple common sense. I’m passionately concerned about my employees; they share in our success. After almost 50 years in business, I am now told I’ve got it all wrong. I am labelled a cynical totem of the business establishment. You ignore the empirical evidence and, like some fevered teleevangelist, tell me I must convert to stakeholding. I must decline your invitation. Although I too have vision, I am an idealist without illusions.

Reclaiming a Repertoire of Care Repertoire of Rationality Appeals to rationality, order and knowledge Emotive/provocative language Real/Rational/Proven vs. Personal /Felt/ Emotional dichotomy

Authorisation (legitimation by reference to institutional authority) Analogy. Moral evaluation – Moral Decline Repertoire

Gender interpretation/Gender as binary Claim-backing through examples of institutional authority

Appeals to common sense/the facts Reclaiming a Repertoire of Care

Appeals to expertise and empirical evidence Real/Rational/Proven vs. Personal /Felt/ Emotional dichotomy Repertoire of Rationality Appropriation of the concepts to serve diVerent purposes in contrasting arguments

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These extracts from Column 1 illustrate the use of repertoires and linguistic strategies employed throughout the data. To begin with, there appears to be a conXict in this debate between a Repertoire of Care, in Roddick’s claim to be concerned about employees, and the distinct emphasis in Kalms’ discourse on concrete and documented facts – a Repertoire of Rationality. Interestingly, Kalms’ wording constructs a juxtaposition between, on the one hand, ‘carefully documented wisdom’, ‘a sound ethical base’, ‘age-old values’ and ‘proven rules’, and on the other, ‘instant ethics’; on the one hand, a ‘focused, rational approach’, ‘a reasoned acceptance of the real world’, ‘an ordered and studied manner’, ‘simple common sense’, and on the other, ‘scattered thoughts’, ‘a frenetic, self-righteous’ approach and ‘abstract theories’. In terms of text organisation, this juxtaposition is achieved through analogies, questions, ironic usage, and emotive, provocative language. Apart from assuming a binary, clear-cut opposition, the dichotomy between what Kalms depicts as real, rational, and proven on one hand, and personal, felt, and emotional on the other, is a dichotomy frequently interpreted in terms of gender (Litosseliti 2002). Emotion, like the female, has typically been viewed as irrational, chaotic, subjective and uncontrollable (Lutz 1990). Gender may not immediately emerge as an explicit theme in the examples above, but as the debate progresses, both participants make overt attempts in their letters to disrupt or defend a ‘male as rational-female as emotional’ dualism. The symbolic association of gender with the repertoires of care and rationality aVects the content and process of argument, as seen in Roddick’s opening of her second letter: “Now I know where you’re coming from. I’m the irrational female imposing my world view on employees, ignorant of how markets work”. As I discuss elsewhere (Litosseliti 2002), women often have to anticipate and account for the construct of ‘women’s argument’ in their own arguments, and to consequently do additional argumentative work in order to support their positions. For example, in a passage from Column 1 not cited above, Roddick defends her argument for a ‘caring’ approach to business by acknowledging the ‘irrational female’ label and by trying to distance herself from it. She goes to some length to defend her argument, by claiming that it is a ‘real’ and valid one, not even if, but because it draws upon what she has personally experienced. A similar example can be found in Lindsell’s argument in favour of euthanasia (Column 2):

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What little breath I have is always taken away by the sheer arrogance of those who discount my knowledge, as well as my experiences… I also know quite a lot about the disease I live with... I don’t just play a passive, emotional role: I learn for myself, and decide as an equal partner. So please don’t patronise me by implying that I don’t really know my own mind. (Annie Lindsell)

This extract presents an attempt to legitimise personal experience as a valid and signiWcant component in the construction of a balanced moral argument. It also puts forward a case for the role of the individual (rather than or in addition to society) in negotiating the complexities of a moral argument (Individual vs. Collective Repertoire). There are various examples throughout the data of such emphasis on individual judgement and personal autonomy, particularly in the arguments put forward by women. Lindsell’s argument in favour of euthanasia is based on her own judgement of what she describes as “the loss of dignity” in her life as a result of illness. She explains that her knowledge about her disease is important in learning for herself and playing a non-passive role (Column 2). Roddick uses her own insight as a result of “journeying” to argue against multinationals (Column 1), and Langdon talks about commitment in her own family in order to argue against the necessity of the institution of marriage (Column 3). Acknowledging the importance of individual authority involves avoiding being prescriptive about what others should do. For example, Julia Langdon, in her discussion of marriage (Column 3), describes teaching her children “to accept diVering points of view” and claims that she “wouldn’t dream of prescribing what others should do”. Similarly, Margi Clarke resists being evangelical about vegetarianism: “It’s up to individuals to make up their own mind about these issues” (Column 4). But not being prescriptive does not mean being any less involved with others or caring less for others. Indeed individual experience is inextricably connected with the Repertoire of Care, since it involves relationships and responsibility towards others: employees (what makes Roddick happy is seeing “employees involved, when the connection between life and work appears seamless”); patients (Lindsell: “It is extraordinary that you don’t even mention that people are suVering. This debate is not about scoring points oV each other, but about two very simple facts: a desire to avoid unwanted suVering, and a desire to exercise personal autonomy”); animals (Clarke: “the building of a more compassionate world is the foundation of my vegetarianism”). In the same way that individualistic arguments are typically (though not necessarily) sustained by drawing on personal experience, opinions and feel-


ings, collective arguments draw considerably on common sense assumptions about rationality. This is especially evident in the arguments put forward by the male participants, where there is an emphasis on the views and values of a collective majority. Such emphasis is seen in the various appeals to facts and objectivity, attempts to legitimise claims by reference to the authority of tradition, custom, the law, order and common sense, and concerns with evidence and proof, such as statistics. These become evident in Kalms’ insistence on empirical evidence, carefully studied and documented facts, or what he calls “a focused, rational approach” (Column 1). Similar are Fergusson’s numerous and detailed appeals to statistics and facts about euthanasia across diVerent countries (Column 2), and Marsland’s constant references to the signiWcance of a nation’s existing laws, rituals and customs: “Wouldn’t [the preservation and strengthening of marriage] be more sensible than swinging over to untried alternatives?” (Column 3). The varying interpretations of the Individual vs. Collective Repertoire by the female and male participants, in turn construct varying moral arguments. For example, Julia Langdon asks: “Isn’t [love] what matters more than any legal or Christian framework for our relationship? […] What keeps people together is their commitment to each other for which no one can legislate” (Column 3). Here, the moral authority of the individual is as important or more important than what social institutions and authorities prescribe (authorities such as religion, laws, GPs and business leaders). On the other hand, within the collective arguments put forward by the male participants, there is not simply a preference for a collective morality, but a necessity for it (which is obvious, it is claimed, according to a rational examination of the world). There is a recurrent theme in these arguments on a perceived change in contemporary moral values, a perceived suVering of ‘basic’, ‘traditional’ values, as a result of the ‘barbaric’ and ‘individualistic’ modern living. This Moral Decline Repertoire is typically characterised by the use of melodramatic vocabulary, sensationalised narratives, rhetorical questions and metaphors (Tester 1994; Litosseliti 1999, 2002). The most eloquent examples of the Moral Decline Repertoire can be seen in David Marsland’s heavily moralising argument in favour of marriage, and in John Bird’s argument against shopping (Columns 3 and 5). There we Wnd vivid descriptions of a society in crisis, culminating to a ‘moral panic’ discourse:

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[…] manifest faults in the legal, administrative and Wnancial framework of the family (David Marsland) […] much shopping has become a mass, wasteful, aimless activity […] It destroys minds, economies and the environment. The crisis is coming whether you like it or not. (John Bird)

Contrary to the female participants, who are concerned about not appearing to be prescriptive, this kind of moral argument is prescriptive, that is, it suggests ‘solutions’ for reversing the perceived crisis: We should seek to prevent subversion of the family, to provide practical support for the institution of marriage: to re-moralise our concepts of sex and childrearing […] to go back to back to basics. (David Marsland)

This is a retrospective type of argument, in which speakers unproblematically attribute an assumed moral decline to individualistic or excessively liberal judgement, and the loss of a collective morality. The argument is based on a conviction that the ‘crisis’ can be controlled and resolved by re-evaluating the ‘safety’ and ‘legitimacy’ of what most ‘right-thinking’ people see as commonsensical or ‘right’. Andrew Fergusson, the doctor in the euthanasia debate (Column 2), argues that “a majority in a civilised society will always conclude against euthanasia”, and articulates the conXict between individual/private and collective/public morality as follows: The answer lies in society’s interdependence, our responsibilities in relation to one another. To protect the large majority for whom euthanasia is ‘wrong’ the small minority for whom some think it ‘right’ must forgo their choice. Utilitarian perhaps, but that’s life. (Andrew Fergusson)

A similar example is Marsland’s emphasis on social norms, in seeing marriage as “a covenant linking a man and a woman, their future children, the nation and its laws and customs, and not least God” (Column 3). This becomes more prominent when he claims that love and commitment between individuals are not suYcient, and can only survive with “the nourishment of symbols, family relationships, neighbourhood recognition, legitimacy and moral grounding”. Similarly to Fergusson’s approach to euthanasia, Marsland adds that untried alternatives to marriage “may suit a ‘sophisticated’ few, but they are no good for most of us”. He then draws clear links between the Moral Decline Repertoire and the Individual vs. Collective Repertoire, as in this extract: Besides, we have too little ceremony in modern Britain, too much that is casual and merely personal…we need rituals, symbols, customs and beliefs which are


older and bigger than ourselves. Freedom springs from moral and social obligation. (David Marsland)

In terms of text organisation, common linguistic resources that instantiate the Moral Decline Repertoire include lexical choice that summons up notions of morality and urges for moral revitalisation, as well as war metaphors. Some examples of the former are wordings such as “decaying value system”, “shallow, permissive notions”, “a sad statement about modern life”, “a temporary buzz”, “damage goes on apace”, “dissatisfaction runs through all generations”, “a mass, wasteful, aimless activity”. Marsland and Bird also make liberal use of war metaphors, typically used in conservative discourse, and especially in media debates. For example: The family is under pressure – from the impersonal forces of modernisation and its enemies among socialists, feminists, and gay liberationists. (David Marsland) [Shopping] destroys minds, economies and the environment. (John Bird)

The striking absence of such discourse and of the Moral Decline Repertoire in general from women’s arguments can perhaps reinforce the (often quoted) use of non-adversarial language by women. However, in line with more complex theorisations of gender, it is more likely that participants, being aware of gender assumptions (as seen especially in Column 1), produce – and sometimes resist – what is expected of them as female or male. This process may be accentuated by the particular genre, and the fact that, in these constructed arguments, positions are often exaggerated or caricatured. For example, we Wnd heavy moralising and strong language in men’s arguments (above), while the female writers oVer various personal narratives (e.g. Clarke’s and Grant’s stories about vegetarianism and shopping), and often exaggerated allusions to a Repertoire of Care (such as Clarke’s plea: “Why can’t we all join hands together on this and Wght it together?” (Column 4)). Genre characteristics put aside, the content and organisation of arguments is both shaped by assumptions around notions of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ and produces gender. This became evident in the way the symbolic construct of ‘women’s language’ as irrational and emotional gave rise to the particular arguments in Columns 1 and 2. Further, the texts examined exemplify how gendered constructs (repertoires of care and of rationality, and the dichotomy between real/rational/proven and personal/ felt/emotional ways of arguing) work towards producing and sustaining diVerent moral arguments. These moral arguments are supported by varying

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and often conXicting interpretations of the relationships between the individual and society (Individual vs. Collective Repertoire) and of the moral state of society (Moral Decline Repertoire). More specifically, the conXicting arguments address the extent of a perceived moral crisis, and whether such a crisis can be attributed to shifts away from a collective morality towards individualism and personal judgement. Common implicit associations of collectivism with rationality, and individualism with subjectivity and emotion, and arguers’ attempts to reinforce or resist these associations, are at play in the discursive construction of gendered moral arguments. In exploring the discursive construction of these arguments in the particular newspaper texts, I have adopted a view of language and of argument as a context-situated process and a social mode of communication. In line with this, the framework of analysis used emphasises the interconnectedness of text organisation (linguistic practices and strategies) and text content (interpretative frames or repertoires). Examining these practices and repertoires allows for an understanding of some of the participants’ images of the world, since participants make choices from the linguistic resources and cultural themes available to them. Discourse analysis, by viewing discourse as a social practice in itself, and by seeking to demystify the workings of identity, ideology and power in discourse, is particularly useful in exploring the implicit and assumed aspects of gender and morality.

Notes 1. The plural ‘identities’ is in line with an understanding of our sense of self as multiple, fragmented, contested, and shifting. 2. Fairclough (1992:215) describes genre as ‘linguistic activity with speciWed positions for subjects’ (e.g. interview). 3. I am using the term ‘repertoires’ to refer to the social concepts and polarities invoked in discourse. Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) examine tactically mobilised linguistic repertoires in scientists’ talk, and Wetherell and Potter (1988) use interpretative repertoires as analytic units constituted stylistically and grammatically. I think of repertoires as similar to discourses, in being entities or worlds consisting of acts, behaviours, values and assumptions which we evoke in our talk, writing and reading. However, I am interested in the interpretative aspect of interpretative repertoires: there is constant interpretation and evaluation in what we say and write, and how we do so, and these two element are particularly salient in arguments.


References Andrews, Richard, Costello, Patrick and Clarke, Stephen. 1993. Improving the Quality of Argument, 5–16 – Final Report. Hull: The University of Hull. Andrews, Richard. 1995. Teaching and Learning Argument. London: Cassell. Antaki, Charles (ed). 1988. Analysing Everyday Explanation – A Casebook of Methods London: Sage. Antaki, Charles (ed). 1994. Explaining and Arguing – The Social Organisation of Accounts. London: Sage. Bellah, Robert (ed), Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William and Tipton, Steven. 1985. Habits of the Heart – Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Belensky, Mary, Clinchy, Blythe, Goldberger, Nancy and Tarule, Jill. 1988. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books. Boulter, Carol and Gilbert, John. 1995. “Argument and Science Education”. In Competing and Consensual Voices: The Theory and Practice of Argument, P. Costello and S. Mitchell (eds). 84–98 Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. Costello, Patrick and Mitchell, Sally. 1995. Competing and Consensual Voices: The Theory and Practice of Argument. Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold. Gilbert, Nigel and Mulkay, Michael. 1984. Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a DiVerent Voice. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Grimshaw, Allen. (ed). 1990. ConXict Talk – Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaworski, Adam and Coupland, Nicolas. (eds). 1999. The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther. 1989 (2nd edition). Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Litosseliti, Lia. 1999. Moral Repertoires and Gender Voices in Argumentation. PhD thesis, Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University. Litosseliti, Lia. 2001. “Language, Culture and Gender Identities: Examining Arguments about Marriage”. In Relative Points of View: Linguistic Representations of Culture, M. Stroinska (ed.), 119–140. New York: Berghahn. Litosseliti, Lia. 2002. “The Discursive Construction of Morality and Gender: Investigating Public and Private Arguments”. In Gendered Practices in Language, S. Benor, M. Rose, D. Sharma, J. Sweetland and Q. Zhang, (eds), 45–63 Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Lutz, Catherine. 1990. “Engendered emotion: Gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse”. In Language and the Politics of Emotion, C. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod (eds), 69-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Jonathan and Wetherell, Margaret. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.

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Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You just Don’t Understand. London:Virago. Tannen, Deborah. 1998. The Argument Culture. New York:Virago. Tester, Keith. 1994. Media, Culture and Morality. London: Routledge. van Leeuwen, Theo. 2000. “The Construction of Purpose in Discourse”. In Discourse and Social Life, S. Sarangi and M. Coulthard (eds), 66–82. London: Longman. Wetherell, Margaret and Potter, Jonathan. 1988. “Discourse Analysis and the IdentiWcation of Interpretative Repertoires”. In Analysing Everyday Explanation A Casebook of Methods, C. Antaki (ed), 168–183 London: Sage.


Chapter 7

Is there anything “new” about these lads? The textual and visual construction of masculinity in men’s magazines Bethan Benwell Stirling University

Introduction: the evolution of masculinity in the men’s lifestyle magazine When British men’s lifestyle magazines were Wrst launched in the 1980s under the titles of Arena and GQ, they were acclaimed to be responsible for transforming perceptions of masculinity by oVering a more objectiWed and sexualised representation of the male body in ways more commonly associated with representations of femininity in consumer culture (Nixon 1996:3). Whilst magazines exclusively aimed at women (oVering advice and guidance on lifestyle, fashion, relationship and health issues) have been around for over a century (Beetham 1996), men’s magazines of a comparable ilk, at least in Britain,1 were, until Arena and GQ, nowhere to be seen. Magazines aimed at men existed only in the form of ‘soft’ pornography (e.g. Playboy and Penthouse) or in the form of ‘special interest’ publications (e.g. Wshing, cars, sport, DIY). Whilst the inXuence of the soft porn publications on the modern incarnation of men’s lifestyle magazines can be seen – both in the consumer appeal to the wealthy bachelor and man-about-town, as well as (more obviously) the objectiWcation and sexualisation of young attractive women – the British market had yet to witness a magazine exclusively in the service of lifestyle advice and entertainment for men. More crucially, no magazine existed which oVered a self-conscious, reXexive identiWcation of what it meant to be a man. Up until Arena’s launch in 1986, marketers had been extremely sceptical about such an approach, an attitude summed up by the marketing journal, Campaign:

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While women become “friends” with their magazines there is an inbuilt male resistance to the idea of a magazine that makes public and shares ideas about being a man. To men it is an unacceptable contradiction. Self-consciousness is permissable, even attractive, in a woman; it is perceived as weak and unmanly in a man. (Campaign, 26/7/85:37)

Arena was, however, successfully launched in 1986 and this was swiftly followed in 1988 by the British launch of GQ (which already existed in America), FHM in 1990 and British Esquire in 1991.2 The magazines were aimed at young professionals or white-collar workers and devoted a good deal of space to fashion spreads, health and grooming advice, and advertising. Their interviews and features were serious and aspirational in tone; topical and feministfriendly issues were addressed, and actors, politicians and fashion designers were all upheld as role-model material. This explicit exposing of masculinity, a process of rendering what had been largely and deliberately invisible and unmarked, alongside an unembarrassed and narcissistic pleasure in style and appearance, was strongly associated with the 1980s’ construction of the ‘new man’. This led many gender commentators to perceive men’s lifestyle magazines as an important site of Xux and challenge to traditional, binary notions of gender (e.g. Dougary 1994). However, the central, culturally dominant ground occupied by such magazines meant, perhaps inevitably, that a more traditional type of masculinity started to reassert itself, almost in challenging opposition to the ‘new man’. This challenge to ‘new man’ (who was in any case perceived by many to have been actually nothing more than a media and commercial invention [e.g. Jackson et al. 1999:360]) was embodied in the Wgure of the ‘new lad’. Whether ‘new lad’ was simply a necessarily new market invention, or a genuine manifestation of the zeitgeist of the early 1990s, is diYcult to ascertain. But what is clear is that the responsibility for the launch of ‘new lad’ as a well-formed identity and set of characteristics can be attributed to the joint eVorts of James Brown and Tim Southwell, who launched Loaded magazine in 1994. Brown and Southwell claimed that Loaded was born of a desire to oVer readers a discourse with which they were already familiar, to celebrate “the best moments” in life (Southwell 1998:2) and to oVer humour, male camaraderie and spontaneity. Loaded was a self-conscious antidote to “the snooty fashionbased publications of the time” (Southwell 1998), and in this way oVered the clear suggestion that whilst ‘new man’ was a mere media and commercial cipher, ‘new lad’ was real. This passionate belief in the authenticity and ordinariness of the ‘new lad’ and the discourse of Loaded is interestingly

Is there anything “new” about these lads?

shared both by the magazines’ producers: “we took it to the level of the street and the nightclub and the pub, where guys were used to being ignored” (Brown 1998 cited in Crewe 2001:187), and by its readers: “I think [the magazines] are aimed at the average lad […] have a few beers, watch the footie, trying to, er pull girls….” (a reader cited in Jackson et al. 1999). This apparent ‘authenticity’ in the phenomenon of ‘new laddism’ is also allied to an associative shift in class allegiance from middle to working class (regardless of the ‘actual’ class of the target reader (Edwards 1997)), which is reXected in the celebration of working class comedians, footballers and genres of British Wlm and Wlm actors with working class connotations. In addition, ‘new laddism’, in line with its rejection of the values of the feminist-friendly ‘new man’, can be seen to re-embrace very rigid, conformist and conservative models of masculinity, including an adherence to misogyny and homophobia (a charge which Brown and Southwell (see Crewe 2001; Southwell 1998) were anxious to counter). To a certain extent, this return to traditional masculinity was greeted by those sympathetic to its cause as a message of support and endorsement for the qualities and activities of the ‘ordinary reader’, a view expressed in focus groups: Other groups spoke about the “honest and open view” of “shameless” magazines such as Loaded which don’t feel any need to justify themselves (Politics lecturers, Manchester) and which celebrate “a kind of freedom to… shout and be kind of loud and get pissed” (Media professionals, London). (Jackson et al. 1999:360)

This endorsement of masculinity and absolution from the guilt of unreconstructed, anti-feminist views and behaviour, was also an explicit aim of Brown and Southwell: If Loaded was on a crusade at all then it was to galvanise a nation of men into realising that you didn’t have to be ashamed of being a bloke anymore. (Southwell 1998:214) ….[Loaded had taken] oV the shackles of shame that most men walked around with every day about going to the pub, about liking football, about liking pictures of birds and stuV…. (Southwell interviewed in Crewe 2001)

The word ‘shameless’ embodies the ambiguity and tension surrounding ‘new lad’ discourse and its perceived sexism: on the one hand, it seems to celebrate an absence of shame in the spirit of ‘openness’ and ‘lack of hypocrisy’ and celebrate its antifeminism openly; on the other hand, ‘shameless’ carries pejorative and disapproving connotations, albeit with a possible hint of amused

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(though distanced) admiration. The discourse of the ‘new lad’, represented in data in this chapter, makes for a fascinating study of the way in which modern men’s lifestyle magazines simultaneously celebrate and evade what some discourses would call ‘political incorrectness’. The main strategy of evasion employed by men’s magazines takes the form of a cheeky knowingness and self-reXexiveness (commonly glossed as irony), which enables it to simultaneously aYrm and deny its values. Indeed, it has been observed that irony preserves a quality of “deniability” (Stringfellow 1994). It allows a writer to articulate an anti-feminist sentiment, whilst explicitly distancing himself from it, and thus disclaiming responsibility from or even authentic authorship of it. This strategy corresponds closely to Talbot’s observation concerning tabloid constructions of masculinity, that “the stability of hegemonic masculinity might well lie in its very Xexibility” (Talbot 1997:186). Similarly Connell makes the point that [i]t is important to acknowledge that there is an active defence of hegemonic masculinity and the position of economic, ideological and sexual dominance held by heterosexual men. This defence takes a variety of forms and it often has to yield ground or change tactics. But it has formidable resources, and in recent decades, in the face of historic challenges, has been impressively successful. (Connell 1995:216)

This observation is reXected in the political endeavour of men’s lifestyle magazines to preserve a narrow and conformist version of masculinity in the face of feminist and academic struggles to break down traditional accounts of gender relations. The tongue-in-cheek, self-aware quality (witness Loaded’s by-line: “for men who should know better”) might lead one to identify a space of genuine instability and ambiguity within men’s magazines. Alternatively, this strategy can be seen as “having your cake and eating it” and not a genuine challenge to gender politics at all. In my analysis of the discourse of men’s lifestyle magazines, I shall attempt to chart the evasive, ambiguous and arguably strategic moves that deWne, endorse and give voice to this particular manifestation of masculinity. The discussion of the emergence of and response to Loaded (and its imitators) has suggested that the readers of the magazine constitute a relatively stable discourse community in which the language, values and meanings of the magazine are shaped by a complex dialectic between real readers and the production team. This is further reinforced by the interactive format of such magazines, in which readers’ letters play a prominent and informing role, and


where magazine staV pose as a modern day ‘Everyman’ in the form of intrepid volunteers for regular Weld trips to sample traditional or exotic masculine pursuits, or in the form of the highly interpersonal and self-revelatory nature of the features writing. Although it cannot be assumed that there is an unmediated relationship between text and reader (and instances of possible ‘resistant’ or ambiguous positions will be explored later in relation to the analysis), it can be assumed in this case that men (and women, who make up 25% of the readers) are voluntarily buying into a culture because of its broad appeal. Readers (to varying degrees) might be said to buy the magazine both to have their perceptions about masculinity conWrmed, but also added to. Whilst men’s magazines represent quite a range of target groups, just as women’s monthlies do, it seems that those magazines aimed at the lower end of the youth market (more under 30s, single and C1 and C2s)3 are particularly anxious and rigid in their eVorts to promote a narrowly deWned hegemonic masculinity. Whatever feminist misgivings about the characteristics that deWned the ‘new lad’ and the discourse of Loaded might have been, it proved to be a success with its readers and its circulation Wgures soared month on month. The format of Loaded was swiftly adopted by newcomers Maxim (1995) and Front (1998) and also by the existing FHM (as well as, to a lesser extent, the more staid GQ). The latest available circulation Wgures for FHM (1 July 2000– 31 December 2000) are an average of 716,679 per issue, compared to Cosmopolitan’s 460,086 for the same period. The aim of this paper is to deWne and describe some of the discursive strategies which are employed in men’s lifestyle magazines that seem to characterise and deWne a particular dimension of ‘new lad’ masculine identity. I shall be arguing that what unites many of these textual and visual gambits is a desire to remain ambiguous and consequently elusive or inscrutable. The analysis adopts a particular discourse analysis approach which is qualitative and necessarily speculative, but critical in orientation, and this will be deWned in due course. In addition, the Wndings of the analysis are situated within a gender-political context and interpreted in terms of their implications for masculine subjectivity and gender relations. My conclusions suggest that such manifestations of masculinity are intimately bound up with the survival and adaptability of male power.

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Literature in the area A good deal of material currently exists which examines the genre of women’s magazines and representations of femininity, and indeed this has become something of an established tradition (see for instance Mills 1995; McCracken 1993; Ferguson 1983; Talbot 1995; Goldman 1992; Tanaka 1998; Winship 1987; Caldas-Coulthard 1996; Ballaster et al. 1996; MacDonald 1995; Hermes 1995). Similarly a reasonably large corpus of material exists which examines sociological descriptions and categories of masculinity. There has, however, been relatively little research published on actual textual representations of masculinity in popular culture (Craig 1992; Easthope 1986 and Simpson 1994 are exceptions, but even these do not look closely or systematically at language or image) and many texts which do address men’s magazines (e.g. Edwards 1997; Nixon 1996; Jackson et al. 1999, 2001; Crewe 2001) do so within the context of examining cultures and patterns of production, consumption and reception. Benwell (forthcoming b: an edited collection of essays) provides a wide-ranging overview of new forms of masculinity particularly associated with men’s lifestyles magazines, and also examines verbal play, ritual insult and “male gossip” in the letters pages of Loaded magazine (Benwell 2001). Jackson et al. (2001) examine broad patterns of content and representation, and Tetlow (1991) and Taylor (1998) both examine textual constructions of masculinity in men’s magazines.

Gender identity In this chapter I am arguing that masculinity is a social construct, an identity reiWed through “a stylised repetition of acts” (Butler 1990:140) which is actively constituted and reinforced through the consumption of men’s magazines. Gender is not merely an early result of an infant’s exposure to patriarchal values which then becomes immutably set in stone during the entirety of adulthood, but is a continually on-going, reaYrming process (see also Sunderland and Litosseliti this volume). As Cameron (1997) observes, “Gender has constantly to be reaYrmed and publicly displayed by repeatedly performing acts in accordance with the social norm” (Cameron 1997:49). The media, and magazines in particular, play a large constituting role in this process rather than simply reXecting or representing such diVerences, and by our active consumption of such media texts, so do we. However, whilst


men’s magazines ostensibly strive to present a stable and unambiguous masculinity, gender cannot be thought of as a monolithic or unchanging category. As Butler points out, gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts. (Butler 1990:140)

In other words, gender has a curious negotiability, which may be exploited to a greater or lesser degree. As I shall go on to explore in more detail, men’s magazines both employ a “stylised repetition of acts” in order to reinforce a monolithic representation of what it means to be a man, but also often exploit this negotiability inherent in gender identity by incorporating elements of oppositional discourses (e.g. femininity).

Discourse and discourse analysis Discourse, as discussed in the Wrst chapter of this volume, refers both to language use at the suprasentential level but also to sets of communicative practices within speciWc contexts. Such communicative practices tend to be regulated and delimited by the values and ideologies of the institutions in which they reside, and this broadly Foucauldian approach to discourse is the one I am adopting here. Men’s lifestyle magazines are an example of a discourse type which supports a set of “regulatory Wctions” (Butler 1999) concerning gender. Like most forms of mass media, lifestyle magazines, particularly those that explicitly address one sex rather than another, are a locus for a particularly exaggerated binary oppositional account of gender. Since gender norms, according to Butler, are “discursively constituted”, discourse analysis becomes a potent means by which the process of purportedly ‘natural’ gender divisions and oppositions may be traced and decoded. The approach to discourse analysis adopted in this paper allies itself to a tradition of critical linguistics (as pioneered by Kress and Hodge (1979) Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew (1979)) and more speciWcally Fairclough’s later work within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (e.g. 1992, 1995a, 1995b). Both critical linguistics and CDA share a concern to expose the way in which ideology is encoded in language. Fairclough’s work, which builds on many of

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the theories and premises of Foucault, particularly those developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and History of Sexuality (1981) and which incorporates Foucault’s articulation of discursive formations and orders of discourse, is particularly concerned to widen the scope of description of discourse by adopting a three-dimensional analytical framework (again see the Wrst chapter of this collection). Such an approach argues that a complete analysis of discourse involves not only a detailed engagement with a textual product, but also a consideration of the wider practices of production and consumption, as well as an analysis of the discourse in the context of sociocultural practice (Fairclough 1995a:2; see also the analytical framework outlined by Litosseliti, this volume). Where possible, I have attempted to address issues of discursive and socio-cultural practice; for instance, the introduction to the evolution of the men’s lifestyle magazine provides an overview of the genealogy of the relationship between masculinity and consumption, and on occasion, I address the issues of both consumption and production of magazines by referring to the Wndings of Jackson et al. (1999, 2001), who carried out focus group Weldwork with male readers of men’s lifestyle magazines, and to the work of Crewe (2001), who conducted in-depth interviews with the two founders of Loaded. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that my main focus is the strategic workings of the text in contributing to a particular construction (and sometimes evasion) of masculinity. In this way, the approach I am adopting in this paper might be best described, after Fairclough (1992), as textually oriented discourse analysis. My analysis and interpretation of ‘new lad’ magazine masculinity is premised on a lengthy and involved engagement with a large corpus of magazine data (1997–2001), but this particular study is qualitative and relies on a necessarily small number of “telling illustrations” which seemed to epitomise the characteristics I have been able to observe with the beneWt of a longer acquaintance with the genre. For this reason, any results, conclusions and interpretations ensuing from this analysis are inevitably tentative and qualiWed. Whilst an authoritative account of real readers involves a diVerent kind of Weldwork analysis (of the sort conducted by Jackson et al. 1999, 2001 and Hermes 1996), it can be assumed that linguistic and visual strategies are deployed in order to encourage an ideal reading and a complicity with the values oVered by the text (Talbot 1995:146; Mills 1995:73–74). My analysis will therefore work on the assumption that magazine discourse encourages dominant readings (as a likely ‘resistant reader’, I am nevertheless able to identify dominant reading positions within the text), whilst still acknowledg-


ing the potential for resistant readings and textual ambiguity (Mills 1995:76– 79). In certain instances I will attempt to point to the potential for ambiguous or multiple readings, and even examples whereby ambiguity is an eVect which serves the dominant ideology of the magazine. An additional aspect of an account of ‘discourse’ which lays emphasis upon context, is the non-verbal element which plays a constitutive role in the communication. Images are a ubiquitous form of communication within magazines, and it is impossible to ignore them in analysis. For this reason, part of my analysis focuses upon the signiWcance of gaze in visual representations of men.

Identity of the male magazine The magazine in general is described by Barthes as a “prattling text ... an unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaVectionate” (1983:404). The short articles and features interspersed with bright and attractive images are aimed speciWcally at a busy readership which dips in and out of the text. Jackson et al. (1999), in their study of readers’ receptions and attitudes to men’s magazines, note (as Hermes (1996) did about women’s magazines) that most respondents, even those buying the magazines regularly (“committed readers”), view them as superWcial, disposable, and claim only to dip into them, rather than read them cover-to-cover (358-9). At the same time, such claims might be viewed with suspicion, since a consistent feature of men’s attitudes to magazines is that they should not be seen to be highly invested in them. This is in part a function of their politically dubious image, but as much about the suspicion that they are “unworthy” vehicles of culture or opinion: “trash”, “a waste of money”, “vacuous”, “silly and superWcial” (Jackson et al. 1999:358). Therefore, it is worth noting Jackson et al.’s observation that one man who claimed to be only a “casual” reader, in fact kept a complete set of back copies of one particular title next to his bed. Such ambivalence threads its way, therefore, not only through representations and textual constructions of masculinity, but through the whole text-consumer interface. The imperative nature of the magazine, articulated by Barthes, is particularly signiWcant, and may contribute to the sense that magazines work hard to keep their readers on board. Like adverts, the register is persuasive, but unlike adverts, the attempts that are made to replicate a sense of community of fraternity (albeit synthetic) might lead one to conclude that the magazine text

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is not treated so sceptically or suspiciously. Readers are consumers who choose to buy into the gender ideology and the synthetic community which is on oVer. Men’s magazines are still settling into a niche and establishing themselves as a genre. The instability of the genre is, for me, one of its most interesting features and has signiWcant implications for an articulation of gender identity. It is interesting, for instance, to note that in their conception, men’s monthlies followed the lead of their female counterparts by representing idealised images of men on their front covers. This was quite swiftly replaced by sexualised images of women, countering the hint of homoeroticism perceived to accompany the ‘new man’ image and emulating the genre of soft porn, the predecessor of the men’s lifestyle magazine. Images of men simply did not sell as well as images of women, a point made clearly in a report in The Independent newspaper, in which it was claimed that the phenomenal success of FHM was due to its consistent policy of having only images of women on its covers.4 The primary gender identity promoted by men’s lifestyle magazines is what Connell (1995) has usefully termed “hegemonic masculinity”5: “how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance” (Carrigan, Connell and Lee in Brod 1987:92). Within the context of men’s magazines, hegemonic masculinity is essentially localised and does not necessarily refer to the most privileged and powerful members of society. It is used here as a social construct, which nevertheless controls the production of cultural forms within the sphere of young men’s experiences. Hegemonic masculinity in men’s magazines refers to a culturally-ascendant gender identity which primarily deWnes itself in hierarchical contrast to subordinate groups or constructs, e.g. femininity, women, gay men, hippies. In addition, this masculinity embraces qualities of physicality, violence, autonomy, wit and irony. Men’s magazines are frequently preoccupied with setting strict limits on deWnitions of male and female. In a feature in Maxim (April 1997), the polarity between men and women is deliberately enforced with the title: “Twenty reasons why men are men and women aren’t” written by “The men who know”, which sets out humorous stereotypes of male and female behaviour and preferences. It is very common in men’s magazines for masculinity to be deWned as a default mode – i.e. what it isn’t rather than what it is. This conforms to the frequently cited observation of gender commentators and some feminists, that masculinity is characterised by invisibility:

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[…] one of the major political problems confronting feminism is the need to force men to recognize themselves as men. [...] Men are sustained at the centre of the stage precisely because they can be “people” and do not have to represent their masculinity to themselves. (Coward and Black in Cameron 1990:132)

As I have already observed, the key identities eschewed by magazine hegemonic masculinity are femininity and homosexuality, and frequently these categories are conXated, suggesting a necessary relationship between the two. To give an obvious instance, a profound interest in style and fashion is seen to be both feminine and gay. As Connell suggests, “In homophobic ideology the boundary between straight and gay is blurred with the boundary between masculine and feminine” (Connell 1995:40). The extent to which the magazines actively promote a traditional masculinity is sometimes so self-aware it borders on the tongue-in-cheek; perhaps what GQ’s marketing materials describes as its “own sly brand of humour”. In “Home Front” in GQ (Tim Dowling©Condé Nast PL/British GQ), a fantasy catalogue of ‘masculine’ consumer goods is compiled, including a “trouserWtted apron-suit” which takes longer to put on “but at least no-one will get the wrong idea”. The author of this piece draws self-conscious attention to the construction of masculinity: “it strikes me as strange”, he says, “that no-one has yet come up with a range of domestic products that would help provide a positive gender reinforcement strategy for men”. This uneasy partnership of the promotion of traditional masculine values with clear irony is a common phenomenon within men’s magazines, and one we shall explore in due course. Even at the height of the reign of ‘new man’, there was a commonly acknowledged tension between the sexual, objectiWed representation of masculinity in advertising and fashion promotions and the need to promote a clear, unambiguous heterosexual masculinity (e.g. Simpson 1994:108). The implied gaze inherent in such images might have been a homoerotic one, and thus the entailing anxiety often led to odd disjunctions between images and editorial content (Nixon 1996; Edwards 1997). The ideology of the ‘new lad’ is even more intent on eradicating any possible hint of ambiguity. In ‘new lad’ magazines such as Loaded, FHM and Maxim, advertising promotions for health, grooming and style products survive only with a heavy lacing of irony, humour or surreality. Images of attractive men are kept to a minimum, heterosexualised by the presence of admiring women or replaced entirely by an exclusive focus on the product. A shared vocabulary of ‘style’ and an assumption that readers are narcissistic and knowledgeable consumers is no longer unproblematic.

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In the following section, the dialectic between male gaze and masculine image is explored along with its attendant anxieties about the processes of ‘looking’ and ‘being looked at’. I will argue that such anxieties play a key role in the semiotic construction of masculinity in the magazines.

Image, gaze and anxiety Traditional masculinity associates itself with power and privilege; therefore the fear of not achieving such power is often experienced as anxiety. In Freudian terms this is sometimes glossed as “lack” or fear of castration. This excessive and defensive aspect of hegemonic masculinity has also been described by Adler (1927) as the “masculine protest”. By this, Adler means the anxiety experienced by men in response to the weakness perceived to accompany the position of women which then motivates an exaggerated emphasis on the masculine side. Weakness is associated with femininity, and by extension, homosexuality. This anxiety, one of the chief deWning characteristics of dominant hegemonic masculinity, is reXected in the manipulation of gaze and image within various kinds of media, but in men’s magazines in particular. Laura Mulvey’s inXuential paper “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1988) posited the idea that in mainstream cinema, the pleasure of the gaze is divided into two distinct positions: men look and women exhibit. This eVectively means that all spectators, whether male or female, are interpellated6 into a masculine position of gazing. This idea gained a lot of ground; it Wtted neatly into conventional conceptions of male as active and agents of processes and women as passive and objects of processes. It has, however, been challenged by a number of critics. In an article entitled “Masculinity as spectacle: reXections on men and mainstream cinema”, for example, Steve Neale (1993) argues that the division Mulvey makes along gender lines is not as clear or straightforward as she suggests. Firstly, it is possible for a spectator to identify with either object or subject of the camera’s gaze, so that desires and identiWcations may be multiple and Xuid. Secondly, a male spectacle has the potential to be an erotic object, not merely the “ideal ego” that Mulvey claims it is. Neale does however concede that there is a constant movement to compromise or interrupt the male spectacle as erotic object; one example might be the charged gaze between male characters in a Western which precedes shooting – an example of looks literally killing! (Horrocks 1995:66). Another example is Richard Dyer’s work (1989) on the male pin-up, where he


argues that in order to be an image of masculinity the male pin-up must avoid the appearance or pose of conventional femininity. In other words, despite being an object of desire, he must appear active, not passive. The potential for the male image to be interpreted as erotic object certainly exists within imagery in men’s magazines, and here a movement which attempts to channel and repress desires along more conventional orders of gender can be seen. Hegemonic male ‘focalization’ is where power and control in the magazines’ ideology is invested. Male ‘focalization’ (a term employed by Mills (1995)) refers to the way in which an apparently neutral narrative voice conceals a gendered perspective – what we might gloss as the voice and gaze of the text. In men’s magazines, male focalization is extreme and exaggerated; what the reader is allowed to see and read is a strictly controlled and prohibiting ideal type of masculinity. We can see this process of focalization at work in the speciWc constitution of the ideal male as simultaneously ‘not woman’ and ‘not gay’. The vehemence with which the men’s magazine disassociates itself from both femininity and gay identity can be seen in both text and image. It becomes a clear motivation for the selection of images in these magazines. Men’s magazines largely avoid the objectiWcation of men by means of a variety of strategies, examples of which will be explored shortly. It is signiWcant that the narcissistic female gaze in women’s magazines that acts as a point of identiWcation and aspiration for women is not such a prevalent device in the male equivalent. As Simpson observed, the fashion for putting male bodies on display leaves them open to an undiVerentiated gaze – i.e. it may be a homosexual one. Men who are surreptitiously observed (i.e. who don’t meet the gaze of the reader), it is implied, might be objects of desire, and therefore the male image frequently involves a gaze that conWdently, even challengingly, meets the reader’s. On the other hand, the gaze that meets the reader’s may imply that the reader himself is an object of desire – that a direct interaction is taking place. This observation about gaze also corresponds to Kress and van Leeuwen’s thesis (1996) that represented participants whose gaze meets that of the viewer are establishing a direct relationship, even if only at an imaginary level. Kress and van Leeuwen describe this as a “demand” image (1996:122–123), because the gaze seems to demand something of the viewer, in the form of a particular social relationship. If a smile or pout is presented, social aYnity or even desire may be demanded. The other type of representation, where the represented participant’s gaze does not meet the viewer’s, Kress and van Leeuwen term “oVer” (1996:124), where the image is merely an object of contemplation, and the

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focalizing, observing role of the viewer is accentuated. In this case it is possible that the object in question may be an erotic, desirable one. Images of men in men’s lifestyle magazines therefore tread an uneasy line between occupying subject and object position. When a male represented participant is the object of the viewer’s gaze, he tends to be active and nonsexual; when a male represented participant occupies a subject position, by gazing out at the reader, his gaze tends to be hostile and unsmiling. In both instances the key motivation behind the design of the image is to avoid homoerotic implications for both represented image and viewer. However, this kind of prohibiting positioning of the reader often comes into conXict with other functions of the magazine. A certain kind of tension frequently arises between the norms of this narrow and defensive masculinity, and the demands and products of the advertisers whose revenue Wnancially underpins the magazines. The need to promote anxieties in men about appearance and image sits uneasily with a dominant masculinity and all its phobias about sexuality. This is neatly put by Simpson: “Men’s style magazines, whose raison d’etre is to provide images of attractive men to be looked at by other men, are acutely aware of the imperative to disavow homosexuality” (Simpson 1994:108). Once again, masculinity is forced to draw upon creative resources in order to retain its dominant position, whilst at the same time responding to pressure from consumer forces. In Loaded, which oVers perhaps the most conformist and defensive versions of masculinity, passive or sexualised images of men are almost entirely avoided and yet at the same time, strategies are in place to sell to men products or values which are implicitly ‘feminine’ in orientation; one advert (for Ultratone™ Bodyshaper*) provides a useful example. A product such as this has inescapable connotations of vanity, concern or anxiety with appearance, and because its aim is to build up body muscles cannot avoid featuring a naked male torso, a possible object of homoerotic desire. In addition, the representation is an “oVer” image (to use Kress and van Leeuwen’s term) which presents the man for contemplation or consumption. This image is, however, heterosexualised by the presence of an admiring woman (see Figure 1 below). Other images avoid directly confronting gazes (which might imply an interaction) or naked Xesh, favouring rather whole body action shots with no clear view of the face, fashion shots which obscure the entire head of the model, or simply the product alone.


Figure 1. Ultratone™ advert in Loaded magazine

Humour and irony Humour and irony are two other magazine masculinity’s chief defences against sexual or gender ambiguity and are discussed in more detail in Benwell (2001a). In my introduction I brieXy discussed the role of irony in men’s magazines, arguing that an ironic knowingness, a self-reXexiveness, a refusal to be clearly allied with stable positions, is used as a shield against the explicit markings of masculinity. Irony can be deWned as a disjunction, opposition or contradiction between the surface form of an utterance and its underlying meaning or context, and is therefore a very useful strategy for disclaiming responsibility for politically unpalatable sentiments. Nothing can be more insinuatingly strategic than the ironic disclaimer, which anticipates various charges of sexism, racism or homophobia. For example, in GQ magazine’s

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“Home Front” article, a series of outlandish, exaggerated descriptions of manly “domestic products” signal to us that the piece is meant to be read ironically and humorously: Water for Men: This isn’t some fancy, foreign water, full of poncy minerals. This extra-butch bottled water contains just one mineral: salt, and plenty of it. And because it’s oestrogen-free it won’t turn you into a eunuch like tap water does. (GQ June 1997:29).

Nevertheless, a certain ambiguity is present due to the fact that a literal, surface utterance is not merely cancelled out by its underlying intentions (which are ultimately unknowable) but a trace remains. We can be fairly sure (from our wider, cultural appreciation of hegemonic masculine values) that these are not sentiments that the writer holds in contempt, even if ‘he doesn’t really mean it’. The ability of irony to preserve both literal and non-literal meanings is what contributes to its semantic and political ambiguity and in this way, the ‘dominant’ reading of this piece is arguably one which ‘gets’ both levels of meaning (both literal and non-literal) simultaneously, thus preserving both masculine values and political sensitivity intact. The issue of reception of such subtle and potentially ambiguous formulations (and it must be stressed that this is a tone and a formula which predominates in men’s magazines) is nonetheless a far from straightforward one. What, for instance, could constitute a resistant reading or ‘mis-reading’ in such a case? The range of readers of men’s magazines is wide enough to suggest that a range of readings of such instances of irony might entail. Indeed, from anecdotal evidence, it has been suggested to me that the literal level is the only level of meaning for certain readers heavily invested in traditional values of masculinity and impervious to liberal and anti-discrimination narratives. A reading such as this would potentially be seen as a ‘mis-reading’ by the text’s producer, and it is interesting to observe from Southwell’s autobiographical account of the launch of Loaded (1998) the extent to which he and his colleagues were dismayed by the lack of ‘Wt’ between their ideal, target reader and some of the real readers they came into contact with.7 During a chat-show-style stage event at Liverpool, at which the Loaded team met Loaded readers, Southwell recalls a sector of the crowd (a “mindless minority” (p. 237)) who drowned out proceedings with a chorus of “Get your tits out”. Jon Wilde, a journalist for Loaded, summed up his confusion at the mismatch of values between producers and consumers:


It was a living hell… About 15 truly sexist bastards ruined it for everyone. They were just pissed up and obnoxious… I thought we’d attract people who were into the writing, who were into the humour, who got the point of it, who understood that it wasn’t about hating women. (Wilde in Southwell 1998:234)

Equally, a resistant reading may choose only to accept the underlying meaning, and in this way uphold traditional masculinity as an object of ridicule; and whilst it is unlikely that such a reader is the implied reader envisaged by the producers of Loaded, the strategy of irony can be shown to be one with the capacity to legitimately accommodate a range of responses, and thus conform to the magazine’s commercial imperatives of attracting diverse masculine audiences. The example of a mismatch between producer and consumer values is a crucial one with respect to any kind of identiWcation of ‘magazine masculinity’; clearly neither the intentions of the producers nor the responses of the readers alone can be said to constitute the voice or values of the magazine. What might be termed men’s magazine values are couched in dominant meanings around which the text’s various readings are most likely to coalesce. The other role of irony and humour is to protect magazine masculinity from charges of taking on aspects of ‘other’ identities which might be seen to compromise its hegemonic masculine identity. This can be seen to good eVect in an article in Maxim (April 1997) about facial, massage and manicure treatments entitled “Shape your eyebrows, sir?” which is delivered with a detached, tongue-in cheek tone throughout. The subject matter of the article raises the spectre of an ‘unmanly’ masculinity and embodies the tension discussed earlier that exists between traditional masculinity and the commercial needs of the magazine; for this reason it can be viewed as an exercise in reconciling this tension. The article is extremely explicit about avoiding connotations of the twin pariahs of magazine masculinity – femininity and homosexuality: A men-only grooming shop for normal, everyday, nothing-funny-about-mytestosterone-levels-thank-you-blokes who quite fancy the idea of a de-stressing massage, with maybe a facial and, oh what the hell, a manicure while I’m here. (Maxim April 1997:106)

This telling opening description of the male “beauty parlour” is marked in a number of ways. The exclusive, ultra-male environment is signalled by a hyperbolic plethora of adjectives denoting both masculinity (‘men-only’, ‘blokes’) and ordinariness (‘normal’, ‘everyday’, again ‘blokes’) and explicitly

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rejecting sexual ‘deviance’ (‘normal’, ‘nothing-funny-about-my-testosterone-levels’). Rather than simply being a description it is in fact a defence (one can detect the pursed-lipped tone of “thank you” – meaning “I’ll thank you not to think otherwise”) and reXects a trend in men’s magazines for rare visits into the realm of male health and beauty to be handled with kid gloves. Dougary (1994) suggests that men’s magazines with features on fashion, beauty, accessories, sexuality and emotions, are narrowing the divide between men’s and women’s interests. However, the ‘need’ to promote a distinctive gender identity means that these subjects are treated very diVerently in the respective magazines. All this ties in well with the observation by Talbot (1997) that the stability of hegemonic masculinity lies in its Xexibility – in other words it may incorporate elements of an oppositional discourse (e.g. the notion that men care about their bodies), but leave intact more traditional assumptions about gender identity (i.e. they are not explicitly narcissistic). The opening description of the treatment is simultaneously explicit about promoting a product and promoting a particular type of masculinity, and in this way, the same strategies and concomitant ambiguities witnessed in the previous example of irony can be observed. Flexibility also operates in the way that the narrator’s tone may be variably judged. A reading less invested in the values of the magazine (or alternatively its commercial interests) might be inclined to view the piece more ironically, as a joke at the expense of the ‘macho’ narrator bluYng his way into a feminine realm despite his protestations. Like the example of ‘male consumer goods’ in GQ, it seems that the reader is required to tread a subtle and practised course through a mineWeld of irony, ambiguity and doublevoicing. Underlying the overtly defensive strategy of the piece is a second voice in the form of self-irony, whereby irony is directed at the masculinity espoused by the magazine and by implication its readers. The promotion of this masculinity is exaggerated to the point of absurdity so that the reader is encouraged to ridicule the defensiveness of the position. This means that a potentially politically unpalatable reactionary position (for some readers and writers) is redeemed, whilst at the same time, the function of the original sentiments, exaggerated or otherwise, is preserved: again we can appreciate the way in which men’s magazines, by such strategies, oVer a range of possible positions for their readers. On the other hand, it is precisely the narrator’s ironisation of himself, and by extension, a particular masculine type, that makes a resistant reading (in the sense of resistant to the values of the magazine) a diYcult proposition. The


narrator’s self-awareness of his hypocrisy (the hypocrisy at the heart of men’s and women’s commercial lifestyle magazines) functions to pre-empt the criticism, and it is precisely this “knowing”, so frequently invoked to describe men’s magazines, and postmodern culture more widely, that arguably shores up a dominant reading in favour of the values of the magazine. If we know what we’re about, the narrative seems to say, then what use is your criticism?

Men on women: Poles apart Whilst male focalization prohibits the display of desirable men, women are displayed in abundance as objects of male heterosexual desire. A defensive hegemonic masculinity can strengthen its own identity by exaggerating a polar feminine identity – one we have come to associate with patriarchy. Men’s magazines tend to focus on women in one of two ways. The Wrst way is as an idealised sexual object – usually a celebrity – and this is very much as a fantasy, unattainable icon. The second way of focusing on women is as real women – wives, girlfriends, lovers – and these depictions are almost invariably negative; real women are diYcult, diVerent, impossible to understand and sometimes threatening and to be avoided. This may be, as MacDonald (1995) suggests, an indirect response to the very real threat for some men of women in the public sphere and the workplace. Connell stresses that hegemony is “a historically mobile relation” (1995:77); in other words, it aims to uphold patriarchal privilege by any means that is congruous with social norms. This may well mean that hegemonic masculinity retains its power by actively accommodating ostensibly alien values such as the achievements and progress made by feminism (Talbot 1997), or the consumerist exhortation to groom and pamper. This was witnessed in the previous analysis of an article on male health and beauty, and can also be witnessed in an edition of Maxim (April 1997), where, in an article entitled “This Woman Can Seriously Damage your Health”, the writer (interestingly a woman, Kathryn Hughes) actively constructs a type of woman she labels the “Elastic Band” – “the new breed of girlfriend who’s as cute and forgiving as they come. Until one day she snaps” (Maxim April 1997:48). Hughes deWnes this type as a young, successful, intelligent and professional woman, “pro-active in every area of their life”. Ostensibly this is a positive description and one that realistically describes an average young woman in the nineties, thus conforming to Talbot’s thesis. However, the serrated edge of

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this double sword is that women who tolerate bad behaviour from their male partners in pursuit of a long-term relationship until they eventually “snap”, are portrayed within this construction as dangerous, psychopathic, obsessive and unhealthy. An assertive response to unashamedly boorish behaviour is described as “a syndrome”, and men who deliberately “diss” (show disrespect to) their girlfriends (e.g. by being repeatedly late for appointments, Xirting with other women or being promiscuous) are “forgiven” within the textual bounds of the construction. In fact, the heart of the “syndrome” is deWned in direct relation to the independent identity of modern women: Used to feeling in control, the mid-nineties woman can’t bear the powerlessness that comes with being dependent on another person’s love and approval. When that support is withdrawn, the feelings explode. (Maxim April 1997:49)

A clear discourse (in Foucault’s (1972) sense) is being constructed here, in which connotationally negative terms (e.g. “syndrome”) are applied to actions and behaviour which, in a feminist discourse, would be seen as positive (i.e. not tolerating selWsh and inconsiderate behaviour), and where connotationally positive terms (e.g. “cute and forgiving” if applied to women) would be seen as negative (i.e. unassertive and gullible). The tendency for men’s magazines to relentlessly insist upon the ‘otherness’ of women, whether in a positive or negative way, is part of a wider cultural phenomenon of gender dichotomizing. Although such a phenomenon is hardly new, it is a particularly salient feature of both men’s and women’s lifestyle magazines, as summed up by Ballaster et al.: “The world of the magazine is one in which men and women are eternally in opposition, always in struggle, but always in pursuit of each other” (1996:87).

Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted, through analysis of text and image, to move towards an identiWcation and description of hegemonic masculinity in men’s lifestyle magazines. By employing a deWnition of discourse analysis which involves consideration of texts as inseparable from their contexts, and which therefore includes image and implied relations between text and audience, I have been able to describe a gender identity which is constituted in a particular time and space, and which is variable and adaptive, but nonetheless relatively stable.


My analysis of instances of men’s magazine discourse attempts to demonstrate how discourses reproduce and reinforce a social order and how repeated and recognisable discursive strategies may be employed in the pursuit of gendered identities and relations. Whilst a more dedicated adherence to Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis would attempt to describe the totality of discursive and sociocultural practice in relation to texts, the brief engagement with possible reading positions, as well as observations about known conditions of production and reception, oVers a more complex interpretation of discursive identities than would have been gained by a singular focus on the text. Ultimately, as the Wrst chapter in this collection suggests, an ideal reading of the masculinity discursively produced in and by men’s magazines must involve the identiWcation and analysis of ‘local contexts’: the relationships between all moments in the ‘circuit of culture’ as they actually intersect with the minutiae of the textual product; this continues to be an exciting challenge for linguists. Butler’s concept of discursively-constituted gender identity, reiWed and stabilized by a “stylised repetition of acts” (1999), is highly relevant to an analysis of men’s magazines, in which the same patterns of visual representation, gaze, defensive response to connotations of femininity and insistence on binary gender oppositions all work towards the construction of a relatively stable masculinity. The ironic, tongue-in-cheek, and often ambiguous approach to gender identity, gender relations and gender politics which characterises men’s magazines, and which form the basis of the majority of the textual extracts under scrutiny here, could be seen as a challenge to the monolithic structure of traditional masculinity and, in many ways, the analysis of a range of possible readings oVered by the magazines seems to support this proposition. However, there are a number of alternative responses to this interpretation which I would like to propose. Firstly, this knowing tone must be seen in the global context of the existence of the ‘new lad’ in a wider sociocultural domain.8 Both Crewe (2001) and Jackson et al. (1999, 2001) discuss the notion of a ‘circuit of culture’ in which domains of production and consumption are mutually constitutive and not as easily separable as some writers claim, with both contributing to the formation of texts. This is particularly relevant to a discussion of men’s lifestyle magazines whereby the identities of a readership, both real and imagined, feed actively and continuously into the identity of the magazine. Whilst much of the text of men’s magazines is indeed humorous and ironic, there are

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suYcient repeated instances of unambiguous ideology and representation to provide a fairly homogenous and stable version of masculinity against which any instances of irony or ambiguity might be interpreted. This phenomenon has been described by Jackson et al. (1999) as “constructed certitude”: a familiar voice, schema or script which deWnes and is recognised as acceptable masculinity to its readers, “a commodiWed response to men’s current gender anxieties” (1999:353). Secondly, the presence of irony in men’s magazines, whilst seeming to work against Wxity, is arguably a strategic deployment by which two readings (and by extension two ideologies) may be embraced simultaneously. This implies that such “double-voicing” is actually a speciWc characteristic of magazine masculinity, and that the adherence to or adoption of such an identity depends on an ability to “read” at two levels simultaneously. The anecdotal evidence from the magazines’ producers (e.g. Southwell 1998) supports this view, by suggesting that to not “get” the irony is to seriously misrepresent the aims of the magazine. At the same time, to enjoy the irony and objects of irony too enthusiastically, and in too unqualiWed a way (particularly where the commercial or masculine values of the magazine are at stake) is equally to miss the point of loyalty to the fraternity and shared values of the magazine. Humour and irony, therefore, like the negotiation of gaze and image, may be yet another means by which hegemonic masculinity is able to accommodate social change. The “stylised repetition of acts” is a crucial prop in the upholding of stable gender identity, but it is nonetheless in conXict with the imperatives of a consumer magazine which is continually in search of the creation of new identities, new markets. Humour and irony (and also gaze) are thus chieXy employed in making these necessary adaptations and additions to masculine identity palatable and congruous with a more traditional model. Arguably then, they serve a reactionary, conservative role, rather than a subversive, unsettling one. So, in answer to the question posed in the paper’s title: Is there anything “new” about these lads? the answer would be, largely, “no”. Ultimately I believe that despite its subtle diVerentiation from its predecessors, the genre of mainstream, heterosexual men’s magazines rejects any kind of signiWcant or positive alternative to a traditional version of masculinity. The “knowing” tone, the ambiguity, the double-voicing are all strategies employed to preserve masculine values in the face of a disapproving world. As Johnson (1997) points out, it is perfectly possible for men to change, but the reality is that in


doing so, they “have far too much to lose in terms of the privileges enjoyed within patriarchy” (1997:18).

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Slendertone Ltd for their kind permission in allowing me to use their advert for Ultratone™.

Notes 1. In the USA, titles such as Esquire have been in existence since 1933 (Breazeale 1994). 2. A recent article in the Media Guardian on the phenomenal success of FHM (one of the mainstream monthlies) comments that men’s magazines, which only came into existence with Arena eleven years ago, have seen a meteoric rise in sales over the past few years – FHM itself is the market leader with an increase of 217% year on year. 3. C1 and C2 refer to socioeconomic categories used by marketers and social scientists within a categorisation system known as UK Socioeconomic Groupings. C1 refers to lower middle class with typical occupations being supervisory or clerical, junior administrative or professional and C2 refers to skilled working class, such as skilled manual workers. 4. Report in the Review section of The Independent 18/8/98, David Thomas and Paul McCann. 5. “Hegemonic masculinity” is a term not without its critics. Edley and Wetherell (1999) question its explanatory powers, Donaldson (1993) questions its relationship to Gramscian conceptions of hegemony, and RogoV and Van Leer (1993) question the basis of its very existence. These are issues I am currently grappling with and which I explore in more detail in work in preparation. 6. ‘Interpellation’ is a verb employed by Louis Althusser (1984) to describe the process by which an individual is called into “subjecthood”. This refers simultaneously to role identity and the notion of being subject to the authority of an institution: in this instance mainstream Wlm. 7. I am indebted to Ben Crewe (2001) for his identiWcation of this example from Southwell (1998). 8. Whelehan (2000:58–76) provides a useful overview of various incarnations of this identity in the popular media.

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References Primary Sources Maxim FHM Loaded GQ

April 1997 June 1997 June 1997 June 1997

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Craig, Steve (ed). 1992. Men, Masculinity and the Media. Newbury Park.London: Sage. Crewe, Ben. 2001. Representing Men: Cultural Production and Producers in the Men’s Magazine Market. Unpublished PhD thesis, Dept of Sociology, University of Essex. Donaldson, Mike. 1993. “What is hegemonic masculinity?”. Theory and Society 22:643– 57. Dougary, Ginny. 1994. The Executive Tart and Other Myths: Media Women Talk Back. London: Virago. Dyer, Richard. 1989. “Don’t look now”. In McRobbie (ed.) Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Easthope, Antony. 1986. What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Edley, Nigel and Wetherell, Margaret. 1999. “Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: Imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices”. Feminism and Psychology 9 (3) 335– 356. Edwards, Tim. 1997. Men in the Mirror: Men’s Fashion, Masculinity and Consumer Fashion. London: Cassell. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, Norman. 1995a. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Fairclough, Norman. 1995b. Media Discourse. London: Arnold. Ferguson, Marjorie. 1983. Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann. Foucault, Michel. 1972 The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications. Foucault, Michel. 1981 History of Sexuality, Vol 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fowler, Roger, Hodge, Robert, Kress, Gunther and Trew, Tony. 1979 Language and Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goldman, Robert. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge. Hermes, Joke. 1995. Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use. Cambridge: Polity Press. Horrocks, Roger. 1995. Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jackson, Peter, Stevenson, Nick and Brooks, Kate. 1999 “Making sense of men’s lifestyle magazines”. Environment and Planning: Society and Space 17:353–368. Jackson, Peter, Stevenson, Nick and Brooks, Kate. 2001. Making Sense of Men’s Magazines. Cambridge: Polity Press. Johnson, Sally. 1997. “Theorizing language and masculinity”. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. Kress, Gunther. and Hodge, Robert. 1979 Language as Ideology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. McCracken, Ellen. 1993. Decoding Women’s Magazines. London: Macmillan. MacDonald, Myra. 1995. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Routledge.

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Mills, Sara. 1995. Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1988. “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”. In Feminism and Film Theory, C. Penley (ed). NY: Routledge. Neale, Steve. 1993 “Masculinity as Spectacle: reXections on men and mainstream cinema”. In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds). London: Routledge. Nixon, Sean. 1996. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: UCL Press. RogoV, Irit and Van Leer, David. 1993. “Afterthoughts…A dossier on masculinities”. Theory and Society. 22:739–762. Simpson, Mark. 1994. Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. London: Cassell. Southwell, Tim. 1998. Getting Away With It: The Inside Story of Loaded. London: Ebury Press. Stringfellow, Jr., Frank. 1994. The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation. State University of New York. Talbot, Mary. 1997. “Coherence and the construction of masculinities in a British tabloid newspaper”. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. Tanaka, Keiko. 1998. “Japanese women’s magazines: the language of aspiration”. In The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: gender shifting boundaries and global cultures, D.P. Martinez (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Yolande. 1998. “Paid to have sex: the diVerential construction of gender in two magazine articles.” MA dissertation, Lancaster University. Tetlow, Helen. 1991. “The reinvented man: constructions of masculinity in one issue of Arena.” MA dissertation, Lancaster University. Thomas, David and McCann, Paul. 1998. “This magazine for men sells 775,000 copies a month. These magazines for men don’t. Spot the diVerence (sad isn’t it?).” The Independent Review. 18/8/98. Whelehan, Imelda. 2000. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: The Women’s Press. Winship, Janice. 1987 Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora.


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Chapter 8

The case of the indeWnite pronoun Discourse and the concealment of lesbian identity in class Elizabeth Morrish Nottingham Trent University

Introduction Discourse about sex and sexuality appeared to be at a breach point in Britain during the last twenty years of the last century. Homosexuality was seen to be a threat to society, and legislation was enacted by the Conservative governments of the late 1980s which was an attempt to place homosexuals outside the law and outside acceptable orders of discourse. It was a stunning case study which illustrated the validity of the theories of Michel Foucault. He recognised that sex, contrary to popular assumption, is not repressed, but rather is disciplined via techniques of power (Foucault 1976:6). His contention was that the deployment of sexuality is linked to the economy via the annexing, penetrating and controlling of bodies which both produce and consume; hence the (heterosexual) alliance is privileged within the law (1976:107). Therefore, to speak of non-normative sexuality is to transgress and stand outside of established law. In fact, as Eve Sedgwick points out, the silent uninterrogated nature of heterosexuality has come to mean that heterosexuality does not count as sexuality at all, to the point where it is in eVect the opposite of sex (Sedgwick 1994:10). Fairclough (1992:41) remarks that the ‘objects’ of knowledge – or what is talked about – are realized by the discourse; they do not exist independently of it. Foucault’s project in his genealogical studies was to isolate those discourses which constitute knowledge, produce subjects, transform categories, and act as techniques of power. The relationship of power to discourse lies in the

178 Elizabeth Morrish

Wxing and solidifying of these ‘discursive practices’ as the only way to talk about particular objects and categories (see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). InXuenced by Foucault, Judith Butler asserts that discourse is constitutive of the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (1993:2). Her theories elaborate Sedgwick’s notion of performativity and the idea that identities do not pre-exist but are performed in a highly regulated fashion. In fact identities are constructed iteratively through what are deemed to be processes of citation – a literal copying of the performances of others with the same identity. Rather as a judge cites case law to enforce his power, a citational performance of gender asserts the authority of this text as legitimate (Butler 1993:225). Accordingly, then, one’s use of discourse interpersonally positions one and reveals aYliations in the same way that a subject pronoun positions the subject as the Wrst person, the second or the third (Sedgwick 1994:11). It allows us to be perceived in a particular way by our audience, and so the way in which identity is performed and recognised emerges from discourse. This is particularly true of the gay or lesbian subject whose use of discourse may vary according to audience and context, and may frequently be characterised as a “displacement of expectations and disruption of the ordinary” (Leap 1996:162). Sedgwick recognises that shame is a universal experience for the gay subject. The interpellation “Shame on you” is a powerfully internalised response to the humiliations of a gender-dissonant childhood (Sedgwick 2001). Shame attaches readily to identity – what one is – as opposed to guilt which derives from what one has done. It is no surprise, then, that queer shame might be construed by the audience from the discourse patterns of the lesbian teacher discussed in this chapter. Dominant discourse, far from allowing an authentic and nuanced performance of gender and sexuality to emerge, insists on its erasure when it falls outside the citational norms of the licit. Subject agency in discourse, then, may be temporary and may be surrendered when context, audience or shame dictate that reference to sexual identity be foreclosed. This chapter takes as its focus the notions of discourse and performativity and the extent to which a real performance of sexuality by a lesbian teacher can emerge under the constraints of the dominant discourses of compulsory heterosexuality.

The case of the indeWnite pronoun 179

Ethics and the lesbian teacher The role of the gay or lesbian teacher, and the question of whether to come out in the classroom, are always controversial issues. They demand consideration of ethics and epistemology, and, for the teacher of linguistics, they raise problems of method and of discursive choices in a classroom setting. This chapter will examine classroom strategies of identity revelation and concealment, and those particular professional pitfalls that might ambush the lesbian linguist in her attempts to challenge the erasure of her sexuality demanded by convention and dominant discourse. I will also discuss the deictic choices we make in the classroom context, together with their audience interpretation, and the consequences for the lesbian teacher in situating herself as insider or outsider. In my examination of the discursive practice of a lesbian lecturer it is my contention that certain utterances will be interpreted diVerently depending on how she is read, in terms of both gender and sexuality. The chapter will also assess the eVect that such ambiguity has on the constitution of her sexual identity in terms of performance, and the possibilities for change. Because I am out to a number of individual students, it took me by surprise when I experienced a reluctance to lecture about lesbian topics in a committed and aYliated way. And so writing this chapter has been an important step in my reXections on internalized homophobia, my own closet and the linguistic strategies which police the latter and reveal the former. Ethically speaking, Mark Chekola suggests that the most crucial obligation facing the university academic is that they have a duty to come out and so provide a role model for gay or lesbian students (1994:87). Chekola notes that what makes this all the more acute is the recognition that the teacher’s gayness is often known about by students, and so to continue to hide suggests a reason for shame. Colleges and Universities, unlike high schools, can be places of discussion and tolerance which might attenuate and transform that sense of shame. Barbone and Rice evidently have this in the forefront of their minds in their paper on ‘coming out’ and ‘being out’, when they write that, “In communities where sexual preference is not regarded as an issue fraught with cosmic consequences, the notions of ‘out’ and ‘in’ may lack social consequences entirely” (1994:99). By this reasoning, I should feel reassured, since my own institution has an Equal Opportunities mission statement, a harassment code, and a commitment to integrating sexuality and identity issues into the curriculum. However, such an outlook can be considered naively optimistic,


since it disregards the wider social context in which we all operate – one in which gays and lesbians are viliWed daily by politicians, churchmen, the military, and considered a legitimate subject of derision by almost anybody else. Furthermore, Barbone and Rice appear innocent of contemporary work on the nature of the closet by scholars like Eve Sedgwick (1990) and Judith Butler (1991). There are paradoxes of in and out, as they stand in relation to the roles we traverse in daily life, and there are questions of how to, and when to perform gay identity. We must look here for a perspective on the matter, because, despite Chekola’s justiWcation, many teachers at all levels still wrestle with the projected consequences of coming out.

Closet strategies and consequences of coming out Michelle Maher and Wende Pusch identify some of the rationale behind the lesbian teacher’s continued preference for the classroom closet. Some may try to pass as hetero in order to gain ‘normal’ credentials among their students (1995:41). This practice reXects many teachers’ insecurity, and concerns about loss of credibility if their colleagues or students were to Wnd out about their gay or lesbian identity, and so they wait to reveal it, until they feel a positive impression has been formed. In practice, many of us delay reaching that point, especially because student populations are transient ones. Eve Sedgwick rationalizes such hesitation thus: “every encounter with a new classful of students ... erects new closets” (1990:68). But while many of us submit to the imposition of these closets, it certainly has no ethical or political justiWcation. Accordingly Jacqueline Taylor declares that “to participate in the construction of silence that surrounds lesbian lives, is not neutral, but an act of homophobia” (1994:291). And anyway, perhaps the closeted teacher is too pessimistic. Elenie OpVer, in a study based on interviews with gay and lesbian academics in the San Fransisco Bay Area, comments on some of the bonuses of coming out, which are that you no longer have to scan ahead, reparse and “dance around pronouns” (1994:317), and that students perceive you as more honest and as having a more open communication style. But in addition to interpersonal matters, there are other repercussions to the act of the lesbian teacher’s coming out. If one is to break the silence and assert visibility, then inevitably we ask what form those behaviors should take. One stands as a token of lesbianism, and so the nuances of performance and

The case of the indeWnite pronoun

discourse become politically sensitive and potentially the subject of student scrutiny. A select sample of such choices will be illustrated in this chapter.

Discourse, performativity, identity The approach to discourse I am employing in this chapter is a Butlerian one (1991, 1993, 1997), derived from her notion of performativity. Butler has been inXuenced by Speech Act theory, which asks the question “what is being done with this utterance” – in eVect, what new state of aVairs is being brought into being. In a similar vein, one’s performativity is constitutive of identity since it is “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the eVects it names” (1993:2). The analysis has been particularly applied to manifestations of gender and sexual identities. Butler distinguishes two kinds of performance: discursive and embodied. Discursive performances recognise the eVects produced through language while embodied performances materialise as eVects produced through the interpretation of self-presentation. It is worth exploring further some implications of performativity theory. What Butler does not believe is that there are any essential behaviours determined by gender. Our performance of gender has all the authenticity of a drag queen’s artiWce in that it is a stylised and ritualised enactment – a copy for which there is no original. It is, however, compulsorily regulated if we are to present ourselves to the world as intelligibly gendered and hetero-normative. Discourse, since it too is “reiterative”, as much as embodiment, is a vehicle for regulating and reproducing these gendered performances (1993:2). But as Butler points out, gender performativity is never carried out according to the ideal – there is always slippage and imperfection in this “forcible citation of a norm” (1993:232). This allows for the possibility of resistance to gendernormativity, since discourse may enter into “a ritual chain of resigniWcations whose origin and end remain unWxed and unWxable ... the contexts it assumes must not be quite the same as the ones in which it originates” (1997:14–15). It is the resigniWcations of performance, discursive and embodied, which are of interest in this chapter. Whereas I may be read as lesbian by some of my student audience, the signiWers may not be accurately decoded by others. Moreover the embodied manifestations of sexuality may sometimes seem at odds with discursive performances.

181


Lesbian performance and visibility Butler examines two main conundrums of performativity theory in her paper on “Imitation and Gender Subordination”. In it she extends the concept of performing as a lesbian, from her earlier work on performing gender. As illustration of how the expectations of performance can vary with context, she writes of an occasion when she was leaving to go to a lesbian and gay conference, announcing to colleagues that she was going to Yale “to be a lesbian” (1991:18). She meant by this, not to indicate that she was only temporarily lesbian, but that the context would in some way actualize that identity, as she was going to be one, in a “more thorough and totalizing way, at least for the time being” (1991:18). She asks “can the visibility of identity suYce as a political strategy, or can it only be the starting point for a strategic intervention which calls for a transformation of policy?” (1991:19). I think, by her own reasoning, it has to be a priori an essential strategy, since her argument is that performance constitutes the subjectivity it expresses. For, as far as Butler is concerned, without performance, there are no lesbians! But there is a further contradiction in that Butler asks how can we “be” a lesbian in a context in which the lesbian does not exist (1990:20)? There’s no diYculty at a conference on language and gender, or at gay pride celebrations, but the dilemma re-emerges in the classroom. Even in liberal circles, homosexuality has been designated a private matter and supposedly inappropriate for revelation in public settings. In more repressive contexts the discourse has been about ejecting gays and lesbians from the classroom. I would not include the classroom as a context where lesbians may not exist, but one in which our existence is contested by hegemonic discourse that constructs lesbians as being outside the general population. In this instance it becomes all the more imperative for us to reify the lesbian by our embodied behaviors and speech acts. Only then can the classroom become an arena in which we have the opportunity to educate by our presence and visibility. But this is exactly the point in our discussion where we need to examine the paradox of the closet: Maher and Pusch contend that to ‘come out’, discursively and linguistically, presupposes straight as standard, and homosexuality as hidden and needing to be explicitly revealed. But, and here’s the paradox, staying in the closet has the same eVect! (1995:27, 29). Eve Sedgwick, unlike Butler, does not distinguish between a discursive act and an embodied one. Instead she sees them both as performative in that they bring a state of aVairs into being. This elision of the concepts of a speech act


and performativity allows her to maintain that closetedness is also a performance – one whose deWning speech act is silence. She asserts that it is not a particular silent event, rather “a silence that accrues particularity by Wts and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and diVerentially constitutes it” (1990:3). If silence is the emblem of markedness in sexuality – outsiderness as opposed to insiderness – then Judith Butler reminds us that ‘outness’ depends for its deWnition on the contrast with being ‘in’: “it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence being ‘out’ must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as ‘out’” (1991:16). As Diana Fuss states, Inside/outside functions as the very Wgure for signiWcation and the mechanism for meaning production ... any identity is founded relationally, constituted in reference to an exterior or outside that deWnes the subject’s own interior boundaries and corporeal surfaces (1991:1, 2).

It seems to me that those boundaries as I experience them are worryingly unWxed. I may appear to equivocate sexual identity several times a day – less of an in/out contrast than an uncertain and partial unveiling of identity. It appears, then, that the act of coming out, or rather outing, read this time as an intransitive verb, is inherently ambiguous. I would argue that we do not face clear choices to either come out, or perpetuate the silence of the closet, when we arbitrate the boundaries of ‘out’ and ‘in’. A more frequent choice may be to navigate via a series of indirect speech acts1 that imply rather than state. These speech acts will be received and interpreted diVerently according to the nature of the audience. In this way, outing and the closet may be construed from one and the same speech act. So, my focus is not on silence, but on other ways in which we simultaneously enact the closet and out ourselves. To investigate this route, we need to examine strategies of concealment and audience design.

Concealment/Disguisement Clark (1992) emphasises the role of audience design in the study of discourse. Audiences may share common ground in terms of information or ‘given’ knowledge, or they may not. When addressing interlocutors we make an assessment of any likely shared knowledge and values, but we also need to take into account a wider audience of overhearers and eavesdroppers


(1992:201). We may believe we are designing our utterances for our addressees, but we do not neglect the inXuence of overhearers. We can reveal what we mean to everyone in earshot, or we can conceal part of it from this sector of the audience. Clark points out that Speech Act theory has little to say about concealment and disguisement. This, as we will see, will prove problematic for performativity. The apprehensive lesbian teacher may ask herself “Who is my audience? Who is the beneWciary of my coming out?” What I am calling the weak ethical route, following Chekola, suggests that it is the lesbian and gay students in the audience. It is this rationalisation that leads to a strategy of covert ‘coming out’. In terms used by Herbert Clark, this would be disguisement: your underlying meaning can be conjectured by the target audience, i.e. the gay and lesbian students, but not by overhearers. Clark makes a useful distinction between concealment and disguisement: “hide what you are saying and overhearers will suspect you of having something to hide [concealment]. Disguise what you are saying and they will suspect nothing” (1992:272). – Concealment is part of audience design and relies on mutual knowledge and reference, so in concealing, speakers design their utterances to be impenetrable except to the addressee; a familiar example would be “She’s a youknow-what”. Other instances might involve the use of technical jargon, or use of argot. However, this method acts only to alert the overhearer to the fact that something is being concealed. To the extent that they can conjecture the missing information, they may be able to repair the message. – Disguisement means that the speaker chooses the code in order to deceive overhearers, but not addressees, into thinking an utterance means something it does not (1992:256). Again, a gay example: “I think she may sing in our choir”. The allusion works when there is both a literal meaning, and a cultural metaphor, the latter being accessible only to the target audience. This is what Leap (1996:15) has called ‘double subjectivity’ and it may serve as an invitation to the lesbian or gay addressee to access a contingent gay meaning. Clearly, then, in order to guarantee the success of disguisement, we must Wrst establish the codes of community membership. We can assume that there will be a collection of things regarded as mutual knowledge within a community. Most of us in our interactions become practiced at judging whether an addressee or overhearer is a member of our community. In order for our allusions to succeed, we might need to draw on references which hail members of that community, but are opaque to outsiders. For gays and lesbians, those might include knowing that Gay Pride is in June, that rainbows and pink


triangles are signiWers, and a host of other items of folklore which make up accepted community mutual knowledge. Conversely these references might also identify my membership of the community. But there is another discourse pattern which alerts the astute to a gay identity – an apparent erasure of references to the private sphere, most evident in a consistent avoidance of incriminating pronouns. This may indeed be so common a strategy for lesbians and gays in formal contexts as to serve as a private key to signal disguisement of group membership. We might even go so far as to say that this is a code of the gay or lesbian “Community of Practice” in which such meanings are negotiated and mediated by a “shared repertoire of joint resources for negotiating meaning” (Holmes and MeyerhoV 1999:176; see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). At this point it is useful to digress into a short discussion about pronouns and their avoidance, because it has particular signiWcance for the lesbian linguist. The main impetus for writing this chapter has been my own sensitivity and reluctance to use ‘familial’ examples to illustrate points of linguistic analysis in class. Linguistics is about the study of naturally occurring speech forms, and our home lives and friendship circles are likely to be rich sources of data. And such revelations are commonplace in the repertoires of our straight colleagues. Didi Khayatt writes: A teacher’s life is ostensibly invisible in the classroom, and yet there is an ease with which many heterosexual teachers are able to include personal details into a discussion or give information about their mate and/or child(ren). This is frequently absent with homosexual teachers (1992:205).

Evidently straight authors of linguistics textbooks deem their families to be a legitimate professional tool. I recommend to students Peter Grundy’s (1995) book on Pragmatics, precisely because he illustrates each concept with userfriendly examples taken from his own daily experience. In the Wrst chapter we have a selection of these which are very self-revelatory in a wholesome, straight, family-values sort of way: “Not long ago my wife and I went out for lunch with two other couples.” [5] “I remember that my daughter was very upset when...” [9] “…if I say it late at night it may count as a way of excusing myself and getting oV to bed before my wife.” [10] “If I get home from work and see my children larking about instead of getting on with their homework...” [16]


What strikes this lesbian linguist is Grundy’s taken-for-granted entitlement to reveal these familial and marital contexts and details – even to publish them. For me to do the equivalent would at the very least raise eyebrows in the classroom, and, more probably, in the current climate of discussion of Section 28 in Britain,2 lead to accusations that I was ‘promoting’ homosexuality. The result for me has been self-censorship and a kind of look-ahead reparsing strategy, by which I can adapt my examples in order to eradicate their pronoun content. Just to demonstrate the syntactic complexity involved, I have noted some of my own circumlocutions. The examples below are all taken from my ‘Introduction to Phonetics’ lectures. The underlined portions indicate my substituted circumlocutions; the portions in italics show the construction which Wrst occurred to me; lastly, in brackets, the nature of the syntactic convolutions performed. “I once managed to dislodge my partner’s hyoid bone when kissing.” ...when I was kissing her. (Subject/Object pronoun deletion – replace with gerundive) “Someone I speak to regularly on the phone gave up smoking recently – and I didn’t recognize her voice.” ...my partner (Distancing/depersonalizing by using indeWnite pronoun and postmodiWer) “This transcription is as my partner read it and that’s a standard Mid-Western pronunciation.” ...she has a (Demonstrative substitution for personal pronoun – alter subject NP)

This data may be interpreted diVerently according to the codes of diVerent sections of the audience. By using a recognizably gay tactic of avoiding pronominal anaphora, I have triggered a private key which reveals me as a lesbian to the gay students in the audience. Nevertheless I have probably disguised my lesbian meanings from straight members of the audience who may not be sensitive to this discourse pattern. Notice that in accomplishing this feat I have met the Chekola criterion for ethical behavior: I am out to those students for whom I may stand as a role model. In this way I have simultaneously activated the codes of the closet and of disguised outing. This feat seems to problematise straightforward assumptions about discourse, performativity and agency. I have sent a message of lesbian identity, but one which is all the same produced under the disciplining restraints of a dominant discourse which erases the sexual outlaw.


Deictic centering and confounding Another altogether more pernicious attendant of internalized homophobia revolves around the notion of deictic centering. As a helpful orientation I need to Wrst lay out Clark’s analysis of deixis. He draws on a distinction made by Lyons (1977) between deixis and anaphora. Deixis can be deWned as the speaker’s representation of objects, places, persons, events and processes in the world, from their immediate perspective, in time and space, at the point of utterance. So we have ‘me’ and ‘you’, but from your perspective, I am ‘you’ because the point of deixis has shifted. Whereas deixis can refer to things outside of the text, what Clark calls physical copresence, anaphora can only co-refer to things somewhere else in the text, termed linguistic co-presence. Pronouns, of course, can be either anaphoric or deictic. The previous examples drawn from my classroom practice illustrated my avoidance of anaphora, and therefore of linguistic co-presence. But when pronouns are used deictically they can indicate the extent to which the speaker is willing to demonstrate her sense of aYliation with objects and groups outside of her own text. An example of this deictic use occurred earlier in this chapter, when I clearly positioned myself as a lesbian when I wrote, “In this instance it becomes all the more imperative for us to reify the lesbian by our behaviors and speech acts. Only then can the classroom become an arena in which we have the opportunity to educate by our presence and visibility” (p. 182). This degree of openness may be possible in an accepting, supportive context, but as we know, lesbian academics do not always encounter this in the classroom. For example, Taylor writes in her article subtitled ‘Teacher as text’ that she does not go as far as using the pronoun we when talking about lesbians, but instead uses they (1994:293). This distancing is what Taylor calls dissembling; in linguistics it is called deictic decentering. She claims that many of us have avoided outing ourselves this way, but that it is a ploy which brings with it other psychic problems. A similar instance which particularly crystallized all these questions and paradoxes for me occurred earlier last year when I was due to give a lecture on Language and Ideology. By way of examples, I took texts from the British press to show the defamatory way in which gays and lesbians are represented in discourse. Like Taylor, when I was lecturing on discourse about lesbians, I used they, rather than we. This use of a third person pronoun cannot, in the


narrow sense of deixis already discussed, be considered deictic. It must instead be considered anaphoric, because it refers to a textual antecedent – in this case lesbians. The use of we would have been deictic, as it points outside the text to someone physically co-present – in this case me, and with me as the deictic center, clearly aligned with lesbians. But instead of a person-oriented deictic, I chose textually-oriented anaphora, and en route I positioned myself outside my own text. I managed in my homosexual panic to deXect the deictic center from me, to the text. Furthermore I denied the lesbian students in the class the opportunity to identify with the text’s theme, and with me, by not using the inclusive we, and so I managed to alienate us all. This is neither concealment nor disguisement. The deictic decentering has distorted my lesbian meanings for every sector of the audience. I failed to identify myself with the antecedent noun “lesbian”, and so voiced the denial of my identity and instantiated the closet. The ambiguity of the performance is reXected in the discursive choices. In turn an ambiguous sexual identity is constituted which perpetuates the selfdoubt common to the sexual outlaw. This strategy, by which one set of clues can be contradicted by another signal, is what I have termed confounding. Is such a speech act an act of silence, as Sedgwick conceives of it? She is not clear whether she is using the term ‘silence’ Wguratively or literally. But, in any case, perhaps these decentered deictic choices are a more common realization of the ambiguity of the closet.

Inside/outside? Am I inside or outside the closet when the performance and the speech act diverge and confound an unambiguous reading? To draw on Queer theory, I am ‘out’, and non-verbally, at least, performing the ‘inness’ of my community. Linguistically I appear to be transparently ‘in’ the closet, and by so being, situate myself as an outsider vis-à-vis the students. However my reputation and surely my non-verbal signals supercede the linguistic message and declaim lesbian. The students, at least the gay or lesbian ones, probably conjecture ‘lesbian’ with a classic, eyes-down, interpellating, individuating case of ‘shame’ as described by Sedgwick (2001). At this point let us revisit Butler’s question of “how to be a lesbian in a political context in which the lesbian does not exist?” (1991:20). For me the dilemma was how to be a lesbian when she clearly does exist! Perhaps the problem was instead the one identiWed by Taylor – of what persona to assume,


because, “when the literature and the teacher are both lesbian, the issues involved in this performance of the self are particularly loaded” (1994:289). The quandary is whether to remain ‘in’ and work as an insider, or transgress and be on the outside. That transgression is nowhere more manifest than when the lesbian teacher mentions her partner or centers her identity as lesbian. Fuss theorises that such a disclosure transgresses, and at the same time constitutes a border. It transgresses the boundary instantiated by the silence of the closet, and at the same time demarcates one as being an outsider. Either way it looks as if we risk estrangement in some domain. But in reality this analysis from Fuss may be more apt: to be out, in common gay parlance, is precisely to be no longer out; to be out is Wnally to be outside of all exteriority and all the exclusions and deprivations such outsiderhood imposes ... to be out is to be in – inside the realm of the visible, the speakable, the culturally intelligible (1991:4).

This rationalisation is one which appeals to me both ethically and politically. The barrier I faced in claiming that visibility was in being able to position myself in an involved way with my lesbian texts, and in being able to subvert the convention that decrees my lesbian relationship must remain invisible. For the gay students who were able to infer from my attempts at disguisement, this had to have been read, not as scholarly detachment, but as an act of political cowardice. The fact is, as Labov (1982) made clear in the early eighties, there need be no contradiction between objectivity and commitment in sociolinguistic work. My point of view as a lesbian gives me very clear insight into the lecture topic – an insight which could have been educative for the students, and which I chose to withhold from them. This is an experience recognized by Taylor, who writes: “I obscure and deny one of my own sources of insight into, and information about lesbian texts, heterosexist literature, and what it means to be marginalised and alienated” (1994:293). Moreover, it should be apparent from the discussion of Chekola’s stance on ethics that only the gay and lesbian students beneWt from my coming out, unless that address is a direct and unambiguous one to both gay and straight audience members together.


Conclusion What we can conclude is that there are several methods of avoiding the discomfort of coming out in class. We can employ discourse to conceal, disguise or confound our lesbian identity. What appears to be Sedgwick’s layman’s notion of a speech act does not, except inadvertently, extend to categories like concealment or indirect speech acts. Nor does it take account of the fact that such strategies may operate diVerently for diVerent addressees, and depend also on the presence or absence of overhearers. Since discourse functions constitutively, the identities it actualises seem ephemeral – dissolving and reforming like mirages. The notions of performativity and the speech act founder at the challenge presented by such concealments. The indeterminate nature of identity I have outlined in this chapter demands a re-examination of the relationship of the marginal subject to the wider mainstream culture. The key is to identify the strategies the gay or lesbian subject must deploy in order to resist incorporation and erasure at the level of discourse. Discourse and the appropriation of language must, we believe, occupy the central position of political struggle to propel the queer subject into the realm of the intelligible. But even then, the direct speech act – the concrete performative of outing – may still elude us. The problem, according to Butler (1993:225), is that to use the pronoun ‘I’, you need to have been Wrst addressed, or, as Althusser would know it, to have been hailed by the discourse. Butler seems to be suggesting that this is a pre-requisite for positioning oneself at the deictic center. Only when your subjectivity has been discursively constituted, and your existence acknowledged, can your place in speech be mobilized. But, even using Butler’s own reasoning, we can stand the whole schema in reverse. If, as she has argued, performance brings about the subjectivity, then how better to perform as a lesbian, than by that demonstration of physical copresence realized by deictic centering. We simply cannot wait for hegemonic discourse to furnish our subjectivity. We have to take charge of the discourse ourselves and enact that particular performative of outing oneself. Carl Stychin upholds a similar position: “the strategy for those of us who seek to undermine the universality of the (hetero)sexual subject, must continue to be resistance to and subversion of its rhetorical privileging. One means is the appropriation of the binary of inside/outside” (1995:29). But Stychin warns that the appropriation must be unguarded and unequivocal: “To the extent that the policing of discourse in dominant culture forces us to

The case of the indeWnite pronoun

cling to private language, liberation at best will be partial and survivalist” (1995:30). The important thing is to recognize the primacy of discourse in accomplishing self deWnition and in resisting the constraints of the binaries of inside/outside and homo/hetero. As Sedgwick puts it, “it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen in the vicinity of the transformative”. Only then can we validate lesbian discourse and articulate lesbian meanings.

Notes 1. In Speech Act theory the linguist distinguishes between direct and indirect speech acts. In the direct speech act, the function of the utterance can be read oV from its grammatical form, e.g. “The earth is round” – grammatical form is a declarative; function is a statement. In indirect speech acts the correlation between form and function is ruptured, e.g. “I’d like you to send Mary a card” – grammatical form is a declarative: function is a request/order. However pragmatic rules allow the hearer to repair the meaning by conjecture and implication. 2. The most notoriously homophobic legislation to be enacted in Britain since 1967 has been the Thatcher-inspired Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988. This legislation has a completely ideological nature and up until this point (1996) there have been no challenges based on an alleged contravention. As I write there have been three attempts in parliament to repeal Section 28. All have failed due to tenacious resistance from the rightwing lobby opposed to what they present as the nightmare of mandatory teaching of homosexuality in schools. As ever, the act of acknowledging homosexuality is most often read as “promoting” it by British conservatives. This discourse has proved highly resistant to interruption or resigniWcation. The act states that a local authority (in charge of schools, facilities) shall not: 1. a. intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality b. promote the teaching in any (publicly) maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. Nothing in subsection (1) above shall be taken to prohibit the doing of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease. (Colvin and Hawkesley 1989:38)

References Barbone, Steve and Rice, Lee. 1994. “Coming Out, Being Out and Acts of Virtue”. In Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights and Sexual Science, Timothy F. Murphy

191


(ed), 91–110. Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press. Butler, Judith. 1991. “Imitation and Gender Subordination”. In Inside/Out, Diana Fuss (ed), New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Chekola, Mark. 1994. “Outing, Truth-Telling and the Shame of the Closet.” in Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights and Sexual Science, Timothy F. Murphy (ed), 6790. Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press. Clark, Herbert. 1992. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago: CSLI. Colvin, Madeleine and Hawkesley, Jane. 1989. Section 28: A Practical Guide to the Law and Its Implications. London: Liberty. Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Fuss, Diana (ed). 1991. Inside/Out. New York: Routledge. Fuss, Diana. 1991. “Inside/Out”. In Inside/Out. Diana Fuss (ed), 1–10. New York: Routledge. Grundy, Peter. 1995. Doing Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold. Holmes, Janet and MeyerhoV, Miriam. 1999. “The Community of Practice: Theories and methodologies in language and gender research”. Language in Society 28 (2):173– 184. Khayatt, Madiha Didi. 1992. Lesbian Teachers. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Labov, William. 1982. “Objectivity and Commitment in Linguistic Science. The Case of the Black English Trial in Ann Arbor”. Language in Society 11:165–201. Leap,William (ed). 1996. Word’s Out. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Vol 2. Cambridge,U.K.: CUP. Maher, Michelle. and Pusch, Wende. 1995. “‘Speaking Out’: The Implications of Negotiating Lesbian Identity”. In Beyond the Lavender Lexicon, William Leap (ed), 19–44. Luxemburg: Gordon and Breach. Murphy, Timothy (ed). 1994. Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights and Sexual Science. Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press. OpVer, Elenie. 1994. “Coming Out to Students: Notes from the College Classroom”. In Queer Words, Queer Images, JeVrey Ringer (ed), 296–321. New York: NYU Press. Ringer, JeVrey (ed). 1994. Queer Words, Queer Images. New York: NYU Press. Sedgwick, Eve K. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Sedgwick, Eve K. 1994. Tendencies. London: Routledge. Stychin, Carl F. 1995. Law’s Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice. London: Routledge. Taylor, Jacqueline. 1994. “Performing the (Lesbian) Self: Teacher as Text”. In Queer Words, Queer Images, JeVrey Ringer (ed), 289–295. New York: NYU Press. Electronic Sources Sedgwick, Eve K. Accessed 5th March 2001. http://www.duke.edu/~sedgwic/WRITING/PREFACES.htm

Erotic discourse strategies in powerless women 193

Chapter 9

Erotic discourse strategies in powerless women Analysing psychiatric interviews Branca Telles Ribeiro Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

‘Eroticism is Wrst and foremost a thirst for otherness.’ Octavio Paz, The Double Flame, (1995:15).

1. Introduction A common concern in psychiatry is the doctor’s attentive listening. Though psychiatrists are frequently attuned to patients’ needs, they often fail to listen to the most basic request from the female patient: the need for recognition, reciprocity, and understanding – the need for a conversational listener (Kaplan 1996). In a patient’s own words: Doctor: Patient: Doctor: Patient:

but let’s go back to your problem. you said your problem was neurological. yeah. psychological. I need to talk to someone, no one talks to me, they say there are psychologists, mmm but I never talk to any psychologist. now you are ( ) ’cause you are interviewing me, I’m being interviewed. but I want to talk, I want to let it out, there’s no one to talk to me, not even a brother ( ) Jesus Christ. only with him can I talk in these endless nights, when I pray to (to him )

This chapter investigates discourse and involvement strategies (Gumperz 1982; Tannen 1989) used by women to overcome a deep sense of isolation and

194 Branca Telles Ribeiro

abandonment that is common in psychiatric settings.1 While patients seek occasions for talk and interaction, the psychiatric interview hardly provides such an informal and symmetrical context (GoVman 1961, 1981; Ribeiro 1994). Rather, in these encounters, inquiry (one-sided questioning) prevails. To make matters more complicated, women in psychotic crisis are often treated as stereotypical women (i.e. helpless, dependent, sexless, unreasonable) and crazy (Chesler 1972). There are alternative female self-representations to this rather static and traditional image. Close examination of conversational processes in the psychiatric encounter reveals a diVerent portrait of a female patient: an active and more independent woman with an acute sense of awareness and intentionality. Discourse analysis is a crucial tool to capture the patient’s projected self in the encounter as well as her actions in changing alignments to self and other. Discourse reveals how a patient’s sense of self (of who she is, of her projected identity) can be displayed as provocative, potent, and dynamic – a self creatively constructed in interaction with the doctor. Metamessages conveyed by the patient through conversational and nonverbal cues work to secure listenership. Gumperz’ (1982, 1992) and Tannen’s (1984, 1986, 1993) extensive work in discourse analysis investigates the basic question underlying discourse and interaction: How do people communicate and interpret meaning when they speak to one another? Since talk, in any circumstance, is always meaningful, what are participants doing when they speak and interact? Sociolinguistic research in discourse indicates that the analyst does not have ‘rules’ of language that are or are not satisWed; rather, as Levinson (1983) points out, “the analyst is in the position of the hearer who has interpretations of the discourse which do or do not make sense”. Gumperz (1982) points out that speakers follow interpretive norms that are continuously revised as the interpretation develops. In this process, participants are active predictors of what will come next in the interactive game. Speakers go back and forth, matching their prior knowledge against the unfolding discourse and predicting their next move. The discourse analyst must, therefore, establish the message. Most of all, in order to determine the message, the analyst must determine the metamessage about how the communication has been intended; that is, the frame. No message (words and utterances) can be understood without a reference to the implicit metamessage about the frame (Bateson [1972] 1981). According to Tannen:


Whereas words convey information, how we speak those words – how loud, how fast, with what intonation and emphasis – communicates what we think we’re doing when we speak: teasing, Xirting, explaining, or chastising; whether we’re feeling friendly, angry, or quizzical; whether we want to get closer or back oV. In other words, how we say what we say communicates social meanings (1986:30).

This study focuses on the discourse strategies used by a manic/depressive woman (Rejane Rodrigues) with her interviewer, a male psychiatrist (Dr. Mauro Cardozo).2 The psychiatric interview situation creates an interactional process where each encounter is singular (Shea 1998). Thus the focus on a single patient follows the type of inquiry proper to qualitative discourse analysis (Labov and Fanshel 1977; Ribeiro 1994; Mishler 1999). As Katz and Mishler (forthcoming) indicate, qualitative research takes into account “process and structure, the ways separate parts of an event or process are interconnected to form a complex and uniWed whole”. Four interviews were videotaped within a two month period, during the patient’s stay at the hospital.3 In these interviews, I will discuss how the patient interprets love and sex as the causes for her mental and physical problems. She relates her irrational and disruptive behavior – her mental illness – to troublesome love aVairs (unstable relationships, sexual abuse and repression, physical aggressiveness). We see the interplay of sex, eroticism and love (Paz 1995) in the patient’s own deWnition and enactment of her mental troubles. Most of all, the patient’s talk is an eVort to assert her sexuality and reason. Attraction, and speciWcally sexual attraction, seems to be her means to overcome isolation. Erotic talk works, therefore, in getting the listener’s and interviewer’s attention. This study investigates how and why these strategies work. It also discusses how the pursuit of a relationship is played out in the development of these interviews. What seems to be at stake is the very pursuit of a listener (Kaplan 1996).

2. Framing, alignments and identities Given an interactional model for the analysis of talk (GoVman 1981, Gumperz 1982, 1992; Erickson and Shultz 1982; Tannen 1984, 1986; SchiVrin 1987, 1994), one may investigate what sorts of relationships are established through talk and how these relationships are negotiated in interaction. More speciWcally, one would ask ‘How do frames operate to contextualize the ongoing discourse?’ and ‘What do frames indicate about the way we com-


municate to one another?’ As a ‘bracketing device of a higher phase or episode of interaction’ (GoVman 1981:128), framing captures participants’ ever-changing alignments to each other and to what is being communicated. It captures participants’ deWnition (and on-going redeWnitions) of a social situation, that is, what they believe they are doing (what speech act they are producing or what activity they are performing) and in what way their words and gestures are to be understood. Such signaling among interactants is necessary, because intersubjectivity is not pre-ordained but is, rather, achieved. Frame analysis captures a speaker’s relation to his or her own previous or upcoming utterance, a speaker’s relation to an audience, the audience’s relation to a speaker, and a speaker’s relation to nontextual aspects of the self (Ribeiro and Hoyle, in press). Framing can be thought of as the linguistic negotiation of our social and conversational identities during the ongoing Xow of talk. Thus, identity can be understood as a composite of projected selves or multiple alignments that one negotiates during an encounter. Among the relatively stable social and cultural traits that a participant has (education, social class, language background, ethnicity, gender, etc.), there are those which become most salient in a given interaction. GoVman alerts us to the enactment of social traits in interaction: note that it is not the attributes of social structure that are here considered, such as age and sex, but rather the value placed on these attributes as they are acknowledged in the situation current and at hand ([1972] 1979:62, emphasis added).

Thus interactants negotiate and interpret relevant attributes as the social encounter unfolds. Giddens (1992) conceptualises identity as a series of choices one continually makes about oneself. We choose (though not always consciously) to display and perform a given set of personal attributes in social interaction. This is an ongoing social process sometimes labelled “doing identity work” (see Johnson 1997; also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). GoVman’s frame analysis is particularly interesting for capturing this social work: it can highlight shifts in alignment to self (which may be an idealized representation) or shifts in alignment to other (the doctor or projected audience of the video being recorded) (Ribeiro and Lopes Dantas 2001). Thus in discussing identity in discourse, one must take into consideration the knowledge participants have and share in the encounter (knowledge schemas), the social and conversational attributes which surface in that


encounter (which are enacted face to face, and are also part of the ‘attributions or ascriptions of others’; see Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume), and the eVect these attributes have on the interactant(s). Identity is not only the set of attributes one enacts in a given interaction, it is also the eVect and value those very attributes have on the participants (and interpreters). The following analysis will indicate how Rejane and Dr. Cardozo change alignments as well as embed one alignment within another. Such embedding (or recontextualization of talk) is what makes interaction dynamic and understanding meaning so complex. At times, gender and social asymmetry seem to lessen; in other instances, power roles seem reversed. RedeWnitions of the social situation permeate interaction as within one alignment, another can be fully enclosed. In truth, in talk it seems routine that, while Wrmly standing on two feet, we jump up and down on another (GoVman, 1981:155).

Turning now to the psychiatric interview, we will see how contextualization and framing takes place. First, let’s examine the discourse of medicine (Mishler 1984; GoVman 1961; Foucault [1975] 1987) – how it is linguistically and interactionally revealed in the institutional framing of the interview. These contexts correspond to what Mishler calls “the voice of medicine” in doctor-patient encounters, which displays a “‘technical’ interest and expresses a ‘scientiWc attitude’” (1984:104).

3. The psychiatric interview: Instructions on how to listen Psychiatry is driven by diagnostic procedures. The doctor must investigate each one of the patient’s symptoms and search for a standard deWnition. Part of this work is performing an assessment of thought, language and communication disorders, as disturbances in the use of language are displayed in several psychiatric conditions, such as mania, severe depression, organic disorders, and schizophrenia (Andreasen 1979; Harrow et al. 1982; Shea 1998). Among psychiatric disorders, Sullivan (1954) lists “disturbances of verbal communication” and “disturbances in the gestural components of communication”. What the psychiatrist sees as peculiar misunderstandings or mistaken interpretations may occur in answering the interviewer’s questions, or there may be hallucinations when another reality prevails. The psychiatric interview is modeled after the standard medical interview.


Its general plan can be captured by the following sequence of information and clariWcation requests: Excerpt (1)4 Doctor: but you really like doing that, right? (referring to the patient trying to speak in English) Patient: he tells me to do it. (laughs) Doctor: who tells you to do it? Patient: Bozo. when you get married that’s what happens. Doctor: but are you hearing a voice telling you to do that? Patient: yes. Doctor: but you hear voices inside your head? Patient: yes. ( ) Doctor: what do the voices say? Patient: ‘I love you’ (speaking slowly) Doctor: the voice says ‘I love you’? Patient: ( ) Doctor: what else do the voices say?

The inquiry is marked by a Question/Answer chain format, where the doctor requests information or clariWcation; frequently he probes further for more information and expands the topic. The Q/A/Q/A sequence illustrates the rules set up for interviewing. Such rules as the ‘chaining rule’ (Sacks [1972] 1988:343) rarely apply in long sequences in everyday conversations, but they are typical of doctor-patient interviews, as Coulthard ([1977] 1981) has pointed out. The doctor’s questions often follow an institutional (psychiatric) topic agenda (such as ‘hearing voices’). They foster an asymmetrical relation between the participants: not only does the doctor have the upper hand in introducing topics, but the query format also obligates the patient to respond, thus providing for topic continuity (Mishler 1984): Doctor: Patient: Doctor: Patient:

but are you hearing a voice telling you to do that? yes. but you hear voices inside your head? yes. ( )

Patients’ responses often come as a way of satisfying doctors’ expectations. More often than not, patients respond aYrmatively whether or not the situation applies (Mishler 1984). Thus an aYrmative answer does not necessarily entail a true response. As a case in point, psychiatric patients are familiar with questions on delusions or hallucinations which often refer to ‘voices’ or


‘hearing voices’. In Rejane’s case, when the doctor probes into the content of the ‘voice’ message, Rejane’s answer is playful and ambiguous (smile, change in pace), which may invalidate her previous aYrmations. Doctor: Patient: Doctor: Patient: Doctor:

what do the voices say? ‘I love you’ (speaking slowly to the doctor, smiling) the voice says ‘I love you’? ( ) what else do the voices say?

The doctor holds his professional ground, seeking further information (“what else do the voices say?”). Following the clinical interview structure, the psychiatric interview is thus framed as an inquiry and not a conversation. It sets an agenda for how the psychiatrist is expected (and trained) to listen to the patient’s information. There is a set of topics to inquire about as well as speciWc ways of requesting and responding to information. Foucault (1988) deWnes inquiry as a rational procedure of establishing a truth, a model for investigation, a technique of obtaining information. It is also a way of exerting power over the other: the inquirer asks questions and listens for the responses. Thus the topics introduced are always the doctor’s topics, pre-determined as a format for recording medical data (identifying data, the chief complaint, the present illness, past history, family history, and so on).

4. DeWning the illness: In the patient’s own words Let’s turn to the patient’s own words: Excerpt (2) Patient: but I didn’t tell him my story, I’m telling it to you. Doctor: mmm. but youPatient: telling it in bits and pieces. now I remember that it was a boyfriend, that makes sense, that tore my heart to pieces. Doctor: mmm mmm.

While the doctor structures talk as inquiry, the patient views the encounter diVerently. Rejane states that she has stories (or a life story) to tell, that she is willing to tell her story to Dr. Cardozo although unwilling to tell it to her own (previous) doctor (“but I didn’t tell him my story”). Patients view the medical encounter as an opportunity to account for their life and health stories in their own terms:


In their stories, patients try to restore [the] context, locating the trajectory of symptoms within their daily experiences, specifying their impact on how they can function personally and socially, reporting their own remedial and reparative eVorts (Hydén and Mishler 1999:178).

Rejane views the encounter with Dr. Cardozo as an occasion to tell her story. It is a token of intimacy (‘I’m telling it to you’) – a measure of her interest, her trust, and the type of relationship she wants to develop with this doctor. Linde discusses occasions for life stories to emerge: “the extent to which one knows another person’s life story can be viewed as oVering one measure of the intimacy of the relationship” (1993:36). In the interview situation, Rejane favors Cardozo, signaling an inclusive move (she will tell her stories to him) while excluding her own doctor.5 Several narratives surface in the four interviews. Most refer to troublesome love aVairs (several lovers, sexual abuse, and repression). Relationships with men and sex are the most salient topics for Rejane, related often to good and bad times. These topics are also deeply ingrained in her stories of heath and illness.6 Love may be a source of healing (“salvation”) or trouble (“my problem was being in love”). Octavio Paz’s ([1993] 1995) description of a ‘double Xame’ (eroticism and love) captures the layering of aVect displayed by the patient. While exploring the intimate connection between sex, eroticism, and love, Paz relates sex to the most basic ‘primordial source’, ‘the center and pivot point’: “Eroticism and love are forms derived from the sexual instinct” (1995:7). The dividing line between sex and eroticism is ‘sinuous’; however, his deWnitions are clear and have individual (psychological) and cultural contours: Eroticism is invention, constant variation; sex is always the same. The protagonist of the erotic act is sex, or, to be more precise, the sexes. The plural is essential, because even in the so-called solitary pleasures sexual desire always invents an imaginary other ... or many others. Also, in every encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire.

Paz adds that eroticism is an “ambiguous invention” (1995:11), where “the primal function of sexuality – reproduction – is subordinated to other ends, some of them social and some of them individual”. While eroticism is essentially desire, “a shot Wred in the direction of a world beyond” (1995:13), love attains a higher, spiritual dimension in the attraction for the soul of the beloved (1995:29); it is “attraction toward a unique person: a body and a soul” (1995:32).


In Rejane’s life stories, sexuality, eroticism, and love are woven into her performance and reports. One speciWc narrative, the one about Robert (referred to as Beto the Bozo), a clownish character, gains prominence. First, Rejane indicates her strong sexual attraction to Beto/Bozo, which may be seen as taking the form of a rather crude need, indirectly referred to: Excerpt (3) Doctor: but this is a hospital here, right? Patient: for people who like to get shots, yeah. Doctor: do you like to get shots? Patient: only from Bozo. Doctor: only from whom? Patient: ( ) Doctor: who do you like to get shots from? Patient: from Bozo. Doctor: from Bozo? (laughs) really? Patient: when you do like that, it means marriage. (unknown gesture of hands) Doctor: when you do like that, it means marriage? Patient: yeah. we got married that day. (laughs)

A ‘shot’ or ‘injection’ has the explicit ‘base’ meaning of a medical liquid injected in the body. It also has a metaphorical function as something with an implicit sexual connotation. The interpretation and eVect on the hearer (laughter) derives from its second meaning. Here Rejane alternates between “sexy” (erotic) and “clownish” (playful) alignments with the doctor and with her audience (potential viewers of the videotape). We will see how these ‘play’ interactional contexts allow for ambiguity and denial of intentionality. While crude sexual references occur, what prevails in these interviews are erotic references and displays of erotic desire, as in the following: Excerpt (4) Doctor: and boyfriends? do you have a boyfriend here at the hospital? Patient: I had some sex, y’know? Doctor: some sex? Patient: yeah. not here. Doctor: no. but I’m asking here at the hospital. Patient: that’s bad, man. (laughs) only with Bozo. (laughs) Doctor: only with Bozo. you like Bozo a lot, right? (smiles) Patient: my love (I looked at him), I want you ( ) Doctor: but this Bozo, is he here now or is he somewhere else? Patient: he’s in me. in Jesus. when you get married, your soul belongs to Jesus Christ.


Doctor: Patient:

mmm mmm. only one soul, only one home, that’s salvation ( ).

Sexual references lead to erotic talk. References such as ‘sex,’ attributed to ‘him’ or ‘you’ (“some sex”, “I looked at him”, “I want you”) which are picked up by the doctor (“some sex?”), together with an explicit request and expression of desire (“I want you”), the use of backchannels (“right,” “y’know”), and a colloquial evaluative statement (“that’s bad, man”) make this short segment both intimate and friendly (triggering laughter and smiles). Both participants share a playful alignment. Following Octavio Paz, we hear in Rejane’s own words that sexuality makes eroticism possible, but eroticism transcends and elaborates sexual experience. However, erotic attraction is an involuntary force that can overcome reason and will. It can therefore be used for the better or for worse. The patient closes this interaction by indicating a higher level of aVection, where commitment is displayed (“one soul, one home, that’s salvation”). Rejane refers to marriage (“one home”) and spirituality (“soul,” “Jesus Christ”). At this level, both Rejane and Beto (the Bozo) would blend into one ‘soul’ and ‘home,’ where love and oneness are conclusively associated with healing: “that’s salvation”. As Paz says “love goes beyond the desired body and seeks the soul in the body and the body in the soul. The whole person” (1995:33). As erotic and love narratives unfold, Dr. Cardozo is an active listener. He frequently probes into topics brought up by Rejane (“who is this Bozo you speak so much of ?”, “you like Bozo a lot, right?”, “you’ve got three boyfriends?”). His contributions ratify Rejane’s topics. He also contributes to a conversational and playful alignment, as in the following: Excerpt (5) Patient: that ANIMAL, where’s that animal? where is he? Doctor: animal, Edmundo? [a Brazilian soccer player often referred by the media as ‘animal’] Patient: yeah. Doctor: he’s around, making trouble, had a problem somewhere, he hit someone. Patient: he hit someone? Doctor: yeah. he crashed his car and all. no he didn’t hit [someone], he crashed. Patient: but he’s okay? but he’s okay? / he’s very crazy./ Doctor: you like Edmundo?


Patient: Doctor: Patient: Doctor: Patient: Doctor:

I’m crazy about him. you’re crazy about him? so what? I’m drawn to him, I go deep, see, when you’re drawn to someone, you do it, right? oh yeah. yeah. you go deep.

Both participants are fully engaged in talk. The inquiry (where the doctor introduces institutional topics and the patient responds) has changed to a conversational frame where Rejane brings up referents (mostly past and present relationships) and the doctor takes a secondary position. Throughout these segments, Rejane speaks as an active, independent, and sexual person. In asserting her sexuality and reasoning capabilities, Rejane no longer performs as a helpless or powerless woman. Let’s now examine the discourse strategies that constitute erotic talk. 5. DeWning erotic interactive contexts: ‘Let’s play’ and ‘let’s Wght’ Two major metamessages (‘let’s play’ and ‘let’s Wght’) frame how erotic talk develops. These metamessages convey superordinate messages for what is taking place at that moment, and how participants signal and assess the context of communication and interaction (Tannen 1984, 1986, 1990). These metamessages establish ways of getting the doctor’s attention. A rhetoric of seduction and captivation unfolds with the telling and enactment of several love narratives. While play is established by a series of teasing and joking moves (Bateson 1972; GoVman 1974, 1981), Wghts are constituted through acts of challenge, threats, and confrontation. Following frame dynamics, the play frames encompass potential Wghts, threats and confrontations.

5.1 Let’s play: this is our show Rejane and her doctor display two diVerent orientations vis à vis the videorecording. To the doctor, the taping is a research document: Excerpt (6) Doctor: but we ha- you must speak really loud so that it’s recorded clearly, ok? Patient: ok. (pause)

The patient, however, views it as a Wlm. Thus, performing to the camera


becomes one of the most salient contexts for Rejane.7 She becomes an actress, an entertainer, who may even address future audiences: Excerpt (7) [speaking out loud and looking at the camera] Patient: I want to say something more. Those who have AIDS must say AMEN. Doctor: why?= Patient: =no one has AIDS. Doctor: because no one said amen? Patient: yeah. Doctor: ‘but here there’s only me and you, how can anyone say amen? Patient: yeah, but you told me to speak up loudly, so that it would be recorded (because it is being recorded, some place this Wlm will be seen).

Consistently throughout the four interviews, the patient performs to an audience (she sings and dances; she attempts to speak and sing in English – the prestigious language of show business). As an entertainer, she takes on several alignments oriented either toward the doctor or her imaginary audience: 1. She teases and plays with the doctor, directing him to be alert and awake for her show while also expressing an erotic request (“turn yourself on”), to which he promptly responds “I’m turned on”; she praises and Xirts with him (“this is wonderful” (referring to the hospital), “I see you, I see handsome men, sexy, looking at me, video-taping me.” She sings as she says “I feel this man looking at me”). Finally, at the end of the last interview Rejane requests Dr. Cardozo to evaluate their common enterprise or joint performance: “how good was our show?”) 2. She teases the audience (and the doctor) by performing a sexy dance (she calls it “the little ass dance”) or by pretending to be a sunXower (making herself into an elongated sculptured being). She refers to famous American and English singers (John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson) as well as to the people “at the TV [station]”. Performance and eroticism also work in getting the doctor’s attention: Excerpt (8) Patient: the one who got me real good was Eric. Doctor: Eric is the patient who’s downstairs? (laughs) Patient: yeah and- he he’s our patient but he’s being discharged, right? that’s it. Doctor: and what do you see in Eric that’s so interesting?


Patient: Doctor: Patient: Doctor: Patient: Doctor:

his eyes. his eyes? yeah. why? he kills me ‘cause he eats me with his eyes, what can I do. he eats you with his eyes?

Rejane introduces Eric as a conversational topic. Dr. Cardozo responds by restating Rejane’s assertion and requesting conWrmation. He repeats this conversational move at each turn of talk, signaling an alignment closer to that of a conWdant than of an interviewer. Once again, the interactional context is closer to a casual and intimate conversation. The same takes place in the following: Excerpt (9) Patient: and see, I had an orgasm right there. Doctor: so you also like sex? (smiles) Patient: I love it. (laughs) Doctor: you love it? (laughs) Patient: mostly with Bozo, right, doctor? (laughs) Doctor: mostly with Bozo. (smiles) Patient: yeah. (laughs) Doctor: and what else, what else do you like? Patient: I like to- to eat beans.

Here Rejane brings up an explicit sexual reference (“orgasm”) related to a provocative statement (having an orgasm). This assertion could be considered culturally provocative in gender relations as seldom do women declare explicitly enjoying sex, neither do they openly talk about orgasms (but see Bauman [1995] 1998, 1998; Giddens 1992). Laughter and smiles are shared throughout this segment which ends with a joke (among her preferred objects are sex and beans). The unexpected juxtaposition of ‘liking beans’ sequentially following ‘liking sex’ makes the doctor (and, later, a video audience) laugh. Poking fun and thereby creating a humorous frame allows for ambiguity and denial of intentionality, the overarching metamessage being: this is to be taken lightly, this is play. Throughout this performance, however, Rejane asserts her sexuality and reason.

5.2 Let’s Wght: This is a battle Changes in interactional contexts may be gradual or abrupt. In describing framing, Bateson (1972) says that play may frequently evolve into a Wght (and


vice versa). In these interviews, the play frame encompasses potential Wghts and aggression. This is what we see in the following interaction: Excerpt (10) Doctor: but what is white meat? white people? Patient: I love it. Doctor: who have got white skin= Patient: = I eat only white skin. Doctor: really? Patient: then I step on it, I squeeze it, all together, then ( ) I spit and then throw it to the devil. (anger displayed in facial expression and aggressive gestures Doctor: mmm mmm.

Play is established by a series of praises, teasing and joking moves (as Rejane declares to the doctor: “you understand, you are white meat, kid”, “I love [white skin]”, “I eat only white skin”). Rejane refers often to “white people” as well as to “black people”. While the doctor is Caucasian (with green eyes and light brown hair), the patient is a dark brunette and could be ethnically considered mulatto. On erotic talk, ‘eating’ (as in “I eat only white skin”) in Brazilian Portuguese often corresponds to ‘having sex with’. Rejane’s erotic alignment alludes here to “white skin” as an appetizing dish. However, potential Wghts are announced through acts of challenge, threats and confrontation (“then I step on it, I squeeze it”, “and then throw it to the devil”. This contextual change demarcates clearly the patient’s ambivalent position and projected love/hate relationships. Reported threats are intensiWed in their sequential juxtaposition (“I step”, “I squeeze”, “I throw”) and her reference to the devil implying ‘once I’m done with you, I’ll throw you to the devil’. Her non-verbal language portrays anger and tension (a series of gestures and facial expression). Aggressive acts may also be indirectly referred to, as packaged within a Wlm script: Excerpt (11) Patient: ( ) it’s in this Wlm ‘I love you.’ isn’t there [a Wlm] ‘I love you’? Doctor: a Wlm ‘I love you’? what is it about? Patient: terror in a beating. Doctor: terror in a beating? Patient: ( ) a terrorist. Doctor: but how can a Wlm be called ‘I love you’ and only have terror? Patient: I looooooove you.


Doctor: Patient:

but do you think that a Wlm ‘I love you’ can have terror and beating? terror is great. I love horror Wlms.

Contradictory referential information (love and beating; terror and love) is not resolved in spite of the doctor’s repeated questions.8 Warnings against potential violence toward the doctor also occur: Excerpt (12) Patient: watch out, you’ll get beaten. (tense facial expression) Doctor: were you beaten by someone? Patient: only by my love (he does like this) (gesture of spanking towards the doctor) Doctor: by your love? Patient: pif paf (series of spankings in the air toward the doctor) Doctor: and did you beat someone? Patient: never. only in thoughts (I do scare people) (laughs) Patient: really?

When Rejane refers to physical aggressiveness (beating and spanking), her non-verbal communication also replicates gestures of aggression. Dr. Cardozo, however, reacts to these statements as descriptions and not as acts of violence per se. Sometimes the clownish Rejane mixes play and Wght (“I do scare people”, “pif paf” and laughing), sending an ambiguous metamessage about ‘what is happening here’. Reports on Wghts either at the hospital or at home also come up frequently in the interviews: Excerpt (13) Patient: we beat one another ( ) Doctor: you talk a lot about beating, have you beaten anyone lately? Patient: they beat me ( ) on my faceDoctor: oh, they beat you. Patient: they beat me, left me (like this) on my face ( ) Doctor: but who did this?

Anger, cursing and aggressiveness are reported throughout the four interviews. Chesler (1972) comments about women in asylums and their search for potency. In many ways this search “often involves ‘delusions’ or displays of physical aggression, grandeur, sexuality and emotionality (...) traits [that] are feared and punished in patriarchal mental asylums” (1972:31). Rejane breaks away from the stereotypical female identity (polite, controlled, and passive) as she displays anger (“watch out for the punch!”, “I’ll beat lots of people”). Also in many instances we see her cursing at Beto, the Bozo (“Shitty guy, Bozo”, “son


of a bitch”); such terms of reference are picked up by the doctor: Excerpt (14) Doctor: you curse a lot? Patient: sometimes, it makes me feel good. don’t you think that Faustao is right, shit, kid, who will ( ) right? Doctor: Faustao curses a lot, right? Patient: he got it right, he knows it, I- son of a bitch. Doctor: you also curse a lot?

A very diVerent metamessage is conveyed in these excerpts (10–14) on doing battle and Wghting back. Rejane’s language attitude and behavior break away from sexual repression or submission, the more traditional female roles.

6. The strategies of involvement Tannen deWnes involvement as a metamessage of rapport, “an internal, even emotional connection individuals feel which binds them to other people as well as to places, things, activities, ideas, memories, and worlds” (1989:12). This connection is achieved in and through conversation (1989:12). It is a connection with the other and with the world. While this emotional experience is important to everyone, it is crucial to women who feel isolated in psychiatric wards. Chesler’s comment on women and hospitalization still seems particularly relevant: the mental asylum closely approximates the female rather than the male experience within the family. This is probably one of the reasons why Erving GoVman, in Asylums, considered psychiatric hospitalization more destructive of self than criminal incarceration. Like most people, he is primarily thinking of the debilitating eVect – on men – of being treated like a woman (as helpless, dependent, sexless, unreasonable – as ‘crazy’). But what about the eVect of being treated like a woman when you are a woman? and perhaps a woman who is already ambivalent or angry about just such treatment? (1972:35).

There are several strategies used by Rejane and Dr. Cardozo that signal participants’ involvement in interaction. Given the scope of this paper, I will comment on Rejane’s ambivalent alignments and secrecy as eVorts to keep the doctor “turned on”. Both strategies seem to be particularly felicitous (Austin 1962) in the construction of erotic talk.


6.1 Embracing a paradox In shifting alignments between ‘this is play’ and ‘this is battle’ in these interviews, Rejane proposes and maintains a tension that keeps her interlocutor hooked. She successfully accomplishes what she had set out to do in the opening of the Wrst interview, when she requested attention: Excerpt (15) Doctor: I didn’t understand, repeat it slowly. Patient: turn yourself on. (laughs) Doctor: I’m turned on.

As previously discussed, these shifts in context (play and Wght) are constituted by acts of teasing and joking (this is play) or challenging, threatening, and confronting (this is Wght). While the doctor engages in the play frames, probing into most of the topics brought up by the patient (excerpts 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13), he views acts of aggression as reports or descriptions about Wghts. Frequently he reframes a potential threat, as indicated in excerpt (12): Excerpt (12) Patient: watch out, you’ll get beaten. (gaze and facial expression of anger, looking at the doctor) Doctor: were you beaten by someone?

In proposing paradoxical frames, Rejane embraces contradictory metamessages – this is play and this is Wght, signaling that love and conXict may coexist. This tension, which is not resolved in the interviews, also triggers ambivalent alignments from Rejane toward her lover.

6.2 Ambivalence toward her lover Here Rejane shifts from a series of complaints to a series of praises. Beto/Bozo is thus someone who is a “pest” or an “ass” who did not run away with her, but he is also someone who is “quite sexy and attractive,” someone to whom she says “I love you”, and who is also “a Christian in God”. The referring term “the clown” may well capture this ambivalence since it may be interpreted by its negative attributes (a rude, awkward, ill-mannered person; an incompetent or silly person) or by its positive traits (a playful, funny, bright person). This trickster identity invokes ambiguity that does not get resolved. There is added uncertainty about their wedding, which took place in the hospital; as she says, “we married in mystery”.


6.3 Secrecy What parts of the Beto love story are credible? Dr. Cardozo frequently asks “who’s Beto?”,“who’s Bozo?” His clariWcation and conWrmation requests indicate uncertainty and doubt: “Bozo [is here]?”, “ah really? but Bozo is your husband?”, “and he is also here?” The doctor’s questions indicate his eVort to get reliable information. As he probes in his queries, however, he progressively shifts from a distant, unrelated alignment towards the Bozo love story (1st interview) to a display of attention and curiosity (2nd interview) and Wnally to repetitively pursuing information (3rd interview) on who this Bozo character/persona could be and what he means to the patient (“you talked a lot about Bozo”, “but Wnally, who is Bozo?”). This change in listernership enables the unfolding of a detailed narrative in the last interview with beginning, middle and end (Ribeiro, 2000). The development and conclusion of this narrative also indicates a way of balancing and wrapping things up. Though the doctor – and the audience – is left uncertain as to what exactly happened between Rejane and Beto, the two main protagonists, secrecy seems to be a major ingredient in keeping the doctor – and the audience – involved. By playing on ambiguity, the patient successfully keeps her interlocutor ‘turned on’, in one sense accomplishing what she initially set out to do when she told him “turn yourself on” and Dr. Cardozo responded “I’m turned on”.

7. Conclusion: The pursuit of interaction and attentive listening Mental health is deeply associated with one’s capacity to establish and keep relationships. Yet Chesler reminds us that patients often “have been abandoned by (or have abandoned dialogue with) their ‘own’ families. As such, they have no way — and no one — to ‘tell’ what is happening to them” (Chesler 1972:35). In the data discussed in this paper, at the end of the fourth interview, Rejane thanks the doctor and “everyone who’s here at the hospital” because “this has been a way of letting it out.” It was a way of attending, at least for a moment, to the female patient’s need for recognition, reciprocity, and understanding (Kaplan 1996). Kaplan highlights the intersubjective discursive construction of self, how identities are formed in conversation and interaction. If what grounds identity is the practice of dialogue and conversational exchange (1966:6), then the psychiatric interview would provide a particular critical moment for a

Erotic discourse strategies in powerless women

meaningful exchange. While male patients tend to focus on conversations about work and work environment (on having the competence or skills to address certain tasks, to assume certain responsibilities), the female patient speaks of relationships and escaping isolation. Rejane speaks from an intimate sphere where she voices not only familiar and safe topics but also aggressive and oppressive bits of stories, as illustrated in several excerpts. What is particularly interesting in these interviews is the doctor’s active participation. For example, listening to Rejane’s stories implies a double alignment on the doctor’s part: he is not only the ‘inquirer,’ portrayed by GoVman (1981:143), the active professional pursuing information with a prior institutional topic agenda; he is also a receptive and available person, placed in a secondary position in the speech exchange situation, that is, the listener to a story. Here is how this doctor perceives his alignments as interviewer: I let the encounter Xow as close to a conversation as possible, as the traditional agenda disturbs me; I accept a more personal relationship; sometimes I even talk about personal issues of my own; I Wnd this makes the patient more comfortable.9

It is, therefore, not surprising that a more intimate interaction takes place, closer to a conversation than an inquiry. Thus the asymmetry of power relations in the interview situation is somewhat altered. In these interviews, doctor/patient power relations are also modiWed by the patient’s potent metamessages. Attraction – speciWcally, sexual attraction – is played out in diVerent interactional contexts (as most excerpts illustrate). It may be performed as part of ‘play’ or ‘Wght’. Most of all, a type of connection (whether referred to as sexual, erotic, or loving) signals a willful pursuit of relationships on the part of the patient, with the likely therapeutic eVect of overcoming isolation.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to my colleagues for insightful discussions, speciWcally Susan Hoyle, Elliot Mishler, Jane Liebschutz, Lauren Storck, Sandra Jones, Trudy DuVy, Cynthia Poindexter; also many thanks to my colleagues at our research center (IPUB/UFRJ), Cristina C. Lima, Maria Tereza L. Dantas, Diana S. Pinto. My sincere thanks and love to Susan Green for her friendship and keen editorial observations. I am also grateful to Drs. João Ferreira da Silva Filho and Romildo Bueno for supporting the research project on Context and Coherence

211


in Psychotic Discourse at the Institute of Psychiatry of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Grants from CNPq (the Brazilian National Research Council) and FAPERJ (the Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation ) are sponsoring the project.

Notes 1. Ten female patients were recorded in interview situation, six of them with the same male doctor. They all spoke of their need to talk and being listened to. In ethnographic observations, female patients reiterated this request and complaint (“there’s no one to talk to me”). Male patients, on the other hand, gave relevance to other needs, such as competence to do things independently and work abilities. For instance, a male patient referred to the need to be ratiWed as a competent worker (“I like (this social assistant) because she tells me I’m competent and trustworthy, she leaves me alone in the computer room.”). 2. I am indebted to the doctor and the patient for their time and availability. All names have been changed to protect the conWdentiality of the participants. Both participants are Brazilian, and the interviews were conducted in Portuguese. The English translation is not a word-for-word translation. Rather, it portrays “the sense of the talk that is taking place at that moment” (Ribeiro 1994:40). My goal was to preserve most of the information presented in Portuguese while making the English text as close as possible to natural English discourse. However, one must bear in mind the inevitable loss of information that permeates the process of translating talk (1994:40–46). Appendix (2) displays the Portuguese text. 3. Each interview lasted approximately for 40 minutes. They were recorded for research purposes, a common routine for in-training staV in a university hospital. The patient was informed of the recording and its purposes. In each interview, the doctor sat facing the patient. He assumed the posture of a conversationalist, oriented towards the other (Kendon 1990). He did not write notes or refer to written records. For the most part, Rejane also sat and kept an orientation towards the doctor. There were moments, however, that she would get up, dance, or perform to the camera (though not necessarily knowing where the camera was). The videotaping was done in a sparsely furnished room with no window, where two chairs were placed sideways. Besides these two participants, in another room – separated by an opaque glass – were the video camera operator and the researcher (me). These interviews took place in an annex to an in-patient facility. 4. See transcription conventions in Appendix 1. Most of these conventions are based on Tannen (1984). 5. Whether Rejane has told some of these stories to her own doctor is not relevant. What is salient here is how she works with language to create a close relationship with Dr. Cardozo, metacommunicating “you are my listener, not him” and “I give these tokens (my stories) to you.” 6. Similar behavior (sexualized and eroticized communication) is also displayed in other women with psychotic manic symptoms (and who were videotaped in interview situa-


tion). Hypersexuality (increased intercourse, promiscuity) is used clinically as one of the typical symptoms in patients with mania (Andreasen and Black 1995). 7. DiVerences in expectations regarding the videotaping entail diVerences in projecting the audience (or the viewers). For the doctor, the video is a research and training tool. Thus it will be seen and discussed by researchers and students. For the patient, it is a Wlm that could be seen by her friends, family or a wider audience (as in television). Several segments of talk attest to this understanding. 8. In the late 1970s there was a Brazilian Wlm I Love You. Conceived as a Brazilian version of The Last Tango in Paris this Wlm did juxtapose various scenes of love and violence. 9. In 1996, after the video recording, I interviewed the doctor.

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Harrow, M., Grossman, L.S., Silverstein, M.L. and Meltzer, H.Y. 1982. “Thought pathology in manic and schizophrenic patients.” Archives of General Psychiatry 40:765–71. Hydén, L.C. and Mishler, Elliot. 1999. “Language and medicine.” In Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 19:174–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, Carla. 1996. The Erotics of Talk. Women’s writing and feminist paradigms. NY: Oxford University Press. Katz, A. M. and Mishler, Elliot. “Qualitative research is to quantitative research as ...” In Journal of Pediatric Ambulatory Association (accepted for publication). Kendon, Adam. 1990. Conducting Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William and Fanshel, David. 1977. Therapeutic Discourse. NY: Academic Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence. NY: Oxford University Press. Mishler, Elliot. 1984. The Discourse of Medicine. Norwood, N. J.: Ablex. Mishler, Elliot. 1999. Storylines. Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paz, Octavio. [1993]1995. The Double Flame. Love and Eroticism. NY: Harcourt Brace & Company. Ribeiro, Branca T. 1994. Coherence in Psychotic Discourse. NY: Oxford University Press. Ribeiro, Branca T. 1996. “ConXict talk in a psychiatric discharge interview: Struggling between personal and oYcial footings.” In Texts and Practices: readings in critical discourse analysis, C.R. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Coulthard (eds), 179–193. London: Routledge. Ribeiro, Branca T. 2000. “Listening to narratives in psychiatric interviews.” In Dialogue Analysis VII: Working with Dialogue, M. Coulthard, J. Cotterill & F. Rock (eds), 283– 292. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Ribeiro, Branca T. and Hoyle, Susan. “Frame analysis.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, J. Verschueren, J-Ola Ostman, J. Blommaert, C. Bulcaen (eds). In print. Ribeiro, Branca T. and Lopes Dantas, Maria Tereza. “Unfolding stories in psychiatric interviews: from multiple to unique female identities”. Paper presented at the Georgetown University Round Table in Languages and Linguistics. Washington, D.C. (GURT/2001). Sacks, Harvey. [1972]1988. Lectures on Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. SchiVrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University SchiVrin, Deborah. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell. Shea, Shawn C. [1988]1998. Psychiatric Interviewing. The art of understanding. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders. Sullivan, Harry S. 1954. The Psychiatric Interview. NY: Norton. Tannen, Deborah. 1984. Conversational Style. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, Deborah. 1986. That’s not what I meant! NY: Ballantine. Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation. NY: William Morrow and Cia. Tannen, Deborah. 1993. Framing in Discourse. NY: Oxford University Press.


Appendix 1: Transcription conventions .

sentence-Wnal falling intonation

? , (pause )

sentence Wnal rising and fall intonation (BP question pattern) phrase-Wnal intonation (indicating more talk to come) glottal stop or abrupt cutting oV of sound noticeable break in rhythm with no speech; length of time was not assigned emphatic stress very emphatic stress, loudness or shouting spoken softly spoken very softly reference indicated in the original text (in Brazilian Portuguese) transcription impossible uncertain transcription two utterances linked by = indicate no break in Xow of talk, latching

underline CAPS /words/ //words// [words] ( ) (words) =

Appendix 2: The Portuguese Texts Introductory segment Médico: mas vamos voltar ao assunto do seu problema? você disse que seu problema era neurológico. Paciente: é, psicologia. eu quero conversar com alguém, ninguém conversa comigo, dizem que tem psicólogo, Médico: /mmm./ Paciente: mas num converso com nenhum psicólogo. no momento (cê tá assim) que você tá me entrevistando, só tô sentindo entrevista. mas eu quero conversar, me desabafar, num tem nenhum santo que converse comigo, nem o próprio irmão ( ) Jesus Cristo. só com ele que eu converso nas minhas madrugadas que eu oro, (pra ele ) Excerpt (1) Médico: mas você gosta muito de fazer isso, né (referindo-se ao uso do idioma inglês) Paciente: ele tá mandando. (rindo) Médico: quem que tá mandando? Paciente: o Bozo, quando casa é assim mesmo. Médico: mas você está ouvindo alguma voz mandando você fazer isso? Paciente: tô. Médico: mas você ouve vozes dentro da sua cabeça? Paciente: ouço. ( ) Médico: que que as vozes dizem? Paciente: eu te amo (voz arrastada)


Médico: a voz diz ‘eu te amo?’ Paciente: ( ) Médico: que mais que as vozes dizem? Excerpt (2) Paciente: mas num falei a minha história pra ele, eu tô falando pra você. Médico: mmm. mas vocêPaciente: que contava em etapas. agora que eu me lembrei foi por causa do namorado, tudo tem a ver, isso machucou muito meu coração. Médico: mmm mmm. Excerpt (3) Médico: mas aqui é um hospital, não é isso? Paciente: pra quem gosta de tomar injeção é. Médico: você gosta de tomar injeção? Paciente: só do Bozo. Médico: só de quem? Paciente: ( ) Médico: de quem que você gosta de tomar injeção? Paciente: do Bozo. Médico: do Bozo? (ri) é? Paciente: quando faz assim ó (gesto com as mãos) é casamento. Médico: quando faz assim é casamento? Paciente: é. casamos naquele dia. (ri) Excerpt (4) Médico: e namorado? você arranjou algum namorado aqui no hospital? Paciente: tive alguns machos, né? Médico: alguns machos? Paciente: tive. aqui não. Médico: não. mas eu estou perguntando aqui no hospital. Paciente: é ruim, hein, (rindo) só o Bozo (rindo). Médico: só o Bozo. você gosta muito do Bozo, né? Paciente: meu amor (olhei pra ele), quero você ( ) Médico: mas esse Bozo, ele está aqui agora ou ele tá fora daqui? Paciente: tá em mim, em Jesus. quando é casado a alma pertence a Cristo. Médico: mmm mmm. Paciente: uma alma só, uma casa só, é a salvação ( ). Excerpt (5) Paciente: ANIMAL, cadê o animal, onde ele tá? Médico: animal, o Edmundo? Paciente: é.


Médico: Paciente: Médico: Paciente:

tá por aí encrencado, teve um problema aí, atropelou uma- um pessoalele atropelou? é, bateu com o carro e tal. atropelou não, bateu com o carro. mas ele tá bem? mas ele tá bem? /ele é doidão./ Médico: você gosta do Edmundo? Paciente: sou aWnzona dele. Médico: é aWnzona dele? Paciente: o quê? eu sinto atração, vou fundo, hein, quando sente atração, é pra fazer, né? Médico: ah é. Paciente: é. Médico: você vai fundo. Excerpt (6) Médico: mas a gente va- tem que falar bem alto pra poder a gravação Wcar boa, tá bem? Paciente: tá bom. (pausa) Excerpt (7) [falando em voz alta e olhando para a câmera] Paciente: quero dizer mais. quem tá com AIDS diga amém. AMÉN. Médico: por que?= Paciente: =ninguém tá com AIDS. Médico: porque ninguém disse amén? Paciente: é. Médico: ‘mas aqui só estamos eu e você, como é que alguém vai dizer amén? Paciente: não, mas você mandou falar bem alto, pra sair na gravação, porque (tava sendo gravado em algum lugar vai sair esse Wlme.)

Excerpt (8) Paciente: quem pegou mesmo meu cabaço legal foi o Eric. Médico: o Eric é esse paciente que tá aí em baixo? (rindo) Paciente: é e- ele ele é nosso paciente mas ele tá de alta, né? é isso aí. Médico: e o que que você acha mais interessante no Eric? Paciente: o olhar. Médico: o olhar dele? Paciente: é. Médico: por que? Paciente: me arrasa porque me come com o olhar, que que eu posso fazer. Médico: te come com o olhar? Excerpt (9) Paciente: e ó, gozei na hora. Médico: então voce gosta de sexo também?


Paciente: Médico: Paciente: Médico: Paciente: Médico: Paciente:

adoro. (rindo) adora? principalmente com o Bozo, né (doutor)? principalmente com o Bozo. é. (rindo) e que mais, que outras coisas você gosta? eu gosto de- comer feijão.

Excerpt (10) Médico: mas carne branca é o que? quem é branco? Paciente: adoro. Médico: quem tem pele branca= Paciente: =como só carne branca. Médico: ah é? Paciente: ainda piso nela assim ó, esmago, juntinho, ainda ( cuspo e aí jogo pro diabo. (expressão de raiva e gestos de agressão) Médico: mmm mmm.

)

Excerpt (11) Paciente: ( ) vai sair um Wlme ‘Eu te amo’, num tem ‘Eu te amo’, Médico: Wlme ‘Eu te amo’? É sobre o que esse Wlme? Paciente: é terror na pancada. Médico: terror na pancada? Paciente: ( ) terrorista. Médico: mas como é que o Wlme se chama ‘Eu te amo’ e só tem terror? Paciente: eu te aaaaamoooo. Médico: mas você acha que um Wlme ‘Eu te amo’ pode ter terror e pancada? Paciente: terror é maravilhoso. adoro um Wlme de terror. Excerpt (12) Paciente: olha, a porrada. (expressão facial tensa) Médico: você já levou porrada de alguém? Paciente: só do meu amor ( faz assim ) Médico: do seu amor? Paciente: paf, paf. (gestos agressivos no ar na direção do médico) Médico: e você já deu porrada em alguém? Paciente: nunca dei, só na base do (espírito), (assusto qualquer um.) (rindo) Médico: é? Excerpt (13) Paciente: a gente dá porrada (

)


Médico:

você fala muito em dar porrada, você andou dando porrada em alguém ultimamente? Paciente: me porraram ( ) na minha faceMédico: ah, porraram você. Paciente: me porraram, me deixaram (Wzeram assim) na minha cara ( ) Médico: mas quem foi que porrou você? Excerpt (14) Médico: você fala muito palavrão? Paciente: de vez em quando é sempre bom. você não acha (que se) o Faustão tá certo, porra, cara, quem é que ( ) né? Médico: Faustão fala muito palavrão, né? Paciente: ele tá certo, ele enxerga longe, eu- ‘vai pra puta que pariu.’ Médico: e você também fala muito palavrão? Excerpt (15) Médico: não entendi, repete pra mim devagarzinho. Paciente: Wca ligadinho. (rindo) Médico: tô ligadinho.



Discourse and Gender Identities in Education



Chapter 10

From representation towards discursive practices: Gender in the foreign language textbook revisited Jane Sunderland, Maire Cowley, Fauziah Abdul Rahim, Christina Leontzakou and Julie Shattuck Lancaster University, UK / Lancaster University, UK / Universiti Utara, Malaysia / Papaeliou Language School, Athens, Greece / Frederick Community College, USA

Introduction The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a Xurry of analyses of gender representation in foreign language textbooks, for good reason. Foreign language textbooks can be seen as data worth examining for their gender signiWcance because they are characteristically densely populated with people who are not only in social relationships with each other, but who continually verbally interact with each other. Using the concepts of ‘Exclusion’, ‘Subordination’, Distortion’ and ‘Degradation’ of women and girls, content analyses of language textbooks found, variously, that males were over-represented in relation to females (e.g. Hellinger 1980), that men tended to occupy both more powerful and a greater range of occupational roles than women (e.g. Schmitz 1975; Porecca 1988), that both males and females performed gender stereotypical activities (e.g. Cincotta 1978), and that women tended to be stereotypically emotional and were more likely than men to be the butt of jokes (e.g. Hartman and Judd 1978) and ‘implied slurs’ (Talansky 1986). Complementary linguistic analyses of textbook characters’ discourse – who speaks, when, how, how much, about what, and who listens – showed that the verbs associated with female agents reXected “some of the traditional stereotypic female behavioural patterns” (Hellinger 1980:272). In dialogues

224 Jane Sunderland et al.

females were found to speak less, speak Wrst less often, and perform a narrower range of discourse roles (e.g. Hartman and Judd 1978; Talansky 1986; Poulou 1997). And computer concordancing showed a range of correlations between word frequency and gender, including letter being associated with (hegemonic) male characters, and letters with (subordinate) female characters (Carroll and Kowitz 1994). Most of the texts investigated were from EFL textbooks, and the overriding concern was with texts and textbooks considered undesirable. The situation now seems rather less dire (see Jones, Kitetu and Sunderland 1997, for a study of three recent textbooks) as publishers’ and writers’ awareness of gender bias, along with that of teachers and students, the consumers, is changing.1 However, to welcome this may be to miss the point. The question is surely what, if anything, gender stereotyping in written texts (and other forms of gender representation) may mean for the learner’s gender identity (as well as for her or his learning and proWciency in the target language). The possibility that it does mean something for the learner’s gender identity requires taking as given two things. First, that identity potentially derives in part from learners’ aYliation with gendered discourses evident in written texts (and elsewhere), and in part with any identities written texts ‘ascribe’ at least to the ‘ideal reader’ of the text, with whom a given reader may or may not identify (Talbot 1995; Ivanic 1998; see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). And, secondly, that the discoursal gendering of identity is ongoing, and therefore relevant to child, teenage and adult classroom learners. However, we suggest that a text is never just ‘a text’, a print-related artefact, and this chapter aims to address the issue of the importance of particular textual gender representations by moving the spotlight away from the text itself. In this paper we are in fact using text in two diVerent, related senses. At its simplest, we mean a stretch of written language which shows unity of purpose, or, in Halliday’s and Hasan’s terms, “language that is doing some job in some context … essentially a semantic unit” (1989:10). A text in this sense is thus a ‘speciWc product’ or ‘output’ in the form of a stretch of writing, as distinct from any of the real-time talk which may go on around it. SpeciWcally, for much of this paper, though by this deWnition a textbook is itself a text, the texts in question are not textbooks, ‘whole’ written documents which are physical entities in themselves, but rather much shorter stretches of writing in the form of exercises, tasks or activities, which are characteristically accompanied by visuals, such as line drawings or photographs (see Jaworski and Coupland 1999:7).

From representation towards discursive practices 225

However, additionally, as Halliday and Hasan also observe, from a socialsemiotic perspective (appropriate when dealing with texts used by a group of people in interaction), a text can also be seen as “an instance of social meaning in a particular context of situation” (1989:11), and thus as process as well as product. Textbook texts are in written mode, but are written to be read, and interpreted, through the reader interacting with the text. Further, many textbook texts are written to be (or at least written in the knowledge that they are likely to be) spoken – by one or more, to one or more classroom participants. In social-semiotic terms, as with Halliday and Hasan’s example of a scripted radio talk, the mode of many the ‘texts’ we deal with here is “Written to be read aloud” (1989:14). Learners’ responses to a given text (in the ‘semantic unit’ sense) cannot be predicted, but are likely to be many, varied and highly situated. Their identities may shape these responses – but may also be further shaped by them. That reader’s responses are unpredictable is now widely accepted in literary, literacy, Wlm and some educational studies, which, in adopting a ‘receptiontheory’ or ‘reader-response’ position, theorise that meaning is constructed in the interaction ‘between’ the reader and the text: a creative process (e.g. Rosenblatt 1976). Text-reader interaction will be diVerent with diVerent readers and with diVerent readings by the same reader. Stubbs, writing on language education as regards the relation between text, author and reader (in the classroom context, we take ‘reader’ to include ‘listener’), observes: “A balanced approach must take into account … not only the text itself, but also its production and reception” (1997:8). However, though the focus has moved away from the text-as-product, it is hard to see meaning as residing solely in the reader (Mills 1994; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). Recognition that responses to a text could not be predicted may have contributed to the demise of content and linguistic analyses of gender representation. However, rather than writing oV textbook research completely, one step towards a more sensitive prediction of the ‘eVect’ of a given text may be to look at the teacher’s discourse, and discourses, in relation to that text. These may be ‘available resources’ for his or her learners’ continually developing identities. Discourse is here used in two of its several senses. One is in the ‘speech act’ sense (Austin 1962; Thomas 1995), in terms of what teachers do in and with words when confronted with an issue of gender: they may for example express approval of a particular representation. The second use of discourse is in the social theory sense of a ‘recognisable way of seeing the


world’ (see also Fairclough 1992; and Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). This countable use of discourse assumes the previous one, and, importantly, sees discourse as having the potential to constitute, to structure knowledge and social practices (Fairclough 1992), as well as to represent existing understandings and social practices.

Teacher talk around textbook texts: Prescription, prediction and description Little has been documented about teacher use of textbook texts, though there have been numerous prescriptions about what FL teachers can or even should do when they encounter ‘gender bias’ in their textbooks. These include awareness-raising through discussion, subversion, and careful selection of texts and indeed textbooks in the Wrst place. In an unpublished paper, Zografou observes that “teachers can use sexist materials to question the outdated assumptions, and thus counteract the message of negative sex stereotypes” (1990:20). On selection, Talansky writes that “Teachers should review ... role play situations for sex biased attitudes and choose instead practices which permit and enhance alternative sex role models” (1986:41). And Willeke and Sanders, concerned about sex stereotyping in the areas of grammar, lexical items, dialogues and readings, devote an article to measures teachers can take to increase student awareness here. These include using supplementary materials, role reversal “as a direct response to speciWc instances of subordination in the text”, “teaching against the text” and using “a light touch and a sense of humor” (1978:63, 64; see also GaV 1978). Can actual treatment of language textbooks, though, ever be predicted? Experience suggests that diVerent teachers will always implement a textbook diVerently, depending in part on the amount and kind of autonomy their teaching situation allows and expects. Even if a group of teachers intended to teach the textbook in the same way, the diVerent behavioural responses of students, and the fact that all lessons must be ‘co-productions’ between teacher and learners (Swann and Graddol 1988; Allwright 1991), mean they could never really do so. Let us take as an example a gender-stereotypical textbook dialogue between ‘Susan’ and ‘Pete’, in which Pete speaks more, Wrst, last, and gives Susan the information she requests. The teacher may not teach the dialogue in the way it is written. She may, for example, give Pete’s part to Susan and Susan’s to


Pete, or get male students to play Pete and female students Susan, and encourage discussion of either approach, or she may turn the lesson into a (perhaps critical) discussion of some aspect of gender relations. Because of the range of pedagogic strategies and discourses which can be used in relation to a given text, then, rather than predicting, it is surely necessary to look empirically at what is done with the text in practice. A little work has been done on teacher use of textbooks. Stodolsky, for example, working in mathematics classrooms, “found little evidence in the literature or our case studies to support the idea that teachers teach strictly by the book” (1989:180). She identiWed “a real need for more study of textbook use, particularly in subjects other than the basic areas of reading and math” (1989:181). Correspondingly, Alderson observes that “Research into aspects of the use that is actually made in class of textbooks is rare in language education” (1997:12). As an exception, he cites Bonkowski, who found that “teachers either ignore the teachers’ guides to textbooks, or make selections from the text and the teachers’ guides and distort the authors’ intentions” (1997:12; see also Hutchinson 1996). Teachers do this, Bonkowski claims, because they interpret the intentions of the author through their own models of language, language learning and language teaching – to which we could add their models of gender relations and identities, and of the role of the teacher in mediating gender relations and identities as represented in the textbook. Two studies relate to teacher talk around gender in language textbook texts. Abraham (1989) observed maths, French and English classes, looking at how dependent the lessons were on the textbooks, and whether sexism in texts was ever discussed. He also interviewed teachers about their “general ideological frameworks”. Abraham’s conclusions were that teachers’ ideological perspectives “strongly inXuence their attitude towards designing, and/or introducing in the classroom, non-sexist or anti-sexist curriculum materials” and “signiWcantly inXuence[s] teachers’ selection of texts with respect to sex roles” (1989:46–47). He reached these conclusions from his interview data and “some observational data”. Perhaps because Abraham’s study is more concerned with relating teachers’ ideology to selection and use of materials, than with their actual discourse around these, frustratingly, we are told little about what the “observational data” actually were. Dendrinos in an interview with Chouliaraki cites one relevant instance she observed of an EFL teacher in Greece, who was teaching ‘Making Predictions’ through the future perfect tense. The teacher was using Dendrinos et al.’s own Task Way English (1988), one aim of which is to systematically


question sexist stereotypes (Chouliaraki 1994). Before the teacher started on the Unit, Dendrinos notes that she provided her own examples, “most of which were tremendously sex biased” (1994:126). She describes how, using a photograph, the teacher says: “Now, this ... eh ... this poor man is having trouble with his au... authoritarian wife”. The lesson continues: T: P: T:

She is ..., you know, she is ... em ... very ..., what is ... very bossy and he is very weak, eh? Tell me, what will have happened ... in Wve years time? Yes? Em ... he will have had a divorce ... ah ... in ten years time ... eh ... he will have had a divorce He will ... have divorced her, or .. or he will have suVered more by her, OK, do you agree? (Dendrinos, 1992:194).

Though an account of only one event, this is a telling illustration of how a non-sexist text or a whole non-sexist textbook is no guarantee that the teacher’s discourse will follow suit. Both Abraham and Dendrinos were drawing implicitly on the idea of ‘talk around the text’, a concept from literacy studies which is also relevant to the study of discourse. An example of a literacy event of a bedtime reading session involving a mother and child will illustrate its signiWcance (Dombey 1992). The story is Rosie’s Walk, by Pat Hutchins. It tells about a hen (Rosie) walking round the farmyard while unknowingly being stalked by a fox, who suVers one mishap after another in his fruitless pursuit of Rosie. Using columns, Dombey systematically indicates the text (words in standard font, visuals in italics) on the right hand side, and the discourse between mother (M) and child (A), including several questions and answers (the ‘talk around the text’), on the left hand side: A M A M A M A M

Splash! How they, how the fox just don’t get out? Oh I expect he’ll climb out Why? Why will he climb out? Yeah Well, why d’you think he’ll climb out? Like when he wants, when he, the hen to eat Yes he wants to eat Rosie Over the haycock

Picture of hen walking on unaware of fox landing in the pond. No Wsh in picture 9–10

Picture of hen walking over haycock unaware of fox right behind her over the haycock 11–12 (simpliWed extract)


This series of question-answer adjacency pairs and quite complex embeddings nicely illustrates not just the interactive nature of reading sessions with children, but also how the ‘reader-aloud’ through her or his discursive mediation of the text has the potential to shape the listener’s response to that text, and to make available beliefs and resources which are then available for that listener’s identity construction. The inXuence of the discourse of a language teacher ‘reader-aloud’ on a student will inevitably be diVerent from that of a parent ‘reader-aloud’ on a child. Nevertheless, as a ‘reader-aloud’, the teacher has a potential of the same order in the development of both ‘reader response’ and ‘identity work’ in the student.

This study: Investigating gender identity and teacher talk around language textbook texts This study thus takes as its theoretical and methodological approach the concept of ‘talk around the text’, as realised in teacher discourse. From a critical discourse perspective (Fairclough 1992), this ‘talk around the text’ can be seen as ‘consumption’ of the text, as the ‘discursive practice’ which may be realised, or instantiated, in diVerence discourses, and which occurs in relation to social practices which are gendered in a variety of (often patriarchal) ways. The ‘discursive practice’ concept is essential – it is only when the text is unused, for example when the textbook it is in remains in the storecupboard, that there is no associated discursive practice (or practices). As soon as a text is ‘consumed’, it ceases to be text alone. The study aims to go some way to both opening up and partly-Wlling the empirical niche of teacher talk and textbook use in relation to gender. In this way it supplements the work of Abraham and Dendrinos, who provide only scanty and peripheral evidence of how the language teacher, in his or her ‘reader aloud’ role, talks about gender in textbooks. The study took the form of a project undertaken by members of the ‘Language and Gender in the Classroom’ (LAGIC) research group, based in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University.2 There were thus multiple researchers, whose studies shared the same research questions, design and methods, and data was accordingly gathered from multiple sites. Four of the researchers were MA students, and their data formed the basis of three MA dissertations. We are here presenting some of the data from each of the three sites, and synthesising it in order to propose a


possible working analytical framework for all the data gathered (and, possibly, future comparable data) which we have developed across the studies. We are not presenting or summarising all the data gathered, or even trying to present ‘representative’ examples. Rather, we have chosen to present ‘telling cases’ (Mitchell 1984) in order to demonstrate the diVerent ways in which teachers talk about gendered texts. The research project began in 1995 with an expression of group dissatisfaction with the many studies of gender and textbooks which looked no further than the textbook itself: our own experience as teachers had made us aware that a given text can be treated in many ways, including those seemingly contrary to the author’s intentions. As well as apparently gender-biased texts, we were also concerned with those that were apparently ‘egalitarian’ or ‘progressive’, which had not been a concern of the earlier text-based studies. This was because we recognised not only that such texts did exist, but also that there was no guarantee that progressive texts would be taught in the spirit their authors intended: “The most non-sexist textbook can become sexist in the hands of a teacher with sexist attitudes” (Sunderland 1994:64). This led to an intention to carry out some naturalistic classroom research (cf. Allwright and Bailey 1991) to look at what teachers in classrooms actually did with textbooks in their lessons. Our main research question, then, was the exploratory and relatively open one of: ‘What are some diVerent ways language teachers talk about gendered texts in the classroom?’ A secondary research question, to be operationalised through interviews, was ‘What are some of the diVerent ways in which teachers say they deal with particular gendered texts and with gendered texts in general?’ This meant we now also had three related methodological questions: (a) what sort of textbook texts would be suitable to focus on? (b) should this involve pre-selection of textbooks and/or texts being taught? and (c) if not, what was the alternative? We reached answers to these questions through the following line of discussion. Logically, texts can be categorised into those which are ‘gendered’ in some way, being about people, and those which are ‘non-gendered’ (e.g. an ‘English for speciWc purposes’ (ESP)-type text about scientiWc processes which is passivated throughout). Gendered texts may be ‘gender-neutral’ (referring for example to people, students, holiday-makers) or ‘gender-speciWc’ (referring for example to women, men, boys, girls). Spoken gendered discourse however can logically occur whether or not a text alone has any gender signiWcance. For example, teacher or student talk around a text on ‘the process of winemaking’,


in which the verbs are all passivated and deagentialised, may include comments and opinions about the relative expertise of managers of wine cellars, people who collect and crush the grapes, and wine-tasters, in relation to how these practices are characteristically gendered. A text on winemaking might accordingly be talked around in a way which draws on existing stereotypes about women and men, or which directly or indirectly challenges them. A textually-gendered text, then, is not the only text type around which gendered discourses may be evident. However, given the usual constraints of time and a need for eYciency, we decided that the best strategy would be to observe teacher talk around already gendered texts, when those texts were the focus of the lesson. (We did, however, recognise that gendered discourse in relation to a particular text can logically also occur (as part of a ‘long conversation’) in a previous or subsequent lesson when the text is not being used directly.) Gendered talk would not necessarily occur in relation to these gendered texts (the teacher might, for example, adopt a discourse of gender-blindness, which would in itself be interesting), but already-gendered texts seemed to have the greatest potential as relevant epistemological sites for our study. Beyond this stipulation, we agreed that, given our intention to conduct the research in naturalistic classroom settings, it was not possible to pre-select a text with a view to investigating the teacher’s treatment of this. Having identiWed a suitable educational institution as a research site, we would rather Wnd out in advance what textbook and textbook units would be taught (if any) during the data collection period, and, if one or more texts in those units were gendered, to observe those lessons. We accepted this might mean missing gendered talk around non-gendered texts. We decided to refer to those gendered texts to be taught in the lessons we would observe as ‘gender critical points’ (to the best of our knowledge, our term). The gender representation might appear to maintain or exaggerate traditional gender roles (with or without irony), or might appear ‘progressive’, representing gender roles saliently broadened so as to extend the range of activities normally available to men or women, boys or girls. All these make available to the student representations of gender identities; all we saw as thus potentially (but only potentially) constitutive of identity. The points were ‘critical’ in the sense that, having reached such a point in the textbook, the teacher would then have to do something about the particular gender representation (even if that something was ‘playing it by the book’, or ignoring it).


Though the study drew on insights of CDA, ‘critical’ in the phrase ‘gender critical point’ was thus not derived from CDA, and did not even necessarily mean that we were critical of the representation (though, working within a broadly feminist paradigm, we might have been; alternatively, we might have approved of it). When observing the lessons, the researchers would concentrate particularly on what the teacher said when a given ‘gender critical point’ was reached and would take Weldnotes on the classroom discourse surrounding this. She would also audiorecord the whole lesson, with a view to transcribing the parts of the lesson(s) which included teacher talk around the ‘gender critical points’. The resultant transcript would be characterised by readability, so ‘noticeable pauses’ would be indicated, but not features such as overlapping speech and students’ pronunciation errors. Thirdly, she would obtain the teacher’s own perceptions of the talk around the ‘gender critical points’, thus providing an additional, emic perspective, and an indication of how, in principle, the teacher thought s/he dealt with gendered texts. This would be done through a semi-structured interview which meant the interviewer could remain open to any additional gender-related issues raised. The teachers’ perspectives were also important because these might allow us to add to the range of possible ways teachers’ talked about gendered texts, in addition to those we observed and audiorecorded. (See Shattuck 1996, Leontzakou 1997, Abdul Rahim 1997, for details of the studies, in addition to those that follow.) The Wrst investigation was carried out in 1996 by Julie Shattuck; this constituted a useful pilot study. The other two were carried out in 1997.

Research project 1: Julie Shattuck (Portugal) Shattuck collected her data from adult EFL classes in a British Council language school in Portugal. All classes at the school met for three hours per week. Most of the students were Portuguese, some were Brazilian and others Spanish. Shattuck’s data collection took place near the end of May, which meant that the classes were preparing for end-of-year examinations. Shattuck wanted classes of adults, as she believed this would mean a quieter lesson and hence clearer recordings. (We took it as given that adults have an on-going capacity for ‘being gendered’, just as do primary and secondary school students.) Shattuck found the original criterion for selection worked well, i.e.


choosing classes in relation to what part of the textbook the teacher planned to use. In this way I could avoid lessons that were unlikely to bring up gender critical points from the textbook, for example one lesson I was going to observe, but did not, focused on New Cambridge English Course 2 (NCEC2), Unit 25, which is solely concerned with teaching the passive by looking at the history of paper making, and the natural and manufactured goods produced in the USA.

and By choosing classes based on what part of the textbook the teacher planned to use, I was able to watch one unit taught by two diVerent teachers (as was my original goal), and one teacher teach the same unit to two diVerent classes (1996:14).

Shattuck observed three teachers and six one-hour lessons. The students were at an intermediate level of English proWciency. She also managed to interview two teachers: Alison and Beth. Here we have chosen to discuss present parts of the lesson of the third teacher, Clive, and parts of two of Alison’s lessons. These provide salient illustrations of diVerent ways of talking about the same and diVerent gender-related texts. The textbook used by both Clive and Alison was Upper Intermediate Matters (1992), written by Jan Bell and Roger Gower. Shattuck identiWed two ‘gender-critical points’ in the unit to be taught: Unit 13, ‘Wedding Customs’. The gender-critical points were two short texts called ‘Just a piece of paper?’ and ‘The mayor has nine wives’.

‘Just a piece of paper’? Two teachers, Alison and Clive, taught this text, which centres around an Indian man from Gujarat, a recent bridegroom, talking about his two weddings. His bride is Swedish. The text acts as an introduction to a listening activity. The text could be said to have a masculine bias: in accordance with marriage as an arguably patriarchal institution, Barbro is referred to as Satish’s wife whereas Satish is never referred to as Barbro’s husband; further, we are given Satish’s experiences and opinions and not Barbro’s. The two teachers dealt with the text very diVerently. Alison, who taught Unit 13 in two diVerent lessons, uses ‘Just a piece of paper?’ in only one, explaining in her interview that “the students were a lot younger (.) and I don’t think that weddings are something they are particularly interested in talking


about”. In the lesson in which she did teach it, she used it, Shattuck notes, “as suggested in the TG as an introduction to the listening activity and the idea of arranged marriages [but] does not talk about wedding customs in any great detail” (1996:24). Shattuck observes that the other teacher, Clive, however uses the text as a springboard into a whole class comparison of English, Portuguese and Spanish wedding customs. He has only three students in his class, and he commented to me after the lesson (unrecorded) that he knew the topic would generate a good discussion because his students are all married women.

She then claims that Clive “confuses his students about the role of the women in an English wedding ceremony by his use of ‘humour’ ”. He tells them that: the bride (.) usually (.) if it’s especially for the church wedding will wear white (.) and (.) the bridesmaids (.) she will often choose the (.) the outWt for them (.) usually she chooses something horrible so they (.) don’t look as good as her

Unfortunately, because of the timing of her observation of this lesson, Shattuck was not able to interview Clive. However, in retrospect, Clive is articulating what might be called a ‘women beware women’ discourse – arguably a discourse which is still legitimised in some contexts. Shattuck observes critically that: He is positioning the women as in competition with each other: the bride feels threatened by the physical appearance of her bridesmaids …. This foregrounds the idea that appearance is of the utmost importance for women. In contrast, the best man’s clothing is not discussed and he is described as helping the groom, not being in competition with him (1996:27).

There may have been a measure of irony in Clive’s words, which may or may not have been picked up by the students. However, no-one could blame the textbook writer for Clive’s folk-stereotypical representation of brides (and, by extension, of women). Traditional representations of femininity were actually being exaggerated in Clive’s chosen commentary.

‘The mayor has nine wives’ Shattuck’s second text from Upper Intermediate Matters is an authentic text, originally from the Independent on Sunday (21/4/91). The accompanying picture is of the nine women and the mayor of Big Water, USA (their twenty children are not included in the picture). The short text includes a quotation from Elizabeth, one of the wives, who is described as a Mormon, bright,


modern-looking, and the town attorney. Elizabeth says It’s an ideal arrangement for a career woman …. Most American women are trying to juggle their career, lipstick and marriage and not succeeding very well. In a plural marriage you can have it all. You never have to worry about who’ll look after the kids. You can be fully a mother, fully a professional, and fully a woman.

‘The mayor has nine wives’ can be seen as patriarchal discourse par excellence. Shattuck writes: The text, although short is packed with presuppositions about the roles of women and men both within and without the family unit…. The text positions the man in the family as not having a role in child upbringing, despite the fact that the children are described as his, the women can only have a career because they are in a polygamous relationship which means that the other wives can shoulder the child-care responsibilities (1996:29–30).

Further, polygamy without polygyny (despite the problematic nature of the latter) can hardly be described as equal rights or opportunities. However the text is not patriarchal in a straightforward way, as it is ‘voiced’ partly by Elizabeth, who is describing what she sees as advantages in the arrangement. So whereas some will read ‘The mayor has nine wives’ as a very sexist text, others might (just) see it as pro-female (a reminder that a text cannot be straightforwardly read as ‘progressive’ or otherwise). So how does the teacher mediate it? Alison teaches the text with two diVerent classes: In both lessons Alison does not tackle or discuss the presuppositions. Lesson 3, after the students Wnish reading the text, Alison just checks the students’ comprehension of some vocabulary: smart, bright, modern-looking, and answers a student’s query about the meaning of attorney. In Lesson 5 she covers the same words, checks that the students are aware of Elizabeth’s religion (but does not discuss Mormons’ beliefs about polygamy), and answers a student’s question about what to juggle means (Shattuck, 1996:32).

Shattuck continues by showing Alison’s explanation of to juggle. The student has suggested that juggle in this context means “like (.) you have (.) for instance kids (.) and a career (.) and (.) a juggle is when you try to have time for the career”. However Alison’s response, in contrast, is both literal and gender-blind, making no reference to women in particular having to juggle diVerent roles: for example (.) can anybody in this class juggle (.) can anyone juggle (.) with balls (.) you know with objects (.) OK you might get three oranges (.) and you can keep


them all (.) moving in the air that’s actually juggling (.) usually see a juggle clown (.) er a clown juggle at the circus or something like that (.) but yeah you’re exactly right (.) be able to give time to career (.) to children or to whatever you happen to have in your life

When the students are asked to write about their own view, the following exchange occurs: S4F: can we change the Wrst one (.) instead of 9 wives (.) 9 husbands T: of course you can (.) yeah (.) you’re more than welcome to do that (.) yeah (1996:33)

In her interview, Alison refers to ‘the woman that (.) I can’t remember her name (.) the irritating student (.) had the thing about oh can we have 9 husbands’ (1996: App M). In Lesson 3 Alison is similarly (largely) genderblind throughout the lesson; part of her pre-activity summing up includes ‘you’ve got someone who’s (.) very keen on perhaps more than one husband and wife’ (Shattuck 1996:33; her italics). Shattuck summarises the diVerent ways in which Alison mediates this text in the two lessons: 1. She ignores the [gendered] presuppositions in the text 2. She adapts the gendered views of marriage in her summary of the article’s content, using gender-neutral terms to talk about the diVerent attitudes to marriage. 3. She degenders the concept of a woman having to juggle with her diVerent roles, by using gender-neutral terms and adapting the idea of ‘being fully a woman’ to ‘whatever you happen to have in your life’

However, in addition 4. She indirectly challenges polygamy by introducing, or allowing her students to bring up, the alternative situation of a woman with nine husbands. (adapted from Shattuck, 1996:33–34)

Like ‘Just a piece of paper?’, then, Shattuck’s second example of the discourse around a text in the classroom also illustrates convincingly how studies of the text as product alone must be limited. In particular, it illustrates how discourses which are widely available, at least in most Western contexts – in this case, feminist or legitimised ‘Equal Opportunities’ discourses – are not always taken up. However, this lack of take-up on Alison’s part may not be monolithic: one reading of (4) above is, as Shattuck words it, that Alison can be seen as ‘indirectly challenging’ the superWcially positive representation of poly-


gamy, and her gender-neutral stance can (if with diYculty) be read similarly. Alison is thus not in any straightforward way endorsing traditional representations of gender roles; however, she can be seen as missing an opportunity for class discussion which could have interestingly challenged such representations, and, in addition, have been pedagogically useful. Looking at the way a text is talked about and comparing this with what was not said, but logically could have been, as Shattuck did, and looking at discourses not drawn on as well as those that were, is to consider what has been referred to as omission (Huckin 1997) and as absences (van Leeuwen 1996). To do this is to draw directly on CDA. Huckin describes omission as “the most potent aspect of textualisation” because “if the writer does not mention something, it often does not even enter the reader’s mind, and thus is not subjected to his or her scrutiny” (1997:82). It may or may not, of course (and this cannot be ascertained from the written text alone) – but something present in or even absent from a textbook text would seem more likely to “enter the student’s mind”, and accordingly be available for identity work, if the teacher mentions it, than if s/he does not. As regards methodological considerations for future studies, Shattuck recommends Wnding schools that run more than one class at the same level. This … means that the researcher(s) have the opportunity to observe a number of classes (ideally with diVerent teachers) using the same part of the textbook…. [T]he researcher can observe how diVerent teachers mediate the same text … (1996:47).

Shattuck’s study had produced some interesting Wndings, and had shown the research design to be workable. However, the small number of lessons, from a single educational setting, meant it was insuYcient to allow the construction of a working analytical framework for diVerent ways in which teachers talked about gendered texts for use in future studies. The aim of the studies carried out the following year was thus to gather more data on ‘talk around the textbook text’, which would allow the construction of such a framework.

Research project 2: Christina Leontzakou (Greece) Leontzakou gained permission to conduct her study in two private language Institutes in Athens known to her (she had previously worked in as a teacher in one). Because of her familiarity with their professional practices she knew


that the same textbook unit would probably be taught by diVerent teachers at the same time, and that she would indeed be able to look at diVerent teachers’ use of the same text. In the Wrst Institute Leontzakou was able to survey the textbooks used. She found that one textbook, HighXyer Intermediate (1996), included several interestingly gendered texts, and made arrangements to observe lessons in which this textbook was used. The textbooks used in the other Institute included Blueprint Intermediate, and she decided to observe classes in which this was used because of its relative newness (it was published in 1995), since publishers and authors “should have taken into consideration the [relevant] research and the guidelines” (1997:15). Leontzakou observed and audiorecorded seven lessons, but eventually focused on three. In these the Units taught included Unit 21 of HighXyer and Unit 44 from Blueprint. ‘Gender critical’ were two texts: on appearance (‘It takes all sorts’) and babysitting, respectively. These three lessons were taught by Nancy, Martha and Anna. All were young but experienced teachers whose training had included sessions on textbook adaptation. The students were all Greek and all teenagers, at an intermediate level of English. The gender balance of all classes was uneven: four boys and seven girls in Anna’s class, three girls and thirteen boys in Martha’s, and ten girls and seven boys in Nancy’s. Leontzakou audiorecorded the lessons and made Weldnotes, including on non-verbal behaviour and additional material used. She also carried out semistructured interviews with the teachers to collect data on their perspectives on their textbook use, in relation to gender representation. The interviews were carried out in Greek.

‘It takes all sorts’ Unit 21 of HighXyer starts with pictures of two famous women and two famous men. It then continues with the question: ‘What does your ideal boy or girl look like?’, and continues with ‘It takes all sorts’ – a text about ideas of beauty in diVerent parts of the world. Leontzakou considered this text on appearance to be a non-traditionally-gendered text since it “associat[es] beauty with both sexes and [uses] an equal number of pictures of men and women” (1997:33). The two teachers dealing with this Unit, Martha and Anna, did so in


rather diVerent ways. Martha asked the girls whether they found the men who were pictured good looking, and the boys the women, giving feedback such as “OK that’s how you feel” to their responses. She used her own picture of three women to illustrate the words fair, dark, straight and curly. She Wnally returned to the title of the text, “highlight[ing] again that diVerences are part of life” (1997:35). Leontzakou concluded that despite the picture, and because of her ‘objective’ stance, Martha was supporting the text’s apparent non-traditional position on gender, and could thus be said to be endorsing it. In retrospect, Martha could be said to be articulating a progressive (but peripheral) ‘Appearance as equally salient for women and for men’ discourse (and avoiding a traditional ‘Privileging of appearance – in women’ discourse). When interviewed by Leontzakou about the use of her own picture of three women, Martha explains this as convenience: “it was the only picture I had (.) it was handy and I did not have the time to look for something else … I had used it with the junior class and I had it in front of me” (1997:34). On being asked if she had used the pictures to attract the attention of the boys (the majority) she replies “that’s a correct thought but I didn’t think of that at all” (1997:35). The other teacher, Anna, also used some pictures of her own, and, again, more were of women. However, when she asked the boys which of the pictures of the women they liked best, the following exchange occurred: T: B: B1: T: B: T: B:

which one to [sic] you prefer from those two (.) the model or the singer Ari the model none [translated from Greek] in English nothing none of them (.) why not (.) don’t you like blonde so what [translated from Greek]

Leontzakou comments Anna seems to be implying that blonde is a beautiful trait for women and is supposed to be preferred by males. She does not seem to understand why the boy does not like the blonde woman in the picture.... [s]he is ... asking a question which implies that a certain, stereotypical, physical characteristic of women is considered as beautiful (whereas another may not be considered beautiful) and by appointing a stereotypical preference to men …. The fact that the student has a diVerent preference from the one that the teacher expects could have been used


to point out that diVerent people have got diVerent tastes, which is also the topic of the unit, but no comment is made (1997:36–37).

Leontzakou’s conclusion was that Anna was “subverting the text overtly” – an illustration of how an arguably progressive text may well not be done justice to. When interviewed, Anna claimed she used her own pictures “mainly because I wanted to attract their attention” and more pictures of women again because they were available: “and why not men because I couldn’t Wnd any in the magazines” (1997:36). Anna otherwise did not demonstrate any particular awareness of gender.

‘Babysitting’ The ‘Babysitting’ text, in Unit 44 of Blueprint, was a listening exercise in which two parents are talking about their babysitter, Alan. Leontzakou claims: “By presenting a man who was supposed to do the babysitting, I believe that the book itself deWes stereotypes [i.e. in the context in which she was teaching]” (1997:40). When one of the teachers, Nancy, came to deal with this text, she asked the students if they knew what babysitting was, whether it was usual in Greece, and why. However: Nancy seems to ignore the fact that the textbook presents a man who has been asked to do the babysitting. At no point does she suggest that it can be done by a man or a woman. Nor does she comment on the students’ use of ‘she’ and the fact that they say ‘woman’ and ‘grandmother’…. Furthermore, she does not compare the Greek situation, where mothers and grandmothers are thought to be responsible for babysitting, to the English situation, where, according to the textbook, it seems more common than in Greece for a man to do such a task (Leontzakou, 1997:41).

Nancy does, however, when trying to get the students to explain why (paid) babysitting is unusual in Greece, ask ‘Wrst of all do mothers work?’ Critiquing the non-problematising stance of this question, Leontzakou writes: “in my opinion, the teacher in this situation subverts the progressive text by introducing the idea that mothers who do not work are responsible for the babysitting” (1997:42). When asked in the interview whether she was surprised by the book showing a man doing the baby-sitting, Nancy replies “yes it seems that in England things are diVerent they are not like in Greece where baby-sitting


seems to be a woman’s job” (1997:42). As to whether the students would have found it strange, she replies no no (.) take it for granted (.) maybe if he were Greek they would not have liked it … but because they knew it was Britain they were not annoyed by it (1997: App. 0).

In response to Leontzakou’s suggestion “Maybe they did not notice it [i.e. presumably that Alan was a man/that ‘Alan’ is a man’s name]”, Nancy replies “maybe that’s possible too”. (There were, however, several references to he in the text.) Leontzakou’s conclusions were reached through ‘high inference’ thinking, extrapolation of a gendered discourse from a sexist linguistic item (blonde), and the absence of an explicit and positive acknowledgement of a potentially positive gender representation, i.e. the male babysitter. Nevertheless, whereas Shattuck’s study had found a case of a ‘traditional’ text being treated (by Clive) in a way that made his discourse arguably more sexist than the text, Leontzakou in contrast had found two cases of what could be seen as gender-progressive texts being undermined by the teacher. Though an ‘Equal Opportunities discourse’ can be read in both textbook texts, this discourse was absent from the talk of both Anna and Nancy, unlike that of their colleague Martha. Though this should not be seen as a simple reverting to a ‘traditional’ default discourse of gender, it is an example of an apparently available discourse not being taken up by the teacher.

Research project 3: Fauziah Abdul Rahim and Maire Cowley (UK) Abdul Rahim and Cowley conducted their investigation in a comprehensive school in the north-west of England. They collected data from six fortyminute lessons – three from a French classroom and three from a German classroom. However, for this paper we have chosen to report only some data from the German lessons, since the French class did not use a textbook (the teacher prepared the materials herself). The German class consisted of 31 students, 17 boys and 14 girls, all about fourteen years old. They had been learning German for just over four months. The teacher, Jonathan, had been teaching for ten years. The German class used Auf Deutsch! (1993). One Unit taught when Abdul Rahim and Cowley observed was a revision unit: ‘Wiederholung’ (Unit 9).


Before the lesson observation, Abdul Rahim and Cowley identiWed a ‘gender critical point’ in the reading section of Unit 9, ‘Dear Markus’.

‘Dear Markus’ In ‘Wiederholung’, a German boy called Jan includes in a letter to an English penfriend details of where he lives, his appearance, pets, hobbies and siblings – using the phrase ‘Meine Schwester kann ich nicht leiden!’ (‘I hate my sister!’)

Koblenz, den 3. Oktober Lieber BrieVreund!/Liebe BrieVreundin! Ich heiße Jan. Ich bin 13 Jahre alt und ich wohne in Koblez. Ich habe eine Schwester und einen Bruder. Mein Schwester kann ich nicht leiden! Ich spiele gern Fußball, aber ich Wnde Tennis langweillig. Ich höre gern Musik. Wir haben zwei Hunde und einen Kater, Oliver. Tschüß, Jan

Abdul Rahim writes: This statement [Meine Schwester kann ich nicht leiden!] is marked with gender bias towards females as it gives a negative image of sisters as someone likely to be disliked compared to brothers. Negative portrayals of women … can be related to the concept of misogyny … which has no familiar ‘hatred of men’ equivalent (1997:40).

Abdul Rahim and Cowley were therefore interested in what Jonathan would say when he reached this sentence, and what sort of discourse he would use around the ‘I hate my sister’ notion. In the event, Jonathan did not in fact make any reference to this sentence at all, despite having many opportunities to do so (the students had to provide various pieces of information about Jan). In the following lesson he provided his own, similar letter, from ‘Hans’ to ‘Markus’, on an overhead transparency:


Reutlingen, den 6 November Lieber Markus! Hallo! Ich heiße Hans. Ich wohne in einem Reihenhaus in Süddeutschland in Reutlingen. Ich bin ziemlich groß und sehr schlank. Meine Haare sind blond, und ich habe blaue Augen. Ich bin vierzehn Jahre alt. Ich habe am 21. April Geburtstag. Ich habe zwei Schwestern, die Anna und Elke heißen. Ich habe einen GoldWsch, der Humphrey heißt. Hast du Haustiere? Ich habe viele Hobbys. Ich spiele gern Fußball, ich höre gern Musik, ich gehe gern ins Kino und ich fahre gern Rad. Fernsehen gefällt mir nicht, und ich spiele nict gern Tennis. Was macht Du gern? Schreib bald, Dein Hans.

Hans thus writes in his letter that he has two sisters, Anna and Elke (‘Ich habe zwei Schwestern’), but does not say what he feels about them. Of Jonathan’s treatment of this letter, Abdul Rahim writes: [Jonathan] asked students about Hans’ personal information regarding where he lives, his physical appearance, pets, number of siblings, his hobby and what he likes and dislikes. Unlike the letter in the textbook, the letter from Hans was not negatively marked by gender. There was no indication that Hans hated his sisters (1997:43).

and observes: “By not discussing the sentence or notion, it seems to suggest that [Jonathan] had covertly subverted the idea of brothers hating sisters” (1997:45). Cowley and Abdul Rahim had thus found a case of teacher talk around a gender-biased text in which the bias was simply circumvented by non-reference, and by omission in a related teacher-designed exercise. When interviewed about the original text, Jonathan was asked whether not discussing the fact that Jan hated his sister was intentional. Jonathan did not answer the question directly, but pointed out that this was a revision exercise and “when they do the exam [there’s] a girl who’s saying she can’t stand her brother”. He added now if it had been the case that it would’ve been (.) not balanced in that way (.) and implying that somebody couldn’t stand someone else and just left like that then I


think we would have picked that up and we would have made a comment on it (1997: AppO).

Jonathan expressed the opinion that Auf Deutsch! on the whole avoided stereotypes: “you know when if someone’s washing up or cooking or going out to work you know with their briefcase under their arm it’s not always gender stereotypes” (1997:62). When asked what he would do faced with a gender-biased text, he responded “we tend to make a remark about it” (1997:64). Jonathan’s response complements that of the other teacher Cowley and Abdul Rahim observed, Angela (whose lessons are not documented here). In her interview, Angela said that if faced with a gender-biased text, she would “make fun of it” (1997:63): well I can tell you how I dealt with the old book we used to laugh at at this Madame Lafayette … we used to ask them look at this ‘where is she? in the kitchen’ and where else would she be she couldn’t possibly be anywhere else so we used to make fun and make jokes of it … it was the only way telling the students without them assuming well without them thinking badly of it every time and it was just a joke so they’d laugh (1997: App 9).

Angela continued: if there are male pilot[s] and the female something else then in class I would try and do some other things based on what is in the book … we’re conscious of it we’ve got a departmental equal opportunities [policy] and it’s something we know … (1997: App 9).

‘Sending up’ gender stereotypes, and supplementing very traditional representations in texts through more gender-egalitarian spoken discourse in class are possible and empirically demonstrable (though, here, not actually demonstrated) ways teachers can ‘rescue’ a traditionally-gendered text. In their interviews, both Jonathan and Angela can be seen as employing an ‘Equal Opportunities discourse’.

Developing a working analytical framework Shattuck’s study had shown that whereas the approach to data collection seemed to work well, what was needed was more data, before even a working analytical framework could be drawn up. The studies of Leontzakou, and Abdul Rahim and Cowley, allowed this project to be initiated.


It will be evident from the researchers’ observations that the group had discussed various analytical notions surrounding text, including gendered text, texts which went beyond a traditional representation of gender roles,3 texts which maintained a traditional representation of gender roles and gendercritical point. And even before data collection had begun, we were drawing on our own teaching experience, and the various documented recommendations for dealing with bias, to refer to diVerent types of teacher talk around gendered texts. During the post-pilot data collection period, in which the projects were regularly discussed by the ‘Language and Gender in the Classroom’ research group, these ‘types’ of teacher talk around the text began to crystallise into analytical categories. In particular, we developed further the ideas of the ‘discursive practices’ (Fairclough 1992) of the speech acts subversion and endorsement of a text by a teacher. Our eventual interpretation of the categories endorsement and subversion was as follows: Endorsement and subversion refer to the message ‘packaged in’ the teacher’s discourse, in so far as this can be identiWed without recourse to student response. Endorsement means the teacher is broadly supporting the gendered discourse of the text. A gendered text in which there is ‘maintenance of traditional gender roles’ can be endorsed through explicit positive comment, enthusiasm or extension, and perhaps through using the text as a springboard from which to launch gender-stereotypical observations. It can also be endorsed through being dealt with uncritically, or through simply being taught. Endorsement of a text which ‘goes beyond traditional roles’ can be done similarly, though if used as a ‘springboard’, this might be for discussion of issues relating to gender equality. Subversion means that the teacher is undermining the gendered discourse. The teacher may explicitly or implicitly confront a particular representation, traditional or progressive, of gender roles, for example showing a lack of enthusiasm, or simply omitting the text or ignoring aspects of it (but see later). A text which ‘maintains a traditional representation of gender roles’ can be subverted by being treated in a way which encourages rather than discourages gender equality, for example by criticism, discussion, reversal of roles in dialogues, joking or supplementary comment. A text which ‘goes beyond a traditional representation of gender roles’ can be undermined by, for example, the teacher ridiculing the ideas.


Endorsement and subversion may be intentional or unintentional on the part of the teacher. This terminology meant that we could now draw up the following chart to represent our empirical Wndings in relation to the ‘gender critical points’ of the relevant textbook texts. It is, of course, a highly interpretive analysis, as well as one which comes from a particular (broadly feminist) standpoint. The question mark under ‘Alison’ functions as a reminder that it may not always be possible even to interpret. Table 1 is thus a representation of the diVerent empirically-observed forms of teacher discourse around the various texts. We can conceptually add to this Angela’s observation that she made fun of stereotypical representations, and Jonathan’s that he would comment on them, which can both be seen as potential forms of subversion of traditional gender representation. What was now needed was a working model of analysis of teachers’ discourse around gender in textbooks, one that took account of both the text itself, and of what is said about it. Such a model could then be used for analysis of other gendered texts in conjunction with the way in which they are talked about by teachers. We will now outline such a model, informed both by the Wndings and by the group’s subsequent discussion of these. Table 1. Discursive practices as perceived by the researchers from the ‘Teacher talk around the texts’ Text

‘Just a piece The mayor Babysitting of paper?’ has nine wives

It takes all sorts

Dear Markus

Teacher

Clive

Nancy

Anna

Martha

Jonathan

Discursive practices/ ‘Teacher talk around the text’

Exaggerates ? traditional gender representation

Ignores nontraditional gender representation

Subverts nontraditional gender representation

Endorses nontraditional gender representation

Ignores traditional gender representation

Alison

The model is in the form of a classiWcation system which can accommodate the diVerent discursive practices accorded to diVerent text types. It consists of both ‘data-generated categories’ and ‘logical categories’. We had


originally assumed that it was possible to talk about broadly ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ (or ‘non-traditional’) texts. This raised the philosophical problem of whether texts can be thus characterised, without recourse to teacher treatment and reader (student) response. If it is accepted that a given text cannot mean just anything (Mills 1994), then the answer must be ‘yes – to an extent’. However, there are still problems. Is the distinction always clear, for example, between a text endorsing the oppressive practices in relation to women and one exposing oppression for what it is? And what are oppressive practices? The use of make-up, for example, has been seen by feminists as a patriarchal channelling of both men and women into an acceptance of a ‘Privileging of appearance – in women’ discourse, ultimately for the beneWt of men. However make-up can also be seen as something women choose to use for their own pleasure and empowerment. Labelling a text as unproblematically ‘sexist’/‘feminist’/ ‘traditional’, or ‘progressive’/’non-progressive’ is thus simply not possible. Yet some further descriptor of a text is needed, if only because teacher treatment such as ‘endorsement’ obviously means something diVerent when what is being endorsed is a text whose discourse is (apparently) unchallenging to the status quo, and one whose discourse is (apparently) otherwise. We therefore decided to retain as working descriptors of gendered texts as they stand the dichotomy we had learned to use: ‘going beyond a traditional representation of gender roles’ and ‘maintaining a traditional representation of gender roles’. Operationalising these requires a relatively high level of inference and sensitivity on the part of the analyst but simultaneously takes account of her/his understandings and perceptions as valid and useful. The dichotomy alone may not allow for irony, or for ‘non-approving’ reasons for traditional gendered behaviour represented in texts. However, if inference and interpretation on the part of the (sensitive) analyst are seen as productive, these can be accommodated. Moving from this ‘text descriptor’ part of the model to the ‘discursive practice’ level, the model can now be informed by the empirical Wndings of the study as presented in Figure 1. The categories here are essentially data-related rather than an expression of a philosophy of text. The chart uses four performative verbs to describe teacher talk: exaggerates/endorses/ignores/subverts. However, since it may not always be meaningful to distinguish between ‘endorsement’ and ‘exaggeration’ (the latter sometimes being one realisation of the former), we decided that these two categories should be conXated. Gender issues in the ‘traditional’ texts ‘Weddings’, ‘The mayor has nine wives’ and ‘Dear Markus’ were in diVerent ways ‘exaggerated’ and ‘ignored’; those in


the non-traditional ‘Babysitting’ and ‘It takes all sorts’ were ‘ignored’, ‘subverted’ and ‘endorsed’. This gives Wve categories. However, subversion can logically also be applied to texts which ‘maintain a traditional representation of gender roles’, and indeed Jonathan and Angela indicated this to be precisely what they did do with such texts – giving a total of six categories. There will, however, always be discourse which resists characterisation (in this case, Alison’s treatment of ‘Just a piece of paper?’ and ‘The mayor has nine wives’). This meant two further, ‘Unclear’ categories. The resultant working model is represented in Figure 1. It can be seen either as a working and developing description of the range of ways teachers can deal with gendered textbook texts (acknowledging that these ways are likely to be context-related if not highly situated, with particular local meanings), or, more tentatively, as hypotheses regarding the range.

Gendered text

Text which goes beyond a traditional representation of gender roles

Text which maintains a traditional representation of gender roles

Unclear

Teacher ignores non-traditional gender representation

Unclear Teacher ignores traditional gender representation Teacher subverts non-traditional gender representation

Teacher endorses (or exaggerates) nontraditional gender representation

Teacher subverts traditional gender representation

Teacher endorses (or exaggerates) traditional gender representation

Figure 1. A working model of gendered discursive practices of teachers in relation to textbook texts.

‘Ignoring gender issues’ is clearly not a straightforward category. In particular, it may, or may not, represent a discourse of subversion. It may simply


result from the teacher not noticing the gender issue in question, or not thinking it is important or interesting; or the teacher may be deliberately ignoring the issue, or indeed omitting the whole text, because of the gender issue itself or because of a pedagogical reason which has nothing to do with gender. Without looking at teacher perceptions, it would seem unrealistic to expect the analyst to tease out ‘subversive’ ignoring from other-motivated ignoring. Future data may shed light on this, and may also suggest further reWning of all these categories, as well as the creation of new ones.4

Implications for the study of discourse, for language education and for future directions for research This study has shown how teachers draw on (and, saliently, do not draw on) a number of gendered discourses. These include both feminist and traditional discourses (the latter may for some teachers be the ‘default’ discourse of gender). We have also identiWed more speciWc discourses: what we have interpretatively called an ‘Equal Opportunities’ discourse, a ‘patriarchal discourse’, a ‘privileging of appearance – in women’ discourse, a ‘discourse of gender-blindness’, and a ‘women beware women’ discourse’. Though the last three of these may not be familiar currency in the discourse analysis literature, we propose that they are indeed valid gendered discourses, in that, by deWnition for us, but also, intuitively, more widely, they are ‘recognisable ways of seeing the world’. As such, in Fairclough’s (1992) terms, they “structure knowledge and social practice” and are thus relevant to the on-going gendering of individuals of all ages. This study also has particular implications for gender identity in (language) education, in that any textual representation of gender available for ‘identity work’ will be mediated by essentially non-predictable teacher discourse. It also has implications for teacher education – including for critical linguistic awareness in relation to textbook and text selection, for textbook use, and for materials design and adaptation. The study suggests the issue to be wider than whether and how teachers recognise and talk about traditional roles in textbooks. It points to a need for identiWcation of ways in which any widening of the current range of possibilities for women and for men as represented in the textbook can be endorsed and thus facilitated by the teacher through her discourse. Optimistically, since texts representing a wider range of gender roles than previously existed arguably do not require equality-


minded teachers to challenge, endorsing the gender representation in these may be easier for these teachers than subverting ‘traditionally gendered’ texts (see also Abraham 1989). The model suggests a range of further classroom research. This includes detailed investigation of one teacher’s treatment of one textbook with one class, as a case study, and surveys of, say, the use of the same textbook or text by diVerent teachers. One purpose of the latter would be to explore the (presumably unlimited) range of ways selected texts can be talked about, with a view to then identifying frequency patterns of diVerent categories. Possible questions include, for a given context: are teachers likely (and to what extent) to endorse texts produced by textbook writers with concerns for gender equality? do teachers subvert texts which make no attempt to go beyond traditional gender roles? if so, how? what prompts them to do so? The answers would have interesting implications for publishers, textbook writers and teacher educators. Other studies might explore what, again in a given educational context and setting, teacher talk varies with, for example the composition of the class (single- or mixed-sex), and the eVect, if any, of the teacher’s beliefs and teacher education undergone. The students’ age, gender, level and ‘ability’ might also be considered. It might also be asked how much and indeed how teacher talk around a gendered text is shaped by the teacher’s view of the class as students who are also gendered subjects, and the contribution of student-teacher interaction. Student talk around a gendered text (in whole class work, together with the teacher, or in pair/groupwork) is clearly suggested by this work as a companion research project. In any investigation involving naturally occurring spoken data, there will always be problems of developing, deWning and employing categories, and a high level of inference and interpretation will be needed. Here, this is true of both levels of the analytical model. There is also the question of where relevant data begins and ends. In terms of the text, should, say, a ‘reading passage’ always be considered as a whole, even along with any accompanying exercises? For teacher treatment, how far should transcripts go beyond documenting the teacher’s immediate use of the text? Abdul Rahim and Cowley looked at Jonathan’s lesson following his lesson in which he used the text containing ‘I hate my sister!’; the example cited by Dendrinos (1992) referred to a teacher who led up to her direct use of the textbook unit in question with her own highly gender-stereotypical examples. These methodological issues will need to be addressed by further studies in this area.


Conclusion Though these small-scale studies have not produced large amounts of data, they indicate three things clearly. First, these teachers (and presumably others) draw on and produce a range of gendered discourses. Second, teacher discourse around a given text is diverse and cannot be predicted from the text itself. Third, along with concerns about texts which maintain traditional representations of gender roles, there should be concerns (possibly more concerns) about those which do go beyond traditional representations, since these may not be done justice to. Further useful empirical work can be done in all three areas. This study represents a theoretical and methodological contribution to the understanding of how traditional gender identities can be discoursally sustained, or new ones made available, and how stereotypical ways of thinking can be challenged (or not) in classroom discourse. Theoretically, it has shown how conceptualising gendered ‘talk around the text’ (a concept of literacy studies) as gendered discursive practice (as a form of ‘consumption’ of text), operating within and informing wider social practices (including elements of patriarchy), can be highly productive. These discursive practices of the teacher can also be theorised as ‘mediation’ of the text, and as something which may play a role in shaping learning opportunities as well as constituting gender identities. Methodologically, we have shown how, having identiWed a ‘gendered’ text, looking at teacher talk around this text can be done and can produce highly interesting, non-predictable Wndings. However, we do not claim to be able to extrapolate and generalise from these – the study is based on too few teachers, too few lessons, too few hours of data. Each of the instances of the discursive practices identiWed was highly situated. Our intention was to present ‘telling’ rather than ‘typical’ cases, and not to carry out a survey of representative teacher practices, but rather to look at possible forms of teacher talk around a gendered text. Our working model thus remains tentative. We hope, however, that we have shown that for those engaged in research on gender in (language) education, rather than looking ‘in the text’ for bias or gender representation, or even looking diachronically for improvements in textbook representations of gender, a more relevant and fruitful focus in terms of the constitution of gender identity may be the mediation of gender representation in textbook texts by teachers, through their discourse around those texts. Such ‘consumption’ of gendered texts is amenable to – indeed,


waiting for – further empirical observation. Of particular interest now would now be studies of teacher talk around recent textbook texts which go beyond a traditional representation of gender roles (as many do). Data such as this will make the working model more relevant in terms of contemporary educational publishing. It will also make the model empirically more robust in terms of possibilities, and will thus contribute to the further theorisation of discourse, gender and textbook texts, in language and other subject classrooms. (An earlier and slightly diVerent version of this chapter originally appeared in Linguistics and Education 11/3:251–286.)

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the participants of the ‘Language, Literature and Text’ session at the 1997 ‘Transitions in Gender and Education’ Conference, Warwick University, for an enlightening discussion surrounding the diVerent ‘levels’ of the model; Julian Edge and participants of the ‘Teacher Development’ group in the Language Studies Unit at Aston University for ‘resonating’ their understandings of the analytical framework; David Barton for reading and commenting on a draft of this paper; the teachers and students in Portugal, Greece and UK for graciously allowing us into their classrooms and giving up their time to be interviewed; and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Lancaster University for a small grant for this project. For permission to reproduce the ‘Letter from Jan’, we would like to thank Reed Educational and Professional Publishing, Oxford. We would also like to thank Damien Cashman for technical assistance with the Wnal preparation of this paper.

Notes 1. On Balance, a booklet written for publishers and reprinted in Sunderland (1994), highlights precisely these issues. 2. The group still exists but is now the ‘Gender and Language’ research group; our interests have broadened accordingly. 3. Thanks to Silvia Valencia for pointing out how our original term ‘extending traditional roles’ could in fact mean a consolidation or exaggeration of these rather than the reverse; it is because of this observation that we changed our terminology to ‘going beyond a traditional representation of gender roles’. 4 For example, a teacher (whose name we regret) in a workshop suggested ‘Contextualisation’ (of a text in which gender was represented traditionally). While this may not count as ‘Subversion’, neither is it endorsement.


References Abdul Rahim, Fauziah. 1997. Gender – if ‘it’s part of the climate’, what do language teachers do?: Looking at teachers’ treatment of gender in teaching materials. MA dissertation, Lancaster University. Abraham, John. 1989. “Teacher ideology and sex roles in curriculum texts”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 10 (1):33–51. Acevedo, A. and M. Gower. 1996. HighXyer Intermediate. London: Longman. Alderson, Charles. 1997. “Models of language: whose? what for? what use?” In Evolving Models of Language. British Studies in Applied Linguistics 12. A. Ryan and A. Wray (eds), 1 – 22. Clevedon: BAAL/Multilingual Matters. Allwright, Dick. 1988. Observation in the Language Classroom. London: Longman. Allwright, Dick and Kathleen Bailey. 1991. Focus on the Language Classroom. Cambridge: CUP. Austin, John L. 1962. How To Do Things with Words. Oxford: OUP. Bell, Jan and Roger Gower. 1992. Upper Intermediate Matters. Harlow: Longman. Bonkowski, Frank. 1995. Teacher use and interpretation of textbook materials in the secondary ESL classroom in Quebec. PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Carroll, David and Johanna Kowitz. 1994. “Using concordancing techniques to study gender stereotyping in ELT textbooks”. In Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education, J. Sunderland (ed), 73–82. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Chouliaraki, Lilie. 1994. “The case of Task Way English: alternative gender constructions in EFL textbooks. Interview with Bessie Dendrinos”. In Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education, J. Sunderland (ed), 121–133. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Cincotta, Madeleine Strong. 1978. “Textbooks and their inXuence on sex-role stereotype formation”. Babel: Journal of the Australian Federation of MLTS Association 14 (3):24–9. Dendrinos, Bessie. 1992. The EFL Textbook and Ideology. Athens: N.C. Grivas Publications. Dendrinos, Bessie. 1992. Taskway English. Athens: N.C. Grivas Publications. Dombey, Henrietta. 1992. “Lessons learnt at bedtime”. In New Readings: Contributions to an Understanding of Literacy. K. Kimberly, M. Meek and J. Miller (eds). London: A and C Black. GaV, Robin. 1982. “Sex-stereotyping in modern language teaching – an aspect of the hidden curriculum”. British Journal of Language Teaching 20 (3):71–78. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Halliday, Michael and Hasan, R. 1989. Language, Context and Text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Oxford: OUP. Hartman, P. and Judd, Elliot. 1978. “Sexism and TESOL materials”. TESOL Quarterly 12 (4):383–92. Hellinger, Marlis. 1980. “ ‘For men must work and women must weep’: sexism in English


language textbooks used in German schools”. Women’s Studies International Quarterly 3:267–275. Huckin, Thomas. 1997. “Critical discourse analysis”. In Miller, T (ed.) Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom Applications. Washington D.C.: United States Information Agency. Hutchinson, Eunice. 1996. What do teachers and learners actually do with textbooks?: teacher and learner use of a Wsheries-based ELT textbook in the Philippines. PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Ivanic, Roz. 1998. Writing and Identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jaworski, Adam and Coupland, Nikolas (eds) 1999. The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge. Jones, Martha, Kitetu, Catherine and Sunderland, Jane. 1997. “Discourse roles, gender and language textbook dialogues: who learns what from John and Sally?” Gender and Education 9 (4):469–49. Leontzakou, Cristina. 1997. How teachers deal with gendered EFL textbook material. MA dissertation, Lancaster University. McNab, Rosi and O’Brien, A. 1993. Auf Deutsch! Oxford: Heinemann Education. Mills, Sara (ed) 1994. Gendering the Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mitchell, J.C. 1984. “Typicality and the case study”. In Ethnographic Research: a Guide to General Conduct, R. Ellen (ed.), London: Academic Press. Porecca, Karen. 1984. “Sexism in current ESL textbooks”. TESOL Quarterly 18 (4):705– 24. Poulou, Sophia. 1997. “Sexism in the discourse roles of textbook dialogues”. Language Learning Journal 15 (March):68–73. Rosenblatt, L. 1976. Literature as Exploration (3rd ed.) London: RKP. Schmitz, Betty. 1975. “Sexism in French language textbooks”. In The Cultural Revolution in Foreign Language Teaching, Lafayette, R.C. (ed), 119–130. Skokie, Ill.: National Textbook Co. Shattuck, Julie. 1996. The interplay between EFL textbooks, teacher behaviour and gender. MA dissertation, Lancaster University. Stodolsky, Susan. 1989. “Is teaching really by the book?” In From Socrates to Software: the Teacher as Text and the Text as Teacher, P. Jackson and S. Harountian-Gordon (eds), 159–184. The National Society for the Study of Education (USA). Stubbs, Michael. 1997. “Whorf’s children: critical comments on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)”. In Evolving Models of Language. British Studies in Applied Linguistics 12, A. Ryan and A. Wray (eds.), 100 – 116. Clevedon: BAAL/Multilingual Matters. Sunderland, Jane. (ed) 1994. Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Swann, Joan and Graddol, David. 1988. “Gender inequalities in classroom talk”. English in Education 22 (1):48–65. Talansky, Sandra. 1986. “Sex role stereotyping in TEFL teaching materials”. Perspectives XI (3):32–41. Talbot, Mary. 1995. “A synthetic sisterhood: false friends in a teenage magazine”. In


Gender Articulated, Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds), 143–165. New York: Routledge. Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in Interaction: an introduction to pragmatics. London: Longman. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. “The representation of social actors”. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge. Walker, E. and Elsworth, S. 1995. Blueprint Intermediate. London: Longman. Willeke, Audrone and Sanders, Ruth. 1978. “Walter ist intelligent und Brigitte ist blond; dealing with sex bias in language texts”. Unterrichtspraxis 11:60–65. Zografou, Anastasia. 1990. “Explore the way language supports and generates sexist values, concepts and models in the ELT textbook Turning Point”. Unpublished MA essay, Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University.



Chapter 11

‘What’s the hottest part of the Sun? Page 3!’ Children’s exploration of adolescent gender identities through informal talk Janet Maybin Open University, UK

Introduction On the school coach on the way to their weekly swimming lesson, a group of eleven and twelve year olds are swapping anecdotes about travel and holidays. A few of the boys have been on aeroplanes and jostle verbally to tell their stories. Martie momentarily holds an audience of around six children sitting nearby with his story of an encounter with an airhostess: Martie Darren Martie Darren Martie

Boy Darren

Do you like getting oV the seat? No I love getting oV the seat. I was sitting in the middle of the Xoor and reading a book and the hostess come /I did that once /And the hostess come, and she said, she was, she was REALLY nice if you know what I mean, and as she came past she had this trolly with all the dinners on it and she went (high pitched ‘neep neep’ horn sound, laughter) and all I done is, I went (low pitched sound of car engine) and I moved to the side as she went past. (groan) Her legs, man (groan, short pause). I was going to eat the dinners, man. Chicken /And you can leave what you want

Martie’s story comes from an ethnographic study of informal language practices in two middle school classes of ten to twelve year olds in a working class housing estate about Wfty miles from London (Maybin 1996, 1998, 1999). My

258 Janet Maybin

data includes sixty hours of continuous recordings of children’s talk throughout the school day and twenty hours from interviews with friendship pairs. It was collected using a radio microphone and small tape recorders over two terms, during which time the children got used to my presence and lost interest in the fact that they were being recorded. I wanted to Wnd out how these children used informal talk (and literacy) to explore and negotiate new knowledge and identities, as they moved from childhood into adolescence. This transition point is particularly signiWcant in relation to gender which becomes more culturally marked in sexual terms. In many ways children have to recast themselves, their activities and their relationships in ways which are moving towards more adolescent conceptions of being male or female. Many of these ten- to twelve-year-olds moved easily back and forth between the worlds of childhood and adolescence, depending on context and their own purposes. Martie’s account nicely illustrates the ambivalence which this dual identity creates, where a boy can play on the Xoor like a child but can also look up an airhostess’s skirts and admire her legs. Physical attractions are discussed in the same breath as the meals on the plane and a child’s delight that you do not have to eat all the food on your plate. The dialogue between the horn and the engine noise, as Martie presents it with his suggestive deep-throated purr, is similarly ambivalent and can be interpreted either as a child’s game or as a Xirtatious joke. This holding of two alternative interpretative frames is common in the children’s talk, often allowing them the possibility of switching frame to save face and oVering alternative points of engagement for their audience (GoVman 1974). In this chapter I shall examine how these ten- to twelve-year-old children are beginning to explore and take on various kinds of gendered identities within their informal talk. I shall suggest that some of the subject matter of children’s talk, especially within their stories and anecdotes, is directly concerned with trying out ways of inhabiting and performing their gender. I shall also suggest that the language practices themselves, for example the competitive exchange of anecdotes in a public arena, collaborative storytelling in a more private context, ‘chatting up’ a prospective boyfriend or girlfriend or a brief exchange in the cloakroom, oVer diVerent overlapping potential resources of meaning for boys and for girls. I use the term ‘language practices’ to include what children do with language in actual concrete examples and also to acknowledge the way in which language is intimately bound up with social practice. While a considerable body of research has focussed on the gendered use of various features of the linguistic system and diVerent conversational strategies (Goodwin 1990; Holmes 1994; Coates 1997), there is now increas-

What’s the hottest part of the Sun? Page 3! 259

ing interest in the way in which context and social processes, in quite subtle and complex ways, give meaning and function to form (Cameron 1992 and 1997; Gal 1995; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1995; Swann, this volume). In the course of their involvement in everyday activities, children invoke and are positioned within diVerent discourses. I use the term ‘discourse’ here to mean patterns of language use which encode particular kinds of knowledge as authoritative and particular kinds of values, hierarchical relationships and subjectivities as unquestionable (Foucault 1981; Fairclough 1992). In one sense children are being inducted into dominant discourses which involve particular kinds of gendered subject positions. But they are also often exploring and challenging these and alternative positions through their use of language to pursue personal interactive goals and through listening to and questioning each others’ accounts of personal experience. Perhaps because I am focussing on pre-adolescent children, I see the taking on of aspects of gendered identity as a piecemeal, provisional aVair, carried on in Xeeting moments across a wide range of language practices. While I am in no doubt that children acquire important knowledge about gender and their own gendered possibilities within conversations where gender is apparently at the margins of relevance and awareness, I shall focus here on instances in their talk where it is, however brieXy, more explicitly foregrounded. In terms of the ‘warrants’ discussed by Joan Swann (this volume), I am using language as explicit evidence for the children’s orientations towards particular gender issues (although there is always an element of interpretation involved), and I am drawing some comparisons between boys and girls, although the limited quantity of data in qualitative work means that the validity of these comparisons would need to be tested through further research. Throughout my data, the children’s talk tended to return again and again to a number of central themes. These concern questions around children’s changing relationships with parents and other authority Wgures, the imperatives and boundaries of friendship, family relationships, and moral issues of justice, care and cruelty. Individual dialogues concerning a theme build up together into a ‘long conversation’, stretching over days and weeks, as children revisit the same theme in various ways, on separate occasions and in diVerent settings (Maybin 1996). Gender is often explored in the context of talk around these themes. In the rest of the chapter I shall look at a number of extracts from children’s conversations in some detail to examine how they use speciWc language practices to explore issues relating to gender and identity, and how they invoke, manage and are positioned within diVerent kinds of

260 Janet Maybin

discourses. The examples quoted illustrate the kinds of subject matter, language practices and exploration of identity that are found across the data.

Taking on voices, invoking discourses When Martie introduces sexual innuendo into the account above he positions himself Wrmly as a heterosexual male, inviting the listener into his perspective (“her legs, man...”). Children’s stories to each other during the school day are often told within the context of fast moving exchanges and a competitive jostling for conversational space, especially among the boys, so narratives have to immediately grab and hold the audience’s attention. Martie’s story is successful partly because it plugs into a powerful male gendered discourse about fancying attractive females. As well as presenting an active gendered position for himself (Martie is the one doing the fancying), this story of Xirtation also positions its audience along gendered lines. The boys are invited to collude with the gendered perspective of the narrator (‘she was really nice if you know what I mean’), and the girls are positioned as passive spectators for this public performance of male heterosexuality. The way in which this conversation was dominated by the boys was echoed in other stories of self-display told in public arenas. The girls in my study related plenty of stories which depicted themselves as powerful but these were told mainly in more private contexts. They also took on active roles in more private heterosexual encounters. During the three days I was recording ten-year-old Julie, she asked friends a number of times about whether they were going out with particular boys. ‘Going out’ with a boy or girlfriend was an important topic of conversation among the children and particular individuals were paired together as boyfriend and girlfriend until one was ‘dumped’ or ‘chucked’ by the other. This pairing, however, seemed to happen largely at the discursive level, with one child asking another (often through a mutual friend) whether they wanted to be their girlfriend or boyfriend and possibly exchanging notes and cards or presents, but not actually engaging in any other kinds of ‘courting’ behaviour. Conversations provided an arena to rehearse cultural courtship patterns, to tease each other about emerging or imaginary sexual interest and to acquire and exchange knowledge about how heterosexual relationships are ‘done’. In the next example, recorded while the children were eating their sandwiches together at lunchtime, Julie is attempting to engage the interest of


David, a boy she expresses interest in a number of times over the three days I was recording her. As in Martie’s story about the airhostess, two alternative frameworks of interpretation are set up within her interaction. 1

Julie David Julie

5 David Julie

10 David Julie

David 15 Julie David Julie David 20 Julie

Do you know where I live? Right if you go along Redlea the only blue door, that’s where I live. The only blue door in Redlea. Only? Right, if you can’t get through, go to my next door neighbour’s, that side (... ), go through her place, jump over the fence and go down my path. Which number do you bang on? One three four. And if you can’t get through, go to, go round to number one three two, go through the fence, over the wood (....) E you got a bike? Puncture (........) got lost. I got skates. I can hold onto the back of your bike and go oooooh! (pause) Do you really go out with thingy (pause) MaWho? Mellie No What, did she chuck you? Why? (pause) Do you think Warren will mind if I move onto your table? No. It’s my table, I was the Wrst one on it, so I own it. You don’t, the school does. What’s the hottest part of the sun? What’s the hottest part of the sun? (pause) Page three!

The conversation starts oV in a child’s world of knocking on each other’s doors after school to go out and play. David responds to Julie’s invitation by asking if she has a bike, and at this point Julie suggests that David should pull her along behind his bike on her skates (line 11–12). She immediately follows this with a question about whether David is going out with Mellie (pretending initially to forget her name, which she had discussed shortly before in a conversation with girlfriends). This question retrospectively reframes her previous invitation, and her enquiry about whether Mellie has chucked David (line 17) could now be seen as an enquiry about whether he is ‘available’ as a boyfriend, especially as it is immediately followed by the suggestion that Julie sit with David in class (line 17). This last request is skilfully deXected towards Warren (“Do you think Warren will mind if I move onto your table?”), thus guarding against loss of face through a direct refusal from David, and mitigating what might be otherwise regarded as an overly direct approach. David’s more childish idea of ‘owning’ tables is quickly refuted by Julie in similar

262 Janet Maybin

terms, but she immediately follows this up with a joke which depends for its humour on ‘hot’ photographs of naked female models in the Sun newspaper (lines 20–21). In one sense Julie is using language as a resource and drawing on both childhood and teenage discourses to negotiate her relationship with David, whose response will to some extent determine which meanings are carried forwards (and he seems singularly uninterested in or unaware of the Xirtatious connotations of the interaction). The way Julie sets up and manages this ambiguity is an intrinsic part of her attempt to accomplish particular conversational purposes. But these discourses are also themselves shaping the choices of meanings available. The words ‘go out with’, ‘chuck’ and ‘hot’ all have speciWc cultural connotations, and invoke particular kinds of gender relations. Thus, although language may be a resource, it is not a neutral one but rather pushes Julie towards taking up particular positions and values. The ambiguity and provisionality of her approach allows Julie a way of trying out and testing these positions and values with the opportunity at any point of moving back into the safer discourses of childhood. The next extract also illustrates this kind of exploration of culturally available ways of expressing heterosexuality and gender identity, this time in talk among girls. The transcript starts in the maths class where Julie is working out how much each of a number of customers in a cafe will have to pay for their meals. She has just added up ‘Tom Ato’s’ bill. Julie Miss P

Julie Nicole Julie Nicole Julie Nicole Julie

J+N Julie

Three pounds twelve I make Tom Ato. Back in a second. Miss, can I go to the toilet please? Yes alright (sound of Julie’s heels as she goes down the corridor. When she enters the toilets the acoustics on the tape change abruptly, with the tiled walls making the voices echo. Carol and Nicole are already there) Oh, hi. Where did you get your hair permed? (..............) You’re not going out with Sasha, are you? Yea Are you? Yea, I hope so (laughs) You’ve got darker skin than me, I’ve got a sun tan. (pause) (to Carol who is adjusting her skirt) I should think so too, it’s disgusting, that skirt is! Aii ... don’t!(Nicole starts tapping her feet on the tiled Xoor) Do you do tap dancing? (both girls start tapping their feet and singing) ‘I just called to say I love you, and I mean it, from the bottom of my heart’ Caught you that time, Carol- ooh! What’s the matter, Carol, don’t


Julie

show your tits! (laughs) (to Nicole) I went like this to Carol, I says, I pulls down her top, I went phtt ‘don’t show your tits!’ (Nicole laughs). (Julie leaves the toilets, walks down the corridor, re-enters the classroom, and sits down.) Turn over – six plates of chips – oh I’ve nearly Wnished my book. I’ve got one page to do.

As well as switching between childhood and adolescence, children switch between diVerent contexts which oVer contrasting possibilities for gender identity. In the example above Julie moves from the world of the classroom, where girls are rewarded for being amenable pupils, into a discourse of teenage femininity expressed through echoes of popular songs and references to boyfriends and sexually provocative clothing. The vocabulary of the conversation in the toilets is diVerent, the subject matter is diVerent and the role of the girls are diVerent. They are no longer pupils straining to interpret the teacher’s instructions and produce a neat, acceptable piece of work, but young adolescents concerned with trying out particular notions of femininity. Personal worth here is determined not by how quickly and accurately sums can be completed but by how attractive you are to boys and how much experience you have had in ‘going out’ with them. The authoritative voice is not the text book, but the pop song. In my data there are frequent examples of children taking on the voices of textbooks, popular songs, teachers, parents, other children and themselves, in the course of their conversations. While appropriated and reported voices are an important feature in oral communication generally, they have a particular role to play in the context of children’s social, intellectual and moral development. Bakhtin (1981) suggests that we are always inserting other people’s voices and their viewpoints into our speech. Authoritative voices are often reproduced by children to guide their actions, strengthen an argument or evoke an alternative discourse. In my data, pupils often reproduced the voices of teachers and textbooks as sources of authority while they talked over their work and girls sang snatches of popular songs together during more informal moments in school, invoking the possibilities of a more sexualised discourse of identity and relationship. In addition to directly reproducing authoritative voices, children also reframed and manipulated the voices of others, especially within anecdotes and stories, to achieved desired eVects. In the next example the gendered voices Darren manufactures are central to the impact of his anecdote, and the gendered identity he projects for himself provokes an easy positive response from his audience. Like Martie’s story about the airhostess,

264 Janet Maybin

this anecdote plugs into a powerful gendered discourse, in this case about machismo and male bravado. Darren and Martie are milling about with other children in a queue in the playground, waiting to go in to lunch. At this point, one child had just sworn at another. Martie Darren

I said that to a real man and he went, he went ‘dick head’ [and I went] ‘of course I am!’ (laughter) And he goes èrm!’ (growling and laughter) This man called me a fucking bastard, right, I go ‘back to you’, he goes ‘come here’, I go ‘come on, then’ and he’s got about size ten trainers and he chased me, right, and then when he got, he catched me, right, like that, and he goes ‘who’s fucking saying?’ And I goes ‘fuck oV’, I says ‘fuck oV’ and he goes, he goes, ‘Do you want a Wght?’ I go (falsetto voice) ‘not tonight, darling’ and he goes ‘piss oV!’ (laughter)

Darren’s story is a response here to Martie’s rather abbreviated anecdote. It is more developed, the man is more frightening, and the turnaround at the end more dramatic and ingenious. Darren, like most of the children, uses reported dialogue to convey the action in his story. In addition to his own voice and the voice of the man with the size ten trainers, when things are getting really alarming Darren portrays himself as taking on a diVerent voice (“not tonight, darling”), using a slightly higher pitched voice to caricature what could be either a woman or a homosexual man rejecting a partner’s advances. The use of this voice invokes an alternative interpretative frame for the encounter, changing it from a male Wght to a sexual tiV and humorously defusing the situation. Through this frame transformation, Darren manages to signal a kind of submission which still enables him to maintain face rather more successfully than Martie did in the preceding turn (“he went ‘dick head’ [and I went] ‘of course I am!’ ”) As well as providing a turn in the immediate conversation, Darren’s anecdote also contributes to the ‘long conversation’ about toughness and canniness which are important aspects of the way the boys present themselves to each other. None of the girls’ stories portrayed them as baiting or taking on physically stronger opponents in this kind of way and, indeed, Darren’s assumption of a feminine sounding voice is accepted as a signal of submission by the man who is chasing him. Darren’s falsetto voice achieves its comic eVect within the story because of its incongruity within the context of the macho exchange, and Darren can momentarily take on a female or homosexual identity without jeopardising the macho masculine identity he has successfully projected in the Wrst part of the anecdote.


Troublesome stories The children in my study were continually telling stories in the course of exchanging ideas, explaining, arguing, or simply entertaining one another and passing the time. Narratives ranged from Xeeting anecdotes to more lengthy, clearly framed accounts. Some were told by one speaker, some collaboratively, and other stories emerged piecemeal through the course of a conversation. Labov (1972:359) deWnes a conversational narrative as ‘one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events’, and he stresses their evaluative function. That is, the narrator is using the story to put across a personal perspective, a particular evaluation of events, relationships or individuals. This evaluation may be conveyed through a kind of aside to the audience, as in the anecdote about the airhostess at the beginning of this chapter when Martie says “she was really nice if you know what I mean”, or through part of the description within the story, as in Darren’s account where he emphasises the size of the man who chased him, and therefore his own daring: “he’s got about size ten trainers!” A third way of conveying evaluation is in the voices of characters within the story, through which the narrator conveys particular perspectives. For the children in my data, interaction or conXict between the voices they invoked enabled them to explore their own evaluation of alternative or conXicting perspectives concerning, among other things, ways of being masculine or feminine. While the examples of data discussed so far all came from my continuous recordings of children’s talk among themselves, the two examples in this section come from my informal interviews with friendship pairs, where I raised a number of themes from the continuous recordings that I wanted to explore further with the children, for example their leisure time activities and literacy practices, their involvement in gangs and clubs and the practice of swapping. I also encouraged them to pursue any subjects that they themselves raised. In their talk during the interview children’s narratives were longer and provided a kind of suspended discursive space where speakers could explore an issue in more detail. The friends (who were all same-gender pairs) tended to support each other’s narratives and some told stories collaboratively. In this relatively private context the boys in my study were just as likely to share the conversational Xoor, or mirror each other’s accounts, as the girls. Whether this apparently female conversational style (Coates 1996, 1997) is the result of the immaturity of the children, or the intimacy of the context, I am not sure.

266 Janet Maybin

Certainly, boys in my data tended to use the same range of collaborative language strategies as girls when they were talking with friends in relatively private conversations. There was, however, a distinctive diVerence in terms of the topics which boys and girls chose to introduce into the conversation during my interview with them. Like Holmes (1997) in her study of New Zealand men and women’s conversational stories, I found that the boys wanted to talk about things, activities and accomplishments, while the girls talked about people, relationships and feelings. The children’s explicit exploration of gender and identity was therefore done in the interviews largely around these diVerent kinds of topics. The Wrst story comes from my interview with Lee (11 years) and GeoVrey (10 years), who talked extensively to me about their interest in animals and birds. 1

Lee

5

10 Geof

15

Lee Geof

Janet Geof 20 Lee

25

Geof

/Yesterday I was on, I was walking with my mum, we walked past this bush, and there was this nest and it was fallen down on the Xoor, and I goes ‘Mum look, there’s a nest on the Xoor’, and I goes ‘Mum can I go and have a look at it?’ and I went over there and there was four baby chicks in it, little chicks, I think they were willow warbler and my mum said ‘Climb up and put them back in the tree’, so and I had some bread, eaten some bread, so I fed it bits of bread, cause she had to go to the phone, and em she waited and I put it back up in the tree and its mum’s with it now. Yea, cause someone, someone had pulled the nest down, out of the tree I know this kid called Richie Binns who knocked a nest down on purpose E They’d probably be dead by now /three little birds in there, one of them got thrown in my court and got squashed, one of them got dumped in a bush and that got squashed, and one got run over. Aah, that’s a shame And I spent all that time putting worms and that in the nest, put it up in the tree, Richie Binns knocked it back down again. That’s, then, that’s when they got squashed. The ones I found yesterday are probably dead by now cause this girl I know called Ellie goes to (name of school) she’ll probably nick them, cause she loves birds. I know someone called Alan Horton, whenever he sees a bird’s nest he climbs up the tree and goes (gruV voice) ‘There’s eggs in it’ and takes the whole bird’s nest into his shed, gets the eggs and smashes them with a hammer


Nurturing behaviour like Lee’s and GeoVrey’s tended to be celebrated within the girls’ talk, where accounts of the vulnerability and antics of younger children or animals were invariably met with an enthusiastic ‘Ah, isn’t that sweet’ type of response, and girls invited each other to mother the small toys which were brought into school and borrowed or swapped. Whereas a nurturing discourse appeared to be a powerful marker of in-group solidarity for the girls, however, such a discourse did not seem to be immediately available to the boys. Lee and GeoVrey’s repeated contrasts of their own actions with those of others suggests a need for conWrmation that their own evaluative position is justiWed. In contrasting their solicitous treatment of baby birds to that of Richie Binns who knocks nests out of trees on purpose (line 12), Ellie who kills with kindness (line 22–24) and the hammer-wielding Alan Horton (line 25– 28), Lee and GeoVrey are reassuring each other that their own response is the morally correct one. Children, like adults, often gain a sense of their own identities through diVerentiating themselves from others (Miller et al. 1992), and while GeoVrey’s animation of Alan Horton (line 26) enables him to brieXy explore this diVerent, more violent version of masculinity, GeoVrey is clearly positioning himself as diVerent from Alan, and similar to Lee. Why do the boys have to do so much discursive work around this issue? I would suggest that GeoVrey and Lee are not able to invoke an instantly recognisable discourse within which to celebrate nurturing behaviour. Rather, they have to deWne themselves against the images of Richie Binns and Alan Horton. In Wnding ways of talking about gentleness and kindness to small helpless creatures, the boys seem to be expressing aspects of themselves which sit uneasily with more generally accepted powerful cultural conceptions of masculinity (Connell 1995). The behaviour of others was also explored at some length by Michelle and Kim (both 11 years old), who told me a series of linked stories about people being treated unfairly in various incidents in school and at home. These included a number of stories about Michelle’s father, who had moved out when Michelle was Wve, but who kept coming back and abusing her mother. In the Wrst extract below, Michelle recounts one violent incident where her father’s toughness and violence are portrayed through the voice she creates for him (marked by a gruV, vehement tone on the tape), and his and her mother’s anger are contrasted with her own level headed “Mum, just go in there and I’ll stay with ya” (lines 22–23), which resolves the situation.

268 Janet Maybin

1

Michelle

5 Janet Michelle 10

15

20

25

Kim Michelle 30

He’s jealous you know you can get men jealous but they’re allowed to go with someone else but if they Wnd out their wife’s got someone else and they’ve left.... Cause my mumshe, she had some boyfriends and he, he caught her out once and he done her really badly, smashed all the pipes in her stomach What, what, your dad? Cause he can be nasty when he wants to ..We’ve got a massive telly in our front room and all furniture we’ve got new and it, my mum run out once cause he whacked the phone right round her face- she just run out the back, so did I cause I’m more- I love my dad, I love them both but I’m close to my dad, but, if he lays a hand on her I’m on my mum’s side, do you know what I mean? So I run out with her- and em, we- we sat down outside the front with Ann and all that (laughs) this man thought he was well hard, the other boys called him out the house, he sat out there, and when my dad come out and he (dad) goes ‘You try to stick up for my wife, I’ll have you all on’, you know, beat ’em all up (laughs) and all the men walked in their house and shut the door. So my dad goes to my mum ‘Right, see you later, I’m going to smash your telly’ and he pretended to smash that he goes ‘I’ll see you later I’m going to smash your furniture in half’ (laughs). And my mum was kind of going ‘If you don’t get in here I will do it’ and all that. I said ‘Mum, just go in there and I’ll stay with ya’ so I walked in there with them and he didn’t touch her at all /He won’t touch her with- if Michelle’s there because /Yes cause I’m his favourite... I’m closest to my dad, like all girls mostly are, cause my mum’s closer to her dad

In this extract, the danger and violence of the situation are given impact and immediacy through the voices of Michelle’s parents. Her father’s three utterances: “You try to stick up for my wife, I’ll have you all on” (line 18–19), “Right, see you later, I’m going to smash your telly” (line 21) and “I’ll see you later I’m going to smash your furniture in half” (lines 22–23) and her mother’s angry “If you don’t get in here I will do it” (24–25) build up the tension and suspense to make Michelle’s own successful intervention all the more remarkable. The incident is strongly coloured by male violence, by Michelle’s father, the neighbour who thinks he is “well hard”, and the boys who call him out, perhaps hoping for a Wght. Michelle’s mum is also angry, but the force of her speech is mitigated by “kind of” (line 24). Michelle momentarily tries on her


father’s strength and violence and her mother’s anger and fear through her reproduction of their voices. In spite of her father’s violence, Michelle states twice that she is closer to him than to her mother (lines 12 and 29), and her description of how all the neighbourhood men are frightened of him suggests a certain pride. In her general pronouncements about relationships, however, it is clear that she is aligning herself with her mother’s perspective: “You can get men jealous but they’re allowed to go with someone else” (lines 1–2) and “I’m closest to my dad, like all girls mostly are, cause my mum’s closer to her dad” (lines 29–30). This alignment with her mother is produced even more clearly in the next extract, when Michelle explains her mother’s response to the doctor’s suggestion that she should take her husband to court: 1

5

Michelle

But my dad can get nicked cause the doctor see all the bruises over her and he says ‘Who’s done this?’ and he found out and it’s on his records, you know they keep records, so he retyped it out again, she goes to the doctor’s about crying all day with the bruises. He said that we’ll go and get him done and she said ‘Don’t, don’t’ cause when he comes out here she doesn’t want to do him any more cause she’s really scared of him...but he said from now on he won’t lay a hand on her, but that’s a lie my mum said.

In line 5, Michelle moves from direct reporting of her mother’s speech ‘Don’t don’t’, into a short stretch of discourse which is grammatically her own voice as narrator, but which is strongly coloured emotionally by her mother’s voice. This is even clearer in the oral recording, where Michelle’s voice tone echoes her mother’s fear. In the comment ‘cause when he comes out here she doesn’t want to do him any more cause she’s really scared of him’ (lines 6–8) we can hear both Michelle’s voice and her mother’s, simultaneously. In this kind of double-voiced discourse (Bakhtin 1984), or ‘free indirect discourse’ (Toolan 1998) the boundaries between the narrator’s and another’s voice are blurred as the narrator temporally takes on the words and perspective of a character. In grammatical terms free indirect discourse is signalled by the use of a third person pronoun for the speaker (‘she’ for Michelle’s mother), proximal deictics as in direct discourse (‘here’), and prominent use of modality markers which reXect the perspective of a character rather than the narrator (‘want to do him’). Free indirect discourse, often emotive, conveys the internal beliefs and feelings of a particular character, thus constituting a switch in focalisation

270 Janet Maybin

within the account and at this point in Michelle’s narrative she seems to align herself most closely with her mother’s perspective. The contradiction between Michelle’s statements about her closeness to her father and her focal alignment with her mother reXects the dilemma of loving both her two warring parents, whose relationship colours Michelle’s negotiation of her own gendered identity as she moves from childhood into adolescence. While Michelle seems to position herself with her mother, she portrays herself as more powerful than her and manages to express attachment to her father and admiration of his strength without condoning his behaviour.

Conclusion In this chapter I have examined some of the ways in which the move from childhood into adolescent gender identities is mediated within children’s informal talk. The content of their conversations, their engagement in diVerent language practices, and the ways in which they invoke and are positioned within discourses all contribute to their explorations of gendered behaviour and identities. Sometimes the subject matter of children’s talk focuses directly on gendered identities or sexuality, and they take up evaluative positions in relation to the physical attractions of the opposite sex (Martie), present themselves as macho (Darren), or use a suggestive joke to colour an interaction (Julie). Gendered relationships and identities are often explored within the context of conversations about other recurring themes which are of particular interest to this age-group, for example relationships with parents and other authority Wgures, courage, fairness, care and cruelty. In talk concerning these issues, children may rehearse readily available discursive positions, as in Darren’s anecdote, or they may, as in Lee and GeoVrey’s conversation, endeavour to deWne themselves against the positions of others. Alternatively, children may explore problematical models of gendered behaviour and relationships through a series of narrative accounts, like Michelle. Frequently in their accounts children take on or report other people’s voices, in order to invoke a discourse (Julie, Martie), try out an alternative kind of identity (GeoVrey) or to explore conXict (Michelle). Volosinov (1986) suggests that the way we reproduce or frame a voice adds a new layer of meaning. Thus, for example, the pop song in the girls’ toilet is used as an indexical sign for a particular discourse of teenage femininity, Alan Horton’s voice is framed as the immoral ‘other’ and Michelle uses her parents’ voices to explore her own


position in relation to their behaviour. Bakhtin (1981:134) suggests that “the ideological becoming of a human being ... is the process of selectively assimilating the voices of others”. This selection must surely involve trying out voices, exploring the relationships between them and examining the power and potential of voices to deWne contexts, invoke discourses and construct identity. The children’s diVerent language practices oVer a range of possibilities for the expression and negotiation of gender identities; Julie does ‘being a girl’ diVerently when messing about with other girls in the toilets and when chatting up David over their sandwiches. Some language practices may be more available to one gender than the other; for example I have suggested that the public competitive exchange of anecdotes of self-display tended to be dominated by boys. But a more signiWcant diVerence between boys and girls seems to be their positioning in relation to culturally available discourses of masculinity and femininity. It is through negotiating these discourses, whether represented in jokes about Page 3 of the Sun or in folk wisdom about the diVerent sexual rights of men and women, that the children are beginning to explore the possibilities and limitations of readily available expressions of gendered identity. They do not, however, take on these identities in a straightforward and unquestioning way. Rather, their negotiation and exploration of gendered relationships and behaviour involves the complex manipulation of diVerent interpretative frames and the invoking and reproduction of voices from written texts, songs, adults and other children. Children draw on available discourses to pursue their own purposes and are simultaneously positioned and constructed within them. Frequently falling back on the safer and more familiar discourses of childhood, these ten to twelve year olds are nevertheless beginning to tentatively try out new ways of inhabiting their gender, drawing on the culturally available resources around them and their own experience and imagination.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the novel”. In The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist (ed), (trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist), 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. and ed. C. Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Cameron, Deborah. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. “Performing gender identity: young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexuality”. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds), 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell. Coates, Jennifer. 1996. Women Talk. Conversations between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell. Coates, Jennifer. 1997. “One-at-a-time: the organisation of men’s talk”. In Language and Masculinity, S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds), 107–129. Oxford: Blackwell. Connell, Robert W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1995. “Constructing meanings, constructing selves. Snapshots of language, gender and class from Belten High”. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds), 469–507. London: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The order of discourse”. In Untying the Text: a Post-structuralist Reader, R. Young. (ed), 48–78. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gal, Susan. 1995. “Language, gender and power”. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds), 169–182. London: Routledge. Goodwin, Marjorie. 1990. He-said-she-said. Talk as Social Organisation among Black Children. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Holmes, Janet. 1997. “Storytelling in New Zealand women’s and men’s talk”. In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed), 263–293. London: Sage. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Maybin, Janet. 1996 “Story voices: the use of reported speech in 10–12 year olds’ spontaneous narratives”. Current Issues in Language and Society 3(1):36–48. Maybin, Janet. 1998. “Children’s voices: talk, knowledge and identity”. In The Sociolinguistics Reader:vol 2: Gender and discourse, J. Cheshire and P. Trudgill (eds), 278– 294. London: Edward Arnold. Maybin, Janet. 1999. “Framing and evaluation in 10–12 year old school children’s use of appropriated speech, in relation to their induction into educational procedures and practices”. TEXT 19(4):459–484. Miller, Peggy J., Mintz, Judith, Hoogstra, Lisa, Fung, Heidi and Potts, Randolph. 1992. “The narrated self: young children’s construction of self in relation to others in conversational stories of personal experience”. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 38:45–67. Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toolan, Michael J. 1988. Narrative: a Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge. Volosinov, Valentin. 1986 (trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.


Appendix: Transcription conventions Comments in italics and parentheses clarify unclear references, or paralinguistic features e.g. (laughter). (...) indicates words on the tape which I can’t make out / indicates where another speaker interrupts or cuts in [ indicate simultaneous talk.



Gendered Discourses of Parenthood



Chapter 12

Pregnant self and lost identity in Ana Blandiana’s ‘Children’s Crusade’ An ironical echo of the patriarchal pro-natality discourse in communist Romania Daniela Sorea University of Bucharest, Romania

Historical background On October 1, 1966, in Romania, Ceausescu issued Decree 700: what was to be fearfully called ‘The Decree’ for almost a quarter of a century, the law forbidding any birth control procedures. Importing contraceptive means was banned, dissemination of knowledge about family planning strategies and birth-prevention devices was censored, abortion was proclaimed illegal and those practising it on themselves or on any other person were liable to imprisonment. Women were required to have a monthly pregnancy test by a gynaecologist to detect any pregnancy, and the gynecologist would keep track of it until delivery (Baban 1996:60; Kligman 1998:42–53). The extremely few newspapers and magazines printed in communist Romania, as well as the even fewer TV broadcasts, were imbued with vehement pro-birth discourses. In compliance with ‘The Decree’, women were bidden to deliver as many children as possible, given the alleged need of the homeland for revitalisation through boosting of the birth rate (Kligman 1998:42–46). Ana Blandiana’s poem is simultaneously an elegy and a mock eulogy of this pronatality discourse which ceaselessly interpellated the Romanian nation for 23 long years:

278 Daniela Sorea

Cruciada Copiilor de Ana Blandiana Un întreg popor Nenascut înca Dar condamnat la nastere Încolonat dinainte de nastere, Foetus lânga foetus, Un întreg popor Care n-aude, nu vede, nu-ntelege, Dar înainteaza Prin trupuri zvârcolite de femei, Prin sânge de mame Neîntrebate.

Children’s Crusade by Ana Blandiana An entire nation, Still unborn, Yet doomed to birth, Ranged in battalions before birth, Foetus next to foetus, A whole nation Unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping, Yet advancing Through the writhing bodies of women, Through the gore of mothers Unconsenting.

A patriarchal misogynist state of the overtly intrusive type (Kligman 1998:5– 6), the Romanian totalitarian state empowered itself with the ‘almighty’ right to control the ‘fertile lot’, to record any current pregnancy and eventually to detect and punish all those who desisted from fulWlling their ‘sacred’ patriotic duty of “making their precious contribution to the increase of the socialist nation”. By means of its reproduction politics, the intrusive state took decisions on behalf of and allegedly for the beneWt of its citizens, never contemplating taking into account individual consent: In Ceausescu’s Romania, individual rights did not form part of public or private discourse. The state legislated social equality and ideologically supported social rights (e.g. jobs, housing, access to medical care). The banning of abortion and the bearing of children were related to citizens’ obligations to the paternalist state that ‘cared’ for them. Individual rights were not an issue (Kligman 1998:6).

State authorities regarded the foetus as the property of the socialist society and giving birth as a patriotic duty. All women refusing to have four or Wve babies deserved to be branded as ‘criminal infringers of the laws of natural reproduction’ (Baban 1996:51). The totalitarian state’s intervention in reproductive issues usurped women’s privacy and subjected their bodily capacity for mothering to public scrutiny, literally penetrating their public space and eVacing the public/private border. Thus, individual women were denied the right to refuse public assessment of their bodies in terms of their birth-giving potential. Paradoxically, the Decree and the propaganda it inspired1 became a simultaneously horrifying and ludicrous discourse. As you may have already noticed, no source is speciWed for quotations from oYcial pro-birth texts. The

Pregnant self and lost identity in Ana Blandiana’s ‘Children’s Crusade’ 279

explanation is simple: most expressions pertaining to the oYcial speeches in the Ceausescu regime used to be read or heard everywhere and believed nowhere. They continually made the headlines of each and every newspaper and were ceaselessly bellowed by Ceausescu during all gatherings of the ‘working people’, while most citizens used to consistently dismiss them in disbelief, and reiterate them ironically. As Gibbs deWnes it: Verbal irony is recognised by literary scholars as a technique of using incongruity to suggest a distinction between reality and expectation – saying one thing and meaning another – with the audience aware of both (Gibbs 1994:362; emphasis mine).

The blatant mismatch between reality and the discourse allegedly representing it was both intriguing and ridiculous to most Romanians, who used to draw on verbal irony in order to highlight this incongruity. Famous verbal clichés from Ceausescu’s speeches describing Romanians as having reached “the highest peak of civilisation and progress” and “having the privilege to live in the many-sidedly-developed socialist society” struck the ear as incongruous to the point of grotesqueness in the face of the shortages and constraints Romanians had to put up with every single day. As I know from personal experience and as Kligman convincingly points out in her chapter ‘Building Socialism’ (1998:19–41), in communist Romania food was rationed; there were endless queues for milk, bread and toilet paper; long hours without electricity, heat or running water; empty shops; censorship at all levels (from personal remarks to printed books); and refusal of visas to Western (and even Eastern) European countries. People risked arrest for verbally criticising the ferocity of the communist regime and the incompetence of its leaders. Since freedom of speech was denied, Romanians were left only with the right to grin and bear it (a face haz de necaz) and derisively reiterate oYcial slogans. Given the incongruity between the incommensurable beneWts of communism gloriWed in oYcial discourses addressing an allegedly democratic and prosperous nation, and the unimaginable deprivation most people lived in, the quoting of pompous chunks from oYcial discourses could only be understood as ironic. By engaging in such mentions themselves, ironists adopted an attitude of duplicity (in Romanian, dedublare) which comprised two representations of the self: a public self, feigning consent and approval towards the oYcial discourses, and a private self, manifesting contempt, derision or outrage towards such discourses by ironically repeating those chunks that most blatantly contrasted with reality (see Kligman 1998:14–15).

280 Daniela Sorea

The poem as counter-text to the totalitarian discourse A famous dissident in Ceausescu’s time, Ana Blandiana was awarded several international distinctions for those very poems whose publication had been forbidden in Romania. Children’s Crusade is one such poem, written in 1984 but only published after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. The poem has aroused both political and academic interest in Romania, although it does not rank among the poems to have made Blandiana a resonant dissident. The translation provided in the present chapter is mine (loss of polysemy or emotional connotations will be speciWed whenever discrepancies or gaps arise between the Romanian and the English versions).2 The title, Children’s Crusade, can be read as an ironical echo in more ways than one. First, it may reiterate the name of the 1212 mediaeval crusade, during which hundreds of children led by one Nicholas, aged 12, marched from the German Rhineland through the Alps to Italy, hoping to cross the sea dry-shod and to recapture Christ’s Sepulcher in Jerusalem.3 In Romanian, however, ‘Cruciada copiilor’ is meant to sound ambiguous, as it may mean either the war waged by the unwanted children against their bearers and implicitly against those that doomed their mothers to give birth to them, or the war waged by a hostile world against the unborn children. If this ambiguity were to be further pursued, the poem could be viewed both as the lament of the unconsenting mothers and as the ironical echo of the oYcial discourse eulogising motherhood. Since it ironically echoes the propaganda discourse, Blandiana’s poem is what Hutcheon calls a ‘countersong’ (literal translation of the Greek parodia) to the pro-birth demand issued by the voice of authority: The preWx para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of ‘counter’ or ‘against’. Thus parody becomes an opposition or contrast between texts. This is presumably the formal starting point for the deWnition’s customary pragmatic component of ridicule: one text is set against another with the intent of mocking or making it ludicrous.… However, para in Greek can also mean ‘beside’, and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast (Hutcheon 1991:32).

Hutcheon’s deWnition of parody (1992) facilitates the teasing out of the parodic dimension in Blandiana’s poem. By assuming the summoning tonality and the military terminology (an entire nation, ranged in battalions, advancing) of the oYcial pro-natality discourse, the poem becomes a protest-laden


counter-text. Thus, Blandiana’s depiction of the site of birth as a site of grotesque homogeneity displays a striking similarity to that of the crowds compelled to parade in honour of their ‘Beloved Leader and President’. The amorphousness of the foetuses ranged in battalions (in Romanian incolonati means not only ranged in battalions but also ranged in parade columns) recalls the amorphousness of the ‘working people’ trained and summoned to march and pay homage to their leader in the course of minutely organised kitsch mega-parades.4 Like the site of the parade, the site of birth is invaded by homogeneity and depleted of any trace of agency. The picture is that of a non-agentive shapeless mass of writhing foetuses entrapped within the bodies of a throng of matres genetrices, doomed to expel them into a carceral archipelago. The image of the throng of undiVerentiated writhing unborn children seems to have inspired Margaret Atwood’s imaginary ‘brave new world’ in The Handmaid’s Tale (1987), Gilead. There, in a world running out of fertile wombs, instead of going to prison, women law-breakers are invested with the ‘sacred’ duty of becoming fertilised by mighty Father-of-the-Nation Wgures. They are to ‘serve’ the nation by delivering healthy babies, to be consequently appropriated as valuable national assets. As in Atwood’s book, the birth-giver in Blandiana’s poem is not only the prisoner of the carceral totalitarian universe she has to live in, she is equally the prisoner of the inner prison she bears in her womb: her unborn child.5 Along the same line of reasoning, the mock eulogy ‘brought to birth’ while introducing the word in a collocation like doomed to birth becomes the gruesomely ironical echo of the death penalty as a performative utterance. Since being born in a universe that solely wants one’s being as a contribution towards its propagandistic-nationalistic end is tantamount to incarceration in a death camp, birth becomes a punitive sentence to the same extent and with the same tragic consequences as death. If death was dictated by the ruling apparatus and its regulative policies in all communist regimes (Brzezinsky 1993:10–15), in Ceausescu’s Romania birth was a phenomenon beyond individual control and decision as well. Statistical surveys regarding the number of deaths ordered and carried out by post-war Romanian heads of state Gheorghiu-Dej and his successor Nicolae Ceausescu (as well as prominent communist leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), however, fail to provide adequate data for one of the following reasons:

282 Daniela Sorea

a. such statistics were hardly at all carried out during the regime; b. statistical analyses of genuine data were carried out solely by the Secret Police (‘Securitate’) and are even nowadays kept under lock and key by the current secret services c. statistical documents were destroyed by the same Secret Police whenever one dictatorship was replaced by another or when major political changes took place (in Romania, the dethroning of communism owing to the events in December 1989). Nevertheless, most contemporary political thinkers (Liiceanu 1996; Patapievici 1997) agree that the number of those who were killed or died from malnutrition, lack of medical assistance, physical torture and psychological harassment in communist political detention camps overall exceeded that of the Nazi camp victims (Patapievici 1997:205; Brzezinsky 1993:16–17). The number of deaths caused by abortion reached alarming rates during the Ceausescu regime, when most women were forced to undergo experiences resembling participation in battleWeld butchery. Some women acquired the skill of inducing miscarriage – usually by inserting soap bubbles or a knitting needle into the uterus – and became part of those registered with the label ‘invisible’ abortions (Kligman 1998:56). Those who failed to stage what might look like a spontaneous miscarriage had no other choice but to have an ‘invisible’ back street abortion (again see Kligman 1998). This alternative usually involved being taken blindfolded, in a car, to an unknown place in some remote slum, being strapped to a kitchen table, and having the abortion without any anaesthetics or sterilised surgical instruments. Lack of professionalism on the part of those who consented to perform such back street abortions – usually unqualiWed physicians or midwives who were not overconcerned with acceptable standards of hygiene – combined with women’s ignorance as to the risk they were exposing themselves to, led to the death of an overwhelming number of women. Many of those who did not die of septicaemia bled to death hidden in their own homes, or at a hospital where prosecutors forbade doctors to provide medical care to the ‘treacherous citizen’, or at a Police Station, beaten to a pulp by an overzealous investigator, eager to unveil the network of abortion practitioners (Baban 1996:60–63, Kligman 1998:57–67).


‘Interpretive resemblance’ and the language of the poem Sperber and Wilson (1996) characterise irony as a case of indirect quotation which involves the mention or echoing of an already uttered proposition in a context that is likely to be incongruous with a bona Wde interpretation of that proposition. Unlike reporting, which informs about somebody having expressed a certain thought, echoing is meant to express the utterer’s attitude towards the proposition echoed: The speaker echoes a thought she attributes to someone else, while dissociating herself from it with anything from mild ridicule to savage scorn (Sperber and Wilson 1996:265).

As Sperber and Wilson further specify, a speaker may dissociate herself from an attributed thought or opinion for one of two reasons: a. the speaker believes the opinion or thought is false and implies the opposite of what is literally said b. the speaker considers that entertaining the attributed thought or expressing the attributed opinion under a speciWc set of circumstances would be ‘patently absurd’ (Sperber and Wilson 1996:265–269). Like parody, irony involves both an echoic allusion and a dissociative attitude. While in parody, the echo is that of form, in irony the echo is related to content, as certain words or chunks of discourse are reiterated in a context which makes them sound absurd. In other words, irony involves interpretive resemblance or resemblance of content: Where resemblance of propositional content is involved, we talk of interpretive resemblance; we reanalyse echoic interpretations of an attributed thought or utterance, and verbal irony as a variety of echoic interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1996:267).

By echoing certain key words pertaining to the oYcial pro-natality discourse, Blandiana dissociates herself from the respective discourse and highlights its patent absurdity. Blandiana’s poem displays ‘interpretive resemblance’ to the oYcial pro-natality discourse since it simultaneously evokes it, exacerbates it and unveils the incongruity between this discourse and the dehumanising condition of the nation.6 Although recognition of irony may fail since “The communicator’s intentions cannot be decoded or deduced, but must be inferred by a fallible process of hypothesis formation and evaluation” (Sperber

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and Wilson 1996:269), the only reading of Blandiana’s poem a Romanian reader could entertain is the ironical one, given their awareness of the incongruity of what ‘airquotes’ (Gibbs 1994:368) from oYcial pro-natality discourses the poem reiterated and what the facts of life under the regime were. Like any successful piece of irony, Blandiana’s poem exploits the contradiction – tacitly acknowledged by the poet and her readers – between what is literally said and what constitutes the poet’s genuine belief. As Bernsten and Kennedy point out, “the contrast between the literal statement and the shared background knowledge can be a way of specifying an attitude ….” (1996:21). In this light, Blandiana’s attitude can readily be regarded as a mixture of outrage and helpless petriWcation in the face of an uncontrollable explosion of unwanted births on the one hand, and of derision and contempt inspired by those who ordered and controlled such births on the other. In the light of Clark and Gerrig’s ‘Pretense Theory’ (1984), Blandiana could be pretending to be somebody else, i.e. to impersonate the voice of authority, in order to address a Wctitious audience, a mass of listeners allegedly taking the oYcial discourse at face value. In this way, the poet manages to highlight the contrast between the belief presented (an echo of the belief espoused by the oYcial propaganda) and the belief actually held by her and imparted by her readers (that of rejection of and derision at the oYcial propaganda). Highlighting this contrast enables Blandiana to achieve what Rosen-Knill and Henry call ‘intentional re-presentation’ (1997:719–729). The poet juxtaposes the ‘represented’ or ‘parodied’ discourse and the ‘representing’ or ‘parodying’ discourse.7 This juxtaposition enables the exposure of the discrepancy between the parodying and the parodied voices, while equally amplifying the poet’s self-distancing from and refutation of the parodied voice. The simple but incisive language of Children’s Crusade introduces the reader into the nightmare of coerced pregnancy. Particularly violent are the images of erasure of the foetus’s features and senses: the foetus is unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping, attributes that are expressed in Romanian by means of relative clauses using verbs of perception in the negative (care n-aude, nu vede, nu-ntelege/who does/cannot hear, see and understand). EVacement of the mother’s will is suggested by the syntagm mothers unconsenting (in Romanian, the literal meaning of mame neintrebate is unasked mothers, mothers whose consent has never been required). The syntagm is particularly striking because it immediately brings to mind the image of the writhing bodies of women (trupuri zvircolite de femei). The succession of the two syntagms


suggests that the bodies have been totally deprived of will and that any potential consent or dissent has been drowned in the blood (singe) gushing from the writhing bodies (trupuri zvircolite). Such images build up a universe of ubiquitous loss of identity, the consequence of ceaseless merging of one body into another. The ever-increasing addition of expendable new bodies to the expandable body of the nation leads to further homogenisation via loss of individuality. Blandiana describes coerced pregnancy as a aggressive, ruthless, tumultuous still undesired performance: she uses lexemes that pertain to the discourse of war – crusade (cruciada), ranged in battalions (incolonati), advancing (inainteaza), writhing bodies (trupuri zvircolite), gore (singe) rather than those that pertain to the discourse of blissful motherhood. Paradoxically, Blandiana’s progressive enumeration of acts – from the premonitory, prophetic, irreversible act of dooming to birth to the agony-inXicting processes of creeping in battalions, advancing and writhing – is accompanied neither by agent speciWcation nor by verbs as semantic operators of performance. By means of what Judith Butler calls historicization (Butler 1997:36), Blandiana’s reiteration of the negative suYx un (unborn, unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping, unconsenting) in all adjectival modiWers of foetus congeals the unborn child into non-identity, while encoding and perpetuating the trauma it undergoes as well as the trauma it simultaneously inXicts upon the mother: If we understand the force of a name to be an eVect of its historicity, then that force is not the mere causal eVect of an inXicted blow, but works in part through an encoded memory or a trauma, one that lives in language and is carried in language. The force of the name depends not only on its iterability, but on a form of repetition that is linked to trauma, on what is, strictly speaking, not remembered, but relived, and relived in and through the linguistic substitution for the traumatic event (Butler, 1997:36).

The obsessive reiteration of what the unborn children are not emphasises the amorphousness of the traumatised and trauma-inXicters, the two becoming hardly discernible. The poet regards birth as performativity devoid of agency, as there is no consenting identity within the site of child delivery.8 The insertion of the collective noun nation (popor) accompanied by the adjectives entire and whole (in Romanian there is only one adjective, intreg, which means complete, not partitioned), a syntagm which was recurrent in all oYcial discourses, suggests an inXicted collective performance. During such a depersoniWed performance any trace of individual identity is erased while any

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distinction is blurred between the child doomed to be born despite its will and the mother doomed to give birth to it despite hers. In addition, Blandiana’s images of agglutination – foetus next to foetus, and forced regimentation – the creeping battalions, ironically echo situations and exhortations frequently encountered in most speeches delivered by Ceausescu. I shall only quote a few: vom lupta neabatut pentru victoria comunismului (undeterred we shall Wght for the victory of communism), vom lupta umar la umar (we shall Wght shoulder to shoulder), marsaluind spre victoria decisiva a comunismului (marching towards the decisive triumph of communism), which I regard as particularly illustrative of the incompatibility between the grandiose claims made in such speeches and the paucity and bondage of those they addressed. Despite the description of birth as an act of butchery and as participation in some institutionally inXicted battleWeld performance, I am nevertheless of the opinion that physical death is not what Blandiana designates by ironically echoing certain syntagms recurrent in oYcial discourses. Reiteration of chunks of pro-natality discourses or repetition with a diVerence – such as in the expression doomed to be born – rather invokes Solzhenitsin’s view of the living dead (as discussed in Steinhardt 1991): having stepped into the prison, one should consider oneself dead. If hope for survival is forever left behind, the threat of death becomes ineYcient. Once declared dead, the individual transcends their previously acquired and acknowledged identity and ceases to be the object of deceit, blackmail, humiliation, terror. Fear, the foundation of all totalitarian regimes, can only be vanquished if one claims to be dead instead of stating that one is alive.9

The discourse of birth as a discourse of lost identity Ironically echoed in Blandiana’s razor-sharp Crusade, the sentence passed on the ‘guilty without guilt’, on birth-givers and to-be-borns alike, creates a sarcastic counter-text intended to distortedly reiterate the discursive intrusion of the totalitarian state and of its patriarchal authority Wgures into the individual’s life. Blandiana’s discourse of corporeality presents the reader with two basic images: that of the mothers doomed to give birth, and that of the foetus doomed to be born. The mother-container is both the birth-boosting instrument of a patriarchal punitive ideology and the powerless, nurturing expe-


riencer of the traumatic discourse of pregnancy inXicted upon her as national duty. The foetus is both sentenced to extrusion into an oppressive universe, and to the writhing intrusion that colonises the mother’s body. Behind the aggressive patriotism it claimed to promote for the welfare of the nation, the pro-natality discourse of the Ceausescu era concealed a cynical misogynist discourse which held womanhood and femininity in deep patriarchal contempt (Baban 1996:51–53). As an institution, motherhood was publicly gloriWed.10 Ceausescu’s communism performed a monolithic institutionalisation of motherhood by grotesquely eulogising fertility as the means to enhance the size and strength of the nation. Once motherhood became a state-controlled institution, Romanian women were deprived of any right to exert control over their own bodies (Baban 1996:60–61). Designated as men’s working ‘comrades’ for their lifetime, women were solely assessed in terms of their capacity to bear and rear future citizens, invested with the lofty mission of building up what was both oYcially designated and ironically referred to as “the vast ediWce of the many-sidedly developed socialist society”: In Ceausescu’s Romania, family values were politically dictated and legislatively embodied. The banning of abortion was the organising principle around which political demography was conceptualised and implemented. Pro-natalism – introduced in 1966 and modiWed substantively in the two decades that followed – was an integral feature of Ceausescu’s communist nationalism, providing the means through which the Romanian population was to be ensured and ‘secured’. Legislation served to legitimate the political will of the regime while simultaneously deWning the parameters of legitimate intrusion into the practices of everyday life. Yet this formal legislation also oVered individuals a blueprint for assessing the windows of opportunity through which they might evade or resist the dictates of the Party/State (Kligman 1998:70).

The Wgure of Big Daddy watching over the children of his nation aligns itself with Mary Daly’s castigation of patriarchal systems, which subject women to bodily coercion and psychic bondage. Daly rightly claims (1973:23) that under patriarchal oppression women become “limited and undiVerentiated identities”, “zomboids” that are invaded and brainwashed by “the Fathers”. OYcial discourses repeatedly cast Ceausescu in the role of the Father-of-thenation (inspired by the Soviet worship of ‘djadja Stalin’) whom they had to obey in a robot-like, wordless, blind fashion. Kligman (1998:124) observes that the paternalist state structure engendered a whole set of ‘familial’ metaphors in the propagandistic discourses: thus Romania was tara mama (the mother country) while the Communist Party was addressed as partid parinte

288 Daniela Sorea

(the party as parent). In a social order where the state’s organisation was a wider version of the traditional patriarchal and patrilineal family, sexual activity for other purpose than procreation was perceived as anti-social and an act of indulgence – a ‘capitalist decadent practice’. In compliance with an agelong rural patriarchal tradition, women deserved public appreciation solely due to their assumed fertility and current or potential motherly status. Overtly somatophobic, the Romanian communist ideology gloriWed birth while never discursivising motherly experience. A combination of patriarchal authority and misogynist prudery prevented any issues related to mothering, other than its being part of a woman’s patriotic duty, from entering public discourse. Consequently, the pregnant woman’s identity was restricted to the concept of chora, i.e. the womb providing the raw matter for the future infant, to be subsequently moulded by the Father-State. Seeing mothers as receptacles/containers for the sons-and-daughters of the nation complies with the Aristotelian deWnition of chora: Aristotle, in continuing a tradition possibly initiated by Plato in his account of chora in Timaeus where maternity is regarded as a mere housing, receptacle, or nurse of being rather than a coproducer, distinguished matter or body from form, and in the case of reproduction, he believed that the mother provided the formless, passive, shapeless matter which, through the father, was given form, shape, and contour, speciWc features and attributes it otherwise lacked (Grosz 1994:5).

Blandiana’s imagery of the writhing bodies of women (trupuri zvircolite de femei) ironically echoes the view of mothers as a mere receptacles, passive providers of wombs for the future sons of the nations (Wi natiunii) – neither children nor sons and daughters – empowered to continue the mission of the Father of the nation (parintele natiunii), a name frequently assigned to communist heads of state. The political manipulation of reproduction and the pro-natality discourses implementing such manipulation fully enabled the state to intrude into women’s bodily spaces and to intervene into their bodily choices and practices. Such interventions have been analysed by the Romanian feminist philosopher Mihaela Miroiu in her book Convenio. Miroiu’s analysis of pregnancy draws on Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological-existentialism (Miroiu 1995:15–21), which perceives birth as a transition towards a new self that the birth-giver simultaneously craves for and dreads. What the birthgiver dreads is loss of identity, as if by the act of giving birth she might become


a diVerent person and cease to be her previous self. In Miroiu’s view, loss of identity is inevitable when a woman is deprived of her right to exert control not only over her own body, but also over her bodily capacities. J.J. Thompson’s ‘ethics of right’ (in Miroiu 1995:87–89) supports the idea that the pregnant woman and the unborn child are not two tenants in a house they have happened to rent at the same time by mistake. The house is the property of the mother, since if there is any fully justiWed right a human being beneWts from, that is the right over one’s own body. Miroiu discusses Thompson’s theory in terms of the right over one’s own body and implicitly of the right to make (full or partial) use of one’s bodily endowments. A woman can become pregnant and carry through a nine-month pregnancy, but it should be up to her whether she fully utilises this bodily capacity of hers. If the woman has been prevented from making a free choice and that choice has been made by the totalitarian state in the name of its pro-natality policy, a conXict is generated between the right to exert control over one’s body (pregnant or not), and the desire to enable the ‘living need’, i.e. the unborn child within the pregnant body, to become a person (Miroiu, 1995:89–90). According to Miroiu, the unborn child becomes a ‘living need’ the moment the mother no longer perceives it as a mere agglutination of cells and calls it a person instead of a foetus (Miroiu 1995:90). In other words, the conXict ceases the moment the mother deliberately chooses to utilise her body in order to give life to another human being. If, however, the pregnant woman fails to perceive the unborn child as a ‘living need’ meant to acquire personhood, initial symbiosis may turn into alienation of the birth-giver from the living need she has housed and is to nurture. Blandiana’s Crusade is the lament for this lost symbiosis. An ironical echo of the pro-natality discourse in Ceausescu’s Romania, Blandiana’s poem is a cry for re-humanisation, for re-investment of mothers with their long-lost personhood, for reinstatement of maternal agency. Blandiana’s poem is the voice of protest that still shouts when the body is in pain, when the voices of women in labour can no longer be heard.11 I would venture that Blandiana’s Crusade poetically compensates for the inexpressibility of the body’s pain as pain shatters language itself. By echoing violence, her language simultaneously describes and counters violence. In this way Blandiana’s poem is kindred to the memorable statement Toni Morrison made during her 1993 Nobel Lecture on Literature with special reference to the violence of representation: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives”.

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Notes 1. Kligman amply analyses such propaganda in the chapter ‘Spreading the Word’ of her (1998) book. 2. While classifying it as “a poem criticizing the regime’s brutal, seemingly senseless, political demographic policies” (Kligman 1998:147), Kligman also provides a translation: An entire population as yet unborn but condemned to birth lines up in rows, before birth fetus beside fetus An entire population which doesn’t see, doesn’t hear, doesn’t understand but develops through the convulsed bodies through the blood of mothers Unasked. 3. The mediaeval ‘Children’s Crusade’ followed the fourth anti-pagan crusade. Most children taking part in it either perished or stayed in Italy. Tradition has confused these children with a French children’s group led by young Stephen of Cloyes, said to have been promised free passage from Marseilles to the Holy Land, but who were sold into slavery instead. Crusading preachers, mass hysteria, and popular views of children as God’s instruments probably contributed to this phenomenon. 4. Homogenisation of individuals and the state’s desperate endeavour to eVace all gender-, race- or ethnicity-related diVerences promoted the image of the nation as a sum of ‘faceless masses’ (Kligman 1998:33). 5. ‘Romania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility’ (Atwood in Kligman 1998:42). 6. Concurring with Sperber and Wilson’s claim that there is a wide range of attitudes a speaker may espouse when echoing an utterance or a thought attributed to somebody she is keen on dissociating herself from (Sperber and Wilson 1996), Gibbs (1994:368) states that the ironic use of ‘airquotes’ may convey a multiplicity of attitudes on the part of the quoter. 7. Drawing on Bakhtin’s distinction between the representing and the represented styles, Rosen-Knill and Henry deWne ‘intentional re-presentation’ as follows: In verbal parody, the speaker intentionally recasts the object of parody in the form of a verbal expression. This act creates the parodic text as Bakhtin sees it, as the juxtaposition of the “represented (or parodied) style” (1981:75). More than this, the act of re-presentation intentionally recalls the object of parody and its context. The intentional re-presentation may take any linguistic form and target anything in the world: events, actions, individuals, groups, institutions, and/or


beliefs and thoughts (whether enacted by an individual, a group, or an institution) …. (Rosen-Knill and Henry 1997:723). 8. To use Butler’s term personhood (1992:16), one may state that in Blandiana’s poem there is no responsible acting within the site of performativity: Within philosophical discourse itself, the notion of ‘the person’ has received analytic elaboration on the assumption that whatever social context the person is ‘in’ remains somehow externally related to the deWnitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation (Butler 1992:16). 9. In the Preface to his Diary of Happiness (1991), the Romanian Christian philosopher Steinhardt develops Solzhenitsin’s dead-while-alive solution for survival, while discussing three others: Zinoviev’s freedom in insanity, Churchill’s lust for life and struggle when menaced by death and last, but not least, the mystical solution of faith in God. 10. Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution, as well as her claim that motherhood has often been institutionalised in a manner that has proved to be oppressive to women, are amply discussed by Grimshaw (1986:127). 11. The impossibility of discursivising pain and the unrepresentability of the pain language seeks to represent is sustained by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985).

References Atwood, Margaret. 1987. The Handmaid’s Tale. London:Virago Press. Blandiana, Ana. 1991. ‘Cruciada copiilor’. In 100 de poeme. Editura Tinerama. Baban, Adriana. 1996. “Viata sexuala a femeilor: o experienta traumatizanta in Romania socialista”. In Cine suntem noi? Despre identitatea femeilor din Romania moderna. Nicolaescu, Madalina (ed), 51–53, 60–63. Bucuresti: Editura Anima. Berntsen, Dorothy and Kennedy, John M. 1996. “Unresolved contradictions specifying attitudes–in metaphor, irony, understatement and tautology”. Poetics 24:13–29. Brzezinky, Zbigniew. 1993. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Macmillan Publishing Company. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1992. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Clark, Herbert and Gerrig, Richard. 1984. “On the pretense of irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 113 (1):121–126. Daly, Mary. 1973. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press. Grimshaw, Jean. 1986. Feminist Philosophers. Women’s Perspectives on Philosophical Traditions. Wheatsheaf Ltd.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1991. A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Routledge. Kligman, Gail. 1998. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction and Everyday Life in Ceausescu’s Romania. University of California Press. Liiceanu, Gabriel. 1996. Apel catre lichele. Bucuresti: Humanitas. Miroiu, Mihaela. 1995. Convenio. Bucuresti: Editura Alternative. Patapievici, Horia-Roman. 1997. “Doua masuri si un morman de cadavre”. In Politice, 202–205. Bucuresti: Humanitas. Rossen-Knill, Deborah F. and Henry, Richard. 1997. “The pragmatics of parody”. Journal of Pragmatics 27:719–752. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1996. “On verbal irony.” In The Stylistics Reader. From Roman Jakobson to the Present, Weber, J.-J. (ed), 265–269. London and New York: Arnold. Steinhardt, N. 1991. Jurnalul fericirii. Cluj: Editura Dacia.


Chapter 13

Baby entertainer, bumbling assistant and line manager Discourses of paternal identity in parentcraft texts Jane Sunderland Lancaster University, UK

Introduction The masculine identity of ‘father’ as textually constructed has hitherto been underexplored. In this article, I illustrate several discourses of paternal (and maternal) identity which can be seen in parentcraft texts – discourses which are usually mutually-supporting, but at times potentially conXictual. I am thus looking at the representation of men in relation to that of the women who are the mothers of their children. I am drawing on a notion of identity not only as something that people take for themselves from the beliefs and possibilities available to them (Ivanic 1998), but also as something attributed, interpellated, ‘given’ to people (though not necessarily accepted by them) by social practices and practitioners and the written texts with which these practices and practitioners are associated (Althusser 1984). Representationally, gendered discourses in parentcraft texts are likely to be shaped by (changing) parenting practices, and thus to reXect them (though not necessarily accurately). However, they can also be seen as constituting gendered parenthood – what Dorothy Smith (1990) refers to as “textuallymediated social organisation”. Despite numerous diVerent possible readings of a given text, the written text may have a special constitutive potential. As Smith notes: The [written] text’s capacity to transcend the essentially transitory character of social processes and to remain uniform across separate and diverse local settings

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is key to the distinctive social organisation and relations they make possible (Smith 1990:168; my italics).

In some cultural contexts, then, parentcraft texts can be seen as contributing to practices associated with Smith’s “social organisation and relations”.1 Why are parentcraft texts worth exploring? If gender is constructed and gendered practices reproduced in and by written texts, as well as in and by the world outside, I suggest that both those written texts which are related to the act of sex in some way (but which move beyond the merely biological), and those related to heterosexual relations in a wider sense, provide particularly valuable data for the study of gender (see also Lazar, Sorea, this volume). Since parentcraft literature arguably falls into both camps, it is likely to be an important epistemological site for feminist linguists.2 Parentcraft texts, being themselves so-named, and use of the term parent, “so as not to distinguish between fathers and mothers”, can be seen as implying that “parenthood is shared equally between them” (Lupton and Barclay 1997:88, 91). However, although this may be intended as constructive and encouraging as regards equal parenting, it can also be read as gender-blindness, inaccuracy, disingenuousness and glossing over gender asymmetry. Hence the need for such a study. There are of course many famous ‘classic’ texts on childcare, such as those by Hugh Jolly (1975, 1977) and Benjamin Spock (many editions, from 1946 onwards; the most recent [co-authored with Stephen Parker] is 1998). On the subject of ‘How a Husband Can Help’, Jolly (1977) reads thus: Your husband can help by being useful with the baby and sympathetic about chaos in the house; by not expecting you to feel like a mother overnight when your past life has been spent in a totally diVerent way; and by taking the initiative sometimes to prevent you from becoming a drudge who never wants to leave the house. When a woman does need help from her doctor in adjusting to the new life, it is disastrous for her husband to scoV. His role is to try to understand the stresses she feels when she suddenly becomes completely responsible for their child, and to oVer her practical sympathy. Arranging for domestic help, buying her a washing machine, taking her out regularly – all can help (1977:169, my italics).

The lack of agency attributed to the mother (who is after all the addressee) here is striking. Dr Benjamin Spock chose to comment on issues of identity as well as practices: Some fathers have been brought up to think that the care of babies and children is the mother’s job entirely. But a man can be a warm father and a real man at the same time (1978:41).

Discourses of paternal identity 295

Though at the time of their publication the modern Women’s Movement was well underway, it seems to have had little impact on these texts (though Spock seemed to be trying, however oddly, to merge what he saw as the problematic identity of “warm father” with that of “real man”). Given the ongoing Xux in gender relations and gendered social practices at all sorts of levels, some evidence that Anglo-American men’s involvement in childcare and housework is increasing (e.g. Parke 1996), and the now ubiquitous explicit discourse on gender, it might be expected that more recent parentcraft literature would manifest more symmetrical representations of motherhood and fatherhood. And indeed this seems to be the case. In Women, Mothering and Childrearing, Richardson (1993:51) observes that “By the mid-1980’s ... most authors of childrearing advice books encouraged fathers to become more involved in the care of their children”. The following analysis however suggests that shared parenting still has some way to go. The study of gendered parental behaviour in Western countries is not new to linguists (e.g. Berko Gleason and Blank Greif 1983, Hasan and Cloran 1990). Gendered discourses related to sex have also been identiWed (see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume). Hollway (1984) through discussions between and dialogues with her respondents on sexuality noted the ‘male sexual drive discourse’, the ‘have/hold discourse’ and the ‘permissive discourse’. Marshall (1991) identiWed three main discourses of motherhood in childcare and parenting manuals, ironically entitled ‘Ultimate FulWlment’, i.e. what women Wnd in motherhood; ‘Happy Families’, i.e. the assumption that the child is living with its biological parents, a contented heterosexual couple; and ‘Sharing the Caring’, i.e. both mothers and fathers being involved in childcare. (Marshall points out that ‘sharing’ usually means that the father is responsible for the most positive aspects of childcare, and the mother does the maintenance work.) And Lupton and Barclay (1997) write on the discourses and experiences of fatherhood in a range of contexts and genres, though largely from a sociological perspective. A gap, to the best of my knowledge, is a detailed linguistic analysis of diVerent parentcraft texts, with a view to identifying discourses of motherhood and fatherhood.

The data By parentcraft literature I mean texts on childcare written by professionals, such as doctors or midwives, for parents – mothers, fathers or both. These

296 Jane Sunderland

texts are clearly written to constitute advice. However, since much parentcraft literature is written largely for a general audience, but is written by professionals in the Weld of health, it may interdiscursively draw on both popular and ‘expert’ literature (Lupton and Barclay 1997). Parentcraft texts can be seen as prescriptive, even if a range of prescriptions is there for selecting from. And literate parents (especially, I would suggest, Wrst time parents) who also live in those parts of the world where it is common to Wnd and seek advice on ‘personal’ issues in written texts will often consult such texts for advice, especially in the early months of a new baby’s life.3 I became a mother some seven years ago, and hence was in a good position to conduct a small-scale study of what contemporary parentcraft literature has to say to, and about, fathers and mothers. I chose data from several source texts (summarised on p. 298; cf. van Leeuwen 1993), i.e. those that I was given by my doctor and local (state) hospital when I was pregnant, and two my partner and I received as presents, prior to and just after Emily’s birth. The literature I received from members of the medical profession (Pregnancy Book, Birth to Five, The Bounty Babycare Guide, The Bounty Health and Infant Feeding Guide, and Your First Baby) could be seen as ‘representative’ as it would normally have been given to every pregnant woman at that time in the UK who had informed her own doctor of her pregnancy and was visiting him or her, and/or a local hospital, regularly. The booklet ‘It’s Your Baby Too: a Guide for Fathers’ was also free and widely available, but may not have been given to or picked up by every mother and/or father. Whereas I chose the source parentcraft texts based on how I actually encountered them as a parent, I chose the texts to be analysed for their representation of fatherhood and motherhood according to speciWc social practices (detailed below), rather than looking at the whole of one source text, or at random passages of the same length (as in some other corpus studies). I was thus not interested in constructing my main argument around the statistical distribution of lexical items. Considering, say, the distribution of pronouns in one source text or over random or particular texts might have obscured very striking diVerences in reference in relation to speciWc practices. For example, sections on babies’ ailments which refer to ‘parents’ and, when a pronoun is needed, you, might balance out other texts on other practices in their overall statistics, but this would not mean that the source texts were close to a gender-symmetrical representation of practices. In a textual analysis with a focus on social practices, the practices themselves provide (micro)contexts for the texts. I decided to look at the treatment


of two particular areas of practice: (a) how fathers are represented, particularly their practices, and (b) the practices associated with expressing breast milk.4 Texts on fathers are interesting because the care of new-born children can be written about (and sometimes is) with no mention of the father at all. (Because of the possibility of breastfeeding, it is hard to imagine one which does not refer explicitly to the mother.) References to the father – whether these are made in passing, or whether they are sections entitled something like ‘Fathers’, ‘The Role of the Father’, or ‘For the Father’ (and addressed to him) – are, then, marked and therefore deserving of investigation.5 I chose to look at texts on expressing breast milk for a similar reason. Since one reason for a mother expressing milk is that the father can then feed the baby – to give the father pleasure, make him feel more involved, ensure he has some responsibility, allow him to ‘bond”, or allow the breastfeeding mother to have a few hours when she can choose not to be with the baby – from a perspective of gender equality, I would regard it as salient if some reference to the father when dealing with this topic was absent from such a text. The result was a corpus focusing on speciWc practices which created the possibility of studying the microcontext of speciWc textual ‘choices’, and the range of representations of these practices – omissions as well as realisations (cf. van Leeuwen 1995, 1996). This gave me eleven texts, in two groups, listed in Table 1 a and b (full references are in the Bibliography). Text 5 appears in both tables since it makes reference to expressing breast milk within a discussion of ‘The father’s role’. The implied audience of the source texts, as indicated in the fourth column of these tables, is diverse. Even prior to analysis, this can be predicted to have shaped the lexical choices of the selected texts, and the distribution of these choices – and, accordingly, the range of discourses running through the selected texts. Thus while texts in the commercially-produced books and M and M magazine can address more speciWc audiences, texts in the booklets distributed free to all mothers might be expected to make fewer assumptions about families’ arrangements for childcare. The unit of analysis, the ‘text’ in Tables 1 and 2, is therefore a selected extract. I have however attempted to contextualise at least the Wrst six of these extracts as far as possible by giving in the Appendix the whole short text (usually a clearly marked section of the source text) in which mention of the father occurs. (For reasons of space, I have not included the texts on expressing breast milk i.e. texts 7–11; these, however, are less crucial to this paper.)

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Table 1: Texts on and/or addressed to fathers.

1

2 3

Text

Source text

Text addressed to?

Distribution

‘Home from hospital’ and ‘Helping with baby’ ‘Dad Chat’ ‘The modern father’

It’s Your Baby Too

fathers

free

Your First Baby Dr Miriam Stoppard’s New Babycare Book Nanny Knows Best: How to Bring Up a Happy Child

fathers both mothers and fathers (?)

free commercial publication (book)

4

‘How do you determine when bedtime should be?’

5

‘The father’s role’

6

‘Accepting help’

“... mothers, or for nannies of course, but mainly ... mothers” (p. 1) The Bounty Babycare mothers Guide ‘Coping together’, “the magazine for in M and M the mum-to-be and new mother”

commercial publication (book)

free commercial publication (magazine) but free copies available

Table 2: Texts on expressing breast milk. Text

Source text

5

‘The father’s role’

free

7

‘Putting the baby to the breast’ ‘Expressing your milk’ ‘Coping with breast feeding’

The Bounty Babycare mothers Guide Your First Baby mothers The Bounty Babycare mothers Guide

free

Birth to Five

free

8 9

10 ‘Expressing milk’

Pregnancy Book

11 ‘How to express breast milk’

The Bounty Infant Health and Feeding Guide

Text addressed to?

both mothers and fathers (?) both mothers and fathers (?) mothers

Distribution

free

free free


Discourse analysis applied to parentcraft literature Drawing on the position taken by Critical Discourse Analysis (as well as Dorothy Smith) that texts have a role to play in constituting social practices, parentcraft texts can be seen as speciWcally shaping practices surrounding both paternal and maternal identities, and accordingly (as I will show) as shaping gender relations between the mother and the father of their child. I am regarding the grammar and vocabulary in these texts as systems of choices from which writers can select. I am also assuming that these choices have nonequivalent meanings, and that choices, though not ‘free’, not necessarily intentional, and almost certainly not conspiratorially-motivated, are meaningful (Fairclough 1992). I hope to show that these eleven texts, through their language, realise a range of gendered discourses which thread their way through the texts, positioning fathers and mothers diVerently, with each discourse doing this in a particular way, and hence representing gender relations in a particular way. And though, as Hollway writes (with reference to her study on sexuality): ... at a speciWc moment several co-existing and potentially contradictory discourses ... make available diVerent positions and diVerent powers for men and women (1984:230)

the majority of the co-existing discourses here are, I suggest, mutually supporting. I will not be looking at what is often dealt with under the heading of ‘sexist language’ – most obviously, texts referring to the baby as he, or at the use of husband and wife. Gendered discourses can be realised by non-sexist and apparently ‘gender-neutral’ language items as well as sexist language items. A pornographic text, for example, may objectify women without using a single linguistic item which of itself degrades, trivialises or deWnes women. As Cameron points out, meaning (the real problem) may not correlate with linguistic form (1994:29). She observes: ... sexism in language exists below the surface, so that superWcial reforms (like proscribing some Wnite set of oVensive forms or making all texts formally gender neutral) are insuYcient to combat it. Many instances of sexism are manifested not in single words or speciWc constructions but through an accumulation of discursive or textual choices … (1994:32).

The aim of this paper is to show this “accumulation of discursive or textual

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choices”, not because texts determine responses (though see Cathy Urwin 1985, on interpretation of parentcraft texts), but because they can show what is assumed about the world, what practices are possible, what practices are not thought of, and perhaps what practices seem too obvious to be mentioned. Thus, rather than Wnding meaning in audience accounts, or solely in the texts, I am attempting to provide a description of the kind of world the texts assume and represent – and, in this view, help constitute.

The analytical framework Hollway writes that I arrived at [the sexuality discourses] through a combination of my own knowledge and what was suggested by the data (an approach which Glaser and Strauss (1967), call ‘grounded theory’). Certainly my assumptions and those of the research participants share a largely common historical production; they will also be recognizable to most readers (1984:231).

Such an approach, though appealing, and indeed productive, is likely by itself to be problematic to linguists – in particular, what is the relationship between what is ‘suggested by the data’ and particular linguistic items? To investigate this relationship, i.e. that between any discourses which ‘emerge’ from the texts and the language which realises them, a textual analysis is also necessary. I have thus tried to supplement ‘grounded theory’ with greater consideration of the language of the text itself, so that any discourses which do ‘emerge’ are an eVect of the interface between the analyst’s knowledge, and the actual data. The procedure is largely one of ‘shuttling between’ emerging discourses and relevant linguistic items, making each given discourse both the object and result of analysis. Rather than drawing on assumptions which are shared and recognisable, then, I am oVering features of the text as a common ground between myself and the reader. In this way I hope to show, in terms of these features of the text, how one discourse can be identiWed as ‘overarching’, and when and how one speciWc discourse rather than another can be seen as prevailing. The discourses identiWed I have called ‘identity discourses’: they draw partly on diVerent sets of actions or practices, and thus all characterise the father as someone who does something and the mother as someone who does something else. I am also using ‘my own knowledge’ to identify what is not instantiated in


these speciWc texts (in terms of linguistic items), when my experience suggested that it might be. Such an approach allows the researcher’s own insights and perceptions (e.g. of which linguistic items are striking in their (in)frequency or absence) and understanding to be drawn on and acknowledged as valuable. In order to see what sort of ‘gendered identities’ are being constructed through discourses of parenting in these texts, I thus follow CDA in looking at what grammatical and lexical choices have been made from those available (though not equally available to all), thereby representing the world in a certain way, and at what others could have been made, and from an ‘equal opportunities’ standpoint should have been, but were not. In looking at what is not said, as well as what is, at both absences and presences, and at what is made explicit and what left vague, I have found it helpful to draw on parts of van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework for analysing representations of ‘social actors’. Of interest for gender relations and identities in a text is who is included and who excluded, when, in what contexts, and linguistically how – in this case, the ‘who’ being the social actors of mother and father (also potentially lexicalised as wife, husband and partner). As van Leeuwen observes, some exclusions “may be ‘innocent’, details which readers are assumed to know already” (1996:38). Others may however be intentional. van Leeuwen proposes two ‘exclusion’ concepts: ‘suppression’ and ‘backgrounding’. These may both be realised similarly in language: classically by passivisation and agent deletion, for example, but also by process nouns and nominalisations, and van Leeuwen gives actual contextualised examples of immigration (unaccompanied by an indication of who is immigrating) and support (unaccompanied by an indication of where this comes from). However, whereas suppression is “radical exclusion” which “leave[s] no traces in the representation, excluding both the social actors and their activities”, in backgrounding the excluded social actors may not be mentioned in relation to a given activity, but they are mentioned elsewhere in the text, and we can infer with reasonable (though never total) certainty who they are. They are not so much excluded as de-emphasised, pushed into the background (van Leeuwen 1996:39).

Whereas fathers are occasionally suppressed as social actors in discourse on parenthood in general, these days I would suggest that they are more likely to be backgrounded.6

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Linguistic items drawn on Close linguistic analysis may point to the ‘big picture’. When reading these texts, certain linguistic items recur, others occur once, while others are conspicuously and surprisingly absent. A frequency count of these linguistic items in terms of which social actor each is associated with shows that, as a noun or verb, in Texts 1–6, the ‘What Fathers are Represented as Doing’ texts, play(ing) referring to fathers in relation to their children occurs seven times, help(ing) referring to fathers in relation to mothers Wve times, and fun three times. Share, however, occurs only once, in Text 5. In particular, then, I focus on the following linguistic items: a. the verbs play, help, share b. the nouns fun, help and play c. mother/father/wife/husband/partner, as well as substitution forms like someone else These can be seen as coming from three semantic Welds: those in (c) from one, play/fun/help (the Wrst and third whether as nouns or verbs) in another, and share in a third. I am not assuming that the selection of these items is a ‘neutral’ one which all analysts would automatically arrive at; rather, the above inventory can be seen as a variable construct dependent on the analyst’s knowledge and experience, including that of being a parent and reading the texts as a parent.

‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse Even an only slightly more than casual reading shows that current parentcraft literature clearly embodies the dominant discourse of what can be called ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’. I am suggesting this is a single ‘combination’ discourse because the two parts are consistent and complementary, each part implying the other, and because they do not seem to originate from diVerent sources. (The name, and others which follow, are clearly interpretative in themselves.) This discourse is manifested (in diVerent ways and to diVerent extents) in all eleven texts under discussion here. Though it may reXect (and help maintain) what is frequently the case in practice, it does not reXect (or help constitute) alternative and more egalitarian possibilities for childcare. The ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse is clearly related


to the fact that most parentcraft publications are, directly or implicitly, addressed to the mother. This was not the case in the early 19th century, but became so at the start of the 20th (Lupton and Barclay 1997:88). The ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse supports a traditional division of labour, but can also be traced back to Freud and to psychological views of the importance of the mother-child relationship – for example those advanced by Bowlby (1969), such as the importance of mother-child attachment and of the dangers of ‘maternal deprivation’, which have since been largely discredited. In 1985, Urwin nevertheless still pointed to an “image of an almost totally child-centred mother … reinforced by contemporary childcare literature” (1985:164). And, more recently, Lupton and Barclay identify a ‘bonding discourse’, which “privileges the mother over the father as the primary caregiver” (1997:43). Through the lexical items indicated (both absences and presences), the two complementary parts of this discourse also illustrate the profoundly relational nature of gender, i.e. that masculinity and femininity exist in relation to each other. In particular, as we have seen, what fathers do is represented by the transactive verb help. There are instances of help in Text 1, ‘Helping [her] with baby’: the title; l. 1: ‘You can help with the baby’s care by changing nappies ....’; and l. 3: “If your baby is bottle-fed you can help by making up and giving feeds”- the can, I suggest, indicating possibility rather than ability. Who the father is helping is not explicitly stated – this backgrounding of the mother suggesting that her role is too obvious to require mention. Help also appears as a noun in Text 2, ‘Dad Chat’, in the subtitle “Your wife still needs lots of support and help with all the chores”; and in Text 6, ‘Accepting help’, addressed to mothers: “If you do need to ask for help, go to your partner Wrst” (l. 17) – the if and do taken together suggesting that the mother not taking sole responsibility for the baby is the exception that proves the rule. Help applied to the father can be seen as ‘vague language’, compared to other possible verbs such as bathe, change, wash, cook, as well as those verbs used in reference to the father in Text 2: limit [the number of visitors], put [locks on all the low cupboards]. This vagueness is in one sense surprising since these texts are supposed to be useful in a practical sense to uninitiated novice parents. However, it can also be seen as legitimating the father’s parttime, essentially supporting and non-‘carrying the can’ role, in that in most of these cases of help, no actual, speciWc tasks are represented for him. These diVerent uses of help thus suggest that the father has some role to play in childcare: he is expected to act in ways which have an eVect on the world

304 Jane Sunderland

around him, but he will not be the one left holding the baby. Other, non-recurring lexical items which help realise the ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse are “she may need a short, regular break” (Text 2, l. 35), and references to the father “stepping in” (Text 1, l. 20) and “taking a turn at night-time care” (Text 5, l. 24). Stepping in and taking a turn – likewise ‘vague language’ – are in the same semantic Weld as help, as are material verbs like that addressed to the father in Text 1, ‘Home from Hospital’: “give her a break” (l. 20). Though this give is “integratively transactive” (van Leeuwen, 1995:90), in that the ‘goal’ of give is a human being, her, the father is nevertheless being positioned as someone empowered to ‘give’ the mother a ‘break’ (i.e. before she returns to caring for the baby) – or not! These verbs are normally transactive (van Leeuwen 1995:89) in that they implicitly or explicitly involve more participants than the social actor who ‘does the deed’ (you would normally help someone, share something with someone, and probably play with someone). However, transactive social action can be de-agentialised or deactivated – and there are cases of each here. Fathers’ transactive social actions of assistance and support are represented as de-agentialised, in “playing with your baby will help him get used to his environment” (Text l, 1. 23), and as de-activated, i.e. “as though they were entities or qualities rather than dynamic processes”, in play in “Bathtime oVers a good opportunity for play [with your baby]” (l. 27) (van Leeuwen 1995:93, 95). Both de-agentialisation and deactivation can be seen as forms of backgrounding. Another manifestation of the ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse is the recurrent and somewhat mysterious phrase someone else, or its semantic equivalent another person, which occurs frequently in the texts on expressing breast milk, as follows (the italics are mine): Text 5: ‘...breastfeeding mothers are encouraged to express their milk, so that another person can sometimes give the feed’ (l. 44) Text 7: ‘...if you want to go out and let someone else give the baby his feed’ (l. 23) Text 8: ‘you can express your milk into a sterile bottle so that someone else can give the feed’ (l. 7) Text 9: ‘you may want to express some milk for someone else to give to your baby in a bottle’ (l. 48) Text 9: ‘it can be an advantage later when you want to leave your baby with someone else’ (l. 58)

In the Wrst three of these the father is clearly ‘suppressed’ from these texts (though ‘backgrounded’ if the texts are seen in the context of their wider


source texts – see Appendix for Text 5) since he is not even mentioned as a possible ‘someone else’ – though logically could have been. In Text 9 he is ‘backgrounded’, since there is in fact reference to a ‘partner’ between the two ‘someone elses’ of ll. 48 and 58. The father can thus be seen as included in these extracts, and personalised, but indeterminate (“when social actors are represented as unspeciWed, ‘anonymous’ individuals or groups ... [this is] typically realised by indeWnite pronouns” [van Leeuwen 1996:51]). van Leeuwen suggests that in anonymising a social actor, the writer “treats his or her identity as irrelevant to the reader” (1996:52) – not, I suggest, an eVective way to indicate that one active and responsible parent might be father. The writers of these texts may of course have been trying to be as inclusive as possible – to the extent of including lesbian family relationships – but it is nevertheless striking that there are so few references to the father even as an example of ‘someone else’. Texts 10 and 11 do refer explicitly to the father (“The odd bottle of expressed milk can also be a chance for a father to have the pleasure of feeding his baby” – l. 11) and partner (“... if your partner would like to give a feed, you can express your milk into a sterilised bottle” – l. 2), respectively. These texts thus do not background the father. Nevertheless, he does not seem indispensable: “a chance”, “to have the pleasure of….”, “if [he] would like to ….” In both texts the father’s involvement is mediated so that in neither case is he the overt agent of feed (Norman Fairclough, personal communication). An example of social (and perhaps lexical) backgrounding comes from Text 4, from ‘Nanny Knows Best’ (originally a British television series). This is atypical, but it is an illustration of the ‘Part-time father’ discourse par excellence. Part of Nanny’s response to the question ‘How do you determine when bedtime should be?” is Nowadays it seems quite usual for a mother to keep her child up so her husband can see him when he comes back late from the oYce. I would say ‘Too bad’. The husband can peep at him whilst he is asleep and play with him at the weekend (italics mine) (1993:126).

Text 3, ‘The modern father’, from Dr Miriam Stoppard’s New Babycare Book, is the only text here to attempt to represent the father as anything other than part-time: “The modern father is a father who takes responsibility for the general care of his child ... the modern father is a full-time parent” (ll. 1, 23). However, as I show below, this does not mean his tasks are the same kind as the mother’s. Stoppard attempts to construct her full-time father through

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what van Leeuwen calls ‘categorisation’: the modern father. One way this is realised is through ‘identiWcation’, since the categorised actor is represented in terms of what he “more or less permanently, or unavoidably” is – a father – as opposed to what he does (‘functionalisation’) (1996:54). ‘Relational identiWcation’ is that which “represents social actors in terms of their personal, kinship or work relationship to each other” – and mother and father, as verbs, are diVerent. van Leeuwen observes that terms such as mother – but not father – are polyvalent in that ‘mother’ can be used as a functionalisation (‘mothering’ is not the act of bringing a child into the world, but the act of giving care to a child, while ‘fathering’ signiWes only the act of begetting a child!) (1996:57) (my italics)

I would suggest that Miriam Stoppard is here attempting to extend such polyvalency to the term father, not by using father as a verb, but (less convincingly) through such items as the existential is (“The modern father is active rather than passive”) and naturalised future modal will (“He will participate from day one with the care of the baby”), in characterising his ‘relational’ role. Stoppard is apparently adopting the familiar rhetorical strategy (though unique in this dataset) of making an appeal by assuming a favourable but inaccurate view of all her potential readers, deliberately avoiding any problematicisation of such claims (for example that, in most cases, the ‘modern father’ is not like this). Presumably she feels that this strategy – like that mentioned earlier of creating texts which deliberately refer to parents – is more likely to help change traditional roles. The ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse is characterised by three salient lexical absences. The Wrst is that of the importantly transactive verb share (which from an equal opportunities perspective one might have expected both in texts on fathers and those on expressing breast milk). As indicated, there is only one occurrence of share, in Text 5: “To achieve [‘bonding’], a father needs to get acquainted with his baby through sharing in feeding, nappy changing, taking a turn at night-time care....” (l. 21). Notably, achieving gender relations based on domestic equality is not a rationale given for such sharing. (This share is in fact share in – arguably another mediation of involvement.) The other two lexical absences have been made salient by my own experience. The Wrst is that of the lexical Weld relating to laundry – a tedious and time-consuming but unavoidable aspect of childcare, as everyone who has had to deal with all the wet sheets, babygrows and one’s own damp clothes that accompany a new baby knows. Yet there is no mention of any of


this in these texts. The second is the lexical Weld relating to paternity leave – a curious omission since several institutions in Britain (for example, Universities and local government) allowed fathers to take a week’s paid leave for this purpose when these texts were written. (Universal paid paternity leave for two weeks has more recently been authorised in the UK.) Text 2, ‘Dad Chat’, does not in fact mention taking leave of any sort when the baby is born, nor, surprisingly, does Text 3, Stoppard’s ‘The modern father’. Like the grammatical and lexical presences identiWed, these absences, the second in particular, can be seen as representing the father’s part-time role as Wxed, unaltering even for a week, and thus as endorsing the status quo as regards British social and institutional structures surrounding current childcare practices. It is also worth looking at absences in the wider, though still discoursal sense. Lupton and Barclay note how in the most recent edition of Baby and Child Care (Spock and Rothenberg 1992), the authors emphasize the importance of fathers considering the care of their children to be as important as their careers, taking the time to share with their children and partners, putting family life as their Wrst priority and letting it be known at their workplaces that they take their parental responsibilities very seriously (Lupton and Barclay, 1997:89).

This is to my mind to be welcomed, and the “letting it be known at their workplaces ….” idea is not one I have come across in other parentcraft literature. However, as Lupton and Barclay point out: “None of these injunctions is directed at female readers in relation to motherhood. Rather, it is simply assumed that mothers will automatically adopt such priorities and approaches to their role as mothers” (1997:89). It in fact seems to be simply assumed too that they will not be returning to work after some weeks or months of maternity leave. The absence here is not simply a lexical one, but rather the absence of a whole ‘New mother who also works outside the home’ discourse. Instead, Urwin (1985) cites (admittedly older) references, for example in Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child (1977), to the importance of childraising as a job, and to how emphases on the importance of stimulation and enrichment for young children textually constitute motherhood as well as childhood (1985:196). This absent discourse might be referred to as a “discourse of resistance” (Martín Rojo 1997). Arguably waiting to be intertextually inscribed (Fairclough 1995:189), this discourse is a potentially destabilising one for both the ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse and for the speciWc companion discourses, identiWed in the following

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pages, which both inter- and intratextually ‘shore up’ the overarching ‘Parttime father/Mother as main parent’ discourse. I suggested earlier that there are in fact several supporting, speciWc gendered discourses evident in these texts. Under the ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ overarching discourse, three further discourses of paternal identity can be identiWed. These sometimes run in parallel through the diVerent texts and are sometimes ‘bricked together’ within texts. I call these ‘Father as baby entertainer’, ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ and ‘Father as line manager’. Each has particular linguistic characteristics which allows it to prevail as a speciWc gendered discourse of identity. And though they may seem at Wrst sight to be potentially in competition with each other, suggesting, respectively, prepared performance, natural incompetence and strategic overview and detachment (Greg Myers, personal communication), I suggest that in practice they are not – trivially, when they occur in diVerent texts, and, more importantly, because they are all to do with operating on the margins of childcare and are thus complimentary at a higher level of abstraction.

‘Father as baby entertainer’ discourse ‘Father as baby entertainer’ is probably the most prevalent of the three speciWc paternal identity discourses, frequent lexical exponents being the material and potentially transactive verb play, and the nouns play and fun. In Text 4, from Nanny Knows Best, the father’s sole role during the baby’s waking hours is to “play with him” – at the weekend.7 Nanny Knows Best may be atypical, but this discourse is apparent elsewhere too. In Text 1, ‘Helping with baby’, we read about how “playing with your baby will help get him used to his environment and help with his development” (l. 23), that bathtime “oVers a good opportunity for play” (l. 27), that “babies are lots of fun so enjoy playing with him” (l. 33), and that the father “should take every opportunity ... to play with [his] child as this is a vital part of his development” (l. 34). There is also one occurrence of cuddles (l. 3) and another of cuddling (l. 8). In Text 2, ‘Dad Chat’, the subtitle includes “Enjoy this time together as a family” and ends with the injunction, in bold type, “Have fun”, and the father is reassured in the last paragraph that “Babies are for loving and enjoying”, and that “Babies can be fun!” – positioning him as someone who might just think they are just boring and a lot of hard work with no rewards. And even in Text 3, Miriam Stoppard’s ‘The modern father’, though this father is expected to change


nappies and get up at 2 a.m. to feed the baby (l. 20), he will also (from l. 12) “spend time playing with [his children], showing them new things, helping them with their hobbies, taking them with him when he enjoys his own”, and (from l. 16) will “participate with reading stories, playing games and singing songs before bedtime”. Despite Stoppard’s claim that “the modern father is a full-time parent, not a part-time stranger” (l. 23), and the transactive verbs which represent his social action as involvement with the children, the emphasis is deWnitely on this involvement being through fun and enjoyment rather than through washing wet sheets. And even amid all the fun and enjoyment, the father’s involvement is again covertly mediated: rather than simply doing something, he “spends time”, he “participates”, he has “opportunities”. Despite her utopian rhetoric, Stoppard’s ‘full-time parent’ sounds not so very diVerent from the ‘part-time father’ who inhabits all the other texts.

‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ discourse The ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ discourse of paternity can be seen in Text 1, in the section ‘Helping with baby’ from the booklet ‘It’s Your Baby Too’, in which the imperative ‘Remember’ occurs three times: “Remember never to leave your baby alone with a bottle” (l. 10), “Remember to always check the temperature of the [bath] water before putting him in” (l. 29), and “Remember that babies are rather fragile so don’t be too rough [when you play with the baby]” (l. 37). This use of the cognitive remember represents the father as a thinker as well as a doer, but seems patronising and hectoring; it deWnitely does not position the father as a competent parent. (It is hard to imagine a mother being addressed in this way.) Since there is little or no mention of fathers doing these traditionally feminine tasks, Texts 2 and 4 do not adopt this same sort of positioning. Text 2 identiWes a father’s roles in diVerent terms, which I will return to, and in Text 4, ‘Nanny Knows Best’, as we have seen, the father’s role is minimal.8 Text 5, ‘The father’s role’, however, refers to the possibility of the father being made to feel ‘less conWdent’ (l. 37). And Text 6, ‘Accepting help’, line 20, reads “They [fathers] are often keen to be involved, but are not sure how to go about it” – which is again positioning men as something other than competent carers. The paternal identity is represented here as involving feeling (as well as thought and action). However, like in Text 5, paternal identity again seems to

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include lack of self-conWdence, being unsure – an individual, psychological phenomenon. Missing is a critical voice, about social practices like paternity leave not being standard, playgroups being referred to as ‘Mother and Toddler’ rather than ‘Parent and Toddler’, nappy changing facilities being located in women’s toilets rather than both women’s and men’s (or in a third area entirely), and fathers facing particular disapproval if they take leave from work to look after sick children. Of the six ‘To the father’ texts, it is only in Text 3, ‘The modern father’, that there is no suggestion that the father might not be up to scratch in his (fun-oriented) parenting role. The ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ discourse of paternity can be seen as being related to the ‘Mother as main parent’ discourse-related ideas of ‘maternal instinct’, and that ‘mother love is natural’, and that so, by extension, is childcare on the part of the mother. This is exempliWed by advice to the mother such as “Do whatever suits you: so long as your baby is loved, fed and washed he will be all right” (from the 1986 edition of Hugh Jolly; quoted in Marshall (1991:72)), and, here, in Text 6, ‘Accepting help’, addressed to mothers, ‘Follow your instincts’ (l. 43) – a far cry from the ‘bumbling assistant’ identity assigned to fathers in Texts 1, 5 and 6. The Wrst part of Text 1, ‘Home from hospital’, refers to the father having to “adjust” (lines 3 and 6 – an individualistic and non-transactive social action), suggests that taking a few days oV work will help him “understand the new routine”, and talks about how “experience” will help him learn why his baby is crying (l. 27) – nothing very instinctive there! Drawing on a poststructuralist perspective to describe the ‘expert discourses’ on fatherhood in academic research, Lupton and Barclay note that The notion of the pre-existing subject who after becoming a father Wnds himself so distorted and stressed that he can no longer identify his ‘real self’ and must painfully transform into a ‘new self’ is dominant …. (1997:46).

I would suggest that this same identity is represented in parentcraft texts in the shape of the ‘bumbling assistant’, and that any such painful conXict of identities mothers might have is represented as muted in comparison (note that in the earlier quotation, Benjamin Spock only identiWed a problem here for men). ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ is complemented by a motherhood discourse of identity which also supports the ‘Part-time father/Mother

Discourses of paternal identity

as main parent’ discourse: ‘Mother as manager of the father’s role in childcare’. This discourse was evident too in Text 6, ‘Accepting help’, in the claim that men “are often keen to be involved” (l. 20), and in Text 1 (from ‘It’s Your Baby Too’), ‘Home from hospital’: “expect to be called upon to step in” (l. 20) – a truncated passive, agentless because, despite the fact that she is backgrounded here, there is no doubt about the identity of the social actor. As ‘manager’, it is the mother who will ‘call upon’ the father to help with childcare tasks.9 In Text 6, ‘Accepting help’, the mother is urged to “try getting your partner to take some of the strain while you recover” (l. 29). Try however suggests that the father may not be as easy to ‘manage’ as all that, one reading of which may be a warning that his help should not be taken for granted.10 And in Text 4, the implication seems to be that the mother should channel her ‘husband’s’ parenting practices into “peep[ing] at him while he is asleep and play[ing] with him at the weekend”.

‘Father as line manager’ discourse The third speciWc ‘Part-time father discourse’, ‘Father as line manager’, is evident in Text 2, ‘Dad Chat’. Here there are several highly transactive imperative verbs which contrast strikingly with the ‘you can help with’ and ‘you can help by’ of Text 1 and which ‘give’ the father a protecting, almost patriarchal ‘Head of the Family’ identity (the italic typeface is mine): ...limit the number [of visitors] you invite into the house, stop them from disturbing the baby when he is asleep. Ensure that your family routine is protected (Paragraph 2).

And, in paragraph 5, “ ... plan for the future. Get yourselves a stairgate, put locks on all the low cupboards, protect electric wires and sockets”. And again, this time as regards the mother: “Go out together for a treat that is fun for both of you. Let her know that you still enjoy being with her” (paragraph 3). This last invokes the spectre of the logical converse – that new motherhood may in fact make a woman less enjoyable as a companion than she previously was. In the representation of the father’s role as ‘line manager’, the mother herself is backgrounded in the phrases “Get yourselves a stairgate” and (though in a less extreme way) “Go out together for a treat that is fun for both of you.” ‘Mother as manager of the father’s role in childcare’ can be seen as a

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companion discourse to ‘Father as line manager’ (as well as to ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’). However, there is potential for conXict here: what mother asks father to do for the baby may not correspond with what father thinks is good for the family, while father’s way of looking after mother and the baby may conXict with what mother thinks is good for the baby. Importantly, then, speciWc parenthood discourses can come into intertextual conXict; this may create instability in the overarching discourse. These four discourses of paternal identity (one dominant, three speciWc) are thus realised in this analysis of these texts in diVerent ways. Lexical Welds play a role, though speciWc lexical absences, notably (here) share, laundry and paternity leave. Secondly, realisation sometimes takes place without recurrence: although I have focussed on repeated forms, single instances of words or phrases (e.g. “men are often keen to be involved….”) are also relevant. However, the main way the diVerent discourses are realised in this analysis is through diVerent recurring linguistic items. ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ is realised through the recurrence of help and other verbs in the same semantic Weld, and of indeWnite pronouns such as someone else, which background the father. ‘Father as baby entertainer’ is realised by recurrences of play, fun and enjoy. ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ is realised through repetition of the verb remember and other, variously-realised suggestions of paternal incompetence. ‘Father as line manager’ is realised through a series of imperatives and a degree of backgrounding of the mother. And though other analyses would undoubtedly have identiWed diVerent fatherhood identity discourses, they would still, I suggest, need to account for these recurring linguistic features.

The textual organisation of discourse In any analysis based on ‘discourse identiWcation’, the analyst has the problem of not only recognising a discourse, but having principled ways of (a) distinguishing it from another discourse (with which it may or may not be cooccurring), (b) deciding whether two such discourses are ‘combination’, being two sides of the same coin, like ‘Part-time father’ and ‘Mother as main parent’; complementary and hence running in parallel or even ‘bricked together’; contradictory and hence destabilising; or simply unrelated, and (c) identifying discoursal hierarchies, if it is claimed that some speciWc discourses are forms of, or are shoring up, other, overarching discourses. Such an analysis must


always be a high inference, interpretive one, but if this interpretation comes from the interface between the analyst’s knowledge and experience and the actual language of the text, then the analysis will be more principled than one simply ‘suggested’ by the data, whose Wndings are ‘recognisable’. Though the ‘Part-time father’/’Mother as main parent’ discourse is evident in all the texts in this corpus, in some texts only one speciWc discourse is evident, and in others no speciWc discourses are. The speciWc discourse running through Text 3 would appear to be ‘Father as baby entertainer’; in Texts 5 and 6 ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ is particularly evident. In Texts 7–11, ‘Part-time father’ seems to be unaccompanied by any speciWc fatherhood discourse – only by its ‘other face’, ‘Mother as main parent’. In each of Texts 1, 2 and 4, however, there appear to be two co-occurring speciWc discourses: in Text 1, ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’ and ‘Father as baby entertainer’; in Text 2, ‘Father as line manager’ and (though rather less saliently) ‘Father as baby entertainer’; and in Text 4, ‘Father as baby entertainer’ and, implicitly, ‘Mother as manager of the father’s role in childcare’. There does not appear to be tension between any of these three pairs of diVerently ‘bricked together’ discourses, but rather a complementary intertextuality, the ‘synthesis’ in Text 1 being that father does not have a problem being a baby entertainer, he just needs advice about the safety aspects of this, in Text 2 that these roles are both peripheral to the essentials of childcare, and in Text 4 that mother’s management of the father’s role includes the appropriate channelling of such interest in his child as there is assumed to be into ‘playing’ at weekends.

Fatherhood, motherhood and gender relations Like the wider masculinity and femininity, I suggest that paternal and maternal identities are not only relational but also mutually-constructing – even (or perhaps especially) when one is not mentioned. In addition to the three speciWc fatherhood discourses which shore up the ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ discourse, I also identiWed a ‘Mother as manager of the father’s role in childcare’, operating as a companion discourse to ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’, and a companion but potentially conXicting discourse in relation to ‘Father as line manager’. So while the mother is managing the father, but only in his role as a father, the father is managing the mother by drawing on his ‘Line manager’ identity. Just

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as they are being continually discoursally shaped, then, the shaping of motherhood and fatherhood can in its turn also be seen as continually shaping gender relations. This is also evident in a further motherhood identity discourse, ‘Mother as wife/partner’, exempliWed in Texts 5 and 2. Text 5, ‘The Father’s Role’, reminds mothers of the risk that “your partner may feel ‘left out’ and rejected” (l. 12) – which can be read as being left out as a father, or as a companion and sexual partner. The mother is herself backgrounded in this clause, but a likely inference is that she would be the social actor responsible for such rejection. ‘Dad Chat’ (Text 2) refers to “your wife” being “a mother and wife” (l. 37), and l. 25 reads “They [most mothers] need to have times when they are women instead of mothers” (my italics). This binary and exclusive representation of two identities of the same social actor may not read incongruously to everyone, but clearly denies the idea of this particular combination of feminine identities as positive, even invoking the traditional madonna-whore dichotomy. Presumably the writer meant by a woman someone who is sexual, i.e. currently sexually active, or at least sexually interested/ interesting, whereas, paradoxically, mothers are not supposed to be (or are supposed to be, but in a decidedly more functional way).11 The existence of the hegemonic, overarching identity discourse in these texts – ‘Part-time father/Mother as main parent’ – is perhaps predictable, though problematic, given on-going changes in gender relations, not least through changing patterns of employment. Less predictable, and more interesting, perhaps, is how this dominant discourse is shored up by other discourses: ‘Father as baby entertainer’, ‘Father as mother’s bumbling assistant’, ‘Father as line manager’, ‘Mother as manager of the father’s role in childcare’ and ‘Mother as wife/partner’. Gender in these texts is essentially heteronormative. Partly in relation to this (as outside the texts) gender is also relational, the texts suggesting that a father can really only be expected to play with his children, and to perform certain tasks inexpertly, under the guidance of the mother, whom he is after all supporting in addition to managing the family as a whole. The ‘discourses of parental identity’ discussed in this chapter can thus be seen as contributing to the shaping of gendered parenthood, and as a further illustration of the more general relationship between masculinity and femininity (Johnson 1997:22, 23). Arguably, in parentcraft texts we can see a dialectical ‘bundle’ of heterosexual and relational femininities and masculinities, most discourses here being ‘companion’, mutually supporting ones, others potentially conXictual and destabilising.


If gender is, however, not only seen as something one has or is, but (also) as something one does, i.e. as performative, “constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Judith Butler 1990, see also Sunderland and Litosseliti, this volume), the focus for any analysis of parentcraft texts would need to be on parenting actions and ‘deeds’, rather than on ‘social actors’, and how these ‘deeds’ themselves constitute what Butler would call the ‘expressions’ of fatherhood and motherhood (1990:25). The selection of texts according to the gendered practices they represent – as has been done here – would seem to be consistent with a subsequent analysis of textually mediated gendered parenthood as performance. Certainly, most childcare practices can be described as ‘repeated’ – a characteristic of performativity.

Conclusion My own position on parentcraft literature is that I would like to see more reference to fathers as central. However, parentcraft text writers are in something of a dilemma. They are writing for a huge and very diverse audience, with culturally very diVerent current childcare practices. This audience includes single mothers (including those who have chosen to bring up a child alone), and lesbian mothers living with partners, as well as mothers from cultures in which discourses of what we might clumsily call ‘fathers’ full involvement in childcare as desirable’ are negligible. The mother is the only (almost) guaranteed common denominator. The Bounty writers in particular could not target an audience, since their booklets were automatically given to all pregnant women and new mothers registered with a GP and hospital. These writers will in addition be well aware of the much quoted statistic that one in three babies is born out of wedlock and that, of these, half have parents who do not live together. This means that one in six babies does not live with both parents, and the majority of these babies live with their mother rather than their father. It is perhaps then not surprising that texts are full of mentions of mothers rather than fathers. Writers may feel that since mentioning a father who is not around is inappropriate and may not be well received, the safest thing to do in order not to alienate readers is to explicitly mention only the mother. Some readers will, however, Wnd themselves contesting such representations. But the situation may be changing. In the latest (at the time of writing) version of ‘It’s Your Baby Too’ (published by SMA Nutrition), entitled ‘What

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you really need to know about becoming a new dad’, though fun is still foregrounded (it comes at the end of the sentence), other tasks are explicitly listed, without being represented as ‘help’: “As well as changing nappies, bathing the baby, and helping soothe away inexplicable crying Wts, being involved also means having fun” (p. 13). And, encouragingly, in a section entitled ‘Q: How can I help with feeding?’, the answer includes: “Practically, you can help with ‘burping’ your baby, as well as feeding him from a bottle if your partner expresses her milk” (p. 14). While still ‘help’, this practice was not suggested for new fathers in the earlier version of the booklet. The ‘identity discourse’ waiting to be inscribed in parentcraft texts, ‘New mother who also works outside the home’, I suggest is potentially destabilising to the whole discoursal structure underpinning ‘Western’ gendered parenthood. Together with the changes identiWed in the previous paragraph, it may herald a possible ‘redistribution’ (Martín Rojo 1997:252) in the present order of childcare discourse. A ‘New mother who also works outside the home’ discourse is not suYcient, here, of course: a mother who works outside the home, whether full- or part-time, may still be the ‘main parent’ relative to the father (the baby may have professional carers during the day; a mother who works full-time may still be the main parent when she returns home). The discoursal status quo would remain intact. A further question for the discourse analyst is whether, if ‘Western’ mothers were attributed the ‘part-time parent’ identity and fathers that of ‘main parent’, the discourses of ‘baby entertainer’, ‘bumbling assistant’ and ‘line manager’ would change, and how. Changing ‘roles’, I suggest, is unlikely to bring about any straightforward redistribution here. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Discourse and Society 2000, 11/2, under the title ‘Baby entertainer, bumbling assistant and line manager: discourses of fatherhood in parentcraft texts.’ Reprinted by kind permission of Sage Publications Ltd.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Roz Ivanic for her enlightening teaching sessions on Theo van Leeuwen’s work on the representation of social actors and social action, Norman Fairclough and Greg Myers for reading and making valuable comments on earlier versions of this article, and participants of the Critical Discourse Analysis meeting in Birmingham (April 1999) for their insights, observations and perspectives. I would also like to thank Bounty SCA (UK) for permission to use ‘The father’s role’ from The Bounty Babycare


Guide. The extract from Nanny Knows Best: How to Bring Up a Happy Child by Nanny Smith and Nina Grunfeld (Appendix, Text 4), is reproduced with the permission of BBC Worldwide Limited, copyright © Jean Smith and Nina Grunfeld 1993. I also wish to thank the following for the use of copyright materials: ‘Home from hospital’ and ‘Helping with baby’ from ‘It’s Your Baby too: a Guide for Fathers’ (SMA Nutrition), ‘Dad Chat’ from ‘Your First Baby’ (Royal College of Midwives), ‘The modern father’ by Miriam Stoppard from Dr. Miriam Stoppard’s The New Baby Care Book (Dorling Kindersley) and ‘Accepting help’ from ‘Coping Together’ (M and M Magazine). Every eVort has been made to trace and gain permission from the copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked, or if any additional information can be given, the author will be pleased to make the necessary amendments at the Wrst opportunity.

Notes 1. Parentcraft texts are not the only genre concerned with childcare and parenthood, of course. Other written genres include academic articles from the Welds of social history, psychology, sociology and anthropology; teaching materials for would-be nursery oYcers doing an NVQ; medical texts for future and practising paediatricians; documentation from Nurseries; paternity leave policies; many news items; proWles of famous fathers; and self-help books for men. Spoken texts include drama, television comedy and adverts (Lazar 1998), and popular Wlms (Lupton and Barclay 1997). And some texts whose discourses may shape motherhood and fatherhood may not focus on childcare at all: selfhelp manuals, for example, which deal with questions of personal identity and personal growth, and how being a parent may be seen as contributing positively to these, or damaging them. 2. Hollway writes “I consider that heterosexual relations are the primary site where gender diVerence is re-produced” (1984:228). I am suggesting that texts pertaining to the sexual side of heterosexual relations provide a site for the study of gender diVerence par excellence, through the language of these texts. Almost any text (including its visuals) on any of the following topics would be a fruitful source of data on gender identities and relations in that it is likely to contain several gendered discourses: sex education; puberty, including the onset of menstruation; sex itself (i.e. the whole range of sexual practices); sexuality (Hollway 1984); HIV, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (Jewitt 1997); conception; contraception; abortion; pregnancy (see also Sorea and Lazar, this volume); childbirth; and of course news reports and editorials on sexual scandals, one example being the Clinton-Lewinsky saga. 3. Though such texts have actually existed since the early 19th century, Lupton and Barclay identify the large current number of such texts as one eVect of the increase, since the 1960s, of ‘experts’ who ‘monitor[ed] individuals in virtually every social setting’ (1997:36). Similarly, Urwin sees parentcraft texts as one manifestation of ‘normalisation’, which, pace Foucault, she observes has become ‘a basis for regulating the rest of the [nondeviant] population’ (1985:165). 4. For those not familiar with this practice, it refers to the mother either manually or by

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means of a breast pump expressing milk from the breast – with the option of saving this milk to be given to the baby later in a bottle. 5. It would be instructive to look at texts which speciWcally address or refer to mothers, as well as those which address or refer to fathers, and, where appropriate, to compare them. 6. Interestingly, in his own study of the representation of fathers in texts on schooling, van Leeuwen found that they “were radically excluded [i.e. suppressed] in texts addressing teachers, but included in many children’s stories, even if only brieXy, during the breakfast preceding the Wrst school day....” (1996:39). See also Martín Rojo (1997) for a comparable study of women’s and men’s discourse(s) in the workplace, which similarly draws on van Leeuwen’s framework, and the notions of both ‘social actors’ and ‘social action’. 7. Marshall (1991) in her examination of motherhood discourses suggests that ‘fun’ in parentcraft texts is not mentioned as much when the focus is on the mother, since the mother’s experience is overall described as positive, and therefore there is no need to go on at length about ‘fun’. 8. It is in fact minimal throughout Nanny Knows Best. Interestingly, Nanny is not overconcerned about children living with single mothers – for if the main carer is Nanny, and the mother is secondary, this displaces the father even further down the line, something which may apply even when there is no nanny. 9. Similarly, after the recent birth of the fourth child of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Daily Mail read: “Yesterday it was clear that Mr Blair had been called on to help out during Leo’s Wrst night at Number 10 ….” 10. I similarly remember reading another edition of the Bounty Babycare Guide in which there was a section entitled ‘Five Ways to get His Help’. 11. Ironically, this mother or woman opposition, to be operationalised by the father, is here supposed to be for the beneWt of women.

Data Sources Kohner, N. 1988. Pregnancy Book. London: Health Education Authority. Kohner, N. 1989. Birth to Five. London: Health Education Authority. Manning, M (ed). 1993/4. The Bounty Babycare Guide. Diss, Norfolk: Bounty Publications. ‘M’. 1993 (April/May). “Coping together”. M and M: the Magazine for the Mum-to-be and New Mother. London: HHL Publishing:48. Nanny Smith and Grunfeld, Nina. 1993. Nanny Knows Best. London: BBC Books. Rodway, A (ed) 1993/4. The Bounty Infant Health and Feeding Guide. Diss, Norfolk: Bounty Publications. Bennett, V R (ed) 1990. Your First Baby. London: Maxwell Marketing Services. SMA Nutrition. n.d. It’s Your Baby Too: a Guide for Fathers. Maidenhead: SMA Nutrition


Stoppard, Miriam. 1990. Dr. Miriam Stoppard’s New Baby Care Book. London: Dorling Kindersley.

References Althusser, Louis. 1984. Essays on Ideology. London:Verso. Berko Gleason, Jean and Blank Grief, Esther. 1983. “Men’s speech to young children”. In Language, Gender and Society, Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae and Nancy Henley (eds), 140–150. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Bowlby, John. 1965. Child Care and the Growth of Love. Penguin. Butler, Judith. 1990, 1999. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 1994. “Problems of sexist and non-sexist language”. In Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education, Jane Sunderland (ed), 26–33. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Harlow: Longman. Hasan, Ruqaiya and Cloran, C. 1990. “A sociolinguistic interpretation of everyday talk between mothers and children”. In Learning, Keeping and Using Language Vol. 1, Selected Papers of the 8th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Michael Halliday, J. Gibbons and H. Nicholas (eds), pp. 67–99. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hollway, Wendy. 1984. “Gender diVerence and the production of subjectivity”. In Changing the Subject, Julian Henriques et al. (eds), pp. 227–263. London: Methuen. Ivanic, Roz. 1998. Writing and Identity. John Benjamins: Amsterdam. Jewitt, C. 1997. “Images of men: male sexuality in sexual health leaXets and posters for young people”. Sociological Research Online 2 (2):1–18. Johnson, Sally. 1997. “Theorizing language and masculinity: a feminist perspective”. In Language and Masculinity, Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. Jolly, Hugh. 1977. Book of Child Care: the Complete Guide for Today’s Parents. London: Sphere. Lazar, Michelle. 1998. “Then something wonderful happened: advertising a lifestyle on oVer”. Centre for Language in Social Life Working Paper Series 92. Dept. of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University. Lupton, Deborah and Lesley Barclay. 1997. Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences. Sage. Marshall, H. 1991. “The social construction of motherhood: an analysis of childcare and parenting manuals”. In Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies. Ann Phoenix, Anne Woollett and Eva Lloyd (eds), 66–85. London: Sage. Martín Rojo, Luisa. 1997. “The politics of gender: Agency and self-reference in women’s discourse”. In Political Linguistics, Jan Blommaert and C. Bulcaen (eds.), pp. 231– 254. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Parke, Ross. 1996. Fatherhood. London: Harvard U.P. Richardson, Diane. 1993. Women, Motherhood and Childrearing. London: Macmillan.

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Smith, Dorothy. 1990. Texts, Facts and Femininity. London: Routledge. Spock, Benjamin. 1978. Baby and Child Care. London: The New English Library. Sunderland, Jane. 1998. Review of Bergvall B., Bing J. and Freed A. (eds.) 1996. Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Sociological Research Online 1998. http://www.socresonline/3/2/ sunderland.html Urwin, Cathy. 1985. “Constructing motherhood: the persuasion of normal development”. In Language, Gender and Childhood, Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine (eds.), 164–202. London: RKP. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1993. Language and representation: the recontextualization of participants, activities and reactions. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1995. “Representing social action”. Discourse and Society 6 (1):81– 106. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. “The representation of social actors”. In Texts and Practices, Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge.

Appendix: The data Text 1. Home from hospital

5

10

All of a sudden there’s a new little person at home. You will need time to adjust to this new situation. You may Wnd yourself feeling a little left out as your partner and baby get to know each other. As you adjust and get to know your baby you will become more involved and these feelings will disappear. You might both Wnd it useful if you can take a few days oV work when your baby Wrst arrives home. This will also help you to understand the new routine which will need to be set up.

Of course your partner may wish to take a break from this routine from time to time, especially if she has had a diYcult day with the baby crying. So you should expect to be called upon to step in and give her a break whenever it’s necessary. Babies cry for diVerent reasons. They can be too hot, too cold, still hungry, wet or soiled or sometimes just want some attention or a cuddle – do not panic. Experience will help you to know which.

15

20

25


Helping with the baby

5

10

15

20

You can help with the baby’s care by changing nappies, giving baths and giving cuddles. If your baby is bottlefed you can help by making up and giving feeds. During a feed your baby may swallow air and require winding. You can encourage him to burp by cuddling him over your shoulder or on your lap then rubbing his back gently. Remember never to leave your baby alone with a bottle as he could choke. Sometime between 3 and 6 months your baby will begin on solid food as well as his milk feeds. This is a time for experimentation, not only for the baby but also for you, as you both get used to the foods he likes and dislikes. This is enjoyable but can be messy, so arm yourself with bibs.

Playing with your baby will help get him used to his environment and help with his development. It will also help 25 you to get to know each other. Bathtime oVers a good opportunity for play using diVerent toys in the bath. Remember to always check the 30 temperature of the water before putting him in. Babies enjoy lots of fun so enjoy playing with him. In fact you should take every opportunity you can to play with your child as this is a vital part of his development. But remember that babies are rather fragile so don’t be too rough.

35

Text 2. Dad chat Now that your baby is born, life will take on a diVerent tempo. Enjoy this time together as a family. Your wife still needs lots of support and help with all the chores. Have fun.

5

• During the Wrst few weeks most babies waken for at least one feed or maybe two at night. Parents get desperately tired at this time. Life can seem one long round of feeds and bleary eyes. Take heart! The baby will settle into a routine which Wts in with family life and your night life should return to normal.

• If your wife returns to work after the birth of the baby do discuss with her just how you feel about this. It may be that there is a Wnancial or social reason for her to work, but she may need a short regular break from the baby, which may enable her to be a better mother and wife.

• Everyone loves babies, especially

• Babies turn into toddlers very

30

35

10 40

322 Jane Sunderland

15

20

25

new ones. Visitors will descend on your home from all corners of the world. Fathers need to be very Wrm; limit the number you invite into the house, stop them from disturbing the baby when he is asleep. Ensure that your family routine is protected. Babies are not happy to be handled by too many people, it makes them fretful. • Most mothers need to feel precious and special to their partners. They need to have times when they are women instead of mothers. Go out together for a treat that is fun for both of you. Let her know that you still enjoy being with her.

quickly and toddlers are brilliant at Wnding all the unsafe areas in your house. So even at this stage, plan for the future. Get yourselves a stair-gate, put locks on all the low cupboards, protect electric wires and sockets.

45

• Babies are for loving and enjoying. 50 They are not so fragile as they look; they love to be touched and spoken to, especially by Mum and Dad. Babies can be fun!

Text 3. The modern father

5

10

15

20

The modern father is a father who takes responsibility for the general care of his child. Fewer fathers nowadays are prepared to be strangers to their children, missing out on all the good times in the family and, most important, missing out on their children growing up. The modern father is active rather than passive. He will arrange his day to come home early from work to see his children; he will spend time playing with them, showing them new things, helping them with their hobbies, taking them with him when he enjoys his own. He will participate from day one with the care of the baby, with nappy changing, with getting up in the middle of the night, doing the two a.m. feed, helping with bath times, reading stories, playing

A father who has a high interest in the pregnancy generally stays interested after the baby is born. Interest is positively related to how much he holds the baby in the Wrst six weeks of life and also whether he goes to the baby when he or she cries. Not unexpectedly, his attitude aVects his wife’s enjoyment of pregnancy and motherhood. The happier he is about the pregnancy and the more he looks forward to fatherhood, the more she enjoys the Wrst few weeks of her baby’s life and, of course, the better the start to the baby’s life. The better the father is at playing his role, the more important he becomes. As a woman I’m surprised that men aren’t more prepared to manipulate the

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games and singing songs before bedtime. The modern father is a full-time parent, not a part-time stranger, and everyone in the family beneWts from this.

situation in their favour.

Text 4. 3. How do you determine when bedtime should be?

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My children have always gone to bed at some time between 6.30 and 7 p.m. from the day they were born until they were about seven, when they went to bed half an hour later, having had their bath at 6.30 p.m. At eight years they had their bath at 7 p.m. and bed followed. It was always bathtime that was prompt and bedtime that was a little bit Xexible. I put my children to bed early because an early bedtime was thought to be best for growing children. Nowadays it seems quite usual for a mother to keep her child up so her husband can see him when he comes back late from the oYce. I would say ‘Too bad’. The husband can peep at him whilst he is asleep and play with him at the weekend. I do not see any point in keeping children up. A young parent may feel it is charming, having the new baby around all evening to fuss over, but it does overstimulate the child. It also means that when the parents one day want their evenings to themselves again the routine they have established is hard to break and their child may be very reluctant to be put to bed (see question 4).

Text 5. The father’s role

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INEVITABLY, the responsibilities of parenthood bring with them changes in your own and your partner’s relationship and lifestyle. Instead of being a couple with shared interests of a varied nature, you have become the parents of a tiny infant whose round-the-clock needs call for priority. And with so much of your time taken up with meeting those needs, there is a risk that your partner may feel ‘left out’ and rejected.

A mother can unwittingly delay this process by discouraging oVers of help. Perhaps because of her personal anxiety about her baby’s well-being, she may Wnd it diYcult to trust anyone else to care for her baby. As a result, she may be depriving herself of an opportunity for a much-needed rest or change of scene, while her partner may feel less conWdent about oVering her a ‘break’ in future. In the past, breast feeding tended to be seen as a barrier to sharing in feeding. As a consequence, mothers The more he is involved in baby felt that they could not be separated care, the less likely this is to happen. from their babies for more than a few

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324 Jane Sunderland

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With so much emphasis on ‘bonding’ in the mother and baby relationship, we tend to forget that bonding is also necessary for fathers. To achieve this, a father needs to get acquainted with his baby through sharing in feeding, nappy changing, taking a turn at night-time care, and being aware of the general routine.

hours. But with today’s more enlightened approach, breast feeding mothers are encouraged to express their milk, so that another person can sometimes give the feed. (See chapter Breast feeding your baby.)

45

Text 6. Accepting help

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If you are used to doing everything yourself, it may be hard to ask for help. But one of the most important things you can do after a diYcult birth is to learn how to ask for help and not see it as a sign of your own inability to cope. You will be surprised how many willing hands there are amongst your friends and neighbours. However, if you feel that the problems facing you require more than a helping hand or two, don’t be afraid to ask for professional counselling. Ask your health visitor to put you in touch with someone. If you do need to ask for help, go to your partner Wrst. Many men feel totally left out during the early part of a baby’s life. They are often keen to be involved, but are not sure how to go about it. In those early days when baby really only recognises mum, the real truth is that many women want their partner to direct his parenting abilities at them. Your baby is probably getting all

the attention she needs but, if you aren’t, try getting your partner to take some of the strain whilst you recover. We live in a society that currently believes in mastering the body. We whip ourselves into shape with exercise and deny ourselves the foods we like. When you are pregnant – and especially when you are in labour – you learn the truth. Our bodies have a will of their own and are not there simply to be mastered but to be worked with. Just as it is true that tension during labour can increase the pain, so can Wghting your natural inclinations after the baby is born prolong both emotional and physical ailments. Follow your instincts – even if that means neglecting the laundry, having a nap, remaining celibate for a while or having that second helping of pudding. Before you know it, things will begin to get easier. M

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Subject index

abortion 277–278, 282, 287, 317 absence (discoursal/lexical) 22, 59, 145, 151, 185, 190, 237, 241, 301–307, 309–310, 312–313, 315 see also backgrounding, circumlocution, exclusion, omission advertisements 1, 7, 9, 12–13, 15, 28–29, 93, 95, 101–103, 111–128, 150, 159, 162–164 affiliation 7, 23, 75, 178, 187, 224 agency 10, 14, 18, 24, 46, 112, 125, 155, 178, 186, 281, 285, 289, 294 see also deagentialisation, social actor alignment 98, 118, 188, 194–197, 201–202, 204–206, 208–211, 269–270 already–gendered texts 231 ambiguity 44–46, 82, 132, 151–153, 157, 159, 163–164, 166, 169–170, 179, 183, 188, 199–201, 205, 207, 209–210, 262, 280 analytical framework 2, 20, 33, 156, 229, 237, 244–249, 252, 300 anaphora 186–188 anecdote 78–79, 257–258, 263–265, 270– 271 anxiety 159–160, 162, 323 appropriation 14, 17, 74, 96, 140, 190, 281 Arena 149–150, 171 argumentation 129–136 argumentative texts 129–130 attribution 23, 27, 316 audience 26, 34, 55, 105, 112, 119, 155, 165, 168, 178–179, 181, 183–189, 196, 201, 204–205, 210, 257–258, 260, 263–265, 279, 284, 296–297, 300, 315 backgrounding 301, 303–305, 311–312 see also absence, omission, exclusion banter 80–81, 84, 86 binary (opposition) 3–4, 48, 70, 74, 133, 139–141, 150, 155, 169, 190, 314

birth 15, 29, 111, 277–290, 296, 298, 324 Black feminist theory 56 bodies 25, 52, 80, 93–94, 98, 105, 114–116, 121, 137–138, 149, 161–162, 166, 177, 200–202, 258, 278, 281, 284–290, 324 see also corporeality CDA 11, 15, 17–22, 28, 33–35, 38–39, 45, 57, 65, 107, 111, 155, 169, 173, 214, 231– 232, 237, 254–255, 299–316 see critical discourse analysis childcare 294–297, 302–314 childrearing 295 chora 288 circuit of culture 169 circumlocution 185–186 see also absence, backgrounding, concealment, disguisement, exclusion, omission class (social) 15, 48–50, 58, 62, 72–74, 78, 80, 95, 112, 118, 130, 151, 171, 196, 257 classroom research 229–252 classrooms 1, 9, 11–12, 27, 30, 44, 50, 52, 61, 177, 179–180, 182, 185–188, 190, 224– 244, 250–252, 262–263 closet 179–184, 186–189 commitment 2, 33, 82, 120, 142–144, 179, 189, 202 communism 277–282, 286–288 Community of Practice 7, 15–17, 28, 32, 69– 74, 76–77, 79, 82, 84–86, 185 see CofP competitive strategies 77 complexity 15, 18, 32, 60, 78, 85, 133, 142, 186 concealment 29, 177, 179, 183–184, 188, 190 see also absence, circumlocution, disguisement concordancing 61, 224

326 Subject index

conflict conflict talk confounding 187–188 constructed certitude 170 consumer 29, 107, 112–113, 124, 137, 149, 157–159, 162–166, 170–171, 224 consumption 20, 154, 156, 162, 169, 229, 251 context 1, 4–5, 7, 9, 12, 15–18, 20–28, 32–34, 44–48, 50–53, 56, 60–62, 69, 72–74, 81– 82, 84–86, 96, 100, 102–103, 119, 121, 129–136, 146, 153–158, 163, 168–169, 178–182, 185–188, 194, 197, 200–205, 209, 211, 224–225, 234–236, 240, 248, 250, 258–260, 263–265, 270–271, 283, 290, 294–296, 301, 304 contradictory identities 8 conversation 18, 33, 39, 44, 52, 54, 58, 70, 73, 79–82, 86–87, 199, 205, 208, 210–211, 231, 259–266, 270 see also long conversation conversation analysis (CA) 18, 33, 39, 44, 52, 54 conversation management 58 conversational narrative 265 conflict 30, 80–82, 91, 131, 141, 144, 162, 170, 209, 265, 270, 289, 310, 312 conflict–talk 81 co-operative strategies 74 CofP 16, 71–74, 77, 79, 82, 84–86 see also Community of Practice corpora 49–51, 60–61 see also corpus corporeality 286 see also bodies corpus 45, 51, 61–62, 154, 156, 296–297, 313 see also corpora couplehood 111, 114–117 critical awareness 19 critical discourse analysis 11, 15, 17, 22, 28, 33–35, 45, 57, 65, 107, 111, 155, 169, 231– 232, 237, 254–255, 299–316 see CDA critical linguistics 19, 155

deagentialisation 230, 304 see also agency, social actor death 17, 137, 281–282, 286 deixis 125, 179, 187–190, 269 dialogue 12, 39, 55, 210, 226, 258, 264 dialogues 223, 226, 245, 259, 295 dichotomy 43, 133, 139–141, 145, 168, 247, 314 ‘difference approach’ 3 disadvantage 29, 32, 44 discourse 13, 6, 8–15, 18–31, 33–39, 41, 45, 47, 54–57, 70, 85, 95, 97, 103, 107–113, 118, 121, 124, 129–130, 133–136, 138, 141, 143–146, 150–157, 166–169, 177– 179, 181–187, 190–197, 203, 212, 221– 236, 239, 241–252, 259–260, 263–264, 267, 269–271, 277–280, 283–289, 295, 299–316 see also discourse analysis, discourses, discursivity discourse analysis 13, 11–12, 15, 18–22, 31– 34, 45, 54, 57, 70, 107, 111, 130, 136, 146, 153–156, 168–169, 194–195, 249, 299, 316 see also discourse, discourses, CDA, critical discourse analysis, textually oriented discourse analysis discourse as constitutive 13, 18 discourse as representative 13, 18 discourse community 152 discourse practices 129 see also practices discourse strategies 29, 193–195, 203 discourses 7–16, 18–19, 23–24, 27, 29–30, 32, 95, 131, 134, 146, 152, 155, 169, 177– 178, 224–227, 229, 231, 236–237, 241, 249, 251, 259–260, 262, 270–271, 275, 277, 279, 284–288, 293, 295, 297, 299– 301, 307–308, 310–318 alternative 13, 24, 263 available 241 classroom 9, 30, 226–228, 232, 251 co-existing 299 companion 314

Subject index 327

competing 11 cultural 11 dominant 24, 178–9, 186, 259, 307, 314 gendered 230–231, 241, 245, 260, 264, 308 identity 316 liberating 13 maternal 11 mutually–supporting 10 official 279 patriarchal 235, 244 oppositional 155 resistant 18 subversive 24 teenage 262 specific discourses: ‘autonomous school management discourse’ 10 ‘compulsory heterosexuality discourse’ 11, 178 ‘equal opportunities discourse’ 249 ‘father as baby entertainer discourse’ 308–309 ‘father as line manager discourse’ 311– 312 ‘father as mother’s bumbling assistant discourse’ 309–311 ‘father’s full investment in childcare as desirable discourse’ 315 ‘God’s will discourse’ 10 ‘have and hold discourse’ 24 ‘male sexual drive discourse’ 24 ‘mother as main parent discourse’ 302– 312 ‘new mother who also works outside the home discourse’ 307 ‘nurturing discourse’ 267 ‘part–time father discourse’ 302–312 ‘permissive discourse’ 11 ‘privileged femininity discourse’ 305 ‘privileging of appearance – in women discourse’ 239, 247–249 ‘pro-natality discourse’ 284, 288 ‘women beware women discourse’ 234, 249

discourse(s) of: autonomous school management 10 birth 286 blissful motherhood 285 childhood 262, 271 commerce 10 conservative gender relations 112 corporeality 286 femininity 11 fertility control as beneficial 10 gender–blindness 231 lost identity 286 masculinity 30, 271 parental identity 314 parental involvement in school affairs 10 resistance 307 sexuality 24 subversion 248 teenage femininity 263, 270 see also discourse, discourse analysis, discursivity discursive construction 146, 210 discursive practice 20, 179, 229, 245, 247, 251 discursivity 2–3, 11–12, 15, 18, 20, 30, 32, 54, 59, 107, 130, 134–136, 146, 153, 156, 169, 178–182, 188, 210, 223, 229, 245, 248, 251, 260, 265, 267, 270, 286, 299 see also discourse, discourses, discourse analysis disguisement 29, 183–185, 188–189 see also absence, circumlocution, concealment distribution 20, 50–51, 296–298 doll 28, 91, 93, 97–98, 103–106 dominance 3, 4, 52, 72, 124, 152, 158 ‘dominance approach’ 3 dominant reading 156, 167 double–voicing 166, 170 emotion 133–134, 141, 146, 166 endorsement 34, 151–152, 245–247, 250– 252 epistemological site 2, 22, 28–29, 231

328 Subject index

epistemology 5, 56, 179 erotic 160–162, 195, 200–206, 208, 211 see also homoeroticism erotic talk 195, 202–203, 206, 208 essentialism 5, 32, 57, 71 ethics 132, 139, 141, 179–180, 186, 189, 289 ethnicity 6, 15, 23, 27, 72, 196, 290 ethnography 18, 33, 85 exclusion 46, 223, 301 see also backgrounding expletives 50, 59 exploratory talk 61 face 28, 70, 75–77, 85, 98, 104–106, 114– 115, 119, 123, 131, 152, 162, 170, 183, 197, 207, 258, 261, 264, 268, 279, 284, 313 face threatening act (FTA) 75, 76 fatherhood 30, 97, 120, 293–316 feminine identity 24, 29, 111, 125, 167 see also identity femininities 6–7, 31, 101, 314 femininity 3–4, 7, 11, 21, 24–25, 29–30, 59– 60, 73, 84, 97, 101–113, 124, 149, 154– 155, 158–161, 165, 169, 234, 263, 270–271, 287, 303, 313–314 feminism 1–5, 10, 14, 19, 21, 28, 31–39, 46– 48, 69–71, 73, 107, 123, 125, 132, 150– 153, 159, 167–168, 232, 236, 246–249, 288, 294 feminist epistemology 5, 56 feminist linguistics 5, 19, 28, 31, 69, 71 free indirect discourse 209 focalisation 29, 161, 269 foreign language textbooks 223–224, 226– 227, 233–241, 245–250 see also language textbooks forms of participation 16 frame 29, 121, 130, 146, 194–197, 203–206, 258, 264, 270–271 frame analysis 196 framing 29, 195–197, 205, 261 fraternity 59, 157, 170 gaze 115, 119–120, 123–124, 157, 159–162, 169–170, 209

gender throughout gender asymmetry 116, 118, 294 ‘gender critical point’ 231–244 ‘gender differences’ 3, 32 gender enactment 28 gender identity 1–2, 7, 22, 25–27, 30–31, 48, 72, 85, 134, 169, 175, 221, 231, 251, 257– 258, 270–271, 301, 317 see also feminine identity, femininities, femininity, identity, identities, masculinities, masculinity, sexuality gender relations 11, 29–31, 93, 111–119, 124–125, 152–153, 169, 205, 227, 262, 295, 299, 301, 306, 313–314 gender tendencies 133 gender–inclusive language 5 gendered repertoires 129, 138 genre 15, 18, 80, 105, 112, 124, 138, 145– 146, 151, 154, 156, 158, 170, 295, 317 GQ 29, 149–150, 153, 159, 163–164, 166 Head to Head 136–146 hegemonic masculinity 152–153, 158, 161, 166–168, 170–171 heterosexual femininity 112–113, 124 heterosexual masculinity 48, 73, 113, 159 heterosexual sociality 111, 113 heterosexuality 11, 24, 29, 111, 177–178, 260, 262 see also heterosexual femininity, heterosexual masculinity homoeroticism 158, 162 see also erotic homogeneity 281 homophobia 151, 163, 179–180, 187 homosexuality 29, 31, 73, 159–162, 165, 177, 182, 185–186, 188, 264 humour 81, 150, 159, 163, 165, 170, 234, 262 identities 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 16–18, 22–27, 29–31, 33–34, 47–50, 54, 59, 72, 85, 93, 106, 129, 130–131, 134–136, 138, 159, 165, 169, 170, 175, 178, 181, 190, 195–196, 210, 221, 224–225, 227, 231, 251, 257–258,

Subject index 329

267, 270–271, 287, 299, 301, 310, 313– 314, 317 identity 13, 15–17, 22–34, 43, 47–49, 62, 68– 69, 72, 86, 91, 97, 107, 111–112, 119, 124– 125, 136, 146, 150, 153–158, 161, 165– 171, 177–197, 207–210, 224, 229, 231, 237, 249, 251, 258–260, 262–266, 270– 271, 277, 285–286, 288–289, 293–295, 300, 305, 308–318 see also feminine identity, gender identity, masculine identity ideology 19, 91, 94, 125, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 155–159, 161, 170, 187, 227, 286–288 impoliteness 12, 69–85 see also politeness incongruity 106, 264, 279, 283–284 indexing 26–27, 270 inside/outside 183, 188, 190 interaction 9, 12, 18, 21, 23, 44–45, 48, 50– 58, 60–61, 70–76, 78–84, 94, 123, 130– 131, 161–162, 194–209, 250, 261–262, 265, 270 interactional power 74, 82, 84 interactional sociolinguistics 18, 55 interdiscursivity 14 see also intertextuality interpellation 171, 178 interpretation 4–5, 12, 26, 33, 44–45, 47, 51, 58, 61–62, 69, 80–81, 86, 103, 133, 139– 140, 146, 156, 169, 179, 181, 194, 201, 247, 250, 259, 261, 283, 300, 313 see also reader response interruption 39, 45, 50 see also overlapping speech intertextuality 14, 18, 28, 95, 103, 307, 312– 313 intuition 49, 57–58 involvement 10, 56, 113, 130, 133, 193, 208, 259, 265, 295, 305–306, 309, 315 irony 14, 29, 32, 53, 139, 141, 152, 158–159, 163–166, 169–170, 231, 234, 247, 277, 279–281, 283, 284–289 language education 34, 223–252

language practices 257–260, 270–271 see also practices language textbooks 1, 223, 226 see also foreign language textbooks lesbianism 8, 12, 15, 29, 71, 177–182, 184– 191, 305, 315 lexical absences 22, 59, 145, 151, 190, 237, 241, 301, 303, 306–307, 312 see also absence (discoursal/lexical), backgrounding, circumloction, exclusion, omission linguistic choices 22 linguistic practices 19, 46, 56–57, 134–135, 146 linguistic resources 130, 134, 145–146 Loaded 101, 132, 150–154, 156, 159, 162– 165, 189 local meanings 15–17, 248 long conversation 231, 259, 264 see also conversation loss of identity 32, 285, 288–289 love 4, 112–119, 124–125, 144, 168, 195, 198–203, 205–207, 209–211, 257, 262, 268, 310 male gaze 160 see also gaze marriage 11, 111, 113, 117, 119, 121, 124, 137, 142–144, 201–202, 233–236 masculine identity 153, 165, 170, 264, 293 see also identity masculinities 6–7, 31–32, 48, 54, 101, 314 masculinity 3–4, 7–8, 21, 29–30, 34, 48, 59– 60, 73–74, 97, 101, 113, 149–171, 267, 271, 303, 313–314 media 2, 12, 28–29, 93–96, 111, 113, 123, 125, 130–131, 136–137, 150–151, 154– 155, 160, 171, 202 mediation 22, 24, 229, 235, 237, 251, 270, 306 men’s lifestyle magazines 149–150, 152– 158, 162, 168, 169 metamessage 194, 205, 207–208 moral argumentation 132, 136, 142, 144

330 Subject index

moral beliefs 132 moral judgements 129 ‘moral panic’ 143 moral positions 129 morality 129–130, 134, 136, 143–146 motherhood 27, 30, 111, 119–120, 123–124, 277–289, 307, 310–316 newspaper columns 28–29, 131, 136 omission 237, 243, 307 see also absence, backgrounding, circumlocution, exclusion order of discourse 11–12, 156, 177 other-centredness 112–113, 118–120, 122– 125 overlapping speech 45, 58, 232 see also interruption parentcraft texts 1, 12, 22, 293–296, 299, 300, 310, 314–316 parenthood 10, 28, 30, 111, 113, 120, 275, 293–294, 301, 312–317, 323 patriarchy 30, 154, 167, 171, 207, 229, 235, 247, 249, 251, 277–278, 311 pedagogy 30, 227 perception 18, 71, 73, 78, 149, 153, 232, 247, 249, 284, 301 performance 10, 25 27, 31, 34, 70–71, 75– 85, 97, 122, 178–183, 186, 188–190, 201, 204–205, 258, 260, 285–286, 291, 315 performativity 25–27, 47, 60, 62, 71, 97, 178, 181–184, 186, 190, 247, 281, 285, 315 personal experience 133–134, 138–139, 142, 259, 279 politeness 2, 28, 69–71, 73–87 see also impoliteness post-modernism 28 post-structuralism 4, 6, 39, 54 power 10, 14–16, 19, 24, 27, 30, 44, 48–49, 54, 59–60, 71, 73–76, 81–82, 84, 93, 100, 103, 106, 119, 131–132, 136, 146, 153, 158, 160–161, 167, 177–178, 197, 199, 211, 271 practices 2, 7, 11–21, 25, 30–33, 43, 46, 48,

51, 56–57, 62, 71, 93–94, 97, 103, 107, 125, 129, 134–136, 146, 155, 156, 178, 223, 226, 229, 231, 237, 245–248, 251, 257–260, 265, 270–271, 287–288, 293– 297, 299–300, 307, 310, 311, 315, 317 see also discourse practices, language practices, social practices pragmatics 18, 185 producer 57, 95–96, 151, 164–165, 170 production 5, 12, 20, 23, 71, 76, 79, 91, 107, 133, 152–158, 169, 183, 225, 300 progressive text 230, 240–241 pronouns 114, 180, 185–189, 296, 302, 305, 312 psychiatric interview 28, 194–199, 210 psychiatry 29, 193, 197, 212 public argumentation 136 qualitative research 2, 60 62, 136, 153, 156, 195, 259 quantitative research 50 Queer linguistics 32 Queer theory 188 race 14, 27, 48–49, 56, 72, 122, 130, 290 rapport talk 74 see report talk rationality 138146 reader 3, 17, 21, 26, 29, 334, 105, 137, 150– 153, 156–159, 161–166, 179, 224–225, 229, 237, 247, 284, 286, 300–301, 305– 307, 315 see also ‘reader–aloud’, resistant reader, resistant reading, reader response ‘reader–aloud’ 229 see also ‘talk around the text’ reader response 17, 229 see also interpretation, reader, ‘reading against the grain’, resistant reader readership 157, 169 reading 17–21, 134, 146, 156, 164–167, 169, 188, 227–228, 235–236, 242, 250, 252, 257, 284, 302, 309, 311, 316 ‘reading against the grain’ 17 see also resistant reader

Subject index

readings 39, 156–157, 164–165, 169–170, 225–226, 293 relevance 9, 20, 28, 39, 51, 56, 60, 70, 80–81, 212, 259 relevance theory 70, 80 repertoire 39, 54, 71, 129, 134–135, 138– 146, 185 report talk 74 see rapport talk reported voices 263 representation 4, 25, 91, 93, 98, 100, 107, 113–116, 124, 132, 149, 154–155, 159, 161–162, 169–170, 187, 196, 223–225, 231–236, 238, 241, 245–252, 289, 293, 296, 301, 311, 314, 316, 318 see also verbal representation, visual representation research question 230 resistance 5, 14, 16, 150, 156, 181, 190, 307 resistant reader 156 resistant reading 164–166 see also reader response, ‘reading against the grain’ rhetoric 54, 131, 203, 309 rhetorical strategies 134 ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ 129, 132 Romania 2, 15, 277–282, 284–290 romantic love 114–115, 117, 119, 124–125 semiotics 2, 28, 97, 107 sex 2, 4–5, 10, 20–21, 25, 29–31, 44, 71–73, 85, 144, 155, 177, 195–196, 200–202, 205–206, 226–228, 250, 270, 294–295, 317 sexism 4–5, 7, 19, 22, 32, 44, 51, 73, 151, 163, 165, 226–228, 230, 235, 241, 247, 299 sexist language 5, 19, 32, 299 sexuality 24, 28–29, 33–34, 48–49, 81, 93, 102–103, 156, 162, 166, 177–179, 181, 183, 195, 200–203, 205, 207, 270, 295, 299–300, 317 see also heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism silence 11, 67, 136, 180, 183, 188–189

situated meanings 1, 15–16, 29, 131, 146, 153, 225, 248, 251 social actor 106, 302, 304–305, 311, 314 see also agency social construction 13, 158 social identities 48, 136 social practices 9, 12–15, 18, 20–21, 30, 33, 44, 93, 103, 134, 146, 226, 229, 249, 251, 258, 293, 295–296, 299, 310 see also discourse practices, language practices social relations 17, 23, 30 social theory 9–10, 56, 132, 225 sociocultural context 129–130 sociolinguistics 2, 18, 22, 34, 55, 85 specificity 15, 17, 32 speech act 25, 27, 82, 181–184, 188, 190, 196, 225 speech act theory 25, 181, 184 speech community 5, 16, 57, 74 stereotypes 4, 7, 16, 26, 69, 71–73, 78, 80–84, 133, 139, 158, 194, 207, 223–224, 226, 228, 231, 234, 239–240, 244–6, 250–251 struggle 6, 14, 71, 168, 190 subordination 182, 223, 226 subversion 5, 11, 24–25, 43, 107, 144, 170, 189–190, 226, 240, 245–252 suppression 113, 301 sympathy 74, 82, 151, 294 tag questions 45–46, 58 ‘talk around the text’ 228–229, 251 see also ‘reader-aloud’ teacher talk 226–232, 243–247, 250–252 ‘telling case’ 55, 230 text 1, 9, 11–15, 17–18, 20–23, 27–39, 44, 47–52, 54, 58, 93, 95, 101, 103–107, 121, 129–130, 134–139, 141, 145–146, 153– 157, 161, 164–165, 168–169, 178, 187– 189, 212, 224–241, 243–252, 263, 271, 278, 280–281, 286, 290, 293–318 text content 134–135, 138–139, 146 text–reader interaction 225 text(ual) organisation 134–135, 138–139, 141, 145–146, 312

331

332 Subject index

text type 22, 28, 231, 246 textually oriented discourse analysis 156 totalitarianism 30, 278, 280–281, 286, 289 traditional masculinity 151, 159–160, 165, 169 values 11, 16, 28, 71, 79, 94–95, 97, 101, 105–106, 124, 129–130, 132–136, 139, 141, 143, 146, 151–152, 154–156, 159, 162, 164–167, 170, 183, 185, 259, 262, 287 variability 6, 43 see also variation

variable identities 31 variation 4, 60, 135, 200 variationist studies 50, 62 verbal representation 116 visual representation 97, 100, 157 see also representation war 94, 145, 280–281, 285 warrant 2, 16, 28, 44, 47, 49, 52, 56, 58–60, 62, 259 see also conversation analysis (CA) ‘women’s argument’ 141

Subject index 333

Name index Abraham 227–229, 250, 253 Allwright 226, 230, 253 Althusser 171, 172, 190, 293, 319 Andrews 131, 138, 147 Antaki 130, 134, 135, 147, 148 Atwood 281, 290, 291 Baban 277, 278, 282, 287, 291 Baker 32, 35, 51, 65 Bakhtin 14, 35, 263, 269, 271, 290 Barbone 179, 180, 191 Barclay 123, 127, 294–296, 303, 307, 310, 317, 319 Barrett 25, 26, 34, 35 Barthes 17, 35, 93, 107, 157, 172 Bateson 194, 203, 205, 213 Bergvall 6, 15, 16, 34, 35, 38, 43, 47, 48, 63, 70, 87, 88, 320 Billig 54, 63, 65 Bing 6, 15, 34, 35, 38, 43, 47, 63, 70, 87, 88, 320 Black 4, 8, 35, 56, 57, 63, 64, 97, 104–106, 159, 172, 192, 206, 213, 253, 272 Bowlby 303, 319 Brown 2, 28, 35, 70, 75–77, 84, 85, 88, 150, 151, 206 Bucholtz 5, 6, 15, 23, 25, 34–36, 38, 47, 48, 56, 57, 63, 64, 72, 85, 86, 88, 255, 272 Butler 25–27, 35, 62, 63, 71, 88, 97, 107, 154, 155, 169, 172, 178, 180–183, 188, 190, 192, 285, 291, 315, 319 Cameron 4, 5, 9, 15, 18, 19, 22, 26, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 46, 47, 50, 62–64, 66, 70, 73, 79, 81, 82, 88, 154, 159, 172, 259, 272, 299, 319 Chekola 179, 180, 184, 186, 189, 192 Chodorow 7, 21, 35 Chouliaraki 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 20, 22–24, 31– 35, 225, 227, 228, 253 Clark, H. 183, 184, 187, 192

Coates 11, 13, 34, 36, 45, 50, 58, 62–64, 66, 70, 74, 77, 88, 89, 258, 265, 272 Collins 56, 57, 64 Connell 7, 36, 48, 64, 152, 158, 159, 167, 172, 267, 272 Coulthard 2, 13, 19, 28, 39, 91, 107, 148, 154, 172, 198, 213, 214, 255, 320 Coupland 2, 3, 7, 14, 23, 26, 34, 37, 136, 147, 224, 254 Coward 4, 35, 159, 172 Crewe 151, 154, 156, 169, 171, 173 de Klerk 50, 59, 61, 64 Dendrinos 227–229, 250, 253 Dombey 228, 253 Eckert 4, 15–17, 36, 50, 51, 64, 69, 71, 72, 88, 259, 272 Edmondson 9, 23, 36 Edwards, T. 151, 154, 159, 173 Fairclough 9, 11–15, 17, 19–24, 31, 33–36, 130, 134, 136, 137, 146, 147, 155, 156, 169, 173, 177, 225, 226, 229, 245, 249, 253, 259, 272, 299, 305, 307, 316, 319 Foucault 9–11, 13, 14, 30, 31, 36, 37, 74, 88, 156, 168, 173, 177, 178, 192, 197, 199, 213, 259, 272, 317 Freed 6, 15, 34, 35, 38, 43, 47, 63, 70, 72, 73, 87, 88, 320 Fuss 71, 88, 183, 189, 192, 323 Gee 6, 10, 36 Gergen 23, 24, 38 Giddens 7, 196, 205, 213 Gilbert, N. 18, 36, 146, 147 Gilligan 132, 147 GoVman 29, 75, 113, 115, 121, 126, 194–197, 203, 208, 211, 213, 258 Graddol 52, 62, 64, 66, 226, 254

334 Name index

Grimshaw, A. 133, 147 Grosz 288, 292 Gumperz 38, 55, 64, 193–195, 213 Hall 13, 15, 25, 26, 34–38, 47, 48, 64, 89, 91, 93, 97, 107, 253–255, 272, 319 Halliday 96, 107, 113, 126, 224, 225, 253, 319 Hartman 223, 224, 253 Hasan 224, 225, 253, 295, 319 Hellinger 223, 253 Henley 36, 39, 66, 319 Henry 284, 290–292 Hollway 11, 13, 24, 37, 295, 299, 300, 317, 319 Holmes 3, 16, 37, 45, 46, 50, 60, 61, 64, 69, 71, 73, 76–78, 88, 185, 192, 258, 266, 272 Horsman 18, 23, 37 Huckin 237, 254 Hutcheon 280, 292 Ivanic 6, 8, 37, 224, 254, 293, 316, 319 Jackson 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 169, 170, 173 Jaworski 2, 3, 7, 14, 23, 26, 34, 37, 136, 147, 224, 254 Johnson 7, 26, 34, 37, 47, 48, 59, 62, 64, 70, 88, 170, 172–174, 196, 272, 314, 319 Jolly 294, 310, 319 Judd 223, 224, 253 Kaplan 193, 195, 210, 214 Khayatt 185, 192 Kiesling 59, 60, 64 Kitetu 11, 13, 37, 224, 254 Kress 10, 13, 37, 95, 96, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113, 126, 134, 147, 155, 161, 162, 173 Kristeva 14, 37 Labov 50, 64, 80, 89, 189, 192, 195, 214, 265, 272 LakoV 3, 37, 45, 48, 57, 63, 65, 73, 74, 79, 89 Lazar 2, 12, 13, 15, 19, 28, 29, 37, 111–113, 122, 125, 126, 294, 317, 319 Leap 65, 178, 184, 192 Leontzakou 2, 30, 223, 232, 237–241, 244, 254 Levinson 2, 28, 35, 70, 75–77, 84, 88, 194, 214

Liiceanu 282, 292 Litosseliti 1, 2, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 28, 29, 37, 62, 71, 72, 85, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 143, 147, 154, 156, 178, 185, 196, 197, 224– 226, 295, 315 Lupton 123, 127, 294–296, 303, 307, 310, 317, 319 Lutz 133, 141, 147 Lyons 187, 192 Maher 180, 182, 192 Marshall 295, 310, 318, 319 Martín Rojo 307, 316, 318, 319 Maybin 2, 12, 15–17, 30, 62, 257, 259, 272 McConnell-Ginet 4, 15–17, 36, 51, 64, 71, 72, 88, 259, 272 Meinhof 7, 34, 37, 47, 48, 59, 64, 70, 88, 172– 174, 272, 319 Mercer 61, 63, 66 MeyerhoV 16, 37, 69, 71, 88, 89, 185, 192 Miller 267, 272 Mills 2, 5, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19, 28, 34, 38, 66, 69, 74, 85, 89, 154, 156, 157, 161, 174, 225, 247, 254 Miroiu 288, 289, 292 Mishler 195, 197, 198, 200, 211, 214 Mitchell 79, 89, 230, 254 Mulkay 18, 36, 146, 147 Mulvey 160, 174 Nicholson 49, 62, 65 Ogbay 11, 14, 38 OpVer 180, 192 Pauwels 5, 19, 38 Paz 193, 195, 200, 202, 214 Potter 15, 20, 21, 38, 56, 65, 130, 134, 146–148 Pusch 180, 182, 192 Rice 179, 180, 191 Rich 11, 30, 38, 111, 118, 127, 185, 291 Rosen-Knill 284, 290–292

Name index 335

Sacks 198, 214 SchegloV 16, 33, 38, 44, 45, 52–55, 63, 65, 67 Sedgwick 177, 178, 180, 182, 188, 190–192 Shattuck 2, 30, 223, 232–237, 241, 244, 254 Shotter 23, 24, 38 Simpson 154, 159, 161, 162, 174 Smith, D. 293, 294, 299, 320 Smith, S. 106, 108 Smithson 54, 58, 65 Sperber 70, 80, 89, 283, 290, 292 Spock 294, 295, 307, 310, 320 Stokoe 54, 58, 65 Stubbs 38, 45, 51, 57, 62, 63, 65, 225, 254 Stychin 190, 192 Sullivan 197, 214 Sunderland 1, 2, 7, 8, 11–13, 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 50, 55, 56, 62, 65, 66, 71, 72, 85, 122, 130, 133, 154, 178, 185, 196, 197, 223–226, 230, 252–254, 293, 295, 315, 319, 320 Swann 2, 6, 16, 21, 27, 28, 38, 43, 44, 52, 62, 64–66, 226, 254, 259

Tannen 3, 38, 74, 77, 79, 81, 82, 89, 133, 138, 148, 193–195, 203, 208, 212, 214, 272 Taylor 180, 187–189, 192 Toolan 269, 272 Trudgill 3, 34, 38, 50, 65, 66, 272

Talansky 223, 224, 226, 254 Talbot 3, 12, 34, 38, 152, 154, 156, 166, 167, 174, 224, 254

Zimmerman 3, 39, 45, 66

Urwin 300, 303, 307, 317, 320 van Dijk 12, 19, 21, 38 van Leeuwen 2, 13, 19, 22, 28, 39, 91, 96, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113, 126, 132, 148, 161, 162, 173, 237, 255, 296, 297, 301, 304–306, 316, 318, 320 Volosinov 31, 39, 270, 272 Wegerif 61, 63, 66 West, C. 3, 39, 45, 65, 66 Wetherell 16, 33, 38, 39, 54, 56, 65, 66, 130, 134, 146–148, 171, 173 White, J. 21, 39 Wilson 70, 80, 89, 283, 284, 290, 292 Wodak 6, 19, 21, 34, 36, 39, 47, 66, 272

In the series DISCOURSE APPROACHES TO POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE (DAPSAC) the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. GELBER, Katharine: Speaking Back: The free speech versus hate speech debate. 2002. 2. LITOSSELITI, Lia and Jane SUNDERLAND (eds.): Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis. 2002. 3. CHNG, Huang Hoon: Separate and Unequal. Judicial rhetoric and women’s rights. 2002. 4. CHILTON, Paul and Christina SCHÄFFNER (eds.): Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic approaches to political discourse. n.y.p.

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Discourse And Power in a Multilingual World (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Arab News and Conflict: A multidisciplinary discourse study (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Discourse, War and Terrorism (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 6)

Analysing Identities in Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, Volume 28)

Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society & Culture)

A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Narrative Counselling: Social And Linguistic Processes Of Change (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Mediating Ideology in Text And Image: Ten Critical Studies (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Manipulation And Ideologies in the Twentieth Century: Discourse, Language, Mind (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Discourse And Power in a Multilingual World (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Discourse, War and Terrorism (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 6)

Analysing Identities in Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, Volume 28)

Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society & Culture)

A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Shaping Minds: A Discourse Analysis of Chinese-language Community Mental Health Literature (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Narrative Counselling: Social And Linguistic Processes Of Change (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Mediating Ideology in Text And Image: Ten Critical Studies (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

Metonymy in Language and Thought (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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Language, Communication And the Economy (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

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