Gender in Interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse
Edited by Bettina Baron Helga Kotthoff John Benjamins Publishing Company
Gender in Interaction
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker Justus Liebig University Giessen, English Department Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany e-mail:
[email protected] Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey University of Southern Denmark
Herman Parret Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp
Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp
Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jean Caron Université de Poitiers
Robyn Carston University College London
Bruce Fraser Boston University
Thorstein Fretheim University of Trondheim
John Heritage University of California at Los Angeles
Susan Herring University of Texas at Arlington
Masako K. Hiraga St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University
David Holdcroft University of Leeds
Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni University of Lyon 2
Claudia de Lemos University of Campinas, Brazil
Marina Sbisà University of Trieste
Emanuel Schegloff University of California at Los Angeles
Deborah Schiffrin Georgetown University
Paul O. Takahara Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Sandra Thompson University of California at Santa Barbara
Teun A. Van Dijk University of Amsterdam
Richard J. Watts University of Berne
Sachiko Ide Japan Women’s University
Volume 93 Gender in Interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse Edited by Bettina Baron and Helga Kotthoff
Gender in Interaction Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse Edited by
Bettina Baron Konstanz University
Helga Kotthoff Freiburg University of Education
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 in interaction : perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse / edited by Bettina Baron, Helga Kotthoff. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 93) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social interaction. 2. Sex role. 3. Communication--Sex difference. I. Baron, Bettina. II. Kotthoff, Helga. III. Pragmatics & Beyond ; new ser. 93. HM1111.G46 2001 305.3--dc21 isbn 90 272 51126 (Eur.) / 1 58811 1105 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
2001043921
© 2001 – 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
In memoriam Gisela Schoenthal
Table of contents
Preface Helga Kotthoff and Bettina Baron
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Part I Introduction Gender and interaction: Widening the conceptual scope Barrie Thorne
3
Part II Perspectives on gender in childhood and adolescence Girls oppositional stances: The interactional accomplishment of gender in nursery school and family life Jenny Cook-Gumperz
21
Constituting the emotions: A longitudinal study of emotion talk in a preschool friendship group of boys Amy Kyratzis
51
Notably gendered relations: Relationship work in early adolescents’ notes Spencer E. Cahill
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Far from sugar and spice: Teenage girls, embodiment and representation Gerry Bloustien
99
Part III Perspectives on masculinity Masculinities and men’s health R.W. Connell
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Gender and habitus: Fundamental securities and crisis tendencies among men Cornelia Behnke and Michael Meuser
153
“Male honor”: Towards an understanding of the construction of gender relations among youths of Turkish origin Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
175
Part IV Perspectives on femininity Arguing among scholars: Female scientists and their shaping of expertise Bettina Baron
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Academic women in the male university field: Communicative practices at postgraduate seminars Britt-Louise Gunnarsson
247
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals Helga Kotthoff
283
Theorizing gender: Feminist awareness and language change Rachel Giora
329
Subject index
349
Preface Helga Kotthoff and Bettina Baron
1.
What does “Gender in interaction” mean?
“Gender in Interaction” — with this title we want to allude not only to the interaction between the sexes, but also to gender as an interactional achievement and to the social category of gender in interaction with other social parametres such as age, status, prestige, or institutional and ethnic frameworks as a third dimension. The new-born baby has no gender, but merely a sex. However, with the exclamation “It is a girl/boy!” that socio-cultural formation of gender begins. Thus, from the first day on, communication includes gender work. The title of this book is programmatic in the sense that all papers collected in this volume share the perspective on gender as interacting with other social categories and with cultural, situative and institutional contexts. The assumption that masculinities and femininities are communicatively performed is a cornerstone in approaching gender. Presently there is wide agreement that they have to be conceived as pluralized: changing over time and varying culturally and contextually. One aim of the book is to trace the varying relevance of gender in interaction. In many contexts gender is not the only identity category a person acts out: people act as friends, neighbors, computer experts, scientists, etc., and they play certain roles in these social environments. Many of their everyday activities have a gendered dimension, though not all. How can this gendered dimension be described and what do the contexts look like in which gender is not made relevant? It is a basic assumption of the book not to depart from an ubiquitous importance of gender, but to ask if and in which way gender influences interaction in specific communicative situations. This book is divided into three sections: perspectives on childhood and adolescence, on masculinity, and on femininity. All contributions discuss empirical research of communication and the question of whether (and how)
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gender is made accountable in discourse, and how it is symbolized as a relevant category in the real world. The authors come from a wide variety of backgrounds: from sociology (Cahill, Behnke and Meuser, Connell, Bloustien, Bohnsack et al., Thorne), from anthropological linguistics (Kotthoff), from sociolinguistics (Baron, Cook-Gumperz, Gunnarson), from social psychology (Kyratzis), and from text linguistics (Giora). Only with cross-disciplinary approaches can we trace the multiple layers of the social semiotics of gender as forming (and being formed by) emotions, ideology, habitual ways to behave and act, body concepts, and concepts of “self”. Linguistic behavior is not the only object of the researchers’ attention. It is related to ethnographic description of the contexts and ideologies within which communication takes place. In addition, some authors (Bloustien, Connell) concentrate on the role of the body in defining one’s identity and integrate information from video-based data (Kyratzis, Bloustien). Another guiding motif for bringing the present articles together is to show various perspectives on how gender is shaped in the course of an ongoing socialization. Further, the fact that gender socialization continues in education, in the workplace, during spare time, and in the private and public sphere indicates that genderization is a process, which takes a context-specific character. The papers included cover a wide range of contexts, from children acting in gendered, peer-created situations in the classroom and on the play ground (Cook-Gumperz, Kyratzis) to teenagers (Cahill, Bloustien) and adults’ behaviors and activities, from young working class men of Turkish origin living in Berlin (Bohnsack et al.) to young urban professionals in Swedish academic settings (Gunnarsson), from teenage girls in Australia (Bloustien) to older women in Caucasian villages (Kotthoff), from private to public communication, from mixed-sex to single-sex conversations framed by different cultural backgrounds (Australian, German, Georgian, Turkish, US-American). Three contributions (Thorne, Connell, Giora) center more around a theoretical discussion on gender and the implications of that discussion for empirical research. They do not conceive of gender as a socially mediated expression of something biologically given, and do not assume a straightforward relation between sex and gender. They view gender as a factor of the social order, a historically produced, discoursive construct serving as a resource to constitute gendered identities. Biological anatomy is just an anchor point drawn into a symbolic practice of order formation which has many consequences for our lives. To favor an interactional notion of gender means that we have to deal with the previously mentioned coupling of parameters, for example, gender and
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age, gender and class, race, institutional demands, social milieu, etc. Gender is seen as communicated and put on stage by many semiotic means. How gender is performed and what such a concrete performance means becomes an empirical question. Gender is by no means always enacted the same way in all contexts. This insight has in the last few years sometimes led to the conclusion that gender is completely re-negotiable in every situation,1 which is just as false as the assumption of stable oppositions between the sexes common in earlier research on women and men.2 The articles in this book implicitly reject the postmodern arbitrariness hypothesis, as well as the old structuralist thesis of binary distinctions between the sexes and essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity. Even though the authors included in this volume focus on the historicity (and therefore relativity) of gender, they also take the factual stability of gender distinctions in society — as seen in many everyday situations — into account. So, in spite of rejecting binary and decontextualized conceptions of gender, none of the authors conceive of gender as being arbitrary in the sense that its nature and its importance are negotiable in every situation, or could, just by performance, be discharged. Gender is based on typification as a social process,3 not just personally performed, but recognizably performed in order to match intersubjective typification. It sets up background expectations, which are more or less stable factors of a culture. Individuals are not in full control of the degree to which gender is taken into account because others can perceive their behavior in traditional gender categories against their own intentions. Further, even though most people do have a certain amount of freedom to either conform to or oppose this cultural “normality”, the expectations as well as the actual “doing gender” are interrelated with power processes in society. Although it seems obvious to include both the construction of femininity and masculinity in gender research in communication, for many years only women’s speech has been analyzed. According to Johnson/Meinhof 1997, this phenomenon has to be interpreted as a remainder of a traditional ideology: female talk as the exception from the (male) norm, which has to be closely examined in its peculiarity. Prior to feminism sociolinguists paid only little attention to women as speakers; men’s talk had been the unquestioned norm (e.g. in Labov’s claims about vernacular). The stages of exploring men’s and women’s ways of speaking went from overgeneralizing men’s experiences to feminist efforts of focusing on women’s perspectives (motivating a period of extensive research on women’s talk)4 to more profound theorizing of gender and gender relations (Gal 1989, 1995), which includes studying cultural
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masculinities (Connell 1995). Thorne (in this volume) explores the history of gender studies in sociological and linguistic discourse analysis. She also explains why the focus was on women’s speech behavior for a long time and also what the benefits of this focus were in relation to prior research foci in the field. As mentioned earlier, we depart from the assumption of diverse “masculinities” and “femininities” which, phenomenologically, may differ considerably from person to person and situation to situation. However, there is also stability in performing and perceiving gender. Otherwise it would be difficult to identify a dressed person as either male or female. Very seldom do we have uncertainties like these in our everyday life. The articles presented here look in both directions: stability and change. We are interested in finding out what makes gender such a stable factor of interaction order and how changes are brought about. As the subtitle indicates, most of the authors connect ethnography and discourse analysis. This approach is derived from the idea that our communicative behavior arises out of activities we engage in and the social relations within which we undertake them (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Cameron (1997: 34) writes that the introduction of practice as a variable makes the language-gender relation a mediated one: “The potential advantage of this is that it leads away from global statements, and the stereotypical explanations that frequently accompany them. Towards a more ‘local’ kind of account that can accommodate intra- as well as intergroup differences.” We, the editors, think that current gender studies suffer from a decoupling of theory formation and empirical grounding. We witness a wide gap between generalizing approaches (e.g. in poststructuralism) interested in global reflections on gender and microscopic analyses and catalogues of very small speech phenomena (in the tradition of variation analysis or conversation analysis) which abstain from interpreting their (inconsistent) findings in larger social settings. Giora (in this volume) problematizes the inconsistency of findings in comparative gender research (men vs. women) and discusses it in relation to implicit theoretical assumptions. This book combines data analysis, ethnographic description of various social worlds (in which gender has become more complex and consistencies are in some settings harder to find), and theory development. The papers cover a broad spectrum of methods: ‘large-size’ biographical studies (Connell), content analysis of discussions (Bohnsack et al., Behnke and Meuser), sociological text analysis (Cahill), quantitative sociolinguistic variation analysis (Gunnarsson) and qualitative performance analysis (Bloustien, Kyratzis, Cook-Gumperz, Baron, Kotthoff). Gender is seen in context which is created by the interactants.
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Apart from the audience of gender researchers, we hope this book to be of interest for sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and the larger field of cultural and social studies. Most of the papers are rooted in interactional sociolinguistics and sociology. In the attempt to overcome the limitation to the verbal side of communication, the authors try to link interaction and emotion analysis and to elucidate what recent research has called “embodied language”. Many analysts (e.g. Bloustien, Cook-Gumperz, Kyratzis, Kotthoff) also take para- and nonverbal aspects of communication into consideration. The research on embodied language is a very young field of analysis where methodology is only beginning to be developed. Further, by including video analysis as well as studies of game interaction and ritual communication, this book aims to broaden the scope of communication analysis. Some authors draw on Bourdieu’s habitus theory to explain the relative stability of gender (Behnke and Meuser; Bohnsack/Loss/ Przyborski, Bloustien, Gunnarson). The concept of habitus, envisioning gender not as situationally constructed but as grounded in the participants’ socialization history, allows one to go beyond — and look behind — people’s local strategic and automatic forms of acting.
2. The articles In the following, we will briefly summarize the articles. Writing from the vantage point of a feminist scholar based in the U. S., Barrie Thorne (Berkeley), who has long worked within the interactionist tradition of sociology, steps back to assess almost three decades of research on gender and interaction. She observes that a strategy of deliberate one-sidedness has guided this research tradition, with the emphasis on everyday interaction, and the relegation of other dimensions of gender (structural, individual or personal, and, to a lesser extent, symbolic or discursive systems) to the background. This strategy has yielded considerable insight into the daily interactions that produce dichotomous gender categories and make them seem “natural,” even as the organization, meanings, and salience of gender vary by context. Research, at the level of interaction, has also illuminated the “micropolitics” of gender and everyday life. After detailing the advantages of a concerted focus on interaction, Thorne argues that new perspectives and a more holistic understanding can be gained by drawing research on interaction into closer conjunction with analyses of discourse, social structure, and individual identity and emotions. She discusses some of the challenges that arise from this broadening strategy, as well as
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specific theories and lines of research that link conceptions of interaction to other domains of inquiry. The multiple dimensions of gender make this category of analysis a useful route for examining connections between interaction and discourse, structure, and personal experience. Jenny Cook-Gumperz (Santa Barbara) discusses the accomplishment of gender among girls from 3–5. Particularly, she investigates nursery school play ecologies to see if these environments have a gendered character. Although children have very different interactive experiences at home and many schools nowadays try to create gender equity in contemporary classrooms, children very actively create a gender-specific environment. The question Cook-Gumperz asks is why young girls — in an era of feminism — continue with such conventional play and use such stereotyped images. In Cook-Gumperz’s field work the playground turns out to be a remarkably constant gendered zone (e.g., doll playing and household pretend play have existed over several centuries). She discusses several micro scenes in which gender/power distinctions play a role, for example, a scene in which a group of boys manage to dominate a group of girls involved in domestic play. After the arrival of the group of boys, the three original players become a group of girls, rather than a gender unspecified group of “animal minders” (as they were before). As the two groups of girls and boys evolve into oppositional groups, they develop into a kind of socially organized entity which takes on a social life of its own for the duration of the activities and this grouping has an implicitly gendered character because from this point onward, any additional members of the group will need to be inducted into the group as gendered members. Research has shown that through their reading, writing and fantasy life, girls continue to be exposed to views of femininity that are often at odds with the world the girls live in. A tension exists between girls and young women’s attempts to control their own lives and the cultural stereotypes of their gender possibilities as presented to them in books and other media. Mothering and romantic relationships, the most stereotypical destinies of women and girls, still seem to be the twin poles of the play scenarios that young girls freely adopt even in the gendered neutrality of the contemporary nursery classrooms. However, there is also some evidence that girls are involved in a struggle against their own conformity to stereotypical behavior. Cultural resistance, for example against the image of girls as “little mothers” can be found in an sub-culture that happens in nursery school fantasy play. Amy Kyratzis (Santa Barbara) examines peer emotion socialization through language in naturally occurring same-sex friendship groups in the
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nursery classrooms across one school year. She focuses on three areas of emotion socialization: aggression, fear, and caring attitudes. The three to four year old children she observed were 70% Caucasian and 30% Asian, Latino, Middle-Eastern and African-American. Almost all the groups were same-sex. Her study focuses mainly on boys. The children were videotaped during freeplay periods. Kyratzis presents several transcripts from play scenes. Certain play themes seemed to lend themselves to certain kinds of emotion display. The boys’ often played nature themes, “scary stories”, or “smash houses”. Boys’ play themes often involved risk-taking and confronting danger and trouble. There was a preoccupation with things powerful and scary. The more conquest/ dominance-oriented the boys’ play, the rougher the emotion display was, tending towards increased display of aggression or roughness towards characters in play. Kyratzis notes contextual variation, e.g., when a certain boy was around, the bravery and aggression seemed to be expressed more strongly than when he was absent. There were over-time changes in attitudes towards being scared, fear, and bravery that were concurrent with changes in attitudes toward girl-associated characteristics. The members of the friendship group referred to gender by statements such as “that’s a girl”. These patterns suggest that the over-time changes in emotion were part of socialization about gender. However, socialization about gender appears to be part of peer organization. Bigger groups, and the presence of particular children, affect when gender displays are in evidence. Children, within their peer groups, work out norms of what is appropriate and not appropriate in terms of the display of emotion. Kyratzis shows how children appropriate gender stereotypes from the adult culture, practice, reproduce, and reinvent them and actively produce them in their play. Strong contextual differences prevent taking an essentialistic view on emotions. Spencer Cahill (Tampa) analyzes the written notes of girls from middle and junior high school. (164 notes were collected which had been received between 1985 and 1989 from 36 girls and 10 boys). These notes are passed in class. Cahill views these notes as an important medium for the construction, negotiation, and dissolution of relationships. He turns his attention to girls’ affirmation of themselves as romantic actors within the context of same-sex relationships, the negotiation of romantic relationships between boys and girls, and, finally, the effects that girls’ romantic relations with boys have on their relations with one another. North American boys seldom exchange written notes among themselves. The notes reflect some characteristic patterns and processes of early adolescent peer relations in North America in recent history. Note writing is
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shown in the article as a form of resisting adult authority and of cementing exclusive social bonds because they provide a private channel of communication in settings where private conversation would be virtually impossible. The girls negotiate their complex interpersonal networks characterized by shifting internal coalitions by note writing (as a form of written gossip). Also, their romantic attractions to boys, and relationships with boys, find expression in these notes. Disclosure of romantic trouble is also quite common in the exchanged notes. Girls also show their faith in friends by soliciting their romantic advice. They seem to depend heavily on the wisdom of their corresponding friends and share their own wisdom with those friends. Some boys apparently recognize that notes provide a medium for romantically approaching girls without the threat of face-to-face rejection. Boys’ notes to girls are accountably masculine in the sense of how masculinity has been described in the literature on preadolescent boys. Their personal disclosure is limited to sexual desire or aggression against third parties. Cahill determines that early adolescents create their romantic relationships in accountably masculine and feminine ways. However, their romantic relationships are not just between a boy and girl but between each of them and their same-sex peers as well. Girls and boys are very active in balancing their romantic/sexual and their friendship relations. Among girls even romantic competition and gossip about inappropriate romantic conduct adds new content to familiar forms of clique boundary work and internal coalition formation. Having a boyfriend is an important symbol of early adolescent girls’ maturing femininity, but it is no substitute for having girlfriends and their social approval. Cahill describes how young people creatively appropriate, transform and use images and information about heterosexual romance from the adult world for their own purposes. The notes examined in Cahill’s article also suggest that early adolescent girls put a high value on the maintenance of their emotionally rich relations with one another. Gerry Bloustien (Adelaide) investigates the intersection of embodied subjectivity, gender, micro-cultures, and self-representation through fieldwork including participants’ own videotaped recordings of their experiences. She explores the ways in which female adolescents reflect upon, discuss, enact, and constitute their sense of self. She shows “learning to be female” to be hard work, which means constant self-surveillance of the body to meet a ubiquitous female ideal. On the surface, such attempts to represent oneself through clothing, style, image, and bodily inscription can be seen just like play, but under closer scrutiny we also see “the human seriousness of play”. The fifty-six participants were offered a Hi 8 domestic video camera to use when and where they liked for
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over one year. The process of selection, filming and editing pointed to the ways the girls struggled to represent themselves in ways that cohered with their already established social and cultural framework. Bloustien focuses on two young women, Diana and Bekk, highlighting differences and similarities between them. Diana is a quiet, shy, and selfcontained girl in a class with mostly boys. The other girl in the class, Bekk, is extremely self-confident. Both girls indicate — in dress, stance, and language — the importance of the body as “physical and symbolic capital” in the sense of Bourdieu. Both were appropriating a particular representation of femininity. Fashion plays an important role. It boosts confidence and group-membership. Girls learn to be the object of a scrutinizing gaze. Bloustien discusses the girls’ own vocabulary, i.e. what it means among them to be seen as a “slut” or a “tryhard”. By discovering in-group criteria for evaluating people, she closely investigates the immense efforts, which are required to constitute and maintain “the self.” In his reflections on “Masculinities and Men’s Health“, R.W. Connell (Sydney) first gives an overview over the recent upsurge of topics connected to “masculinity”. The range of issues dealt with in the media is constantly widening, covering health, education, leisure, family, peace politics and many more. Following insights originally developed by feminist research, Connell considers masculinity to be “very actively made, in practices both individual and collective”. This anti-essentialist approach sees a multiplicity of masculinities as constantly creating new social realities and thus demands that “maleness” be understood in its historicity and interactivity. The new interest in understanding masculinity which can be found in modern societies could now develop into two directions: on the one hand, it could become a separatist movement competing with feminist programs; on the other, men could take the chance to cooperate “across gender boundaries”, based on the insight that men’s and women’s issues have to be of vital mutual interest. The latter would be a promising perspective for men as they become increasingly aware of the cost of maintaining the traditional gender patterns (stress, diseases, restrainted emotional expressivity, violence, exclusion of important human experiences). At any rate, according to Connell, men’s present situation must be described as being full of double-binds and ambiguities — a result which coincides with similar findings in the following article. Cornelia Behnke (Erlangen) and Michael Meuser (Bremen) theorize masculinity with the help of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (which can successfully be transferred to gender relations, though originally referring to class
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structure), based on discussion data from which they extrapolate different faces of the “male habitus”. They argue, that detecting pluralized notions of “masculinities” / “feminitities” need not conflict with the assumption of one gender habitus in either case: modes of expression (femininities, masculinities) on the one side and a generating principle (habitus) on the other. Adopting Connell’s notion of “hegemonic masculinity”, they point out the power dimension of the male habitus and account for the diversity of the latter’s shapes. Living in accordance with the male habitus provides the individual with a fundamental security, which the authors call “habitual security”. Their empirical study shows what happens if this security is challenged. The authors present two different groups of men sharing leisure activities in their spare time: the first type consists of men with a secure masculine habitus, which take the gender affiliation for granted. Masculinity for them is a natural fact that just has to be accepted. Men and women represent two opposite spheres for them, whose existence is never sceptically questioned. These men define themselves basically by their work and see themselves quite traditionally as those who earn their family’s living. The latter functions as an essential source for self-confidence. The second type, the “new male”, represents crisis tendencies. Involved in circles of the women’s movement, they are confronted with the task of critically examining themselves as men. In the course of permanent self-reflection, it becomes more and more unclear to them what it means to be a man. This uncertainty leads to strong ambivalences and various counter-reactions. Behnke and Meuser propose that the insecurities these men experience cannot be explained in terms of role conflict or role stress because it goes deeper into the personality structure; their habitual security is increasingly missing. Some men go on struggling with their self-perception, some manage to find personal identity beyond traditional masculinity. Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski (Berlin) analyze various group discussions of Turkish young men and women living in Berlin, Germany, focusing on the young men’s (Turkish) concept of “male honor” in the migration context. They filter out big differences in masculine and feminine gender standards between the Turkish immigrants and the surrounding, mostly German, communities. The authors differentiate between several levels of meaning, focusing on a level of experiential knowledge embedded in “habitus” in the sense of Bourdieu. The concept of habitus allows not only to go beyond conscious or strategic acting but also to look behind automatic forms of acting. It makes it possible to see gender not only as situationally constructed, but as grounded in the participants’ socialization history which is strongly influenced
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here by Turkish cultural values. Bohnsack, Loos and Przyborski analyze the experiental spaces as they manifest themselves in same-sex group discussions. One problem turned out to be highly relevant to all groups of Turkish young men examined: that of male honor. “Being a man” for them has not only to do with virility but also with financial security, honesty, respect, and the ability to support one’s own family. The search for habitual security is precarious for them. They repeatedly assert their desire to orient themselves to the habitus passed on to them through their Turkish socialization and struggle with different forms of masculinity practiced by the German or Italian men around them. The concept of honor is extended to the whole family. It includes controlling women’ s outdoor activities and being respectful to parents. German men, of course, lack honor in their eyes, because they allow their wives to act in situations they have no personal control over, e.g., having dinner with male colleagues. In many ways, the young Turkish men and women float painfully between Turkish and German behavioral gender standards. Their parents often try to pre-arrange a marriage with someone from the Turkish home village, which is refused very often by the young Turks living in Germany. These inter-generational conflicts can be very dramatic. The young Turkish women interviewed also seek their way between the transmitted traditional social habitus on the one hand and a new personal one on the other hand. Two papers in this volume deal with academic discourse. Bettina Baron (Konstanz) examines professional debates during conferences and Britt-Louise Gunnarsson looks at communication during university seminars. The data Baron analyzes suggest considerable differences between the conversational styles of male and female scholars in certain professional situations (e.g., conference debates after a paper delivery). For example, she finds differences in the formatting of criticisms and concessions, in the opening sequence of contributions, and in the strategies of presenting oneself as an expert on a certain topic. The analysis concentrates on formal situations in academia. For both sexes, there seems to be a correlation between the degree of formality, structure, and publicity of the event and the indirectness of criticism. The more formal the situation, the more indirect the criticism is expressed. Men typically use special formats of indirect criticism for specific kinds of “face-work”, thus demonstrating a high competence in performing academic rituals. By starting their critical comments indirectly, they disguise the intensity of their critique, which is only revealed later. In contrast, women’s critical comments usually lack this sharpness of critique. At the same time, they seldom use indirectness as a segue into more explicit critique coming later.
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Despite being well-known experts, the women also tend to use certain strategies of self-deprecation, which are not found in the majority of utterances by males. The interplay between gender, status and prestige is very complex: Those women with a low hierarchical rank are even more handicapped in these ritualistic academic fights during conferences than men of the same professional status. Women of high status and public prestige, on the other hand, often do not receive the same verbal space as male scholars with similar prestige. The women tend to anticipate criticisms from the audience and transform them into self-criticisms, sometimes as early as the very beginning of their talk. This is often accompanied by admissions of the limited scope of their hypotheses and promises to keep their contribution short. When criticized or when their special role within conversation, e.g. being the chairwoman, is challenged, the female scientists observed were also likely to react with concessions. Today we have much empirical evidence that both sexes handle a large stylistic repertoire, but there is still a lack of research about the institutionalized mechanisms which lead to a reduction of this repertoire as soon as a certain degree of publicity and officiality emerges. Under these conditions, women tend to choose styles, which may be advantageous in private settings. However, due to historically and institutionally developed frames, in the field of academia their speech styles are evaluated as signs of unprofessionality and low competence. Britt-Louise Gunnarsson (Uppsala) discusses the discursive roles assigned to and played by female doctoral students and teachers. She examines postgraduate seminars within two university departments, the first one in the humanitites, the second in the social sciences. These departments vary as to the position established academic women have within the hierarchy. Though the investigated university is portrayed as trying to preserve itself as a male domain, in the social sciences we find more women in top positions than in the humanities. Gunnarson’s analysis focuses on the production and perception of critical comments, e.g., on how within the seminar the roles of commentators are constructed. Women in both departments act as critics on other students’ papers presented in the seminars. However, both the general acceptance of women in the department culture and the extrinsic status of the overly critical woman affect the stylistic strategies they use to present their criticisms. They also affect the reception by the seminar group. Fundamentally, the female teachers in the social sciences department seem to show a more straightforward speech behavior with respect to criticizing than their colleagues within the humanities. A closer look, however, reveals that in the social sciences, males and
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females do not act on equal terms either. In particular, on the students’ level, considerable asymmetries can be observed. She uses Bourdieu’s habitus concept in order to explain the differences, which she found in the two gendered department cultures: the behavior differences on the one hand and the acceptance in the group on the other. In the end, Gunnarsson poses the question, whether we must assume gendered academic habitus (a male opposed to a female one), or if we should conceptualize the prevailing habitus as genderneutral, a habitus of the “homo academicus” which the single individual, may (s)he be a man or a woman, can adopt more or less successfully. Helga Kotthoff’s (Freiburg) article deals with the relationship between gender, emotion, and culture in Georgian mourning rituals. Lamentations are seen as their core. In many parts of the world these polylogues are performed by women, as for example in Georgia. The article focuses on the poetic performance and social meaning of the genre as a gendered activity. Lamentation is a ritual of shared grieving, seen in Georgia as a female way to act out grief. The performance of grief is thereby delegated to women, and therefore grief as an emotion is gendered. It is, however, not a powerless activity. Expressive grieving at the same time allows the women to form cultural memory and social morals. The fact that the wailers have the last words about a deceased reinforces social bonding among village people and especially among the women themselves. It is an important form of their acknowledged religious practice outside the official Orthodox church, since it is believed to intensify relations to the deceased in the hereafter. In the role of lamenters women enjoy high respect. In these ritual polylogues the loss of a person is communalized, and by aestheticization it is quasi therapeutical. The article focuses on interrelated, bonding dimensions of Georgian death rituals and on the tension the genre contains for women’s social position. The lamenting women carry out emotion work for the whole community, thereby maintaining a gendered emotional division of labor. Instead of regarding ritual wailing as a form of losing control of oneself, this high standard of verbal art shows that wailers must be in good control of their emotions. Aestheticized speech, demanding bodily control of the mourners during the performance of “being beside oneself,” involves the audience in grieving and thus makes possible a shared cultural memory. The ceremonial genre of lamentations refers to moral standards, which are linked with emotional and religious expression. Kotthoff presents transcripts from a lamentation and analyzes the form and function of the genre within a theory of emotion work, thereby linking gender with body politics, power, and social structure.
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In the last paper of the volume, Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv) offers a critical discussion of contemporary gender research from a text-orientated perspective. There is a growing body of evidence in the field, which suggests that the notions of ‘difference’ and ‘similarity’, prevailing in the public and scientific discourse of gender (and other minorities), should be revoked. Neither explains the conflicting data found in the literature. While the ‘difference’ assumption predicts different categorization (e.g., men vs. women, Jews vs. Arabs, etc.), the ‘similarity’ assumption predicts the opposite: men and women should belong to the same category. Giora’s data, consisting of linguistic introductory patterns, impositives, and thematic and narrative structures of Israeli female and male authors and scriptwriters show that none of these assumptions hold. Contrary to the ‘difference’ assumption, Giora’s findings provide evidence of similarities rather than differences between, for example, traditional female and male authors and male Arab and female Jewish characters. Contrary to the ‘similarity’ assumption, her findings suggest differences between female feminist authors and male authors. The search for either difference or similarity is erroneous, because it is local and superficial — it focuses on ‘features’. Instead, she proposes to look into more global structures and themes. For example, similar strategies (e.g., setting out from a self point of view) result in different styles for different groups (e.g., men and women). In contrast, adopting different strategies (e.g., setting out from a self- vs. other- point of view) result in similar styles for different groups. Thus, looking into processes rather than products allows, in Giora’s view, for the reconciliation of conflicting evidence. As can be concluded from this brief introduction, all of the authors included in this volume indicate the necessity of examining “gender in interaction” under the perspective of its historical stability on the one hand, and its contextual variation on the other. Neither are men observed to be continually dominant, nor women to be permanently submissive. We watch variations, inconsistencies, and changes. Men and women certainly are no “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel 1967); they may question social norms and create subversive micro-worlds. Although gender — together with race, class, and age — is one of the most important social parametres, it does not dominate (as feminist research of the seventies sometimes suggested) all other identity categories, which also may define a communicative situation. For centuries, gender has been constructed in accordance with the patriarchal system and the fact that up to now there has been little change in societal power structures on the whole proves that the patriarchal order has been astonishingly stable.
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Studying gender and interaction means to wrestle with the tension between structure and action. We agree with Barrie Thorne’s conception that “doing gender” needs to be linked to an understanding of the power of institutions, and of the unconscious — the coercive — force of gender conceptions, which cannot be grasped solely at the surface level of analysis.
Notes * We are grateful to the Ph.D.-program “Gender, rupture, and society” of Vienna University, Austria, for many forms of support. 1. Theories like these have been formulated in some postmodern theorizing around the reception of Judith Butler’s book “gender trouble” (1990). Although Butlers formulations on the performativity of gender acknowledged the necessity of attending to questions of power and intersubjective processes, some receptionists took phenomena such as symbolic plays with gender distinctions (drag and queer performances) as the revolution capable of overthrowing the whole gender system, e.g. Hark 1993. Other postmodernists reduce gender to a “rhetorical effect” (Menke 1992). Deconstructing gender then basically means to “reread texts.” The identification of persons with texts leaves totally open how the body and the socially constructed self are drawn into the formation process. They suggest quite simple symbolic changes, for example in dress codes, as threats to patriarchy as such. It remains totally unclear whether a “re-reading of texts” (and what this is supposed to mean) suffices as a threat to the gendered social order. 2. For a discussion of the sex and gender relation in discourse studies see Kotthoff/Wodak 1997 and Cameron 1997. 3. In the sense of Berger and Luckmann 1966. 4. See the overviews on the development of (socio)linguistic gender studies of Günthner/ Kotthoff 1991 and Crawford 1995.
References Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas 1966 The Social Construction of Reality Harmondsworth: Penguin. Butler, Judith 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah 1997 “Theoretical Debates in Feminist Linguistics: Questions of Sex and Gender” In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed), 21–27. London: Sage. Crawford, Mary 1995 Talking DifferenceOn Gender and Language. London: Sage.
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Eckert, Penelope, and McConnell-Ginet, Sally 1992 “Think practically and look locally: language and gender as community based practice” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490. Gal, Susan 1989 “Between Speech and Silence: the Problematics of Research on Language and Gender” Papers in Pragmatics 3,1: 1–39. 1995 “Language, Gender and Power: an Anthropological Review” In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds), 169–182. London: Routledge. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Günthner, Susanne, and Kotthoff, Helga 1991 “Preface” In Von fremden Stimmen: Weibliches und männliches Sprechen im Kulturvergleich, S. Günthner and H. Kotthoff (eds), 7–52. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hark, Sabine 1993 “Queer Interventionen” Feministische Studien 2: 103–109. Johnson, Sally, and Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna 1997 Language and Masculinity Oxford: Blackwell. Kotthoff, Helga, and Wodak, Ruth 1997 “Preface” In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), vii-xxv. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Labov, William 1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City Washington, D.C: Center for Applied Linguistics. Menke, Bettine 1992 “Verstellt: Der Ort der Frau — Ein Nachwort” In Dekonstruktiver Feminismus, B. Vinken (ed), 436–477. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Part I
Introduction
Gender and interaction Widening the conceptual scope* Barrie Thorne
For over two decades many scholars who study gender and interaction have followed an analytic strategy of “deliberate one-sidedness.”1 To focus our distinctive subject matter we have foregrounded one aspect of human experience — the gendered dynamics of face-to-face interaction — and relegated other dimensions, such as gender as a process embedded in social structure and in personal and emotional experience, to the background. Erving Goffman (1983) explicitly used the strategy of deliberate one-sidedness when he defined the “interaction order” as a “substantive domain in its own right”, “loosely coupled with,” but distinguishable from, the more macro level of social structure. In this paper I briefly review the history of almost three decades of convergence between feminist ideas and the loosely linked traditions of interactional sociology and sociolinguistics. After discussing the significant insights that have resulted from concerted attention to gender and interaction, I bring other dimensions of gender, obscured by the strategy of deliberate one-sidedness, into view. Gender is a multifaceted concept that has been extensively theorized and studied not only at the level of interaction, but also as an aspect of personal experience and identity; symbolic or discursive systems; and social structure and institutions. The multiple dimensions of gender give the concept an elusive quality, but this multiplicity also provides opportunities for crossing levels of analysis and developing fresh perspectives on interaction and on the whole of social, cultural, and personal life.
A brief history of research on gender and interaction in the U. S. There is a long tradition, dating back to the 19th century writings of the German social theorist, Georg Simmel, of finding sociological significance in
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the seemingly small details of everyday life. In the history of U. S. sociology Simmel’s ideas, as well as those of Robert E. Park, George Herbert Mead, and Everett C. Hughes, helped shape the “Chicago school” of fieldwork. Coming from a different theoretical tradition, the phenomenological sociologist, Alfred Schütz, attended to the structuring of experience and the contextual nature of intersubjectivity. His work was one of the precursors of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, another key strand of contemporary sociological research on interaction. In the 1950s and 1960s Goffman picked up and reworked these and other traditions, theorizing the specificity of social contexts, the dynamics of face-toface interaction, and the social framing of experience. Goffman’s approach, which both converges with and differs from the traditions of symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, and sociolinguistics, placed everyday experience and social interaction at the forefront of inquiry. The study of social interaction was well established in the U. S. before the early 1970s, when second-wave feminist ideas began to move into the academy (I’m telling this brief history from an American vantage point).2 But the interactionist tradition, like other strands of knowledge, had largely ignored women’s experiences and issues of gender. In 1967 I read the American and British literature on social interaction and sociolinguistics with the urgency of a Ph.D. student preparing for a comprehensive exam. There were writings on social class and ethnicity, but little on gender as a social division that might make a difference in everyday talk and interaction. I found studies of interaction in all-male and in mixed-sex groups, but virtually nothing on interaction among women (at that point girls were all but invisible as subjects of study). A few writings focused on gender and interaction, but none of them moved beyond the assertion of dichotomous difference to theorize the complex dynamics of gender. The women’s liberation movement helped articulate the limitations of knowledge that consistently omits or distorts women’s experiences. In the early 1970s feminists brought this critique into the realms of scholarship by questioning ideas that parade as inclusive, but in fact embed masculinist assumptions. Feminists revalued women’s lives and experiences, bringing them from the margins to the center of knowledge, and they emphasized gender as a category of analysis. I became engaged with the ideas of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and joined other feminists who asked “where are the women?” as we discussed the literature on processes of interaction and verbal and nonverbal communication. These dialogues resulted in a spate of writings published in the
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mid-1970s (e.g., Key 1975; Lakoff 1975; Thorne and Henley 1975) that brought visibility to women as speakers and social actors, and that called attention to the gendered dynamics of language, speech, and everyday interaction. Goffman’s early writings ignored issues of gender, although, as Candace West (1996) has argued, he was attuned to micro processes, such as the asymmetric use of gestures, that mark relations of unequal status and power. Goffman’s insight into “micropolitics” (a term coined by Henley [1977]) and his focus on everyday life resonated with notions of “the personal as political” that were basic to the contemporary U. S. women’s movement. In early and influential studies of gender and everyday interaction, various researchers (e.g., Henley 1973, 1977; Zimmerman and West 1975; Fishman 1978) documented asymmetrical patterns of touch, interruption, listening, and other dimensions of interaction between men and women. Goffman, in turn, picked up on issues of gender raised by feminist work; and, while keeping a distance from the political issues, he analyzed “gender displays” in advertisements (Goffman 1976) and wrote a generative theoretical article on “the arrangement between the sexes” (Goffman 1977). By the 1980s the groundwork had been laid for more nuanced theorizing and empirical research on gender and interaction. Later, other intellectual currents, such as Judith Butler’s (1990) poststructuralist, “performative” theory of gender, also enriched this area of study.
The advantages of deliberate one-sidedness The analytic strategy of focusing on face-to-face interaction and relegating other levels of analysis to the background has resulted in significant contributions to knowledge. The micro level of analysis offers fertile soil for nourishing the core feminist insight that gender is socially and historically constructed rather than a given of nature. Deepening Simone de Beauvoir’s (1942) argument that “one is not born but becomes a woman,” a compelling body of theoretical work (e.g., Kessler and McKenna 1978; Goffman 1977) upturned the assumption that the signs we read of “masculinity” or “femininity” reflect underlying, natural essences. Thus, Goffman (1977: 302) wrote: It is not … the social consequences of innate sex differences that must be explained, but [how] these differences were (and are) put forward as a warrant for our social arrangements, and, most important … [how] the institutional workings of society ensured that this accounting would seem sound.
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In short, daily patterns of interaction, such as gender-differentiated demeanor and practices of pairing that result in the man being taller in most heterosexual couples, evoke the belief that women and men have “essentially different natures.” An array of social practices, many embedded in daily interaction, cut across the complex variation of biological sex and the wide range of individual behavior to construct the apparently “natural” world of two genders that is basic to Western cultures. In 1987 West and Zimmerman drew these insights into a vivid concept, “doing gender,” that jolts the assumption of gender as an innate condition and replaces it with a sense of ongoing process and activity. A range of empirical studies, for example, of the ways in which employees in fast food restaurants and insurance sales “do gender” as they go about their daily jobs (Leidner 1991), and of the “category maintenance work” of Australian preschool children (Davies 1989), have expanded insight into the daily interactions that sustain, and occasionally challenge, dichotomous gender categories. In its guise as a category of individual placement and identity, gender is relatively fixed, dichotomous, and omnirelevant. But in another guise, as a dimension of social situations, gender varies in organization and meaning and assumes a more fluid quality. I explored this paradox in an ethnographic study of daily life in two U. S. elementary schools (Thorne 1993). On some occasions girls and boys collectively enacted dichotomies, separating into same-gender groups and performing stylized playground and classroom rituals (like “girlschase-the-boys”) that mark the genders as opposite and antagonistic. But in other situations boys and girls mixed in relaxed ways and gender was of minimal significance. On some occasions another line of difference, such as age or ethnicity, muted the relevance of gender. Gender may be omnirelevant, but its meanings and salience vary across situations. As theorizing and research of the last two decades have amply documented, the organization and meanings of gender are highly contextual and intertwined with other lines of difference and inequality, such as sexuality, social class, ethnicity, and age. Three decades of research on gender and interaction have yielded significant insight into the daily practices that produce dichotomous gender categories and make them seem “natural,” even as the organization, meanings, and salience of gender vary by context. This research has also illuminated connections between gender and power. More abstract formulations of inequality become especially vivid when they are situated in everyday experiences, for example, of unwanted touch or of having one’s talk or space repeatedly interrupted. Practices of resistance and experiences of empowerment — talking
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back, claiming verbal space, holding anti-rape marches to “take back the night” — also take shape in everyday life. The level of interaction engages the immediacy of social relationships, embodiment, and experience, and the fundamentals of positioning in space and time. In short, a concerted focus on everyday interaction and social situations has generated important contributions to the understanding of gender.
Intellectual divisions of labor in the study of gender Although the study of interaction has richly illuminated some dimensions of gender, the vision is partial since gender is an organizing strand not only of interaction but also of symbolic systems, institutions, and identity and emotions. Scholars sometimes encounter the breadth of gender when they become interested in a strand of experience and follow it, like Ariadne’s thread, in many directions. For example, women’s primary responsibility for caring work is built into the organization of paid and unpaid labor and is basic to the distribution of political and economic power. These institutional arrangements are sustained by various ideologies and representations of gender, such as discourses of feminine nurturance and masculine detachment and autonomy. The gendered allocation of caring also infuses daily interactions and moves deeply and ambivalently into experiences of self and identity. A full account of gender and the dynamics of caring (and many other topics) would extend across several levels of analysis and varied domains of theory and research practice. It is difficult to sustain such breadth. When one tries to envision the whole of gender as a focus of inquiry, the enormity of the task is likely to send one scurrying for a more manageable gaze. But it is useful to remember that the study of gender emerged from the women’s movement and the wish to understand the whole of women’s lives in order to challenge and end their subordination. Thirty years ago, when feminist ideas generated by the women’s movement began to enter the academy, they moved across disciplinary partitions of knowledge. But as feminist perspectives took hold in scholarly communities of practice, divisions of intellectual labor that loosely map to traditional disciplines and subdisciplines of knowledge came, increasingly, to shape the contours of research on and the theorizing of gender (Laslett and Thorne 1997). Research on gender tends to cluster around four levels of analysis, each organized around somewhat different traditions of theorizing: (1) Gender as discourse and ideology (e.g., theories of the discursive construction of binary
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gender and studies of gendered fields of meaning such as “nice vs bad girls”); (2) Gender as a dimension of social structure and institutions (e.g. theories of gender and the state and research on the gendering of particular organizations); (3) Gender in relationship to individual identity, subjectivity, and psychodynamics (e.g. theories of gendered subjectivity and research on topics like maternal guilt); (4) Gender as a feature of social situations and everyday interaction (e.g., theories of face-to-face behavior and research on the patterning of conversations between women and men).3 Each of these nodes of research has generated an enormous literature, with various points of intersection that become more active when intellectual currents, such as poststructuralist feminist theory, move across the disciplines. While the multiple meanings or dimensions of gender are sometimes a source of confusion, the sheer reach of the category raises provocative questions about connections among various aspects of social, cultural, and personal life.
Widening the conceptual scope of research on interaction Many roads converge in the study of social interaction and everyday life. This is where individual experience meets up with social situations and relationships, and where daily practices connect with social and symbolic structures. Have we done enough to explore these varied crossroads? What might be gained by reversing the strategy of deliberate one-sidedness, broadening our conceptual scope, and lighting up dimensions that we have, often quite purposively, tended to ignore? These questions open on to vast territory, which I will quickly survey from three directions: first, by examining connections between the study of interaction and theories of discourse or symbolic systems; second, by discussing the need for closer knitting between interaction and social structure; and finally, by pointing to theories of personal gender that might remedy the problematic conceptions of the individual that are embedded in theories of interaction.
Linking interaction and discourse The study of symbolic systems (variously understood as beliefs, ideologies, discourses) and the study of interaction have developed as somewhat separate lines of theorizing and research. The pay-off from bringing them together,
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attending to processes of situated interaction while also encompassing the content of symbolic systems, is evident in Lisa Stulberg’s (1996) ethnographic study of a sex education classroom in a U. S. junior high school. Stulberg found that the teacher and students continually negotiated between different discourses of gendered sexuality in classroom discussions: scientific language (“testicles,” “orgasm”); vernacular, or what the students called “gross” sexual language (“balls”; “she came”) and the (relatively missing) discourse of experienced desire (“that tingly feeling”). Stulberg situates these discourses within ongoing processes of interaction, such as patterns of question-asking, joking, and interruption. The teacher continually imposed scientific language; the students brought in “gross” discourse through the use of interruptions, eruptions, and humor; and on the few occasions when students talked about their own desire, the teacher interrupted and silenced them. This effort to situate competing discourses within the context of ongoing interaction moves beyond the formalism that often makes conversation analysis seem sterile and abstracted from substance and feelings. In showing how actors negotiate, appropriate, rework, and resist competing discourses, Stulberg also counters a problem that haunts poststructuralist theories of discourse: the denial of human agency and action (as in phrases like “actors are positioned in and taken up by discourses”). Both levels of analysis benefit from such bridging. Over ten years after Goffman (1977) used theories of social interaction to challenge the “naturalizing attitude” that obscures even as it is sustained by social constructions of gender, a feminist poststructuralist philosopher, Judith Butler (1990), laid out a similar argument, although rooted in a different theoretical tradition and with distinctive twists of analysis. Butler denaturalizes gender by arguing that the heterosexualized binary of man / woman is a “regulatory fiction,” made to appear “real” through stylized repetitions of speech and other actions. (Her focus on hegemonic constructions of sexuality, in relation to gender, raises issues neglected by Goffman and by West and Zimmerman). Butler argues that (…)because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all (Butler 1990: 140).
West and Zimmerman (1987) distinguish symbolic systems (“normative conceptions” of dichotomous gender and related assumptions about the “nature” of masculinity and femininity) from situated interaction (the practices
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by which actors hold one another accountable to these normative conceptions). In contrast, Butler’s “performative” theory of gender makes discourse coextensive with the social, and with the bodily. “Gender,” Butler (1990: 30) writes, “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a ‘natural’ kind of being.” The fact that this appearance has to be sustained through repeated performances points to the inherent instability of these regulatory frames. This raises the possibility of transgression and disruption, although in more recent work, Butler (1993) emphasizes the constraining force of regimes of power and knowledge. Butler’s focus on the discursive construction of bodies, and bodily experiences, has informed a number of empirical studies in the interactionist tradition, such as Karin Martin’s (1998) ethnographic research on gender and children’s experiences of embodiment, and Bell and Valentine’s (1995) analysis of the differing ways in which closeted lesbians and queer activists may disrupt heterosexualized, binary discourses of gender. Butler’s performative theory of gender, which emphasizes the constitutive nature of discourses, is rooted in conceptions of power and knowledge drawn from the work of Michel Foucault. West and Zimmerman use a more Weberian conception of power as coercion. Both lines of theorizing vacillate between an emphasis on agency (if gender is a social construction, current patterns are not inevitable) and on constraint (both stress the durability and persistence of oppressive arrangements). But, as various critics (e.g., Ebert 1996; Collins et al. 1995) have argued, theories that operate solely at the levels of interaction and discourse cannot adequately account for the constraining force of gender. To understand the coercive force of gender arrangements, one must also attend to the dynamics of institutions and social structure.
Knitting between interaction and social structure The structural dimensions of gender, and of women’s subordination within economic, political, and social institutions, have been extensively studied, with feminist and social theorists often reaching from the level of institutions to other sites of analysis, including interaction. This analytic crossroad has been explored with varied theoretical tools, but detailing connections in empirical and non-reductionist ways remains a significant challenge. In the 1970s feminist sociolinguists posited an isomorphic relationship
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between men’s control of political and economic structures and what Nancy Henley (1977) called the “micropolitics” of communication. There is ample evidence that those with greater power are more likely to interrupt, initiate touch, stare at, and violate the space of those with lesser power. But as the phrase “more likely” suggests, these patterns are statistical rather than categorical. As Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak (1996) have observed, the connection between situation and societal status is not as direct as was originally asserted. And the meaning of a particular gesture, like interruption, partly depends on the framing of each situation. Henley’s claim of isomorphism relies on a categorical approach, locating men and women within larger structures, like the economy, and then assuming a parallel positioning within daily processes of interaction. But gender does not come in such a simple package. It takes shape within a complex field of difference and inequality, intersecting with social class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, nationality, religion. The specific fields of socially marked difference, and their meanings and organization, vary by context and involve many dimensions, including the give and take of interaction itself (Schegloff 1987). Goffman’s (1983) observation that structure and interaction are “loosely coupled” indeed is apt. This loose coupling has led some to ignore the level of institutions and social structure and to highlight the distinctive features of situated interaction. But there are important theoretical and political reasons to try to connect these levels of analysis. On the one hand, the interaction order is the site where embodied and experiencing humans engage in social action, which highlights issues of agency — the very issues that tend to be neglected in abstract accounts of structure, such as analyses of social stratification or the state. On the other hand, interactionist accounts tend to neglect structure and thus the range of forces that help shape human action. An adequate account of society, and especially of social and historical change, arguably should encompass what Anthony Giddens (1984) calls the “duality of structure,” or the process of “structuration.” Larger structures are instantiated, reproduced, and challenged through the daily practices of social actors, who in turn are constrained and enabled by social structure. I find Giddens’ argument persuasive, but difficult to enact when one is engaged in empirical research that puts daily life front and center. Giddens uses Paul Willis’s ethnography, Learning to Labor, to illustrate the process of structuration. Willis (1977) studied the daily interactions of a group of working-class “lads” who resisted the authority system of the school and later ended
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up in unskilled jobs. The lads’ enactment of a defiant type of masculinity resulted, ironically, in the reproduction of their position at the bottom of the class hierarchy. I have long admired Willis’ study, in part because of his sensitivity to connections between social class and gender (although the standpoints of the lads’ mothers and girlfriends, and the perspectives of more obedient boys, are notably absent). But Willis didn’t grow his ethnography; it lacks the thick quality of research that takes full and open-ended account of daily life and interaction. His ethnography is driven by theoretical imperatives from the level of structure, especially the goal of understanding how hierarchical relations of social class get reproduced, in spite of moments of resistance. The process of theorizing provides a prod and guide across levels of analysis (one should bear in mind that theoretical moves also split these levels apart). But there is also an empirical challenge: to use strands from both sides as one knits across the “macro/micro” divide, making sure that full insight into a particular domain is not slighted, as often happens to the level of interaction when linked to social structure.
Toward a fuller conception of the person in accounts of interaction I will now turn in a last direction and ask about relationships between the study of interaction, and the level of analysis that focuses on the individual or personal dimensions of gender. Research on interaction has not sidestepped the individual level of analysis (after all, actors are central to interactionist accounts) so much as taken it for granted, making assumptions that are worth bringing into view. Susan Krieger (1991) has observed that various branches of the social sciences construe the self in different ways. For example, experimental psychologists understand the self in terms of measurable behaviors and cognitive processes; economists assume a self of rational choice and preference functions; political scientists understand the self in terms of the exercise of rights, power, and political participation.4 The study of interaction is a hybrid field that veers in a sociological direction, and the self or individual actor assumed by this perspective is, not surprisingly, shaped by the dynamics of social contexts and by relations with others. For example, Goffman theorizes the parts of the self that are activated and colonized by social interaction. He posits a cognitive self, continually responding to cues from others, and vulnerable to one major emotion — embarrassment or shame. The fear of “flooding out” motivates the individual to sustain
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the interaction order. In the end, Goffman theorizes a relatively hollow self, which he even describes at one point as a “peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time” (Goffman 1959: 253).5 Although theorists of social interaction vary in their imagery of the individual, they tend to neglect the depth of inner experience. This impoverished understanding of persons stems from a conceptual division that lies at the foundation of the social sciences: the separation and even opposition between the individual and society. The anthropologist Jean Briggs (1991: 113) articulates the problem: I have noticed that when anthropologists talk about ‘individual and society’ they often assert the definite article before individual, thereby, in one simple three-letter stroke, obliterating all the rich detail of individual lives — the essence of individuality. This focus on what individuals have in common creates a homogeneous individual to set off against society.
More extensive questioning of the dichotomy between individual and society would enrich both sides of the divide. Psychologists have much to gain from sociologists’ and anthropologists’ understandings of context; and if students of interaction made room for a fuller sense of persons, including a wider range of emotions and a sense of individuality, it would take their work in creative and pathbreaking directions. These possibilities are illustrated by Briggs’ (1998) ethnographic research with Inuit families and children. Informed by psychoanalytic theory, she attends to emotional dynamics and unique personalities as they take shape in particular contexts, especially playful dramas and interrogations between adults and children. Briggs describes these interactions with close attention to intentions, motives, understandings, and the complexities of emotional experience. Her work is an inspiring example of bringing a fuller, emotionally-attuned understanding of persons, and of culture, into the study of everyday life. Once again, the multidimensional concept of gender opens up possibilities for bridging across levels of analysis. Nancy Chodorow (1995; 1999) has recently theorized what she calls “individual gender”, arguing that in additon to shared or cultural meanings, such as socially consolidated notions of masculinity or femininity, each person has a distinctive sense of gender, shaped through their unique biography, psychodynamics, and interpersonal contexts. This individualized and highly personal dimension of gender operates not only in the inner world of perception and fantasy, but also in everyday life and interaction.
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Conclusion I have organized my argument as a sort of pendulum, swinging between two strategies of inquiry. At one end is the strategy of deliberate one-sidedness, which involves foregrounding a partial slice of reality, such as everyday interaction or intra-psychic experience, in order to explore it with some depth. At the other end is the strategy of looking behind what is foregrounded to bring other dimensions, and the challenge of bringing them together, into view. The narrowing and broadening strategies are, in some ways, complementary; both have enhanced the study of gender and the construction of knowledge. For feminists the study of gender has been more than just another topic to be plumbed from many directions. Feminist scholarship emerged from and sustains ties with a political movement that seeks to understand the whole of women’s lives and patterns of subordination, and that links knowledge with the goal of emancipatory social change. This goal bears on the issue of analytic strategies. Some of the most innovative and inspiring feminist scholarship reaches across levels of analysis. For example, “institutional ethnography,” a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy Smith (1987), uses women’s lived experience and the “embodied ground” of daily life and consciousness as a take-off point for interrogating the “relations of ruling” congealed in texts, discourses, and institutional practices. Smith uses tools from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and Marxism to probe these connections, without settling into any one level of analysis. This broad scope lends force and insight to her critical analysis and to empirical research anchored in Smith’s method of inquiry (for examples, see Campbell and Manicom [1995]).6 Like the patterning of women’s experiences, the multiple dimensions of gender — reaching across consciousness and emotions; discourse and meanings; the dynamics of social interaction and contexts; and institutions and social structure — challenge traditional divisions of knowledge. As Joan Alway (1995) has argued, the scope and complexity of gender makes it difficult to sharply distinguish levels of analysis, although scholarly practices reinforce such distinctions. By challenging dichotomies like “private vs public,” “reason vs emotion,” “individual vs society,” and “mind vs. body,” theories of gender subvert conventional divisions of knowledge. The very complexity, and even the instability, of gender as a category of analysis open avenues for broadened understanding.
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Notes * An earlier, much shorter version of this paper was published in German in Friederike Braun and Ursula Pasero (ed.), Kommunikation von Geschlecht. Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus 1997. My thanks to Anita Garey and Jean Lave for helpful suggestions. 1. See Weber (1949) for a discussion of the methodological use of “one-sided viewpoints.” 2. The essays in Laslett and Thorne (1997) explore the history of U. S. feminist sociology and the more general, often rocky convergence between the women’s movement and academic disciplines. 3. See Acker (1995), Alway (1995), and Hawkesworth (1997) for recent discussions of the multiple dimensions of gender that have been theorized and researched over the last three decades of feminist scholarship. Joan Scott (1986) and Sandra Harding (1986), the first feminist theorists to articulate different dimensions of gender, distinguished three levels of analysis: the structural, the discursive or symbolic, and the individual or personal. Their neglect of everyday interaction reflects the relatively low profile of this approach in feminist theory, although interactional approaches have been central to the core feminist argument that gender is socially constructed and not a given of nature. 4. Rebecca Blank (1993) raises an additional, scary possibility: that various social scientists actually believe that a given partial perspective is the full story about how the world works. Blank (1993: 133) reports that during a seminar or conversation with a colleague in economics, she sometimes recognizes, with surprise, that the colleague “really believes all this stuff about individuals constantly making fully informed and rational choices accounting for all expected lifetime costs and benefits”. It never occurred to her, even in graduate school, that this model was meant to be more than a partial view of reality. 5. My analysis of Goffman’s work has benefitted from the insights of Murray Davis (1966) and Candace West (1996). 6. R. W. Connell (1987) has also developed a comprehensive theory of gender that connects historically changing “gender regimes” of labor, the state, and other institutions; ideologies; everyday conduct (theorized by using Sartre’s theory of practice); and personality, including hegemonic and subordinated “masculinities” and multiple “femininities.” Although Connell’s focus on “practice” rather than social interaction neglects issues of intersubjectivity, his theoretical framework is useful precisely because of its broad scope and multiple nodes of theorizing. Connell’s attention to the historicity of gender, and to the contradictions and tensions in its structuring, is also inspiring.
References Acker, Joan 1995 “Hierarchies, bodies, and jobs: A theory of gendered organizations” Gender & Society 4: 139–158.
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Alway, Joan 1995 “The trouble with gender: Tales of the still-missing feminist revolution in sociological theory” Sociological Theory 13: 209–228. Beauvoir, Simone de 1972 [1942] The Second Sex.Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bell, David and Valentine, Gill 1995 “The sexed self: Strategies of performance” In Mapping the Subject, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds.), 143–157. New York: Routledge. Blank, Rebecca 1993 “What should mainstream economists learn from feminist theory?” In Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, M. A. Ferber and J. A. Nelson (eds.), 133–143. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Briggs, Jean L. 1991 “Mazes of meaning: The exploration of individuality in culture and of culture through individual constructs” In The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, B. Boyer and R. Boyer (eds.), 113–153. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press 1998 Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Educaton of a Three-Year Old New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Butler, Judith 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity New York: Routledge 1993 Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Marie and Manicom (eds.) 1995 Knowledge, Experience, and Ruling Relations: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge Toronto, Canada: Universtiy of Toronto Press. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1995 “Gender as a personal and cultural construction” Signs 20: 516–544 1999 The Power of Feelings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill, Maldonado, Lionel A., Takagi, Dana Y., Thorne, Barrie, Weber, Lynn and Winant, Howard 1995 “Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s ‘Doing difference’” Gender & Society 9: 491–513. Connell, R. W. 1987 Gender and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davies, Bronwyn 1989 Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender Boston: Allen and Unwin. Davis, Murray S. 1966 “Homme manqué: Commentary for connoisseurs of Erving Goffman’s social world.” Unpublished paper, Brandeis University Sociology Department. Ebert, Teresa L. 1996 Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire and Labor in Late Capitalism Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Fishman, Pamela 1978 “Interaction: The work women do” Social Problems 25: 397–406.
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Giddens, Anthony 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books 1977 “The arrangement between the sexes.” Theory and Society 4: 301–336 1979 [1976] Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row 1983 “The interaction order” American Sociological Review 48: 1–17. Harding, Sandra 1986 The Science Question in Feminism Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hawkesworth, Mary 1997 “Confounding gender” Signs 22: 648–685. Henley, Nancy M. 1973 “Power, sex, and nonverbal communication” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 18: 1–26 1977 Body Politics: Power, Sex and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kessler, Suzanne J. and McKenna, Wendy 1978 Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach NY: Wiley. Key, Mary Ritchie 1975 Male/Female Language Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. Kotthoff, Helga and Wodak, Ruth 1996 “Gender issues in language and communication” In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Krieger, Susan 1991 Social Science and the Self. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lakoff, Robin 1975 Language and Woman’s Place New York: Harper & Row. Laslett, Barbara and Thorne, Barrie (eds.) 1997 Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Leidner, Robin 1991 “Serving hamburgers and selling insurance: Gender, work, and identity in interactive service jobs” Gender & Society 5: 154–177. Martin, Karin 1998 “Becoming a gendered body: Practices of preschools” American Sociological Review 63: 494–572. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987 “Contexts and other connections” In The Micro-Macro Link, J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch and N. J. Smelser (eds.), 207–234. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, Joan W. 1986 “Gender: A useful category of historical analysis” The American Historical Review 91: 1053–1075. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic Boston: Northeastern University Press.
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Stulberg, Lisa M. 1196 “Let’s talk about sex: The negotiation of discourse and the critical potential of classroom Talk in a sex education classroom. “In Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Thorne, Barrie 1993 Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thorne, Barrie and Nancy Henley (eds.) 1975 Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Weber, Max 1949 On the Methodology of the Social Sciences (translated and edited by E.A. Shils and H. A. Finch). Glencoe, Il.: Free Press. West, Candace 1996 “Goffman in feminist perspective” Sociological Perspectives 39: 353–369. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don 1987 “Doing gender” Gender & Society 1: 125–151. Willis, Paul 1977 Learning to Labor.New York: Columbia University Press. Zimmerman, Don H. and West, Candace 1975 “Sex roles, interruptions, and silences in conversations” In Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, B. Thorne and N. Henley (eds.), 105–129. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Part II
Perspectives on gender in childhood and adolescence
Girls’ oppositional stances The interactional accomplishment of gender in nursery school and family life* Jenny Cook-Gumperz “If the little girl at first accepts her feminine vocation, it is not because she intends to abdicate; it is, on the contrary, in order to rule; she wants to be a matron because the matron’s group seems privileged; but, when her company, her studies, her games, her reading, take her out of the maternal circle, she sees that it is not the women but the men who control the world. It is this revelationmuch more than the discovery of the penisthat irresistibly alters her conception of herself (De Beauvoir 1958 The Second Sex). “When I grow up and you grow up, we’ll be the bosses” (two four year old girls -playing Mothers).
The social construction of gender An anecdote told several years ago by anthropologist Myer Fortes encapsulates one of the main theoretical issues that reverberate through the study of gender. Fortes’ story goes like this: his granddaughter, aged three was asked on returning from play in a neighborhood pool whether she had been playing with a little girl or little boy, she replied “I don’t know they didn’t have their clothes on.” (Fortes in Jakobsen-Widding 1982). Clearly for this girl the human body as such was not sufficient evidence to make the relevant gender determination. It was not that the biological facts were unavailable to her, since she also had a little brother, but that for this three year old the social category of gender had to
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have more than just a biological component. Her answer showed that while she was in no doubt that social gender is an embodied construct it is also one which must be established through activities in an acceptable social medium, in her case by wearing gender appropriate clothes. Traditionally theories of gender socialization have assumed that gendered behaviors were inherent in individual’s qualities and that they develop exclusively from a basic biological/genetic difference (Archer and Lloyd 1988). More recently biological essentialism has given way to a constructionist view that assumes gender identity is established through interaction in a social world (Bem 1993). Biologically based theories tended to take gender differences for granted whereas from the social constructivist view researchers wanted to find out how basic differences were realized in changing contexts (Epstein 1988; Maccoby 1996). While there has been disagreement over the notion of whether or when girls and boys develop a sense of being in separate worlds, sociolinguistic research over the past decade has served to established several possible scenarios as to the persistence and variety of these differences. Deborah Tannen in reviewing work on gendered discourse suggests that these views can be seen as forming two distinctive or bifurcated sets of approaches (Tannen 1994). One view is based on assumption that the socially different situations of women and men lead the two genders to act in very different often conflicting ways, because what is at issue is the matter of the dominance of one gender over the other (Thorne and Henley 1975). The other view suggests, building on extensive work on children’s play (e.g. Lever 1978; Goodwin 1991) that social gender identities are built on the experiences of same sex friendship groups and that these develop into separate group cultures, separate interactive goals and therefore separate interactive styles ( Maltz and Borker 1982). Furthermore, these socially constructed differences between the genders become further consolidated in adulthood through different interactive preferences, speech styles and socially grounded interpretive strategies (Tannen 1990). These differences are then seen as constituting two different cultures of the sexes/genders, or what is now most often referred to as the separate worlds hypothesis.
The separate worlds hypothesis While the separate worlds claim has been documented in several ways from interact ional styles in the children’s peer play to everyday interactions between women and men, some questions remain. If gender is to be seen as an interactional
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accomplishment that develops from specifics of everyday interactions then are there particular gendered contexts that make a significant difference? Does gender difference merely grow out of different discourse practices in many contexts or do these differences deepen into differences in ways of knowing in particular contexts, as researchers such as Nell Noddings have suggested (Noddings 1984). An additional concern that I want to explore in this paper is that the separate worlds claim can seem rather circular in its arguments, providing only for a socially constitutive agenda which has little room for oppositional cultures of gender. In other words does an interactionally achieved gender identity as a part of peer group life present little space for individual agency; that is does it lead to an ‘oversocialized’ conception of gender? Do gender ideologies present only one way of being an appropriately gendered person? Does an emphasis on peer group experiences in the development of gendered identity ignore the importance of social asymmetry in relationships between different ages and genders, or does the relationship between the two genders lie in the way that these terms are defined? We can begin to answer some of these questions by making an initial distinction between the strong and weak forms of what has been called gender reproduction theory (Connell 1987). In its strongest form gender reproduction theory suggests, that the social roles of women and men, girls and boys cannot change in substantial ways until gender specific and stereotypic behaviors no longer exist. In this view, gender differentiated behaviors will need to be eradicated before a cognitive and emotional basis for social change can be established (Connell 1987; Davies 1989; Holland and Skinner 1990). The more traditional approaches of social gender distinctions, such as those originally established from anthropological perspectives, take the position that gender differences are akin to the nature/ nurture distinctions and built into the origins of human society (Rosaldo 1974; Ortner 1974). So that to make any changes, would mean changing the social institutional order, reversing current arrangements and putting into place an “ideology of opposites” such that, for example, girls might hunt and fight and boys might hoe and nurture. Bronwyn Davies, in her study of middle school children, “Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales” (1987), takes a similarly strong reproductive view when she shows how resistant children are to the idea of exchanging gendered behaviors. She concludes that gender inequalities will continue to be reproduced until girls and boys are able to view each other as capable of the opposite behavior, with boys becoming nurturant and caring and girls becoming challenging and adventuresome. As an alternative, what can be called the weak reproduction thesis suggests
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that task sharing and cooperation between the genders will attenuate the reproductive links. The claim is that gender equality will come about through a withering away of distinctions, a state of affairs that can arise in a social environment of public gender neutrality where women and men are able to achieve equity of tasks and positions (Epstein 1988) in such a way that the gender of the person is not ever an issue. It is this latter view of the desirable benefits of an environment of gender neutrality that provides the main focus for much current school practice (Bem 1993). Schools, even preschools are becoming sites where an ideology of gender neutrality in games, curricula activities and classrooms is promoted as the way to eradicate social difference between the genders (Scales and Cook-Gumperz 1995). Yet as Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein has shown in a sociological evaluation of the changing social position of women in contemporary society the social constructivist view of gender difference continues to be one of the most acceptable explanations of the societal differences. In synthesizing two decades of research she provides support for this view as a powerfully influential theory of gender difference yet she also concludes from the empirical evidence that changes of social ordering in the direction of greater equalities have not led to a withering away of differences (Epstein 1988). And that while not agreeing with those who use only a socio-biological explanation of gender, she suggests that the human need for organizationally powerful social categories may be the root reason for continuance of gender distinctions. She argues that social ideological categories are most powerful when they are simple and clear-cut, and that gender distinctions provides us with one of the most powerful, and because they can embodied by everyone, easily available organizing categories which can realized in any scenario of social differentiation. However, while both views present the problem of gender difference as the need for social roles and genderized tasks to be redistributed in order to bring about necessary social change, both also see the continuance of social gender differences as evidence of the need for ideological manipulation of what are to be seen as desirable activities for the two genders. Neither suggests the possibility of a move away from an oppositional view of the gender roles. More importantly, reproductive theories do not deal with the more fundamental issue addressed by Nancy Chodorow who using feminist-informed psychoanalytic theory argues that: “the social organization of gender requires that there is a theory as to how we become sexed and that while biology informs both notions of sexuality and gender, these are not immutable givens” (Chodorow 1989:168). That is, Chodorow is suggesting that not only is gender socially constructed but
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that this idea does not stand in opposition to the biological bases of human sexuality, but rather in complementary alignment to it. Both gender and to some extent sexual orientation can be seen as deriving from a selected set of intentional behaviors and are thus interactionally constructed social categories. Both gender and personal representations of sexuality are potentially changeable or subject to alteration. The gist of Chodorow’s argument is that gender choices are developmentally constructed in relation to prevailing societal practices (Chodorow 1977). Discourse analysis provides us with a way of exploring this construction process and provides a view of young children’s representations of these gender choices. Discourse can capture the changing perceptions of social reality in children’s lives and show how the ongoing discursive practices of ‘doing gender’ take place.
A gendered life in families and schools In light of this claim I will look at young girls, aged three to five years, beginning to acquire a sense of their own gender identity as they move from a familyfocused life into the more public domain of nursery school (Cook-Gumperz 1995). I explore the ways in which girls establish the discourse of a gendered self and how this shapes their own peer interactions, using examples from different play contexts. The argument is that as the epigram below suggests young girls must to a large extent rely on the conventional images and symbols of womanhood and motherhood as they grow up observing them at firsthand, to explore their own future womanhood. By exploring what seems when young the ultimate goal of girls to become women, children construct a socially embedded concept of the female/woman. How little girls understand the mother’s position is part of the child’s awareness of the mother’s ability through talk to control the resources of the home and the activities of people who live there, in short to be one of “the bosses”, as the epigram at the beginning of the paper quoting two four year olds shows. While girls demonstrate in their play talk that they see the role of the woman as one of power and dominance in the family, as they use unmitigated directives and issue orders to other players. However, as the following analyses show these same girls are also likely to conduct their interactions with peers and adults, in situations other than family play in a verbal style that is marked by the negotiative skills, explanation and politeness. All these are verbal strategies that
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may later be interpreted as to a reflecting abdication of power in both familial and other social relations. The distinction between verbal strategies and social action becomes the crux of the paradox of language socialization. Furthermore by focusing on specific instances where young girls take an oppositional stance to the women’s’ agenda, I will show how the girls’ developing conception of “being a woman” requires them to confront the effects of this paradox. That is the potential asymmetry in what they see as the consequences of womanhood, and of what they are aware of is the burden of motherhood. The notion of an oppositional stance suggests a struggle against what can be described as an oversocialized female persona, which is the result of verbal strategies of compliance and persuasion. This paper explores how girls can experiment with the possibility of constructing opposition to their compliant, polite and conciliatory selves by rejecting what seems to be predetermined in their gendered life, that motherhood makes women of us all. In an earlier paper, “Reproducing the Discourse of Mothering”, I suggest that through play activity children find out some of their own gender possibilities and so begin to construct a theory of gender which begins by enacting the possibility of womanhood, the activities of the powerful and controlling mother (Cook-Gumperz 1995).
Little girls as “little women”: play in the world of the family A partner was absolutely essential to me [at home] if I was to bring my imaginary stories to life… In fact, I was always the one who expressed myself through them; I imposed them upon my sister, assigning her the minor roles which she accepted with complete docility..Sometimes, spellbound by our play, we succeeded in taking off from the earth and leaving it far behind until an imperious voice suddenly brought us back to reality. Next day we would start all over again. We’ll play ‘you know what’, we would whisper to each other as we prepared for bed. (DeBeauvoir 1963 Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter).
Since Simone De Beauvoir first described it in the Second Sex, one of the major puzzles in the establishment of gender identity has remained the issue of how it is that although young children experience the mother’s role as all powerful and important, little girls still grow up into young women who publicly carry through roles, activities and talk that allow them to be placed in a secondary position (De Beauvoir 1962). Eleanor Ochs and Carolyn Taylor provide evidence for why this may be so when they describe how mothers construct family discussions in such a way that father seems to have the last word in
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decision making and appear to know best (Ochs and Taylor 1995). It also seems that this phenomenon presents girls with a duality of gendered experience in the family that can lead to conflicting influences for young girls. In this chapter I suggest that what I will call oppositional stances may result from attempts to find alternative resolutions to these conflicts. Additionally as the discourse data and examples below show, each position contains within itself other conflicting aspects. For example although women as mothers may be all powerful their children actively devise strategies to counter their attempts at control. Studying the games that children play provides a direct view into their own construction of reality ( Dunn 1988; Winnicott 1971). We can find the first stage of the children’s gender theory at work in young children’s play talk in family setting where games involve some form of domestic play, that always have some combination of mummies, babies and sometimes fathers and siblings, but where the mother role remains primary whatever the family configuration. In such circumstances even boys have been heard to demand that they play “ the mother”. Later on in the developmental cycle as the young child enters into the world outside of the home, there is a shift towards accommodating to new social demands that provide another aspect of a gendered self. I will show through a later set of examples of play in the nursery school, how a second stage to the child’s theory of gender is developed through peer interaction. I in this stage established through peer exchanges girls face a very different set of discourse demands from those of the home. The first set of data come from a corpus of children’s play talk recorded in the homes of two 3 year girls over several winter months when the children played in each others homes (1992, 1993). The two little girls, who often play together, enacted a spontaneous narrative where mothers and their babies engaged in many different activities, such as going to the park, putting the babies to bed, changing and feeding them. In all the game is made up of twentysix different narrative events (Cook-Gumperz 1985). All of these were described by an on going accompanying narrative voice which gave the plot details and a commentary, punctuated by occasional interruptions from the little girls’ ordinary selves when special actions needed explanation. The girls have three markedly different “voice tones”, that is intonational, rhythmic styles that enact game talk, and distinguish whether they are speaking as mothers to mothers, or mothers to their babies, or thirdly, providing the game plot and commentary. At no time during the game do the babies themselves speak, that is the children have no voice for “baby talk”. Babies are talked at and about, are scolded, cajoled, fussed over and comforted by the mothers. The mother characters give
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directives or direct requests to each other such as a shouting out “Sandra you’re baby wants ya” or “Sandra do you have pins?” (Sandra is a game name for one of the “mothers”). When the two girls, Lucy and Susie, speak to each other in their ordinary voices it is to further negotiate details of activities and when this happens they are likely to mitigate or hedge their requests. Requests here usually carry a politeness tag, such as the ungrammatical: “Can I borrow this if you mind?” Or they carry an ordinary tag question: “And my/my baby sits there, don’t she?” In game commentary the two girls use the conditional “because” to provide explanations such as: “And…and this is my baby..the littler (one)..I have to have this cause..cause… she has to have the little cup.” Or: “ Not that babe…I’ll give her some tea..cause she wants tea, don’t she”. Sometimes persuasive strategies of explanation as are made in the following example where Lucy attempts to persuade Susie by explaining why her particular request is part of a general order of how things should be: “But other people hold other people’s babies so you hold that [one]”. In a typical game sequence the same “voices” representing the characters and distinguishing levels of the game, extend across turns or they can shift within a single person’s turn. However the voice quality keeps the two interactants on track and the two girls always seem to know who, in the sense of which character, is speaking at any one time. In the example below the planning or narrative talk goes across turns. The game’s action is fast paced yet has a marked rhythm, a metric beat, that is mostly provided by the mother to baby talk accompanied by rhythmic back channel signals like “Shh..Shh..” or expostulations of “ oh..poor baby..” “Come here baby” performed with a marked by a rise fall intonation. Made-up words, such as “maccamba” above also conform to this rhythmic pattern. These unlexicalized sounds and conventional expressions symbolize comfort sequences or are accompanied by such expressions as “Naughty baby” “Oh No” with a high rise and fall contour, which represent recognizable scolding or disapproval patterns. The mother’s need to watch over their babies activities is captured in the following example. The capital letters in bold are narrative talk, ordinary capitals are mother to baby, and ordinary type Mummy to Mummy. Example 1 L: AND BABY SPILT HER FALALANGA. …LOOK BABY, DON’T SPIT IT OUT …my baby’s spittin’ at your baby AND STOP THAT! ..ALL RIGHT …I’LL BRING IT [you] TO YOUR MUMMY… My baby’s ( ) s/ s/ spitting it.
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In this example the mothers controls the babies, the talk animates the motherbaby relation, in which mothers monitor and scold the babies yet the silent babies are still naughty. The mother’s voice tone could be characterized as reacting with exasperation to the naughty babies or soothing them when they need comfort. Throughout this game scenario the babies misbehave and need scolding, or sometimes comforting and healing. Mothers perform all these tasks but it seems that the limit of the mother’s power is revealed by their ability to keep their babies naughtiness in check and by their ability to heal any wounds or hurts. Thus mothers are not quite all powerful, their power is dependent on a constantly demonstrated success, and the babies although silent, keep the mothers not only busy, but somewhat harassed. Furthermore the girls show in their discourse that they are not only representing the powerful mothers using direct requests and statives to each other and their babies, but they are also polite and persuasive in their talk with each other, ready to negotiate and explain to achieve their desired ends. We can see that the discourse of young women is already in place in play lives of these girls. At three and half years old, they display sense of social gender. Yet when girls and boys enter a school situation these patterns will be open to new social demands and ones that are not as asmuth of the child’s own construction as in home based play.
Discovering the self in a public sphere Research on the influence of peer group experience on social gender development in preschool children has to attend to two issues. One, that the pre-school or kindergarten classroom as a public space for children presents very different interactive experience for children than the home. Children gain the experience of making friends and alliances through activities of the children’s own choosing activities that are not brokered by parents or other adults. And so they experience challenges, satisfactions and distress that making and breaking friends can cause (Dunn 1988). The study of peer cultures in early schooling has helped to refocus social scientists’ attention on the world that children are able to construct for themselves. While discourse analysis and explorations of play talk has reoriented theories of socialization toward the child as an active agent of their own socio-cultural understanding (Corsaro 1996; Cook-Gumperz and Corsaro 1986). It must not be assumed that children find entry into the public world of the nursery school play groups any less difficult than say an adult might find making a change of occupation. The significance of the shift from
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the intimacy of home life into a more public world has often seemed to be downplayed as if children’s lives of peer play represent a seamless transition between the two domains. Secondly, the contemporary classroom, even the preschool classroom, is a public arena subject to many political pressures and forces from society, parents and educational (pedagogical) theorists. Many of these pressures reflect adult assumptions about gender relations in the adult world, both actual and desired. In other words children participate in school environments that are governed by adult notions of how to influence children’s awareness of the social manifestations of gender. Curricular policies require teachers, and others to be aware of the dangers of gender discrimination. Teachers and other adults make attempts to generate gender equity in contemporary classrooms through working to create a largely ‘gender neutral’ environment where the images, discourse and representations of gender are equally sharable by all, sufficient to conform to what I have called the ‘weak’ notions of gender equality. However, as I will show below, adults’ attempts to neutralize the classroom in terms of gender expressions and activities are frequently at odds with children’s own very active efforts to create a gender specific environment (Scales and Cook-Gumperz 1993).
Gender at work in the nursery school classroom Vivian Paley, began her studies of children’s play activities at work in the nursery school with an examination of how children managed the school play settings as essentially gendered in “Super Heroes in the Doll Corner” (Paley 1978). She showed the powerful part that gender has in shaping children’s lives irrespective of adult suggestions and describes how, what we now call using Barrie Thorne’s term “border work”, takes place (Thorne 1993). Following on from Paley’s work Barbara Scales and I conducted a series of “interviews” or discussions, with nursery school students, in a university play center, using still photographs of different areas inside the school and in the play-yard, to explore children’s perceptions of we called particular nursery school play ecologies, and to see if these definable spaces had a gendered character. Each area depicted had a different set of props and activities associated with it, from sand play tray, painting easels to large blocks, climbing structures and a rubber tyre ring that was suspended near the climbing structure (Scales and Cook-Gumperz 1993). We asked children to come during the day, in friendship pairs and talk to us about the places they liked to play, and we showed photographs to make their
Girls oppositional stances
task easier. Most boys chose the outside climbing frame with a slide attached (known as the big structure”) as their favorite. Several girl pairs also chose this area, but said since it “belonged” to the boys they were not able to use it. Discussion showed that the play-yard was considered by the children as a gendered zone, with some territories specifically for boys or others more specifically the girls’ domain. While our observations showed that this did not corresponded completely with actual practices these responses presented the children’s perceptions of the territories. One pair of girl friends explained how they waited to use a particular play area they liked that was usually associated with the boys: Example 2 Res: Kris: Res: Kris Res: Kris: Chloe: Res: Kris: Chloe: Res: Chloe: Res: Chloe: Kris:
Who would you go on the big structure with? Ummm . . . we like to stoled it from the bad guys. You like what? We like to stoled it . . . cause we never been there. Oh, Kristin, what did you say about the bad guys? Ummm . . . oh. We’d like to stoled it from the bad guys, because they have it every time of the day. So, we have to take care of it. But we didn’t take care of it yesterday. Who are the bad guys? They just play. They’re all David’s friends and David. Oooh. My brother David. You steal it…you steal the big structure from the bad guys? Yeaaaa . . . then they leave. Yea! They chase us . . . but I try to get ‘um away.
If Chloe seems a bit more audacious about invading the “boys’ territory,” perhaps it is because the David she referred to was in fact her own twin brother, someone with whom she had a very familiar relationship. In this explanation the girls are using the language of chase games, such as “ bad” guys” and by implication also good guys, in rather “macho” script. Yet while the girls talk about themselves as challenging the boys for their supremacy in this area they also describe themselves as fleeing and being chased. Is it possible to see in these descriptions that the girls are beginning to act in a somewhat stereotypical way, as girls who want to be conquered, so flee away. Although they say that they
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challenge the boy occupants for their favorite play area, yet at the same time they seem give themselves up to the excitement of being chased and of yielding. It seems in this short dialogue as if the position of “being a peer player” becomes transformed into a concept of a “feminine other” who recognizes her significance as a potential conquest and an object of the chase. Analyses of further observations from on-going data collection of children’s games made in the same nursery school over a five year period, both of play in different areas of the school and in some interviews with children about their choices of play friends and places within the school, do show a striking contrast between the public and private persona of the young girls. A scenario similar to this interview is repeated. In their publicly “gendered self” they express a powerlessness in abdicating many play sites to the boys, as do Chloe and Kristin and in showing a readiness to be influenced by boy’s activities in agreeing to play. While we saw that at home the middle-class girls play the controlling or domineering mother, in school they appear to be more compliant than bossy. However in more private play sessions in a “play house” site for girls together, or even with boys present, they take on a different role, one which rejects many compliant and nurturant activities. As I will show later in this paper children seem able to use their understanding of what women do to make the activities of women into symbols. They can then use these to subvert what they see as the intended consequences of the woman’s agenda, that is their role as mother’s and as family managers whose individual freedom is compromised by having children. While young girls observe and note the cultural politics of gender at first hand, they are also influenced by their peers in the ways that they construct gendered occasions in their lives .
Gender as a group interactional accomplishment Girls in their talk with others, girls, boys and adults, reveal their understanding of the nature of gender/power distinctions and use these symbols for their own purposes. These distinctions are at the heart of the interactional accomplishment of gender. In the following set of two play episodes taken from CookGumperz and Scales, a group of three girls who regularly play together have set up a play site on the edge of the carpeted area used for playing with large and small blocks. As in Paley’s nursery school the large blocks constitute an area usually seen as belonging to the “boys”. The three friends begin a game of
Girls oppositional stances
“ponies” using small toy ponies that they have played with repeatedly (CookGumperz and Scales 1995). Example 3. Playing “little ponies” with Jen and friends
As the episode begins, the three girls, Jennifer age 4.9, Emily, age 3.10 and Alicia, age 4.5, enter a carpeted area of the classroom. They gather around a structure of small blocks with miniature animals and an array of various size unit blocks to the rear of the area. The three girls start a play by constructing a house setting into which animal characters will be introduced. The girls establish the outlines of a scenario involving making food, tending and feeding pets, and tidying the area. Alicia introduces a topic: “Sweep our roads. Sweep our roads, every body . . sweep here.” Jen follows with a topic about making rice, which Alicia takes up also. After several minutes the single boy James comes and sits next to the shelves to the right of the girls. His presence seems to bother them, since he keeps looking in their direction as if wanting to join in their play, and finally Jen, the ‘leader’ of the group says: Excerpt (i) 276 Jam: 277 Jen : 278 Jam: 279 Jen :
(making weird noises.) If you will not please, don’t bother us! I’m not bothering you. OK — well then don’t trip the horses or the dogs or the zebras. 280 Jam: I wasn’t doing that. 281 Jen : What? 282 Jam: I wasn’t doing that. 283 Jen : Oh good- good. (talking quietly to the other girls) He’s just being a next door neighbor or something because we have a house. [James continues to play by himself without making any sounds, he wanders off later]
By looking at the way the interactional episodes evolve, we gain insights into how in the course of the play a gendered scenario develops. The initial play episode begins with domestic play, where the three girls use blocks and miniature animals, and where the girls as “animal minders” clean, cook and sweep the area. Such domestic play is seen as typical of girls. The two episodes juxtapose two different interruptions, one by a single boy who begins to play nearby and a second involving a group of boys who come by and then return to set up a
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block structure adjacent to the girls. The first interruption by the lone boy is quickly negotiated by one of the girls to be a non-threatening interruption, which can be explained away by saying, “He is a just being a next door neighbor”. In this way, James becomes a warranted part of play and does not take on a gender specific character. He remains nearby as just a “person,” not a gender specific person, and the girls are able to continue with no change in the character of their play to be alongside their “neighbor.” In the example above Jen issues a hyper polite request for James, a lone nuisance, “not please don’t bother us” which is successful in persuading James to play silently and so be ignored. With the arrival of a group of boys, however, the play changes: Excerpt (ii) A group of three boys led by Jason who have passed by the girls play area before, now return and encamp on the other side of the rug from the girls, from here they have to walk behind the girl’s play space to reach the large block unit from which they keep taking new stores of building blocks. They sing loudly as they walk back and forth “We’re walking ..we’re working” 499 Jen:
And we should say to be quiet we should say you should be quiet, we should say be quiet, we should say you should be quiet. [Three boys continue singing, as above. We’re walking ..we’re working.. we’re walking. They repeat this 25 times more while the walk back and forth carrying large blocks to make a structure] [Emily leaves the play with Jen and Ali] [Teacher interrupts, talks to boys. They start singing again. The two girls continue their play then Emily returns] 500 Emi: Do you want to see a ring? Do you want to see a ring? [Boys still singing.] [Alicia covers her ears then whispers to Jen] 501 Jen: Hey, look it. Hey, are you dead? 502 Ali: No, I’m not. [Boys still singing.] 503 Jen: Well, I don’t mean to interrupt you. 504 Emi: This, this girl (kept on) walking and walking and walking and 505 Jen: Pretend she was walking this way. 506 Emi: And she fell off here. [Alicia and Emily come behind Jen to move their pieces…play continues for a few more turns and the Ali and Emily run off and Jen leaves a little later]
Girls oppositional stances
After the boys have begun their noisy working/walking song as they move piles of blocks around the girls play area, Jen issues another hyper- polite request. She works over the request trying to find the right degree of authority mitigated by politeness. But this time she is less successful, only the teacher responds and tries to quiet the group. The group of boys lead by Jason seem to become more and more dominant, while all the girls can do is watch them a bit, cover their ears, and then alter their own game in ways that build in anxiety. For example in the game animals fall over a cliff and cry out for help, and the girls echo the boys’ words using ‘working and walking’ in their own game. In other words the group of boys dominates the girls in a way that the one lone boy could not. Although the children are not consciously aware of this the boys’ actions introduce gender into the play as an underlying dynamic to the ensuing proceedings, a possibility of threat from one group to another that did not arise before. It appears that since the arrivals are a group of boys, the three original players react by becoming a group of girls, rather than a gender unspecified collection of as “animal organizers”. As the two groups evolve into oppositional groups, they come to form a new kind of socially organized entity, which takes on a life of its own for the duration of the activities. This grouping has an implicitly gendered character because from this point onward, any additional members will need to be inducted into the group as gendered members. The boys have been successful in transforming play. Altough in both episodes the girls try polite requests for compliance from the other player. In the case of a single boy this proves to be a successful strategy which leads to resolution, in the group situation the opposite happens. Rather they find themselves being coopted into the other’s play discourse. It seems from these examples that A gendered opposition is evolving through the play discourse. Gender in other words becomes a group accomplishment.
The paradox of feminism and femininity Yet the question asks itself: what is it never to see yourself reflected in the words, never quite to find a woman in the glass, but always struggled for, dimly made out, ‘the human being ‘, a person? And what if the symbols used for thought, the reflection and transformation of experience can only be seen through the glass of their official meaning- if the baby, the nest and the house can only be interpreted as avowals of a traditional femininity? (Carolyn Steedman The Tidy House).
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Clearly Steedman is expressing a common dilemma. Yet none of these explanations do justice to the fact that social gender revealed in children’s play seems to have stayed remarkably constant over time, that is children have played and continue to play gendered domestic games. Studies of children’s play in the familial world find that very similar conventions of doll playing and household pretend play have existed through several centuries (Pollock 1983). The question remains: why do young girls in an era of feminism continue with such conventional play and use such stereotyped images? The examples in this paper have shown both powerful mothers and naughty babies, and the chase and flee games of boys chasing girls that constitute two very different notions of how girls can and should act. How can such age old themes remain as regular ingredients of a play repertoire in contemporary childhood? Research on young girls after they have developed literacy shows that through their reading and fantasy life, girls continue to be exposed to views of femininity that are often at odds with the world they inhabit. A tension exists between girls and young women’s attempts to control their own life worlds, and the cultural stereotypes of gendered options presented to them in books and other media (Cherland 1994; Steedman 1982). The history of the romantic scenario is at least as long as women novelists found marriage a convenient solution to women’s life chances. In studying contemporary children’s lifeworlds we can see that their problem, as well as ours, is to discover a gendered self refracted through the cultural politics of femininity. A popular culture that romanticizes the options of young women even in the contemporary world (Christian-Smith 1988; Holland and Eisenhardt 1989). Could it be that this romance culture influences even very young girl’s awareness of their gender possibilities? In answer to this question the following example shows two four-year-old girls playing with small circus figures at a table. The two girls are attempting to find a way of incorporating the different animals and figures into their play, but each person keeps contesting the other’s suggestions until one proposes that the figures are “boy friend and girl friend”. This romantic scenario gives them an immediate a set of possibilities, which they work through in the following way: Example 4 Z: And pretend somebody was ice-skating on the rink. There was a Mom. Wait pretend you got off the rink to watch for a while [Z grabs J’s figure and places it in front of J] J: Okay. I got off it
Girls oppositional stances
Z: Now now somebody’s on the ice skate rink ‘cuz when she [grabs J’s figure again] I’ll set her to be standing. J: OK but he is in the audience [grabs a male figure and places it in front of Z] Wait I’ll be right back [J goes to Z’s side] Pretend they were girl friend and boy friend, okay? [J returns to her seat] Z: And you’re sitting where the man-where the lady zooms by, but she slows down when she gets to you Okay? [Z runs her figure along the “ice” until it reaches J’s side of the ring] They say who’s that J: And I say and I say and I say Z: Mama J: Oh he’s my boyfriend We’re talking… Z: They both say that. ———. J: Ya but they’re boy friend and girl friend too Z: Hello Sweetie…. (Kyratzis, 1993)
In this excerpt the girls find a story frame in terms of which the play can get started rather than just negotiating about who has which play figure, the “romantic pairings” scenario becomes a way to get the play going and gives rise to an exchange that Kryatzis and Marx have termed “gushy” (Kyratzis and Marx 1996). That is girls’ use of emotionally laden address terms and romanticized ways of describing things, people or activities, in this case the “Hello Sweetie” greeting given by one character to another, shows that even these small girls are learning the talk of gendered relationships. While I have suggested that children’s early perceptions of a feminine reality are seen through the lens of mothering and all its various care taking accommodations to the needs of others (Chodorow 1982), girls once they enter into the shared culture of school, also become aware of the alternative of a romanticized “girlness”. Mothering and romantic relationships, the most stereotypical destinies of women and girls still seem to be the twin poles of the play scenarios that young girls freely adopt even in the gendered neutrality of the contemporary nursery classrooms. Perhaps the paradox of feminism owes some of its character to what Jennifer Coates, describing the talk of young teenage girls, has called the establishment of a discourse constitutive of friendship, girls’ play involves establishing their relationships to each other (Coates 1996).
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In the nursery school young girls turn to what ever images and symbols they share most with their peers in order to construct play, as in they did in the above examples. Although the design of the play can involve persuasive, dominant, controlling mothers or animal minders and their compliant or naughty babies or animals, the ultimate purpose of play for all the interactants is building relationships with each other. Perhaps, because the participants need to choose the most shared and available scenarios for their group play, the social scenes and characters seem to constitute the publicly acceptable face of “femininity” and thus involve many stereotypical elements. However underneath the surface appearance of conformity, girls’ fantasy play can distort these images away from mere stereotypes. Even the usual course of early socialization in familial settings may introduce into young girls experience an awareness of the duality of women’s roles as both conforming, yet challenging, as Peggy Miller has shown in her study of very young working class girls acquiring language (Miller 1982). She found that working class mothers valued different behaviors, they did not usual encourage a willing compliance in their daughters. Rather they presented their little daughters with a world in which the ability to be resistant, that is to be alternately challenging and accepting, to tease or learn to answer back when teased, yet at the same time also to be nurturing and caring, were all valued as making the future woman. Nursery school discourse very occasionally reveals some examples of the resistance and challenge young girls are likely to give to production of an ‘over socialized’ subjectivity based on nurturance of others and the acceptance of femininity through romantic love. Different kinds of play scenarios occur that suggest the possibility of resistance by girls to the public culture of gender experience which they seem to inherit, in order to produce their own gendered possibilities. In the final section of this paper I explore this phenomenon.
Little girls cultural resistance to the “over socialized” public self Some evidence that girls are engaged in a struggle against their own conformity to stereotypical behavior can be gleaned even in nursery school. The emergence of an oppositional self becomes evident through symbols and actions of cultural resistance that can be found in an underlife, in Goffman’s sense, of nursery school fantasy play. The implications of such oppositional stances is that young girls are enabled, in the safe interactional domain of fantasy play, to explore the extent and limitations of their gendered selves, and so to oppose the increasing
Girls oppositional stances
pressure of gendered self presentation and what is meant by the idea of an oversocialized self. I will explore resistance through looking at some instances of play frameworks and performances that specifically oppose the stereotypical talk of girls as helpful, compliant and caring. Oppositional stances are expressed through negative words, that is the intentional use of mean and hurtful words and actions, or as in the final examples below, play that directly challenges and opposes the nurturant image of girls as “little mothers”. These examples show that girls can create play scenario where “girlness” has a bad image. Some of the following interaction sequences occur in data from an archive of nursery school play from The Child Study Center Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, and others from recent work on children’s spontaneous play collected in other childcare centers.
Girls’ oppositional stances Research on girls’ social interaction has repeatedly shown that the girls prefer to form small groups or cliques of friends, rather than larger more hierarchical groupings characteristic of boys. Strategies of exclusion in girls groups become a focal point of continuous discussion that keeps groups aware of their own existence and so bonded together (Lever 1978; Goodwin 1990). The needs of the group require what Barrie Thorne has called border work, that is keeping the boundaries of groups defined and rejecting certain potential members (Thorne 1993). Decisions about who can be a potential member or who must be excluded, leads to talk about personal qualities as well as descriptions of negative feelings about others. In a similar way the social domain of nursery school provides some early experiences in describing, and even evaluating negative feelings. In the following examples young girls in nursery school talk in a manner they call “being mean” that is using negative and hurtful expressions toward another. Talk such as this can often result in rejection of others friendship or exclusion from the group. Example 5.1. Using unkind words Excerpt (i) “Only girls with pretty dresses can play with us” “You’re ugly. Why’s your hair so short. My mother says you look like a boy, ‘cause your hair’s so short”. (Child Study Center Archive)
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Excerpt (ii) Je: How come all the times when you bring me home, you get to come in my house and all the time I bring you home I don’t get to come in your house? Al: I know my mummy doesn’t let you. Je: I hate this! (Kyratzis, 1996)
These excerpts give a glimpse into what Corsaro has called the underlife of nursery school (Corsaro 1996), where children assess the consequences of their own actions or those in which they become involved. It can be argued that children gain an early sense of their own agency through evaluations of feelings toward others actions.
Being Naughty “Being Naughty” involves strategic uses of deliberate misdeeds. The assumption here is that there are activities in any family context likely to be dubbed as “breaking a rule”. It is usually assumed that gendered naughtiness is more likely to be associated with boys, than girls. Cultural stereotypes contrast “a good little girl and a naughty little boy” and present a typical childhood image of boys as adventuresome and girls as demure and quietly playful. In the example at the beginning to this paper we can see the two girls displacing their own naughtiness on to their play babies, making them do naughty things and then themselves acting as the long suffering mothers who patiently endure or scold their naughty babies. However in the following example two four year old girls are having a tea party at the mother’s suggestion. These are the two girls whose comment “when we grow up we’ll be the bosses” begins this paper. Their party takes place on a brick-paved area, at a small table and chairs with child sized cups, plates, teapots of milk, a jug of water and cookies: an almost text book picture of feminine apprenticeship. In the course of the play the “being naughty” scenario moves over into real life, a result the girls turn to making amends. Example 5.2. The Tea Party
Jane 4.2 (J) and Kate 4.5 (K) her visitor having what they, and the mother, described as a tea party the Mother and her visitor (JG) are indoors.
Girls oppositional stances
Scene: an outside patio between the door and the front gate to the house, the two girls are seated at a small table and chairs, which were moved from the playroom. They have small plates and cups, each has a teapot and a jug, one filled with water the other with milk. There is a plate with cookies on the table. The tea party consists of the two girls eating cookies and appreciative sipping “tea”, then a new scenario begins when K whispers to J. J: This is so good tea [Adult passing by ] Its getting a bit moist be careful [Jane mopping up the water spills with paper towel she brought out before] K: Jannie look what I did [Kate spills some more milk/water mixture] Its getting a bit wet I wonder where we could dry it J: Oh well, why’d you need it? K: Could you dry my cookie please? J: O. K. K: I don’t like this tea anymore? That’s enough [K tips the tea cup sideways and empties the milk on the ground] Adult: What’s wrong with your tea? (as she walks past the table) K: We don’t like it. {K whispers to J} J: What is that for? (K whispers again) (Girls giggle and pour the milk and water from the jugs and pots onto the patio) ……… K: Let’s clean it up so you mother won’t notice J: O. K. K: yikes Can I help you clean it up (K watches while J mops with paper towel) J: O.k. K: You can do it I’m scared J: Why? what are you scared about? K: I’m scared but I … we.e yikes J: Don’t hide Mother[coming out of the house]: What happened girls what happened? Hmm Jannie? K: you tell Mother: Katie what happened?
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K: You do it Mother: Was there an accident? K: yeah J: yeah K: Yeah the milk spilled ……… [Mother hand the two girls small brooms and they start sweeping.] ……… K: When your Daddy comes he won’t have to walk on the dirty milk he’ll say “who did that and what will you say what will you say Jannie what will you say? J: What will you want me to say? K: I want you to say Me and Katie
In this example the two girls set about destroying the tranquil scene by deliberately pouring all the milk-tea onto the patio. When they realize that their actions have turned the game of tea party into a real life event in which they are actually seen as naughty, they become concerned about what they have done. Katie who is a visitor says that she is afraid of the mess they made, after they tired of the tea party game, even though it appears to have been initiated by her. At first the girls deny any intention of wrecking the party to Janey’s mother but when she offers them some suggestions for clearing up the mess, they readily become involved in new clean-up game. Yet Katie’s comment at the end displays an awareness that rules were broken and reaffirms a gendered principle of the need for reparative action, so that the father will not find out. This “Father-Knows-Best” principle, (Ochs and Taylor 1995) now dominates the action as Katie justifies the girls’ attempts to put right what they have done. Katie’s final restatement of blame as equally apportioned between both of them clearly reflects her understanding of a sense of feminine responsibility that involves each of them.
Rejecting of the “Nurturing Mother” image: “Boiling babies” and killing baby kitties. In this the most surprising of the examples, the girls reject the stereotyped “good mother” image while they play at rearing babies. In the first excerpt the girls plan to destroy the babies they have looked after by doing away with them. Although their game appears to the outside visitor as if nothing is wrong. In the
Girls oppositional stances
second excerpt the babies being born are baby kitties, and their girl/mothers are known as the “superkitties” in a continuing game scenario. The section reported on here begins as the baby kitties are being born and the superkitties give them up to be killed much as actual newly born cats are frequently “put down” at birth. Example 6.1. “Boiling Babies” Three 4½-year olds in British kindergarten class. The girls are in the “Play House Corner” playing with dolls and “bathing the babies”. G3: the water is hot, G2: “Lets boil the babies” G1: Yes lets boil them and boil them. G2: We’ll boil them till their skins fall off”. A visiting adult walks by and sees the girls playing with dolls in the playhouse and she comments “Are you playing house and bathing the babies ?” “yes” chorus the girls “we’re playing with the babies” The girls return to their task of baby boiling. (tape ends).
The surprise about this data is not only that the girls are imagining doing something destructive, but that they deny that something odd is going on, aware that adults might disapprove. Examples such as these although rare do appear occasionally in other nursery school corpus of free play situations. Such talk is evidence of an underlife in nursery school where children plan, conduct, discuss and often evaluate their own and others actions that when overheard can contain material that suggests a child’s view of life experiences that often amazes adults. Example 6.2. The Super Kitties. PN -Penny, leader/initiator of “super kitties” SE -Sela LNG -Lynn JK -Jake (boy) Gina and Donny also stop by but the play is centered on the 4 main players The kitties are in the dressing up corner and the lower level of the “Wendy House” they are playing with a pile of stuffed animals and additional dresses SE: JK: SE: JK:
I am fatter than you Penny/ Penny look I am fatter she’s asleep/ can’t hear you/ Penny /Penny she wakes up
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SE: JK: LN: JK: PN: SE:
I woke you up now you can stay like that I am pregnant/ now don’t bother me you____/ get out of there/ a kitten/ no I don’t want your baby/ do you know what I worry about? PN: what/ SE: my mummy running away from me/ PN: meow/meow/ I am pregnant/ JK: who want to have that baby / who want to have that baby? PN: oh Gina [Penny is showing Gina, who has stopped by at the house her photo album] SE: I am about to die/ I about to die/ PN: She’s the babysitter [still looking at the photo album] LN: no Sela /I want that one/ PN: its my kitten/its my kitten/ I can do what ever I want with my kitten/ LN: but you were hurting her/ PN: I hate her/ she is already dead/ she is already dead/ JK: now who is having a baby? SE: meow Penny /meow Penny/ PN: meow /meow I want to go away SE: meow Penny/ meow Penny, she is coming through/ JK: now who want the baby? LN: me/ PN: don’t touch my kitty that way Sela/ JK: who want to kill the baby PN: me/me/ SE: me/ PN: Sela, I am going to die/ PN: who got the candy? who got the candy SE: meow/ meow/ Donny broke the little candy D: meow/meow SE: now you’re dead meat/ now you’re dead meat/ (the play scene begins to break up) [Kyratzis: Child Friendship Study ]
This group has been playing together throughout a semester in nursery school. The girls take on the identity of “superkitties” with their group leader, a girl
Girls oppositional stances
called Penny, and Jake, a lone boy playing with them occasionally. The game scenario seems to arise from one of the children’s knowledge of the possible fate of real-life newly born cats. In this episode, the girls discuss their own real families with each other, and they plot the theme of having babies. Jake does not call himself a doctor but he seems to be taking the role of a doctor delivering the babies and then after they are born taking and killing them. Surprising, and perhaps disturbing as this game may seem it does reveal the gender fantasies that the children explore via such games. As superkitties they are able to reject the idea of womanhood as necessarily linked to pregnancy and future motherhood. What is more they co-opt a boy into helping them in this rejection, their partner, Jake, who as the doctor both delivers and destroys their babies. The Chodorow thesis of women’s identity, the biologically determined need of girls to become women just like their own mothers can be rejected in the safety of the game where they can distance themselves from their everyday persona as little girls by taking on an animal identity. Such oppositional stances acted out in games gives support to the idea of the interactional accomplishment of gender by simultaneously exploring both positive and negative consequences of their gender futures. Thus by means of their games the girls show themselves as active agents in their own gender socialization. As Dorothy Smith puts it in “Femininity as Discourse”: “women are not just passive products of socialization; they are active agents, they create themselves” (1990).
Conclusion: gender as an on-going interactional accomplishment “Women are not just passive products of socialization; they are active agents, they create themselves (D. Smith 1990 Femininity as Discourse).
This paper, along with those by Thorne, Cahill, and Bloustien are all seeking answers to the question of how in the contemporary world of feminism can girls’ gender socialization practices continue to revolve largely around traditional themes. In examining the texts of feminine discourse Smith describes how conflicting views of the feminine are available in every possible textual form. Girls in attempting to understand their social prospects therefore meet a variety of textual images in advertisements and in other forms of popular culture that offer a competing image of a romanticized “girl culture”, which as Gerry Bloustien and Barrie Thorne in this volume argue is essentially an embodied culture.
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Jennifer Coates in her study of British middle-class teen-age friendship groups finds that in their early teenage years girls’ discussions center around a home based self where their talk is “constitutive of friendship”. Later these girls move away from an easy acceptance of their home based self to a more selfconscious accomplishment of their own femininity (Coates 1996). She goes on to suggest this girls’ world is influenced by magazines, advertising and all the panoply of commercially available images of women and girlhood, and that this brings about a shift in their discourse. Coates argues that teen-age girl talk changes between the ages of 12 to 15 years old, from a free wheeling, almost a joking resistance to being young women, onto issues of femininity, appearance, cosmetics and relationships with boys. That is their talk become more dominated by the texts and discourses of an official femininity, one that appears to be sanctioned and legitimated by the public world outside of their families. Thus the girls move away from an easy acceptance of their home based self and their talk is no longer just talk between friends and turns to a more self conscious realization of their view of femininity, with “different kinds of feminine subjects some in direct conflict with each other” (Coates 1996: 128). Such changing definitions of women’s roles present a feminism that often seems to be viewed differently by children, teenagers and by adults. And it is these conflicting views that we see being played out in some of the young children’s play scenarios where the bad and the dangerous themes can be explored without negative consequences. Play becomes a site for rehearsal of oppositional stances through which girls can attempt to avoid the pressures of an over-socialized feminine self. It is this self that girls too often led to display in family life. Therefore it is through the talk about gender and through the game based practice of gendered scenarios that girls become active agents of their own gendered identity.
Note * I want to thank Amy Kyratzis for generously sharing some of her data; other examples come from the Child Study Center Archives, at U. C. Berkeley, and I thank Barbara Scales for the years of our collaboration on collecting and using these archival materials.
References
Girls oppositional stances
Archer, J. and Lloyd, B. 1988 Sex and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bem, Sandra 1993 The Lenses of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cherland, Meredith. 1994 Private Practices: Girls Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity. London: Taylor and Francis. Christian-Smith, Linda 1988 Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture. Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press. 1993 Texts of Desire: Fiction, Femininity and Schooling. Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press. Chodorow, Nancy 1982 The Reproduction of Mothering. Berekeley: University of California Press. 1989 Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coates, Jennifer 1996 “Discourse, gender and subjectivity: The talk of teenage girls in cultural performances”. In Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, L. Sutton et al. (eds.). University of California, Berkeley. Canell, Robert 1987 Gender and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny 1992 “Gendered contexts”. In Contetxualization of Language, P. Auer and A. Di Luzio (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publisher. 1993 “Gendered talk and gendered lives: Little girls being women before they become (big) girls”. In Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, K. Hall, M. Bucholtz and B. Moonwoman (eds.). 1995 “Reproducing the discourse of mothering”. In Gender Articulated, M. Bucholtz and K. Hall (eds.). London and New York: Routledge. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny and Scales, Barbara 1996 “Girls, boys and just people: The interactional accomplishment of gender in the discourse of the nursery school”. In Social Interaction, Social Context and Language, D. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis and J. Guo (eds.). Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Corsaro, William 1996 The Sociology of Childhood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Davies, Bronwyn 1988 Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Gender in the Pre-Sschool. London: Allen and Unwin. Dunn, Judy 1989 The Growth of Social Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Epstein, Cynthia F. 1988 Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Fortes, Meyer 1983 “Concluding comments on identity from a socio-anthropological perspective”. In Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural: A Symposium, A. Jakobsen-Widding (ed.). Alantic Highland, N. J.: Humanities Press. Gal, Susan 1991 “Between speech and silence: The problematics of research on language and gender”. In Gender at the Crossroads: Feminist Anthropology in the Post-Modern Era, M. di Leonardo (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1990 He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Holland, Dorothy and Eisenhart, Maureen 1989 Educated in Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly-Byrne, Denise Kyratzis, Amy 1992 “Gender differences in the use of persuasive justification in children’s pretend play”. In Locating Power: The Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, K. Hall, M. Bucholtz and B. Moonwoman(eds.). 1993 “Tactical uses of narratives in nursery school same-sex groups”. In Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the 3rd Berkeley Women and Language Conference, M. Bucholtz, A. Laing, L. Sutton and C. Hines (eds.). Kyratzis, Amy and Marx, Traci 1998 “Gender and contextual specificity: Influence of play themes on group make-up, status and gender displays”. A paper presented at the 4th Berkeley Women and Language conference U. C. Berkeley. Maccoby, Eleanor 1996 The Two Sexes: Girls and Boys Growing Apart and Coming Together. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Maltz, Daniel and Borker, Ruth 1982 “A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication”. In Language and Social Identity, J. Gumperz (ed.). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Peggy 1982 Wendy, Amy, Beth: Learning Language in S. Baltimore. Austen: University of Texas Press. Noddings, Nel 1984 Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ochs, Elinor 1992 “Indexing Gender”. In Rethinking Context, A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor and Taylor, Carolyn 1995 The “Father Knows best”, dynamic in Dinnertime Narratives. In Gender articulated (of. cit).
Girls oppositional stances
Ortner, Sherry 1981 Sexual Meanings and the Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996 MakingGender. New York: Beacon Press. Paley, Vivien 1982 Super Heros in the Doll Corner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pollock, Linda 1983 Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations 1500- 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scales, Barbara & Cook-Gumperz, Jenny 1995 “Gender in the nursery school: A view from the frontier”. In Advances in Early Childhood Education, S. Reifel (ed.). Greenwood, Con: JAI Press. Smith, Dorothy 1993 Femininity as Discourse in Texts: Facts and Femininity. London: Routledge. Steedman, Caroline 1982 The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing. London: Virago Press. Streeck, Jurgen 1986 “Towards reciprocity: Politics, rank and gender in the interaction of a group of school children”. In Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language, J. Cook-Gumperz, W. Corsaro and J. Streeck (eds.). Berlin: Mouton deGruyter. Tannen, Deborah 1990 You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books. 1993 Gender and Conversational Interaction (ed.). . New York: Oxford University Press. Thorne, Barrie 1993 Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thorne, Barrie and Henely, Nancy 1975 Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. New Jersey: Newberry House. Winnicott, Donald 1971 Play and Reality. New York: Basic Books.
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Constituting the emotions A longitudinal study of emotion talk in a preschool friendship group of boys* Amy Kyratzis
Introduction A pervasive gender stereotype is that females are more emotional and by extension, more emotionally vulnerable than males (Golombok and Fivush 1992). “Women are seen as expressing more happiness, more sadness, and more fear than men, but men are seen as expressing more anger than females (Golombok and Fivush 1992: 218)”. According to Golombok and Fivush, who, in their book on gender development, review the literature on gender, psychopathology, and emotion, “most researchers agree that the way in which emotions are understood, interpreted, and expressed are culturally influenced, and the cultural norms for emotional expression are learned through socialization” (Golombok and Fivush 1992: 218). This led them to ask “are parents socializing emotions differently with sons and with daughters, and, if so, how might these gender differences influence gender differences in psychopathology (Golombok and Fivush 1992: 218)?” Toward this end, several recent studies have examined the “emotion talk” that adult caregivers use in interaction with their young children. Emotion talk is talk that references feeling states (e.g., “ I’m mad”). Fivush (1993), Kuebli, Butler and Fivush (1995), and Dunn, Bertherton and Munn (1987) found that mothers of girls talk to their children more about emotions than mothers of boys. Eisenberg (1999) found that gender differences in emotion talk identified in earlier work conducted with European American middle-class mother-child dyads were also found among Mexican American middle-class and workingclass mother-child dyads. Not only the amount but the content of the emotion
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talk received by American middle-class girls and boys differs. Mothers focus more on anger with sons and more on sadness with daughters (Fivush 1993). These patterns of emotion talk and language socialization may influence emotion development. Several investigators have suggested a link between emotion talk and emotion socialization (see Eisenberg 1999 and Fivush 1993 for reviews of this literature). Girls may be receiving a stronger message than boys that talking about emotions is appropriate activity (Fivush 1993) and that, among different emotions, it is more appropriate for boys to focus on anger and for girls to focus on sadness . Though we have some information about the emotion socialization that children receive from adult caregivers, to date, with the exception of a few studies (e.g., Kyratzis 2000), little work has documented emotion talk among peers. What is the explicit language socialization that children receive from peers regarding the appropriate expression of anger, fear, sadness, caring, and joy? Though little is known about explicit language socialization concerning appropriate emotion display occurring among peers, recent sociological and sociolinguistic studies show that an implicit socialization may be occurring. Such has been found to occur among same-sex peers in the pre-adolescent period (Cook-Gumperz this volume), and among both mixed-sex and same-sex peers in the period of adolescence and beyond, when romantic and heterosexual meanings overtake other definitions of cross-gender relations (Bloustien this volume; Cahill this volume). Gender ideology is often carried in subtle linguistic contrasts. Lakoff (1975) and Tannen (1990) have documented how certain linguistic features (e.g., hedged vs. unhedged statements; euphemisms vs. strong language) convey certain messages about the self (e.g., degree of commitment to what one is saying; involvement in real-world, money-making concerns vs. involvement in personal, idiosyncratic concerns). Recent research with children shows that their talk also contains subtle form contrasts that may embody subtle gender ideologies. Sachs (1987) and Sheldon (1990; 1992; 1996) have documented contrasts in the use of speech acts and linguistic forms in girls’ and boys’ same-sex group interactions that are in line with the emotion-gender stereotypes described in the psychological literature above. Sachs (1987) found that white middle-class girls’ directives to one another in pretend play are mitigated, cast as proposals for future action that invite cooperation (e.g., “Pretend we were both doctors”), while boys’ directives are more likely to be unmitigated and imposing (“bring her to the hospital;” “you have to push it”). Sheldon (1992; 1996) found that white middle-class girls, while embracing conflict, use a set of indirect, mitigated
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
strategies for managing it that Sheldon terms “double-voice discourse.” These strategies avoid direct challenge of the partner but enable the speaker to realize self goals. Sheldon did not find use of mitigated conflict management strategies among boys, who used directive speech and coercive physical tactics such as threats and physical intimidation (Sheldon, 1990). Mitigated request and conflict management strategies were not used among girls when cultures other than white American middle-class cultures, including African-American and Latino communities in the United States (Goodwin 1990; 1995) and Chinese communities in Taiwan (Farris 1999) and Mainland China (Kyratzis and Guo 2001), were studied. These cultural differences notwithstanding, differences between white American middle-class girls and boys in use of request and verbal conflict management strategies may relate to the psychological description of boys as more “aggressive” since aggression among children is very often (although not always) found in conflict (Shantz 1987). Socialization towards the use of linguistic strategies such as directives that are imposing and that do not invite cooperation (Sachs 1987), unmitigated conflict strategies (Sheldon 1990), and other strategies that support an interactional agenda of “one-upsmanship” (Maltz and Borker 1982; Tannen 1990) may render boys more likely to linguistically construct roughness and toughness as valued emotional stances in their peer groups. The sociolinguistic studies suggest that through the use of subtle linguistic contrasts, peers in same-sex groups may be sending one another subtle messages about appropriate emotion display for girls and boys. In fact, the language may help constitute the emotional attitude, along lines suggested by Gumperz’ (1982) model of how interpretive frames for talk are reflexively constructed through contextualization cues. Contextualization cues are linguistic and paralinguistic cues in the ongoing communication, including lexical items, prosody, gesture, voice quality, etc. Emotional stances may be viewed as interpretive frames against which ongoing talk in a communicative exchange is made sense of. Contextualization cues in the ongoing interaction reflexively help to constitute these interpretive frames (Gumperz 1982). Few studies have examined emotion talk, including explicit references to feeling states as well as broader and subtler contextualization cues indexing emotion, especially as they are used in friendship groups. In their naturallyoccurring friendship groups, do girls and boys explicitly reference feelings, such as “mad”, “scared”, etc., in talk to one another? What feelings do girls’ groups and boys’ groups reference? Through broader contextualization cues, how do
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they construct aggressive, fearful, brave, and caring attitudes? To what extent do norms about appropriate emotion displays develop over time in girls’ and boys’ friendship groups? To what extent are explicit links made between gender and emotion by the children, as through statements such as “boys don’t cry”, “girls shouldn’t be rough”? Contextual variation is also important to study. A few studies have suggested contextual variation in the use of sociolinguistic phenomena such as request forms and other features associated to gender-marking (e.g., Goodwin 1993; Nakamura 2001). Thorne (this volume) advises that, in order to arrive at a multidimensional concept of gender, we consider how the distinctive sense of gender that each person possesses is shaped by their unique biography, psychodynamics, and interpersonal contexts. In the present analysis we ask, to what extent does the emotion talk used by members of friendship groups vary by context? In addition, Goodwin (2001) recommends that we situate gender differences in longitudinal studies of activities. Longitudinal observation enables the identification of the influence of features other than gender affecting children’s language that vary across time (e.g., expertise). Toward this end, the current study examines emotion talk in a naturally occurring preschool friendship group of boys that was followed across the academic year.
Method Participants One mixed-age classroom of three- and four-year olds in a university based preschool was studied. There were 16 children in the class. Half were girls, half were boys. The children were middle-class offspring of faculty, staff, and students of the university. Two thirds were Anglo-American, and one third were of diverse cultural backgrounds, including Mexican-American, AfricanAmerican, and Asian-American children. Procedure A researcher was assigned to the classroom, which she visited two to three times a week during the free-play period of the day. She took detailed fieldnotes, indicating who was playing with whom (all interactions lasting more than three minutes were noted), and what activities were engaged in. Based on these ethnographic fieldnotes, each quarter of the academic year, each child was videotaped in her/his two most representative friendship groups. These
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
20-minute videotaped sessions of friendship talk were transcribed utilizing the Gumperz and Berenz (1993) transcription system and analyzed for emotion talk. The longitudinal perspective allowed examination of over-time changes in emotion talk and evolution of norms about appropriate emotion display within the groups. Multiple tapings of each friendship group allowed comparison of emotion talk across context. In this classroom, two friendship groups of 3 children or more were identified. One was of girls and one was of boys. The present report focuses on emotion talk in the friendship group of boys. The diagram below represents this friendship group. Bill, Roger, Sam, Pete, Jeffrey Boys’ Group
Analysis of emotion talk and emotional attitudes Following Eisenberg’s (1999) definition of “emotion talk”, the children’s explicit references to feeling states (“he’s afraid”, “I’m shy, ” “you love chocolate”) were extracted. However, the definition of “emotion talk” adopted here was broadened to encompass Gumperz’ (1982) notion of “contextualization cues”. Contextualization cues that helped constitute emotional attitudes or stances were extracted. Emotional stances are a part of the interpretive frame that becomes co-constructed among participants in a conversation. The negotiation processes that enter into this co-construction are cued by means of verbal, prosodic, and nonverbal signs or contextual cues which function as part of the rhetorical system. For example, the boys’ group made use of references to physical acts of aggression (e.g., “kick him in the butt”; “smash this girl!”), verbal aggression (e.g., insults and put-downs) and other cues (e.g, terse, loud utterances) that helped reflexively constitute an angry, aggressive stance that was often accomplished without explicit emotion labels (e.g., “I’m mad”) being used. Analysis of other gender socialization — Attitudes towards girl- and boy-characteristics The children’s references to girl- or boy- characteristics were also extracted. For example, one boy said , “Roger’s afraid of a dirt claw; he’s a girl”. This shows a boy’s negative attitude towards a girl-associated characteristic and shows a child linking gender and emotion in his talk with peers.
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Emotion talk in the boys’ group Norms over time — Over-time changes in “shy”, “afraid”, “scared” In their games and pretense, the boys’ group members frequently referred to being “shy” or “scared”. They seemed obsessed with this topic in games of pretending to be shy wizards or telling scary stories. However, norms or attitudes towards this emotion seemed to solidify over time. Early in the year, in Fall, it was okay to be scared. Later, being scared became unacceptable. These over-time changes are shown in Examples 1–4. Example 1 is from Fall quarter. In Fall, there was a close friendship between Bill and Roger, but other boys, such as Pete, sometimes joined the play. In Example 1, the boys are enacting an episode of play about being shy wizards. In this episode from early in the year, it is okay to be shy. (1) Okay to be shy early in year B = Bill, R = Roger, P = Pete 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Qtr: Fall
R: … if someone comes, then we **hi::de, really// B: ==yeah/ … we’re *shy:: wizards// ————— B: =we’re still-= [Pete comes in the hut] … we’re =shy//= R: =(we’re still)/= … yeah/ .. so we’re *shy wizards// ————— B: … we’re too shy// R: … yeah/ to talk to you// ————— R: … and when people walk by, we’re so **shy (than everyone else), right? ————— R: .. (come on)/ … (xxxxx)// … oh, here she comes again//[ Roger hides] … is she- … oh *man, [Bill hides] .. (xxx)/ … i’m the (shy)- … i’m the *shyest// B: … i am too// ————— B: … and we just had a *bad *dream, R: … yeah/ … and i pr- .. i felt worse (for) i was afraid, ————— B: … let’s pretend i’m the shyest// R: .. me too//
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
B: R: B: R: B: R: B:
.. no no// cause i’m… i’m the *really *really shyest// .. yeah// =when people-= =but if= i see somebody, i (just run)// .. pretend i’m shy as you, .. yeah// .. i’m *this shy:::// … pretend (i’m this shy)// [gesturing with his hands to show how shy “this shy” is] R: … [standing up] i’m this *shy// [gesturing with his hands] B: … well, i’m … i’m .. this .. shy// [gesturing with his arms to convey a large amount] R: … i’m **this .. sh…y// [does same gesture as Bill did in previous utterance] B: … i’m .. this .. {[pp] shy}// [turning away] R: … pretend we’re thisP: ==me too// i’m =this-= B: =we’re= *same amount// R: .. yeah// P: ==i’m this shy// ————— R: {{[ff] [hi] hey/ birds// aah [screams] birds// .. they’re coming to **eat us//}} B: .. they *eat us/ they *eat us/ we’re *small// [hiding] R: … pretend we don’t know how to *cli::mb, [getting up to climb on window of hut] B: … [starting to stand up, he sees female classmate, and hides again] look out//… call for help// … call for help//
In this episode, the boys explore the ramifications of being shy wizards, which include elements of vulnerability, including running away from people (line 25), being small (line 39), turning away (line 31), having bad dreams (line 16) and calling for help (line 41). There is actual label of the emotion, being afraid, in line 17 and there are references to fearful feelings (“I felt worse” — line 17) and thoughts (Bills’s reference to having a bad dream in line 16). The sense of fear is also created reflexively through the use of sound effects, such as screaming (line 38), repetition (“call for help, call for help” — line 41), stress (“they *eat us, they *eat us”, line 39), gesture (using distance between hands to convey a large amount of shyness in lines 27–29), voice quality (use of pianissimo in line 31), and hyperbole (“I’m the shyest”, “I’m the really, really shyest” (line 22).
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In Example 2, it is early in the year, Winter Quarter, and it is again acceptable to be scared. The boys, Bill, Sam, and Pete, under Bill’s leadership, are telling scary stories. (2) Okay for boys to be scared early in year B = Bill, S = Sam, P = Pete
Qtr. = Winter
1. 2. 3. 4.
B: i’ll tell you this scary stories// P: okay// ————— B … and then, … um in the middle of the night, (i heard a scary scary sound)/ … and it was so scary, it- we were too- we were too scared to go outside and look/ we just looked out of the door// … and we saw a giant// … and we saw teeny .. teeny footsteps .. that were little as ant bodies// … and we saw:: … crickets/ 5. ————— 6. B: … so, … so .. the door wasn’t locked/ … and then when- right when we turned the handle, we heard … a ~ding dong// … we heard a ding dong// … i mean .. we we heard some..thing say in the house who’s there// … and we were .. **scared/ … cause we didn’t know who (that is)/ … and we looked in the *window/ … and all we saw was a *shadow … of something k- .. with five horns on its head / … and seven eyeballs . . .
The children again explore the ramifications of being afraid, including the circumstances under which fear would occur (“we saw a giant” [line 4], “we saw was a shadow…of something…with five horns on its head” [line 6]). Bill explicitly labels the emotion (“we were scared”) in lines 4 and 6. He reflexively constitutes a sense of dread through suspense-building utterances. In line 6, he specifies several steps building up to the moment where the protagonists (the boys) make the discovery, which, even at the moment of being first revealed, eludes complete recognition (“all we saw was a shadow…of something k-…”). Bill makes hyperbolic use of adjectives and adverbs, a feature, which, as has been found in previous studies (Gunthner 1997; Kyratzis 2000), is used in girls’ friendship groups to create emotional involvement. Bill says things such as “scary scary sound”, “so scary” (line 4), “all we saw”, (line 6), and uses repetition (“we heard…a ding dong//…we heard a ding dong”). He also uses pauses repeatedly (lines 4 and 6) to create suspense and heighten the feeling of dread.
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
The following two examples are from late in the year, Spring Quarter, and show that it has become no longer acceptable to be afraid. In Example 3, Bill, Roger, and Sam, under Sam’s initiative, are digging through the dirt in the yard, looking for worms. (3) Not okay to be scared late in year B = Bill, R = Roger, S = Sam 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
R: B: R: S: B: R:
Qtr: Spring
they’re always in our w- [starts screaming] what? ants// [chuckles] you’re a (girl) [slow, deliberate verbalization] Roger, afraid of a big..dirt claw/ no, I’m not// . . .
The example shows that it is now not acceptable to be afraid. In line 1, Roger indicates fear when he encounters a worm. He seems to be play-acting, using the contextualization cues of truncation and screaming sounds to create the feeling of dread. Yet, even so, he receives negative feedback on the acceptability of his fear from Sam, who chuckles (line 4), and makes fun of him, associating fear with being a girl-quality (“you’re a girl”). Sam uses the contextualization cue of slow, deliberate delivery to heighten the sense of the inappropriateness of Roger’s fear. Bill picks up on this and taunts Roger for being afraid (“Roger, afraid of a big..dirt claw” — line 5). Note Bill’s use of the contextualization cue of pausing in line 5 to draw out the taunt and heighten the feeling of inappropriateness. By the end of the excerpt (line 6), Roger gets the message and responds appropriately (“no I’m not”). In Example 4, it is Spring quarter, and it is again not appropriate to be afraid. Bill, Pete, and Jeffrey are pretending they are in a haunted house, which is a cardboard playhouse that is out in the yard. The game was initiated and led by Bill. Bill is in the role of monster. The other two boys, Pete and Jeffrey, are in the haunted house and are about to be terrorized by the monster. The excerpt is a working out of the fascination with fear and roughness, and the appropriate reactions to these emotions. (4) Not okay to be scared late in year B = Bill, P = Pete, S = Sam, J = Jeffrey
Qtr: Spring
1. [Bill claims he will walk across a tenuous structure Pete and Jeffrey had made out of sand] 2. S: *no *way, I’m not/are you Pete?
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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
P: no/ B: {scardy cat, scardy cat [singing]} P: no, i’m not// ————— B: and then, when someone walks in, it goes {ye, ye, ye ,ye [shouting, pretending to be scary ghost]}// ————— B: * the monsters no, you can’t go in, two people are in there, that’s Pete and Jeffrey and no, and we’re in the haunted house/ okay? we’re the monsters// ————— B: . . . the monsters that go {pang [f]} [pretends to be a scary monster as he is saying ‘pang’] right when you come in the house, (x) out of the window, and they come through the *do::ors// ————— J: now i’m *sca::red/ can we get *ou::t? P: i don’t think so (xx)// P: see, we’re *not scared of *him [referring to Bill, who is pretending to be a monster] [Jeffrey laughs, and he and Pete start to ‘punch’ Bill] ————— P: what do you think he’s *play::ing? J: i don’t *kn::ow// they’re very *mean (xxx)// P: well, we’re not *scared of ‘em (“them”)// J: i’m not *either//
In lines 2–3, Sam, Pete, and Jeffrey say “no” to doing something risky Bill proposed in line 1. Bill negatively sanctions them for their resistance and fear in line 4, using repetition and sing-song delivery to heighten the sense of inappropriateness (“scardy cat, scardy cat”). At line 13, Jeffrey and Pete are in the haunted house, awaiting Bill, in the role of the monster, to pounce on them. Jeffrey says that he is “scared” (line 13) and asks Pete if they can get out. Pete provides the appropriate socialization. In line 15, he states that they are not afraid of Bill. He uses the contextualization cue of stress on “not” and “him” to create the sense of brave posturing. Despite this posturing, at line 17, he uses a question with stress to wonder what delays the monster’s pounce. The two contextualization cues (question form and stress) create the effect of awe and fear, which Pete may be experiencing. However, in line 19, he reactivates his brave stance, using stress again (on “scared”) to create the effect of sticking to
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
his guns. By line 20, probably as a result of socialization from Pete, Jeffrey comes around to the right point of view, saying “I’m not *either.” Excerpt 5 is another example of in-group socialization about fear. The boys Bill, Roger, and Jeffrey are playing a game involving bees. The boys aggravate, and consequently run from, a set of bees in the yard. (5) Not okay to be scared late in year B=Bill, R=Roger,J=Jeffrey
Qtr: Spring
1. B: … that’s a special kind of bee/ … (you better run)// 2. R: aah, they’re gonna (“going to”) tell their friends// … i’m not afraid [going back to where he was stepping on the bees] 3. ————— 4. B: aah [running away] 5. R: aah bumble bees//… run// aah [screaming] 6. ————— 7. R: … {[ff] the bees are angry at us// . . . 8. ————— 9. J: i’m not afraid of them//
This excerpt contains references by both Roger (line 2) and Jeffrey (line 9) that they are not afraid. These members, after extensive socialization over time such as we saw in Examples 1–4, have gotten the message that it is not appropriate to display fear in this friendship group. These examples show that, while it is acceptable to be afraid early in the year, over time, as the group becomes larger, norms solidify and the boys socialize one another towards not being afraid.
Norms over time — Attitudes towards girl characteristics Ervin-Tripp (2001) asks an important question. How do we know, when we see boys behave one way, and girls another, that the children themselves associate stylistic differences in language with gender? Perhaps the differences that we see reflect social networking, children simply behaving like others in their group, without making a link between these behaviors and gender identity, masculinity and femininity. One example in our data, Example 3, is a clear case where the boys identify being afraid with girlness and downgrade the quality. Sam calls Roger “a girl” for displaying fear of worms. While other cases of such a clear link between emotion and masculinity were not made in our recorded samples, it is notable that there were concurrent time changes in both the attitude toward scaredness and the attitude toward girl characteristics. Between Fall and
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Spring, as the quality of scaredness was becoming negatively valued, so too were girl characteristics in general. Several examples demonstrate the shift over time in this boys’ group towards devaluing girl-associated qualities. Example 6 is from fieldnotes, an episode of play involving putting on a circus show. It shows that it is acceptable, early in the year, to dress up as girls. (6) Okay to dress up in women’s clothes early in year B = Bill, R = Roger
Qtr: Fall
[Bill and Roger put on skirts, capes, and hats and put on a play. Put music on tape recorder and dance] Bill: we’re putting on a circus//Lynn, Ethel/come watch our circus// [Bill washes up for an “interview.” Pulls Magic rabbit out of his hat. Bill kisses a stuffed bear].
In this example, Roger and Bill dress up as girls and ask Lynn and Ethel to come watch them. Bill is effusive — he even kisses a stuffed bear. Later in the year, behaving as girls or even playing with them, became unacceptable. Example 7 is from later in Winter Quarter. It shows the boys Bill and Roger displaying feminine qualities, dressing as girls, and even talking like them. However, even at this middle point in the year, the boys need an excuse to dress up as girls — the dress-up is for the goal of trickery, deceiving Jeffrey about their identity. (7) Okay to dress up in women’s clothes early in year B = Bill, R = Roger, (J = Jeffrey)
Qtr: Winter
1. B: this costume would be great// 2. ————— 3. R: … Bill, … it’s time to get on your boots// … {[coming toward Jeffrey] {[hi] oh oh … i would like a .. bracelet for sale//} 4. ————— 5. B: .. he’ll never find out who we are// 6. R: .. yeah/ he found out right away who i was// … (he said)// 7. ————— 8. B: … i’ll be a girl// [Bill is putting on a big red hat]
Besides dressing as girls, the boys reflexively constitute femininity in other ways as well. Roger speaks in high pitch, as a girl, in line 3, going so far as to use a euphemistic expression of surprise (“oh, oh”). Lakoff (1975) has written of the use of euphemistic language as marking women’s speech. In line 8, Bill even says “I’ll be a girl.” These two examples show that it is acceptable to dress up as girls and display feminine qualities early in the year.
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
Example 6 is from Fall Quarter and Example 7 is from Winter. Between these two examples, a sudden shift in the acceptability of dressing as a girl can be seen. In Fall, it was completely okay. By Winter, the boys could still do it but needed an excuse. Downgrading of things feminine began to be seen in other ways by Winter Quarter. Girls began to be excluded. In Example 8 from Winter Quarter, Pete, Roger, and Jeffrey are engaged in yard play and tell a girl, Betty, that she can’t play. (8) “No girls allowed” in mid-year P = Pete, R = Roger, J = Jeffrey
Qtr: Winter
January 12, Roger, Pete, Jeffrey. In a house in the yard. Roger pushes Betty out of the “house” because “no girls allowed.”
There were three instances of boys telling girls they couldn’t play captured on our videotapes and fieldnotes, but no instances of girls saying the like to boys. By late in Winter quarter, feminine qualities were downgraded in this boys’ group. This was evident in Example 3 where Roger was sanctioned for being afraid and acting like a girl (Sam said, “you’re a girl”). The downgrading of feminine qualities is also evident in Example 9, from early in Spring Quarter. Bill, Roger, Pete, and Sam are deciding which Power Ranger they’ll be and Bill is made fun of for acting like a girl. (9) Downgrading girl characteristics late in year B = Bill, R = Roger, S = Sam, P = Pete 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Qtr: Spring
P: I’d rather play power rangers// ————— R: = I’m the red one//I’m the red one// ————— B: I wanna (“want to”) be — I wanna be the pink one// ————— P: that one’s the *{[girl]}// {uses disgust voice] S: yeah, B: I can be that one anyway// S: ahhrg// let’s go// P: you can’t be that one B: yes I can P: that one’s the girl// B: I can be that one// P: . . .if you’re gonna be that one, play somethin’ (“something”) else{[disgust voice]}
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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
————— B: okay, I’ll be the.. purple// S: the blue one is the boy// ————— S: you want to be pink? that’s the *g::irl// B: I wanna (“want to”) be..blue// S: right// that’s the boy// [R joins them; S jumps on tree] where does it go?
Bill sets out wanting to be the pink power ranger (line 5). However, he gets negative feedback for this from the group. Pete tells him “that one’s the girl” (line 7), creating the sense of disgust through use of voicing cues. When Bill persists in lines 9, 12, and 14, he gets negative feedback from Sam, who growls at him (line 10) and from Pete again, who in line 15 tells him “if you’re gonna be that one, play somethin’ else.” The contextualization cues, disgust voice, growling, and the use of a colloquialism (“somethin’ else”) heighten the sense of taunting and downgrading in this example. Bill first begins to succumb by agreeing to be the purple power ranger. But this is not good enough, as Sam tells him that it’s the blue one that’s the boy (line 18) and then makes further fun of him (“you want to be pink? That’s the girl”) in line 20. (Note again the emphasis and elongation on “girl”). Bill finally adopts the right view for this friendship group in line 21 (“I wanna be blue”) and gets positive feedback from Sam (“right, that’s the boy” — line 22). There are several references to what’s appropriate for being a boy, and explicit instances of downgrading of feminine qualities, in this example. These examples show clearly that between Fall and Spring, as the quality of scaredness was becoming negatively valued in this boys’ group, so too were girl characteristics in general. It is possible to conclude from this concurrent development (and from Example 3, where scared and girlness were explicitly linked) that scaredness may have become downgraded over time because of its association to gender, addressing Ervin-Tripp’s (2001) problem raised earlier. Why might girl-qualities become downgraded by this group over time as boy-qualities are embraced? One explanation is a cognitive-developmental one; gender schema knowledge (Levy and Fivush 1993) is simply increasing over this developmental period as the boys move from the early to the later parts of their fifth year. However, an additional, complementary, explanation is suggested by Cook-Gumperz (Cook-Gumperz and Scales 1996; Cook-Gumperz this volume), who refer to gender as an “interactional accomplishment.” As the school year progressed, the boys’ group increased in size. It started out as a dyadic
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
friendship between Bill and Roger, but grew to embrace other boys, Sam, Pete, and Jeffrey. Sam and Pete had more stereotypic views about gender, as we saw in such examples as 3 and 6, and may have influenced the group to embrace such views. However, in addition, as a larger entity, the group now needed a gelling theme to pull it together. Gender may have provided such a coherent aboutness and identity for the group. As Thorne (1993) has written, children alight on gender and other social categories to organize themselves into large groups. Eckert’s (1988) research on high school students’ use of social categories from the adult culture to organize their peer culture as the cohort shifts from junior high to the larger high school setting supports this view.
Context effects — Roughness, aggression, and make-up of the group The view that these boys’ emotion talk changed over time because they were acquiring more knowledge about gender is an essentialist one. There was evidence in our data that the embracing of seemingly masculine emotional qualities was not an all-or-none phenomenon, but was heavily influenced by context. It seemed that the presence (or absence) of certain children altered the emotion talk of the group. For example, Sam, especially, brought rougher language; without him Bill, Roger, and Pete were more subtle and gentle. Partly, this influence of Sam was through the themes enacted in pretense; without Sam, Bill led the play and the themes of play were nature-dominated (“Stink Bugs”). With Sam, the themes of play were conquest-dominance sorts of themes; the boys played “Digging for Worms” (which had rough components) and “Smash this Girl.” These contextual influences on the display of roughness and aggression are evident in the contrast between Example 10, where Sam is absent and the theme is nature-oriented, with Example 11, where he is present and the theme is conquest. Both examples are from Spring quarter, so the contrast is not an influence of time. In Example 10, Bill and Pete and enacting a nature scenario, “Stink Bugs.” Bill is a participant in both examples, but his demeanor is much rougher in Example 11 than in Example 10. (10) No roughness in nature play B = Bill, P = Pete, R = Roger
Qtr: Spring
1. B: I know where stink bugs are// Not behind the bunny huts, behind the bunny huts// 2. they usually.. some stink bugs in here// oh I see one// *it’s a baby// [lots of fuzz]
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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
(Look at this) ————— P: I see them, I found the stink bugs// ————— B: (ummm) It’s getting away// Good little stink bug//[Fuzz] Don’t get out/ P: (little buggy bug//) B: [laugh] I’m going to get something to put this little guy in// Good little stink buggy, good little stinkies// [goes on playground] All the bugs that we find are going in here/ Okay? In here/ Hold this// [hands Pete a box] Let’s go find some bugs// And don’t touch them// If I say you can dump them out then you can dump them out/ Okay, *Okay Pete? P: Okay// B: Cause (“because”) if you take them out it it- the wrong time it run away, cause stink bugs can run really fast/ not as fast as lizards, about this fast// [Bill swirls his hand around making a swish, swish sound] ————— B: Woo, little stink bug you// [Fuzz, 15 sec] Humm, (whatelse) (XXX) here// ————— B: Pete, don’t even think about it/ P: Don’t even think about =dropping=him? B: Hey little stink =bug=// ————— B: (XXXX) [Lots of fuzz] {We’re going to get a friend for you little stink bug}// {[hi pitch]} ————— B: [Gasps] Ahhh! Pete! Ahuug/! (Do::n’t!)// [fuzz] (Ahhh there’s no XXXXX) [fuzz] (Let me) hold the little (pooly)// ————— B: (Look it) [fuzz] (he::re) little stink bug// ————— B: . . . you in there, come on, good little bug/ [fuzz] (ohh you woody woody) [fuzz] Good little stink bug/
Bill and Pete here refer to “good little stink bug” “little buggy bug” “Good little stink buggy” “good little stinkies” “we’re going to get a friend for you little stink bug.” These utterances contain hyperbolic use of adjectives, and diminutives
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
(“good little stink buggy”; “let me hold the little pooly”), features that have been found to be used in girls’ friendship group talk (Gunthner 1997; Kyratzis 2000). In Example 10, Bill constructs a fearful, caring stance when he makes alarmsounds and screams in line 22 at the prospect of Pete dropping the stink bugs and a loving, caring one when he speaks in high pitch to the stink bugs in line 20. In Example 11, Bill’s demeanor is very different. Bill and Sam are enacting a rough, aggressive theme of play involving smashing. They animate the voices of a rough, aggressive protagonist, a smasher, and his victims, who are usually female, and enact the voices as duetting rounds. (11) Boys’ roughness in smasher play B = Bill, S = Sam
Qtr: Winter
1. B: Sam, pretend a man came out- … pretend a man came out like this and said/ … 2. why are you stepping on our houses// … and he asked you, okay? 3. S: okay// 4. B: … and then i came up- and then you s- and then you said **smash this guy// .. okay? 5. S: okay// 6. ————— 7. B: now, now um, now a little girl comes up/ .. now a little girl comes up, okay? 8. ————— 9. B: … now it’s my turn// … {[uses high pitch] why are you stepping on all of our houses?} .. smash this girl// 10. S: [making sound effects] … and i’ll rip her head off [sound effects] pulling the toy apart … uh/ stay in there// [referring to box for toys] 11. ————— 12. S: how come you’re smashing all of our houses// 13. B: … and you’re posed (“supposed”) to say, because// … smash her, okay? 14. S: .. okay// {[uses high pitch] why are you stepping on all of our houses}? … because// … smash her//
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15. B: (now we posed (“supposed”) to drop her) [Bill stands up and stomps on the toy. He can’t be seen because the table is in the way.] 16. S: rip her head off// 17. B: … yeh [sound effect; pulling the toy apart] … 18. ————— 19. S: how come you’re smashin all our houses// … mm … because, i should smash your head and face off// Bill speaks differently here than he did in the previous example. He makes reference to acts of physical aggression, speaking of “smashing” “smash this guy/girl “, “drop her.” He agrees to “ripping her head off” (line 17), when Sam suggests it. Bill did not talk this way when he wasn’t with Sam or when a rough, conquest-oriented theme was not instantiated. In addition to these explicit lexical and semantic items, in the role of smasher, Bill makes use of contextualization cues to reflexively construct a rough, aggressive stance. He uses terse language; all his utterances in the smasher voice are terse, abrupt commands (“**smash this guy” — lines 4 and 9). He uses emphasis on the word “smash” in line 4. His rough language in this example contrasts sharply with the caring language he displayed with the stink bugs. The contextualization cues he uses in his smasher voice also contrast sharply with the linguistic features he uses when he is animating the victim voices, where he uses questions (“why are you stepping on all of our houses?”, line 9), hyperbole (“all” line 9, which Sam also uses when he animates a victim voice in line 14), and high pitch. These contrasts show that Bill can alter the emotional tone of his language to fit the context. His use of code-switching is quite sophisticated in this example, and across Examples 10 and 11. Over-time changes and contextual differences in these boys’ emotion talk and language suggest that emotion talk, downgrading of the emotion scared, and rough talk, are not essential qualities of the boys. Rather, masculineseeming emotion talk may be an interactional accomplishment under heavy contextual influence, as the boys seek to act in boy-like ways, possibly particularly when Sam is present. Masculinity may be a type of conceptual glue that holds the group together and gives it identity, but does not reside in the essential nature of the individual boys that make up the group. This particular group of boys does seem to be aware of the qualities, including emotional ones, that are appropriate for masculinity or boyness, as seen by the fact that they explicitly talk about this (“that’s a boy”, “that’s a girl”), but they are fluid in the display of these features.
Emotion talk in a boys’ friendship group
Discussion Emotion talk was defined in this study in part as defined in previous research (Eisenberg, 1999); references to feelings states such as “I’m mad”, “he’s scared.” However, the concept was here expanded to include “contextualization cues” (Gumperz 1982). This included lexical items that did not explicitly label emotions (e.g, insults; references to acts of physical aggression; hyperbole), features of the voicing (e.g., repetition, slow or accelerated delivery, loudness, stress, etc.) and other non-lexical phenomena (e.g., laughter). We suggest that the concept of “emotion talk” be expanded to include these contextualization cues. When children use pauses to enhance suspense and create the sense of fear and dread, or use distinctive lexical items, laughter, slow, exaggerated delivery, loudness, and stress to create the sense of mockery and taunting, the command of these devices is an important aspect of their sociolinguistic competence that should be incorporated into a comprehensive model of the development of emotion talk. Findings in the boys’ friendship group spoke to issues of norms development and socialization over time in a close friendship group. The examples showed clearly that between Fall and Spring, as the quality of scaredness was becoming negatively valued, so too were girl characteristics in general. It is possible to conclude from this concurrent development (and from Example 3, where scared and girlness were explicitly linked) that scaredness may have become downgraded over time because of its association to gender and because gender-schema knowledge was increasing. However, because group size as well as cognitive development increased and changed over the developmental period encompassed in our longitudinal study, we embraced an additional or alternative explanation, that the gender-typed practices observed here were an interactional accomplishment. The children may have come to use gender as a conceptual, organizational glue as the size of the group increased and required some sort of organizational basis, in a fashion similar to that described by Eckert (1988). The notion that the emotional language that evolved over time was an interactional accomplishment as well as a cognitive/developmental one received further support in our study from the fact that, in the boys’ group observed, there were contextual influences on the type of emotion talk utilized. The instantiation of particular themes and presence of particular children influenced other members of the friendship group to use rougher language. As noted by recent feminist critiques of gender-language research (Bing and Bergvall
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1996; Cameron 1996; Freed 1996; Goodwin 2001), contextual influences support the need for developing non-essentialist models of the nature of the relationship between gender and language. These findings of “multivocality” (Goodwin, 1999; p. 403) within boys’ speech across time and context support the need for an analysis of identities as shifting rather than static and as heavily influenced by the activity setting. As stated by Marjorie Goodwin, through an analysis of talk in different settings “we can show how individuals propose and demonstrate to each other the relevance of particular features of their identity operative on specific occasions of use (Goodwin 1999: 403).”
Transcription Conventions / // ? , :: == = * () {[]} [ff] [pp]
Falling intonation at end of intonation contour Final fall at the end of intonation contour Rising intonation at end of intonation contour Holding intonation at end of intonation contour Lengthened Segment Truncation Latching or overlapping speech Overlapping speech Accented syllable Unintelligible word or stretch of words Nonlexical phenomena that overlay the lexical stretch Fortissimo, loud Pianissimo, soft
Notes * The research reported was supported by a grant entitled “Gender, Peer Groups, and Social Identity in the Preschool” to the first author from the Spencer foundation. I am grateful to the children who participated in the study and their parents, teachers, and school administrators. I am also grateful to Traci Marx, who worked on data collection and coding, and Nereyda Hurtado and Tamara Shuqum, who worked on data collection and transcription. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the author at the Department of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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References Bing, Janet M. & Bergvall, Victoria L. 1996 “The question of questions: Beyond binary thinking.” In Rethinking language and gender research: Theory and practice, V. L. Bergvall, J. M. Bing, & A. F. Freed (Eds.), (pp. 1–30). London: Longman. Cameron, Deborah 1996 “The language-gender interface: Challenging co-optation.” In Rethinking language and gender research: Theory and practice, V. L. Bergvall, J. M. Bing, & A. F. Freed (Eds.), (pp. 31–53). London: Longman. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny & Scales, Barbara 1996 “Girls, boys, and just people: The interactional accomplishment of gender in the discourse of the nursery school.” In Social interaction, social context, and language: Essays in honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp, D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, & J. Guo (Eds.), (pp. 513–527). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Dunn, Judy, Bretherton, Inge and Munn, Penny 1987 “Conversations about feeling states between mothers and their young children.” Developmental Psychology, 23, 132–139. Eckert, Penelope 1988 Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in high school.. New York: Teachers College Press. Eisenberg, Ann R. 1999 “Emotion talk among Mexican American and Anglo American mothers and children from two social classes.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 267–284. Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. 2001 “The place of gender in developmental pragmatics: A cultural peerspective.” In Gender construction in children’s interactions: A cultural perspective, A. Kyratzis (Ed.), Special Issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, 34, 131–147. Farris, Catherine S. 1991 “The gender of child discourse: Same-sex peer socialization through language use in a Taiwanese preschool.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2, 198–224.
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Farris, Catherine S. 1999 “Cross-sex peer conflict and the discursive production of gender in a Chinese preschool in Taiwan”. Manuscript submitted to Journal of Pragmatics. Fivush, Robyn 1993 “Emotional content of parent-child conversations about the past.” In Memory and affect in development: The Minnesota symposia on child psychology. C. Nelson (Ed.), Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Freed, Alice 1996 “Language and gender research in an experimental setting.” In Rethinking language and gender research: Theory and practice, V. L. Bergvall, J. M. Bing, and A. F. Freed (Eds.), (pp. 54–76). London: Longman. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1990 He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1993 “Accomplishing social organization in girls’ play: Patterns of competition and cooperation in an African-American working class girls’ group.” In Feminist theory and the study of folklore , S. T. Hollis, L. Pershing, and M. J. Young (eds.), 149–165. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1995 “Co-construction of girls’ hopscotch.” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28(3), 261–282. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1999 “Constructing Opposition within Girls’ Games.” In Reinventing identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, M. Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and L. A. Sutton (eds.), 388–409. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, Marjorie H. 2001 “Organizing participation in cross-sex jump rope: Situating gender differences within longitudinal studies of activities.” In Gender construction in children’s interactions: A cultural perspective , A. Kyratzis (ed.), Special Issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, 34, 75–105. Gumperz, John J. 1982 Discourse strategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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Gumperz, John J. & Berenz, Norine 1993 “Transcribing conversational exchanges.” In Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research, J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert (eds.), 91–121. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Gunthner, Susanne 1997 “Complaint stories: Constructing emotional reciprocity among female friends.” In Communicating gender in context, H. Kotthoff & R. Wodak (eds.), 179–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kuebli, Janet, Butler, S., and Fivush, Robyn 1995 “Mother-child talk about past emotions: Relations of maternal language and child gender over time.” Cognition and Emotion, 9, 265–283. Kyratzis, Amy 2000 “Tactical Uses of Narratives in Nursery School Same-Sex Friendship Groups.” Discourse Processes, 29, 269–299. Kyratzis, Amy and Guo, Jiansheng 1996 “‘Separate worlds’ for girls and boys?: Views from U. S. and Chinese mixed-sex friendship groups.” In Social interaction, social context, and language: Essays in honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp, D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, & J. Guo (eds.), 555–578. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Assoc. Kyratzis, Amy and Guo, Jiansheng 2001 “Preschool Girls’ and Boys’ Verbal Conflict Strategies in the U. S. and China: Cross-Cultural and Contextual Considerations.” In Gender construction in children’s interactions: A cultural perspective, A. Kyratzis (ed.), Special Issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, 34, 45–73. Lakoff, Robin T. 1975 Language and woman’s place. Harper & Row: New York. Levy, Gary D. & Fivush, Robyn 1993 “Scripts and gender: A new approach for examining gender role development.” Developmental Review, 13, 126–146. Maltz,Daniel N. and Borker, Ruth A. 1982 “A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication.” In Language and Social Identity, J. J. Gumperz (ed.), 195–216. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
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Nakamura, Keiko 2001 “Gender and language use: Same-sex peer interactions among Japanese preschool children.” In Gender construction in children’s interactions: A cultural perspective, A. Kyratzis (ed.), Special Issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, 34, 15–43. Sachs, Jacqueline 1987 “Preschool girls’ and boys’ language use in pretend play.” In Language, gender, and sex in comparative perspective, S. U. Phillips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (eds.), 178–188. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press. Shantz, Carolyn A. 1987 “ Conflicts between children.” Child Development, 58, 283–305. Sheldon, Amy 1990 “Pickle fights: Gendered talk in preschool disputes.” Discourse Processes, 13, 5–31. Sheldon, Amy 1992 “Conflict talk: Sociolinguistic challenges to self-assertion and how young girls meet them.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 38, 95–117. Sheldon, Amy 1996 “You can be the baby brother but you aren’t born yet: Preschool girls’ negotiation for power and access in pretend play.” In Constituting gender through talk in early childhood: Conversations in parent-child, peer, and sibling relationships, A. Sheldon (Ed.), Special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29 (1), 1–25. Tannen, Deborah 1990 “You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation..” New York: Ballantine Books. Thorne, Barrie 1993 Gender play: Girls and boys in school.. Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Notably gendered relations Relationship work in early adolescents’ notes Spencer E. Cahill
Those of us who are interested in gender and interaction have focused almost exclusively on what Goffman (1963: 14) once termed “embodied” interaction and with good reason. Face-to-face interaction is arguably the principal and most fundamental medium through which individuals collectively construct social worlds (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 28–29), including the gender of their inhabitants (West and Zimmerman 1987). Yet, this quite reasonable focus of attention has resulted in the neglect of a potentially informative form of “disembodied” interaction or communication. In North America at least, preadolescent and adolescent girls and, on occasion, boys write and exchange notes or brief letters with one another on a daily basis at school. Among these young correspondents, written notes are an important medium for the construction, negotiation, and dissolution of relationships. Other students of social life have noted the prevalence of note passing among elementary school age girls (Adler, Kless, and Adler 1992), and Joyce Canaan (1990: 223) has argued that the teenage girls whom she studied “primarily express themselves as gendered subjects . . . by frequently writing and passing notes”. Yet, few (Finders 1997; Hey 1997; Hubbard 1989) have paid serious attention to the form, content, and interpersonal functions of this common type of disembodied interaction among the young, and even those few have not given adolescents’ notes their undivided attention.1 This neglect may well be at the expense of our understanding of the interactional doing or accomplishment of gender, especially among those who are, in North America, middle school or junior high school age. In North America, the transition from elementary to middle or junior high school occurs around twelve years of age and is widely viewed as a movement from childhood to adolescence (Merten 1996: 464). It also marks the initiation of what I once termed the transition from apprentice to bona-fide participation
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in the interactional reproduction of gender (Cahill 1986). In Barrie Thorne’s (1993: 135) words, this transition from child to teen “entails striking shifts in kids’ gender relations and systems of meaning”. Romantic and heterosexual meanings “begin to eclipse other definitions of cross-gender relations, and some kids start to publicly affirm themselves as sexual or at least romantic actors” (Thorne 1993: 151).2 And, as West and Zimmerman (1987: 142) have suggested, this transition from the largely sex-segregated worlds that are common among elementary school children to the “heterosocial worlds so frightening to adolescents is likely to be a keystone in our understanding” of the intergenerational reproduction of gender. In this paper, I examine the construction, negotiation, and engendering of relationships among middle and junior high school students in the notes that they write and pass to one another in and between classes. Of course, the romantic engendering of cross-sex relations does not occur in a social vacuum but within the context of ongoing negotiation of same-sex relations. Thus, after a brief description of the source and characteristics of the notes on which I draw, I focus attention on the construction, monitoring, maintenance and negotiation of friendships and friendship alliances among girls. I then turn my attention to girls’ affirmation of themselves as romantic actors within the context of same-sex relationships, the negotiation of romantic relationships between boys and girls, and, finally, the effects of girls’ romantic relations with boys on their relations with one another. Drawing upon this analysis of the relational work of notes exchanged among middle and junior high school age girls and between them and boys, I offer some general observations about the intergenerational reproduction of gender and gendered relational boundaries among early adolescents.
Notes on the notes I obtained the notes on which the following analysis of early adolescents’ relational work is based from three women when they were approximately twenty one years of age. Each had kept notes that they had collected between 1985 and 1989 when they attended middle or junior high school. They graciously allowed me to photocopy and use these notes for scholarly purposes. Although all three women had attended public school, one attended a junior high school in a relatively small and mostly white New England city, another attended middle school in an affluent and exclusively white suburb in the
Notably gendered relations
metropolitan New York area, and the other attended an urban middle school with a more racially and socio-economically diverse student body.3 The 164 notes that these women shared with me were written by 46 different authors. 36 of those authors were girls and 10 were boys. Of the 28 different recipients, 21 were girls and seven were boys. Unlike the letters of adults, recipients of early adolescents’ notes do not necessarily retain possession of them. First, some notes are truly interactive and passed back and forth between and among individuals, with each recipient adding to the note before returning it or passing it on to another party. 28 of these 164 notes are of this type. Of those, 22 were passed back and forth between two parties, five were passed back and forth among three parties, and one among four girls. Second, authors sometimes request the return of a note for safe keeping, and recipients sometimes return notes to authors for that purpose. For example, one such note was returned to its author with the written request “you keep this. My mom found the last one and read it.” As might be expected from other studies of preadolescent and adolescent peer cultures, the overwhelming majority, 107, of these notes were both authored by and addressed to girls. In addition, 24 of the 28 interactive notes were exchanged exclusively between and among girls. Although Canaan (1990: 227, emphasis added) claims that “boys never use the written form of note-passing” at the high school that she studied and Hey (1997: 51) reports that she “did not see boys engage in this activity” at the British schools she studied, some middle and junior high school boys in North America do. 22 of the notes in my possession were authored by boys and addressed to girls, and four of the interactive notes were exchanged between and among boys and girls. The remaining seven notes were authored by girls and addressed to boys. I clearly can not claim that these 164 notes are statistically representative of the notes written by and exchanged among early adolescents currently enrolled in North American middle and junior high schools. First, the notes in my possession are historical documents and do not document possible changes in early adolescents’ peer relations since they were written. Second, the overwhelming majority of the authors and recipients of the notes examined here were white and from middle to upper middle class families. However, notes from the three different schools and written by different authors exhibit a number of general patterns and themes. Moreover, those patterns and themes are consistent with much of what other students of early adolescent peer cultures have reported. Thus, I am relatively confident that the form, content, and interpersonal functions of the notes on which the following analysis is
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based are not peculiar to their authors nor to the schools where they were exchanged but reflect some characteristic patterns and processes of early adolescent peer relations in North America, at least, in the not so distant past.
Notable relations The very activity of passing notes, quite apart from their content, establishes and cements social bonds among preadolescent and adolescent girls. Although occasionally written when at home and brought to school, most notes exchanged by such girls are written and passed in class or written in class and delivered between classes. In Canaan’s (1990: 227) words, these notes are a subversive genre and their composition and exchange in class are what Goffman (1961: 189) termed “secondary adjustments”. They are means of subverting the school’s “assumptions as to what [students] should do . . . and hence of what [they] should be”. In class note writers and passers are well aware that they are engaged in an organizationally forbidden activity, and occasionally boast of their subversive genius, as does the following author. I’m sitting here in math! Gagg! Yuckaoo!! . . . God I hate Mrs. Bitch or my fault Mrs. Coooooley! . . . I’m very sly. We’re supposed to be doing math homework now so I switched papers. smart, huh! She’ll never know, because I even have the book open to the correct page.4
Although Goffman stresses the contributions of secondary adjustments to the maintenance of self and personal identity, Corsaro (1985: 267) argues that, among children at least, they are also means of “developing and maintaining group identity”. In collectively resisting adult authority, as he notes, “children develop a sense of community and ‘we-ness”. That is arguably the case with the collective activity of in school note writing and exchange. The exchange of notes is also an important medium of establishing and cementing more exclusive social bonds. Such disembodied communication is both more privileged and enduring than the embodied kind. Although potentially subject to interception, notes are less vulnerable to eavesdropping than spoken interaction and provide a private channel of communication in settings where private conversation would be virtually impossible. The exchange of notes in such a setting pointedly excludes others from the communicational circle and is sometimes employed for that very purpose as the following opening round of a three party interactive note suggests.
Notably gendered relations
do you want to anoy the boys by passing notes. YES YEEPPERS!
Moreover, in contrast to spoken interaction, written messages leave their imprint not only on memory but on paper. They can be stored, reread, and directly shared with others. Their authors can not as easily deny or creatively reconstruct them as can the authors of spoken messages. As such, the exchange of potentially incriminating notes entails considerable trust in the recipient. Although the private character of such notes is often implied, it is sometimes made quite explicit as the following excerpts indicate. PLEASE DON’T SHOW THIS TO ANYONE Don’t tell jen or any one I told you that if anyone knows I know you told them because Jen didn’t tell anyone and neither did I so don’t TELL ANYONE!
As Simmel ([1908] 1950:333) noted several years ago, the “attractions of secrecy are related to those of its logical opposite, betrayal”. The author of a secretive note, by making herself vulnerable to betrayal, asserts the existence of a special bond with the recipient and implicitly tests the strength of that bond. Writing and passing notes test the strength of relational ties in yet another way. Most of the notes authored by early adolescent girls are not intended as one way communications but as a turn in an interaction. A reply is expected. For example, most of the notes in my possession end with the cryptic W/B, for write back, or W/B/N, for write back now, or more elaborate variations on this theme. The promptness, length or absence of a response are symptomatic of the health of a relationship. For example, some notes plaintively inquire “why don’t you write me back anymore?” Others take special note of the frequency or length of correspondence as implicit indications of relational quality, as in the following example. If you haven’t noticed everytime we write the notes are long ones not the ones that say stu¬ like Hi Im so bored some people write this that this that. You know what I mean. Just look at how long this note is.
Thus, middle and junior high school girls’ passing of notes has important interpersonal functions as the content of those notes makes clear.
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Among the girls Thorne and Luria (1986:183) report that the fourth and fifth-grade elementary school girls whom they studied talked extensively about their relationships with one another. If the notes in my possession are any indication, middle and junior high school age girls write extensively about their relationships with one another. This often takes the form of bold declarations of friendship, as in the following. Just want to let you know your one of my very good friends. So your a priviledge child now.
There are also impassioned expressions of affection between girlfriends. I missed you SO much. I really did . . . I wanna give you a hug right here! I [heart] U!. JANE, I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE BACK CAUSE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!
Although girls’ written declarations of friendship are seldom this impassioned, most notes to close friends use endearing expression like “babe” and “sweetie” and almost all close with salutations like “love ya” or the frequent acronym LYLASS for “love you like a sweet sister.” However, these notes suggest that best friendships among middle and junior high school age girls, like those among Thorne and Luria’s elementary school girls, are subject to continual renegotiation. This can provoke spirited and possessive protection of best friendships from potential interlopers. That’s right, Alice is my best friend. You got nothing to say about it jerk! You can’t say anything about me and Alice. We all know you want to be Alice’s best friend, but that doesn’t mean you piss at me. If u had a best friend you would do the same.
It also provokes wounded and accusatory pleas from the rejected. I am writing this letter because I can’t get up enough nerve to tell you in person. I guess the main question I have to ask is “whats wrong.” We were best friends and now you won’t even speak to me. What have you got against me? You have been ignoring me for around a month now. I really thought I could trust you and you have really hurt me and let me down. Please return a letter to locker #69.
These girls clearly make some heavy emotional investments in best friendships, but they also hedge their bets through participation in larger friendship networks or “cliques” (Adler and Adler 1995).
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The shifting and overlapping friendships among middle and junior high school age girls, like those among Thorne and Luria’s (1986: 182) elementary school age girls, can “result in quite complex social networks.” In order for girls to know where they stand in those networks, they must closely monitor who is friends with or “likes” whom. This is particularly salient for sixth or seventh grade girls who are making the transition to middle or junior high school where there is a larger population of potential friends than in elementary school (Eder 1985: 155). Their preoccupation with interpersonal likes and dislikes often takes the form of a note with a list of names prefaced by the question “Do you like?” Each name is followed by yes, no, other or “kinda” and boxes or lines for the recipient to check to indicate her responses. There are a number of variations on this form of note. The recipient is sometimes instructed “if you check other, say what”, and some notes ask the recipient to indicate if various girls like the author. There are also multi-party versions such as the following note addressed to both Lisa and Sally and passed back and forth among both of them and the author. Lisa: Sarah: W/B SS: LF:
Do you like Marsha and/or Jean? Do you like Patty? Sorta Yeh I like Marsha Jean who? Nathan Yeah were not really close but she’s nice.
Through the exchange of such notes, girls stay abreast of the shifting landscape of peer relations that they must navigate. Girls also employ notes to construct and defend the exclusionary boundaries of friendship alliances and cliques. The following excerpts from two different notes illustrate these exclusionary dynamics. She is such a jerk. I’m glad she’s not coming to the party. She still thinks it is cansaled. Me and June are having a party and we are not going to invite Roni Because she didn’t invite us and she is so mean. She always talks about it in front of us. She is so rude!
Over time, the boundaries of friendship cliques tend to become more clearly demarcated and obvious.5 This is suggested by conspiratorial exchanges among those excluded from certain cliques, as in the following two party, interactive note.
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What is Patty talking about? W/B Patty, Eva, Sally and Holly are having a slumber party on Friday. But it’s none of our business. I get the picture. Let’s keep passing notes. Maybe we can have a slumber party Friday. We could invite you, me, Sherry, and Alice, and Eva K.
There are also occasional angry exchanges between members of different friendship cliques. Why do you always talk about me, Annie, and Allison? I (we) don’t talk about you guys. Why do you think we do. Because you don’t like us. That doesn’t mean we’ll talk about you guys!!!! Well, it isn’t so much you as Patty + everybody. Well, then don’t get on my case! I’m not! Tell Patty she’s a bitch.
There are also pleas for inclusion and for explanations of exclusion, sometimes in the same note. Should I go to the dance or not because I now you won’t want me hangin’ around you and your friends the whole time … I just don’t know what to do … If you know why people don’t like me would you tell me why, even it it’s gonna “hurt my poor feelings.”
Although the boundaries marking girls’ friendship cliques seem to become more obvious over the course of middle and junior high school, girls’ preoccupation with the changing parameters and negotiation of friendships does not wane. As the boundaries of friendship cliques are drawn, girls’ attention, at least in the notes they write and exchange, starts to focus on the behavior of and relations among members of their own clique. The deceptiveness of appearances, as their notes suggest, necessitates vigilance over the state of the various relationships in which they are embedded. Patty thinks I’m pretty good friends with her now, but boy is she wrong. I sort of try to be polite to her, but if she starts up again, no way! I don’t understand why Sherry says she is a little angry at Alice then she hugs her and is her best friend the next day.
In addition to the normal deceptiveness of social appearances, girls have other reasons to suspect that there is more than meets the eye in their friendship circles.
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Like the mostly younger, African-American girls that Marjorie Goodwin (1990: 258) studied, the girls who authored the notes in my possession tend to take their grievances about a particular member of their friendship clique to other girls rather than directly to the accused. One medium for doing so is secretive notes. Such written gossip, like the spoken variety, is not only a means of collectively establishing and transmitting peer group norms, as Eder and Sanford (1986; also see Eder 1985) demonstrate. The exclusionary exchange of evaluative secrets also strengthens the bond of the gossiping parties relative to their bond with the target of their gossip. For example, the girls who exchanged the following notes clearly convey that they have a different kind of relationship with one another than they have with Alice and Patty, respectively. I just love it when Alice acts so friendly towards me. She thinks she can rule and do anything she wants to w/ people W/B Tell me about it … Patty’s hair looked so bad today! . . . She was flipping her hair so much at lunch! We, all the boys, all the kids at my table, were all staring at her flip her hair. That’s how much she was showing o¬! God! What a jerk.
Girls’ friendship cliques are not undifferentiated groups of friends but complex interpersonal networks characterized by shifting internal coalitions. Written gossip is one of the means through which those internal coalitions are forged and negotiated. These are some of the ways that middle and junior school girls form, monitor and manage their complex peer relations through the interactive medium of written notes. The energy they devote to this relational work is arguably energy expended in the doing of gender. Their preoccupation with interpersonal relationships could easily be construed as accountably feminine as it often is in both popular and scholarly accounts of feminine and masculine interpersonal orientations and skills (e.g. Cancian 1987). Yet, it is far from clear that the authors of these notes would consider their considerable relational efforts expressive of femininity. Rather, as romantic and heterosexual attraction begins to eclipse other definitions of cross-gender relations, declarations of and action upon such attractions become definitive of early adolescent girls’ maturing femininity. At least their notes imply as much.
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Boys among the girls Girls’ romantic attractions to and relationships with boys are not simply grafted onto their same-sex relational networks but absorbed into them. Sometime early in their middle or junior high school years, boys’ names begin to appear in the checklist of names in notes girls exchange with one another requesting information about personal likes and dislikes. Other notes are more direct and specific in soliciting information about romantic attractions, such as the following. Do you think Scott is: A) Cute B) O. K. C) Gorgeous
Other notes blatantly ask “Do you like Dan K” or some other boy. Romantic attraction to boys is apparently an essential expression, in early adolescent girls’ peer cultures, of their transition from child to teen and of their maturing femininity. For example, authors of notes who admit that they do not currently “like” any particular boy are quick to qualify or acknowledge the deviance of that unfortunate state of affairs: I don’t really like anyone I mean I think alot of people are cute. I don’t like anyone this week — sad huh? I have to like someone.
As the second of these excerpts suggests, romantic attraction to someone is a virtual requirement among these early adolescent girls. These notes also suggest that their authors are oriented to what Simon, Eder and Evans (1992: 36) term “the norm of exclusivity”. That implicit norm directs that they should not have romantic feelings, much less act upon such feelings, for a boy who is already taken, especially by a member of their own friendship clique. For example, the initial recipient’s reply in the following interactive note clearly indicates her orientation to this implicit norm. Do you like Peter F.? I kinda of like him. He is cute though Ann K. REALLY wants to go out with him.
Other notes acknowledge the recipient’s romantic claim to a particular boy, as in the following.
Notably gendered relations
So how’s your main babe. Is it still Dennis? Dennis is so cute but he is taken, very taken.
Still others gleefully stake romantic claims to newly available boys. I like Dan! He dumped Denise Man oh MAN!!
These girls’ concern with the exclusivity of romantic claims necessitates that they monitor one another’s romantic likes and dislikes as closely as they monitor their relationships with one another. At least the notes in my possession are filled with the following kind of inquiries about romantic attractions. First subject. Do you still like or not subject 2. If you don’t like Tim than who do you like? Who’s you’re new boyfriend? Do you like Ted?
On the other hand, the authors of many of these notes apparently did not need to be asked about their current romantic interest. Chris is wonderfully beautiful. Oooh. Mighty nice looking. He’s getting taller, too! I think he’s taller than me now. Wow, how beautiful. I like this kid. He’s SOOO nice. he isn’t really that hot but he’s cute.
Because of girls’ apparent orientation to a norm of romantic exclusivity, such bold declarations of romantic attraction establish a claim to the boy in question. And, whether requested or not, revelations of romantic attractions minimizes the threat to girls’ own friendships of inadvertent infringements on such romantic claims. Revelations of romantic attraction also serve what may be more important purposes. First, they affirm the author’s maturing femininity by affirming that she is a romantic, heterosexual actor. As Eder (1995: 137) observes, that sometimes includes rejection of the sexual innocence of childhood. Steve is so cute well not really but he is nice and is has the nicest ass . . . I just want to remind you Steve has the nicest ASS! When you see him check it out. I [heart] Tony SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!! He was the best part of my dream. Tony put his hands on my tits + I stuck my foot up his ass + gave him a wedgy. MAN OH MAN!
However unsophisticated such declarations of heterosexual desire may seem to adult readers, they may well serve to affirm the author’s heterosexuality and maturing femininity among her peers.
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Perhaps even more significant is what the disclosure of romantic attractions contributes to girls’ friendships with one another. A girl who reveals the object of her romantic attraction to another girl conveys her trust in that girl and in their relationship by making herself vulnerable to betrayal and its consequences. This is generally implied but occasionally made explicit in their self-disclosing notes, as the following interactive note illustrates. Everyone’s telling Kurt I [heart] him + he was sitting right there. Can I trust you? I hope so. Please do not show Kurt or share. Your secret is safe with me — even though it is not much of a secret.
The frequent disclosures of unrequited love in girls’ notes may be even more trusting because they implicitly call the author’s heterosexual attractiveness into question. I’m so depressed! I want Tommy! SOOOOOOOOOOO BAD!!!!! I [heart] A HOT GUY! I WISH HE [heart]’d me!
When reciprocal, as it probably often is, this self-disclosure of untested and unrequited romantic attraction forges bonds of mutual vulnerability among girls. Disclosure of romantic troubles does much the same, and it is also common in notes exchanged among girls. There are reports of parental interference in romantic relations, conflicting romantic attractions, apparent romantic rejection, and inadvertent disclosures of romantic attraction as when a boy spied his name written on the hand of the author of one note. Girls also show their faith in friends by soliciting their romantic advice. Their notes to one another are full of requests for guidance in approaching a desired boy, dealing with upset boyfriends, and dumping “someone who won’t let you dump him because he likes you too much and you like someone else.” Their notes also offer advice about such romantic matters as well as about heterosexually heating up parties. Yer party sounds like it’s gonna be fun. We should definately do 3 min in the closet but squash spin the bottle — it’s stupid and immature — besides nothing ever happens — the good stu¬ happens in the closet!
When it comes to romance, girls depend heavily on the wisdom of corresponding friends and share their own wisdom with those friends. Girls also support one another’s romantic endeavors more directly. As many others report (e.g. Adler, Kless and Adler 1992: 176; Eder and Sanford 1986: 291; Thorne and Luria 1986: 186), girls, and boys, often serve as romantic
Notably gendered relations
messengers and emissaries for their same-sexed friends. That was clearly the case among the girls who wrote and received the notes in my possession. There are numerous requests for such romantic aide in their notes. Can you do me a favor? Tell me if Kurt likes me or not. It would sound kind of obvious if you asked him right away though. You HAVE to say hi to Ted for me tomorrow! Like talk to him you know, ask him if he had fun on Sunday.
There are also reports from romantic emissaries, such as the following. So, I go Ken, do you like Jean! He wicked smiled and then he goes why does she like me. I go maybe and I smiled and then I left. He was wicked happy when I asked him.
Yet, once mutual attraction is established, the potential romantic partners must interact with one another if that potentiality is to be realized. And, notes are also an important medium for establishing and conducting interaction between girls and the boys whom they, in their words, “go with”.
Between boys and girls Middle and junior high school students’ transition from child to romantically active teen necessitates interactional traffic between the gendered social worlds of same sexed groups. For boys, that often involves awkward forays into the traffic in notes among far more experienced female correspondents. For example, the occasional boy may find himself pulled into that traffic and involved in a collision of relational idioms because of his own clumsy interference in girls’ peer relations Brad, thank you so much for telling Michelle that I was talking about her. So good of you. W/B Damn Straight! Roll the dice, pay the price! You lyin piece of sack of shit, trash can, scummy-ass dirtbag bitch!
More commonly, boys’ romantic attraction to and relationships with girls draws them into the traffic in notes. That may result from recruitment into the passing of notes by their girlfriend’s emissaries. Happy for you and Annie and it happened at just the right time! I’ll explain. Like every Sat. night we get together and go to the movies … Preferably couples! We’re short one couple this time and if you wanna come it will be great … you can sit alone with Annie … W/B with an answer.
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Girls with apparent romantic designs on a boy may also recruit him into note passing. I haven’t passed notes w/ you in a while. So, how’s life? The last note we wrote was when I like Joany and you like Tim, a long time ago! Yes, I suppose it was a long time ago when I liked Tim. Do you like anyone now! I don’t think I do. w/b [heart] No I don’t like anyone really.
Early adolescent girls clearly draw boys into the predominately feminine activity of note passing, but boys are also drawn to it by their own romantic attractions to girls. As some boys apparently recognize, notes provide a medium for romantically approaching girls without the threat of face-to-face rejection. Notes sent to intermediaries, such as the following, provide yet another layer of insulation from direct and immediate rejection. tell Judy K. I want to go out with her, but tell her I am not going to us her for tonight.
Humor, including that of romantic overstatement, provides another form of insulation by enabling an unsuccessful suitor to claim that his rejected romantic advances were in jest. I see you in the halls and in class and I’m attracted to you. You are so beautiful a delicate flower I wish to adorn … I now many men wish to hold youre soft hand. But I want to hold you … Joelle please don’t reject me it would scorn my passions, I will never love again … I need to share you’re breath w/out it I would su¬ocate from lonliness.
There is also protection in numbers. Me and Allan shall have a duel at approx. 2:15 P. M. today to see who you shall marry. (It will be me Allan the one you truly love!) No it’s me the Fresh Kenny “K” your love always.
As the preceding notes suggests, boys employ a variety of strategies to protect themselves from the humiliation of romantic rejection, not the least of which is the disembodied medium of written notes. Disembodied romantic communication reduces the risks of embodied and potentially public rejection.
Notably gendered relations
If, moreover, boys’ romantic overtures are reciprocated, they may become further involved in the disembodied interaction of passing notes. Experienced and comfortable with such disembodied interaction, their girlfriends may well draw them into it. Why hello there. How are you? Such a lovely day outside eh? So, talk (write) to me. About what, I don’t know. But do it anyway! Shity you are crazy over notes. I don’t mind. What should we do about the semi? I know its kinda early but I’d like to know. Limo? Tucs?
And, as the preceding example illustrates, at least some boyfriends of “note crazy” girls oblige. They write notes to their girlfriends to arrange meetings, apologize for such slights as forgetting to send an expected candy gram, and simply to report on their life apart. As I previously argued, the very activity of exchanging notes serves to forge and cement interpersonal bonds among girls, and it does much the same for romantic bonds between boys and girls. Yet, despite their similar interpersonal functions, the content of girls notes to one another and of boys’ notes to girls are notably dissimilar, as the following excerpts from boys’ notes to girls suggests. At halftime at the UC game I had a hotdog, coke, popcorn, M and M’s, and nachos. Well good night (BURP!). Luv ya, Tim There was a girl named Tess whose dog left a big brown mess Then one day it went to play But Tess kicked it in the ass and ran away. (Write Back). Love Darin
Moreover, self disclosure in the notes authored by boys in my possession is limited to disclosure of sexual desire or what they call “getting horny” and to often vulgar expressions of anger toward third parties, such as the following tirade against a basketball coach. He pisses me o¬! Fuckin bitch tries to act black when he’s a white honkey asshole … I better stop writing before I really get MAD!
However unromantic boys’ notes to girlfriends may seem, they are accountably masculine. Their tales of gastronomic and athletic exploits, vulgarity, aggressively verbal anger, and thinly veiled heterosexual innuendoes are all accountable expressions of masculinity among preadolescent and early adolescent boys (e.g. Fine 1987; Eder 1995: 61–102; Thorne and Luria 1986). Yet, this very textual doing of gender may undermine boys’ relationships with their girlfriends. Based on their relational experience with other girls, girls may well expect something else from their boyfriends.
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That may partially explain why breaking up is as common as going with someone in junior high school (Merten 1996: 476). Although common, the dissolution of romantic relationships among early adolescents can be quite emotional, as Eder (1995: 30) observes. That possibility recommends the use of notes to initiate break ups so as to avoid engulfment in an emotional scene. It also recommends attempts to “cool out”, in Goffman’s (1952) sense, the jilted party, such as those in the following note written by a boy to his now former girlfriend. Look, I think I’ve realized that I don’t like you as much as I first thought. I love you as you would a good friend but I don’t love you as you’d love a girlfriend. Maybe I will realize di¬erent + ask you out again, but until then I’d like to break up with you.
The distinction this boy draws between a good friend and a girlfriend is of no small significance among early adolescents. Authors of the notes in my possession commonly distinguish between liking someone as a friend and as a girlfriend or boyfriend. They clearly consider relations between girlfriends and boyfriends quite different from friendly relations. Among other things, friendships are not necessarily engendered, but romantic relationships are by definition, and perhaps more significantly, engendering, as Thorne (1993: 153) explains. In some cases, having a boyfriend or girlfriend may express personal desire and connection, but it may also be a way of claiming status with one peers, and a qualitatively di¬erent, more mature (‘teenage’) form of femininity and masculinity.
And, Merten (1996: 478–479) argues that this very use of “going-with” as a symbol of adolescence is largely responsible for what he describes as the “superficial, even empty, quality of interaction” characteristic of such romantic relationships among early adolescents. What Merten neglects is that the status of adolescent is not gender neutral. Having a boyfriend or girlfriend does not exempt girls or boys from gender assessment by their peers, including gender assessment of their romantic conduct. For example, the contents of boys notes to girlfriends may be so accountably masculine because the passing of notes is not. In any case, it is not enough simply to go with someone of the other sex to claim a mature, adolescent form of femininity or masculinity. Early adolescents must do so in accountably masculine and feminine ways. Their romantic relationships are not just between a boy and girl but between each of them and their same-sexed peers as well.
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Boys between girls Although none of the notes in my possession were both written by and to boys, they do provide some suggestive evidence about what girls make of their romantic relationships with boys in their disembodied interactions with one another. As Schofield ([1982] 1989: 107) reports and might be expected, “competition for boys occasionally [leads] to negative interactions between girls.” There is one such negative interaction in the notes on which this analysis draws, initiated by the following warning. I asked Mike if he like you and he said No. He said you were a dog, JB said he only like her and he like me. everyone is telling him to ask me out. STAY AWAY FROM MIKE & I MEAN IT. I’M NOT JOKING.
The recipient apparently did not heed this warning. A note by the same author dated a week later with the instruction to “read carefully ‘Bitch!!’” reports that “all my friends in the 8 & 9 grade wants me to beat you up . . . And people in the seven grade want me to.” Yet, it seems likely that such combative competition for boys is limited to girls who belong to different friendship cliques. Girls’ apparent orientation to the informal norm of romantic exclusivity would tend to minimize such competition between members of friendship cliques. Moreover, girls’ heavy emotional investment in their relationships with one another may overwhelm their romantic attraction to particular boys. For example, the following passage is from a poem titled “Friends” and written by a girl for another. Well be friends forever even if we arent together No boys will come between, OK?
Although girlfriends may not let romantic competition for boys come between them, their romantic relationships with boys may come between them in other ways. A girl who is going-with a boy faces what Merten (1996: 476) aptly describes as the “formidable challenge” of balancing her romantic and friendship relations. Fine (1987: 107) notes that preadolescent boys are at pains to ensure that girls do not “replace other boys as their focus of attention,” and the same might be said about early adolescent girls. At least those girls chide one another for being preoccupied with their romances, especially when it detracts from interaction among girls, as the following illustrates.
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when you went out with Tim you acted like how you always get mad at us for acting… All we heard was TIM, TIM, TIM.
Girls also gossip about what they consider the inappropriate romantic conduct of other girls. For example, there are reports in notes of girls “flirting with” a boy “so bad” and of “being ALL OVER” a boy and having another “boyfriend too.” Although girls’ romantic involvement with boys appears to detract from their relationships with one another, that appearance seems partially deceptive. As I previously argued, girls’ romantic attractions to and relationships with boys are not simply grafted onto their relationships with one another but absorbed into them. They use those attractions and relationships as resources in their relational work with one another. The disclosure of romantic likes and troubles serve to forge and strengthen bonds of trust and mutual vulnerability among girls. Similarly, girls’ exchange of romantic advice, aide and information ties them together into networks of romantic support. Even romantic competition and gossip about inappropriate romantic conduct merely adds new content to familiar forms of clique boundary work and internal coalition formation among girls. Thus, early adolescent girls’ romantic involvement with boys may do more for their relationships with one another and their standing among same-sexed peers than it does for their relationship with boys. I am not suggesting that early adolescent girls are not emotionally invested in their romantic relationships with boys. Many undoubtedly are, but they also thereby invest in their relationships with other girls. Early adolescents’ girls concerted attempts to affirm themselves as romantic actors may encourage increasing and increasingly intimate forms of cross-sex interaction, but it seems to do little to erode the boundary separating the interpersonally rich, emotionally charged, and complex social worlds of girls from those of boys. Having a boyfriend is an important symbol of early adolescent girls’ maturing femininity, but it is no substitute for having girlfriends and their social approval. On the contrary, it is a virtual necessity to having and keeping both.
The intergenerational reproduction of gender boundaries On the surface it may seem as if the young merely internalize the social expectations of their elders and then developmentally meet them. Yet, this is a view from a distance. As numerous students of the young’s peer cultures have demonstrated, once you get close enough to the young’s daily lives things
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appear considerably more complicated. It becomes clear that the distant and fortunately fading view of childhood socialization as indoctrination underestimates both the young and the complexity of their daily social lives. To borrow from Corsaro and Eder (1990: 200), the young do not passively internalize but creatively appropriate information from the adult world and transform it to meet peer concerns. That aptly describes what the early adolescent authors and recipients of the notes that I have examined here are doing. They creatively appropriate, transform and use images and information about heterosexual romance from the adult world for their own purposes. Those purposes include the claiming of mature forms of masculinity and femininity, the securing of peer status, and the negotiation of peer relations. Yet, as Corsaro and Eder (1990: 200) note, in creatively appropriating and deploying information from the adult world for their own purposes, the young often simultaneously contribute to the reproduction of adult culture. That would seem to be the case with what early adolescents do in their notes to one another. Among other things, the disembodied interaction of early adolescents in the notes examined here may well contribute to the reproduction of all too familiar gender boundaries (Gerson and Peiss 1985: 318–321). For example, boys’ masculine posturing in the notes they write to girlfriends is arguably a form of what Thorne (1993: 63–64) refers to as “borderwork”. Those boys’ pointed expressions of their accountably masculine natures do nothing to diminish girls’ sense of difference from them and may well enhance that sense of difference. On the other hand, the exchange of romantic aide, support, and information about romantic attraction and troubles among girls strengthen their relationships with one another and the boundaries separating them from boys. Boys, including their own boyfriends, are excluded from these interactional networks and the social worlds that emerge within them. In this respect, the story told by the notes examined here remarkably parallels that told by the letters and diaries of late 18th and 19th century girls and women examined by, respectively, Nancy Cott (1977) and Carroll SmithRosenberg (1975). According to Cott (1977: 174), late 18th and early 19th century women “friends engaged in gossip about suitors and assemblies, but made their reciprocal affections, their longings to see one another, and their feelings of loss at parting their major themes.” Similarly, Smith-Rosenberg (1975: 20–21) reports “boys were obviously indispensable to the elaborate courtship ritual [late 19th century] girls engaged in … [but] appear distant and warded off … [while] young women’s relations with each other were often
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close … and devoted.” Cott and Smith-Rosenberg attribute these relational patterns to the rigid gender role differentiation of the past, but, where social structural boundaries once stood, love-struck early adolescents now erect micro-interactional ones. Although they do so with definitions and images of heterosexual romance appropriated from adult culture, the construction of those gender boundaries is their own. Howard Becker (1982) once described human cultures as collective solutions to collective problems and that includes the young’s distinctive peer cultures. One problem that early adolescents collectively face is securing recognition of their maturity. Affirming themselves as romantic heterosexual actors in the eyes of their peers is one of the few available ways for them to do so. Yet, that solution partitions same and cross-sex relations into actual and potential romances and actual or potential friendships, reproducing gender boundaries that can be quite confining and forms of cross-sex relations that can be quite oppressive. On the other hand, like the letters of 18th and 19th century women friends, the notes examined here betray what Jennifer Coates (1996) refers to as the “heterosocial world view” on which those gender boundaries and forms of crosssex relations rest. That ideology “assumes the primacy of male-female relationships above all others, so that women are seen as being ‘for men’” (Coates 1996:38). Although the female correspondents who wrote the notes examined here gave great significance to male-female relationships, they clearly saw themselves as being as much, if not much more, for their girlfriends as for boys. Early adolescent girls do venture out from the familiar confines of samesexed friendships and discourse in order to claim a fully mature form of femininity and often, thereby, reproduce confining and oppressive forms of cross-sex relations. As is well documented (e.g. Thorne 1993: 155), prevailing cultural constructions of heterosexual romance and attractiveness do place a heavy burden on many adolescent girls. Yet, the notes examined here suggest that early adolescent girls also use those constructions as resources in the construction and maintenance of their emotionally rich relations with one another and, thereby, a comfortable retreat from confining and oppressive cross-sex relations. Perhaps, then, girls are not as deluded by prevailing cultural constructions of heterosexual romance as commonly assumed. They clearly are not as deluded by those cultural constructions as are those boys who actually believe that girls’ main attraction to romance is their attraction to them.
Notably gendered relations
Notes 1. Finders (1997) examines the notes of a group of junior high “social queens” along with their graffiti writing and reading of “teen zines” — magazines marketed for adolescent girls. Although Finders (1997: 19) claims to have “collected hundreds of notes,” she shares the contents of only three with readers. On the other hand, Hey (1997) draws heavily on 75 notes to supplement her interviews and observation of two groups of British girls. And, Hubbard (1989) reports on a collection of 33 notes in her examination of various forms of “underground literacy” in a sixth grade classroom. 2. Adler, Kless, and Adler (1992) report that cross-sex relations start to be imbued with romantic meanings as early as the fourth grade, but this is an exceptional finding. However, it may signal a historical shift in the biographical timing of initiation into cross-sex romantic relationships. 3. This is a preliminary report from a larger, on-going project. I now have nearly 2000 notes from thirteen young women and one young man representing more diverse age, social, and geographical backgrounds. I have only begun my analysis of this larger collection of notes. 4. I have attempted to reproduce these hand written notes as faithfully as possible. Thus, I have reproduced misspellings, original punctuation or lack thereof, abbreviations, capitalization, underlining and the like. For drawn, logographic symbols such as “hearts” and “smiling faces,” I provide a description in brackets. However, I have changed names to insure the anonymity of the correspondents. 5. I was able to arrange many of the notes in rough chronological order and analyze the evolution of relational patterns over time. One woman submitted notes to me already sorted into three different shoe boxes labeled 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Other notes made reference to school grade, still others were dated, and yet others made reference to events in earlier notes, providing clues to their chronological sequence.
References Adler, Patricia, and Adler, Peter 1995 “Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Preadolescent Cliques.” Social Psychology Quarterly 58: 145–162. Adler, Patricia, Kless, Steven and Adler Peter 1992 “Socialization to Gender Roles: Popularity among Elementary School Boys and Girls.” Sociology of Education 65: 169–187. Becker, Howard 1982 “Culture: A Sociological View.” Yale Review 71: 513–527. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas 1966 The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday.
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Cahill, Spencer 1986 “Childhood Socialization as a Recruitment Process: Some Lessons from the Study of Gender Development.” In Sociological Studies of Child Development, Volume 1, P. Adler and P. Adler (eds.), 163–186. Greenwich, CT.: JAI Press. Canaan, Joyce 1990 “Passing Notes and Telling Jokes: Gendered Strategies among American Middle School Teenagers.” In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, F. Ginsburg and A. Lowenhaupt Tsing (eds), 215–231. Boston: Beacon Press. Cancian, Francesca 1987 Love in America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Coates, Jennifer 1996 Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell. Corsaro, William 1985 Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Corsaro, William and Eder, Donna 1990 “Children’s Peer Cultures.” Annual Review of Sociology 16: 197–220. Cott, Nancy 1977 The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1935. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Eder, Donna 1995 School Talk: Gender and Adolescent Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1985 “The Cycle of Popularity: Interpersonal Relations among Female Adolescents.” The Sociology of Education 58: 154–165. Eder, Donna and Sanford, Stephanie 1986 “The Development and Maintenance of Interactional Norms Among Early Adolescents”. In Sociological Studies of Child Development, Volume 1, edited by P. Adler and P. Adler, 283–300. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Fine, Gary Alan 1987 With the Boys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Finders, Margaret 1997 Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York: Teachers College Press. Gerson, Judith and Peiss, Kathy 1985 “Boundaries, Negotiation, Consciousness: Reconceptualizing Gender Relations.” Social Problems 32: 317–331. Goffman, Erving 1963 Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press. 1961 Asylums. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1952 “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.” Psychiatry 15: 451–463. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness 1990 He-Said-She-Said. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Hey, Valerie 1997 The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendship. Bristol, PA: Open University Press. Hubbard, Ruth 1989 “Notes from the Underground: Unofficial Literacy in One Sixth Grade.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 20: 291–307. Merten, Don 1996 “Going-With: The Role of Social Form in Early Romance.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24: 462–464. Schofield, Janet Ward [1982] 1989 Black and White in School. New York: Teachers College Press. Simmel, Georg [1908] 1950 “The Secret and the Secret Society.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, K. Wolf (ed.), 317–376. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Simon, Robin, Eder, Donna and Evans, Cathy 1992 “The Development of Romantic Norms Among Adolescent Females.” Social Psychology Quarterly 55: 29–46. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 1975 “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1: 1-29. Thorne, Barrie 1993 Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thorne, Barrie and Luria, Zella 1986 “Sexuality and Gender in Children’s Daily Worlds.” Social Problems 33: 176–190. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don 1987 “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1: 125–151.
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Far from sugar and spice Teenage girls, embodiment and representation Gerry Bloustien For women, associated with the body and largely confined to life centred on the body (both the beautification of one’s own body and the reproduction, care and maintenance of the bodies of others), culture’s grip on the body is a constant, intimate fact of everyday life. (S. Bordo 1993: 17) What are little Girls Made of? Sugar and Spice and all things nice… (anon: English Folk song) It’s pretty funny looking at old photos. I got them out today because well I’m kind of looking to see who I am… and I think that who you are is made up of our (sic) past…Its really funny seeing me on the outside ’cause all I know is me on the inside. (Hilary, 15, direct address to camera)
Theoretical frameworks: The serious play of body work This chapter investigates the intersection of embodied subjectivity, gender and (self) representation, exploring the ways in which the female adolescents in my fieldwork reflected upon, discussed, enacted and constituted their sense of self. Their ‘explorations’ and articulations of bodily practices involved negotiation of both similarity and difference, the marking of boundaries between self and other (Harraway 1990, 1991; Feher 1989). On the surface, such attempts at representation through clothes, style, image and bodily inscription, seem like ‘just play’. Yet, under closer scrutiny we can see specific strategies, ‘the human seriousness
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of play’ (Goffman 1970; Turner 1982; Handelman 1990; Schechner 1993), providing insights as to the way gendered subjectivity is perceived, understood and performed. Femininity itself, as an integral part of selfhood and a more public sense of identity is simultaneously constituted and interrogated through enactment. Specifically, this play concerns body work, “the most immediate and most important form of labour that humans engage in” (Schilling 1993:118; Bourdieu 1984, 1993). In other words, this is ‘serious play’ indeed. A related factor is that of the underlying unity of the body. For a body to be mature it not only has to be ‘complete’ but it also has to be ‘contained and controlled’. If we consider the popular teenage use of the word ‘cool’ we can see it is replete with these connotations; a cool person is one who is in control, ‘has it all together’, has the appearance of a natural self-possession’, is not ‘fake’ but is ‘authentic’.1 Cool means unemotional, calm and in control — not only in terms of one’s material body but by implication in terms of emotions, one’s appetite, one’s temper, one’s desires and thus in one’s social relationships too. Hot as an epithet applied to someone else means capable of arousing passion. Such language has great implications when we consider the body in its entirety for the ideal self keeps the boundaries of within and without, inside and outside the body surfaces, very closely monitored. In this conception, bodily expression and control is firmly linked to (self) identity. It is an integral part of human agency; it both constrains and facilitates. While this in itself is not a new idea, what has remained unproblematic in so much of the research into Western youth social groupings and culture is the question of whose identity is being talked about. Here I address this issue, by exploring the ways in which distinction is as important as similarity in youth perceptions of bodily style and social performance. I examine how and why symbolic boundaries are marked out between one body and the next, even within the same social groupings. Secondly, I highlight the related paradox and difficulty of any discussion of the body in the constitution of subjectivity, for the body is both “contained and container at once” (Stewart 1984: 104), both biological organism and cultural representation (Falk 1994). Hilary’s words, quoted above, highlight this paradox; in order for her to conceptualise her body in this way, in terms of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, she is drawing on an historically and culturally specific mental process that defines ‘me’ in relation to ‘not-me’. That is, the very concept of différance involves the notion of being a separate ‘individual’, which in turn requires an ‘Otherness’ for its emergence. Standing theoretically separate from society like a painted relief it emerges as ‘naturalised’, the way things are.
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In other words, one can only see and ‘know’ oneself through a cultural prism.
Mimesis and methodology: Bodies in action In order to demystify these cultural prisms, the material in this paper draws upon my intensive ethnographic study of female adolescence in Adelaide, South Australia, achieved across a range of locales and social groupings. It provides an insight into the interweavings and intersections of micro and macro cultural discourses and understandings, the way notions of the more private self and public identities interact and merge. The participants — and eventually the research focussed upon ten key young women and their worlds — were offered a small Hi 8 domestic video camera to use when and where they liked for just over a year.2 The girls had complete control over the content, editing and style of their films. Over the course of the 15 month fieldwork, I learnt a great deal about how each girl engaged with, perceived and represented her world, both on and off the camera. Each girl’s videos and the filmic processes clearly demonstrated the ways in which she understood her social and cultural constraints, through the perceptual frames and boundaries she placed upon herself in the task. Not everything in her world was for public viewing. Not everything was selected for recording in the first place. The processes of selection, filming and the editing pointed to the ways the girls struggled to represent themselves in way that cohered with their already established social and cultural frameworks. Although my research is based on the ten girls, reflecting their particular perceptions and understandings of their worlds, it contextualised their perspectives within their familial and wider social networks. So in fact my research findings are based on 65 young people in all, as well as all the adults and authority figures in the teenagers’ lives.3 The result is an exploration of both the ways in which young people make themselves similar to each other, demonstrate allegiance to social groupings for example, but also the ways bodies allow and sometimes enforce expression of distinction (Bourdieu 1984) and of différance. (Derrida 1979). In dress, stance and language, their views captured in casual conversations with friends or in more self-conscious, direct address to the camera, the girls indicated clearly bodily praxis as a mode of knowledge (Moore 1994). To serve as an entry point into this discussion of the relationship between body and self and how that nexus intersects with each girl’s sense of psychic ‘fit’ within her world, I turn to my fieldwork and introduce the reader to two bodies
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‘in action’. Here we see the way two young people “watched themselves”.4 It is also an introduction to clear indicators of simultaneous sameness and difference, highlighting many of the issues outlined above. The occasion was my first dramatic encounter with Bekk.
Bodies in action: Watching the watchers It was my second visit to Diane’s media studies class. The previous week I had been struck by the small size of this class and by its gross gender imbalance; of the sixteen students, the only girl attending at that time had been Diane. The students were working in pairs to complete various projects, Diane and her partner investigating Heavy Metal music. The lyrics, understood by the initiated but not so easily by the casual listener, were often extremely sexist and antisocial. Diane preferred Techno Pop she told me, giving examples of commercial dance music, such as songs by Peter André and New Kids on the Block. However, Heavy Metal was the only music her partner was interested in so they were studying that.5 On that first occasion, I had become aware of a marked difference in bodily deportment and appearance between the boys and Diane. The boys had openly lounged in their chairs, sprawled over the desks, talked and laughed loudly and seemed quite relaxed. In comparison, she sat upright, absolutely controlled in the way she positioned and presented herself. Her bodily restraint was expressed in other ways apart from deportment. Her hair obviously freshly washed was immaculately groomed. Her school uniform was neat and orderly, in marked contrast to those of the students around her, indeed in contrast even to the physical conditions of the classroom. When I arrived in the same room the following week, I discovered there was another female student in the class — Bekk. In contrast to Diane’s quiet entry, Bekk entered the room like a tornado. She was bubbly, flirtatious and garrulous, wearing her blond shoulder-length hair in what was a popular scraggly ‘messylook’ style. She wore a white t-shirt printed with a lurid design, indicating it was very obviously not official school uniform or even appropriate clothing for the classroom. She was loud and, ostensibly, supremely self-confident. She immediately mingled with the boys chatting about her weekend and her time away from school. She had been away for a week and a half. On spotting me, she yelled across the room to the teacher, “Mr B., have we got the new teacher? Who is that?” Then a few minutes later she asked me directly, “Are you a new teacher?”
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Wandering restlessly around the classroom towards the heater at the back left hand corner and then back again over to the chairs and desks on the right to where Diane was sitting, Bekk loudly recounted a cacophony of diverse personal information in a stream of ‘free-association’: I got sick from drinking a whole bottle of mint sauce, last week. It was at Macdonald’s…Hey! the heater’s on!…Those boys must have finally learnt how to put light it as I wasn’t here…I’ve been going with Les (Bekk’s boyfriend) for five weeks now but my mum doesn’t like him. He’s been living at our house for three weeks. She wants me to go to Victor Harbour with Mick.6 She really likes him ‘cause he works at Players.7 He’s too old though. He’s got an apprenticeship there. She’s paying for me and him to go to Victor ‘cause she wants something to happen.8 I hope it doesn’t though ‘cause I really love Les….Hey, someone put on some music. I want to dance!…I love dancing…I get into clubs all the time. They never check my ID. Les, he’s twenty, He has trouble getting in but they never ask me!…”9
Then apparently feeling that more dramatic activity was needed, she grabbed a tie from one of the boys, tied it around her own neck, and exclaimed, “I love wearing ties. They suit me.” The teacher intervened, attempting to bring back some semblance of order into the class room. The students in some show of settling down, obligingly split up into groups with about six going into adjoining rooms which had video and sound-mixing facilities. However, six other students stayed in the classroom, chatting to each other and to me. Diane sat near me to talk about my film project. As I showed Diane the video camera, one of the boys asked if he could look through the lens. He immediately trained the camera towards Bekk who lay full length across the desks. Far from retreating from the camera’s gaze, she stretched out her body in an exaggerated pose of a fashion model and purred “Do you want to see my legs?” After a while she moved again, until this time she was on my left. Bekk:
(interrupting my conversation with Diane) ’Scuse me but how old are you? Are you a new teacher? Gerry: No I’m doing some research here. Diane’s going to make a film with me. Bekk: Do you work at the University? I’ve been away sick last week so I haven’t seen you before. I was already feeling sick from stuff I ate at Macdonald’s and then my mum bet me I couldn’t drink a
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whole bottle of mint sauce. She bet I wouldn’t do it. She said she’d give me ten bucks if I did it. So I did it but I then I was ill. She didn’t give me the money though but she did buy me two packs of smokes so that’s the same thing really.10
Bekk gave all this information totally unsolicited, although obviously aware that it won her attention. Finally the conversation returned to the topic of music again and specifically about Madonna herself as her concert was forthcoming. Bekk had saved up for a ticket and was going to the concert as she said she admired Madonna “tremendously because she stands up for what she believes in.” One boy in the class overhearing this, quickly and crudely chipped in “She makes other things stand up.” Bekk told him to “Shut up.” The teacher who had been working on a computer in the classroom but apparently simultaneously listening to the interchange, intervened. Teacher: Bekk: Teacher: Bekk: Teacher: Bekk:
What do you think Madonna believes in? She believes in standing up for what she wants. She believes in doing what she wants. Yes but why does she do that? She believes in it. But what do you think she does it for? (quieter) Money, I suppose.
The teacher’s assumption that Madonna’s purpose (and ultimately her meaning for young women) could only be part of her marketing ploy was presented as though to counteract Bekk’s admiration for Madonna. However, as I had already learnt to suspect, Bekk couldn’t be suppressed for long. She launched into a counter attack: Bekk:
She has a great body. If you look at her arms they are really muscly because she works out all the time. I can say that. I notice girls’ bodies but I’m not being a lesbian or anything. I can go up and say to Diane, “Diane, you have got a good body”. Boys can’t say about another boy, he’s got a good body, because they are scared of people thinking that they are…. Diane: (interrupting)….Some boys say that other boys have got ‘cute butts’ but they are just fooling around. They are just pretending to be… Bekk: I tell my boyfriend, “you look at her. She’s got a good body”. (laughs) He says “You’re weird.”
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Bekk decided she wanted to hear some louder music so she left us abruptly and went into the room next door only to return a few moments later wearing a baseball hat backwards. She said that she had borrowed a hat from one of the boys whom she said thought she looked like the lead singer from The Divinyls.11 Then she added “and he just kissed me. Everyone tries to kiss me.”
Bodily praxis as modes of knowledge This extended introduction to Diane and Bekk ‘in action’ serves as an entry point to the discussion of bodily praxis as a mode of knowledge (Moore 1994). In the account we not only saw Bekk and Diane physically interacting with others but also heard their articulations about the meaning for them of different aspects of embodiment. Their understandings were expressed primarily through their own bodies and also through their articulated interpretations of bodily practices of others. This included the significance of appearance and the perceived status of the bodies of some popular cultural icons, such as Madonna and The Divinyls. Above all, in dress, stance and language the girls indicated clearly the importance of the body as physical and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984; Schilling 1993) — although in some aspects their understanding of its ‘currency’ seemed very different. Bekk’s ‘capital’ came from being able to compete with the boys in terms of space, language and an assertive sexuality, to “stand up for what she believes in” like Madonna. For Diane, in her self-contained, quiet demeanour and acquiescence, it seemed to be from marking herself out as different from the boys. Both girls, in their own quite different ways, were appropriating a particular exaggerated, extreme representation of femininity. Furthermore, in their sympathetic discussions of Madonna, both girls indicated an ambivalent struggle to contest the usual confining images of women as passive recipients of the gaze of (male) others. There was an awareness that such assertiveness, whether it was Madonna’s or their own, comes with risk; Bekk could declare herself the subject of the gaze, “I can say that. I notice girls’ bodies” but. only while quickly asserting “I’m not being a lesbian or anything.”12 She also asserts herself to be clearly heterosexual in her allusions to her boyfriend Les, his rival Mick, and her stated supreme confidence that she is attractive to boys (“Everyone tries to kiss me!”). In the conscious and unconscious ways that both girls present themselves in their world, they draw our attention to other important aspects of ‘bodily’ management or body work. For example, in Bekk’s anecdote about her food poisoning she is subverting two other ways in which bodily control and
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maintenance are usually thought about. Firstly, ordinary food (mint sauce) has been used inappropriately and to excess. Secondly, rather than express anger at her daughter for the behaviour, her mother (usually mothers are considered the providers of nurturing food) instigated the behaviour (“It was a bet so I did it”) and rewarded it with cigarettes — (another harmful substance!). So how do we untangle all the complexities of embodiment hinted at here? Firstly, all together these aspects of exploring socially acceptable boundaries and bodily behaviour can be seen as ‘play’ in order to gain knowledge.13 The body is the locus and primary symbol of simultaneously acquiring, articulating and negotiating particular understandings of the world. Bodies, as Bourdieu reminds us “take metaphors seriously”.14
Taking metaphors seriously #1: Exploring difference Why is there such a difference in the way Diane and Bekk felt that they could and should engage in the world? The two teenagers described above were from the same geographic locale and had similar social, ethnic and class backgrounds.15 Yet we obviously cannot assume that Diane and Bekk, both ‘working class’ girls, perceived and negotiated their worlds in exactly the same way. As was the case with all the girls in my research and their friends and families, they had differently nuanced ideas about representations of themselves as female, different ways of ‘playing’ with gendered identity, different ways of expressing these understandings through their bodies.16 But exploration of that difference is far from simple. To understand articulations of difference we need to turn again to look at other bodies in action, to understand other ways in which the all girls in my fieldwork negotiated the ubiquitous gaze; firstly, there is consideration of the relationship between embodiment, (gendered) subjectivity and (micro)cultures; consideration, in other words, of the ways bodily behaviour and the verbalised attitudes of these girls reflected and were attempts to negotiate their particular taken-for-granted cultural understandings of their realities. The second related consideration is how the pervasive dominant discourses of femininity, including its expressions through the media, interweave with those particular understandings, how they complement and where they appear to be contradicted by everyday experiences. The third issue to consider is the way morality intertwines with both sorts of discourses, the meta and micro narratives, the different but interlocking ways of understanding and being in the world. I will return to all
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of these issues as we consider the way particular girls explored their sense of self and their worlds through their bodies.
Taking metaphors seriously #2: The joy of physicality One of the first things I noticed on entering my fieldwork was the very different way that the young people I got to know used their bodies; differently from me and often differently from each other. The over-arching culture shock for me, entering these worlds as an adult woman, was the sheer physicality of the teenage world. I had almost forgotten in my own adult socialisation how much I had learnt to control and constrain bodily action. So, for example, any conversation I had with Kate was undertaken without any semblance of formality despite our age and education differences. On one particular occasion, Kate conducted almost the entire conversation with me, either standing on her head or practising other yoga positions. She was simultaneously drinking cordial with ice cubes. As she sucked on an ice cube it repeatedly popped out of her mouth by accident. She thought this was very funny as it kept sliding on to her lap or even on to the floor.17 The whole of my fieldwork, in fact, led me into using my body in ways that as an adult I have become unaccustomed. Elsewhere, I have recounted attending Rave dance parties and discos and participating in the teenage workshops at Cirkidz, known more formally as Bowden Brompton Youth Circus.18 The latter particularly involved my learning many different kinds of bodily skills: attempting to juggle (acquiring new hand/eye co-ordination skills); learning to clown (acquiring the ability to be relaxed, to be ‘silly’ and ‘unlearn’ the appearance of control) or learning to be the base of a human pyramid (acquiring the necessary skills to be strong and share personal space and indeed parts of my body with others). On a much simpler level it meant doing what my teenage participants did, such as being prepared to squeeze under the staircase at school because that was where the group was having a conversation out of the eyes and hearing of the teacher on duty.19 It wasn’t simply the lack of physical inhibition that I often noticed. It was also paradoxically the overt concern with scrutinising aspects of appearance and body parts. Perhaps because one was freer with the body, one was aware that it was more ‘in the limelight’, as it were. That is, more under the possible gaze of others. Even without that awareness however girls learn early that learning to be female is hard work and that it requires a constant self-surveillance of the body to meet a ubiquitous female ideal, as I detail below.
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Taking metaphors seriously #3: Femininity as discourse The ideal female body is understood and represented in a maze of paradoxes. Firstly, the ideal female in dominant Western discourse is young but sexually provocative; she is childlike but expected to be morally responsible; she is passive but manipulative, full of ‘feminine wiles’. In this discourse, her paradoxes simply confirm her enigmatic status. In the context of the dominant, Australian culture, this ideal feminine aesthetic currently has three major components. Firstly, it is of a slender young woman. Indeed the body should appear to be without obvious muscle, a body that is “firm but bulgeless, lacking in excess fat” (Coward 1984: 40). Although looking physically active, this body is passive, more done to rather than doing. Although perhaps expected to be more assertive than in the past twenty years, the female body is never allowed to be aggressive in this discourse. It takes up minimum space in public arenas.20 It creates little noise.21 The second aspect of the ideal feminine aesthetic is that paradoxically, in spite of the sexualised or even eroticised context, this body is not in fact sexually-mature; it is the pre-pubescent underdeveloped shape that is currently ideal in magazines, television, film and print advertisements. Because it is, in fact, pre-pubescent the body actually lacks other secondary sex characteristics. Indeed, “what more than anything else arouses (self) repulsion is our secondary sex characteristics — body hair and fat….signs of sexual maturity; they are about being a woman rather than a girl” (Le Roy 1993: 10). The third component of this ideal feminine bodily aesthetic is that it is always non-black and light-skinned. Overall I discovered that this aesthetic was well and truly internalised in the young women in my research, as I detail below. Early in my fieldwork I found there were several occasions when this awareness and surveillance of the body became quite explicit, as for example, during my early visits to Cirkidz. There, I was struck by the openness with which the girls discussed and talked about their bodies. One of my first sights was to see Cindy and Fran standing at the back of the room gently feeling each other’s faces. They explained they were trying to decide whose skin was the softest, inviting me to feel too! Although less overt than at Cirkidz, I found that this scrutiny and commenting on physical appearance was commonplace and frequent amongst all the girls during my fieldwork. Although Bekk considered she was unusual “noticing girls bodies”, a mark of her own distinction, in fact every girl in my fieldwork seemed acutely aware and commented on others’ appearance and behaviour.
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On one occasion Diane, whom we met above, was videoing in her bedroom with two sisters, Jane and Helen. At one point, Jane took the camera while Diane asked Helen questions from the magazine romance quiz. As the others responded aloud to the quiz with great hilarity, Jane made a simultaneous commentary sotto voce , giggling as she filmed. Here we have the world’s most famous model being filmed with the world’s most famous interviewer. (zooming in with the camera for a close up) Hmm! Nice skin!
Sometimes the comments were far from complimentary, as when Jane then zoomed into a close-up of Helen’s body, “look at that belly! Look at that belly!” Such comments were made with affection and in a spirit of fun. But as I indicated in the anecdote about Bekk, observing or engaging with another’s body was not without risk. There was a fine line between what was considered appropriate scrutiny and what was not; who could touch whom and who could not.
A question of touch Best friends could often be in extremely close proximity to each other, sharing clothes, space and bodies. This was usually carried out in the private spaces of bedrooms or at least in areas where the girls could feel free to gossip, laugh, role play and be intimate with each other in this way and not feel embarrassed. Stuart Hall and Angela McRobbie dubbed such behaviour as “bedroom culture”, describing this as peculiarly feminine activity enjoyed by teenage girls in the privacy of their bedrooms as opposed to activities in more public arenas. In the original 1970s / 1980s conception of this behaviour, researchers interpreted this as a kind of gendered resistance, noting it was young women carrying out activity that was particularly pleasurable to them. Jane Campion’s short film A Girls’ Own Story, however, also shows the girls role playing in ways which are far from suggesting resistance. I agree the pleasure is there but I do not equate this with resistance. Rather I would argue that this play constitutes different forms of exploration with the body, with space, with relationships. In other words, play is far more about ‘learning the game’, learning about accommodation and incorporation, than resistance. Several parts of Grace’s video were carried out in the company of her best friend Katie, the two girls sitting huddled up on a couch together chatting
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directly to camera. Their bodies were positioned so closely with arms and legs resting on each other that it was sometimes hard to see through the camera lens whose body belonged to whom. In their discussions on camera they talked about their friendship and the importance of sharing everything — clothes, music, accessories. The video also had several segments where they were obviously sharing food, cooking and chatting together as they cooked. Boyfriends, however, could not be shared. When I asked what would happen if they liked the same boy they answered that they had a rule to protect their relationship “neither of us would touch him!”
Grace and her friend Katie
Mutual grooming between friends was another activity, which often took place when a friend ‘stayed over’ for the night. That often included experimenting with hair-styles, make-up or dress-ups. Such intimacy involved trust. A best friend here becomes a doppelganger, an extension of the self, the me who is notme. She can see and reach parts of the body that the other can’t — like the back of the head — and in many ways personifies the concept of the alter ego.22 This does not mean that such intimacy always goes without notice from other people or was acceptable in all female groups. Grace and Kate commented with a dismissive laugh that often people asked them if they were lesbians
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“because we are so close”. They were obviously aware that their physical affection caused comment but considered themselves completely heterosexual in orientation. Indeed, all of the girls in my research, including the many beyond the ten key participants, indicated that intimacy or affection between women in public attracted comment and derision. Quite ordinary activities could arouse gossip, create suspicion. I noted above, Bekk’s speedy caveat that she was “not a lesbian or anything”. On a quite different occasion, Anne took over the camera and was filming Diane, her best friend, at school. In a voiceover while she was videoing, she eulogised about her friend’s qualities as well as her physical attractiveness. Suddenly she seemed to pull herself up sharply, saying still on camera to her prospective audience, “I don’t want you to think I’m like that. I have a boyfriend and everything.” The internalisation of surveillance and constraint frequently carried with it a sense of moral guardianship and was an important aspect of the ‘naturalising’ of heterosexuality and the required gendered relations that emerged with it. As girls in my research began to video themselves and their friends, turning the camera on each other and themselves, the ‘objective’ scrutiny intensified. The first place that such scrutiny fell upon was on ‘the body’s body’ or the importance of clothes as manifestation of the self. It is to this aspect of embodiment I now turn.
Clothing the body Several of the girls during the course of my fieldwork made a point of talking about their favourite clothes, commenting on the importance of the garments to their sense of self image on and off the camera. It was noticeable that the girls who could least afford the expensive fashionable labels wanted them and bought or attained them in some way.23 These were girls from lower socioeconomic back-grounds — (including the girls from Aboriginal homes) — where a combination of single parenthood and unemployment was common. This selection of clothing indicated an acquired prestige and membership of a ‘discriminating’ group. Diane articulated it clearly in answer to my inquiry of why she had particularly asked her parents for Adidas Equipment tops and Nike shoes. I had already learnt that money was particularly restricted in the family. She answered thoughtfully “I can hold myself up when I wear them. People look at me and think, ‘she knows the latest fashion. She cares enough to wear them’. It boosts my confidence.”
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Clothes and appearance were important then, for group membership and acceptance and for knowing that one’s body could be portrayed with confidence. It is an important dimension of ‘self-making’ (Battaglia 1995), an important aspect of emulating and ‘being’ the Other that one admires. It could be seen in the less obvious adoption of a style, such as the degree of care, grooming and body maintenance that one displayed. Like Diane described above, Hilary too, even in her school uniform after a day at school, looked immaculate and self-possessed. I commented on this one day to Hilary’s mother who always looked immaculate herself. She smiled and said, “We try to keep up a standard.” In a totally different setting, I noticed the importance of clothes at the Blue Light discos I attended during my fieldwork. These are dances held and organised by the police in an attempt to counter youth antisocial behaviour. There I was surprised at not only how young some of the dancers were (approximately only about eight or nine years old) but also how they deliberately presented themselves as much older. Although they were tiny in stature and obviously physically under-developed compared to their older counterparts, many of these eight-year old girls were dressed in ways that made them look like mini parodies of sixteen year olds — tight short skirts, panti-hose, high heels, make up and tight crop tops. Whereas I was used to eight-year olds dressing up in older clothes for fun or play, experimentally as it were, I was not used to seeing young pre-pubescent girls dressing up as ‘serious play’ in this way. And it was serious play, femininity as decidedly hard work! Towards the end of one of the evenings, at about ten-thirty, there were a number of slow romantic numbers and several of these younger boys and girls were dancing romantically together. As I was to see on several future occasions, I noticed on this night how one of the young couples, again probably about eight years old, was approached by an older group of children. Most of these children were about twelve year old who apparently didn’t feel the young couple were being romantic enough. They instructed the boy how he should be holding the girl and telling them how to kiss each other. The little boy (who was quite a bit smaller than the girl) and his partner smiled and giggled with embarrassment but accepted the instruction. I discovered a parallel monitoring of clothes and behaviour in the many Raves that I attended. At first I noticed only the unisex baggy outfits, the oversized t-shirts and wide short pants or long trousers that the boys and girls seemed to wear. However after attending several dances myself and talking to Pat and her friends I realised that the implicit dress code was, in fact, far more restrictive for girls. Often the girls would come with their hair in little bunches
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or tiny plaits reminiscent of small children. Rather than the large loose tops many of the girls would wear short cropped tops and close fitting pants or short skirts; less suitable for dancing but marking them out as female and feminine. Clothes in some situations can confer (adult) authority and status. Several of the girls attended end of school formal dances during the time of my fieldwork. This required wearing very expensive evening dresses, many of which looked extremely anachronistic to my eyes. An even more bizarre example of anachronism to me was when Janine, who identified as Nunga (South Australian Aboriginal), showed me with great pride her evening dress acquired for the yearly Nunga Ball that she attended with other family and friends. The rich colourful ‘satins’ which she and her sisters wore on these glamorous occasions with the compulsory accessories of long white gloves reminded me with a shock of old photographs of missionary days and colonial encounters.24 Apart from the adult status and authority I have noted here, clothes have another purpose too. They have a great deal of symbolic significance in various social groupings and institutions, serving iconically as direct pointers of social closure (Gerth and Wright Mills 1974 [1948]), entailing “the singling out of certain social or physical attributes as the justificatory basis of exclusion” (Parkin 1979: 44, quoted in Nilan 1992). For example, the Nunga girls indicated their allegiance to their social groupings by combining the Adidas track suits, t-shirts and tops that were fashionable and popular, with a particular colour range — those of the Aboriginal flag and with images and icons of black celebrities. Thus, they almost always wore clothes of black or Aboriginal colours (red, black and yellow) or clothes with particular symbols on them that represented a black identity; Jamaican singer Bob Marley was a favourite. On the other hand, several of the girls from Cirkidz even though they came from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, all favoured second-hand retro-clothes, implying an alternative, rather nostalgic anti-materialistic image. They were scathing in their comments about people who wore Adidas clothes calling them “Townies”. To the initiated, clothes and style indicated whether the wearer had “got it (the look) right”, really belonged or was simply a “Tryhard” (Nilan 1992). That is, one who attempted to indicate affiliation with a particular group but failed miserably to impress. So clothing style is also the first, easily identifiable way that young people indicate allegiance to a particular social grouping or experiential community (Hebdige 1979). Sometimes the layering of significance of this could be extremely complex. For example Kate loved to “dress up”. With her own money, obtained from her weekly allowance and babysitting, Kate purchased a
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second-hand wedding dress. She enjoyed playing and dancing in the dress but her actions should not be read as an indication of an attachment or desire for traditional romance. In fact I believe that Kate would see this play with the dress as a kind of sophisticated ironic stance. Kate had been encouraged to consider herself, from babyhood, as strong and independent. Her parents who were not married, brought her up in an open and feminist manner striving to give their daughter a sense of her own personhood. Kate herself liked to believe she was ‘disinctive’.25 She showed me her wardrobe half of which was filled with garments she called her “hippy clothes”. Many of these, like the wedding dress, she purchased herself and most were second-hand, obtained from markets and ‘opportunity’ (that is, cheap, second-hand goods) stores. They made her feel “an individual” she said, in an interesting echo of Diane’s reasons for choosing quite different types of clothes.26 This is not to argue, of course, that the ideal styles and fashionable looks do not change. At most teenagers’ level of income fashionable images are dependent on rapid capricious turnover.27 At the lower end of the market, in strategic contrast to the fashion statement of the elite, classic image, the emphasis is on a plethora of styles. Today’s fashionable image, influenced no doubt by the ideology of rapid material progress, physical speed and the technological advances of film, video and computer, is not only about adornment but about sexual daring, status and knowledge (Berger 1972; Coward 1984; Williamson 1986). This is expressed even in the photographic still, in terms of change, movement, posture and gesture. The modern girl is knowledgeable, physically active, on the move, ‘going places’. She is photographed and framed in the public sphere rather than the domestic — frequently the image captures and freezes the active moment — a jump frozen in the air, a group of friends laughing animatedly. Or if she is portrayed in the domestic sphere, she is preparing herself to enter the more public realm, go out, ‘party,’ be adventurous.28 Perhaps this is why Diane, stated animatedly in direct address to the camera that she “enjoyed partying totally”. The girls are what they represent through their clothing however inappropriate or anachronistic it may seem to an outsider. In these examples, clothing indeed enables the mimetic, indeed facilitates the ‘magical’ transformation into something other. Mimesis is the technique employed to create certainty, to capture the elusive ‘real’, “the sensuous moment of knowing includes a yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unknown, of thought in its object…a yielding that is, be it noted, despite apparent passivity, an act both of imitation and of contact” (Taussig 1993: 45–46). Taussig’s insights remind us again that
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the transformation and constitution of the self into and through the Other, “despite apparent passivity” requires work. The whole body is implicated in this work or ‘serious play’, for the whole body is a project. It is a project that has at its underlying core a paradox; for this project is, in itself, a problem. It cannot be completed, it cannot be finished yet it strives to reach perfection, to be perfected, to be achieved. The fact that the woman does not become the perfect ideal is not because it is impossible but because she hasn’t been diligent enough. In mimetic terms she hasn’t learnt to ‘create the magic’ to its greatest effect. Clothes are a relatively easy means to create the ideal image. They can be put on and taken off at will. However once one tackles the material body itself, the magic is harder to realise.
Skin Apart from clothes, skin seemed to be the next most important aspect of self scrutiny by the young women in my fieldwork. Skin blemishes, such as pimples, are indicators of lack of maturity and therefore lack of control.29 Pimples and facial hair could be removed or camouflaged, but not the colour of the skin. For the three groups of girls whose skin colour was darker than the others it was an immediate way in which they obviously did not fit the feminine ideal. Mary from Papua New Guinea, dealt with her lack of fit by deliberately calling attention to her difference. She called herself BB to her friends explaining to everyone that it stood for Black Bessy. When some of the youth workers and I pointed out that such a name had racist overtones — in fact we all, I discovered, could not bring ourselves to call her by this name — Mary just shrugged and smiled. It was her way of being distinctive. Sara, born in Nepal was also extremely aware of her skin colour and often expressed a belief that she was the victim of racism especially at her high school. She saw her dark skin as an impediment to a full realisation of her personhood. As she noted resignedly “in this day and age it would be easier if I were white. I’ve got a lot of things to say and I don’t get much of a chance to say them.” However, it was an incident that occurred when I was with Janine and her friends, Wanda and Janelle that really highlighted for me the issue of skin colour and identity. These girls belonged to an all female Aboriginal rock band. The band was called Black Image, originally created and named by their school as a way of encouraging the Nunga students to stay on at school by giving them a means of developing their skills, talents and self-esteem. Yet, on one occasion,
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when we were filming in the Botanical Gardens, I was to learn just how ambivalent was the girls’ apparent enjoyment and pride in their Aboriginality. Wanda was sitting on a bench ready to be interviewed (by the others) while the others were setting up the equipment. It was in the middle of a scorching summer day (it was about 40 degrees centigrade) so we were all starting to feel extremely hot and damp. Suddenly, Wanda started to screech. “Hurry up” she called out frantically to the others “I’m getting tanned.” She slid over to a less sunny part of the bench. As the filming proceeded, every time she got anywhere near the sun she would continue to shriek loudly. At last, feeling rather bewildered by the histrionics and looking at her very dark, attractive features, I asked, “are you being serious?” “Yeah,” she answered. “I’m dark enough already. I go black in the sun.” The others didn’t laugh or protest. They knew what she meant. The poignancy of their sense of otherness was also encapsulated for me in the way they talked about themselves as Nunga while non-Aboriginal people, friend or relative, were referred to as Australian. Consideration of skin also brings us back to the question of touch and intimacy. I noted earlier the way best friends could and often did touch each other freely in some groups. However the skin because of its associated contact sense, touch is a highly charged aspect of selfhood.30 Not everyone has licence to touch and in some groups, concern about imputation of the ‘wrong’ sexual orientation led to considerable discussion about appropriate behaviour. For example Diane, already concerned about Helen’s rumoured promiscuity, anxiously told me that she also found the latter’s behaviour amongst her female friends ‘weird’. “She is always hugging her friends,” Diane told me, obviously looking for reassurance “I hug my boyfriends!” she declared decisively, “Not my friends!” A more dramatic concern about touch and possible repercussions occurred one day when Janine was talking vehemently about one of her Vietnamese friends. She hated Kena now she said because she was a slut. On being asked for further elaboration, Janine explained, head tilted away from me in obviously embarrassment, that Kena and another girl had taken a shower together. Taken back at the condemnation for something I assumed often happened at school camps, I tried for a further explanation. I pointed out that, in Kena’s culture, it was possibly acceptable to have a shower with someone else. Janine didn’t answer so I tried another tack. “Maybe it’s just not true,” I finally offered lamely.
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At that Janine looked at me, this time asserting even more strongly, “Oh yes it’s true. I know her friend and she said it’s true. Kena’s a slut.”
Ultimate scrutiny — Slut is the heaviest word! The power of the word slut is awesome. Apart from its constant and casual use among the girls when they wanted to insult another, I was present on several occasions when its power as a word was discussed. For example, during an informal talk one day with Janine and her friends the word was raised and analysed. The girls had been in trouble with the headmistress as on a school trip they had approached some girls from another school and called them sluts. As we sat and talked, I felt the word seem to take on almost a concrete presence amongst us. One of the girls sighed. “Slut is the heaviest word!” she was moved to say. It is “the heaviest word” because firstly it carries with it all the connotations of the body/mind and the split between ‘Damned Whores and God’s Police’ (Summers 1979). It is a term exclusively used for women or girls. It is part of a vast vocabulary of abuse, all referring in some way to a girl’s/ woman’s sexual reputation (Lees 1993). Grace and Katie on one occasion struggled to explain the double standard. Boys were not called sluts, they noted, they were called gigolos (“a proper slut word for boys”). But they also pointed out that the word gigolo carried a quite different connotation. Kate:
When a boy is called a gigolo he is pleased. But when a girl is called a slut — well she cries.
The word on the whole implied promiscuity although, as we have seen already, the meaning of the word could easily carry over into other situations that had nothing to do with actual sexual behaviour. What is significant is that it is a sexist term of abuse that both the boys and the girls used to label and curtail girls’ behaviour and movement. Girls were far more likely to be called a slut in any situation by boys or by girls if they were ‘unattached’, that is, not in a romantic relationship or in the current terminology, ‘single’. The word also carried in it the assumption of heterosexuality. Gossip and innuendo was of course the easiest way for a reputation to be lost rather than the actual offending behaviour. Grace: You can get a bad reputation in a week. But to lose it — (shrugs with a resigned laugh) well, it can take about a year!
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My fieldwork notes are replete with tales from teenage girls and adult women talking about the difficulty of negotiating public space without losing one’s good reputation. In other words, the issue of having one’s body constantly in a ‘male gaze’ of scrutiny was a very real experience for nearly all the (young) women in my research. This meant the girls firstly learnt to see their bodies as potential sexual objects, which needed to be hidden or controlled, and secondly, their bodies came to be seen as the rightful possession of their boyfriends.
“That’s what you get for having nice legs!” Young women learn early on that they are constantly the object of a scrutinising, often judgmental, gaze. This gaze is quickly internalised and constantly reinforced by comments from (usually female) peers. Scrutiny and comments from adults, though, have more serious implications. During my fieldwork period, when I was filming at a Blue Light Disco, one of the senior police officers supervising there, a middle-aged avuncular figure, looked through the camera lens. He marvelled at the small size of the camera before handing it back and then continued his stroll around the room. About ten minutes later he was back by my side. “I should have borrowed it now, shouldn’t I?” he said with a grin and a wink. I followed his gaze to a young girl aged about fourteen who had recently come into the dance hall. She was wearing a tight white sweater. “She’s well-developed isn’t she?” he said salaciously. The tacit assumptions and often overt sexist attitudes towards young women that this comment revealed was one that all of the girls in my project faced daily and which they articulated on several occasions. To become more physically developed meant that in the public arena one was literally and metaphorically in the public gaze and spot-light. Here, indeed, was the paradox; to be the object of the gaze required vigilance; it required skill and work to attain desirable perfection but simultaneously, it required a vigilance of a different kind. There was the constant contradictory message for girls through personal experience, adult and peers advice, newspaper and electronic news broadcast horror stories, popular media texts such as soap operas and magazines of the dangers of such public attention. For all of the girls in my research potential or actual unsolicited sexual harassment or even sexual violence was part of their every day experience. If sexual harassment did not occur in their homes then it was present amongst their peer groups and in the street. All had tales to tell of incidents that had occurred to them or to someone close to them.
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Fran told me of Gina, her sixteen year old friend, who was walking down a main city street early one morning on her way to work experience. She suddenly was attacked from behind and a man grabbed her breasts. “That’s what you get for having nice legs!” the man told her as he ran off. Gina was deeply distressed and Fran was angry and indignant “It’s not fair!” she said vehemently several times. “They shouldn’t be allowed to do that. No-one has the right to do that!”
The moral discourse of feminine embodiment: ‘Rightful’ possession The moral dimension within the discourse of femininity is particularly powerful and circulates through the cultural texts that target young women. It places the responsibility of sexual control firmly on the young woman herself. She feels guilty if she is not presenting herself as sexually attractive — according to the prescribed codes. It is her fault if she is not being cheerful enough, friendly enough, alluring enough to attract the opposite sex and popular. However, too daring in self-presentation then she runs the risk of social condemnation. To be acknowledged as attractive equates with being regarded as ‘sexy’ but this immediately becomes an area of conflict in terms of a girl’s appearance. If she is perceived to be dressed in a sexually-provocative way or if she acts in a particularly aggressive manner, she can immediately attract the epithet of ‘slut.’ If she is appears reserved or modest in appearance — according to the dominant codes of her day or her particular social milieu — then she can seem too conservative and therefore too childish in her manner and appearance.31 The most explicit and poignant expression of this paradoxical position in which young women constantly found themselves was told to me in the form of a song. For the Aboriginal girls in my project, their sense of self was constituted by their Nunga identity and their gender positioning within their own cultural milieu. Primarily, they saw themselves through their heterosexual relationships, as girlfriends and future mothers, relationships where they often experienced violence. Another group of Nunga girls whom I met through their involvement with Port (Adelaide) Youth (Theatre), expressed the same ironic awareness of their subordinate positioning. Their ‘disco rap’, created as part of an improvisation on their social/ sexual relationships, poignantly reflected an awareness and yet an acceptance of their powerlessness in gender relationships. I have reproduced the words in full: Disco Rap Verse 1:
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As I pulled out my ID The bouncer said there was no need As I walked into the toilet This guy asked me to pull it 33 You’re nothing but a slut Looking for a good fuck So get on the dance floor And I’ll give you a lot more As my friends were dancing I was romancing
32
Chorus: What a scheme (x 3) 34 What a mighty good scene When I want a scheme I wanna make you scream I wanna take you boy And use you as a toy. Verse 2: Drinking Alcohol is so damn cool And those who don’t are such fools When the bartender gave me a wink I went to the toilet and spewed in the sink If you want to have a buzz Come on and take some drugs Whilst listening to the latest CDs I was tripping out and thought I was seeing 3D Chorus Verse 3: DJ was his name Playing music was his game So get up and dance to the music Take control and don’t lose it Violence was in the air But I didn’t really care Underneath the lights There was the biggest mob of fights So if you want a lash 35 You’re gonna get smashed.
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The song suggests these girls are a long way from any romantic notions of ‘sugar and spice’. It could be argued that in their very articulation of the scenario, the girls are experiencing some sense of empowerment. The chorus for example suggests that the girls feel that they were in control of the situation (“I wanna take you boy / and use you as a toy”) but it was hard to believe that these girls were really in a powerful position in these situations. At first, it was also possible to consider that the song was an exaggeration and a fantasy particularly on the context of a drama workshop. However, when I was talking and listening to the girls chatting afterwards to other girls whom they knew, I realised that their rap in fact reflected many of their usual social practices. Sex, violence, excessive drinking and drugs were very much part of their everyday lives. This brings us to the final aspect of embodiment that I want to consider and that is the ‘inside’. Up to this point I have explored aspects of ‘self-making’ through the surfaces of the body, through clothes, hair, skin and bodily deportment. Now it is timely to turn to the parts of the body usually hidden from view even to the self. To talk about knowing oneself from the inside involves a conception of the subjective experience of the body. Yet of course, as I stated earlier, such a dualistic conception is a cultural construction. All emotional sensations, whether pain, pleasure, hunger, desire, anger, love, hate or shame are essentially lived and experienced in and through the body. Inside and outside, mind and body are simply expressions of the phenomenological experience. Csordas reminds us that understanding embodiment “requires that the body as a methodological figure must itself be non dualistic, ie., not distinct from or in interaction with an opposed principle of mind” (Csordas 1994: 8). However, as we explore the ‘internal’ aspects of the body, control and surveillance of the body from the inside, there seems already to be a discursive split in the mind / body conception. That is, people often consciously decide to do things deliberately to their bodies — whether it is to eat healthily or moderately, over-indulge, binge or purge themselves. When people are suffering extreme pain, they do indeed metaphorically separate the part of themselves they regard as the acorporeal ‘self’, (a separation that necessitates the belief in the intact, unified, controlled ‘me’) from the body that is out of control (Sacks 1984; Good 1992; Jackson 1992). What I argue in this section, then, is that just as activities, which involved the surface of the body, were manifestations of selfsurveillance and control, ingestion and emission of substances were also carefully monitored. They were also in other words, an essential part of ‘serious play’ and the rhetorics of self-making, They are of course the most difficult aspects of the body to discuss because of their essential paradox and elusiveness.
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A useful entry point to consider the ‘inside’ body is to utilise Bakhtin’s insights concerning the open and closed body (Bakhtin 1968).
Ingestion: You are what you eat Bakhtin argues that modern society evolved as one “in which all the orifices of the body are closed” (Bakhtin 1968: 320). To be a complete and mature person in contemporary Western understanding is to be independent and to be in control of one’s body functions. This means that one is in control of the flow of substances in and out of the body. The body, in other words, has become more “closed” to outside forces (Falk 1994). Food is an important aspect of this in terms of the amount, the type and the manner with which one consumes.36 Eating has become a far more individualised activity. Shared meals are still present but the role of the meal and food has changed, impacted by the emphasis on the individual. Bakhtin’s metaphor of the closed body bears some similarity to Norbert Elias’s conception of the civilising process (1978, 1982). As the body becomes more ‘civilised’. That is, it becomes more concerned with control over the bodily openings and with affective expressions (Falk 1994). When there is threat to social order and hierarchies, the threat of pollution to existing conceptions of order, the boundaries, literal and metaphorical, become more rigorously monitored for “all margins are dangerous” (Douglas 1966: 121). The modern body thus expresses its controls over boundaries at an individual level by controlling the ‘flows’ between the inside and outside. For example, in our comparatively affluent society, in order to be considered a mature person, one eats just enough for the body to be satisfied. To eat more than one needs indicates a poorly (self) disciplined body and denotes a childish lack of self-control. For a woman this is particularly so for, as noted before, the aesthetic ideal is of the slender woman with the curtailed appetite. While not a new phenomenon, the late 20th century manifestation of concern about image and weight has reached epidemic proportions.37 But the control over food flow has another related function, for it is not simply the amount of substance that is important as a register of the self but also the type of food or drink. Food and drink selection and monitoring involve symbolic categories of taste or distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Three aspects of food consumption in their relation to personhood and ‘serious play’ were particularly significant in my fieldwork. Firstly, there is the aspect of food as
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fun; that is the social importance of shared food. The second aspect is food as a general manifestation of ‘taste’, a marker of social distinction, along a vertical plane. The third area is food as a marker of other identities, of différance, along horizontal plane of difference, as it were.
Food as a marker of distinction Food was actually a common topic of discussion and eating, common shared activity among the participants of my research project. All of the girls when I first got to know them expressed a delight and in interest in food, several of them having responsibility for sometimes preparing and cooking food for their families. All had voracious ‘adolescent’ appetites for cakes, ‘lollies’ (confectionary) and other sweet things. At band practice for Janine and her friends, I was often designated the ‘goffer’, sent to pick up the snack food for rehearsal breaks.38 As the girls grew older through the time of my fieldwork, certain cultural constraints did evolve. For example, for many, desire for sweet things became a guilty secret delight rather than a childish pleasure. In Hilary’s video, she and her friend filmed their huge bags of purchased sweets. In fact they even videoed the inside of the paper bag to emphasise its contents and then deliberately discussing their greed in terms of their childishness. “How old did you say you were, Hilary?”
But it was of course a concern about weight that led most the girls to be far stricter about their intake of food as they grew older. I noticed a considerable and deliberate weight loss in many of the girls as they aged over the three years of my knowing them. While for some it was the leaving behind of teenage ‘puppy fat’, for others it was an appropriation of the feminine ideal of being slender. For Mary, food was also a way of reasserting her identity. She would go to the house of her friend Rana, whenever she could. There under the guidance of Anna, Rana’s mother, she would learn how to make traditional dishes from Papua New Guinea, her birthland. Mary would ‘trade’ cooking lessons, food and occasional overnight accommodation for babysitting and general help with the Anna’s eight small children. Once she had learnt how to cook the dishes she would practise them at her own house and cook for her many visitors, most of them boys off the street. In this way food for Mary was a major vehicle for her to constitute her dislocated identity, as Papua New Guinean woman and as nurturing mother-figure.39
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Food that is not food If food was a way of marking out symbolic social boundaries of distinction and difference, so were other substances. Illicit drugs were substances that all of the girls knew about, and several of them took. But even the type of drugs taken and its frequency was an indicator of self-making. Certain drugs cost more money than others and carried with them particular connotations of who the person was in terms of social hierarchy, rather than what behaviour they indulged in. The most common drug, because of easy accessibility and its social acceptability, was alcohol. It was easily obtained at dance clubs and discos in the city, and it was often the young women who were the primary targets of the cheap sweet drinks. For example, champagne could be obtained regularly at one or two dollars a glass. Sometimes alcohol would be offered free to club members once they had paid their door entrance price for the night. Cigarettes were the next most popular drug with their connotations of ‘coolness’ and sophistication. For many girls, cigarettes had an added attraction of being associated with loss of weight as well. The Cirkidz group spurned cigarettes and alcohol as they saw themselves far too concerned with the body’s health to take up such practices. They did not reject marijuana however. They saw this substance as ‘natural’, probably because it was a substance that they could grow easily themselves in small quantities. It had the other obvious attraction of being a drug that their particular parents, or the significant adult figures in their worlds, had taken in their youth (or were still taking). In other words, for many of this group, the drug had the same standing of social acceptability as cigarette smoking and the alcohol did in other groups. Of all the girls, Grace was the most explicit about the role of harder drugs in her world. When I first got to know her, illicit drugs were a vitally important part of her world. They were the central purpose of the social activity of her group. — “I can’t imagine a world without drugs; it would be so boring!” It seemed to me that her engagement with drugs was an activity of “dark play which subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed” (Schechner 1993: 36). When the drugs are so dangerous as to involve serious risks, drug-taking suggests a form of play that is excessive. It is a stretching of the boundaries of the body to breaking point — like a rubber band that is stretched so thinly that it is in danger of finally snapping. It is a behaviour that echoes that of the obsessive dieting of the anorexic; it gives the impression of control over the
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body. It breaks the social taboos about substances and substance control, what one should and should not put into the body. Falk argues that such a transgression should not be seen as a denial of the taboo but an action that “transcends and completes it” (Bataille 1962: 63, cited in Falk 1994: 86). That is, the act of transgression concerning food or other substances taken into the body involves the pleasure in opposing what is to be feared. Yet it also, in its very constitution, reaffirms the cultural boundary of what is and what is not appropriate behaviour or substance. Perhaps this can be seen as is the ultimate act of mimesis — the absorption into the other that threatens in its transformative act to completely consume the original. In so doing the protean self finds its centre, is absorbed back into Nature, back into non-being. “The eater is overwhelmed by the (taste of) the food — allowing himself to be consumed by the experience” (Falk 1994: 88, emphasis in the original). To be completely ‘taken over by drugs’ whether it is excessive alcohol or amphetamines or an hallucinatory drug is to ‘go beyond’ the body constraints. The expressions “stoned out of my mind” or “off my face” imply a pleasure in losing control, losing the ‘withness’ of the body.
Keeping the insides in The final aspect of play as bodily control that I want to look at, albeit briefly, is that of emission; how substances have to be contained within the body. If there is censorship concerning what may or may not be taken into the body, there is also monitoring of what may or may not come out. Food stuffs, sneezing, excessive laughter, regurgitated matter are all substances that the mature person does not permit to occur in public. For young women there is also the difficulty of negotiating the question of menstruation and menstrual blood. Despite the current spate of film and television advertisements where young women seem to be able to talk easily and without inhibition about the effectiveness of their sanitary napkins, menstruation is still a relatively secret and taboo subject even amongst most young women themselves. It is of course an important area where the containment of the whole mature person can come unstuck — for embarrassing leakages of blood, odour or stains all immediately destroy any semblance of self control or self-possession. In my own fieldwork, sexuality and sexual experiences were more easily talked about than menstruation. The only time that I am aware of where menstruation was a topic at all was where it was a topic of embarrassment and
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significantly at co-educational schools where the ‘norm’ for bodily behaviour often seems to be taken as male. One such incident took place on a school camp. The instruction had been that the students all bathe in the sea every day in their bathers (there were no showers at the camp — another assumption that all ‘normal’ bodies are male and do not have particular needs of hygiene). A new female pupil was unsure how to cope with this request on two levels. She was embarrassed to enter the water in her bathing costume as it would be apparent she was menstruating and on the other hand she did not want to not bathe for a week. She approached a female teacher but could not bring herself to explain the problem. The teacher sent the girl to another child to see if the problem could be resolved. However as neither girl could articulate the problem it hung in the air and remained an issue. As young women take on board the dominant cultural images and circulating discourses of themselves and their bodies, it is no wonder that menstruation is the unspoken topic even among girls themselves.
Conclusion: The ‘incompleteable’ body In this chapter I have drawn on just one aspect of much wider research, focusing here on the way the girls in my fieldwork acknowledged and explored their embodied sense of self through the serious play of body work. I introduced the framework of body as project, as an integral part of ‘self-making’. I have also traced the different ways in which the girls in my fieldwork simultaneously sought to represent and constitute themselves as ‘individuals’ through their bodies in relation to the different material circumstances and their discrete social groupings. Their body work involved both aspects of différance and distinction, a vacillation between belonging and distanciation, sameness and difference. It involved a constant negotiation of delicate territory wherein their bodies were evaluated, scrutinised and controlled by others as well as by themselves. It was a fundamental aspect of their gendered experience. Women learn to see their bodies as Other partly through a pervasive discourse of femininity, one that gains its authority and power from its ubiquity, in media images and through Western concepts of Self being ‘frameable’, bounded and knowable. But real life embodied experiences cannot help but explode the myths. However much women have internalised aspects of this idealised Other, they are simultaneously aware of the contradictions, the fact that they are “pretending to believe”, that there are yawning gaps between the self-images in the photographic frame, the mirror and the bodily experience.
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In Michael Taussig’s observations and analysis of the mimetic faculty, he argues that it is “different for women”, as they have to learn to accept another’s mimesis, “pretend to believe…that what they are witness to are real gods and not their kinsmen acting as gods. In this way the public secret essential to mystical authority is preserved” (1993: 85). Although he is specifically referring to very different ethnographic fieldwork, it is interesting to observe the parallels in my own fieldwork. Is it not precisely this ability to withhold belief, “to pretend to believe in the Other’s simulation” (86) that is so powerful and effective in making women want to become an Other not of their own making, indeed an Other that contradicts their own real life experiences? The tenuous holding together of these different contradictory knowledges is only possible because of the fundamental mythological premise — that this idealised project of the perfect body simply requires the right amount of work to be realised; in other words the persistent myth that this Other is deemed possible, is achieveable through agency. As we watched the different young women in my fieldwork perceive, survey and articulate their sense of embodiment, the impossibility of their task, their project of body work, becomes clearer. Indeed, it is only through the various forms of ‘fantasy’, ‘serious play’ and ‘dark play’ that the constitution of the self through the body can be negotiated although never completely achieved. It can never be a completed project. Indeed, an army of consumer and cultural icons, accessories and cultural expectations, standing by in the wings, rely and feed on this assumption that the embodied self can never be finally managed, can never finally be complete.
Notes 1. It is of course a word that is regularly exploited in advertising, applying the word to all manner of commodities, from chocolates, drinks and clothes to cosmetics, that will allow the properties of ‘coolness’ to transfer from the product to the purchaser and user. 2. The key teenage participants of this study were directly involved in telling their own stories on video, selecting, framing, filming and editing the footage themselves. In the text I refer to them as Diane, Hilary, Mary, Janine, Kate, Cate, Fran, Claire, Pat and Sara but these are not their real names. The main participants were deliberately drawn from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, but the process was self-selection. I simply offered a number of girls from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to participate in what I called ‘the video project’.
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3. I am using the term ‘key’ to distinguish between the ten young women upon whom my main analytic lens was focused and the other participants — their teenage friends and acquaintances, (sixty-five young people in all) and their families, relatives, and significant adults (such as teachers, youth workers, social workers and police). These were all the other people who made up and influenced their worlds. The camera as methodology was formulated as a way of alleviating the inevitable power relationship in such research for I saw my aim as giving the girls a voice that was different from mine, offering them complete control over what they chose to represent out of their lives and how they chose to represent themselves. It was also of course a way of allowing me as an adult researcher a way of reciprocally and legitimately entering into teenage worlds; with the camera I had a role and something to offer in terms of a means of providing a voice and video-making skills, should they decide to learn them (see below). Ten of these girls accepted the challenge, two being originally acquaintances of the key participants and all stayed with the project until the final footage was completed, a period of three years. It is important to stress again that the ten girls did not constitute a friendship group. The majority of them had never met. The last two to join the project (a few months after the others) were part of the social network of two of the original eight but were not close friends. These ten individuals were offered the opportunity to document on video any aspects of their lives that they considered important. I assured them that they would have complete control over the selection, filming, style, and editing and that if they wished we would screen their edited videos publicly at a student film festival. The girls were given no funding nor specific direction on ways of using the camera beyond the fundamentals. The point was emphasised that they were free to video what they liked and how they liked although I would be willing to show them specific video techniques if they requested them. No one did. The camera, lent from the University of Adelaide, Department of Anthropology, free of charge to them with video tapes, was a compact Hi 8 ‘superior’ domestic camera. The camera was deliberately chosen for its low-light capacity, its near broadcast video quality but also its small size so that it would seem as non intrusive as possible in the girls’ lives. For the same reason I did not offer lights nor external microphones. The girls reserved the camera through me whenever they chose, taking it in turns to video their worlds. Initially the project was funded through the University of Adelaide as part of my doctoral fieldwork research grant. It was a deliberate choice not to seek external (commercial) funding for production at that stage in order not to compromise the autonomy of the young women engaged in the project. In 1996 a special community arts grant from The Australia Council for the Arts was gained which enabled high quality post-production to occur. The girls were taught the skills of editing and were able to complete their polished documentary to a satisfactorily high standard. The completed video was then entered into The South Australian Young Film Makers Festival where it gained first prizes for Best Documentary and Best Editing. It has now been screened at four South Australian Film festivals. It is important to emphasise again however that the film itself was not the centre of my analysis but rather the methodology highlighted the processes of representation and self-making through the play and use of the camera. In my visits to the homes of the teenage participants or to other places where they chose to video, to deliver the camera, retrieving it or just meeting to view and talk about their footage, I gradually was able to establish close relationships with the girls, their friends and their larger
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social networks or to gain more detail concerning the background to aspects of this project. See Bloustien (1996,1998a, 1998b). 4. “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…from earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually” (Berger 1972: 46). 5. This deference to male music ‘taste’ and in fact the way gender could influence and affect the style and form of the music and its context, was one I was to meet continually in my fieldwork. 6. A popular sea-side resort in South Australia. The term ‘Victor’ used later is an abbreviation for Victor Harbour. 7. A local white goods (electronics) factory. 8. The “something” that Bekk realises that her mother “wants to happen” is a romantic involvement between her daughter and Mick. 9. ID stands for identity card. Young people are usually required to show their cards with attached photographs as proof of age when entering a licensed premises. 10. Cigarettes. 11. A popular music group with a female lead singer, Christine Amphlet was formed in 1980 and is still rating highly today. Of their six albums, two are in the US music charts. A relatively recent single called (significantly for my purposes) ‘I touch myself ’ reached no 4 in the States music charts. (Jody Scott ‘New Wave of Rockers Take on the World’ The Weekend Australian April 19–20 1997. 12. Boys, they both noted, were even far more afraid of being labelled Other. There was clearly an even stricter hegemonic code of behaviour for young men in their world governing appropriate forms of masculinity. Girls they seemed to agree, paradoxically have more flexibility and freedom in this regard which, of course, was part of their defining feminine attribute. I shall return to this aspect of gendered behaviour later in the text. 13. Also see Cook-Gumperz and Kyratzis (this volume) for their analyses of the language of play activity of young boys and girls. 14. This notion of bodily praxis being the core of self knowledge has been the focus of a great deal of research in cultural studies, especially concerning Youth (Hebdige 1979; Lesko 1988) and central also to understandings in Educational Psychology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Sociology (for example, Douglas 1973; Lock 1993; Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner 1991; Turner 1984, 1987, 1992; Jagger and Bordo 1989; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Sontag 1979; Bourdieu 1984; Taussig 1987, 1993 among many). It has been especially central to understandings of (young) women’s identity construction and (self)-representation (Hendry et al. 1993; Ardener 1993 [1978]; Smith 1987, 1988; Moore 1994; Bordo 1993). 15. The concept of social class, as it occurs in the majority of existing research on young people, fails to take account of the complexities of self-perception on ‘class’ and other social divisions. Class grouping in particular is often assumed to be homogeneous and frequently regarded as self-evident and unproblematic as a means of classification. The result is often then a circular explanation or analysis of behaviour: working class girls do this because they are working-class girls. Such accounts also fail sufficiently to note the complex intersections
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of ethnicity, gender and social positioning which affect future roles, ambitions and cultural choices. The strength of Bourdieu’s analyses, which I find so useful, lies in his denaturalisation and demystification of the concept of class. His work rather highlights the way certain behaviours perceived as ‘class based’ are not essentialised or self-evident but serve to maintain social boundaries. Cranny-Francis notes that Bourdieu’s definition of habitus reveals that “individuals do not act in ways which are totally idiosyncratic; instead they enact (idiosyncratically) the attitudes and values, behaviours and practices that their background and training, home and institutional cultures teach them” (1995: 84). 16. See Cahill (this volume) for similar observations of embodied and ‘disembodied’ gender and interaction amongst early adolescents. 17. The repetition of the behaviour and delight in the physical joke, the spilling out of the ice cube from her mouth, actually reminded of when as small babies, children learn to master a particular skill by carrying out a movement again and again with great hilarity. 18. See bibliography for more detail on this aspect of the research 19. On such occasions as I relaxed and entered into the spirit of the event, I forgot my age and felt as though I fitted in with the young people (my own moment of mimesis?). 20. Recent research into gender issues and adolescence in Australia, Britain and United States indicates that while girls are far more visible in public places — on the street, in the dance club and in pubs, in their everyday lived experience theirs is still an uncertain and subordinate position. As Sue Lees argues, “They may go to night clubs or parties but the problem of getting home unscathed is a fear they routinely have to contend with” (1993: 5). 21. A great deal of research has looked at the way women’s ‘noise’ is devalued is the way women’s speech is rendered trivial. It becomes designated as ‘gossip’, ‘chatter’ or ‘natter’ whereas men’s speech is understood to have more importance or status as ‘talk’. See Spender (1980); E. Ardener (1975); S. Ardener (1975); Gilligan (1982); Griffin (1978). Because such beliefs about the gendering of language and speech becomes naturalised such understandings have great implications for the education and socialisation of girls. In the classroom “boys are seen as lively, curious, boisterous and aggressive while girls are seen as docile, quiet and passive” (Poole 1986; Grieve and Burns 1986). 22. This is not to suggest that female friendships become less important as the girl gets older but that gender relations make their impact as the girls start to form more male / female relationships. See below in the main text. 23. If one didn’t have the monetary means one either “racked” the clothes (stole them from the stores) or “rolled” other people — attacked other young people to obtain the clothes. 24. I can only note again the appropriateness of Taussig’s observations about mimetic transformation (see particularly Taussig 1993). The significance of this particular kind of clothing will be referred to, later in the text. 25. I think part of Kate’s physical behaviour — the way she would meet and talk to be me in different places was an aspect of her desire to see herself as ‘different’. For a similar reason my own teenage daughter rejects any fashionable brand-named clothes such as Sportsgirl or Esprit. Her reasoning is “everyone else wears them. I like to wear clothes that make me feel
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an individual”. Thus, like Kate, she prefers to buy clothes from second hand or ‘op-shops’. I return to this phenomenon further below. 26. See above. Both reasons, of course, are aspects of symbolic capital as both are using clothing to express aspects of distinction. 27. The creation of the new automatically occasions the (temporary) death of the old — that is the way the fashion industries work. Rosalind Coward points out that although elite ‘chic’ fashion seems to be marketed differently the fundamental premise behind it is the same: “the regime of clothing and the particular style designated as timelessly glamorous is merely another statement made with clothes, yet it demands a meaning that is above the vicissitudes of mass taste. The aim of this style is to connote wealth, through the ideas of elegance and sophistication of tastes” (1988: 31). 28. The media images of The Spice Girls (a popular all-girl pop group from Britain) and the later Australian teenage pop group, Bardot, of course, rely on this spectacular portrayal of new ‘girl power’. In a similar way, current advertisements for sanitary towels and tampons emphasise the new physically active, assertive female who makes choices and about one brand of tampon over another in the light of how unrestricted they allow her to be. This is not without its problems though — see below in the main text! 29. Previously (Bloustien 1998b), I pointed out that Sara had said that exploring herself and her world through the camera lens, seeing her development and her immaturity, was like “looking at a great big zit”. 30. As with all of the ways human beings organise their world, the senses too of course are culturally ranked hierarchically. In Western culture sight and hearing are usually considered the first two senses. Both are distant senses not requiring physical contact between person and referent. Smell occupies an ambiguous half way mark as it is so closely associated with the body and the body’s reactions. Animals, small children and babies certainly rely on a sense of distinctive body odours which is socialised out of adults and masked by the application of chemicals ’scents. Smell is a particularly evocative sense that can bring sudden flashes of memories from the subconscious. It straddles the line between outer and inner senses. Touch and taste, the last two senses, at least in Western culture are intimate senses dependent on contact with the physical body for actualisation. They are of course the two senses that babies learn to use first for their knowledge of the world and therefore are regarded as the least sophisticated of all the senses, aligned with appetite, instinct and the primitive. Yet of course connected with the unconscious and thus with the development of the psyche taste and touch are also particularly tied to expressions of sexuality. Advertising explicitly links enjoyment of food and pleasure in touching with sexual desire. Conversely denial of food for the body has often been seen as a way of purify in the soul away from its gross bodily impurities. This close alignment with the body itself rather than to the intellect leads to these senses having their ambiguous place in our negotiated self-making. They are closer to ‘unreason’, to being out of control and therefore less reliable as a foundation for ‘authenticity’ and ‘Truth’ about the self. 31. Too childish because conservative style or behaviour can be seen as emulating or identifying with adult values too closely. In this way, paradoxically, the teenager is perceived as childishly aping the adults and not asserting her own potential independence and difference from
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them. Diane told me that when Helen wanted to annoy her and to highlight what she saw as Diane’s lack of independence from her parents, she would call her “little girl”. 32. “The bouncer said there was no need” — The girls were all underage so in fact they should have been required to show their identity cards as proof of their age. The bouncer saying “there was no need” suggests’ that he was expecting ‘something’ (sexual?) in return. 33. “Pull it” — commit a sexual act. 34. “Scheme” always has a sexual connotation. Here it means to arrange to have sexual intercourse with someone. In spite of the previous verse there is little that is ‘romantic’ about it! 35. Lash = a fight. 36. See Meigs (1984); Goody (1982); Fischler (1980); Falk (1994) among many others. 37. See Walker Bynum (1987) for her fascinating discussion of the history of women and ritual fasting. None of the key participants in my research was anorexic or bulimic, although there was concern and discussion about several female friends of some of the girls at different times. I refer to it here only to emphasise the pervasive notion of bodily control and its social significance. The editor of a popular Australian women’s magazine was recently fired from her position for putting the photograph of a size 16 model on the cover. 38. One who ‘goes for’ all the odds and ends that the group requires. 39. See Bloustien (1999).
References Ardener, Edwin 1975 “Belief and the problem of women”. In Perceiving Women, S. Ardener (ed.), London: Malaby Press Bakhtin, Mikhail 1968 Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Barglow, Raymond 1994 The Crisis of the Self in The Age of Information: Computers, Dolphins and Dreams. London : Routledge. Barnes, Ruth and Eicher Joanne B. 1992 Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts. Oxford: Berg, Providence. Bataille, Georges 1962 (1957) Death and Sensuality: A study of Eroticism and Taboo. New York: Walker and Co. Berger, John 1972 Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Bloustien, Gerry 1996 “Striking a pose: Girls, cameras and deflecting the gaze”. Youth Studies Australia 15 (3): 26–32.
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1998 “It’s different to a mirror cos it talks to you”. In Wired Up, S. Howard (ed.), 115–134. London: Falmer Press. 1999 “The consequence of being a gift”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 10 (1): 77–93 2002 (in press) “Ceci n’est pas une jeune fille”. In Hop On Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture, H. Jenkins, T. Mc Pherson and J. Shattuc (eds.). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bordo, Susan 1995 Unbearable Weight Feminism, Western Culture and The Body. Berkley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1990 [1980] The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc 1993 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Caalhoun, Craig, LiPuma, Edward and Postone, Moishe 1993 Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives Polity Press. Oxford: Blackwells. Chapman, Richard and Rutherford, John 1988 Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Coward, Rosalind 1984 Female Desire:Women’s Sexuality Today. London: Paladin. Cranny-Francis, Anne 1995 The Body in the Text. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Csordas, Thomas 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground for Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Elias, Norbert 1978 [1939] The Civilizing Process Vol. 1: The History of Manners. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1991 The Society of Individuals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Falk, Pasi 1994 The Consuming Body. London: Sage. Featherstone, Michael 1991 Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Featherstone, Michael, Hepworth, Mike and Turner, Bryan 1991 The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage. Feher, Michel, Naddaff, Ramona and Tazi, Nadia 1989 Fragments for a History of the Human Body. New York: Zone. Fischler, Claude 1980 “Food Self and Identity”. Social Science Information 27 (2): 275–92.
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Foucault, Michel 1981 [1976] The History of Sexuality Vol.1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gerth, Hans H. and Wright Mills, C. 1948 [1974] From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Gilligan, Carol 1982 In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Goffman, Ernest 1969 [1959] The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Good, Byron J. 1992 “A body in pain: The making of a world of chronic pain”. In Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, M. J. Good Delvecchio, P. Brodwin, G. Good and A. Kleinman (eds.), 29–48. Berkley: University of California Press. Goody, Jack 1982 Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grieve, Norma and Burns, Ailsa 1990 [1986] Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Griffin, Susan 1978 Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper and Row. Handelman, Don 1990 Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hendry, Leo B., Shucksmith, Janet, Love, J.G. and Glendinning, Anthony 1993 Young People’s Leisure & Lifestyles. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna 1991 Simians Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hebdige, Dick 1979 Subcultures: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Jackson, Jean E. 1992 “‘After a while no one believes you’: Real and unreal chronic pain”. In Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, M.J. Good et al. (eds.), 138–168. Berkley: University of California Press. Johnson, Mark 1987 The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise 1988 Body Invaders: Sexuality and The Post Modern Condition. London: Macmillan. Lees, Sue 1993 Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lesko, Nancy 1988 “The curriculum of the body: Lessons from a Catholic high school”. In Forever Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, L.Roman , L.Christian Smith and E. Ellsworth (eds.), 132–143. Lewes: Falmer Press.
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Le Roy, Margaret 1993 “Why women will always hate their bodies”. In Pleasure: the Truth About Female Sexuality. London: Harper Collins. Reprinted in The Melbourne Age Saturday October 16, 1993: 10. Meigs, Anna Stokes 1984 Food, Sex and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Moore, Henrietta 1994 A Passion for Difference. Oxford: Polity Press. Morton, John and Macintyre, Martha 1995 “Persons, bodies, selves, emotions”. Social Analysis: Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 37: 44–66. Nilan, Pam 1992 “Kazzies , DBTs and Tryhards: Categorisations of style in adolescent girls’ talk”. British Journal of Education 13 2): 201–214. Parkin, Frank 1979 Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique. London: Tavistock. Polhemus, Ted 1978 Social Aspects of the Human Body. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Poole, Marilyn. J. 1986 “Choices and constraints: The education of girls”. In Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, N. Grieve and A. Burns (eds.), 105–121. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Sacks, Oliver 1984 A Leg To Stand On. New York: Harper and Row. Samuel, Geoffrey 1990 Mind, Body and Culture: Anthropology and The Biological Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shechner, Richard 1993 The Future of Ritual. London: Routledge. Schilling, Chris 1993 The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Schneider, Mark A. 1993 Culture and Enchantment. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Scott, Jody 1997 “New wave of rockers take on the world”. The Weekend Australian April 19–20: 28. Scott, Sue and Morgan, David 1993 Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body. London: The Falmer Press. Silverstone, Roger, Hirsch, Eric and Morley, David 1994 Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in the Domestic Sphere. London: Routledge.
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Smith, Dorothy 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 1990 Texts, Facts and Femininity. London, New York: Routledge. Sontag, Susan 1979 Illness as Metaphor. New York: Vintage. Spender, Dale 1980 Man MadeLanguage. London: Routledge & Kegan. Stewart, Susan 1984 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Terry, Jennifer and Urla, Jaqueline 1995 Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Taussig, Michael T. 1993 Mimesisand Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Turner, Bryan S. 1984 The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1987 Medical Power and Social Knowledge. London: Sage. 1992 Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor 1982 From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Walker Bynum C. 1987 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Mediaeval Women. Berkley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Waterhouse, Ruth W. 1993 “The inverted gaze”. In Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body. S. Scott and D. Morgan (eds.), 105–121. London: The Falmer Press. Williamson, Judith 1986 Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture. London: Marion Boyars.
Part III
Perspectives on masculinity
Masculinities and men’s health R. W. Connell
Questions about men and boys In recent years, questions about men, boys and masculinity have aroused public interest in many parts of the world (Connell 1998). In the United States there are several “Men’s Movements” offering rival agendas of change. In Australia there have been heated public debates about men’s health, men’s violence and boys’ education. In Germany debate has developed on a number of issues, for instance a survey of men’s attitudes to religion attracting media attention. Scandinavian countries have pioneered social policies on fatherhood, such as the “Dad’s Month” of paid leave for fathers to take care of new babies. Scandinavia has recently appointed a co-ordinator for men’s studies, the first inter-governmental position in the world designed to promote research on men. An international conference in Chile examined masculinities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and drew researchers and activists from as far apart as Brazil and Nicaragua (Valdés and Olavarría 1998). Japan also has seen debates on men and masculinity, and has a recently founded “Men’s Centre”, which publishes papers and books exploring new patterns of masculinity and family life. In Africa, the Journal of Southern African Studies has recently published a special issue of papers on men and masculinities under apartheid and in the transition to democracy, while the South African feminist journal Agenda has published an issue on changing masculinities and new directions for men (Morrell 1998). Concern with questions about masculinity has not just spread geographically, it has also spread across a wide range of topics. In relation to health, for instance, it is now being noticed that men’s gender is relevant to diet, heart disease, industrial accidents, and sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. Educators are discussing not just differences between boys and girls, but the practical detail of how to teach boys in the light of gender issues.
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This upsurge of concern has a specific point of origin: feminism. Though the concerns of feminism are often supposed to be confined to women’s lives, the questions raised by feminism are not just “women’s issues”. They are also questions about men. Most men in modern societies, whatever their opinion of feminism, know that they are under challenge, know that gender relations are changing, and know that they have to come to terms with these changes. On a whole range of issues, from economic inequality to education to domestic violence to child care, it has become steadily more difficult for men to pretend that this is not their business. It is, and they know it. So it is just in this period of history that “men’s movements” have appeared, with agendas for reform of men’s gender practices (for an excellent introduction to these movements see Messner 1998.) There are, of course, many reasons why men, as the more privileged group, might resist change in our society’s gender arrangements. But there are also reasons why men might be willing to change their gender practices: – –
–
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the interests men have in the well-being of the women in their lives — wives, lovers, daughters, mothers, sisters, workmates, friends; the costs to men of maintaining a system of oppression and inequality — including homophobic violence, narrowed emotional life, and evasion of the truth; the direct costs of maintaining patterns of hegemonic masculinity — competition, violence and warfare, road and industrial accidents, stress, a variety of health costs, environmental destruction; loss of many pleasures and important human experiences, denied to most men by the patriarchal system — including caring for babies and young children, nurturing others, and freely expressing emotions.
But of course all these motives for change have to wrestle with the benefits that men in general derive from the current gender system — economic advantage, authority, career openings, prestige, decision-making power, and so on. Consequently there is no mass movement of men for gender reform. But there are many possibilities of change.
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Studying men and masculinities In recent years there has been a surge of research based on a recognition that “masculinity” is not a fixed characteristic of men, but is socially created and changes through history (for an introduction to this research and its history see Connell 1999.) This recognition first crystallized in a social-psychological idea, the concept of a “male sex role”. The “role” concept, as a way of understanding gender issues, emphasises the learning of norms for conduct, what people are socially expected to do. This approach has been popular in applied areas like education and health, because it gives a strategy for how to change people: first change the expectations. But sex role theory is inadequate for understanding diversity in masculinities, and for understanding the power and economic dimensions in gender. Accordingly, recent research on men and masculinities has moved beyond the “sex role” approach. We now have a library of studies in sociology, anthropology, history and cultural studies, in which researchers have traced the construction of masculinity in a particular setting. Examples include: a body-building gym, a workshop, a street gang, a clergyman’s family, a school, a genre of film, a Green movement, a professional athlete’s life, a police station, a media debate. Though each study is different, there are many common themes. The main findings of this research can be summarized in seven points (for detailed documentation see Connell 2000): 1.Multiple masculinities. Different cultures, and different periods of history, create different gender systems — and therefore different patterns of masculinity. In multicultural societies there are certain to be multiple definitions of masculinity. Equally important, more than one kind of masculinity can be found within a single culture. Multiple masculinities can even be found within a single institution, such as a school or workplace. 2.Hierarchy and hegemony. Different masculinities do not just sit side by side, as alternative lifestyles. Rather, they exist in definite relations with each other, often relations of hierarchy and exclusion. In a given culture or institution, there is generally a dominant or “hegemonic” form of masculinity. This is the centre of the local system of gendered power. In modern capitalist societies it is likely to be found in the most powerful institutions — big corporations, the upper levels of the state, and big media and media-driven sport.
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It is very important to notice, however, that the hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity. Many men do not inhabit this form of masculinity — though all men are affected by it and have to work out their relationship with it. 3.Collective masculinities. Masculinities are enacted not only by individuals, but also by groups and institutions — ranging from street gangs to armies and corporations. Masculinities are created and sustained in our shared culture — some of the most powerful images of masculinity, for instance, are found in films, television and video games. Here too we may find multiple masculinities, though there is often severe stereotyping of gender in mass media. 4.Bodies as arenas. Men’s bodies do not fix patterns of masculinity, but they are still very important in the expression of masculinity. The way we practice gender in everyday life constantly involves bodily experience, bodily pleasures, and the vulnerabilities of bodies. Examples range from sport to sex, to the attention given to dress and deportment in middle-class working life. 5.Active construction. Masculinities do not exist prior to social interaction. Rather, they come into existence as people act. Gender is about what we do, more than what we are. Masculinities are actively produced, using the resources available in a given milieu. Since these resources differ a great deal — between people of different generations, different class situations, etc — the strategies different people follow are also likely to differ. 6.Division. Masculinities are not homogeneous, all of a piece. They are likely to be internally divided, sometimes quite contradictory. Men’s lives often embody tensions between contradictory desires or practices. This is perhaps most familiar in sexuality, but is found in other areas of life too. An important example is the tension between career hopes and job demands, on the one hand, and between family ties, love, and the desire for emotional security, on the other. 7.Dynamics. Being actively constructed, and often in tension, masculinities are liable to change. Masculinities are created in specific historical circumstances. They can be contested, reconstructed, or displaced. We can see this in historical research, which traces large-scale changes in images and rhetorics of masculinity; we can also see it in individual life-histories, as particular men and women shift their strategies, relationships, or goals in life. I will now turn to a specific field of social practice in which many of these ideas find application, the field of health. Gender dimensions in health problems and health care have long been recognized by the women’s health movement, but it
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is only recently that the relevance of a gender-relations approach to the health of men has also been recognized (Schofield et al. 2000).
Masculinities and health Like other institutions, the health system has a gender regime — an internal set of gender arrangments — which marks out places for men as well as for women. The health system’s gender regime over the last hundred years has included: – a gender division of labour, assigning specific jobs to men and distinguishing them from “women’s work” such as nursing; – gender ideologies, which contain images of masculinity, interpretations of men’s bodies, beliefs about men’s illnesses and forms of treatment; – services targeted (or tending to focus) on groups of men: such as veteran’s hospitals, occupational health programs, specialties such as cardiology and sports medicine. Until recently there has been no concept that would collect these issues into one basket. That we now have a concept like “men’s health” (Sabo and Gordon 1995) is due first to feminism, then to those who took up the feminist challenge to established ways of thinking. The social-scientific work discussed above, which has followed from the challenge of feminism, documents the plurality and the historicity of masculinities, the importance of gender hierarchies among men, the internal complexity and often contradictory character of masculinities, and the interweaving of masculinities with the structures of class and ethnicity. All these points are of importance for understanding men’s health; but perhaps the most important point of all is the documentation, in a wide range of settings, of the active construction of masculinity. Gender for men is not simply received, from agencies of socialization or from discourses, but is very actively made, in practices both individual and collective, using the resources and strategies available in a given social setting. From bodybuilders in the gym, to managers in the boardroom, to boys in the primary school playground, a whole lot of people are working away very hard to produce masculinities and have them recognized by other people. That is a crucial point for understanding gender/health issues for men. The health effects are not mechanical consequences of either the physiological or the social condition of being a man; they are the products of human practice, of things done, in relation to the gender order.
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In what follows I will suggest how this insight gives us a grip on a number of significant issues about men’s health, and attempts to promote health. It is important to be specific, both about particular health effects and particular masculinities or groups of men. It is too easy to produce sweeping statements about the “male role” as a health hazard, statements which turn out to have more exceptions than applications.
Road accidents Injury on the road is a leading cause of death for young men, and young men’s road accident rates are spectacularly higher than those of other groups. Currently in NSW, young men drivers aged 17–25 are involved in four times as many serious speed-related casualties as young women (Roads and Traffic Authority1997). When a group of young men in a car drink, drive and crash, they are not being driven to it by uncontrollable hormones, or even an uncontrollable male role. They are acting that way in order to be masculine. The dangerous driving is a resource for their making of masculinity. Here the active construction of masculinity is a key to the risk-taking behaviour, and to strategies of prevention. This is a classic case of collective gender practice. The peer group itself, not just the individuals within it, sustains the definition of masculinity and a particular way of pursuing masculine status. Young men’s peer groups, in turn, act in a context of mass media and corporate business which sustain a masculinized “car culture” on a world scale (Walker 1998). Here the globalization of industry and the globalization of gender have gone hand in hand. The massive growth of the motor transport industry is a public health problem at many levels. The fact that it is strongly gendered is not always noticed, but is a key both to its cultural influence and to the pattern of death and injury it produces.
Drug marketing He can’t be a man cos he doesn’t smoke The same cigarette as me…
Thus Mick Jagger in the Rolling Stones classic “Satisfaction”. The allusion was
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understood by everyone: the Marlboro Man campaign had, with stunning success, repositioned a particular brand of cigarettes by attaching it to a fantasy of frontier masculinity. At the time, men were a larger market for nicotine than women were. The mass marketing of drugs, both nicotine and alcohol, provides striking examples of the collective dimension of masculinity. This is seen both in the board-room masculinity of the corporate executives who direct these toxic operations (for an important analysis of corporate masculinity and risk-taking see Messerschmidt 1997), and in the cultural imagery of he-man masculinity which is often used to sell the products. It is not an accident that drug marketing uses highly stereotyped images of gender. Corporate profits depend on drug habits being established in youth; not many mature adults start drug use (whether legal or illegal). The advertising addresses anxieties that are most acute in adolescence, and often attempts to connect drug use with conspicuous displays of masculinity. One common scenario tries to connect alcohol or nicotine with sexual freedom and success in the heterosexual dating scene. Another tries to connect drug use with elite sport. There is a gender logic to the otherwise bizarre connection of nicotine with cricket and alcohol with football, not to mention the persistent promotion of drugs in connection with speeding cars (“motor sport”).
Occupational health and safety The majority of serious industrial injuries are sustained by men, a fact often attributed to men cracking hardy and taking risks. Before we accept the story that industrial safety is a personality problem of men — “the blokes won’t wear helmets” — we should look at why men find themselves in dangerous work situations in the first place. There is an interplay here between gender and capitalism. Our society’s gender division of labour defines as “men’s work” most labouring, most work involving heavy machinery, most transport work, most work involving weapons and dangerous tools, and most work in heavily polluted environments. But these situations are also, generally speaking, working-class workplaces. The average corporate executive does not lose many fingers in drop-forges nor die of black lung. The distribution of power and the nature of work in industrial capitalism are implicated in men’s health outcomes.
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As Donaldson (1991) points out, working-class men have basically one asset to market — their bodily capacity to labour — and their bodies are, over time, consumed by the labour they do. In stark contrast to managers and professionals, by middle age working men’s earning capacity is falling, unless they have won promotion off the shop floor. The relation between workplace and home that requires a husband to be “breadwinner” has locked in these bodily effects. Given these conditions, working men may embrace the processes that consume their bodies, as their way of “doing” masculinity, and claiming some self-respect in the damaging world of wage labour. Working-class culture is full of legendary examples, from the American railway labourer John Henry who died defeating a steam-driven machine, and the miner who loaded Sixteen Tons on the day he was born, to the “gun” shearers of the Australian wool industry. And working-class life is full of all-too-real young men who disdain helmets or earmuffs, truck drivers who live on stimulants, labourers who lift too-heavy weights, machine operators who drink and work, and professional sportsmen who play hurt.
Sport Modern sport is, the historians tell us, a product of urban capitalism, though it expresses some nostalgia for the countryside (the grassy oval, the horses, the seasonal rhythm) and even a kind of revolt against the factory, the machine, and industrial discipline. These impulses produced mass participation in decentralized, amateur and community-based sports (tennis, cricket, surfing, netball), alongside professional sports (boxing, racing) for popular entertainment, with games like football hovering between the two patterns (Gruneau 1999). With the growth of the service-based economy since the midcentury, professionalism has become completely dominant, and most sports have been re-organized on the same model. Sport is now mainly a branch of commercial mass entertainment, with amateur sports a recruitment zone for the real thing — bitterly competitive professional leagues supported by television advertising revenue. Professional sport is overwhelmingly men’s sport, and has become a major arena for the promotion of dominant forms of masculinity. There are several reasons to think that, far from being a health-promoting activity, sport is now a major threat to men’s health:
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(a)Most men participate in commercial sport only as consumers, with the aid of TV, snack foods and beer. The pattern is symbolized by the growing use of the American term “fan” in Australian sport. (b)The small minority who become players in elite commercial sport, under the “win at all costs” ideology dominant there, are subject to high levels of physical stress, psychological stress, frequent injury, and pressure to enhance their performance with drugs. This is a toxic environment, reflected in high levels of physical damage, and shortened life, experienced by professional sportsmen after retirement (Messner and Sabo 1994). (c)The process of commercialization has included in the domain of “sport” certain activities, notably car and motorcycle racing, which have no physical benefits at all. On the contrary they glamorize practices — speeding and aggressive driving — directly implicated in road deaths and injuries among men.
AIDS prevention Western Europe, North America and Australasia have an HIV/AIDS epidemic of a particular pattern, which contrasts with the epidemic in central Africa, and with the newer epidemics of Asia. In the rich countries the majority of HIV infections, and deaths, are among men. Most new infections are among relatively young men, though because of the long incubation period of the virus, most AIDS cases and deaths are not among the young. Gay masculinity is the main form of subordinated masculinity in the Western gender order. The pattern of subordination includes cultural abuse against gays (in which conservative churches have been prominent), institutional discrimination, and violence (mostly from young men, some of them police, attempting to establish their masculine credentials). Partly in response to these pressures, in the course of the “speciation” of sexuality and gender (Weeks 1986), urban gay communities formed during this century. The sexual networks in these communities were pathways for the spread of HIV in cities like Sydney and Melbourne. They were also the basis of the remarkable gay community response in prevention and care. An active and sustained response included building new institutions, undertaking a large-scale community education program to reshape sexual practices, and providing a range of new services. All this was done in the context of epidemic illness, grief, and episodic struggles with politicians, media and the medical profession (Altman 1994; Kippax et al. 1993).
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The AIDS response in gay communities is the most sustained, and possibly the most effective, men’s health initiative in the last two decades. The gay community response also tells us something important about men’s capacities, which is obscured when we focus only on cultural stereotypes of masculinity. Gay communities created a range of groups concerned with psychological support, housing, home-based care, drugs and other treatments. Though women have been part of these initiatives, men have always been prominent in them. They provide a continuing demonstration of men’s capacity for care, and for doing the practical work of caring, which should be widely noticed.
Child care Another area where men’s caring capacities are in question is in the care of young children. There is every reason to think close relations with fathers as well as mothers is good for the health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. We have heard a certain amount recently about boys’ special “father hunger”, a concept about as well supported as the idea that aliens have landed in the Wienerwald. Girls need fathers as much as boys do; good parenting can be done by both women and men; all children are benefited by the broad involvement of both men and women in child care. Two-gender child care diversifies children’s relationships, and helps break down the belief in rigid division between masculine and feminine which is the source of some of the difficulties in growing up. Men’s level of involvement in child care can be dramatically improved by institutional changes which make it economically or culturally easier. Norway, for instance, has a publicly funded parental leave scheme that, since 1993, has reserved four weeks of the leave entitlement as a “father’s quota”, which can only be used by the fathers (there is also a mother’s quota, and a discretionary amount). In 1996, about 70% of the men who had this entitlement did take it up. And 97% of these men said they took it up because they themselves wanted to (Gender Equality Ombudsman 1997). Denmark has adopted a policy of encouraging gender balance in the workforce of child care centres, with considerable success. In some other countries, change in this direction is now under threat by political and media panic over “pedophiles”. Under the cover of child protection, this has turned into an attack on gender reform, child care outside the
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family, and the unmanliness of men who might have an interest in children. It is distressing to see how a rare sexual disorder has been exaggerated into a state of public fear where parents are made constantly anxious, and gay men, school teachers, and child care workers are under constant threat of accusation. It seems likely that more damage is being done by the media hysteria than by the practice of pedophilia itself. Nevertheless, to get the benefits of greater gender balance in early child care we must now develop more explicit responses to pedophilia and more public measures for child protection. This means changing public perceptions of the issue. Most sexual abuse of children does not come from secret rings of “pedophiles”, nor from child care workers or teachers, but from men and youths in the child’s family or neighbourhood — and particularly from teenagers only a few years older than the abused child. Prevention will need to contest patriarchal culture’s assumption of men’s right to sexual pleasure; as well as contesting the power imbalances within families that make abused children vulnerable, and the environments of poverty and violence from which many young perpetrators come.
Peacemaking Violence, direct and indirect, is an important source of injury among men. It follows that peacemaking is an important health strategy. Antiviolence programs addressed to men have now accumulated a certain amount of experience. Much of it concerns violence against women, particularly domestic violence and rape, and some concerns violence against gay men and lesbians. Broad crime-prevention measures are usually gender-unaware. The prevention of violence involves more than coercive “peace-keeping”. Indeed, coercive social discipline tends to stimulate the production of violent masculinities — for instance, school discipline and the juvenile justice system readily become the opponents which underprivileged youth defy, and define themselves against. In the long run, the prevention of violence requires installing nonviolent methods as our usual ways of handling conflict and aggression. UNESCO has nicely summed this up as the task of building “a culture of peace”. We can usefully ask what kinds of masculinities, and what practices among men, would support the creation of a culture of peace.
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This question was addressed by a recent international conference in Oslo (Breines et al. 2000). This conference was able to gather an impressive range of peacebuilding programs, ranging from the “White Ribbon” campaign in Canada about men’s violence against women, through attempts to change occupational cultures of violence among police in countries like El Salvador, to antiviolence work among boys in Australian schools. Some principles for peace-building work with men were formulated at this conference. They include the importance of breaking down gender isolation, the importance of finding respectful ways of addressing boys and men, and the need to keep the structural causes of violence (e.g. poverty or economic dislocation) in view.
Conclusion The new field of “men’s health” can be a vehicle for backlash politics. But it can also be an important opportunity for men to grasp the significance of the perspectives opened up by feminism. This opportunity is certainly open in current discussions of men’s health, where there is considerable emphasis on diversity and on the construction of masculinities. The more the field can be developed within a broad gender perspective, with an emphasis on the interactive and historical character of masculinities, the less chance there is of it degenerating into separatism-for-men and competition with women’s health programs. It is a field in which the kind of cooperation across gender “boundaries” envisaged by feminists like Segal (1997) can be made a practical reality.
Note This paper draws on an essay first published in the Deutsches Jugendinstitut journal Diskurs, 1999 no. 2, and on the author’s plenary address to the second national men’s health conference, Fremantle (Australia), 1997. I gratefully acknowledge the extent to which I have drawn on the ideas of Toni Schofield, Linley Walker and Julian Wood in the course of several collaborative projects.
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References Altman, Dennis 1994 Power and Community: Organizational and Cultural Responses to AIDS. London: Taylor and Francis. Breines, Ingeborg, Connell, Robert and Eide, Ingrid (eds.) 2000 Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective. Paris: UNESCO. Connell, R. W. 1998 “Männer in der Welt: Männlichkeiten und Globalisierung”. Widersprüche 67: 91–105. 1999 Der gemachte Mann. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. 2000 The Men and the Boys. Cambridge: Polity. Donaldson, Mike 1991 Time of Our Lives: Labour and Love in the Working Class. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gender Equality Ombudsman 1997 The Father’s Quota [leaflet]. Oslo. Gruneau, Richard 1999 Class, Sports and Social Development. Second edition. Champaign: Human Kinetics Press. Kippax, Susan, Connell, R. W., Dowsett, G. W. and Crawford, June 1993 Sustaining Safe Sex: Gay Communities Respond to AIDS. London: Falmer. Messerschmidt, James 1997 Crime as Structured Action. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Messner, Michael A. 1998 Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Messner, Michael A. and Sabo, Donald F. 1994 Sex, Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. Freedom CA: Crossing Press. Morrell, Robert 1998 “Of boys and men: masculinity and gender in Southern African studies”. Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (4): 605–630. Roads and Traffic Authority of NSW 1997 “Project outline for research and development into Gender issues in communicating road safety messages to boys”. Tender background document. Sydney: RTA. Sabo, Donald and Gordon, D. F. (eds.) 1995 Men’s Health and Illness: Gender, Power and the Body. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Schofield, Toni, Connell, R. W., Walker, Linley, Wood, Julian F. and Butland, Dianne L. 2000 “Understanding men’s health and illness: A gender-relations approach to policy, research and practice”. Journal of American College Health 48 (6): 247–256. Segal, Lynne 1997 Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. Second edition. London: Virago.
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Valdés, Teresa and Olavarría, José (eds.) 1998 Masculinidades y equidad de género en América Latina. Santiago: FLACSO-Chile. Walker, Linley 1998 “Under the bonnet: car culture, technological dominance and young men of the working class”. Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 3 (2): 23–43. Weeks, Jeffrey 1986 Sexuality. London: Horwood and Tavistock.
Gender and habitus Fundamental securities and crisis tendencies among men Cornelia Behnke and Michael Meuser
1.
Introduction
The french philosopher Elisabeth Badinter (1995) states in a book about male identity, that what was taken for granted over thousands of years has broken down during the last three decades. As a consequence of women’s attempt to define femininity in a new way men would be coerced to do the same with masculinity. There is no doubt that the transformation of the gender order affects men as well as women. But whether men really have lost all the certainties that characterizes the traditonal male way of life is to be questioned. Data gathered in a study of collective orientations of men suggest that what has happened on the side of women is not simply mirror-reflected on the side of men.1 Masculinity is, of course, not a trans-historical phenomenon and cannot be conceptualized in an essentialistic manner. What masculinity — and femininity — consist of is bound to historical, cultural, economical and political conditions. Thus, each attempt to theorize masculinity must be related to the development of the gender order. But, on the other hand, the focus on change should not result in neglecting continuities. Patterns of masculinity, grown and reinforced in the history of male dominance, are embodied in men’s modes of thinking and are inscribed in their routines of action. It is not to be expected that deeply engraved patterns will loose their effect within a period of thirty years. In this article, we present a conceptualization of masculinity which makes it possible to deal with both: with change and with continuities, with agency and with structure. In contrast to the mode of theorizing currently predominant in
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gender research, we stress the importance of structure. Only by doing this the dialectics of determination and emergence, inherent in all social change, can be grasped. We are attempting to determine how men experience their gender and how this is affected by changes in gender-relation. At issue is not how the social order of two and only two genders is being established. Our focus is rather on how males experience this order and how the established order is being reproduced. The aim is to describe being a man as a distinct social practice. First we will discuss an attempt to conceptualize being male by using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. We will not present a fully developed theory, but rather some theoretical reflections which arose in the process of data analysis. In the second part of the paper we will present some data in order to demonstrate in which ways the notion of gender habitus is grounded in our empirical research. The data originate from group discussions with men.
2. Gender as habitus2 Before going into details a methodological note is necessary. The notion of gender habitus does not simply result from a theoretical application of Bourdieu’s categories to the gender-relation. Rather, as became evident during the analysis of our data, the situations of males differ most of all according to the extent to which they are characterized by a gender-bound habitual security. In the perspective of the “grounded theory approach”, reference to Bourdieu represents an attempt to link formation of substantive theory with formal theory (Strauss 1987: 241–8). The base of a habitus are specific social conditions. Actors who have such specific conditions in common tend to experience social situations in a similar way, and to act alike because they have developed a habitus which corresponds to the social conditions they live in. According to Bourdieu (1977: 83) the habitus serves as a “matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions”. It generates typical patterns of how to deal with problems. While a habitus serves as a “sense of social orientations” that is as a “sense of one’s place” in society (Bourdieu 1979: 544) it is not a neutral means of orientation in the social world but rather a mechanism of reproduction of social inequality. Social position is mainly conceived of as social class position by Bourdieu, and with habitus he refers to class habitus in most cases. However, this restricted use of “habitus” is not at all imperative. We think it is feasible to use the
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notion of habitus for the analysis of social action that takes place under several social conditions. As in the case of gender it is not necessary to limit the usage of habitus to those social actions determined by class membership. By doing so, the logic of the notion of habitus will not be affected. Bourdieu addresses the structures of the gender-relation several times in his work, albeit hardly ever in a systematic way. Gender habitus as a notion, as well as a theoretical concern, does not occur in his major work (McCall 1992). However, in an article published several years ago Bourdieu (1990b) deals with male dominance. In this article the topics of concern are the gender order and its structures of inequality. Bourdieu (1990b: 11) speaks of a “gendered and gendering habitus” (“habitus sexué et sexuant”), but he uses the terms gender habitus and male habitus more casually instead of an elaborated theoretical notion. In an interview published recently, Bourdieu (1997: 221–5) states that gender is a fundamental dimension of the habitus. But at the same time he expresses doubts whether it makes sense to use the term gender habitus in the same way as the notion of class habitus. He assumes that the socialization into a social class is most fundamental, even if it is deeply influenced by the genderspecific socialization. Bourdieu concludes that perhaps we do not have the (empirical) instruments for drawing a clear distinction between gender and class habitus: “What we observe is, that there are always societal and gendered constructed habitus” (225). In the article on male dominance Bourdieu relies on data collected during his early ethnographic research in Algeria in the late fifties. These data are also the background for developing his notion of habitus as incorporated social structure. The algerian cabylistic society knows only one principle of social differentiation: gender. All social distinctions, as well as the organization of space and time, are coded according to the distinction male/female (Bourdieu 1977). For Bourdieu the gender-relation serves as a heuristic device for developing core elements of the notion of habitus. As the body in our culture is considered to be the ultimate proof of gender, it is not accidentally that the incorporation of structures is described by refering to the example of the embodiment of the gender-status. We shall return to this point later. The notion of gender, in sociological terms, necessarily consists of more and something different than the possession of certain biological features — or else it would not be a sociological term. In the perspective of a theory of action gender is bound to a distinctive practice and is maintained through such practice. A specific gender is more than the total of those individuals to whom, based on an inspection of their genitals, a definite gender has been assigned
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after birth. Gender exists only insofar as members of one gender act according to principles which are binding for them but not for members of the other gender. In other words: the social existence of gender is bound to a specific habitus, which generates a particular social practice. In a similar perspective Goffman (1979: 8) argues “that what, if anything, characterizes persons as sexclass members is their competence and willingness to sustain an appropriate schedule of displays”. In this context the ethnomethodological concept of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) can be adopted. Doing gender is based upon the gender habitus; as “modus operandi” the habitus guarantees the orderliness of the gender-performance. For the individual this means: an individual possesses a gender (“opus operatum”) due to the habitus insofar as she/he “does” gender (“modus operandi”). As this acting is not — in a voluntaristic sense — optional, but determined by the habitus, gender is not an individual’s characteristic, although it is attributed to the individual. At the same time the habitus is reproduced only by action, which means that gender is not exterior to the individual’s actions. “Gender”, in the words of West and Fenstermaker (1995: 21), “obviously is much more than a role or an individual’s characteristic: it is a mechanism whereby situated social action contributes to the reproduction of social structure”. In our opinion using the concept of habitus, stresses the aspect of reproduction of social structure stronger than this usually is the case in ethnomethodology. Bourdieu (1990a: 56) defines habitus as “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history”. The gender habitus is embodied and naturalized practice par excellence. Stefan Hirschauer (1993: 60) speaks of the body as “fleshy memory of performances”: the body “knows”, in this sense, how to perform in order to be taken as woman or man; gender is habitualized in the body. “The social world constructs the body as a gendered reality and, at the same time, as a memory of gendered categories of perception and appreciation” (Bourdieu 1990b: 11). The gender habitus seems to be incorporated stronger, or more literally, than the class habitus. Attributes of gender in our culture are considered to be natural consequences of dimorphism. Social differentiation builds on the bodies’ different natures. Naturalization of social practice and of historically grown conditions can no easier be brought about than by means of reference to a bodily substratum. That a social practice has become engraved or inscribed in the body in the form of habitualizations is more hidden in the case of gender habitus than in that of class habitus. Making the fact invisible that the gendered body is a
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product of culture constitutes after all the competence of doing gender. The “passing” of transsexuals is a case in point (Garfinkel 1967): the new body has to be produced deliberately to be adaquate for the new gender. But a competent gendered body results only to the extent to which transsexuals forget about bodily means of gender-enactment as having been acquired, and to the extent to which they habitualize gestures, intonation, and positioning in space. A body of this kind appears to be the base of the performance of gender just as like performances were “its natural way of expressing itself” (Hirschauer 1993: 48). Only when a gender habitus develops as a natural bodily practice, appreciation in the chosen gender is guaranteed. The “passing” of transsexuals thus may be understood as an eradication of dispositions engraved in the body into which they have been socialized in the first place. “Passing”, at the same time, requires appropriate new dispositions to be engraved. This process implies the adoption of ways of expressing the habitus which reflect the semantics of the inequality of the sexes. Usually people acquire the gender-appropriate habitus not by intention but through socialisation as a kind of “practical consciousness” (Giddens 1984: 6–7). However, how socialisation operates to assure that individuals develop the “right” habitus is not the topic here. A view on the current sociological debate on gender raises another question. The notion of habitus implies that a given social position corresponds with one and only one habitus. This seems to be in contradictory to the currently predominant use of language in gender research, which has replaced the singular with the plural: instead of femininity and masculinity one speaks of femininities and masculinities. In women’s studies, the white middle-class bias which was predominant in early feminist thought is now criticized. The femininity of a married female member of the white upper class, for instance, is different from that of a black working class woman living as a single parent. We think that using the plural when refering to femininity and masculinity is not opposed to a concept of just one gender habitus in either case. It is rather a matter of different dimensions which are addressed: modes of expression (femininities, masculinities) on the one side and a generating principle (habitus) on the other. This leads to the following hypothesis: Peculiar to each gender (male or female) is just one habitus. But a habitus does not manifest itself in uniformity of actions, attitudes and attributes; rather different variations of femininity and masculinity exist. It has to be clarified in which areas of the everyday-world different expressions of a habitus are based. Thus, social milieus, generation membership, age and family situation must be taken into
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account. As will be shown later, the structural power of the gender habitus is present even in segments of the social world where the male gender role is rejected. This is the dilemma of the “new men”. Two different dimensions are always related to a gender habitus: a strategy of differentiation and a position in the structure of the gender order. Differences arise from the distinction between men and women. Therefore, developing a concept of the male gender habitus has to take into account how being a man is constituted in distinction from being a woman (dimension of difference). And one has to take into account, by establishing this difference, how male dominance develops (dimension of inequality). A century ago, Georg Simmel (1985; see Coser 1977) already showed that gender relation is not a relation of balanced elements but that one of its poles becomes an “absolute”, which determines the relation. “Doing gender” is “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995) and by establishing this difference the semantics of social inequality are used. Refering to Simmel it becomes also obvious that to make the gendered aspects of action invisible is a crucial feature of the “doing gender” of males. A core element of the male habitus is the equation that male equals human. This is not only true for the construction of masculinity in the bourgeois society of the 19th century, but is more or less still valid at the end of the 20th century (Meuser and Lautmann 1997). Dominance, subordination, dependencies and inequalities do not only exist in the relation between the two genders but also in relations between members of the same gender. Robert Connell (1987, 1995) has outlined a concept, with the introduction of the term “hegemonic masculinity”, which helps to grasp relations of power and dependencies between men and women, as well as among men. His point of departure in developing a theory of masculinity is the domination of women by men in society. As the core feature of hegemonic masculinity Connell depicts the predominance of a heterosexual orientation, whereas, at the same time, alternative forms of masculinity, especially homosexuality, are being excluded. Connell argues further, that subordinated males profit as well from the power of the male gender, which is grounded in hegemonic masculinity. Although the hegemonic models of masculinity can be put into effect by only very few men, most males support these models, because they are an effective symbolic means of reproducing existing power relations between the genders. Even those men who are not in a position of enabling wife and children to live a life without financial problems, due to their income, support the model of the male as breadwinner and even consider themselves as such (see Chapter 3.1). In
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this way they contribute to the reproduction of the gender order (Meuser 1995). The notion of hegemonic masculinity stresses the culturally produced agreement among the underprivileged. It is not so much physical power which guarantees the functioning of the gender order. In his discussion of male dominance, Bourdieu (1990b: 10) speaks of symbolic power not only as real as other forms of power, but as the most effective one because “symbolic power imposes a constraint which is accomplished by a forced tribute that the dominated person cannot avoid to pay to the dominating person”. The culturally produced agreement establishes a certain kind of conspiratory relation between “victim” and “offender” (Krais 1993: 232–3). Symbolic power can be maintained only for as long as it is not recognized as such.3 We suggest to conceive of hegemonic masculinity as the core of the male habitus, as the generating principle of doing gender which is in accordance with the male habitus, as generating principle and not as the practice itself. Consequently, the male habitus finds its expression in a great variety of forms: in responsibility for the well-being of the family (as head of a family), in physical violence, in prosocial behaviour (as protector, guardian), or in hypermasculinity (as “Rambo”- or “macho”-type). In addition, hegemonic masculinity is the standard by which other men judge a male’s behaviour — and often also women. Males attempting to escape the habitus are reminded of its normative force. To give an example: in one of the group discussions, a young married worker reported that he always goes to work without taking sandwiches for the coffee-break and that his fellow-workers always ask him, whether his wife never makes any sandwiches for him. This is a comparatively gentle way of reminding the man of the male habitus. But for those “new men” who offensively challenge the male gender role, more massive forms of reminding them are held in reserve, like “wimp” (“Weichei”) for instance. Thus, not only one’s own actions, but also the evaluation of other males’ actions is determined by parameters which are set up as a standard by the habitus. Living in accordance with the male habitus provides the individual with a fundamental security, which we suggest to call habitual security.4 For an individual, this habitual security implies a “self-conscious acceptance of his habitual fate” (Janning 1991: 31), as readily accepted pressure. This security manifests itself in a naturally performed, taken for granted positioning in the gender-relation — as opposed to a positioning brought about in discourse, by reflecting on the male role. Masculinity, as a consequence, is not regarded as a result of intended action. On the contrary, in the case of such an intentional presentation one would already have lost one’s masculinity. Habitual security
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resembles what Bourdieu (1977: 164–71) calls “doxa”; it is grounded in the everyday order of the taken-for-granted and obvious. The more stable the order is, and the more complete actors’ dispositions, i.e. their habitus, reproduce the order’s structures, the stronger the rootedness is. At the end of the 20th century, the gender order in western societies is everything but stable. This may be expected to have consequences in regard to scope and forms of expression of habitual security. But changes in the structures of the social order do not automatically lead to changes of the habitus. Bourdieu (1977: 78), in reference to the persistence and the relative autonomy of the habitus, uses the term “hysteresis-effect”. This leads to the question by which strategies individuals maintain habitual security when traditional structures are in the process of disintegration. The structures of the gender order do not become fragile all at the same time, and not all men are affected in the same way. In the second part of our paper we will now contrast two patterns of male orientation: the pattern of a fundamental habitual security and that of an extreme insecurity. The comparison of these two opposite poles taken out of a broader spectrum will make clear what we have in mind speaking of a male habitus and of habitual security.
3. Being a man as a matter of self-confidence and of doubt The empirical results we are going to refer to now are based on group discussions with various male associations.5 These are so-called “naturally existing groups”, which means that they exist independently of the research situation. The members of a respective group mostly have the same social background, they meet regularly for social, athletic or political purpose. Altogether we did 30 group discussions. The groups we interviewed belong to various social classes and generations. Also the men differ in their current stages of biography. To refer to the gender-political orientations we distinguish between “traditional men”, for example members of gentlemen’s clubs or drinking rounds and socalled “new men groups”. The latter are men who come together for the critically examination of their being a man. The men we refer to in this paper all belong to a generation that has been socialized before the second women’s movement took place. The group discussions were started with the question: “What does it mean to you to be a man?” Although for a lot of men this question seems to be stupid, this start was extremly fruitful, because it refers to a collective experience: the
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membership to the male sex. And because of its vagueness it enabled and it forced each group to choose a topic that was relevant for its own members. On this way the groups determined the themes of the discussion themselves. After this start the men discussed aspects of their every-day-life which seem relevant for their being a man; the main topics were family, work and the group-life itself. Our data do not offer representative results in a statistic sense. We rely on the research strategy of “grounded theory” (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Based on a systematic comparison of all groups we reconstruct patterns of orientations which are typical for certain social backgrounds (Behnke, Loos and Meuser 1998). In interpreting the data we relied on the “documentary method of interpretation” which was developed by Bohnsack (1999; Bohnsack et al. in this volume) as a procedure of qualitative research. Bohnsack refers to Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. 3.1 Fundamental securities First we refer to three groups that represent men with a secure masculine habitus: On the one hand there are two gentlemen’s clubs. One of them is very exclusive. Its members work as managers or as freelances. The members of the second club are either self-employed or local dignitaries or managers of middleclass companies. On the other hand there is a group of skilled workers who meet every evening in their favourite pub. All these men take their gender affiliation for granted, so they see no reason why they should discuss it. Asking for the meaning of being a man provokes reactions of amazement and objection. Most of the men assured us that this was a completely stupid question, because in their every-day-life being a man is not a topic of reflection. Therefore the members of one of the gentlemen’s clubs explain to us, that they have never before thought about this question. To belong to the male gender is a natural fact which cannot be influenced by anyone. Being a man is simply a fact that has to be accepted and cannot be discussed: Also erstmal is das gar nich zu diskutieren weil die Entscheidung ob wir Mann oder Frau sind durch die Natur gefällt worden is und durch keine andern ne. (Translation: Well first there is no use to argue about because the decision whether we are a man or a woman was made by nature and by no one else).
Therefore the discussions of these men do not focus on the problems of being a man, as it was the case in the “new men” groups, we will refer to later. These
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men told us about the different dimensions of every-day life in which being a man is of relevance. For the drinking round mates as well as for the members of the exclusive gentlemen’s club is their work an inexhaustible source of masculine self-consciousness. From the point of view of these men it is the task of a man to earn the living for his family. Out of this financial responsibility grows some kind of “higher responsibility”. One of the members defines it as follows:6 In dem Augenblick wo ich aus (…) den Kinderschuhen raus bin (…) und angefangen habe in den Beruf zu gehen, (…) bin ich für Frau und Kinder verantwortlich (…) von A bis Z. (From the moment on when I was (…) no longer a child (…) and started to work (…) I am responsible for my wife and my children (…) from A to Z.)
The “higher responsibility” is therefore a characteristic of the adult man who is tied up in marriage and profession. Professional success plays an important part in the lives of men of the upper middle-class. The public status of a family depends on the prestige of the man’s profession and on his professional smartness. The profession of a woman — a great part of wives work full-time or part-time — has no influence on the status of the family, it can even be contraproductive. Those clubmembers, who see themselves as local dignitaries, lay great emphasize in the advantages of the genderspecific division of labour. The man who wants to be successful in business is dependant on an “intact family life” guaranteed by his wife. The housewife, who creates a recreative atmosphere is — in the eyes of the men — of much higher value than a woman, who is successful in her profession: Das is im Vergleich von ner äh mit ner Vielfalt einer Hausfrau gar nich in Einklang zu bringen (.) weil diese diese Dinge die eine Hausfrau und Ehefrau leistet (.) viel viel viel mehr sind als alles andre äh diejenige die sagt ich bin wie mein Mann äh Ärztin sieht das rein materiell (…) ich freu mich wenn ich abends nach Hause geh (.) so das alles is doch ne Sache (.) man nennt das so unter Schlagwort Gemütlichkeit nech wer schafft das denn das schafft doch die Frau. (Comparing this with the variety of the housewife’s work you cannot bring this into line (.) because these things a housewife and married woman can do (.) are much much much more worth than anything else. The woman who says I am a doctor as my husband regards this in a material way (…) I always look forward to coming home in the evening (.) you know (.) I think one calls it cosy atmosphere anyway. Who does this. It’s the woman who does it.)
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In the opinion of the men who are established in profession and society, man and woman represent two opposite spheres: the man stands fo the material or even the profane things; he lives in a world of profit, money and success, whereas the woman represents the idealistic, harmonious and delightful side of life. The ideal woman who is the perfect completion of the man is considered to be the busy housewife and mother who makes the hard and strenuous life of the man a little bit easier. The emotional atmosphere the woman creates is therefore especially important for the men. We find the same certainty of definition, as far as the differences between the two genders are concerned, among the men of the lower class. The group of workers who meet every evening in the pub defines straight away at the beginning of the discussion what a man is: the man is the provider and the head of the family. It is very interesting to notice that the man is still considered to be the provider, even if the woman is the only one who earns money in the family. The workers use the terms “man” and “provider” like synonyms: the man is automatically considered to be the provider, because he is the man. This definition is unchangeable, even if the function of the provider cannot be fullfilled in practice. The title “head of the family” is explained in a similar way. Even if the woman is really included in processes of decision the man can always be sure of his status as chief — this time with an appeal to tradition: “It has always been the man”. This means, even if conjugal relations are imprinted with equality, the men relate to terms which implicate masculine dominance if they have to describe themselves. For the workers the differences between man and woman are evident, because they are of anatomic nature. From their point of view this leads to different activities of the two sexes. The one who ignores these “natural facts” and, for instance, assigns a woman for railing construction is — in the eyes of the men — a complete idiot. Und dann soll da son Mädel son Stück Geländer da hochziehn und das geht eigentlich von der Kraft schon gar nich (.) das is völlich unmöglich die kriecht das Ding da einfach nich hoch. (And there is this girl, and she has to pull up this railing and this doesn’t work because it is beyond her strength (.) this is completely impossible, she can’t pull this up in no way.)
In the eyes of these men differences in the habitual presentation of women and men are a result of physical conditions. For instance, a woman, who tries to walk like John Wayne, makes a fool out of herself, because she is not really able to walk like a man. The attempt to imitate the masculine habitus looks, in the eyes of the men, like some kind of travesty.
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Even though, for the men of the middle-class as well as for the workers, being a man is a fact that has not to be made sure of, the homosocial community of men fulfills an important function for them: it contributes to validating their masculinity. For the successful men of the middle-class the club is an important place for recreation. In the club the men are amomg themselves and can forget the strain of business and family life. They believe that communication with women can be so strenuous that men need to recreate among men as the following quotation shows: Cm:
Bm: Cm: (Cm:
Bm: Cm:
Ich bin eigentlich auch immer ganz froh so inner reinen Männergesellschaft zu sein weil ich ja im durch meinen Beruf (1) ja zu 95% auch mit Frauen zu tun habe und irgendwann reichts einem nech ho ein hartes Urteil nech nein, das is kein hartes Urteil das is einfach so Usually I am quite glad to be among men because in my profession (1) 95% of the people I have to do with are women and there comes a time when you have enough ho hard words no not at all this is simply a pure fact)
The gender homogenous group stands for authenticity. The men do not have to consider feminine feelings and sensitivities. They can communicate in whatever form or content they like. With the words of a participant, they can be “cheerful and relaxed”. The favourite pub has a similar function for the workers. The pub is a place where one can have amusement and small talk among men. One does not visit a pub in order to have “profound conversation”, explains one of the workers, but to “chat” and to “make nonsense”. In both cases the men’s community is a positive counterweight, a compensation for the institutionalized functions in conjugal and business life. The change of society, feministic demands, as well as administrative measures taken to support women, are being noticed by the men of both classes. Nevertheless it has little effect on the way they see themselves as men. This is to be explained by the fact that demands for emancipation are not brought to the men by significant others. Though the men watch the discources in the media these discourses have no effects on the arrangements with their partners. The relationship to the partner represents a safe and never-changing background, at least in the eyes of the men. However heated the public discussions may grow, conjugal arrangements and the division of labour in relationships are never put to the debate.
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It would be a mistake to allege that the men would ignore changes in the relation of the genders or displace them. Popular german feminists like for example Alice Schwarzer are known and politics of positive discrimination are being noticed and discussed. The public problems however have no practical relevance for the men in their every-day lives. For instance, the men have no objections if some of the members of their sex become housemen. But in their own longlasting and established relationships such a change of parts would simply be a curiousity. Positive discriminations, to take another example, do not seem to be very threatening, if one is settled in the middle-class management or successfully leads a company of one’s own. In other words: Inspite of all the public debates there is little reason for those men to make a problem of their being a man. They even accept their “fate” as man with a lot of self-consciousness. 3.2 Crisis tendencies The men who show crisis tendencies, as far as their own gender status is concerned, are in a minority compared with the men who are secure in their habitus. Most of these men are or have been linked to the so-called “men’s movement”. It is characteristic for them to have an academical background and a left-wing liberal attitude to politics. Most of them define explicitely a profeminist anti-patriarchal demand and take the postulations of the women’s movement for serious. The following three groups, which we will refer to as examples, are so-called “men groups” whose members meet in order to talk about their being a man or their roles as men. Masculinity and being a man is here in the centre of interest whenever the groups meet. This is clearly shown in the reaction of the men when we asked them about the significance of being a man. Most of the other men considered this question to be very strange, but for these men it is extremely important. It is exactly the question the men have been trying to work out for a long time. Nevertheless or better therefore it is difficult to find an answer. Being a man cannot be defined anymore. One group tells us that they would have less problems to define what a woman is. The insecurities concerning their own gender status is explained by them with a hint to the changes “during the last fucking 30 years”. The men’s efforts to analyse the contents of masculinity are highly connected with the women’s movement — and not only in a temporal way. One of the participants defines this as follows:
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Es hat also in den letzten Jahren Phasen gegeben wo (2) es für mich schwieriger war da (.) offen zu zu stehen zu dem was es heißt Mann zu sein weil (räuspern) hm ne klare Position dazu dann auch immer heißt daß man zumindest in den Kreisen in denen ich zu der Zeit verkehrte automatisch in einen Topf geworfen wurde mit denen die hm Kriege führen mit denen die (.) potentiell Frauen vergewaltigen (.) hm alles was mit Gewalttätigkeit zu tun hat (…) und äh das hat es mir zumindest sehr schwer getan dazu auch zu stehen und ich fühlte mich immer mit dem Rücken an der Wand. (During the last (.) years there have been phases where (2) it was for me more difficult (.) to stand up in public for what it means to be a man, ‘cause a clear position always means that one is at least in the circles that I used to belong to immediately lumped together with those who make wars with those who (.) potentially rape women (.) with everything that has something to do with violence (…) and this made it very hard for me at least to stand up for it and I always stand with my back at the wall.)
For these men the power of definition in retrospect was exclusively in the hands of the women. Masculinity and being a man were imprinted with negative definitions. Each single man represented inevitably violence and aggression. Being involved in circles of women’s movement meant being confronted with a certain not flattering image of masculinity. The men of this surroundings tried to fulfill the demands of the women’s movement and to work against the presented negative blueprint of masculinity. A process, which was connected with many difficulties and unintended side-effects. As in these circles everything that has something to do with masculinity has become discredited, every action of a male was a priori under suspicion. Therefore the men were confronted with the task to critically examine all their activities with regard to its meaning in terms of gender roles. The self-reflection is virtually institutionalized. In the course of these self-reflections it even becomes more and more unclear what it means to be a man. This unclearness leads to strong ambivalences which are documented in the following quotation: Und das ist irgendwas, wo ich denke, das möchte ich lernen quasi das Negative so ungefähr in Anführungsstrichen, also diese Konfrontation oder dieses Machomäßige zu können, oder so was, das möchte ich lernen. (And this is something I think I want to learn, so to say, in quotation marks, the negative, that means to be ready for this confrontation or this macho-like behaviour or something like that. That is what I want to learn.)
On the one hand a “behaviour like Rambo or a Macho”, this means every form of hyper-masculinity, is clearly rejected. On the other hand there is no doubt
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that the attractivity of masculine behaviour is increasing. The critisized ”Macho” is provided with a kind of self-confidence and sovereignty that the members of the new-men groups would like to possess again as well. The desire of these men is not focussed on the ruthless acting of the “Macho”, but on the macho-like behaving, and this means on the doubtlessly masculine habitus. It is exactly this habitual security which the new-men groups notice about other men and which they are increasingly missing. Their failing of self-confidence as male has gone so far that one of the participants asks himself whether he could not be a woman as well. Thus the men group gets a double function: On the one hand their self-reflections cause the men to keep their distance from the traditional man’s role. On the other hand they try, again by self-reflection, to reassure themselves of their own masculinity. In this field of tension the therapist of one of the participants is perceived as a shining example. According to the participants this therapist looks “like a ski-instructor”, he wears a beard and is very sturdy, a real “picture of a man”. But at the same time he is a reflecting man. The therapist represents the ideal image of the group: A definite and secure masculine habitus together with the ability of reflection. But it is not accidentially that the new men groups fail to adopt this combination for themselves. The reflection of the admired therapist is of professional nature, it is part of his profession. The reflection of the men group on the contrary is focussed on their own way of being a man. The desired habitual security changes into an intended act and because of this it is not achieved. The imposed processes of reflection are therefore an extremely unsatisfying experience. One man desribes this as follows: Wenn ich so während dieser ganzen Gespräche, die wir jetzt hier geführt haben, jetzt in den letzten Wochen mal im Kreis geguckt habe, habe ich also eigentlich immer nur ganz furchtbar ernste Gesichter gesehen und leidvoll teilweise in sich zusammengesunkene Männer, und das kotzt mich an, das muß ich ganz ehrlich sagen, das kotzt mich wirklich an. (When I looked around during the last weeks, during all these talks we did here I always saw serious and sorrowful faces and broken down men, and this makes me sick. And this is my honest opinion, this really makes me sick.)
The critical examination of being a man makes it impossible to act like a man in a natural way. It is indicated in the “movement circles” to anticipate assumed female demands which leads to a sort of permanent self-censorship. Another frustrating experience for these men is that their efforts to fulfill the demands of the women’s movement are not necessarily honoured. On the
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contrary: according to their experience, a correct genderpolitical behaviour creates a type of man who is not very attractive for women. An example for such a failure is the attempt of feminisation. The men who tried to act as “feminine” as possible found out that this seems to be in no way attractive for women. To make it even worse: such behaviour encourages titles such as wimp and other names. Experiences like these increase the feeling of insecurity: on the one hand it is indicated to keep the distance to “typical masculine” behaviour. On the other hand, to copy feminine behaviour is apparently not what a woman likes. These attempts show clearly that the men have a loss of positive ideas of masculinity. They install continuous reflections in order not to be identified with the generalized negative type of man. The genderpolitical attitude is realized in form of symbolic presentations of masculine guilt and feminine innocence. It is reported that on the height of genderpolitical argumentations “buses full of men” went to the Netherlands to have themselves sterilized. This did not only happen for the purpose of contraception, but rather in order to demonstrate a “politically correct” attitude. In this context the men talk explicitly of “sin and reparation”. The decisive difference to those men who were given their being a man as a matter of course lies in the way of confrontation with feministic demands. For the managers and self-employed as well as for the skilled workers the feminist discourses are mainly conveyed by the media. The new-men groups however have to face feminist demands and orders in form of significant others. The men are at home in circles of the women’s movement, their partners or wives represent the “moral of the women’s movement”. Problems in the relationship are dealt with on an abstract and social-critical level. Genderpolitical subjects, for instance making a problem of being a man, are common topics in the relationship and among friends. The men group serves as a forum for the handling of the incriminated man. There the individual reflection is completed by the collective one. Yet the problem is not diminished but even magnified. In contrast to the men’s community in the club or in the pub the men group is no place of recreation, where the man can recover from the difficulties of his everyday-life with women. The women are always present in a symbolic way, the problems of the gender relation are always in the center of interest. The attempt to design a new kind of masculinity by joint reflection fails, because in the course of reflection the lines of whatever should be masculine become more and more vague. What the men experience is something they define as “deficit of masculine identification”. This feeling is said to be extremely frustrating. Therefore a tendency to break with the demands of the women’s movement and to search for “genuine
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masculine potentials” instead is being noticed. A reflective attitude facing the own gender affiliation can obviously not be kept up in the long run. The vanishing of natural obviousness increases the desire for a solid inner core: a definitively masculine core. One man explains, after years of reflective workingout in the men group: Mittlerweile bedeutet Mannsein für mich eine Herausforderung (…) Es ist erst einmal mein Ziel, mein Mannsein, das verschüttet war, zu entdecken. (In the meantime being a man has become a challenge for me (…) First of all I aim at discovering my masculinity, that has been buried for so long.)
4. Conclusion According to our data, we can conclude that crisis tendencies and serious insecurities are only to be observed among a specific type of men, which is easy to determine. These males are members of the educated class. According to Bourdieu (1983): these men own a lot of cultural capital. Men who possess a lot of economic capital, especially members of society’s functional elite, typically are not found among male consciousness-raising groups. The same applies to the groups of working-class men. We do not state that the possession of cultural capital inevitably leads to a loss of habitual security. However, it seems that only on this basis feelings of uncertainty grow. Focusing on the backgrounds in the lifeworld of these men, the main reason seems to be the state of their marriage or partnership. The private relationships of the “new men” obviously are characterized by an ongoing discourse in the form of institutionalized reflexivity. In this discourse virtually all actions of the males are framed genderpolitically. This is paradigmatically shown in the example of the group of men who went to the Netherlands to have themselves sterilized. The taken-forgrantedness of the male habitus is fading away or even lost. From a requisite it has turned into a task. As mentioned before, the “new men” who are feeling unsure of themselves are a minority. Nevertheless, focusing on these men is highly instructive in a gender-sociological perspective. It shows that even within a world of changing masculinities continuities are to be observed (Meuser 1999a). The “new man”, mentioned above, who tries to discover a buried masculinity is a prototype of this “simultaneousness within the dissimultaneousness”. The new men’s efforts to define masculinity in a new way are captured in the dialectics of
170 Cornelia Behnke and Michael Meuser
determination and emergence. In order to define themselves as men they cannot avoid to rely on the symbolic resources provided by the established cultural order. On the other hand they suffer from the norms and expectancies connected with this order. According to the dialectics of determination and emergence, these men’s attempts of developing a new order make it possible for the observer to get insight into the structures of the old order. The yearning of the “new men” for habitual security, as symbolized in figures like Rambo or macho, reveal that gender is more than a social role. What is documented in the ambivalences of these men, is the experience of the power of the habitus. It becomes obvious that one cannot escape from the habitus by reflection. According to Bourdieu (1990b: 13), “the inertia of the habitus cannot be canceled by a simple effort of will founded on liberating awareness.” At least partially, the men in the men’s groups have a sense for this. One group states resignedly: “We do not get beyond the talking”. According to these men’s self image, they try to transcend the male gender role. However, they do not fail because of the gender role but because of the habitus as incorporated second nature. It is not accidentally that among these men the body gets an importance as a demonstrative gender sign, which is not the case for those men who live in habitual security. Actually, the “new men” do not question the male role, but the male habitus. This explains the high degree of confusion, of existential uncertainty and the loss of orientation which can sometimes be observed. Insofar as gender is virtually omnirelevant for these men uncertainty tends to become a basic experience. In the first part of the article we argued that the pattern of hegemonic masculinity has to be seen as the generating principle of the male habitus. The impact of this principle can be observed among both types of men, among those living in habitual security and among those who experience fundamental insecurities. Looking at the latter type, it is noticeable that these men are impressed by male figures, which not only demonstrate virility in a bodily visible manner but also symbolize male dominance. Among the former type of men hegemony is either a natural practice or the taken-for-granted background of self-perception. In this case, hegemonic masculinity is part of the habitual routine, not accomplished intentionally but second nature. In a certain sense the men know this. In one group discussion it is stated that a man who at home is forced to demonstrate that he is the man has lost his masculinity: “If one really has a certain self-confidence originally, he does not need to parade the man. He is the man.”
Gender and habitus
Theorizing masculinity with regard to the notion of habitus helps to uncover continuities within a landscape of changing gender relations. Of course, at the end of the 20th century, male dominance, which is traditionally taken for granted, is more and more challenged, must be defended and justified. And it is also a matter of fact that, due to the detraditionalization of gender relations, the number and the variety of images of masculinity have grown (Meuser 1998). Nevertheless, these developments do not constitute a “homo optionis” in the postmodern sense. It is not a question of free choice which pattern of masculinity guides the doing gender of a man. Patterns of masculinity, so to say, are not put on display in a postmodern supermarket of lifestyles to be selected by decision. Which type of masculinity a man accomplishes mainly depends on his social affiliations: to a specific social milieu, class, race and others (Meuser and Behnke 1998; Meuser 1999b). And behind the variety of patterns of masculinity the male habitus as a fundamental and generating principle ensures that the social category “man” and masculinity as a distinct and distinctive social mode of existence and practice are not (yet) vanishing.
Notes 1. The study was conducted from 1993 to 1997 at the university of Bremen. It was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The heading was “Collective orientations of men and changes in gender-relations” (Behnke 1997; Loos 1999; Meuser 1998). 2. For a larger, more detailed description see Meuser (1998: Chapter 4). 3. One important impact of feminism consists of deconstructing male symbolic power. A prominent example is Gilligan’s (1982) thesis that the moral standards of justice that dominate western culture are not gender-neutral, but specific male notions of justice. 4. Anthony Giddens (1991: 92) uses the term “ontological security” to refer to “the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action”. Psychologicaly spoken it is a kind of basic trust. Habitual security is a more specific term. It refers to a specific realm of acting in the social world, marked by a specific social order, and to the respective part of a person’s self-identity; gender order and gender identity for instance. It is rooted in a collective unconscious. Insofar as a person belongs to more than one social collective (class, gender, generation and others) she or he develops more than one habitual security — or insecurity. 5. The method of group discussion has proven to be suitable for the reconstruction of collective orientations (see Bohnsack 1999; Bohnsack et al. in this volume). 6. Within the transcriptions, “(…)” indicates omissions, “(.)” stands for a short pause, “(1)” for a pause of one second, etc. Underlining means a stressed utterance. With Am, Bm, Cm etc. the members of the group are indicated. Translating the german original into english, we tried to preserve the colloquial language as far as possible.
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References Badinter, Elisabeth 1995 XY: On Masculine Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. Behnke, Cornelia 1997 “Frauen sind wie andere Planeten: Das Geschlechterverhältnis aus männlicher Sicht. Frankfurt a.M and New York: Campus. Behnke, Cornelia, Loos, Peter and Meuser, Michael 1998 “Habitualisierte Männlichkeit: Existentielle Hintergründe kollektiver Orientierungen von Männern”. In Biographieforschung und Kulturanalyse: Transdisziplinäre Zugänge qualitativer Forschung, R. Bohnsack and W. Marotzki (eds.), 225–242. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979 La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 1983 “The forms of capital”. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, J. G. Richardson (ed.). New York: Greenwood Press. 1990a The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1990b “La domination masculine”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 84: 2–31. 1997 “Eine sanfte Gewalt: Pierre Bourdieu im Gespräch mit Irene Dölling und Maragareta Steinrücke”. In Ein alltägliches Spiel: Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der sozialen Praxis, I. Dölling and B. Krais (eds.), 218–230. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Connell, R.W. 1987 Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1995 Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coser, Lewis 1977 “Georg Simmel’s neglected contribution to the sociology of women”. Signs 2: 869–876. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Giddens, Anthony 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1991 The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilligan, Carol 1982 In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glaser, Barney and Strauss, Anselm 1967 The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine.
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Goffman, Erving 1979 Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row. Hirschauer, Stefan 1993 Die soziale Konstruktion der Transsexualität: Über die Medizin und den Geschlechtswechsel. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Janning, Frank 1991 Pierre Bourdieus Theorie der Praxis: Analyse und Kritik der konzeptionellen Grundlegung einer praxeologischen Soziologie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Krais, Beate 1993 “Geschlechterverhältnis und symbolische Gewalt”. In Praxis und Ästhetik: Neue Perspektiven im Denken Pierre Bourdieus, G. Gebauer and C. Wulf (eds.), 208–250. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Loos, Peter 1999 Zwischen pragmatischer und moralischer Ordnung: Der männliche Blick auf das Geschlechterverhältnis im Milieuvergleich.. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. McCall, Leslie 1992 “Does gender fit? Bourdieu, feminism, and the conception of social order”. Theory and Society 21: 837–867. Meuser, Michael 1995 “Geschlechterverhältnisse und Maskulinitäten: Eine wissenssoziologische Perpektive”. In Neue Horizonte? Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung über Geschlechter und Geschlechterverhältnisse, L. C. Armbruster, U. Müller and M. Stein-Hilbers (eds.), 107–134. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. 1998 Geschlecht und Männlichkeit: Soziologische Theorie und kulturelle Deutungsmuster. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. 1999a “Modernized masculinities? Continuities, challenges and changes in men’s lives”. In Among Men:Moulding Masculinities. Vol. 1, S. Ervoe and T. Johansson (eds.). Aldershot: Ashgate. 1999b “Multioptionale Männlichkeiten? Handlungsspielräume und habituelle Dispositionen”. In Grenzenlose Gesellschaft? Vol. 2, C. Honegger, S. Hradil and F. Traxler (eds.), 151–165. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Meuser, Michael and Behnke, Cornelia 1998 “Tausendundeine Männlichkeit? Männlichkeitsmuster und sozialstrukturelle Einbindungen”. Widersprüche 18 (67): 7–25. Meuser, Michael and Lautmann, Rüdiger 1997 “‘Menschen und Frauen’. Die Geschlechtslosigkeit des Mannes in der Moderne”. In Sie und Er: Frauenmacht und Männerherrschaft im Kulturvergleich. Vol. 2, G. Völger (ed.), 253–257. Köln: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum für Völkerkunde. Simmel, Georg 1985 Schriften zur Philosophie und Soziologie der Geschlechter. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Strauss, Anselm L. 1987 Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, Candace and Fenstermaker, Sarah 1995 “Doing difference”. Gender & Society 9: 8–37.
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West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don H. 1987 “Doing gender”. Gender & Society 1: 125–151.
“Male honor” Towards an understanding of the construction of gender relations among youths of Turkish origin* Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
1.
Introduction and preliminary methodological remarks
We analyzed the discourses of young men and women of Turkish origin living in Germany in the context of a more extensive research project. In the present study as well as in prior studies, we focus on the reconstruction of collective orientation patterns which are not identical to the communicative intents of the individual participants in the discourse. The methods employed in this study include primarily analyses of group discussions but also biographical interviews and participant observation.1 For a more precise identification of our primary interests, we distinguish between different levels or types of meaning implied in the texts. We briefly explain our methodological approach regarding these levels of meaning (1.1.). We will then discuss the methodological conditions for our analysis of gender-specific communication structures, or more exactly: gender-specific “experiential spaces” (1.2.). We also explain the significance of group discussions for the reconstruction of these collective experiential spaces and orientation patterns (1.3.). In parts (2.) and (3.) we deal with the gender-specific experiential spaces of three peer-groups of young men of Turkish origin. As their socialization occurred in the context of migration, all three groups are faced with a comparable (gender-typical) problem: that of “male honor”. They manage it in a milieu-typical way. Finally (4.), a group of young women of Turkish origin is also included in the analysis. This allows a comparison of differences in the gender-typical way of managing the male habitus of honor.
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1.1 Different types of meaning in discourse analysis John Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz distinguish two levels of meaning in principle: “referential meaning” and “interpretation”. “We must draw a basic distinction between meaning, i.e. context free semantic information … on the one hand, and interpretation, i.e. the situated assessment of intent on the other” (Gumperz 1982a: 207). “Interpretation”, as it is used by Gumperz and CookGumperz, aims at reconstructing the communicative intents of the speakers, the discourse participants. On the other hand Gumperz elaborates very clearly that “What is to be interpreted must first be created through interaction, before interpretation can begin.” (Gumperz 1982a: 206). In this respect Gumperz criticizes above all the fact that “linguistic pragmaticists” limit themselves to “single sentences or very brief exchanges”. The relationship between the emphasis on the interactive and cooperative character of the meaning being interpreted and the communicative intent of individual speakers is not clear-cut. Goffman also asserts that single utterances obtain their meaning within the context of the reactions of the conversation participants, that even the speakers can “retroactively” be “created” by the reactions of the others (Goffman 1981: 47f.). Ultimately, however, Goffman’s conversation analysis — as well as his entire interaction theory — remains bound to the communicative intent of the speakers involved or to their (intentional) self-presentation: “A central function of talk is to provide the talker with some means of taking up a self-saving-alignment” (Goffman 1974: 501). To this end the speaker, in his function as “animator” (in contrast to his function as “principal” in reference to “referential meaning”), must appropriately “frame” the conversation. In his reflections on contextualization, framing or social grounding (“footing”) of conversations, Goffman also deals with the analysis of the “participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self” (1981: 127). Here again the speakers are involved as individuals who present themselves in a favorable light, that is, in the ‘light’ determined by the situation or institution. Goffman’s ultimate concern is their individual identity. In this respect John Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz’s approach in their empirical studies is more diversified. They focus not only on the individual, but also — and to a large extent — on collective identities. The “communicative styles” which they examine and especially the “conversational cues”, do not just have — as Goffman proposes — the function of signaling and negotiating the communicative intents (whether it may be at the level of activity types or at the local level, i.e. that of “assessments of illocutionary force”, Gumperz 1992: 46).
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Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz demonstrate in their analyses of empirical data that “conversational cues” also have the function of identifying and establishing membership in groups, collectives and milieus. Conversational cues do not necessarily imply a communicative intent on the part of the participants — as we contend. Particularly with regard to the identification of ethnic membership, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz have observed “that, at the beginning of each conversation, there is an introductory phase when, (…) interpersonal relationships are negotiated and participants probe for common experiences or, some evidence of shared perception. (…) The ability to establish a common rhythm is a function, among other factors, of similarity in ethnic background.” (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 1981: 436). Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz show that those aspects of the synchronization of speech rhythm, voice quality, intonation, and stress placement, i.e. prosody and turn-taking, which are characterized as “common rhythm”, are connected with “common experiences” and “similarities in social background”. In our own analyses, which are situated predominantly at the content-semantic level, we shall attempt to elaborate on these “common experiences” and the similarities in the socialization history connected with them. Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz have especially examined situations in which the establishment of a “common rhythm” or “attunement” (Gumperz 1992: 42) does not succeed — for example in interview situations between white and Afro-Americans (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 1981: 439ff.) or in a communication between passengers and a West-Indian bus driver in London who, because of his intonation, is considered to be unfriendly (see Gumperz 1982b). The works of Gumperz also include however examples of conversations in which the establishment of a “common rhythm” or “attunement” does succeed, for example, between students of the same social or ethnic origin, i.e. who have similarities in social background and common experiences. In our investigations we describe such cases as a belonging to a common or “conjunctive experiential space” (“konjunktiver Erfahrungsraum”) (Mannheim 1982). We are interested in this “conjunctive experiential space” particularly with regard to its content-semantic characteristics, i.e. its “conjunctive” or collective orientations. These collective orientations, which are expressed or ‘emerge’ in discourses, cannot be attributed to the communicative intents of the individual speaker. They are not found at the level of the “intended expressive meaning” (“intendierter Ausdruckssinn”) of the individual speaker, to use Karl Mannheim’s (1952) term. Yet rather stocks of collective knowledge resulting from similarities in socialization history are represented and revealed in these discourses.
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Thus according to Karl Mannheim (1952) three types of meaning can be distinguished: – “immanent meaning” which corresponds to “referential meaning” – “intended expressive meaning” — the communicative intent of the individual participant – “documentary meaning” — that collective meaning which transcends and simultaneously integrates individual utterances Distinguishing between “intended expressive meaning” and “documentary meaning” not only enables us to differentiate between individual and collective orientations. It is also important, because the level of documentary meaning constitutes the primordial level of meaning, i.e. the habitualized processes of interaction. Subjective intents begin to establish themselves only through the internalization of habitualized processes.2 The courses which habitualized interaction, representation and discourse take, emerge from a generative principle, a modus operandi of orientation patterns in the sense of habitus. The reconstruction of this habitus is the object of documentary interpretation. The distinction between “documentary meaning” and “intended expressive meaning” cannot however be understood in terms of a dichotomization or polarization of “conscious” or “subjective-intentional” meaning on the one hand and “latent” or “objective” meaning on the other hand.3 Instead one can differentiate gradually graded levels of reflexive self-assurance of the documentary meaning on the part of the subjects themselves. The (praxeologically grounded) sociology of knowledge does not distinguish between a “completely transparent consciousness” and a “totally opaque consciousness”, as Bourdieu (1972: 207) puts it in reference to the concept of habitus. Proceeding according to an ‘allor-none’ maxim simply does not work. Therefore we are not interested in the analysis of “objective” or “latent” structures of meaning, but rather in analyzing experiential knowledge, “experiential spaces”, i.e. stocks of knowledge embedded in habitualization. 1.2 Gender-specific experiential spaces and habitus Specific experiential spaces establish the focus of the discourse or make up its primary frame of reference depending on which aspects of socialization history the participants share. Thus it is possible, to distinguish experiential spaces characteristic of a given gender, generation, milieu (and of migrational background as well). Our concept of “gender-specific experiential spaces” nearly corresponds to that which Kotthoff (1992: 259), drawing on Tannen (1990),
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calls gendered “communication cultures”. While Kotthoff places emphasis on formal structures as defined by “communicative styles”, we are also and primarily interested in those (collective) orientations and structures of habitual action and those common experiences which become the subject of communication. Orientation patterns and collective habitus are revealed chiefly in descriptions and stories whose metaphoric content is worth exploring. These accounts are interactively articulated through specific forms of mutual interactive reference, through specific forms of “discourse organization” as we call it. These vary according to experiential spaces characterized by gender, milieu and generation. Since we refer to each of these group-related forms of discourse organization in our interpretation work, (collectively shared) “communicative styles” become perceptible by this. The concept of gender-specific experiential spaces also correspondents to that of “communities of practice”, especially because of its emphasis on the “practice component” (see Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999). But while this concept has its focal point in “face to face” communities (Eckert and McConnell 1999), the concept of experiential spaces is placed on the more abstract level of common experiences and orientations. Gender-specific experiential spaces are thus established by way of communicative styles on the one hand and collectively shared orientation patterns or habitus on the other. “Gendered and gendering habitus”4 (and ultimately communicative styles) can be appropriately conceptualized neither as defined by a reflex — like reaction nor a conscious strategy, but rather as “generative schemata, which are, in contrast to its alternative, neither the sum of mechanically-aggregated local reflexes, nor the coherent result of a rational calculation to which mechanicism and intellectualism would limit them” (Bourdieu 1979: 167).5 The concept of habitus makes it possible not only to get around the apory of the conscious or strategic on the one hand and the latent or reflex — like on the other, but also that of constructivism and objectivism. Certainly gender relations as defined by “doing gender” must be viewed — in accordance with constructivistic or ethnomethodological gender research — as a product of the interactive processes of construction. It is necessary however to avoid the situationalism of the ethnomethodology which attempts to explain gender relations simply as the product of situationally oriented practice.6 In the perspective of the sociology of knowledge gender relations are always the product of the participant’s socialization history, which is a history of (sedimented) situated practices. Through struggles with gender relations, genderspecific experiential spaces are established among those who are habitually characterized through these relations in a homologous manner.7
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1.3 The method of group discussion and the analysis of gender-specific experiential spaces The single sex peer group is the social location for discursive articulation of gender-specific experiential spaces, for the struggle with the experientially internalized modus operandi of the gender-related habitus. At the same time in each concrete group or in its discourse — as well as in group discussions — different experiential spaces overlap each other: The gender-specific experiential space is modified according to a given milieu, generation and stage of development (in the case of the latter particularly with regard to adolescent development).8 The approach in our analysis of the gender-specific experiential space of male and female youths of Turkish origin is chosen accordingly. The task of an intensive text interpretation based on the documentary method is to expose the different experiential spaces in their overlapping and mutual modification, as they are articulated in group discussions. Through ca. fifteen years of practical experience, the method of group discussion has proven to be particularly suitable for the analysis of collective experiential spaces, orientations and habitus (see e.g. Bohnsack 1989 and 2000b). The group discussions take place after a period of more or less intensive contact with the groups in the field. The central methodical principle for conducting a group discussions is to create conditions conducive to a selfdirected flow of the discussion. The researchers attempt only to instigate the discussion by way of vague requests to the entire group for stories and descriptions and intervene in the interactive system of rules and relevance (at least in the initial stages) only to such an extent as to keep the discourse flowing. The topics and style of the discussion are thus largely determined by the group allowing it to level out at centers, at foci of common conjunctive experience. Thus certain passages are characterized by a kind of focusing. These can be formally determined in relation to other passages for example on the basis of an increased metaphoric and interactive density found in them. We have called these passages focusing metaphors. In the method of group discussion we are faced with two intertwined discourses: the discourse of the group amongst themselves and the discourse in the presence of and with the researchers. The procedure is oriented towards having the latter remain in the background. It is however precisely the overlapping of the two discourses which (by means of the reactions of those being studied by the researcher) enables the researcher through the interpretation of texts to realize self-reflexively their position bonds. Thus both discourses and the relationship between them in particular serve to generate new insights.
“Male honor”
Documentary interpretation is formalized particularly at content-semantic analysis: Thematically self-contained passages, usually five — to fifteen-minute conversation segments, are always interpreted in two steps. The key methodical difference between immanent and documentary meaning presented above corresponds to the steps of (1) formulating and (2) reflecting interpretation. In formulating interpretation the semantic content is formulated at the level of (more or less context-free) literal meaning by way of a standard language summary. Utterances, which are characterized by high indexicality or are only understandable by deciphering contextualization cues, are inserted as wordfor-word quotes. In this way the largely implicit thematic structure can be deciphered. Reflecting interpretation focuses on the collective orientation frame and habitus, which are revealed to be structurally identical (homologous) through different topics. The reconstruction of this level of meaning follows a sequence analysis: the range of meaning of an utterance characteristic of the group or milieu can only be made accessible through reference to it in the subsequent utterances. This reference is then formally described as “discourse organization” (see also 1.2.). It is therefore significant to note for instance whether an orientation pattern is interactively elaborated through parallel examples strung together or whether it is worked out in argumentative antagonism (“antithetically”).9 The central orientation patterns or orientation problems of the group are therefore those which are repeatedly observable in a homologous way throughout the entire discourse, i.e. through different topics (in different passages). This necessitates an intra-case comparative analysis. A comparative analysis among cases respectively groups serves to differentiate between differing experiential spaces. The following analysis is therefore concerned with reconstructing the struggles with the male habitus of honor in entirely different groups of — initially male — youths of Turkish origin. Through the vast differences and contrasts between the groups, a problem relevant to all groups (that of “male honor”) emerges which is thus exposed as a general, cross-milieu problem of migration location10 (of experiential spaces typical of migrants). On the other hand the various ways of managing this problem seem to be typical of different milieus. Additionally a group of young women of Turkish origin will be included in the comparative analysis as an example. It is evident that they also have a problem with the male habitus of honor. The same problem with the male habitus of honor. The same problem thus is coped with in a different way by a totally different perspective on gender relations. Nevertheless this confirms this problem as a general characteristic of migration location.
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2. The dream of “Being a Man”: Withdrawal to the transmitted social habitus Ideals, future plans and initial experiences with regard to employment composed an important topic cluster which was introduced by the interviewers in all the group discussions. In their response the youths in the group Spiel11 did not initially refer to the area of employment, although it was the central issue in our questions at the outset of the discussion. Their ideal, their “dream”, as they put it, was “to be a man” (Spiel, Ideals, 99–115):12 99
Dm:
100 101 102 103
Cm:
105 106
?m:
107 108
Am:
being a man. to us ein Mann zu sein. für uns ist at the moment it’s a dream. being a man; because a man das (.) jetzt ein Traum. ein Mann zu sein weil ein Mann means, (.) supporting his family (.), it isn’t bedeutet, (.) für seine Familie (.) besorgen, ist nich | | | | they have to ( ) | die müssen ( ) | | | | | (giggling) | (kichern) | | | everything; alles;
109 110
Dm:
111 112 113 114
?m:
simply a man, as far as virility and so on goes, (.) well einfach ein Mann von Potenz her oder so, (.) also auch also being a man; (It) means to us, ein Mann zu sein; (.) (Er ) bedeutet für uns für seine | | (also) (auch)
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115
Dm:
supporting his family, (.) and I know what, (.) being honest; Familie besorgen, (.) und weiß-ich was, (.) e- ehrlich zu sein;
In their opinion being a man is uncertain. Realizing their ideal of becoming a man seems problematic or almost unreachable, like a “dream” to them. Sexuality, or its (biological) prerequisite (“virility”; 110), is not (primarily) at stake here. And — as the subsequent direction of the discourse shows — it is not primarily a matter of coping with the financial difficulties of supporting one’s own family either. But rather it is about the search for habitual security, for habitual concordance in the area of gender relations. This is concealed in the desire to be “honest”. As the sequence quoted below demonstrates, the word “honest” (“ehrlich”) is not to be understood in the sense of truthfulness, as a characteristic of an individual, of the personal habitus. It is instead about “honorability” as a disposition, a component of the social habitus of the man. This habitual security remains a “dream”. It is precarious to them because they must repeatedly assert their orientation to this habitus, with regard to the quite different habitual practice of German men which surrounds them. — This assertion is all the more difficult when the differing habits of the German men penetrate even their own families — as demonstrated by the person of the Cm’s brother-in-law (Honor, 444–470): 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452
Am:
Honor here too what I don’t understand well I’m Ehre auch hier was ich nich versteh also es tut mir sorry now but (1|) I German men (1|) really have leid jetzt aber (1|) ich deutsche Männer (1|) haben wirklich now (.) not virility (in the sense of virility) but (.) the way jetzt (.) nicht Potenz Potenz (für sich gesehen) aber (.) in I see it German men have with regard to women well meinen Augen haben deutsche Männer gegenüber Frauen also are not men to me. (.) really well in fact I have a sind keine Männer für mich. (.) wirklich also ich hab zwar brother-in-law who is German but (1|) I mean (.) if ah my nen Schwager der deutsch ist aber (1|) ich meine (.) wenn äh wife I am German my wife she goes out to eat with meine Frau ich bin Deutscher meine Frau die geht Essen mit colleagues or something (.) actually (1|) yes go ahead then meinen Kollegen oder so (.) eigentlich (1|) ja geh mal oder (.) even if she cheats on you and you see her then you say (.) auch wenn sie fremd-geht und man sieht sie da sagt man
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453 454 455 456
Y1:
457 458
Cm:
459
oh God Ingrid how could you do that to me, you know, (.) oh Gott Ingrid wie konntest du mir das bloß antun, wissen sie we call this you have horns here13 the person is man nennt dis bei uns man hat Hörner hier dann is man hm | | | | hm, hm | hm, hm | | | oh oh God Ingrid where did you hide my guns, Gott Ingrid, wo hast du meine Pistole versteckt
460 461
Am:
462 463 464
?m:
465
with horns on (.) and we don’t have such a thing die Hörner angesetzt (1|) und sowas gibt’s bei uns nich und and this shouldn’t happen (.) they would never allow it dis solltes och nich geben (.) sie könnten niemals erlauben | | it’s over right (imitated Schluß oder (imitiertes gunfire sound) Pistolenschußgeräusch)
466 467 468 469 470
Am:
that their wife maybe goes out to eat with somebody (.) who daß ihre Frau vielleicht mit jermandem Essen geht (.) den they don’t know simply because she says he’s a decent guy I’m sie nicht kennen nur weil sie meint isn korrekter Kerl ich going out to eat with him now right (.) you do have your pride geh jetzt mit dem Essen oder (.) man hat doch seinen Stolz and your honor (then) und seine Ehre (da)
According to them, German men lack “honor” because they demonstrate through their actions that they are unable to maintain complete control over their wives’ behavior in the public realm. Closer examination reveals that it is
“Male honor”
the control over the boundary between inner (marital and familial) and outer (public) sphere which is at stake. In their opinion “German men” are “not men” because they permit the boundary between the inner and outer sphere to be subject to negotiations by taking women’s personal perspectives into consideration. Such action makes them dependent on the women’s ability and willingness to understand and to accept their point of view.14 In their eyes a wife or girlfriend’s unfaithfulness should be avoided from the outset by excluding the possibility of their getting into uncontrollable situations — like dinner dates with colleagues. In his relationship with his girlfriend Am orients himself accordingly as the subsequent segments of the discourse illustrate (Spiel, Honor, 566–567, 600–609): 566 567 600 601 602 603 604 605 606 607 608 609
Am:
I, ah accompany her I ah take her to school in the morning Ich äh begleite sie ich äh bringe sie morgens zur Schule After after school I bring her home. […] nach der der Schule bringe ich sie nach Hause[…] that’s the way it has to be. (.) and ah if anything das muß einfach sein (.) und äh wenn ihr irgendwas would happen to her, because I just had a test passieren würde weil ich nur ne Arbeit zu to take at school, and I would never be able to schreiben habe in der Schule, und das würd ich niemals bear that in any way. I would flip out, just because I wasn’t irgendwie äh aushalten ik würde ausflippen nur weil ik jetzt right there and she would get sent home by herself. That’s nicht dort war und sie wurde nach Hause geschickt allein das simply the way it is. (.) she and I have been doing this for a is einfach so (.) sie und ich mach dis schon seit einem year now, that I always drive her to x-district or then Jahr daß ich sie immer nach x-Bezirk fahre oder dann accompany her by underground, at night at 12:30 drive her home. zu mit der U-Bahn begleite nachts um 12.30 nach Hause fahr (.) it doesn’t matter, you just take it upon yourself, (.) is egal man nimmt es einfach auf sich you sacrifice a lot. there’s no other way. man opfert ne Menhe anderes gibt’s nicht
Controlling the inner sphere of the relationship with his girlfriend and protecting it from the unknown (“anything would happen”) and thus all the more threatening interference or intrusion from the outer sphere evades reflection or
185
186 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
(meta-) communicative understanding (“That’s simply the way it is”; “There’s no other way”). This protection or control is not, however, motivated by a personal mistrust at the individual level (as in the case of “jealousy”). But rather it is simply a component of the habitual disposition of the man, of the male habitus as such. The fact that it is not only German but also other non-Turkish men who, according to this group, lack “honor” and an appropriate male habitus is illustrated in the subsequent sequences of the discourse. The concept of honor thus proves to be a component of ethnic demarcation and “ethnicization”. This becomes evident from Cm and Dm’s description of their experience with an “Italian” and his sister. When the “Italian” is caught eyeing Cm’s girlfriend, she takes him to task, underscoring her disapproval of his behavior and indirectly labeling it as a boundary violation. After the ensuing confrontation has been resolved, a friend of Cm’s invites everyone to a birthday party. “The Italian” who does not want to accept the invitation “entrusts” his sister to the group (Spiel, Honor, 657–670): 657
Cm:
658 659 660 661 662
Am:
and ah we also said yes we’re only guys (.) in an und äh wir ham auch gesagt ja wir sind nur Jungs (.) in einer apartment. (.) and ah the woman said, yes come brother Wohnung (.) und äh die Frau hat gesagt ja komm Bruder come with me, I don’t know if I- no no go komm mit ich weiß nicht ob ich dami- nein nein geh geh go I entrust you with my sister (.) and bla bla bla ich vertrau euch meine Schwester (.) an und bla bla bla | | well fuck na fuck
663 664
Cm:
665 666 667
me:
(.) well if they had said that to someone else, to (.) also wenn se das zu jemand anders da gesagt hätten zum Turks, yes take my sister (giggling) and bring her back Türken ja nimm meine Schwester (Kichern) und bring se nachher | | (laughter) (lachen)
“Male honor” 187
668 669 670
Cm:
afterwards (laughter) mh ah (.) and in fact she came here (.) wieder (lachen) mh äh (.) und sie kam auch her and (1|) and she left three days later und (1|) und sie ging drei Tage später weg
This account documents a misunderstanding which is of structural significance: The “Italian” interprets the demonstrative drawing of boundaries on the part of Cm’s girlfriend as an indication of moral reliability in general. He appears to generalize assuming that it is an indication of (universalistic) morality which guarantees the recognition of all young women, i.e. the recognition of their personal dignity thus justifying his trust in the Turkish youths with regard to his sister. In contrast to this, the latter understand their moral outlook as exclusive and particularistic. In the latter sense the drawing of boundaries cannot be generalized to apply to all women. It does not even apply to women as persons, as individuals, but rather to the men who are to supervise the drawing of boundaries. It is valid primarily with regard to those women who are considered to belong to those men (either family members or relatives). As the ironic conclusion of the account suggests, the young men do not respect the drawing of boundaries with regard to the sister of the “Italian”, since he himself does not meet the requirements of the male habitus. They even make fun of the trust which the “Italian” places in them. Male honor which is in itself already particularistic as it is only recognized for men and is thus gender-related as such, is — ethnically — further particularized: the youths do not feel themselves obligated to this morality with regard to non-Turkish men, since they deny the latter — as demonstrated above — their masculinity in the social sense. They deprive them of the habitus of honor and thus do not need to respect any of their reactions connected with this habitual disposition. Correspondingly they do not respect the drawing of boundaries with regard to “their” women. This morality is not just a particularistic one (in these two respects). It is also a question of a specific kind of particularism, since it demands of others the acknowledgement of one’s own morality and habitual practice, while denying them and their morality the same acknowledgement. It is thus a particularism which shows no or incomplete reciprocity. As the morality of the others in principle cannot attain acknowledgement, in case of a violation of the boundaries of the spheres, honor cannot be preserved or reinstated through communicative negotiation.
188 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
Violence therefore appears to be the only more or less unquestioned possibility available to them (Spiel, Honor, 508–520): 508
Am:
509 510 511
Em:
512 513
Cm:
if my girlfriend is gawked at by some one wenn meine Freundin von jemandem angegafft wird (.) (a-) (.) right (.) him I would well him (.) (a-) (.) oder (.) den mach ich also den mach ich doch | | or was it the other way around oder war’s umgekehrt | | | Now for example I can indeed Jetzt zum Beispiel kann ich doch
514 515 516 517 518 519 520
Am:
I would kill him then what are you looking at my fertich dann wat guckst du denn meine girlfriend or if my girlfriend looks at him (.) then it’s Freundin an oder wenn meine Freundin ihn anguckt (.) is ja her fault in this case I am your boyfriend how can you dann auch ihr Fehler ich bin dein Freund wie kannst du look at somebody else besides me such things and the Germans neben mir jemand angucken sone Sachen und die Deutschen (.) well they they they don’t do anything at all they well say (.) also die die die machen da gar nichts also die sagen (nothing) to them it’s totally normal (nichts) für die isses ganz normal
As we have seen before the group precludes any negotiation with regard to the drawing of boundaries between the inner and outer sphere in the marital and familial realm in their relationships with women, as it means taking the women’s individual perspectives into consideration. Now it is evident that this also applies to anything having to do with “honor” in general and to the drawing of boundaries between the inner and outer sphere with regard to those men who are allegedly seeking to force their way into the inner sphere in particular.
“Male honor” 189
3. The “Turkish Film”: The distance in relation to the traditional social habitus The drawing of boundaries between the inner and outersphere also becomes an issue in the group discussions of another group of youths of Turkish origin which we have called Lineal.15 In a thematically comparable discourse sequence — men “staring at” other men’s wives of girlfriends is also at stake here — differences between the two groups can also be found (Lineal, Jealousy, 90–104): 90
Cm:
91 92 93
Am:
if my when my girlfriend for example put on wenn meine als meine Freundin zum Beispiel ganz kurz something very short (.) well; short things so angezogen hat (.) sich also; kurze Sachen nä so | | yeah yeah ja ja
94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104
Cm:
Top or skirt or something like that I said okay if you Oberteil oder Rock oder so ich hab gesagt okay wenn du think because I’m all jealous (well) lots of us meinst weil ick bin ganz eifersüchtig (also) viele von uns ( ) are really totally jealous people; I said ( ) sind wirklich ganz eifersüchtige Menschen; ich hab okay if if in your thinking you can put the things gesagt okay wenn wenn du in der Meinung bist du kannst die you are free, (.) I have I have nothing against it but, I can’t Sachen ziehen du bist frei, (.) ich hab ich hab nix dagegen go outside with you; then she said then she aber ich kann nicht mit dir raus; da meint sie da hat sie made a scene, and I said alright okay let’s dann Theater gemacht, und ick hab jesagt na jut gehen wa go outside then you’ll see what happens (.) we weren’t raus dann wirst du erleben was passiert (.) wir warn nich even ten meters from the door; the first guy who stares like mal zehn Meter ausm Haus; der erste Typ der so guckt hat er that he got one (hits his hand) at once from me gleich von mir eine (klatscht in die Hand) bekommen
190 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
In contrast to the discourse of the group Spiel, in the above sequence Cm is not talking about “honor”, but about being “jealous”. Cm’s account was brought on however by a researcher’s remark that the term “honor” had been used in other discussions. Cm chooses the term jealousy, as it is used in the German context, in an attempt to explain to his non-Turkish girlfriend and at the same time to the German researchers his own habitual disposition which caused him to react mechanically in the case of (according to him) a violation of the boundary between spheres. His attempt to translate does not, however, succeed. Cm is not actually jealous, but rather his honor has been violated, since “jealousy” — in German language use — characterizes a reaction to the personal motives. Personal motives, in this case those of his girlfriend, do not really interest Cm. Neither does Cm allege that his girlfriend sought contact with the men nor that she did not put up enough resistance when they sought contact with her. But rather it is the behavior of other men which is brought on by his girlfriend’s style of dress and the relationship between them and himself, i.e. the relationship among the men,16 which concerns Cm. Once again it is a matter of “honor” as the group Spiel refers to it.17 Thus it is obviously a term from the German context which is being used to refer to attributes from the Turkish community (or one of their milieus). On the one hand this can be interpreted as an attempt to translate (for the non-Turkish girlfriend as well as for the German researchers), a translation which ends in a kind of fusion of terms. At the same time — and in a broader sense — however this can also be understood as a kind of orientational diffusion between the German cultural setting and that in the Turkish community. On the one hand, Cm is aspiring to maintain a relationship with his girlfriend which allows her personal “independence” (see 105), i.e. which acknowledges her personal habitus. He does not want to interfere with her individual style of dress. This attitude of Cm’s finds expression in the fact that he is willing to take her individual perspective into consideration and to accept to negotiate with her in the first place (see in contrast to this the descriptions of the group Spiel ). On the other hand, however, his habitualized or incorporated need to maintain control over the boundary between the inner and outer sphere, a component of the transmitted social habitus of “honor”, gets in his way. In a broader sense the attempt at a fusion observed here can also be understood as one between two different modes of social relationships, i.e. as an attempt at a fusion between a type of relationship based primarily on concordance or mutual acknowledgement of the personal habitus, on the one hand, and a type of relationship based primarily on the mutual recognition of the social habitus on the other.18
“Male honor”
In contrast to the group Spiel whose members only take advantage of sporadic and varying kinds of opportunities for sexual contact with nonTurkish women or girls, the young men from the group Lineal have tried to establish long-term, meaningful relationships with non-Turkish young women. Just as they make attempts — though repeatedly unsuccessful — to mediate between the different cultural contexts with regard to these young women, they do the same in their relationship with the German researchers. This is documented in Bm’s commentary on Cm’s account, which was quoted above, as follows (Lineal, Jealousy, 144–165): 144
Bm:
145 146 147
Cm:
then we can’t da könn wer just look the other way (.) you can do that you can do that einfach nich weggucken (.) ihr könnt des ihr könnt des | | okay me I stare too okay ich selber gucke auch
148 149
Bm:
yeah I see well when I stare at (German) woman like that well ja ich sehe also wenn ich (deutsche) Frau so angucke also
Cm:
yeah that is eye but @(.)@ @just let someone stare at (mine)@ ja das is Auge aber @(.)@ @wehe jemand guckt meiner@ | | @(5)@ @(5)@
150 151 152 153
Am:
154 155 156 157
Bm:
not that way but ( ) I stare that way (.) I don’t flirt or I nich so aber ( ) ich guck so an (.) ich mach nich an oder ich just look and then her husband give me a quick look at me and guck nur und da guckt ihr Mann mich so kurz an und guckt wieder looks the other way again just like that as I said with well weg i: wie gesagt mit also deutschen Augen denkt
191
192 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
158 159 160 161
Cm:
German eyes you think anyway it’s my wife she loves me he can man ach is doch meine Frau sie liebt mich der kann stare as much as he wants to he won’t get her. she belongs to gucken wie er will der kriegt se nich. die gehört mir (.) | | is mine is meine
162 163 164 165
Bm:
me (.) we don’t think but not like that; hey why are you wir denken aber nich so; ey warum staring at my wife you idiot zack right in he mustn’t guckst du meine Frau an du Idiot zack gleich rein darf er nich (he shouldn’t) just look the other way (soll er) einfach weggucken
In commenting on Cm’s account Bm makes a clear distinction between “we” and “you”. The plausibility and legitimacy of both mentalities, both habitus, are nonetheless equally acknowledged. Furthermore, the fact that a German is able to “look the other way” when a male stranger stares at his wife does not seem here to be considered simply a deficiency, but rather even a certain degree of admiration with regard to the flexibility of the “Germans” is being articulated. They relate this flexibility to the fact that the “Germans” orient themselves primarily according to the individual, personal habitus of their female partners. More precisely they are guided by a pursuit of habitual concordance which is based on the personal habitus of those involved, by a bond based primarily on this (“She loves me”; 158). Up to now the members of the group Lineal have not been very successful in their attempts at a fusion between the two modes of relationships: the one which is based on partnership and the other based primarily on the social habitus as transmitted within the ethnic community. This failure represents one of their primary long-term orientation problems. It is one of the consequences of their socialization history as migrants, of their “migration location” or of their membership in a specific “migrant generation”.19 Although these youths have already integrated themselves into employment situations and are relatively secure, they have not yet found their own way of managing relationships with women.
“Male honor” 193
Similarly, the approaches of the young men from the group Sand20 to managing relationships with women fluctuate between the two different modes for pursuing habitual concordance. For this reason they have not yet found the “right” one: “Well you can’t find the right one, can you? I have now I say, lots of women, you know? But I don’t like any of them. I can’t take one, you know? I can’t say, o.k. you’re my wife.” (Sand, Setting up a family, 34–38). With regard to the future the orientation of the young men is however clear. If Am were to finally get married, he would do it “in his own way”, i.e. on the basis of his own personal decision, of his personal habitus: “And if I get married, then I’ll get married in my own way, you know?” (Sand, Setting up a family, 52–53) The alternative, from which Am is dissociating himself here, is that of marriage through mediation, marriage determined by others (Sand, Setting up a family, 89–103): 89
Am: my mother says to me now, (.) you should take meine Mutter meint zu mir jetzt, (.) nimm du lieber 90 one from (.) ehh (2) from our area you know, from eine von (.) ehh (2) von unserer Gegend weißt du also von 91 the our family’s region. (1) She says to me; °(well)°. (1) and unsern Familienumgebung. (1) Meint se zu mir; °(also)°. (1) und 92 where I was now: last year, (2) an acquaintance has his one wo ich jetz: voriges Jahr war, (2) ein Bekannter hat seine eine 93 daughter you know, (1) and he says to me, (.) do you want to Tochter weißt du, (1) und der sagt zu mir , (.) willst Du den 94 have a look at her, right (.) what do you think of her, I said mal anschaun, oder (.) wie findest Du sie, hab ich gesa95 no I don’t want anything @you know what should I do with she nein ich will nix @weißt Du was soll ich mit sie 96 right (.) (.)@ | ja (.) (.) @ | 97 | | 98 ?m: @(.)@ @(.)@ 99 | | 100 Bm: @Yeah@ They mediate; they make arrangements @Ja@ die vermitteln; die machen Vermittlung
194 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
Crucial for the choice of a spouse on the basis of “mediation” is a common region of origin, i.e. that the future spouse originates from the same region as one’s own family and relatives. Other pivotal components of this mode of seeking habitual concordance — in addition to male honor — become evident here. As it is assumed that habitual concordance can be established primarily on the basis of common region of origin, it is therefore those individuals, who have incorporated the appropriate social habitus, who are predestined to be mediators: the parents, the relatives and acquaintances from the region. In the subsequent segment of the discourse Am presents — not without ironic distance — accounts which take as a whole form a kind of a saga of suffering: The attempts undertaken by relatives and acquaintances from his parents’ region of origin to make marriage arrangements for him repeatedly fail because of his refusal or lack of involvement. The story reaches its dramaturgical climax in one account — formally characterized by its common production — in which Am describes himself at the waterfall, the hub of village life in his region of origin, surrounded by the women of the village (Sand, Setting up a family, 175–206): 175 176 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185
Am:
(2) then we are there again they want to make arrangements for (2) dann sind wir wieder der die wolln irgendwo mich vermitteln me somewhere, you know? Well (.) if he didn’t succeed then the weißt Du also wenn der nich geschafft hat dann next one comes you know, hey: Am, @I have one (1)@ I say kommt der nächste weißt Du, ey Am, @ich habe eine (1)@ sag ich right stop it I don’t want to. and when I was in the village, ja hör auf ich will nich. und wo ich dann im Dorf war (3) supposedly my mother called and said (clears throat) (3) angeblich hat meine Mutter angerufen und gesagt (Räuspern) Am is coming, (.) and (.) he’s looking for a girl or he wants Am kommt, (.) und (.) der sucht ein Mädchen oder der will to have a girl, right (.) she said that (once); ein Mädchen haben ne, (.) hat so gesagt (einmal); and all of a sudden I come out into the village like that, we und auf einmal komm ich raus im Dorf so, bei uns have this waterfall you know where the people (.) gibs son Wasserfall weißt Du wo die Leute (.) | |
“Male honor” 195
186
Bm:
get water Wasser schöpfen
187 188
Am:
189 190 191 192
Bm:
193 194 195 196
Am:
197
get water right, (.) I came out like that: (1) was early Wasser schöpfen ne, (.) bin ich rausgekommen so: (1) war ganz morning, and all the women there at the water morgens, und alle Frauen da am Wasser you know, (2) @(7)@ weißt Du, (2) @(7)@ | | @you’re suddenly standing there everyone is @plötzlich standst Du dann da wird looking right something (.) like the old tradition everyone is geguckt oder watt (.) nach alter Tradition wird looking (2) yeah was it like that?@ (1) @How nice there you geguckt (2) ja war so?@ (1) @wie schön | | @(ah: there) there were standing @(ah: es) es standen a lot yeah @ viele jaa @
198 199
Bm:
know if you made a film hey. (2)@ weißte da (hättste) en Film gedreht ey. (2)@
200 201
Am:
202 203 204
Bm:
@there are standing @es standen a lot yeah@ viele ja@ | | turkish films are like this ah (.)@ türkische Filme sind so ah (.)@
196 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
205 206
Am:
| | @Really.@ @echt.@
What seems like a “Turkish film” to the youths from the group Sand is like a “dream” to the members of the group Spiel : Becoming a man by getting married and starting a family is a process carried out according to the principles of mediation through relatives and on the basis of common region of origin as well as according to the principles of male honor. While this represents the focus of biographically relevant orientations which inspire hope of habitual security for the group Spiel, for the group Sand it represents the conservation (in film) of lifestyle which is biographically relevant for their parents but no longer for them.
4. The “Turkish Street”: Between transmitted social habitus and personal habitus We now move from the gender-specific experiential space of young men to that of girls or young women. The following presentation of the public realm of a Turkish neighborhood, opens up a further perspective on the social habitus of men — beyond those varying perspectives of the men themselves. In cooperation with her girlfriend, Af from the group Straße21 explains in the following sequence through the example of the “mini-skirt” why restrictions with regard to her personal habitus, her style of dress, are imposed on her by her father (Straße, Turks, 32–56): 32
Af:
33 34 35 36
Bf:
well he does actually he does think modern, but we also er ist schon er denkt eigentlich schon modern aber wir live on one of those streets there are only Turks and (.) well wohnen auf so einer Straße da sind nur Türken und (.) halt | | and they gossip und die lästern | |
“Male honor” 197
37
Af:
38 39 40
Bf:
41 42
Af:
and und there are the men all the men da sind die Männer die ganzen Männer | | when we put on mini-skirts they stare and then wenn wir jetzt Miniröcke anziehen dann gucken die so und dann | | yes ja
43 44
Bf:
45 46
Af:
47 48 49
Bf:
50 51 52 53 54 55
Af:
(.) no father wants that men there staring like that; (.) das will ja kein Vater daß die Männer da hinterhergucken | | the men they stare at you ah even if die Männer die gucken da ja einen also au- auch wenn we had a child (.) even then they would stare wir’n Kind hättn (.) sogar dann würden die gucken | | yeah and the Turks too if a woman ja und die Türken auch wenn ne Frau walks around with a child but wearing something short, anyway mit’n Kind rumläuft aber kurz angezogen ist naja whistling and so on after you our street is like that ( ) pfeifen und so hinterher unsere Straße ist so ( ) Turkish | türkisch | | | anyway and (.) my father naja und (.) mein Vater just knows the the people he just hangs around with them and kennt halt die die Leute er hängt halt mit denen rum und
198 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
56
that’s why; (.) he wants to avoid that; (well) with boys deswegen; (.) will er das vermeiden; (halt) mit den Jungs
The interactive presentation of the two women is characterized by an almost lyric style which makes it difficult to distinguish between a primary and a secondary speaker. The scenic presentation thus takes on — compared to other passages — an intensity of focus. The lyric form underscores to the same extent the involvement of the girls in the gender-specific experiential space as well as their distance from the social space which they refer to as “Turkish” (“the Turkish street”). The problem of Af’s father, from which the restrictions on her style of dress originate, consists here — as in the discourses of the group Spiel and Lineal — of the men “staring at” the young women (44). The central issue is also that of the relationships of the men among themselves. For her father it is his reputation with regard to the other men of the community who he “hangs around with” which is at stake. The girls’ view of the men of Af’s father’s generation and what they do is not very respectful. It is the same group or category of men who themselves take advantage of every possible means available to them — through looks, through “gossiping” and “whistling” — to violate boundaries. Yet they demand from Af ’s father the prevention of these very violations. They orient themselves according to that social habitus which the group Spiel and Lineal refer to as “honor” — a term which is first used by the girls at the end of the passage.22 In the young women’s view the men interfere in the personal sphere of women in two ways: On the one hand by their boundary violations and on the other by pointing to the necessity of preventing potential boundary violations by restricting women with regard to their style of dress, to their personal habitus. The latter represents the actual problem for the young women. The orientation according to the social habitus of honor observed here is well known to the young women, but it does not seem so plausible or authentic to them (any longer). Through the example of Af ’s father this is made explicit — from a positive perspective — right at the beginning of the passage: “Actually he already thinks modern.” In terms of his everyday life practice in the Turkish community the father deviates however from his “modern” way of thinking and tries to limit the personal development possibilities and style of his daughter. Within their peergroup however, the young women consistently evade the control of the Turkish community. They are a long way away from allowing their relationships with young men to be dependent on the mediation of parents, relatives or acquain-
“Male honor” 199
tances. They take care of, “off their own bat”, in the literal sense of the word, those young men, to whom they claim exclusive rights. This goes even as far as physical confrontations with potential rivals through which they also come into conflict with the police. They have landed themselves numerous tickets with which they can “paper the walls” (Straße, Fighting, 1–29): 1
Bf:
2 3 4
Af:
5 6 7
Bf:
8 9
Af:
10 11 12
Bf:
13 14
Af:
we can paper the walls with our tickets also wir können mit unseren Anzeigen die Wände tapezieren we can paper @(1)@ also tapezieren @(1)@ | | @(1)@ yeah: and once we had a fight because of @(1)@ jaa und einmal haben wir uns wegen dings ah because of Imad; do you know the boy he isgestritten wegen Imad; kenne sie den Jungen der is | | (in turkish) don’t give any names isim verme | | Yeah: Ja: they’re not going to tell him. die sagen des ihn doch nich. | | the name please erase it. den Namen bitte löschen. | | @(1)@ @(1)@
15 16 17
Y1:
no that all the names will remain anonymous. nein alle Namen werden anonym | |
200 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
18
Bf:
19 20
Af:
21 22 23 24 25
Bf:
26 27 28 29
Af:
okay. okay | | anyway never mind well the naja egal halt der boy who (always comes here) who said ah he is our manager and Junge der (immer herkommt) der gesagt hat er ist unser Manager so on; yes that was that Arab, and she wanted something from und so ja: das war dieser Araber, und sie wollte mal was him once, von ihm | | still wants something. will immer noch. | | yeah right (I didn’t want to say it ja richtig (das wollt ich jetzt nicht like that now, and there’s a girl in my school she also wants so sagen), und da is n Mädchen in meiner Schule die will auch something from him too, of course, then conflicts developed von ihm, @natürlich kam es dann zu Konflikten@
The young women see to it that the “conflicts”, the physical confrontations, remain within the peer-group and, more specifically, within the female scene. The fight over the boy is argued out — as is revealed in the account following the above quote — among the young girls themselves. As becomes clear in lines 11–16, the boy who the young women are fighting over should under no circumstances find out about the confrontations, not even (this is made explicit elsewhere) about the young women’s affection for him. This also applies to the public sphere of the ethnic community. The young women know very well what they want (“she wanted something from him once”; 22–23). They orient themselves very decisively according to their individual inclinations — according to a mode of seeking a partnership, habitual concordance, which is based on the personal rather than the social habitus. This mode is not compatible with the mediation dictated by the social habitus transmitted in the ethnic community, a mode which the group Sand
“Male honor” 201
describes with more or less ironic distancing. Their attempt to detach themselves from this social habitus is documented by the fact that Af “loves” an Arab (and Bf, as we find out at another point, a Chinese). Within the public sphere of the ethnic community they conceal their mode of orientation according to the personal habitus. In this way the young women prevent conflict with the transmitted mode of orientation on the social habitus — above all with that of male honor. This applies both to the honor of their fathers who are obligated to control their actions and the honor of the potential male partners who are entitled to take the initial public step in paving the way for a relationship. The young women (like the young men) are thus situated between the two modes of paving the way for a partnership (or of seeking habitual concordance) — between the mode which is based on the transmitted social habitus and the other mode which is based on the personal habitus. While favoring the latter mode in their everyday life practice, the young women are lacking — due to their socialization — the rules or conventions for coping with the conflicts connected with it, particularly with regard to non — Turkish rivals. Thus they are reduced to an elementary or unconditional means of coping with conflicts, that of physical violence. Whereas the young women commit such acts of violence as a result of experimental pursuits of new rules beyond the transmitted order, among the young men it arises from the attachment (whether based on conviction or awkwardness) to the habitualized and internalized modus operandi of the transmitted honorability.
5. Concluding remarks Including other results of our research project it can be said that the confrontation with the transmitted social habitus of male honor constitutes a central problem among all migrant youths of the second or third generation. Even when a high level of integration in the area of employment and education has been attained (as in the case of the group Lineal and among the secondary school students of the group Spiel), the youths are still faced with considerable problems in the area of gender relations. These types of problems constitute the focus of their discourses and represent an essential experiential base for the formation of the peer-groups among youths of Turkish origin. Problems of male honor are directly connected with problems in the relationship between the inner (familial and marital) and outer (societal-public)
202 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
sphere. The honor of a man is dependent on the possibilities available to him for controlling the boundary between these two spheres. The fact that the relationship between these two spheres represents a problem for the young men not only in their relationships with potential spouses has been illustrated elsewhere (Bohnsack and Nohl 1998). Showing “respect” for one’s father precludes the intra-familial negotiation of specific realms and problems of the extra-familial sphere and thereby of the corresponding elements of the individual, the personal habitus. By analyzing their relationship to their parents and the parental generation it is possible to verify what we have worked out here with regard to gender relations: The youths are faced with the task of having to reconcile two entirely different modes for the construction of sociality and habitual concordance — one which is based on the transmitted social habitus and the other which is based on the personal habitus. The mode for seeking habitual concordance and security connected with the social habitus of male honor seems, in the case of the second and third generation of migrants under study here, to be no longer conducive to sound incorporation and enactment. The pursuit of habitual security and habitual concordance in the realm of gender relations has thus become precarious. In the meantime extensive research analyzing gender-related habitual security for men exists which has been conducted on the basis of the methods presented here, i.e. of the group discussion and of the documentary method (Behnke 1997; Loos 1998; Meuser 1998 as well as Behnke, Loos and Meuser 1998). While younger men (from the higher education and skilled labor milieu) have also been included, male development in the adolescent phase has been neglected (with the exception of Loos 1998). In other research projects — also based on the same empirical procedure — intensive case studies have focused on the search for habitual security and concordance in individual development stages of adolescence in general and from the point of view of employment, but did not focus on the area of gender relations (Bohnsack et al. 1995; Schäffer 1996). Up to now the existing empirical research which aims at reconstructing the stages of adolescent development with direct reference to the pursuit of habitual security in the area of gender relation focuses above all on peer-groups of girls (Bohnsack 1989; Breitenbach 2000; Breitenbach and Kausträter 1998). This has to do with the fact that, usually only young women’s discourses focus on gender issues.23 Negotiations in the pursuit of habitual concordance and security in the area of gender relations takes place primarily in the single sex peer group — among the young women preferably in a dyad with one’s “best” girlfriend. Within these
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groups the gender-specific experiential spaces — as well as the collective orientations and habitual dispositions relevant to them — are articulated. In correspondence with the concept of communication cultures (Kotthoff 1992; Tannen 1990) and the concept of “communities of practice” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999) the analysis of discourses in group discussions of single sex peer-groups thus gaines pivotal significance in gender research.
Notes * This project has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and has been carried out by the authors of this article as well as by Arnd Michael Nohl, Wivian Weller and the following students: Yvonne Gaffer and Monika Wagner. 1. The group discussions and the other types of inquiry encompass ca. 30 cliques of youths in Berlin and Ankara (for Ankara see Nohl 2000; for the application of various methods of “method triangulation” see Bohnsack et. al. 1995). The research project has been conducted in a district of Berlin, in which the percentage of foreigners is more than 20%. The percentage of youths of non-German origin (15–20 years of age) amounts to more than 35% (Statistisches Landesamt 1995). There is however a further means of segregation within the district in that individual streets are inhabited predominantly by persons with non-German nationality or of non-German origin, a fact to which the youths themselves refer as well. 2. See Anthony Giddens (1976: 86 ff.) who, in confrontation with Grice in particular, distinguishes between “communicative intent” and “meaning”. 3. As we find it for example in the so called “objective hermeneutics”. 4. “L’habitus sexué et sexuant” (Bourdieu 1990: 11). 5. See also Mannheim: “The life of the mind is in a constant flux, oscillating between the theoretical and atheoretical pole, (…)” (Mannheim 1952: 40). 6. On the differences in the ethnomethodological analysis and those in the praxeologically grounded sociology of knowledge in general see Bohnsack (2000a) and Nohl (1998) and specifically regarding gender relations see Loos (1998) and Meuser (2000). 7. According to Bourdieu (1972: 277) “habitus is the generative principle of objective classifiable forms of practice and a classification system of these forms”. 8. On this point we agree with Günthner (1996) who, in her programmatic article on gender and communication writes: “I consider the analysis of the connection between language and sex to be part of a larger inquiry: namely the inquiry into the connection between language and social meaning. Within interactions complex social relationships are constructed, transmitted and confirmed and sex is one of these relationships (…)” (257). 9. We can ascertain that the (biographical) community of a group or of couples as Schwitalla (1993, 1995) or Coates (1996) view it, the conjunctive experiential space, as we would refer to it, can find expression not only in paralleling (and parallel) but also in competing and antithetical discourse organization (see for example Bohnsack et. al. 1995). An ongoing study
204 Ralf Bohnsack, Peter Loos and Aglaja Przyborski
deals with the question what these different forms of discourse organization or styles can tell us about the form of sociality (see Przyborski 1998). 10. Migration location refers to the fact societal location of migrants is marked by their history of migration (see Nohl 1996; Bohnsack and Nohl 1998). 11. The youths of the group Spiel are between 17 and 20 years of age. They are either attending Gymnasium (German secondary or high school), learning a trade or working in undefined informal areas (for example “an uncle’s shop”). 12. The code name of the group, the name of the passages and the line numbers of the passage sequences that follow are provided in parenthesis preceding each quoted sequence. Am, Bm, Af, Bf and so on refer to the speakers. The “m” stands for male and the “f” for female. The lines indicate overlapping utterances. 13. This is a German and Turkish idiom meaning “to cuckold someone”. 14. Schiffauer’s remarks about the “societal order” in the Turkish village of Subay are interesting in this connection: “‘Honor’ denotes the integrity, inviolability and good reputation of a household (…) In Subay one tells of cases in which women were dishonored only for the purpose of attacking their husbands or fathers. In the same way a head of household is liable for every action of his relations — they were … only performed on his behalf.” (1987: 23–24). 15. The youths of the group Lineal are between 22 and 26 years of age. One of them is a lathe operator, another is an insurance salesman, and a third has completed an apprenticeship as a tile setter, but was unemployed at the time of the inquiry. 16. Again a parallel can be drawn here with the behavior patterns in the Turkish village worked out by Schiffauer: “A man is in a relationship of equality with another man outside his family, the term honor demarcates the spheres of each individual. If the man violates the sphere of another, he must reckon with retaliation.” (1983: 89). 17. In the “conclusion” of this passage, in its closing sequence, both Bm and Cm speak about “honor” again. 18. While the concept of “honor” is thus appropriate for the context of the social habitus (see for example the term “professional honor”), that of “jealousy” deals with the personal or individual habitus and thus has to do with “dignity”. Compare also Berger (1970: 343) who connects the concept of “honor” with “institutionalized roles”. On the other hand it would be more appropriate to talk about (social or collective) habitus here than about “roles”. 19. See Nohl (1996) or Bohnsack and Nohl (1998). 20. Both young men from the group Sand are about 24 years of age, have had no formal employment training and were unemployed at the time of the inquiry. 21. Af is 18 and Bf 19 years of age. Both visit an evening school. 22. At the end of the passage they say: “they consider honor important, thus my father is like that as well.” In this respect the mother does not share this attitude (315–318).
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23. It is interesting to note in this context that, in our recent investigation of groups of hooligans which also included a group of the hooligans’ girlfriends, only the girlfriends discussed problems of relationships with the opposite sex. (see Bohnsack et al. 1995).
References Behnke, Cornelia 1997 “Frauen sind wie andere Planeten”: Das Geschlechterverhältnis aus männlicher Sicht. Frankfurt: Campus. Behnke, Cornelia, Loos, Peter and Meuser, Michael 1995 “Wir kommen über das Reden nicht hinaus”: Selbstreflexion und Handlungspraxis in Männergruppen. Widersprüche 15 (56/57). Berger, Peter 1970 “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor“. European Journal of Sociology 11: 339–347. Bohnsack, Ralf 1989 Generation, Milieu und Geschlecht. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. 1996 “Youth violence and the ‘episodical community of fate’: A qualitative analysis of hooligan groups in Berlin”. Sociologus 46 (2). 2000a Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung. Einführung in Methodologie und Praxis qualitiver forschung. Opladen: Leske + Budrich (fourth edition). 2000b gruppendiskussion. In Qualitative Forschung. Ein Handbuch, U. Flick, E. von Kardoff, I. Steinke (eds.). Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bohnsack, Ralf, Loos, Peter, Schäffer, Burkhard, Städtler, Klaus and Wild, Bodo 1995 Die Suche nach Gemeinsamkeit und die Gewalt der Gruppe: Hooligans, Musikgruppen und andere Jugendcliquen. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Bohnsack, Ralf and Nohl, Arnd-Michael 1998 “Adoleszenz und Migration: Empirische Zugänge einer praxeologisch fundierten Wissenssoziologie”. In Biographieforschung und Kulturanalyse: Transdisziplinäre Zugänge qualitativer Forschung, R. Bohnsack and W. Marotzki (eds.). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Bourdieu, Pierre 1972 Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Genève and Paris: Ed. Droz. 1979 La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les éditions de minuit. 1990 “La domination masculine”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 84: 4–31. Breitenbach, Eva 2000 Mädchenfreundschaften in der Adoleszenz: Eine fallrekonstruktive Untersuchung von Gleichaltrigengruppen. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Breitenbach, Eva and Kausträter Sabine 1998 “‘Ich finde, man braucht irgendwie eine Freundin’: Beziehungen zu Gleichaltrigen in der weiblichen Adoleszenz”. Zeitschrift für Sozialisationsforschung und Erziehungssoziologie (3).
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Coates, Jennifer 1996 “Gesprächsduette unter Frauen”. In Frauengespräche: Sprache der Verständigung. S. Trömel-Plötz (ed.). Frankfurt: Fischer. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet 1999 “New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research”. Language in Society 28 (2): 173–184. Giddens, Anthony 1976 New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. London: Hutchinson. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982a Discourse Strategies: Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982b Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992 “Contextualization Revisited”. In The Contextualization of Language, P. Auer and A. DiLuzio (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1990 “The conversational analysis of interethnic communication”. In Interethnic Communication, E. L. Ross (ed.). Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Gumperz, John J. and Cook-Gumperz, Jenny 1981 “Ethnic differences in communicative style”. In Language in the USA, C.A. Ferguson and S.H. Heath (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Günthner, Susanne 1996 “Sprache und Geschlecht: Ist Kommunikation zwischen Frauen und Männern interkulturelle Kommunikation?”. In Sprachwissenschaft: Ein Reader, L. Hoffmann (ed.). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Kotthoff, Helga 1992 “Die konversationelle Konstruktion von Ungleichheit in Fernsehgesprächen: Zur Produktion von kulturellem Geschlecht”. In Die Geschlechter im Gespräch: Kommunikation in Institutionen, S. Günthner and H. Kotthoff (eds.). Stuttgart: Metzler. Loos, Peter 1998 Zwischen pragmatischer und moralischer Ordnung: Der männliche Blick auf das Geschlechterverhältnis im Milieuvergleich. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Mannheim, Karl 1952 “On the interpretation of Weltanschauung”. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, K. Mannheim. London. 1982 Structures of Thinking. London: Routledge. Meuser, Michael 1998 Geschlecht und Männlichkeit: Soziologische Theorie und kulturelle Deutungsmuster. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. 2000 “Perspektiven einer Soziologie der Männlichkeit”. In Der neue Dialog zwischen Frauen- und Männerforschung, D. Janschen (ed.). Frankfurt and New York: Campus.
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Nohl, Arnd-Michael 1996 Jugend in der Migration: Türkische Banden und Cliquen in empirischer Analyse. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. 2000 Migrationslagerung und Differenzerfahrung: Junge Einheimische und Migranten im rekonstruktiven Milieuvergleich. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Przyborski, Aglaja 1998 Formen der Sozialität und diskursive Praxis. Dissertation. Berlin: Proposal. Schäffer, Burkhard 1996 Die Band: Stil und ästhetische Praxis im Jugendalter. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Schiffauer, Werner 1983 Die Gewalt der Ehre: Erklärungen zu einem türkisch-deutschen Sexualkonflikt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1987 Die Bauern von Subay: Leben in einem türkischen Dorf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Schwitalla, Johannes 1993 “Über einige Weisen des gemeinsamen Sprechens: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Beteiligungsrollen im Gespräch”. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 11: 68–98. 1995 Kommunikation in der Stadt. Teil 4: Kommunikative Stilistik zweier sozialer Welten in Mannheim-Vogelstang. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Statistisches Landesamt Berlin 1997 Berliner Statistik. Monatsschrift 2/92. Berlin. Tannen, Deborah 1990 You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation. New York: William Morrow.
Part IV
Perspectives on femininity
Arguing among scholars Female scientists and their shaping of expertise Bettina Baron
Introduction This article is based on a study on how male and female scientists communicate their expert knowledge during professional debates. It comes to the conclusion that the female scholars in these data differ from their male colleagues in speech design with respect to their behavior as speakers, chairpersons and discussion participants. Even female scholars who are established in their field nonetheless limit the scope of their presentations, reduce the significance of their hypotheses before any criticism is expressed and are perfectly willing to make concessions when criticized. Like the female experts who deemphasize their status, female chairpersons deemphasize their authority, in part allowing their position as discussion leaders to be disputed. These activities are not analyzed in the light of a “deficit hypothesis”, according to which women lack the ability to perform appropriately to the situation. Instead, the focus is on a clash of different speech styles, which are initially not subject to value judgments; it is only in the context of institutional traditions and historically determined rhetorical constraints that the style preferred by women has come to connote “lack of professionalism” and “lack of competence” and, consequently, to result in situational and social disadvantages. Linguists with an interest in gender research have addressed differences based on gender in institutional discourse (specifically in the schools and universities) for a long time.1 The effects of different kinds of socialization for girls and boys have been analyzed, which shape their speech styles as early as the school phase and probably also at a later educational stage, and teachers’ behavior towards their female students has been examined at all levels and
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found to be biased with regard to gender. There has been much less focus on the discourse of female scholars, as evidenced in professional discussions, rather than in teaching situations, presumably because the data are so much more difficult to ascertain. Discussions such as these which take place in “closed” sessions would include, for example (listed by degree of formality and level of public attention bestowed) meetings between university teachers and coworkers, colloquia, discussions in connection with professional lectures (where the willingness of students to speak out decreases dramatically in proportion to the prominence of the lecturer, the significance of the public occasion and the presence of established scholars who dominate the discussion), contributions to conferences and symposia and panel discussions. My data2 are based not on teaching situations, but on conference situations, colloquia and discussions in connection with papers presented by visiting lecturers for 1993–95 (students who have not completed their degree are seldom present at such discussions and almost never actively involved in them (see Bungarten (ed.) 1981)). In the German-speaking area, the experts’ behavior was usually studied based on data from a non-academic setting: Kotthoff (1992 /1993a / 1997) found that in television discussions the male participants are thought to have a higher level of expertise than the women who are also participating in their capacity as professionals; men also profit from the fact that their high extrinsic status (due to their professional or overall prominence) almost automatically results in high intrinsic status in a discussion, something which only very rarely applies to women. The women observed by Kotthoff (op.cit.) contribute actively to staging social gender, in this instance to their “inferior” position, for example by making their opening statements very hesitantly, not taking the offensive in presenting their arguments and, in contrast to the men present, being very reluctant to expand their remarks to lecture format. Older studies (conducted mainly in English-speaking countries) dealing with the universities ( e.g. Eakins and Eakins 1978, Holmes 1992, Leet-Pellegrini 1980, Swacker 1978) demonstrate for the period in question that women also tend to deemphasize their own competence in a scholarly context (although this tendency obviously constitutes only part of the problem, however. Other studies (e.g. Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz 1996, Meer 1998, Gunnarsson in this volume) show that male discussion partners and the institutional context are equally important). We might have expected the much touted changes in the style of female discourse,3 including more extensive and in-depth selfrepresentation and a greater willingness to engage in conflict, to have found widespread expression in discussions which take place in a public forum.
Arguing among scholars
Evidently this change has not as yet made itself felt in the university as an institution, however, regardless of how much lip service has been paid to the idea and despite specific efforts to introduce new linguistic norms (e.g. those directed against generic masculine forms). Rather, my recent data show disturbing parallels to the findings on the behavior of female experts in the media context (Kotthoff, op. cit.). The intent of this paper is not to present a one-dimensional analysis of “speech actions” presenting a mono-functional argument; Holmes (1990) has shown, for example, that a simple count of activity types without taking the context and a detailed typology into consideration blurs important distinctions. Based on an analysis of hedges, tag questions and intensifiers, she demonstrates that one and the same particle or question phrasing can fulfill completely different functions, depending on the asymmetry or symmetry of the communication situation, on the position in the sentence and on the prosodic speech design, and can result in considerable differences in the way listeners evaluate the item. According to Holmes’ microanalysis, an intensifier such as “of course” may merely serve to reinforce content, while in another case it may have the effect of creating social distance, making speech more “impersonal”, and in yet another instance it can serve to convey a message about knowledge held in common, creating an impression of very “personal” speech, of intimacy and solidarity between the speaker and the listener. Holmes does not discuss the role of status issues; but Tannen (1994) also illustrates the problem of multifunctionality against the background of the power structure in communicative situations: the same speech activity can serve to express ‘power’ or ‘solidarity’, thus creating an impression of condescension and distance or of closeness and equality of status (or presumption of status). The interpretation depends upon the status of the person taking the initiative, the purpose of the intervention, the cultural, institutional, social, situational, etc. framework for the conversation and the customary interpretation in a given context.. The basic “ambiguity of contextualization cues” (cf.Auer 1986, Auer and Di Luzio 1992) thus cannot be denied. In addition, we must posit complex interaction between such factors as “gender”, “status”, “speech role”, etc., and the presence of certain verbal activities and expectations shaped by tradition with respect to the fullfillment of genre stereotypes. Particularly in academic discourse, traditions of speech genre are important in evaluating conversational activities. Knowledge of the rules of “correct” self-portrayal in scholarly discourse — which do not simply relate to rhetoric — is acquired in the course of a complex process of socialization. This knowledge relates, first of all, to
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situational appropriateness (in a nutshell: who can say what, how, when, where and to whom), and secondly to standards of reception (the associations and reactions traditionally related to certain actions in this setting). Something that may, for example, be perfectly normal and inconspicuous in the context of informal small talk outside the conference hall can be destructive of prestige when uttered in a lecture to an audience. This knowledge does not, however, come with a guarantee that it will actually be applied; the first hypothesis suggested by the data is that women do not apply, or do not wish to apply, certain kinds of traditional knowledge. Secondly, not only behavior but also perceptions are potentially subject to gender bias: one and the same kind of behavior may be evaluated differently depending upon the speaker’s gender and the particular context. This hypothesis is also supported by the data. In the following examples derived from conference situations there are generally no significant differences a priori in the extrinsic status of the female and male participants. Whether in their roles as presenters or commentators, most of the women who speak are established in their fields and thus also wellknown. Nonetheless they are very much less given to playing on their role as an eminent authority than their male colleagues, as will be demonstrated by the following examples.
1.
Strategies used by women to limit the scope of their theses
Datum 1; Situation: Conference: Ms. G. has given her talk and, now that the discussion is open to questions from the floor, she responds to a question from a man.4 1
Moderator: (2.0) bitte Chairman: (2.0) please go ahead
2
Frau Gerber: ja ich ((Räuspern)) ich denke das is äh (-) is Ms. Gerber: yes, I ((clears her throat)) I believe that is uh (-) is certainly
3
die Lösung mit der äh sicher schon sehr viele (’H) Biologen the solution uh which many (’H) biologists
4
ARbeiten. ähm das ist denke ich, seit Hamburg äh (’H) ABalready WORK with. uhm I think since Hamburg uh (’H)
5
Wissenschaft contra CD-Wissenschaft (-) hielt ich das für AB-Science vs. CD-Science (-) I have considered this
Arguing among scholars
6
geklärt, ich beTRACHte die AB-Wissenschaft als ne Teil established. I conSIDer AB-Science a sub-
7
disziplin der CD-Wissenschaft (’H) und beziehe mich selbst in field of CD-Science (’H) and
8
meinen Analysen, wenn ich das MUSterhafte beschreibe, (’H) when I describe representative examples in my analyses (’H), I refer
9
auf äh Erkenntnisse der CD-Wissenschaft. (’H) und vielleicht to the uh findings in CD-science. (’H) and perhaps
10
kann ich da gleich, äh wenn das reicht übergehen auf die (’H) I could go right ahead and uh, if that is enough, respond to (’H)
11
(-) äh Bemerkung von Herrn (-) Klein, (’H) ähm (2.0) jetzt (-) Mr. (-) Klein’s comment, (’H) uhm (2.0) now
12
muß ich bloß den Faden wieder (-) kriegen ((fast tonloses I just have to find my train of thought (-) again ((laughs almost
13
Lachen)) HEHEHEHE (’H) ich ja, ich denke ähm ich wollte mit soundlessly)) HEHEHEHE (’H) I yes, I think uhm I did
14
dem was ich gesagt habe Ü:berHAUPT nicht sagen, oder ich not in the LEA:ST mean to say, or I
15
dachte ich hätte es auch (-) deutlich akzentuiert, daß man thought I had also (-) emphasized this clearly, that we
16
(’H) AB-wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen äh cd-wissenschaftliche (’H) should throw our experience in AB-science uh CD-Science
17
Erfahrungen übern Berg äh äh über Bord werfen sollte. Ü:ber overboard or uh uh that we are out of the woods. NO:T at all. HAUPT nich. (’H) ich hab gesagt wir sind jetzt stark genug im (’H) I said now our ideas have developed to the point
18
im Geiste um uns den alten Dingen wieder zuwenden, nicht um where we can turn to the old things again, which is not
19
die neuen zu (-) zu verraten, sondern um zu sehen was ist in (-) to betray the new ideas, but to see what it is in
20
den alten was uns hilft das neue besser (-) noch zu auszuthe old ideas that can serve to (-) complement our new ideas.
21
füllen. und wir KÖNnen meiner Meinung nach bisher IMMer noch and, in my opinion, we STILL have not been ABle to
22
nicht (’H) das beschreiben was Courbier eben nennt die XY-ZYdescribe what Courbier, well, terms the XY-ZY relationship
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23
Beziehung, (…)(…). das KÖNNen wir bisher nicht.(…) (’H) , (…) (…) this is something we have not been ABle to do up to now. (…) (’H)
24
und wir sollten überlegen, ob es in in unsere Ansätze einzuand we should think about whether it can be included in our approach.
25
fügen ist. mehr (-) mein ich nicht. (’H) und wenns denn That is all (-) I mean to say. (’H) and if that
26
nicht geht, dann gehts nicht, aber ich hab den Verdacht wir doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, but I suspect that we
27
solltens überprüfen, (’H) und ich hab jetzt nicht die Zeit should try it, (’H) and I do not have the time now
28
das zu erläutern, aber ich denke mir, daß Miller äh von to spell it out, but I imagine that uh, given
29
seinem interdisziplinären Ansatz her (’H) biologischen his interdisciplinary approach (’H) biological approach,
30
Ansatz her da Kategorien (-) SCHON vorschlägt, die man zuMINMiller has IN FACT suggested categories which should at LEAST
31
dest mal ausprobieren müßte. (1.5) be tried out. (1.5)
32
Moderator: (’H) Herr Marquardt (…) Chairman: (’H) Mr. Marquardt (…)
A variety of characteristics in Ms. Gerber’s speech are to be found in almost all of the contributions by women in my data but very rarely in the statements by male scholars. In the men’s speech in particular, a variety of procedures which have an objectifying function are observable (cf. Panther 1981), covering up the subjectivity and contingency of their own opinion by way of “hidden performatives” (“it is to be assumed” instead of “I assume”), including passivations (Polenz 1981) (“it should be noted” in place of “I note””) and strategies emphasizing one’s status by using impersonal constructions (like “On this point, theology would state…”). In contrast to this, the women in my data tend to adopt a strategy of emphasizing their subjectivity and deemphasizing the objective correctness of whatever claims they are making. These tactics not only limit scope5 but also threaten the women’s face — in line with Goffman — insofar as they are adopted in a context such as this, where one is supposed to take a scholarly position that reflects the state of the art, rather than to express
Arguing among scholars 217
a private noncommital opinion and where, similarly, one’s style of speaking is expected to reflect institutional tradition rather than one’s own personality. Representatives of an “objectifying” style of speaking do not necessarily in fact do more justice to the requirement that statements be well-founded and scholarly (Polenz (1981) among others emphasizes the counter-productive nature of “jargonization”6 which merely aims to be persuasive), but are more successful in appearing to live up to this standard. In contrast, Ms. G., like her colleagues, frequently introduces sentences and phrases with variations of “I think” (l. 4) (or also “I am of the opinion”, “I believe”, “I consider”, “I have the feeling”), often phrased in the subjunctive (“should think”) and/or combined with modal auxiliaries. In combination with other stylistic elements which serve to limit scope (see above), her statements thus do not appear in the guise of “scholarly insight” or a report on the “state of the art”, but come close to constituting strictly private opinion. The women included in my data typically adopt a style of subsequent selfexplication (cf. also data 2–4), which contrasts strongly with the men’s speaking style, which might be described as having “lecture format”. Both in the presentations themselves and in the discussion contributions, the men who appear in my data tend to explicitly structure their speech: improvised verbal statements include introductions derived from the conventions of written texts, such as “First (…), secondly (…), thirdly, it must be stated that (…); as has already been emphasized under point two” etc. A male participant’s average contribution is considerably longer7 than a woman’s; it is shaped by meta-linguistic indicators pointing to the beginning, the end and the sequence of the hypothesis (and does not encourage interruptions due to the rapid and continuous pace of speech); it is also less likely to be followed by a postscript modifying the original statement. Ms. G., in contrast, seeks to establish what she did not mean in her presentation (thus limiting the scope of her own hypothesis), and is anything but decisive (l.13–15: “I, yes, I think um I did not in the LEAST mean to say, and I thought I had emphasized this clearly…”). This is followed by: “I said…..That is all I mean to say” (l. 17 and 25), which explicitly reduces the scope of the hypothesis. In combination with the remarks emphasizing what the scholarly approach she represents cannot (!) accomplish (l. 21–23), her contribution is so low-key and defensive that it actually reduces the significance of her original presentation. Her concluding suggestions are phrased in noncommittal fashion, using the “we” form to express solidarity (“ we should think about”, “I suspect we should try it”, “which should at LEAST be tried out”). Metacommunicative remarks commenting on one’s own inadequacies, frequently
218 Bettina Baron
accompanied by nervous laughter or giggling, also appear to be characteristic of female speech in this setting (l. 12: “now I just have to find my train of thought again…HEHEHEHE”). The following datum may serve to substantiate this even more clearly. Datum 2; Situation: Conference. A speaker, Ms. Z., wishes to amend her contribution. 1 Moderator: bitte, Frau Zeisig. Chairman: please go ahead, Ms. Zeisig. 2
Frau Zeisig: ja, natürlich, (2.0) das mit dem Adenauer-Text? Ms. Z.: yes, of course, (2.0) the business of the Adenauer text?
3
Moderator: ((schnell, ungeduldiger Tonfall)) ja, bitte, bitte Chairman: ((speaks fast in an impatient tone of voice)) yes, go ahead, go ahead.
4
Frau Zeisig: ja, (’H) nur (-) ich habe natürlich alles sehr Ms. Z.: yes, (’H) but (-) obviously I’ve
5
vereinfacht. ich muß auch sagen, ich werde nie wieder (-) simplified things a lot. I must also admit that I certainly will never again (-)
6
Statements auf acht Minuten zusammen äh äh ziehen hier und uh uh condense statements and cut them to eight minutes here.
7
streichen. es MUSSte notgedrungen sehr vieles UN:gesagt a great deal was necessARily left unSAI:D.
8
bleiben.(’H) das ist ja nun auch so, daß äm (-) die (’H) after all, well, this is also a situation where um (-)
9
Literaturwissenschaft wieder einen ganz extremen Standpunkt literary scholarship has once again taken a very extreme position,
10
verstanden hat, daß eine Rede so viele Bedeutungen hat, wie claiming that a speech will have as many meanings as
11
es (-) Hörer oder LESer gibt, nicht wahr, und daß eben (’H) (-) there are listeners or READers, you see, so that (’H)
12
man (-) sehr VORsichtig sein muß, WENN man kontroversielle you have to be (-) extremely CAUtious IF you are going to make
13
Äußerungen tut, DASS man (-) da wirklich (-) RICHtig controversial statements, to be (-) sure you (-) REALLY
14
ausdrückt, wie man etwas gemeint haben will. das mit dem äh get what you intended to say across. the business about the uh
Arguing among scholars 219
15
Analyse und der Erzählstruktur, das ist auch (-) eine analysis and the narrative structure this is also (-) a
16
publizierte (-) äh Untersuchung, ich glaube, sie stammt von study that has been (-) uh published, I believe
17
Thürmer? (’H) also auch aus äm ästhetischen Gesichtspunkten Thürmer is the author? (’H) so uh the aesthetic point of view also enters in here, in a way.
18
mit. und das s s kann man natürlich verschieden auffassen. and this s s is obviously subject to different interpretations.
19
das ist äh EI:ne der Deutungen, (-) aber es gibt da natürlich that is uh O:NE of the interpretations, (-) but there are obviously
20
sehr ((ersterbende Stimme)) viele unterschiedliche. ((voice fades)) many others here.
21
Moderator: He:rr Steiner. Chairman: Mi:ster Steiner.
It is striking that, even though her paper has not met with any harsh criticism from the audience, Ms. Z. engages in devastating self-criticism after an unfocussed, vague introduction (she had “obviously…simplified things a lot”, a great deal was…left unSAID” (l. 4–7)) and publicly laments her previous statements (l. 5: “I…will never again…”). The repetitive use of “also” (l.5, 8, 15, 17) as a connective is unsophisticated and lacking in interest, in stark contrast to the structured contributions by the men present, whose language as a rule clearly reflects a hierarchy of major hypotheses and minor points. Instead of proceeding to defend her claims when threatened and to salvage as much as possible — as the men generally do, according to my data — Ms. Z. takes recourse to a generalization, arguing that “you have to be extremely CAUtious IF you are going to make controversial statements”, which tends to emphasize her fear of discussing her arguments and being misunderstood, rather than being in the nature of an argument to be taken seriously. When, in concluding, she argues that different interpretations are possible, thus submerging her own, this has the effect of demoting her previously expressed views to an inconsequential and completely private level (l. 19–20). As in the case of datum 1, the statement does not have any effect on the course of the discussion; the chairman procceds to let someone else speak, who again initiates a completely new subject. In both cases, the female speakers are incapable of eliciting an exchange of opinion that is focussed on them and thus
220 Bettina Baron
the responsibility for limiting the scope of their contribution is their own..In the following example, one’s potential vulnerability to criticism is referred to at the very beginning of the presentation: Datum 3; Situation: Conference. Ms. C. had requested time to follow up on her talk with an extensive postscript. Begins speaking. 1
Frau Coulon: also, wie gesagt, ich hab das Gefühl gehabt, daß Ms. Coulon: well, as I said, I had the feeling that
2
ich mein äh Versprechen nur (-) zur Hälfte eingelöst hab, und I only managed to deliver (-) half of what I had uh promised and
3
äm wollte (-) sehr gern (-) äm ( — ) NACHtragen ( — ) äh um I (-) very much (-) uhm ( — ) wanted to ADD ( — ) uh
4
Gedanken äh (-) die ich äh (-) eigentlich s sehr anregend some thoughts uh (-) which I uh (-) actually find v very stimulating.
5
finde. was ich jetzt vortrag is is wirklich (-) äh nur ein what I am going to say now is is really (-) uh just a
6
Vorschlag. der diskutiert werden soll und ich bin GANZ (-) s suggestion. to be discussed. and I am QUITE (-) s
7
sicher, daß (-) ich äm äh gute Opposition hab. nich nur vom sure that (-) I uhm uh will be given good counter-arguments. not just from
8
Panel sondern vielleicht auch vom Publikum. ich werde the panel but possibly even from the audience. I will
9
versuchen, mich möglichst KURZ zu halten äm im (-) Interesse try to keep this as BRIEF as possible uhm in (-) the interest
10
der (-) äh (-) Fairness. (‘H) äm (-) Das Französische und das of (-) uh (-) fairness. (‘H) uhm (-) French and
11
Italienische sind beides romanische Sprachen (…) Italian are both Romance languages (…)
12
((folgt kurzer Fachvortrag)). ((a brief lecture on the subject follows)).
The emotional introduction (l. 1–3: “had the feeling”, “very much wanted to add”) corresponds to the expression of a subjective interpretation and presentation found in the two previous examples (l.2–4: “deliver what I had promised”, “wanted (..) to add”, “thoughts which I actually find very stimulating”, l. 6/7: “am quite sure”, l.9: “will try”). In almost all of the contributions by women in the data corpus there is an inflation of hedging (“perhaps”, “rather”, “actually”,
Arguing among scholars 221
“simply”, etc.), which, in this context, reinforces the impression of insecurity and resembles private speech design. The speaker ensures that the scope of the hypotheses to be presented remains limited: it is all “just a suggestion” (l. 5/6), has the status of personal “thoughts” (as opposed to sound hypotheses) (l. 4), which she does not expect the audience to find necessarily stimulating (she “actually” finds them “very stimulating” but who else would?). By initially stating that she “will try to keep this as brief as possible” (l.9) and then referring to the “interest of fairness”, she thus indicates that she definitely does not want to dominate nor to take up too much space, thus indirectly signalling that she would not put up much resistance to attempts to interrupt her or cut into her speaking time ‘for the general welfare’. After moralistically criticizing herself for not having delivered all she had promised, she explicitly invites criticism from the audience (l. 7: “and I am QUITE sure that I um will be given good counterarguments”) — a sentence which, if it were spoken differently prosodically, might express generosity and the courage to stand up to tough criticism, rather than conveying so much self-deprecation. In conjunction, however, with an emphatically friendly voice (evident in the sound document) and a hesitant way of speaking, full of pauses, minimal expressions such as “uh” and “um” and drawn out sounds, this speech activity tends to be face-threatening for the woman herself. The following datum serves to show how a speaking style which is very similar to the self-limiting statements by women previously described influences others, whose reactions indicate how successful or unsuccessful the intervention was. Datum 4; Situation: Conference. Following upon the “postscript” by Ms.C. partially cited above, Ms. K. begins speaking. 1
Frau Körner: ich möchte auf den Punkt äh VIER in dem Beitrag Ms. Körner: I would like to address point uh FOUR in the contribution
2
von Frau Coulon zu sprechen kommen und besonders auf (…) by Ms. Coulon and especially (…)
3
(…) (’H) das ist vielleicht eine randständige Erscheinung (…) (’H) this may be a marginal phenomenon
4
aber man könnte dieser Sache noch mehr Aufmerksamkeit but more attention could be paid to this matter.
5
schenken.
222 Bettina Baron
6
Moderator ((geflüstert)): ganz kurz. Chairman ((whispers)): keep it very brief.
7
Frau Coulon: äm (’H) vielleicht könnte ein äh anderer Ms. Coulon: uhm (’H) perhaps uh another
8
Französischsprecher darauf äh äh für mich (-) sind das keine French speaker could uh uh, as far as I (-) am concerned that is not
9
ernste äh es ist einfach nich eine (-) syntaktische (-) a serious uh, it simply is not possible (-) syntactically (-)
10
Möglichkeit gegegeben, es gibt xyab. xycd. (’H) aber ich speaking, there is xyab. xycd. (’H) but I
11
kann nich sagen cdxy. ((schneller werdend)) für mich is es cannot say cdxy ((speaks more rapidly)) as far as I can see,
12
keine produktive Möglichkeit aber vielleicht möchte andere this is not a productive approach but perhaps other
13
Sprecher.( — ) dazu äußern. speakers. ( — ) would like to address this.
14
Moderator: ich wollte nur sa:gen d äh wie Sie auch gemerkt Chairman: I only wanted to say th uh as you have also noted,
15
haben, alle syntaktischen (-) äh Aussagen bedürfen immer auch all syntactic (-) uh statements must be
16
der Überprüfung und Ergänzung durch die eigentlichen Fach checked and amplified by the real specialists
17
leute (…) selbstverständlich sind wir dafür sehr dankbar, (…) obviously we are very appreciative of this,
18
trotzdem würde ich Sie (-) bitten, dieses vielleicht dann äh but I would nonetheless (-) request that it be
19
im Anschluß an die Tagung mit dem Referenten im Einzelnen zu discussed with the speaker in detail uh after the meeting, possibly,
20
bereden, hier wolln wir uns doch auf der Ebene (-) was kann we must limit ourselves here to the level of (-) what
21
Syntaxforschung (-) für (-) die Analyse des XXX bringen äh syntax research (-) can (-) contribute to the analysis of XXX. uh
22
beschränken. (0.5) wenn keine weiteren Anfragen zu äh dem (0.5) if there are no additional questions on uh
Arguing among scholars 223
23
Beitrag dem NACHtrag von Frau (’H) Coulon sind, würd ich the contribution the POSTscript by Ms. (’H) Coulon, I would
24
gerne Frau Schumann bitten äh zu ihrer kurzen Intervention, like to ask Ms. Schumann uh for her brief intervention,
25
auch dazu gibt es ein Handout, (…)(…) dazu ein weiteres there is a handout for this as well, (…) (…)
26
Beispiel von Frau Schumann. Ms. Schumann has an additional example.
27
Frau Schumann: ja, ss ein GAN:Z kleiner Ausschnitt aus einer Ms. Schumann: yes, ts s an exTRE:MEly small excerpt from a
28
größeren A:rbeit ((folgt Fachvortrag)) much lo:nger piece ((a lecture on the subject follows)).
In this excerpt, all three speakers limit their scope: Ms. K. states that the point she is interested in “may be a marginal phenomenon” (l. 3); phrased as “more attention could be paid to this matter” (l. 4), the request is noncommittal. Ms. C., an established expert and author of authoritative publications on the subject, loses out on the opportunity to demonstrate her expertise and tries to pass the question on. The attempt misfires (predictably, since the phrasing “perhaps other speakers would like to address this” (l. 13) fails to exert enough pressure), for the chairman steps in and introduces a new subject. All three speakers diminish their statements by hedging (“perhaps”, “simply”, “extremely”); Ms. C. and Ms. K. also appear undecided because of their preference for the subjunctive. While Ms. C. responds briefly to Ms. K’s question, she emphasizes her subjectivity by making a gesture of modesty (l. 8/9: “as far as I am concerned … it simply is not possible…but…”). The chairman’s behavior reflects the effect of such speech actions; he prevents Ms. C’s suggestion for a discussion from being realized, referring instead to opportunities to discuss these issues with the speaker (this must refer to Ms. C.) privately during non-scheduled conference time. He successfully limits Ms. C’s contribution and prophylactically sets limits for the next paper both as regards time and space (l.6: “very brief”, l.24: “her brief intervention”), as is evident from Ms. C’s ‘time-saving’, increasingly rapid-fire speech. All of these actions serve to marginalize, if not to question the significance of the topics initiated by the women. The chairman also feels free to use the slightly paternalistic phrase “we must limit ourselves here to…” (l. 20), which presupposes a collective commitment. He, too, hedges and uses limiting subjunctives, but, due to his unchallenged position as the discussion leader, they tend to
224 Bettina Baron
reflect polite topoi rather than threaten his image. Phrases such as these do not keep him from prevailing, as reflected in the fact that the third speaker, Ms. Sch., pays obeisance to his suggestion not to take up too much time, introducing her presentation by the formulaic phrase so often used by women (in variations) that it is almost a cliché, that it is only “an exTREMEly small excerpt” from a much longer study she is going to discuss which implies shortness of contribution. The supremacy of the chairman’s role (which is also evident from the fact that the non-prestigious interjections used do not have a negative effect) is presumably due to the combination of high speech status, high extrinsic status, male gender and a prosodic speech design which conventionally connotes authority. To put it in a nutshell: given this combination, anything goes.
2. “Explorative” vs. “expository” style Holmes (1992) found a cogent expression to describe the tendency of women in teaching situations, whether in the schools or universities, to give preference to an “explorative” style, in contrast to the “expository”, lecture-like style men often tend to choose. She suggested that, in contrast to the expository style of presentation — focusing on results — an exploratory style enables the audience to follow the speaker’s thoughts as they listen, comparable to Kleist’s idea of the “gradual composition of thoughts while speaking”. The next datum may serve as an example of “explorative style”: Datum 5; Situation: Conference. After the discussion is opened, two female participants from the audience ask to speak. Ms. H. begins. 1
Frau Hahn: ich wollt äh Überlegungen zu einer äh jetzt zu Ms. Hahn: I would like to (’H) present uh some ideas about an uh
2
schreibenden innovativen Lernergrammatik (’H) vortragen, innovative learners’ grammar,
3
wenn ich das s äh im MoMENT äh hab ich das konzipiert (’H) if I s uh that at the MOment uh I developed this idea (’H)
4
als ich die Frage äh gehört hab und überlegt, was müßte oder when I uh heard the question and began thinking about what should be or
5
was könnte man jetzt schon reinschreiben in eine solche äh could be included right now in a uh (-)
Arguing among scholars 225
6
(-) Lernergrammatik, auch WENN wir nicht soweit SIND, da (-) learners’ grammar such as this, even IF we haven’t GOTTEN to that point
7
stimme ich Herrn Klaus völlig zu. (’H) ich denk, es könnte so yet, (-) I agree completely with Mr. Klaus on this. (’H) I think it could
8
äh so ne Grammatik könnte einen Teil enthalten, der etwas wie uh a grammar such as this could include a section, which would include
9
XXXe enthielte, allerdings sehr aufgefächerte, ins Einzelne something like XXXs, but very much subdivided and going into detail,
10
gehende, wie sie s äh von (’H) verschiednen äh ja schon vor as has uh already been suggested by (’H) several uh people,
11
geschlagen wurden, Christian und Martin Bauer und äh Frau Christian and Martin Bauer and uh Ms.
12
Meister haben ja differenzierte äh XXXe vorgestellt und das Meister have in fact presented different uh XXXs and it
13
könnte man sicher in Hin äh sicht auf Lernergrammatiken (’H) would appear that this could certainly be tried? with ref uh erence to
14
auch versuchen? äh dann müßte man sicher so etwas wie äh learners’ grammars uh in this case it WOULD be certainly necessary
15
SCHON das Beschreiben von möglichem XXX-Inventar einfügen, to include uh the description of possible XXX inventory, somehow,
16
aber mit der deutlichen Bemerkung, daß das nicht festgelegte but with a clear reference to the fact that this is not a predetermined
17
Eins-zu-Eins-(’H) Beziehungen sind (…) dann denke ich mir, one-to-one (’H) ratio (…) then I imagine
18
müßten FFFe rein, weil wir alles, was wir lernen (-) vieles, FFFs would have to be included, because we learn everything, we learn (-) many things
19
was wir lernen über (-) FFF-(-)gebrauch, über FFF-Anwendung by (-) FFF usage, by FFF (-) application
20
(-) lernen (’H) und dann äh GLAUBe ich, müßte in eine äh (’H) and then uh I BELIEVE
21
moderne Lernergrammatik UNbedingt. WIE weiß ich nich, aber a uh modern learners’ grammar would ABsolutely have to include. HOW I do not know,
226 Bettina Baron
22
ein (-) ein Teil rein, der DEUTlich macht, und der (’H) für but a (-) a section, which clearly demonstrates and which (’H),
23
mich fast das (-) ein ganz elemenTArer Teil von ä Grammatik as far as I am concerned is almost the (-) a very BAsic part of uh grammar,
24
ist, (’H) daß wir äm (-) auch die Freiheit haben, mit dem, (’H) that we um (-) are free to deal with the aspects
25
was wir als normativ emPFINden, was wir als musterhaft we FEEL are normative, we KNOW are representative,
26
KENnen, frei umzugehn.(…) (…) as we see fit. (…) (…)
27
Moderator: Frau Meister? (5.0) Chairman: Ms. Meister? (5.0)
28
Frau Meister: äh, ich möcht eigentlich, äh beSTIMMT überZO: Ms. Meister: uh, I would actually like to state, and this is uh CERtainly
29
gen, aber auch n bißchen (-) äh provokativ äh sagen, daß die exaggerated but also a little bit (-) uh provocative uh, that
30
äh (-) Spracherwerbsforschung eigentlich die FINGer davon uh (-) language- acquisition research should actually keep OUT of this.
31
lassen sollte, denn MICH hat das sehr, also von der äh von the uh, that is the uh
32
dem (’H) äh BEItrag zu einer psychologisch fundierten äh (’H) uh contriBUtion to a uh grammar (’H) that is psychologically based
33
Grammatik (’H) weil MICH das sehr beeindruckt hat, das ERSte, was to MY mind very impressive, the FIRST point
34
was Frau Hahn (’H) dargestellt hat, daß eigentlich (…)(…) presented by Ms. Hahn, (’H) the fact that actually (…)(…)
There is no comparable instance in my data where a male speaker admits, as H. does, that he developed this idea “at the same moment” (l.3) and, after expressing an idea, freely admits with reference to implementing it: “HOW I do not know” (l. 21). (We must always keep in mind that gender-specific differences may be very different in a private context). It is evident that Ms. H. thus contravenes the tacit norms of a public academic discussion, according to which an impression of competence is traditionally based on assertive, positive phrasing without making very obvious admissions of a lack of knowledge. Her approach, which is to make suggestions and not to present hard facts, is
Arguing among scholars 227
reflected in the use of seven variations of: ‘something “could” or “would” have to be included’. Quite aside from the predictable effect of this speech design in the given context, however, the question arises whether an “explorative style” such as this might not be perfectly appropriate to dealing with certain problems, e.g. if an idea in fact breaks new ground and if conceding a lack of knowledge in certain areas points to questions that are known to be open and difficult to answer. The confrontation of lacunae and the bald identification of a hypothesis as not yet having been sufficiently tested or even as having been falsified might be described as the more appropriate way of reporting on work in progress and stimulating group creativity — if the discussion is not simply to be maintained at a non-committal level. In an institutional and highly formalized context, however, this is not the usual approach.
3. On the interaction of “status” and “gender” In the context of a scholarly discussion, female speakers appear to be much more willing to limit their scope, engage in self-criticism, make concessions and be considerate of claims made by others (This finding is corroborated by recent Scandinavian studies on the academia: Gunnarsson 1995/1997/1999 reports that female Ph.D. candidates correct and excuse themselves considerable more often than the men in post-graduate colloquia, also criticizing others less frequently and speaking more briefly). What is the situation with regard to male participants? Data from other situational contexts (for example, seminar situations with a leader and several participants at the learning or beginning stage), in which major hierarchical differences define the situation, show that men low in status are as prone to resort to stylistic means that result in indirection, such as hedging, subjunctive phrasing and hesistant language that conveys insecurity through its prosody, as the women cited here. The language used by a majority of women in established hierarchical positions, such as female professors, in contrast, often demonstrates directness, decisiveness and controvertibility in such an asymmetrical context, suggesting that the decisive variable might be “status”.The conference data indicate, however, that given relative symmetry of status, female participants are subject to more pronounced limitations of time and subject matter, and, most importantly, subject themselves to these limitations. This does not necessarily have a negative effect in a discussion among women or in a non-public, non-professional context; the communicative advantages of behavior in a discussion that “gives others
228 Bettina Baron
priority” and takes account of others’ need to speak has frequently been demonstrated (cf.for example Tannen 1994). Coates (1995) argues that even in a professional context it would be appropriate to substitute a “collaborative” style (usually introduced by women) for the usual “competitive” style. But “a style which must rely on the other person having a similar orientation in order to be productive, loses out if it must contest with a style focused on selfportrayal and the demonstration of status” (Kotthoff 1993a (translated)). In a conversational context, such as an academic discussion, in which participants have comparable extrinsic status, the battle for intrinsic status is all the tougher (albeit traditionally and institutionally more camouflaged than, for example in the political context, cf. Thimm 1995, Baron 1996). Women who are slightly lower in status face more disadvantages than men with lower hierarchical status faced with a male speaker high in status. The following exemplifies this: Datum 6; Situation: Colloquium. End of the presentation by Ms. A. The discussion is now open. 1
Moderator: Herr Jakob bitte. (0.7) Chairman: please go ahead Mr. Jakob. (0.7)
2
Herr Jakob: ja. äh drei Bemerkungen aus der Sicht des (-) Mr. Jakob: yes. Uh three comments from the point of view of a (-)
3
VERSforschers. (’H) (-) ich würde empfehlen (-) äh nicht VERSE researcher. (’H) (-) I would recommend (-) uh not
4
Kadenz zu sagen. (’H) das hat einen so genau festgelegten saying cadence. that has such a clearly defined
5
SINN ( — ) äh (-) äh und zwar in der Ve:rslehre. das geht auf MEANING ( — ) uh, ( — ) uh that is in the theory of ve:rse, with respect to
6
Hebungen und Senkungen und Rhythmus (’H) (-) was Sie rises and falls and rhythm (’H) (-) what you
7
beschrieben haben ist XXX. äh (-) zweitens ist ihr have described is XXX. uh (-) secondly your
8
[Dramenbegriff [concept of drama is
9
Publikum: [HEHEHE Audience: [HEHEHE
10
Herr Jakob: es sei denn daß die äh Musikwissenschaft sich mit Mr. Jakob: unless the field of uh musicology succeeds in
Arguing among scholars 229
11
einem ganz neuen Kadenzbegriff durchsetzt. das wär ihr dann establishing a completely new concept of the cadence. which it is
12
unbenommen. aber ((räuspert sich heftig)) bei UNS? (’H) Herr perfectly free to do. but ((clears his throat loudly)) in OUR field? (’H) Mr.
13
Franz [wird mir ZUstimmen. Franz I’m sure [will AGREE with me.
14
Publikum: Audience:
15
Herr Jakob: das andere ist der Dramatikbegriff. (0.5) Sie Mr. Jacob: the other point is the concept of DRAMA.. (0.5) You
16
haben abwechslungsweise äh X und Y gesagt. (’H) (-) aber in referred alternately to uh X and Y. (’H) (-) but in
17
Wahrheit haben Sie nur nur Dialogsszenen gehabt, die (-) reality you took only only dialogue scenes, which (-)
18
DURCH IHre Rekonstruktion (’H) dramatische Szenen WERden. THROUGH YOUR reconstruction (’H) beCOME dramatic scenes.
19
(’H) die haben noch an sich selbst (’H) eh keinen dramati(’H) They are not inherently (’H) dramatic.
20
schen Charakter. das müßte glaub ich unterschieden werden. I think a distinction must be made here.
21
(…) ((längere belehrende Ausführungen)) und meine Frage is (…) ((lengthy didactic remarks)) and my question is
22
(-) was machen Sie um solche Fälle (- -) zu beschreiben. (-) what do you do to describe cases ( — ) such as this.
23
(1.0)
24
Frau Anders: ALso. (-) zunächst mal (-) also ich geh jetzt Ms. Anders: WELL then. (-) first of all (-) so I think I will
25
glaub ich der Reihen( — )f:olge durch ähm (‘H) (1.0) äh zum take things in the same or( — )der uhm (‘H) (1.0) uh first the
26
Kadenzbegriff. also im in der (-) MuSIKwissenschaft ich ver concept of cadence. Well then in in (-) musicology I use
27
wende den Kadenzbegriff aus der Musikwissenschaft weil ich: the concept of cadence from musicology because I: uhm
28
ja auch ( — ) ähm (-) Musikwissenschaftlerin BIN ähm (- -) DA AM also ( — ) a ( — ) musicologist uhm ( — )
[HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE [HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE
230 Bettina Baron
29
unterscheidet man (- -) zwischen (-) also (-) XXX is EI:N (we make a distinction THERE ( — ) between (-) well (-) XXX is O:NE ( — )
30
-) äh:m (-) äh is (-) is ein Element (- -) dessen was wir als uhm (-) uh is (-) is an element ( — ) we refer to as
31
Kadenz bezeichnen. (-) nämlich XX. ansonsten (-) rechnen wir cadence (-) that is XX. in addition (-) we include
32
noch dazu A, B, C und D. und des is (-) in der MuSIKwissen A, B, C and D in this. and, at least (-) as far as musicology is concerned,
33
schaft zumindest der gängige( — ) äh Begriff der Kadenz. (0.5) that is the traditional uh concept of cadence. (0.5)
34
Herr Jakob: dann ist die Musikwissenschaft von allen guten
35
GEIStern verlassen. Mr. Jakob: then musicology is not in its right MIND.
36
Herr Franz: ((aufgebrachter Ton)) ja also Sybille hat MEHR Mr. Franz: ((outraged tone of voice)) oh well Sybil is MORE
37
Kontakt mit der Musikwissenschaft, Herr Ja:kob. in touch with musicology, Mr. Ja:cob.
38
Publikum: HEHEHEHEHE[HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE Audience: HEHEHEHEHE[HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE
39
Herr Jakob ((nuschelnd)): [na ja. (0.5) Entschuldigung. Mr. Jakob ((mumbling)): [Well. (0.5) Sorry.
40
Frau Anders: (1.0) gut. soweit zu den äh Begriffs, ähm zum Ms. Anders: (1.0) Fine. So much for the uh concept, uhm
41
zweiten ähm Sie haben Recht ich hab halt immer nur ganz secondly uhm you are right with respect to my somehow taking
42
kleine AUSschnitte. nämlich diese kleinen Dialoge, die aber only very brief EXcerpts, that is the brief dialogues which however
43
eingebettet SIND. (…) (- -) also in so(-) die haben SCHON ARE set into (a larger whole). (…) ( — ) so (-) so in this respect they ARE
44
dramatischen Charakter (…) (…). dramatic in character (…) (…).
Strictly speaking, Mr. J. is speaking as a non-expert (“verse researcher) on a topic in musicology, while Ms. A. is an expert. But due to his high status, in part based on the age factor, it is not surprising that he assumes the prerogative of
Arguing among scholars
being the first to speak in the discussion, is not interrupted despite his unfounded criticism, is allowed to speak extensively without having his status as a non-expert pointed out and receives a very toned down response from Ms. A, who is under attack (subsequently even a concession, l.41). The audience senses the contradiction between an overdue conflict and the respect accorded to J’s position, which enables him to finish speaking, and reacts by laughing. J. demonstrates the typical speech design of the scholar, who seeks to maintain a high level of prestige on the floor: he stresses his role as a “verse researcher” avoiding any reference to his personal identity or the potential subjectivity of his opinion; he “recommends” (l. 3), he instructs (l. 6/7: “what you have described is XXX”; l. 16/17: “in reality you took only…”), he claims to represent the traditional approach and, in contrast to the speaker, to use scientifically correct concepts (l. 12;35) and his speech is highly structured. In addition, J. tries to enlist the support of F., a musicologist who is about the same age but not quite so prominent, to reinforce his position (l. 13) (which does not succeed, see below). Ms. A., who is appreciably younger and lower in status, sums up the situation correctly from her perspective (l. 24–33) and emphasizes her status as an expert, but does not meet with much success (which is certainly to be attributed not only to her position in the hierarchy but also to her hesitant way of speaking with many pauses): when corrected by her, Mr. J. in fact makes abusive remarks (l. 35). It is not until a male colleague, Mr. F., speaks up in support of Ms. A. (l. 36/37) that Mr. J. gives in and mumbles an apology. (The audience’s laughter appears to be a reaction to Mr. F.’s rebuke, which threatens to make Mr. J. lose face; there was no laughter after Ms. A.’s correction, since she did not explicitly attack Mr. F.’s authority, nor was she accepted by him). Although the coalition with Mr. F. has enabled Ms. A. to gain ground, the tone of her defense against F.’s second point of criticism is very moderate. She first concedes that J. is correct in criticizing her choice of excerpts (l. 41: “you are right with respect to my taking only very brief excerpts”), although she is convinced that her analysis is correct (l. 43/44: “they ARE dramatic in character”). She thus clearly refrains from copying the kind of verbal dominance that characterizes J.’s behavior.
4. Gender-preferential turn-taking management Datum 7 illustrates how the normally unchallenged status of a chairperson determined by the setting can be threatened, with a lasting effect.
231
232 Bettina Baron
Datum 7; Situation: Conference. Chairwoman tries to let one of the (female) speakers have the floor. A male member of the audience interrupts. 1
Moderatorin: (…) Frau Laban bitte Chairwoman: (…) go ahead Ms. Laban
2
Frau Laban: mhM, ich möch[te Ms. Laban: mhM, I would [like
3
Herr Brunner: Mr. Brunner:
4
ordnung sagen die wir vorhin verabredet haben, du hast vier we agreed upon before, you uh set up four
5
FRA:gen äh VORgegeben, äh über die wir reden sollen, QUEStions uh which we are to address
6
Moderatorin: hmhm Chairwoman: uh huh
7
Herr Brunner: das war die DRITte, ham wa die erste und zweite Mr. Brunner: that was the THIRD question, have we already
8
schon erledigt? dealt with the other two?
9
Moderatorin: nein, wir ham (-) wir ham festgelegt, daß wir Chairwoman: no, we had (-) we had decided that we would
10
mit dieser Frage anfangen. begin with this question.
11
Herr Brunner: ham wir NICHT, aber bitte, KÖNN wa MACHen. Mr. Brunner: we had NOT, but allright, we CAN DO so.
12
Moderatorin: das ham wir FESTgelegt, ( — ) ham wir das Chairwoman: that is what we deCIDed, ( — ) is that what we
13
festgelegt? decided?
14
Publikum:
15
folgenden Dialog hinweg)) Audience: [HAHAHAHA ((laughter and commotion continue during the discussion that follows))
16
Moderatorin: [ja:. Chairwoman: [ye:s.
[ich möchte was zur Verfahrens[I want to say something about the procedure
[HAHAHAHA ((Lachen, Unruhe über den weiter
Arguing among scholars 233
17
Herr Brunner: wir ham FESTgelegt daß wir mit der Frage was Mr. Brunner: we deCIDed to begin with the question of what
18
ist PhysikaLISmus anfangen, ( — ) wie realistisch sind PHYsicalism is, how realistic are
19
XYZ-aTIONen, [das is ‘ne andre Frage. XYZ ations [that’s a different question.
20
Publikum: Audience:
21
Mod.: das is klar, das (-) äh (-)wir hatten aber(-), Sie sind Chairwoman: we all know that, that (-) uh (-) but we had (-), you are
22
mein ZEUge, wir hatten festgelegt, wir fangen mit dem Begriff my WITness, we had decided to begin
23
der XYZ-ation an. ja? ( — ) JA. [gut. Bitte Frau Laban. with the concept of the XYZation. Agreed? ( — ) YES. [Fine. Go ahead, Ms. Laban.
24
Publik.: Audience:
25
Frau Laban: also, ich muß jetzt auch n bißchen improvisieren, Ms. Laban: well, I am going to have to improvise a bit now
26
aber äm ( — ) ich wollte sowieso nur kurz zu dieser ( — ) äh (-but uhm ( — ) I had only intended to comment
27
-) zu diesem Problemfeld etwas sagen (…) zu dieser Frage on the ( — ) uh ( — ) area at issue briefly in any case (…)
28
will ich ganz kurz Stellung nehmen ((folgt Vortrag)). I want to state my position very briefly on this question ((a disquisition follows)).
[((Zwischenrufe u.a. “Guten MO:Rgen”, Lachen)) [((Heckling such as “good MORNing”, laughter))
[((starke Unruhe)) [((very restless))
In this datum, the situational identities of the participants do not remain constant. Mr. Br. interrupts the speaker L. right after she begins speaking (l. 3); rather than representing an instance of harmless overlapping (see Kotthoff 1993b), this prevents her from taking her turn and gives him the floor (cf. Edelsky 1993). He does not excuse himself and, addressing the chairwoman, rather than the speaker, raises a question about the proper procedure for the discussion (l. 7/8) but does not accept her response. Was this predictable? Mr. Br. addresses her personally in her role as the person responsible for structuring
234 Bettina Baron
the situation (l. 4); she responds by using varieties of “we”, however, thus diverting attention from her function and her role as an authority (l. 9). This results in Mr. Br. contradicting her claim and disputing her position as the chairperson taking charge of the topics to be discussed and their sequence (l. 11). The chairwoman’s response shows considerable insecurity, especially when the statement about the procedure having been previously determined is turned into a question directed at the audience, “is that what we decided? (l.12/13). As in datum 6, the audience responds to the conflict over authority by laughing. Mr. Br. expresses a decided opinion about the correct sequence of questions to be treated (l. 17/18). This serves to threaten the chairwoman’s face, forcing her to concede that Br.’s last claim was correct (l. 21: “we all know that”) and to call upon a third party to “witness” what they had agreed on (l. 21/22). As a result, and due to her query (“agreed?”), she appears dependent on the overall consensus and fails to play the part of a ‘director’. While she gains back some ground by giving the floor to Ms. L. for the second time — this time successfully — the restlessness displayed by the audience (audible in the original tone document), which impinges on the beginning of Ms. L.’s presentation, suggests that the chairwoman’s reputation has suffered from this battle over territory: she was not consistent and vigilant enough about determining the sequence of topics and speakers. She tries to compensate for the asymmetrical relationship between the leader and the members of the group (cf. her use of “we”), instead of benefitting from it herself. The next datum suggests that reference to outside authorities potentially damages the speaker’s face (unless it simply involves citing established theories, usually by prominent authors, in support of a hypothesis); here, it does not lead to success and results in forfeiting the floor. Datum 8; Situation: Conference. A chairwoman opens the discussion. 1
Moderatorin: äh:m ich ich würde sagen, ich SEHE jetzt äh oder Chairwoman: uh:m I I would say, I can SEE now uh or
2
ich DENKE mir, daß (-) die hier ihre Statements abgegeben I can IMAGINE that (-) those who have made their statements here
3
haben, nicht UNbedingt einer (-) m MEInung sind, ich sehe das are not necessARily of one and the same (-) o oPINion, I probably ( — )
4
wahrscheinlich ( — ) RICHtig, (’H) äh und wollte Ihnen, see that CORRECTly, (’H) uh and
5
sofern (-) bei Ihnen BeDÜRFnis besteht, jetzt doch erst noch insofar as (-) you feel the NEED, I wanted to first
Arguing among scholars 235
6
äh zehn Minuten lang oder (-)äh Gelegenheit geben (’H) äh uh give you an opportunity for uh 10 minutes or (-) uh
7
selber noch mal zu (-) ihrer Klärung untereinander (’H) uh to contribute to (-) clarifying things among yourselves.
8
beizutragen. WENN der Wunsch besteht. (4.0) ((sehr leise und IF you so desire. (4.0) ((very softly and
9
zögerlich:)) nicht? hesitantly:)) wouldn’t you agree?
10
Frau Laban: (1.0) also eben (-) MIR is nur grade bei äh Herrn Ms. Laban: (1.0) well (-) it just struck ME while uh Mr.
11
Sendling aufgefallen, daß er ähm eben versucht, XYZ-Prozesse Sendling was speaking that what he is uhm trying to do is explain XYZ processes
12
als Zustände des Gehirns zu erklären, (’H) und wie ich gerade as conditions of the brain. (’H) and, as I just
13
ausgeführt habe, denke ich, ist es kein Zufall, daß äh die stated, I think it is hardly an accident that uh the
14
Neurologen, die sich mit der Struktur und der Funktionsweise neurologists, who deal with the structure and functioning
15
des Gehirns beschäftigen, (’H) KEIne adäquate Erklärung haben of the brain, (’’H) have not found ANY adequate explanation
16
liefern können für das, was WIR im Rahmen von XYZ-Prozessen of what it is WE DO in the context of XYZ processes.
17
MAchen. (-) ich bin mir DEShalb so sicher, weil ich letztens (’H) I am quite sure of this beCAUSE it was only recently
18
erst aufm Kongress mit Neurologen darüber ((nervöses Lachen)) that I discussHEHEed this with neurologists at a convention ((laughs nervously)),
19
diskutiHEHEert HEhab, und die haben es selber eingestanden. and they admitted as much themselves.
20
Moderatorin: mhm Chairwoman: mhm
21
Herr Sendling: ja, natü:rlich, aber äh (-) was, was hei:ßt Mr. Sendling: yes, of course, but uh (-) what what does
236 Bettina Baron
22
das that mean
[jetzt. [now.
23
Herr Bachmann: [also, in EINer Hinsicht is die Sache sicher Mr. Bachmann: [well, in ONE respect the matter is certainly
24
(-) UNstrittig und äh lei:cht konsensfähig, wir sind alle (-) indisputable and we can uh ea:sily arrive at a consensus, we are all
25
davon überzeugt, daß das, was wir hier so VON uns geben und convinced that whatever it is that we set FORTH here and
26
was dann da ankommt oder auch nich ankommt, (’H) da irgendwie which is then received or not, (’H) somehow originates
27
drin in
28
Moderatorin: mhm Chairwoman: mhm
29
Herr Bachmann: durch Schaltungen im Gehirn hervorgebracht und Mr. Bachmann: circuits in the brain and
30
äh verarbeitet wird. also, in dieser Pauschalverabredung, (-) uh is processed there. So we can agree that (-)
31
GEIST beruht letztlich auf dem grauen Glibber da im Kopf, the INTELLECT is ultimately based on this grey mass in our heads,
32
können wir das (-) getrost geschenkt nehmen. darüber hinaus we can presuppose that (-) perfectly well. above and beyond this
33
können einem die Neurologen und äh ((Räuspern)) äh the neurologists and the uh ((clears his throat)) psychologists cannot
34
Psychologen SEHR wenig sagen (…) (…) aber äh ganz tell us much AT ALL (…) (…) but uh
35
pauschal, xyz-wissenschaftliche Modelle erklären zudem, wovon generally speaking, xyz-scientific models also explain of the things
36
äh traditionellerweise UND verNÜNFtigerweise (-) traditionell uh syntax, lexis, semantics have traditionally AND appropriately
37
(-) äh Syntax, Lexik, Semantik handeln, Ü:berhaupt nichts. been about, ABSOLUTEly nothing.
38
((folgt neuer Sprecher)) ((a new speaker follows))
Arguing among scholars 237
The chairwoman’s speech design is similar to the contributions by women in data 1–4 (hedging, subjective forms, etc.). At the micro-level, her introduction (l. 1–4) is an obvious example of ‘de-objectification’: while correcting herself, she transforms the perception of a fact (“I can see”) into a report about an internal process (“uh or I can imagine”). The use of conditionals (l. 5:”insofar as you feel the NEED”, l. 8: “IF you so desire”), makes the invitation to discuss the question appear to be a mere suggestion, which, by asking “wouldn’t you agree?” (l. 9), she subsequently almost retracts, once no one speaks up immediately. In datum 4, for example, the discussion is given a much more explicit direction than here. In datum 7 (l. 25–28), after the battle for power between the chairwoman and Mr. Br., Ms. L. had introduced her presentation very hesitantly, indicating her willingness to limit her time, and had enabled the audience to take her contribution less seriously by conceding that her remarks were improvised. The sentence following upon her hypothesis in datum 8 (l. 17/18) endangers her prestige as an expert, because she claims to base her conviction about being right on the authority of oral statements by others. This approach, in combination with the way she qualifies her introduction (l. 10) shows that she is not doing battle for higher intrinsic speech status, and that she is thus more prone to forfeit the floor. The ground is prepared by Mr. S.’s criticism in the guise of a question (l. 21/22), which ultimately suggests that she has not gotten her argument across. Mr. B. thereupon takes the floor (rather than waiting for the chairperson) and launches into extensive remarks of lecture format, ultimately stating categorically that “xyz scientific models…explain…absolutely nothing” (l. 35–37), and making it appear that the topic has been dealt with. In fact, however, it is not taken up again in this guise. In conversational terms, his comments represent the obverse of the approach most often taken by the women in my data: where they are selfcritical to the point of disparaging themselves, he begins by claiming that his subjective view is “certainly indisputable and we can uh easily arrive at a consensus” (l. 24), presupposes that the audience will agree with him (l. 24/25: “we are all convinced…”) and makes a claim to knowledge about sound vs. unsound findings (l.22: “we can presuppose that perfectly well”). His uninhibited generalizing (l. 35–37) contrasts with the frequent tendency of women speakers to limit their scope: women often confess that their paper is just a small excerpt that is not really representative or that their hypothesis can “only” serve to indicate this but not that, etc. The way speaker B. disqualifies
238 Bettina Baron
other fields of research is diametrically opposed to the self-critical view expressed by a woman in datum l (l. 21–23) as to what her own discipline has not been able to achieve.
5. Strategies of warding off criticism The previous datum (with the contribution by participant B.) also serves as an example of how to ward off criticism preventively. The use of expressions such as, something is “certainly indisputable”, in order to convince the audience is obvious; advertisements for oneself are not always necessarily this easy to detect. Hempfer (1981) analyzed scholarly discourse, particularly in the Humanities, as being permeated by a presuppositional structure, which is not necessarily obvious. Both orally and in written form, scholars very often work with “implicit hypotheses”, which are not subject to testing (cf. op.cit. p. 476). They do not always (though sometimes) do this for manipulative purposes; but there is a risk that presuppositions made by the speaker will not be recognized by the audience, who are deceived by the superficial evidence which the presupposed proposition obtains by rhetorical means. The suggestion that there is a general consensus about what has been said is a simple but as a rule effective means of proofing one’s own hypotheses or theories, especially in combination with certain prosodic speech characteristics. My data indicate that this is definitely a technique used more frequently by men. Datum 9 represents a variation upon this: Datum 9; Situation: Conference. Mr. W. begins his presentation. 1
Moderator: bitte Herr Weiss. Chairman: go ahead please, Mr. Weiss.
2
Herr Weiss: JA. ((Räuspern)) habe mir das so vorgestellt und Mr. Weiss: YES. ((clears his throat)) I’ve thought this out as follows and
3
ich glaube, ich kann in (-) äh großen Perioden wohl auf äh I believe that I can (-) uh count on your immediate acceptance (-) uh as far as most areas
4
sofortige Zustimmung (-) rechnen. es (-) dient das, was ich are concerned. the (-) point of what I am
5
also jetzt niederschreibe, irgendwie ((Räuspern)) einer now going to write down is thus ((clears his throat)) to ascertain somehow
Arguing among scholars 239
6
Vergewisserung meinerseits, ob Sie das (-) teilen. ich on my part whether you do in fact (-) agree. I
7
glaube, wenn wir (-) an eine komparative (Räuspern) Analyse believe that if we (-) try to conduct a comparative ((clears his throat)) analysis
8
(-) unter stilforschungsbezogenen Vorzeichen gehen, dann based on stylistic research
9
müssen wir etwas anderes machen, als wenn wir sozusagen our approach is going to be different from what it is when we
10
Rhetorik betreiben.(-) oder XYZ-Grammatik. lassen Sie mich work on rhetoric, as it were. (-) or XYZ grammar. let me
11
das einfach so abkürzen. (’H)((Räuspern)) wie hat man sich summarize this as follows. (’H) ((clears his throat)) how are we
12
das vorzustellen. (…) (…) to envision this. (…) (…)
Compare this introduction with the introduction in datum 3: rather than anticipating “immediate acceptance” by the audience, as Mr. W. does, Ms. C. hopes to be given “good counter-arguments”. While the speaker uses several hedges, they appear in conjunction with persuasive phrasing and a determined tone of voice and thus do not give an impression of insecurity. He does not really so much put a ‘question’ to the audience as want to “ascertain” (l. 5) something; he states that scholars need to take a “different” approach (l. 9). Finally, he presents his suggestion for a comparative analysis by asking, “how are we to envision this” (l. 11/12), implying that this scholarly approach has already been endorsed (another example of a strategy designed to secure one’s own theory, which works with “hidden performatives”). Strategies to ward off criticism can obviously also be employed with respect to criticism that has already been expressed. In a particularly interesting case (datum 10), a speaker uses an apparent concession to face-work to his advantage. Datum 10; Situation: Conference. Mr. O. is criticized for his presentation i n the subsequent discussion period and now responds. Begins speaking. 1
Herr Oster: na ja, also da dieses Heranziehen von Mr. Oster: well, since I am mainly to blame for introducing
2
außerpsychologischen äh Verdeutlichungen hauptsächlich meine clarification of a non-psychological nature,
240 Bettina Baron
3
Schuld ist, äh will ich dazu was sagen. ich bin natürlich uh I would like to speak to this. obviously I did
4
nich ausgewichen. das ist Unsinn. daß das ein Ausweichen vor not evade the issue. that is nonsense. to say that an evasion of
5
methodischen Problemen ist. äh die Absicht war,, durch äh methodological problems is involved. uh it was my intention to
6
Analogiebetrachtungen etwas zu verdeutlichen (-), wenn mir clarify something by uh considering analogies (-), if I did
7
das mißlungen ist, dann warns eben falsche (-) äh Versuche. not succeeed in doing this, then the (-) uh attempts were misdirected.
8
(’H) aber soweit ich sie nun schon mal angezettelt habe, will (’H) but insofar as I have set all of this in motion, I intend to
9
ich auch zu ihnen stehen und äh ich kann das äh in der Tat stand by it and uh I can uh in fact deal with this
10
Punkt für Punkt durchexerzieren. (…) es sind nicht point by point. (…) it is not the
11
dieSELben Fakten. das ist mal klar. (…) äh und die Art wie SAME facts that are involved. That is obvious. (…) uh and the way this
12
sich das in bezug auf die Daten äh ergibt, ist wirklich Punkt uh becomes evident in relation to the data can certainly
13
für Punkt nachzuvollziehen (…) be followed point by point (…)
14
((folgen vortragsähnliche Ausführungen)). ((This is followed by remarks with a lecture format)).
The ‘admission of guilt’ (“I am … to blame”) in l. 1/2 only represents a concession on a superficial level, for it is immediately followed by Mr. O.’s categorical and slightly aggressive rejection of the suggestion that he “evaded the issue” as “nonsense” (l. 3/4). While an additional concession is made in l. 7 (“the attempts were misdirected”), the subsequent passage serves to counter any potential loss of face; his self-portrayal (l. 8/9 “insofar as I have set all of this in motion, I intend to stand by it”) creates the impression of ‘manly’ behavior (fitting the stereotype of ‘admitting your mistakes,’ ‘being courageous, open and honest’, ‘accepting responsibility’, ‘meeting challenges’. The assurances he makes twice (l. 10 and 13) that his hypotheses “can certainly be followed point by point” show that, rather than being aware of any basic deficiencies in his argument, he is convinced that he can provide all the proof required to show
Arguing among scholars 241
that it is correct. By making these claims, he creates the impression that the previous criticism was unsound and can be refuted and that it is merely to be attributed to the brevity of his presentation (The criticism from the audience is not repeated). The fact that he makes concessions and the way he does so enhances his status in terms of face-work; his admission thus becomes a defense of his hypothesis. Datum 2 represents just the opposite situation: a female scholar destroys her image by making concessions without at the same time taking the offensive. This analysis supports Kotthoff’s hypothesis (1996: 383ff.) that face-work is not to be equated with politics of politeness. The goal of the techniques of facework with a potential to confer prestige, which male experts tend to prefer, is often to emphasize their membership in the in-group and to attack (cf. Baron 1996) the face of others in more or less aggressive, institutionally ritualized fashion (despite a sophisticated, indirect approach, including ironic and joking turns of phrase). The latter goes far beyond basic face-wants (“the want to be unimpeded and the want to be approved”). Conversely, female experts do not refrain from aggressive verbal behavior for reasons of “politeness” but for other reasons which are to be suggested in conclusion. 6. Conclusion I have not discussed the developmental reasons for the differences in style preferred by men and women. “There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that male speakers are socialized into a competitive style of discourse” (Coates 1995: 13); it is just this socialization which does not appear to occur along the same lines for women. In a new version of the Maltz/Borker hypothesis, Coates argues that this has resulted in different “subcultures” and that, in our culture, “female gender” tends to be associated with the “private” rather than the “public sphere”, which, in turn, means that women have less educational and career advancement opportunities (for the problem of socialization see also Cahill 1980). The extreme version of the two-cultures thesis was refuted long ago (cf. Günthner 1992) which had claimed that there is hardly an connection between these “sub-worlds” and that the speech of men and women can be equated with two different foreign languages. More research will be required, however, on the different education children and young people receive at different stages, in order to determine whether it is correct to assume that boys become accustomed to certain rhetorical rituals of ‘public life’ at an earlier stage than girls and that, as a result, women have a hard time catching up, despite
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long-standing familiarity with the conventions of the ‘business’ (e.g. while at the university and thereafter); in any event, this adjustment requires a greater investment of energy. A counter-hypothesis holds that women consciously or unconsciously resist the conventions of discourse which have, historically speaking, mainly been shaped by men; the majority of them do not find it appealing to give up the style they prefer (but why? The question of differences in socialization will have to be raised here), with all of its obvious advantages for communication in an informal context. In the institutional context of the university, however, where formalized discourse takes place with both genders present, the disadvantages are obvious: women take up less space, quantitatively speaking (in terms of time and content) and meet with less response than their male peers; this drawback certainly is not inherent in a particular style but results from historically determined conventions of evaluation. The question remains whether it will be possible to change these conventions gradually or whether women will continue to be forced to make a choice between the perennial threat of being disqualified and an increasingly perfect adaptation to a foreign standard. In many very traditionally shaped communication situations at the universities, the double-bind appears as yet to be in force: women must either be willing to accept the “feminine cliché“ and the attendant disadvantages, or pay the price of their ‘professionalism’ by being accused of forfeiting their ‘femininity’.
Transcription conventions (-) (0.5) HAHAHA HEHEHE …[…… …[…… NAturally ? . , : (’H) (…) (…) (…) ((reads)) underlined
very short pause longer pause, e.g. 0.5 seconds laughter weak laughter overlapping speech stressed syllables rising intonation falling intonation slightly rising intonation elongation of sound audible inhalation omissions omissions exceeding three sentences comments; non-verbal actions anonymized words
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Notes 1. For the German-speaking area, the following should be mentioned: Günthner and Kotthoff (eds.) (1992), Kuhn (1992), Langner (1994), Schmidt (1988), Wagner et al. (1981). 2. The total data corpus consists of more than 30 discussions, in part several hours in length. I would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Research Baden-Wuerttemberg for its support of a 3-year research project on “The potential for conflicts in communication between women and men”. In addition, I am very grateful to E. Couper-Kuhlen, S. Günthner, H. Knoblauch, H. Kotthoff, for a variety of support, and M. Marzahl for the translation. 3. The term, of course, is not based on the assumption of stable “genderlects” existing independently from any contexts (which was empirically refuted long ago; cf. the research report in Günthner 1992/1996). 4. The proper names were changed in all the transcripts. In addition, techinical terms were sometimes changed to provide anonymity (e.g. “art history” instead of “musicology”) while the type and amount of words used were retained. These passages appear underlined within the transcripts. 5. The concept “scope” refers to the scope of the overall statement in terms of time and content, not to syntactical scope. 6. This jargonization appears to be far more pronounced and to have a more restrictive effect in the German-speaking area than in English-speaking countries (cf.Schroeder 1995). There also seem to be significant cultural differences between German and British or AngloAmerican academic settings with respect to expressing and evaluating dissent and harsh criticisms (which in the latter does not seem to be equally connected with prestige as in Germany). 7. This finding agrees with older (e.g. Wagner 1981) and more recent (e.g. Baroni and Nicolini 1995) studies with a more pronounced quantitative orientation.
References Auer, Peter 1986 “Kontextualisierung”. Studium Linguistik 19: 22–48. Auer, Peter and Luzio, Aldo (eds.) 1992 The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam. Baron, Bettina 1996 “Die Inszenierung des Geschlechterverhältnisses im akademischen Streitgespräch: Zur Kontextsensitivität der Dissensformatierung”. Jahrbuch Arbeit, Bildung, Kultur 14: 69–80. Baroni, Maria Rosa and Nicolini, Chiara 1995 “Natural Conversation in Males and Females: Conversational Styles, Content Recall and Quality of Interaction”. Pragmatics 5/4: 407–426.
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Bungarten, Theo (ed.) 1981 Wissenschaftssprache: Beiträge zur Methodologie, theoretischen Fundierung und Deskription. München. Cahill, Spencer E. 1980 “Directions for an Interactionist Study of Gender Development”. Symbolic Interaction 3,1: 123–138. Coates, Jennifer 1995 “Language, Gender and Career”. In Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, S. Mills (ed.), 13–30. London and New York. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny “Girls Oppositional Stances: The interactional accomplishment of gender in nursery school and family life”. (In this volume). Cook-Gumperz, Jenny and Gumperz, John J. 1996 “Treacherous Words: Gender and Power in Academic Assessment”. Folia Linguistica XXX/3–4; 167–187 Eakins, Barbara and Eakins, Gene 1978 “Verbal Turn-Taking and Exchanges in Faculty Dialogue”. In Papers in Southwest English IV: Proceedings of the Conference on the Sociology of the Languages of American Women, B.L. Dubois and I. Crouch (eds), 53–62. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University. Edelsky, Carole 1993 “Who´s Got The Floor?” In Gender and Conversational Interaction, D. Tannen (ed.), 189–279. New York / Oxford. Günthner, Susanne 1996 “Male-Female Speaking Practices Across Cultures”. In Contrastive Sociolinguistics, M. Hellinger (ed.), 135–155. Berlin and New York. 1992 “Sprache und Geschlecht: Ist Kommunikation zwischen Frauen und Männern interkulturelle Kommunikation?” Linguistische Berichte 138: 123–143. Günthner, Susanne and Kotthoff, Helga (eds.) 1992 Die Geschlechter im Gespräch. Kommunikation in Institutionen. Stuttgart. Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise 1997 “Women and Men in the Academic Discourse Community”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), 219–247. Amsterdam. 1995 “Academic Leadership and Gender: The Case of the Seminar Chair”. In Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic conference on language and gender: Tromsoe, 3–5 November 1994, I. Broch, T. Bull and T. Swan (eds), 174–193. [Tromsoe University Working Papers on Language & Linguistics 23]. Nordlyd. “Academic women in the male university field. Communicative practices at postgraduate seminars”. (In this volume). Hempfer, Klaus-W 1981 “Präsuppositionen, Implikaturen und die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Argumentation”. In Wissenschaftssprache, T. Bungarten (ed.), 309–342. München.
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Holmes, Janet 1990 “Hedges and Boosters in Women’s and Men’s Speech”. Language and Communication, Vol. 10, No. 3, 185–205. 1992 “Women’s Talk in Public Contexts”. Discourse & Society 1: 131–150. Kotthoff, Helga 1993a “Kommunikative Stile, Asymmetrie und Doing Gender. Fallstudien zur Inszenierung von Expert(inn)entum in Gesprächen”. Feministische Studien 2: 79–95. 1993b “Unterbrechungen, Überlappungen und andere Interventionen”. Deutsche Sprache 2: 162–185. 1997 “The Interactional Achievement of Expert Status”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), 139–178. Amsterdam. Kotthoff, Helga 1992 “Die konversationelle Konstruktion von Ungleichheit in Fernsehgesprächen. Zur Produktion von kulturellem Geschlecht”. In Die Geschlechter im Gespräch. Kommunikation in Institutionen, S. Günthner / H. Kotthoff (eds), 251–285. Stuttgart. Kotthoff, Helga and Wodak, Ruth (eds.) 1997 Communicating Gender in Context. Amsterdam Kuhn, Elisabeth 1992 Gender and Authority. Classroom Diplomacy at German and American Universities. Tübingen. Langner, Michael 1994 Zur kommunikativen Funktion von Abschwächungen. Pragma- und soziolinguistische Untersuchungen. Münster. Leet-Pellegrini, Helena 1980 “Conversational Dominance as a Function of Gender and Expertise”. In Language: Social Psychological Perspectives, H. Giles (et al.) (eds), 97–105. New York. Maltz, Daniel and Borker, Ruth 1982 “A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication”. In Language and Social Identity, J. Gumperz (ed.), 196–200. Cambridge. Meer, Dorothee 1998 Der Prüfer ist nicht der König: Mündliche Abschlußprüfungen in der Hochschule. Tübingen. Mills, Sara (ed.) 1995 Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London and New York. Panther, Klaus-Uwe 1981 “Einige typische indirekte sprachliche Handlungen im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs”. In Wissenschaftssprache, T. Bungarten (ed.), 231–260. München. Polenz, Peter von 1981 “Über die Jargonisierung von Wissenschaftssprache und wider die Deagentivierung”. In Wissenschaftssprache, T. Bungarten (ed.), 85–110. München. Schmidt, Claudia 1988 Typisch weiblich — typisch männlich: Geschlechtstypisches Kommunikationsverhalten in studentischen Kleingruppen. Tübingen.
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Schröder, Hartmut 1995 “Der Stil wissenschaftlichen Schreibens zwischen Disziplin, Kultur und Paradigma: Methodologische Anmerkungen zur interkulturellen Stilforschung”. In Stilfragen, G. Stickel (ed.), 150–180. Berlin and New York. Swacker, Marjorie 1978 “Women´s Verbal Behavior at Learned and Professional Conferences”. In Papers in Southwest English IV: Proceedings of the Conference on the Sociology of the Languages of American Women, B. L. Dubois and I. Crouch (eds), 155–160. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University. Tannen, Deborah 1994 Gender and Discourse. New York / Oxford. Thimm, Caja 1995 “Strategisches Handeln im politischen Konflikt: Frauen und Männer im kommunalen Parlament”. In Sprache im Konflikt. Zur Rolle der Sprache in sozialen, politischen und militärischen Auseinandersetzungen, R. Reiher (ed.), 72–92. Berlin / New York. Wagner, Angelika, Stahl, Christa and Schick, Hans-Eberhard 1981 “Geschlecht als Statusfaktor in Gruppendiskussionsverhalten von Studentinnnen und Studenten: eine empirische Untersuchung”. Linguistische Berichte 71:8–25.
Academic women in the male university field Communicative practices at postgraduate seminars Britt-Louise Gunnarsson
Introduction The European university is built on an old male academic tradition. For centuries, academic knowledge and debate were exclusively male domains. It was not until the end of the 19th century that women were allowed into universities, and in fact not until the middle of this century that they actually started to avail themselves of this opportunity. Historical factors like these can of course offer an explanation for the fact that academic knowledge and practices have come to be associated with masculinity and that science has assumed male characteristics. It is not surprising therefore that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, when listing the most valued male games, mentions science together with politics and business (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 172). According to Bourdieu (1984), the university is a competitive “field” in which the struggle relates among other things to the possession of prestigious knowledge “capital”, which is in turn related to economic and social capital. Those scholars whose research is considered most valuable gain the highest posts, most economic resources and most power. In his analyses of French society, Bourdieu found the university to be a male field, with men fighting against men for the possession of symbolic capital. We know that such a description was also true of the earlier Scandinavian universities. The universities belonged to male scholars, in terms of both numbers and substance, and women who wished to be accepted in the academic world were forced to play the male game, following rules set by men.1
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More surprising, however, is the fact that a gender division as to tasks and functions still exist. Although in terms of numbers women are level with men in the modern Scandinavian university, they are differently placed within the hierarchical structure. The higher up in the university hierarchy we look, the fewer women we find. And furthermore, on each level of the pyramid we find women and men in different functions. In somewhat simplified terms, we can say that women teach and do basic administrative work, while men do research and control the economic resources. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, it is still a fact that Scandinavian women and men possess different symbolic capital within the university field. This fact becomes even more surprising considering the long equality tradition within the Scandinavian countries, and their claim, so often repeated in public discourse, that there should be equal conditions for men and women in working life. Something seems to prevent this change from taking place within universities, and the question of interest here is what academic discourse reveal about these status quo conserving processes. The university is thus, according to Bourdieu, one of the fields in which actors with different capitals struggle for things to which they all attribute a value. This struggle or game between individuals and groups with different symbolic capital takes place in various arenas within the university field. The game relating to knowledge capital is played in discussions about the selection of articles for prestigious journals, about the granting of large research proposals and about appointments to senior academic posts. It is played at conferences and symposia. It is also played within the various university departments, at academic seminars and in group discussions. Often it is a subtle game, of which even the actors themselves are not always fully conscious. It relates to what is to be considered essential and important for the discipline. What should be placed at the core of the discipline, what on the periphery? The game also relates to who will play what role in the departmental structure. Who will have the greatest influence over knowledge development, who will control the resources, who will have most power? This struggle relating to what constitutes central knowledge, and the power and prestige connected with this capital, also concerns the place of male and female aspects — and of men and women — in the university field. It concerns the prestige of traditional male and traditional female areas of knowledge, as well as the prestige and power of individual men and women. One way of conserving the university as a male domain is thus to safeguard the male influence over the knowledge capital, that is, to ensure that female areas remain marginalized and that women are prevented from playing traditionally male
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academic roles. One way of changing this — of renewing the university field — is to let the new female areas come closer to the core, to make them more central, and to let women act in all academic roles, including traditional male discursive roles. Academic discourse is an important vehicle not only for the reconstruction of the traditional socio-historical structure, but also for the construction of a new structure. Academic practices as we find them throughout the university are thus part of a gendered struggle for centrality, power and dominance. They reconstruct academic history, where males from the upper and middle classes have for centuries been in a majority and dominant within all strands of academic life. They are part of a gradual transformation of the traditional power relationship, thus reflecting the challenge to the male tradition coming from women — and men — who want to change these practices. They can also be part of a process preventing such changes from taking place. This article will focus on the discursive roles assigned to and played by female doctoral students and teachers at postgraduate seminars within two university departments, one in the humanities and one in the social sciences. These departments, though belonging to the same university tradition, vary as to the place which established academic woman have within the departmental hierarchy. Within the humanities department, all the top positions are occupied by men, while at the social science department we also find a few women at the highest level of the hierarchy. One purpose of this article is to discuss what impact — if any — such differences in terms of the more extrinsic roles of women within the departmental hierarchy have on communicative practices in these two departments.
Women, men and “homo academicus” There is quite an extensive body of literature on the socialization of children into traditional boys and girls (for an overview, see Corson 1997). Studies of play and work in schools have revealed clear differences in interaction between boys’ and girls’ groups. Many studies have also uncovered dramatic differences in the way parents and teachers treat boys and girls throughout their childhood and adolescence. Adults and peer groups assign different interactive roles to boys and girls. In a study of the Swedish classroom, Einarsson and Hultman (1984) identified remarkable differences between boys and girls throughout secondary school. In the classroom, they found a considerable gender difference
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in terms of amount of speech, interruptions, initiatives and types of comments. What was also striking was how both male and female teachers assigned different discursive roles to boys and girls. Boys were allowed to dominate and control the interaction, while girls were expected to be silent and cooperative and help the teacher. Classroom interaction seemed to train boys for future leadership in the public sphere and girls for the traditional subordinate female role. Primary and secondary socialization thus train the female and male pupils for different discursive roles. Colleges and universities are to a certain degree merely a continuation of school education. We could therefore expect that the gender patterns learnt at secondary school would be transferred from the lower- to the higher-level classroom and that teacher behaviour would show similar patterns. Academe, however, is also a new world, with a different relationship to knowledge. The goal of university activities is not only to teach students more facts and give them a better understanding of the world, but also to produce new knowledge. The relationship between professors and students is a more complex one than that between schoolteacher and pupil. It is a relationship both of learned and learner and of peers. It is a relationship between adults. We can therefore expect to find similar gender patterns in colleges and universities as those prevailing in workplaces and institutions. By tradition, sex and gender have not been looked upon as important factors for success within the hierarchical university structure. Gender neutrality was for a long time a “doxa”, an uncontested truth, within the university field. In theory, the academic system should be a flexible one, promoting creativity and new knowledge in the search for truth. In reality, however, a network of forces based on a long tradition counteracts this idea. Organizationally, the academic community is designed in such a way as to conserve existing power structures and knowledge patterns and to prevent change. Its power and knowledge hierarchies are intertwined, having effects both on the assignment of roles within the organization and on the evaluation of knowledge. Only knowledge which conforms with the traditional power structure is accepted. Only individuals who have a profile which fits in with the reigning traditions, the prevailing habitus, are given key positions within the hierarchy. Underlying this study on academic discourse is the assumption that gender matters at a macro as well as a local level. My assumption is that there is a difference between the stereotypical female and male academic roles, and that these role stereotypes have an effect on the negotiations which take place in actual discourse. The stereotypes have shaped not only our own but also other
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peoples’ expectations of us as female or male academics, and they influence the role we come to play. They have shaped our representation of our academic self, they are part of our “academic habitus”. According to Bourdieu, history continuously reveals itself in the contemporary, which makes us unconsciously act in a goal-oriented manner. The habitus of an individual is an effect of his or her social background. Social class is the important variable in Bourdieu’s thinking about habitus, but with regard to this variable there is little reason to believe that we will find any difference in background between men and women in the university field — we do not, at any rate, find more women from the working class. Nor is education a differentiating factor between men and women. The people to be found in the university system all have a fairly similar educational background. The issue here, rather, is whether, as a result of differences in gender socialization and gender expectations, women and men have acquired “different sets of dispositions with regard to the social games” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 172). One central question for my analysis in this article will be what academic discourse reveals about the habitus of men and women within the Scandinavian university system. Do the academic man and the academic woman within a certain department have different habituses? Can we talk about a male habitus and a female habita? Or is the prevailing habitus instead gender-neutral, that is, can we talk about a common habitus for the male and female “homo academicus”? As mentioned above, my analysis covers data from two university departments, and another set of questions relates to possible subculture differences between these two departments. Do we find differences in terms of the prevailing male, female or gender-neutral habitus between the humanities and the social science department? One could for instance assume that the proportion of established women, their role and status within the department as well as the social class structure and the social awareness of staff and students would affect the habitus of the department’s prototypical “homo academicus”.
A study of postgraduate seminars at two university departments In this article, we will look at how gender is enacted in seminar discussions at two university departments. Our interest lies in the interplay between the macro and the micro level, i.e. how historically transmitted hierarchical patterns are enacted and transformed in the actual discourse. Gender is not seen as an aggregation of attributes possessed by women and men, but as processes
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enacted in a particular community of practices, with their specific history and scope for change. One question of our analysis will be how the social embeddedness of biological sex2 influences discourse. It would be an oversimplification to say that the macro structure (e.g. the university hierarchy) continuously reveals itself at a micro level, that is in each instance of academic discourse, in the sense that people with a high extrinsic status always dominate the discussion. However, it would be no less an oversimplification to say that the macro structure and extrinsic status do not matter. There is of course variation as to what creates societal dominance structures, and many factors are involved in creating a social order for an event. Institutional status hierarchies, symbolic capital, superior knowledge, physical power and personal relationships can influence a particular dominance relationship just as readily as can conversational style (Kotthoff 1987: 143). In order to understand what takes place in academic discourse, we therefore need to go beyond the local context and include in our analysis information about the setting (the department) and the interlocutors. The data I will analyse here derive from video recordings of postgraduate seminars held at two departments of a Swedish university, carried out within the research project Interaction at postgraduate seminars, which I have headed at Uppsala University. Within these two departments, ten postgraduate seminars were video-recorded, transcribed and analysed.3 Our analyses have been both quantitative and qualitative. For the purposes of this study, however, I have applied a qualitative approach. With the aim of uncovering how hierarchies and traditional patterns are reflected in the local discourse, I will not refrain from including information about either the departmental setting or the interlocutors in my analysis. I will therefore also refer to interviews conducted with doctoral students at the two departments: Agnieszka Bron-Wojciechowska carried out in-depth interviews, using a life history approach, with 8 doctoral students (4 women and 4 men) at each of the three departments we have studied (1995). Cristina Spitzinger interviewed 3 female doctoral students at the humanities and 3 at the social science department about their perceptions of the seminars recorded (1996). I would further like to stress that I do not see gender as something that can be separated from other social dimensions. As Cameron claims: “’the whole woman’ always also has a class, an ethnicity, a cultural position” (1997: 33). Academic status, age, personal relationships, personality are important just as biological sex is, and when relevant such aspects have been included in the analysis.
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Two departments — two subcultures The two departments represent different academic traditions: those of the humanities and the social sciences. More importantly in this context, they also represent different socio-historical structures, among other things relating to the role of women within the department. As far as Ph.D. students are concerned, both departments have an equal number of male and female students — this was one of our criteria in choosing these departments. Within the established group, i.e. teachers, professors and researchers, however, the gender structure differs between the departments. At the social science department, there are many women who have tenure, although the full professors are all men. At the humanities department, there are also quite a few established women. A closer look at their situation, however, reveals that only one of them is tenured; the others survive as part-time staff and associates. The humanities department In Bron-Wojciechowska (1995: 80–99), the humanities department is described as a traditional, “feudal” department, with a group of male full professors as “lords”, “older” male postgraduate students (i.e. further on in their postgraduate studies) as “vassals”, and women and “younger” doctoral students as “peasants”. The hierarchical structure is further strengthened by a strict gatekeeping system, which means that postgraduates have to pass several quality “checkpoints” in order to be accepted as full doctoral students and to become established. With regard to gender issues, doctoral students (both women and men) describe a strong but invisible male-female divide: men choose more theoretical subjects for their theses and women more practical ones, having an effect on the centrality of their work (cf. also Spitzinger 1996); male professors and students use a different kind of language to women. There are different expectations on women and men, and they compete in different groups. Men are more careeroriented, while women feel uncertain of their abilities. The women lack female models: the prototypical postgraduate student and researcher is undoubtedly a man. At seminars, the women remain silent, since they consider that they should only speak when they actually have something to say. The department is in addition described as individualistic; there is considerable distance between teachers and students and little organized cooperation involving doctoral students. However, it is also emphasized that changes are under way. A new generation is taking over, as older male professors make way for younger colleagues (also male, however, up to now). According to Bron-
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Wojciechowska, though, there are forces which could conceivably stand in the way of any radical change, such as the lack of cooperation and the highly individualistic approach to research and education.
The social science department The social science department, on the other hand, is described as a stimulating environment and a nursery of academic talent. This department, too, is characterized by its hierarchy — its gap between postgraduate students and teachers. Departmental management is said to be weak, and another problem is a physical separation of the department’s facilities for research and teaching. However, postgraduates feel that they are well looked after, guaranteed funding and a place to work, and provided with supervision of a high quality. Another favourable point highlighted in the interviews is that students are assigned to small groups, and their meetings with their supervisors in these groups are described as very fruitful. By contrast, the regular postgraduate seminars — analysed here — are felt to constitute a subculture of their own, characterized by hierarchy and control. The women postgraduates can find many female models within the department, and there is also a strong and serious informal female group, which has meant a great deal to the students. Nevertheless, the women stress that they invest less effort than their male counterparts in seeking to remain at the university, and that they feel more uncertain in their role. At this department, too, the prototypical postgraduate student is described as a man (Bron-Wojciechowska 1995: 16–23). The postgraduate seminar The postgraduate seminar serves an important function in the Swedish university system. Though the two seminar series focused on in this article are associated with different departments, they play a similar role within their respective subcultures. They are part of the higher level of university education. Though varying in form and content, all seminars become a forum in which established scholars meet students, thus forming an important element in the socialization of students into the academic culture, and indeed in the shaping and maintenance of this culture (cf. Gunnarsson 1995). The seminars familiarize students with the status-laden academic habitus. The students become familiar with the cognitive dimension of this habitus: what knowledge is accepted, what norms are acceptable in the presentation of this knowledge, and what attitudes should be adopted towards ideas and facts within a particular
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domain and other related domains. They also become familiar with the more social dimension of this habitus: what is the accepted role structure for academic interaction, that is, who speaks when about what at seminars; what are the accepted norms and attitudes regarding academic interaction and discourse, that is, what discursive strategies are to be used to achieve academic success? The question here of course is whether there is a gender dimension to this: are females and males shown different academic habituses? All the seminars covered by this study deal with postgraduate work. They all involve Ph.D. students presenting outlines or chapters of their doctoral theses. The audience has been provided with a paper to read before the seminar and the discussion relates to this. As regards their more formal organization, the seminars are quite similar. They are led by a chair, who after a few opening remarks first gives the floor to the postgraduate student whose work is to be discussed, for a short introduction. After that there follows a more or less directed discussion. The chair ends the seminar with a brief summing up. I can add that all the chairs are men, male professors, a fact which at least as far as the humanities department is concerned causes little surprise.
Women and seminar interaction Our earlier analyses of seminar interaction within the Uppsala project — focusing on discourse participation, types of comment, interruptions, pauses, back channelling, laughter, presenters’ introductions, evaluation, hesitation markers and introduced topics — have pointed to a clear difference between male and female interactional patterns which lends support to traditional gender stereotypes (Gunnarsson 1997 and 1998, Lindroth 1997, Olevard 1997a and 1997b, Persson 1997). As regards doctoral students, this is true of both departments, though to a somewhat varying degree. In the case of the teaching staff, however, the results are less clear, indicating that gender cannot be studied per se. In this article, we will look more closely at the discursive roles played by women and men at the two departments. Our concern will be with the comments made by participants on the work of the doctoral student presenting his or her work, and the analysis will focus on the discourse of and around these comments. In a discussion of the habitus of women and men, the roles played by the agents in the seminar discourse are central and one question of interest is how the seminar discourse constructs the commentator. One assumption is
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that women and men play different discursive roles in the seminars, another is that men try to prevent women from playing the traditional male role.
The comment and the commentator Many studies of gender and language in the workplace show that workplace norms are masculine norms. Kendall and Tannen (1997: 96) argue that it is “the historically greater participation of men in these professions, the current numerical predominance of men at higher levels, and/or the cultural interpretations of given types of work that dictate who is thought to be best suited for that work”. Language, gender and power are linked, which means that men’s discourse styles are institutionalized and seen not only as a “better way to talk but as the only way” (Lakoff 1990: 210). In particular, men’s discourse styles are institutionalized as ways of speaking with authority. Institutions are “organized to define, demonstrate, and enforce the legitimacy and authority of linguistic strategies used by one gender — of men of one class or ethnic group — while denying the power of others” (Gal 1991: 188). Compared to men, women in leadership positions have often been found to use different language strategies to enact their authority (e.g. Wodak 1995). As is shown in the overview in Kendall and Tannen (1997), this, however, is not always unproblematic. Women’s strategies, since they differ from those traditionally used by men in leadership roles, might not be associated as readily with leadership and, consequently, may be less recognizable as authoritative. Quite a few studies point to the difficulties women have in being accepted in predominantly male positions. In many workplace settings women have to choose between being perceived as competent or likeable. According to Kendall and Tannen, a growing body of research “demonstrates that women in authority face a ‘double bind’ regarding professionalism and femininity” (p. 92). As they further stress, this double bind on women seems mainly to come from men. Many studies have shown that men only see a link between “men” and “an authoritative position”, while women see a link between “women” as well as “men” and “an authoritative position”. The fact that women have moved into new areas of leadership has led to a diminishing of the sex typing of women, but not of men (p. 93). The seminar sequences analysed in this article all involve criticism, that is situations which traditionally means that one person takes on the role of an expert and authority in relation to another. The analysis will focus on how women act in these situations as well as how they are treated. Do women and men present criticism in different ways? Do women have problems in being
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accepted as critics? Is it harder for men than women to accept women as critics? The main part of the seminar discussion consists of comments on the work presented by the doctoral student. The main objective of these comments is to influence the student’s research in one way or another. The form in which such comments are made varies, however, from harsh criticism to mild, hesitant proposals or advice. As a basis for my analysis in this article, I have found it relevant to distinguish two prototypical comment types: 1. On the one hand, we find comments with the overt strategy of challenging the presenter; they are presented as criticism or as challenging questions. The commentator acts as a scientist or expert challenging the research done. The subject of discussion is what has or has not been done or written. Very often the discussion revolves around the use of concepts or terms or the relevance of a certain theory. The presenter ends up in a defensive position, which he or she can resolve in various ways. Sometimes other participants enter into the discussion as well; they can either help the critic by adding further criticism or help to defend the presenter. 2. On the other hand, we find comments with the overt strategy of guiding the presenter. The commentator gives advice, warns the presenter of dangers, supports his or her efforts. The commentator takes on the role of teacher or caring colleague. Not infrequently the comments relate to the investigation as such, to the research process, the collection or analysis of data etc. The presenter does not have to put up a defence. He or she can merely accept or reject the advice. Here, too, the other participants can enter into the discussion, offering additional advice or expressing a different opinion. If these two approaches are related to earlier research on women’s and men’s interactional patterns in professional discourse, comment type 1 corresponds to an expected male pattern, with its more expert-like and direct presentation of the commentator’s view (cf. Kotthoff 1997, Tannen 1994, 1997), while comment type 2 corresponds to an expected female pattern, with its more indirect and face-saving presentation of the commentator’s view (cf. Tannen 1994 and 1997; West 1990; Wodak 1995: Ainsworth-Vaughn 1992; also Kuhn 1992). Our own earlier quantitative analysis, too, points to a gender difference in the same direction. When we analysed the number and types of comments (critical, neutral, supportive) made to male and female presenters by the different participant groups (male teachers, male students, female teachers and female students), we found that males and in particular male doctoral students made more critical comments than female students and teachers (Gunnarsson
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1997). In another study, in which our focus was on evaluative statements, we also found a clear gender difference: male presenters receive much more negative evaluations, pure criticism, than female presenters do, and it is from male teachers and students that they get this criticism (Lindroth 1997). Our quantitative analyses further show that women tend to balance their criticism and wrap it up (cf. Olevard 1997). Women on the whole seem to be more supportive than men; as mentioned, female presenters also receive more support than male presenters. From these analyses, we could thus assume that the academic critical tradition is male-gendered: males criticize other males. A straight-forwardly expressed criticism seems thus to be a comment pattern preferred by men, while a more embedded, less direct type seems to be a pattern preferred by women. We should of course bear in mind that the overt strategy used by the commentator has nothing to do with either the content or the seriousness of the proposed change, or with its effect; mild advice can be just as effective as very harsh criticism, provided that the commentator is accepted in his or her discursive role by the presenter. We could, however, expect that women would have difficulties being accepted in the expert-like role of a seminar critic, in particular by male participants (cf. Kendall and Tannen 1997). The purpose of the following analysis is to go beyond our earlier quantitative data and look in greater detail at what happens in the seminar game. The question is not only how women and men present their comments, but also how their comments are received by the seminar group, or rather how the discursive role of the commentator is negotiated in the interaction. It is impossible in an article to analyse ten seminars in their entirety or to present examples of all the different types of comments. For the purposes of this study, I have instead selected a few sequences from the two seminar series in which the negotiation relates to the female habitus. I would also say that in many ways these sequences are representative of the general difference in communicative practices between the two departments which my analyses of the whole of our data have revealed.
The humanities department Analysis For the humanities department, I have chosen three sequences from one seminar with a male presenter. The presenter, a middle-aged doctoral student,
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has chosen a subject for his thesis which does not belong to the mainstream tradition of the department. Quite a large proportion of his total postgraduate scholarship period has elapsed, and his work is far from finished. He receives a lot of criticism throughout the seminar, in particular from the chair, who does not approve of his approach.
Sequence 1. Male student, MS, challenges male presenter, MPa. In our first sequence, which I see as an example of male-gendered criticism, we find a male student, MS,4 who himself belongs to the mainstream group which includes the male chair, challenging the male presenter, Mpa. 1
MS:
2
MS:
3
MS:
4
MS:
5
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6
MPa: MS:
7 8
MS: MS:
9
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11 12
MPa: MPa: MS: MS: MS:
13 14
Well, at the risk of seeming to be stuck in a groove I have to ((clears throat)) return to a criticism which I voiced last year and that / has to do with your independence in relation to Burger / and / by that I- well if you plan to keep this introductory theory chapter the way it is now then / er / an examiner’s going to have a field day with it Yes but because it’s written with so little / independence because you are / there’s thatan awful lo- lot- lot of quotations and what / er / seems to be your own text is still so very close to Burger’s original text that’s to say between the quotes you cite him without quotation marks and that makes up a very large / part of your own text and I can / I can give you some examples again if you like I- I don’t think that’ll be necessary because [no:MS] er er / howhowever it ends up this book the er presentation of Burger you see won’t look like this itNo but then- // then I think I’d want to see some attempt at an independent or critical or that you use Burger for your own purposes in some way but what this- this is a // er how should I put it a faithful
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15
MS:
16 17 18 19
MS: MPa: MPa: MS:
20 21 22
MS: MS: MS:
23
MS:
24
MS:
25
MS:
26
MS:
27 28 29 30
MS: MS: MS: MS:
31 32 33 34 35 36 37
MS: MPa: MCa: MCa: MCa:
summary you know a handbook on Burger in which you stick / er / stick so close to the texts that the reader can see nothing of your own views on Burger That’s why I included these er text analyses there (well- er) a- aap- apply these / source of inspiration in some way Mm / but you know the leap is the leap / from your theory chapter to your analysis chapter is quite / er well I think anyway a very big leap I at any rate find it a bit difficult to see the link / I mean to see your readings of Burger in the analysis that’s to say to see the inspiration from Burger how it / you can be made out here and there I think often in certain choices of phrase but itsometimes it’s tending towards ( ) psychology and sometimes towards / as it were a kind of therapeutic reading where you’re looking / looking / er for some kind of preliminary truth in almost religious terms and // sometimes a few Burgerian wordings find their way in but it isn’t / as I see it / your analysis they don’t read as ob- you know obviously Burgerian analyses // and that isn’t that isn’t necessarily a criticism of your analysis it could be a criticism of this interpretation (I mean this one) / you don’t need to call everything a Burgerian analysis you can call it something else ((2 sec. pause)) Mm ((3 sec. pause)) Well I must- my react- my original reaction was the same as er Göran’s when I saw this text presented here on page nine in this introduction / er Burger’s texts as if they were poetry / poetic qualities ((rustling of paper))
From the very beginning of his comments, the male student attacks the presenter by saying that he made the same criticism at a seminar last year, lines 1–2: “at the risk of seeming to be stuck in a groove I have to return to a criticism which I voiced last year”. The criticism he presents is quite severe relating to the presenter’s “independence in relation to Burger”, lines 2–3. MPa, the male presenter, tries to defend himself: “Yes but that”, but is not let in the first time.
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Later on, he manages to present some sort of defence, saying, lines 11–12: “the er presentation of Burger you see won’t look like this”. The male student interrupts him. He is not calmed by this attempt at a defence. Instead he adds to his criticism, lines 12–13: “I’d want to see some attempt at an independent or critical”. This is, he continues, “a faithful summary” (lines 14–15) “in which you stick / er / stick so close to the texts that the reader can see nothing of your own views on Burger” (lines 15–16). The presenter, Mpa, manages to come in again, trying this time to switch the focus to his text analyses, line 17: “That’s why I included these er text analyses”. But MS is not satisfied by this either, lines 19–21: “Mm / but you know the leap is the leap / from your theory chapter to your analysis chapter is quite / er well I think anyway a very big leap I at any rate find it a bit difficult to see the link…” He is, however, a little less harsh in his criticism here: “I think anyway”, line 20, “I at any rate find it a bit difficult”, line 21. He even goes as far as to say, lines 28–29: “and that isn’t that isn’t necessarily a criticism of your analysis it could be a criticism of this interpretation…” His turn is followed by a pause of 2 seconds, and then by a “mm” from the presenter (line 33). The male chair, MCa, then comes in, saying that he can understand the criticism of the male student, lines 35–36: “Well I must- my react- my original reaction was the same as er Göran’s when I saw this text”. As mentioned, I chose this sequence as an example of male-gendered criticism: here we find a battle between two male combatants. They are both doctoral students, and neither of them gives in.
Sequence 2. Female student, FS, challenges male presenter, MPa In the second sequence chosen from the same seminar, a young female postgraduate, FS, is the critic. She belongs to the rather small group of female doctoral students at the humanities department who do not hesitate to give their opinions and intervene. In the interviews carried out by Spitzinger, she also presents herself as a self-confident person, who does not find the seminars particularly problematic for women. In this sequence she levels her criticism at the style of the male presenter. She does so in quite a straightforward and clear, though at the same time face-saving manner; we can for instance note how she embeds her criticism in expressions like “I think”, lines 96 and 105, “it could”, line 108, “I don’t know whether you were thinking”, line 109, “seems to suggest”, line 110. What is most interesting here is the reaction of the male presenter, that is, lines 113–116.
262 Britt-Louise Gunnarsson
96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116
FS:
I see another problem there and it isn’t just the time / it is that I think that FS: you’ll be very difficult to read if you have all those novels because you have a FS: / fragmentary way of writing / your texts / and tha- first you have an awful lot FS: of quotes and and that means long paragraphs which readers readers of the thesis FS: will have to tie together themselves to some extent as you don’t always have any of those / FS: bridges between the different parts instead you put things side by side and then readers FS: have to / draw their own conclusions and that means that it isn’t all that easy to read and when FS: you then have so many novels and then you end up with an awful lot of text as your FS: method of close reading and having quotes and and and writing something about the quote it takes FS: up / a lot of space that way too so I think it’ll be very difficult later to / FS: to put it together to make an ordinary length thesis even if you take a / FS: a longer thesis than a standard thesis of a hundred and sixty pages / and the fact that that FS: it could then be very difficult to / to gather everything together for FS: the reader of the thesis I don’t know whether you were thinking of making it more but your style FS: so far seems to suggest that you’re keen to have it that way where / where you don’t FS: // go into so much detail when it comes to drawing conclusions or you know FS: overdo the explanation or whatever ((5 sec. pause)) MPa: Was that a question FS: No IFS: No I suppose it wasn’t MCa: I guess it was a reflection / [mm mm:MPa] there may be / something in [mm:MPa] what’s
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When FSa has finished her comment, there is a long pause, 5 seconds long, and then the male presenter comes in with quite a strange remark, line 114: “Was that a question”. He deflects the interest away from what she has said, her criticism of his style, and focuses instead on the form of her utterance, on whether or not it is a question. His remark is surprising, not only because her criticism does not have the form of a question, but also because the strategy she has chosen to present her criticism is quite a frequent one in seminar discussions. By focusing on the form instead of the content of her comment, the male presenter seems to want to show that he does not accept the criticism of the female student, or rather that he does not accept the female doctoral student, who is also younger than he is, in her criticizing role. What then happens is that she withdraws, lines 115–116: “No I- No I suppose it wasn’t”. The male chair, MCa, however, gives her some credit for the comment, line 116: “I guess it was a reflection / there may be / something in”, which makes MPa mutter: “mm mm” “mm”. The content of her critical comment, however, is not discussed any further, that is the presenter has managed to shift the focus to avoid her criticism by instead drawing attention to the form of her intervention. Later on in the seminar discourse, the same situation is more or less repeated: the male presenter does not reply to a comment from the same female student in that situation either. He just says, quite strangely: “Ha”. After sequence 2 there follows a short sequence in which the male chair, MCa, challenges the presenter. In this case, however, the presenter defends himself — as well as he can. I am mentioning this since it shows that the presenter replies to criticism addressed to him by the male chair, just as he did when the male student in our first sequence attacked him. This sequence and other similar ones can thus be said to lend support to the assumption that it is the critical role of the female student, FSa, which is not accepted by the presenter in sequence 2.
Sequence 3. Female teacher, FTa, supports male presenter, MPa. Male chair, MCa, reacts In the third sequence from this seminar, a young female teacher, FTa, takes her turn. 136
FTa:
137
FTa:
Er yes er I think I’d have taken the comment to mean that er we hardly know anything about the structure yet and this is a way of writing your way through so
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138
FTa:
139
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140
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141
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142
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143
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144
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145
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146
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147
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148 149 150
FTa: MCa: MCa:
151
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152
MCa:
153
MCa:
154
MCa:
155
MCa:
156 157
MCa: MPa:
for that reason it’s difficult in a way to discuss it other than as work in progress or what is the subject-matter here er / but when it comes to this aim of covering / eleven or sixteen novels I’ve felt if anything that that’s a good thing there’s a tendency in literary research now to limit ourselves enormously and this is an analysis of novels and and of course we have developed / an awful lot of important instruments in that area but actually daring to have a go at an authorship paradigm a- a- attempting to wanting / to read the text-writer Carl Rexius I’ve felt is extremely important on the other hand of course Gunnar will find time a problem ((giggles)) if you’re going to write your way through [mm:MPa] every novel in this way it’s likely to take time / but I’ve found it hard to reach a conclusion on that now what you / are then going to-= =Obviously you can argue along those lines and say that it’s unfair to level this sort of criticism at a er work in progress you can No I’m not saying that say that but at the same time in reality it is being *so to speak* to be brutal you’re half way through your scholarship [mm:MPa] and you have to complete the whole of this project so it’s high time you decided on the basic structure the plan and made sure it’s feasible so you don’t bite off more than you can chew and that I suppose is er my main task er when I state my views on this to point you very firmly in that direction Yes
As we can see here, the female teacher, FTa, tries to help the presenter in his defence, lines 137–138: “this is a way of writing your way through so for that
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reason it’s difficult in a way to discuss it other than as work in progress”. She also lends support to his work, line 140: “that’s a good thing”. And in lines 143–145: “but actually daring to have a go at an authorship paradigm a- aattempting to wanting / to read the text-writer Carl Rexius I’ve felt is extremely important”. Here, she is interrupted by the chair, MCa, who wishes to put an end to her defensive efforts, lines 149–150: “Obviously you can argue along those lines and say that it’s unfair to level this sort of criticism at a er work in progress”. The female teacher reacts to his interpretation of what she has said, line 150: “No I’m not saying that”. The chair goes on with his criticism, which instead of becoming softer after the defensive intervention of the female teacher becomes sharper, lines 151–152: “to be brutal you’re half way through your scholarship”. He refers to his role as doctoral thesis examiner, line 155: “that I suppose is er my main task er”. The male presenter surrenders, admitting that the chair is right: “Yes” (line 157). And the female teacher has been silenced, at least for a while. The young woman here acts as a defender and supporter of the male student. The chair acknowledges her attempt and interprets it as a criticism of his own criticism. She is forced to withdraw. Here, too, attention is drawn away from the content of her comment, which is not taken up for a discussion. Instead, the immediate effect of her attempt to defend the presenter is that the chair sharpens his own criticism and relates it to his role as examiner: it is his task to act as he has done. The defensive comments made by the female teacher are thus not discussed here nor later on during the seminar. Two other sequences in this seminar, in which this teacher tries to act as a defender and supporter of the male student, meet with the same fate, it may be added. And in those cases, too, she is forced to withdraw, and the substance of her comments is ignored.
Discussion This analysis of the humanities department seminars confirms their strong male domination. As was mentioned earlier, there is only one tenured female teacher among the staff, and she does not attend the seminars we have recorded. There are women with associate positions in the department, but these women too are seldom found as participants in the postgraduate seminars. And when they do attend they are not very active. At one of the seminars, the supervisor of the male doctoral student presenting his work is a female associate teacher. Before the seminar begins, however, she says to her student that she will not intervene in the discussion: “I intend to lie low today because it’s important to hear what
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they say. I’ll sort of intervene as appropriate”. Though it is very clear that she has a very good relationship to her student and that he appreciates her comments very much, she does not want to play the game at this seminar, which does indeed turn out to be a very male event. The seminars at this department are meant to be a preparation for the defence of the thesis, an event which in Sweden involves a ritualized public challenge of the thesis author by an opponent. The seminar culture thus comes to be dominated by the male chair and other males — teachers and students. The whole atmosphere is critical (cf. Christensen 1996). There are frequent evaluations of the work of the presenters throughout these seminars, favourable and unfavourable. The adverse evaluations are made by men and also mostly directed at male presenters (Lindroth 1997). A frequent reaction on the part of the women is withdrawal. They do not participate in the discussion, they keep quiet. This is also true of female teachers. The women who do participate in the seminar discussion have to play on the male participants’ home ground. As was shown in our second sequence, the female student is not accepted in the role of a critic by the male presenter. Even though her criticism is clear and well founded, it is ignored. The same is true of the female teacher who tries to intervene in a defensive role. Her comments, too, fail to elicit any real feedback, and in this case it is the male chair who puts an end to her effort. These women seem to face a no-win situation, a clear “double bind”. It should be noted, however, that they do not give up. As mentioned earlier, they make several attempts to intervene, though every time their comments fall on deaf ears. The main seminar culture of the humanities department is thus dominated by a male tradition. The prevailing habitus is a male habitus, with little acceptance of the role of women. As our interviews with female seminar participants reveal, the discontent with the gender situation at the seminars is less marked than could have been expected. The postgraduate students do not seem to be aware of the gender inequality that emerges so clearly from our analysis; instead, in the interviews carried out by Spitzinger (1996), they choose to give individual explanations for what happens in the video-recorded sequences they are asked to comment on. These findings can be compared to what Victoria Bergvall found in a study of female engineering students. Her analysis of classroom discourse reveals, for one thing, considerable variation in the behaviour of women: “they are assertive, forceful, facilitative, apologetic, and hesitant by turns”. Secondly, it shows how these female students, too, face a “double bind, a no-win situation: when
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the women are assertive, they are resisted by their peers: when they are facilitative, their work may be taken for granted and not acknowledged” (Bergvall 1997: 192). It is also interesting to note that, though these women are so clearly subject to the forces of traditional stereotypes, they do not appear to be aware of this. In interviews, they describe the engineering classroom as a “genderneutral territory with equal opportunities for women and men” (ibid.). Among Bergvall’s engineering students, as well as among the humanities’ students of my study, the double bind facing women seems to be combined with an unawareness of classroom inequality among the female students. We can thus assume that the patriarchal hierarchies found in the American engineering department as well as in the Swedish humanities department are fairly stable and less likely to change in the near future (cf. Bron-Wojciechowska1995).
The social science department Analysis Let us now turn to the other department, the social science department. As was mentioned earlier, there are many women in tenured positions here; established women form a large group within the department and they are also a more integral part of the hierarchy. Our analysis here will cover two sequences, one from a seminar with a female presenter, and one from a seminar with a male presenter. At both seminars, the commentator is a female teacher in upper middle age, FTb, who holds a strong position within the department. She frequently attends the postgraduate seminar and participates very actively in the discussion. The general impression is that she feels comfortable in the seminar culture, and does not seem to hesitate to play the seminar game. Sequence 4. Female teacher, FTb, offers advice and criticism to female presenter, FP In sequence 4, we find the female teacher FTb commenting on the manuscript under discussion at the seminar. 145
FTb:
146
FTb:
mm:MCb] in relation to the text [mm:FP] and in relation to what it actually says here [mm:MCb] which I perhaps a bit unfairly at the moment find-
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147 148 149 150 151 152
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153 154 155 156 157
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FP:
while I find it enjoyable I do feel it’s a bit thin [mm:FP, MCb] / but but er different I- [mm:FP] Yes but that’s a very important point you’re making / tt I don’t know whether you’ve any comment No that’s precisely how I feel about it too [mm:MCb] it is it is thin of course / what I’ve presented at this seminar / all I can say in my own defence is *that I have* I have loads more data but I didn’t present them this time [mm:MCb] / they ((2 sec. pause)) But couldn’t you make any comment on to what extent the other data you have as it were lend more depth to this part and to what extent they are a complement to this part in the sense that it will be a matter of a similar survey but using different data ((2 sec. pause)) Um // it will be more of a complement of course to this one because I was thinking that these three bank committees are so to speak the base
The criticism FTb raises here is that she thinks that one part is “a bit thin”. What is interesting is how she prepares for this criticism. Let us look closer at lines 145–147: “in relation to what it actually says here which I perhaps a bit unfairly at the moment find- while I find it enjoyable I do feel it’s a bit thin”. Her critical comment is embedded in a hedge: “a bit unfairly at the moment” and also balanced by an introductory positive comment: “I find it enjoyable”. The male chair, MCb, latches onto this critical comment, line 149: “Yes but that’s a very important point you’re making”. He is also eager to bring in the presenter herself, lines 149–150: “I don’t know whether you’ve any comment”. The female presenter admits that the female teacher is right in her criticism, line 151: “No that’s precisely how I feel about it too it is it is thin”. She also says that she has more material than she has presented in her manuscript, lines 153–154: “I have loads more data but I didn’t present them this time”. The female teacher picks up on this and asks the presenter, FP, to comment on these data, lines 156–158: “to what extent the other data you have as it were lend more depth to this part and to what extent they are a complement to this part”. This she does in lines 161–168.
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The way in which the female teacher FTb here presents her criticism is very gentle and face-saving. She puts forward her criticism very hesitantly and tries to get the presenter to express her view. The presenter gets a chance to give her views and is not interrupted. We could maybe say that this sequence shows a female-gendered way of presenting and responding to criticism. It does not at all have the character of a battle or a challenge as was the case between the two males in sequence 1 from the humanities seminar. An interesting point, however, is that the male chair chooses to intervene, directing the presenter’s attention to the value of the criticism. What we find in this sequence is an example of a female authoritative style of a similar kind to that described in Tannen (1994 and 1997), West (1990), Wodak (1995) and Ainsworth-Vaughn (1992). The female teacher, drawing on motherhood, is here seen to enact authority by using a presentation form which overtly appeals to equality and consensus. We can also note that her criticism, though presented in a very mild form, is effective. It is accepted by both the female presenter and by the male chair.
Sequence 5. Female teacher, FTb, challenges male presenter, MPb The fifth sequence is taken from another of the video-recorded seminars held at the social science department. The presenter here is a young man who appears to be very self-confident. The commentator in sequence 6 is the same female teacher, FTb, as commented on the work of the female student in sequence 5 from the first social science seminar. Her criticism, however, is of a different character this time, which is why I wish to present this sequence, too: 22
FTb:
23
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24 25
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26 27 28
FTb: FTb: FTb:
29
FTb:
Well no what I was wondering about was er / I mean it was er what you said about the the theoretical component that’s involved here being concerned with economic incentives / but economic incentives are of course one of those parameters you tend to associate with individuals and er / and now we’ve also heard that very few people are involved here but we don’t see any people at all // really / [no:MPb] but you’re very secretive about which people are involved in this context and that I think in fact is a mistake because [mm:MPb] it makes it a great deal more interesting
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30
31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
MCc: () FTb: to the reader if you I think in certain circles if you’re told which people are FTb: involved first of all [*yes*:MPb] and secondly I wonder a little how you FTb: would say that this that that er well in what sense do you consider that you’ve applied that FTb: theory about incentives and so on [mm:MPb] so long as you keep the actors FTb: at the personal level out of your account ((2 sec. pause)) MPb: Hav- well actually I would argue that economic incentives can bebe applied MPb: to the question of companies too FTb: Yes but have you done that MPb: I well er let me put it this wayFTb: Obviously you can you can of course do so FTb: at different levels but to press you on this / assertion I would like FTb: to say that I don’t think you’ve applied [no:MPb] that theory FTb: at all= MPb: =If I can put it this way FTb: You’ve just mentioned that it exists= MPb: =Mm I er yes exactly and that that it surely in ((sigh)) at the theoretical MPb: level plays a major role but then the fact is that / I I don’t intend to MPb: read too much into this business of economic incentives or appropriation either MPb: it was just that it was a starting point for the whole of this / you could say / MCc: Reference MPb: project if you like / and yes they say reference now well let’s put it MPb: like this er / what I’ve looked at is the institutional structure ((throat clearing))
Here we find FTb attacking the male student quite aggressively. Her criticism is levelled at the lack of correspondence between theory and analysis in his work. She ends her comment with a question in which she formulates her main point of criticism, lines 32–34: “in what sense do you consider that you’ve applied that theory about incentives and so on so long as you keep the actors at the personal level out of your account”. The male presenter, MPb, gives what he
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seems to consider to be a reply, lines 36–37: “well actually I would argue that economic incentives can be- be applied to the question of companies too”. But the female teacher is not satisfied with this. She now attacks him more directly, line 38: “Yes but have you done that”. The presenter starts off hesitantly, line 39: “I well er let me put it this way-”, but is interrupted by the female teacher, lines 39–42: “Obviously you can you can of course do so at different levels but to press you on this / assertion I would like to say that I don’t think you’ve applied that theory at all”. He tries to interrupt her, line 43: “If I can put it this way”, but does not succeed. She concludes, line 43: “You’ve just mentioned that it exists”. The male presenter seems at first to concede that the female teacher is right in her criticism, lines 44–45: “Mm I er yes exactly and that that it surely in ((sigh)) at the theoretical level plays a major role”. He then turns the focus away from the topic, diminishing the value of her criticism, lines 45–47: “but then the fact is that / I I don’t intend to read too much into this business of economic incentives… it was a starting point for the whole of this”. In this sequence the female teacher launches quite an aggressive attack on the male presenter. There are quite clear similarities between this sequence and the first one, in which the two combatants were male doctoral students. The female teacher who used a very gentle critical strategy in dealing with the female presenter in the first social science seminar seems to find that she needs to use a tougher strategy here. It is thus clear that the habitus of the female teacher at this department means that she can both play the tough critical game and the gentler and more face-saving game of advice and questioning. What seems to determine her choice of strategy is the presenter, in the first case a female postgraduate student who does not play the defensive part of the game, and in the second case a male student who certainly does play this part. When she needs to she can be very assertive, making her high extrinsic rank interactionally relevant (cf. Kotthoff 1997: 145). The male presenter seems to be readier to defend himself than the female presenter was. The last statements of the quoted sequence are particularly interesting. By ending his answer to her criticism by “I don’t intend to read too much into this business of economic incentives… it was a starting point for the whole of this”, he clearly diminishes the effect of her comment. What he actually says is that her criticism is irrelevant. He himself does not intend “to read too much into this”, which he seems to mean that she has done. He also says that this is just “a starting point”, which he thus seems to mean that she has not understood. Though not ignoring her criticism, he finds a way to diminish
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its value. This battle between the young male doctoral student and the middle aged female teacher could be interpreted as an example of a male resistance to a female critic. Later in the same seminar, there is another interesting sequence, which could be interpreted as an attempt on the part of the male presenter to punish the female teacher, FTb, who so harshly criticized him earlier. FTb, Ulla-Britt, has now raised another topic for discussion, presenting her criticism in a very clear way. Another female teacher, Lena, comments on the same topic, but much less and more as a petty addition to what Ulla-Britt has elaborated on. When, however, the male student replies to this chain of comments, he turns explicitly to Lena, who has only made a minor additional comment, giving her the credit for the point Ulla-Britt (FTb) raised and developed. Lena corrects him, saying that it was Ulla-Britt, her colleague, not she herself who raised the question “it was Ulla-Britt who first raised this I agreed with”. A possible interpretation of this latter sequence is that the male doctoral student does not fully accept Ulla-Britt in her role as a critic. He makes an attempt here to punish the earlier strongly critical female teacher (Ulla-Britt) by playing her off against the other female teacher (Lena). As we have seen, this attempt does not fully succeed, as Lena notices it. In a motherly way she draws on her extrinsic status and seminar experience, in this case balancing her wish to advise the student with the need to correct him when he has made a mistake, that is by trying to discredit Ulla-Britt, the other female teacher.
Discussion At the social science seminars, the climate is on the whole much less critical and more advisory than at the earlier discussed humanities seminars (cf. Christensen 1996). The comments made to the presenters are to a large extent presented as suggestions and questions and less as pure criticisms and evaluations. I can also mention that we found far fewer evaluative expressions in these seminars than in those recorded at the humanities department. The dominant roles at the social science seminars are played by the teachers, and here we find that both male and female teachers are very active. And both males and females can act as critics and also as advisers. It is of course impossible to say what role the larger number of active tenured women has played in shaping the seminar culture. Another possible variable of importance for the seminar culture is the interest in social issues among the students and staff. The subjects of their research not infrequently relate to social issues, and there has also been a Marxist grouping among the department’s scholars. An analysis of
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contemporary data such as this one cannot disguise the origin of the culture. It is striking, however, that these seminars have a more advisory and less critical character and also that women play a much more central role in them. The established women are accepted as full members of the seminar, at least when they do not become too critical. If we relate this to Bourdieu’s habitus concept, we can say that there is no reason to assume that there is any great difference in habitus between female and male teachers at the social science department. The prevailing habitus seems to be shared by the established man and the established woman. The male and female teachers behave in quite a similar way as far as criticism and advice are concerned. Nevertheless, the male doctoral student’s response to the harsh criticism of the female teacher (Ulla-Britt) and the way he explicitly turns his question toward the other, milder female teacher (Lena) show that also in this department it is difficult for women to be accepted in predominantly male roles. We could see this as a sign of a similar “double bind” as the one which according to Kendall and Tannen face women in authority regarding professionalism and femininity (1997: 92). Here as in the workplace studies reported on in the article by the American authors, this double bind sems mainly to come from men, in this case from a young man in an inferior position (p. 93). Turning to the doctoral students at the social science department, our conclusions must be that it is not at all clear that female and male students share the same habitus. One sign that a difference exists is the defensive/non-defensive features of the replies of the two presenters. In the sequences discussed earlier, we found that the female student was challenged less than the male student and that she did not have to take up a defensive position in the same way as the male student did. Another sign of this difference is the students’ own reports on their feelings in relation to the departmental culture. In her interviews with three of the female seminar participants, Spitzinger found a pronounced dissatisfaction not only with the seminar culture as a whole, but also with the role of women within the department. The women expressed an unease with the departmental culture, which they considered to be a male one. In the case of these women, at least, their habitus did not agree with the one prevailing at the department.
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Conclusions One purpose of the analysis presented in this article has been to discuss what academic discourse reveals about the habitus of men and women within the Scandinavian university system. Do the academic man and the academic woman within a certain department have different habituses? Can we talk about a male habitus and a female habita? Or is the prevailing habitus instead genderneutral, that is, can we talk about a common habitus for the male and female “homo academicus”? The seminars took place at two departments with different gender structures, and another set of questions relates to possible subculture differences between these two departments. Do we find differences in terms of the prevailing male, female or gender-neutral habitus between the humanities and the social science department? As the above analyses have revealed, the male dominance is almost total at the humanities department. The struggle at this department is, as Bourdieu has described it, primarily a fight between men over the prestigious symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984). As regards the interactional climate, the atmosphere at the humanities seminars can be characterized as mainly critical. Throughout the seminars we find frequent evaluations of the work presented by the doctoral students, favourable and unfavourable. The role of expressing criticism, however, is male gendered; adverse evaluations are made by men and mostly directed at male presenters. Women very rarely make critical comments, and when they do so their criticism is often ignored. The seminar culture of the humanities department is thus dominated by a male tradition. The prevailing habitus is a male habitus with little acceptance of the role of women. Very few female teachers attend the seminars and more than half of the female postgraduates who attend do not say anything (Gunnarsson 1997), facts which could be interpreted as a sign of resignation or a protest. At the social science department, on the other hand, the struggle over knowledge centrality includes a gender dimension. Above all, we find the female teachers participating in the knowledge game, and science and academic discussion cannot here be said to be a purely male battleground (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The female teachers steer and dominate the discussion as much as their male colleagues, and their topics become even more central to knowledge development (Gunnarsson 1998). The seminar climate at the social science department can be characterized as more process-oriented; the comments seem to have the aim of offering constructive ideas on the ongoing work of the doctoral students (Christensen 1996). The student’s work is also evaluated
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to a lesser extent at the social science than at the humanities seminars (Lindroth 1997). The dominant roles at the social science seminars are played by the teachers, and here we find that both male and female teachers are very active. And both males and females can act as critics and also as advisers. The established women seem to be accepted as full members of the seminar, at least when they do not become too critical. A possible conclusion would be that the female teachers at this department share the same habitus as their male colleagues, that is, that the prevailing habitus is shared by the established man and the established woman. Compared to the humanities department, the social science department appears to offer equality, that is, women participate in the struggle for influence over academic knowledge. The question is, however, whether they really participate on equal terms. I would say that there are reasons to doubt this. If we look first at the situation of postgraduate students, there is quite a striking difference between the ways in which male and female students act. When, for instance, we analysed the introductions given by the presenters before the start of the discussion, we were struck by the difference in length and content between those given by male and those given by female students; only the male students seem to feel at ease in their role as seminar presenters (Gunnarsson 1997). The role of seminar participant, too, seems to be liked less by female than by male students. As far as attending the seminars is concerned, there are equal numbers of male and female students. The numbers who actually participate, i.e. who take part in the discussion, are strikingly different, however. Only around half of the female students who attend the social science seminars say anything, while the corresponding proportion for the male students is more than two thirds. We have also interviewed the quiet female students, and they attribute their silence to alienation and resignation: “they have gradually discovered that their role is not to take part in the discussion”, “they do not want to take part in the game” (Spitzinger 1996). The fact that many of the female students seem to feel that the seminars are not made for them could be interpreted as a sign that their habitus does not fit in with that of the department’s prevailing “homo academicus”. Turning next to the female teachers, there is also reason to feel somewhat hesitant about concluding that their situation is altogether equal to that of their male counterparts. The women, and even female teachers, were for instance found to have greater difficulty than the men in asserting themselves in turn-taking (Persson 1997). And as has been shown in this article, female teachers meet with a certain resistance — from men — when they act in the traditional male role of seminar critic.
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Apart from these reservations, both the present analysis and our earlier analyses of seminar discourse within the humanities and social science departments have revealed a clear difference between the two departments. Although in both departments — as in the university as a whole — the highest statuses belong to men, the stronger position of the women in the social science department appears to have an effect on women’s discursive behaviour and acceptance. We find women standing up for their ideas and views, acting in both a traditional female and a traditional male role. In the humanities department, the male dominance with its low acceptance of the role of women forces the women to submit by allowing themselves to be silenced. Though clearly many of the humanities teachers and students wish to have an influence on the discussion, the macro structure imposes itself on the local discourse, depriving them of their discursive power. Obviously, the humanities department culture does not accept a woman as a fully fledged “homo academicus”. The second purpose of this study of seminar interaction has been to analyse the behaviour and treatment of female and male participants in order to reveal possible gender differences and above all possible gender hinderances. We thus asked if women use different language strategies than men, and also if men prevent women from playing traditional male roles in the seminars. In spite of the long and ambitious equality tradition which the Scandinavian countries can — and very often do — pride themselves of, the Scandinavian universities are still far from equal. Something seems to prevent a change from taking place, and another question guiding this study has concerned what academic discourse reveal about the status quo conserving processes. As our analysees have shown, women are capable of acting as seminar critics, and they also use such a strategy now and then. The problem as regards women and the role of critic, rather, is that they are not always accepted in this role by male participants. This finding can be compared to the above discussed general tendency relating to men’s negative attitudes towards assertive women and their non-acceptance of women in authoritative positions (Bergvall 1996; Kendall and Tannen 1997). We thus find similar gender patterns in Scandinavian universities as in other male dominated workplaces and institutions. Though as we have seen a few women persist in their effort to be heard, even though their comments are repeatedly ignored, the great majority of women seem to act differently in response to such treatment. In the long run, a negative reception of a woman’s critical comments may of course make her refrain from making such comments, and it may also make her change strategy. It is clear that extrinsic status is important for women in seminar interaction,
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even though we must remember the withdrawal of the female teachers at the humanities department. For the new doctoral student, however, a negative reception can have a lasting effect. In one of our interviews, one of the silent female students talks about such a change of strategy. When she first came to the department as a new postgraduate student, she spoke up and expressed her opinion, but gradually she realized what her role was to be and became silent (Spitzinger 1996). Ignoring of women’s attempts to criticize and negative reactions to female critics can thus be seen as part of processes leading to a conservation of status quo. What of course is surprising is that a gender division of discursive roles and functions like the one described above can exist. Goffman (1977) claims that gender is so institutionalized that it develops exactly the features of masculinity and femininity which allegedly justify this institutionalization, although the physical differences between the sexes as such have no great effect on our ability to accomplish most of our daily tasks. The question is then, of course, why institutions have used and still use irrelevant differences for their division of discursive roles and functions. Kotthoff and Wodak (1997) argue that the basis for the institutionalization of the two genders always consists of normative acts of assigning societal positions, including a variety of access possibilities. The institutionalization of gender can easily, they go on, be connected with the use of clearly determinable features — namely biological features — as a basis for the distribution of resources and power. This embedding process is social in all its shades: Although the social expressions of masculinity and femininity have little to do with biology, it helps to demarcate differences between the sexes which can be exploited in creating patriarchal systems. The gender code influences what people regard as their own nature; it is not the product of this nature. /…/ The only thing that is universally observable is the fact that people construct their nature; however, they do not do this in the same way everywhere (Kotthoff and Wodak 1997: x).
What is described here, and what is referred to by the term “institutionalization”, is a general embedding of sexual attributes in the social world. In contrast to feminists (e.g. Butler 1990) who view individuals as free agents, thus denying the materiality of gender and power relations, Kotthoff and Wodak claim that it is necessary to consider the institutional contexts and the power relations within which gender is being enacted. Observable natural phenomena (body, birth, death) enter into the construction of individuals’ perceptions of their nature, which is exactly what makes patriarchal systems so stable.
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Ideas like these help to explain the historical stability of patriarchal hierarchies found in institutions, for instance in universities. It is not enough for us to analyse the strategies women and men use, nor the knowledge status they have. We have to interprete the situation in its social-historical context, thus acknowledging the impact of hidden, traditional values. “Otherwise we tend to think that a person’s dominance depends only on her/his conversational style without taking into consideration that a style has to be legitimate. The conditions of felicity of conversational styles are primarily social conditions, imbued with power and authority” (Kotthoff 1987: 144; Bourdieu 1991).
Notes 1. In Sweden women were allowed to enter the universities in 1873. For the first 75 years, however, very few women took this chance. Since the Second World War the number of women has increased steadily to the point where we now find slightly more women than men at university level. (Cf. Clayhill 1991: 470–71.) 2. For a discussion of gender and biological sex, see Lewontin (1982: 142), Giddens (1989: 158), Stolcke (1993: 19) and Wodak (1997: 3–4). 3. The research project also comprised an analysis of five seminars held at a natural science department and one seminar included in a women’s studies series at the humanities department. Altogether, our study covers 16 seminars, comprising a total of 26 hours of video-recorded seminar discussion. All the seminars were transcribed in full and analysed. 4. For ease of comprehension, I have changed our original participant codes to more descriptive ones (M=male, F=female, C=chair, P=presenter, T=teacher, S=student; when there is more than one person within a certain category, for instance more than one chair, they are distinguished by means of a, b etc.; the first chair is coded MCa, the second MCb, the third MCc). I have also changed the names mentioned in the discussion, in order to respect the anonymity of the seminar participants.
References Ainsworth-Vaughn, Nancy 1992 “Topic transitions in physician-patient interviews: power, gender, and discourse change”. Language in Society 21: 409–426 Bergvall, Victoria L. 1996 “Constructing and enacting gender through discourse: Negotiating multiple roles as female engineering students”. In Rethinking Language and Gender
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Research: Theory and Practice, V. L. Bergvall, J. M. Bing and A. F. Freed (eds), 173–201. London and New York: Longman. Bourdieu, Pierre 1990 “La domination masculine”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 84 (masculin/feminin 2): 2–31. 1991 Language and Symbolic Power. Edited and introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1996 (1984) Homo academicus Stockholm: Brutus Östlings förlag. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bron-Wojciechowska, Agnieszka 1995 Att forskarutbilda sig vid Uppsala universitet: Om kvinnliga och manliga doktorande. Pedagogisk forskning i Uppsala 120. Pedagogiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. Butler, Judith 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah 1997 “Theoretical debates in feminist linguistics: Questions of sex and gender”. In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed.), 21–36, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Clayhill, Harriet 1991 Kvinnohistorisk uppslagsbok. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Christensen, Ditte 1996 Kritiken på forskarseminarier: En analys av interaktiv balans och diskussionsutveckling. TeFa nr 14. Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. Corson, David 1997 “Gender, discourse and senior education: Ligatures for girls, options for boys?”. In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed.), 140–164, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Einarsson, Jan and Hultman, Tor 1984 Godmorgon pojkar och flickor: Om språk och kön i skolan. Malmö. Gal, Susan 1991 “Between speech and silence: The problematics of research on language and gender”. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feministic Anthropology in the postmodern Era, M. di Leonardo (ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Giddens, Anthony 1989 Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell Polity Press. Goffman, Erving 1977 “The arrangement between the sexes”. Theory and Society 4: 301–331. Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise 1995 “Academic leadership and gender: The case of the seminar chair”. In Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic Conference on Language and Gender. Tromsö, 3–5 November 1994, I. Broch, T. Bull and T. Swan (eds). NORDLYD, Tromsö University Working Papers on Language and Linguistics 23: 174–193. Tromsö.
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1997 “Women and men in the academic discourse community”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), 219–247. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1998 “Spelet om den akademiska kunskapen: En studie av ämnesutvecklingen i forskarseminarier”. NyS 24. Nydanske Studier & Almen Kommunikationsteori. Sprog & Køn:41–72. Dansklærerforeningen. Institut för nordisk filologi. Københavns universitet. Kendall, Shari and Tannen, Deborah 1997 “Gender and language in the workplace”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), 81–105. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kotthoff, Helga 1997 “The interactional achievement of expert status: Creating asymmetries by ‘Teaching Conversational Lectures’ in TV discussions”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R. Wodak (eds), 139–178. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kotthoff, Helga and Wodak, Ruth 1997 “Preface”. In Communicating Gender in Context, H. Kotthoff and R.Wodak (eds), vii-xxv. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kuhn, Elizabeth 1992 “Geschlecht und Autorität: Wie Lehrende ihre StudentInnen zur Mitarbeit bewegen”. In Die Geschlechter im Gespräch: Kommunikation in Institutionen, S. Günthnerand H. Kotthoff (eds), 55–72. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Lakoff, Robin 1990 Talking Power: The Politics of Language. San Francisco: Basic Books. Lewontin, Richard 1982 Human Diversity. London: W. H. Freeman. Lindroth, Kajsa 1997 Kön, status och värderande i forskarseminarier. TeFa nr 18. Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. Olevard, Helena 1997a Tystnad och pauser — en analys av förekomsten av pauser och deras betydelse. TeFa nr 21. Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. 1997b Kvinnor i seminarieinteraktion: En studie av enkönade och blandade forskarseminarier. TeFa nr 24. Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. Persson, Annika 1997 Diskursdeltagande — vilja och framgång på forskarseminarier. TeFa nr 17. Uppsala universitet. Uppsala. Spitzinger, Cristina 1996 “Språket och makten. Kvinnligt och manligt i universitetsmiljö”. C-uppsats i Socialantropologi. Socialantropologiska institutionen. Stockholms universitet. Stolcke, Verena 1993 “Is sex to gender as race to ethnicity?” In Gendered Anthropology, T. de Valle (ed.), 16–36. London / New York: Sage. Tannen, Deborah 1994 Gender and Discourse. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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West, Candace 1990 “Not just ‘doctor’s orders’: directive-response sequences in patients’ visits to women and men physicians”. Discourse and Society 1 (1): 85–112. Wodak, Ruth 1995 “Power, discourse and styles of female leadership in school committee meetings”. In Discourse and Power in Educational Organizations, D. Corson (ed.). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. 1997 “Introduction: Some important issues in the research of gender and discourse” In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed.), 1–20. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals1 Helga Kotthoff
Introduction This article deals with the relationship between gender, emotion, and culture in Georgian mourning rituals, especially in lamentations. In many parts of the world laments are performed by women, as well in Georgia. The emotion of grief is thereby indexically feminized. My article focuses on the poetic performance of grief and pain, consisting of various conversational involvement strategies, and the social meaning of this affective genre as gendered activity. In the role of lamenters women enjoy high respect. However, this social role contains tension for them. On the one hand, wailing reconstructs the feminine gender ascription of being vulnerable and over-emotional, on the other hand, it permits women to act as oral artists, and their talents are admired by the whole community. Instead of regarding ritual wailing as a form of losing control of oneself the high standard of verbal art clearly indicates that wailers must be in good control of their affects. The aestheticized speech demands bodily control of the mourners during the performance of “being beside oneself.” They are admired as well as artists of pain and as persons having deep feelings. By involving others with their moving words the loss is symbolically shared and the wailers reaffirm the social network. Pointing out good deeds of the deceased and his/her clan allows them to communicate their moral standards and their views on what good social relationships look like. They also take the chance to praise each other in their laments. Another positive aspect of wailing for the women consists in allowing them to play a public part in practicing religion. Since within the official Orthodox church women have only low positions, they enjoy their important role as mediators between the living and the dead put on stage in the folk religious wailings. Lamentation is believed to intensify relations to the deceased in the hereafter.
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Laments also represent an accepted form of complaint about all forms of sorrow and pain in the lamenter’s own life.2 Women use the genre to publicize their sorrows. Lamenting is interwoven in the Georgian system of gaining and paying respect and honor (Kotthoff 1999). The lamenter represents her clan in honoring the deceased (and thereby his or her clan). In recent years it has been becoming more and more evident in cultural studies that emotion politics is central in the construction of a gendered world and has a lot to do with the organization of social hierarchies and solidarities.3 In taking a close look at gender and emotion politics in ritual wailing we hope to get a differentiated picture of the arrangements between the sexes in one culture (the Georgian). I present transcripts from a lamentation4 and analyze the form and function of the genre drawing on concepts of emotion work and involvement strategies, thereby linking gender with body politics, power, and social structure. The article focuses on specific strategies of indexing communalization of the living and the dead, on interrelated affective dimensions, and on the tension the genre contains for women’s social position.
1.
Xmit nat» irlebi
The region this article deals with is the eastern part of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, nowadays an independent country in the Caucasus. Lament performances still play an important role as part of death rituals in rural Georgia. When someone dies in a Georgian rural area, the “mo»tiralebi”5 assemble to bewail the deceased loudly in an improvised and partly formulaic lament which is rhythmically and intonationally structured in lines. The “mo»tiralebi” are usually close female relatives and neighbors. Men and women display different ways of emotion management and performance from the very beginning of the death event, thereby reproducing cultural gender norms. Laments constitute a body of women’s expressive genres, and a societally acknowledged female way of reaffirming social bonds and moral standards. In the eastern parts of Georgia only women are lamenters. Interestingly, men play the most important role in ending the mourning phase and managing the ritual transition back to everyday life. At the mourning meal, “kelexi,” they formulate a series of toasts, first to the deceased person, then to other dead persons and finally to the living.6
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Grieving is a public act in Georgia. For an entire year a picture of the deceased is hung before that person’s house. The transparency of village life entails that lamenters will be well-informed about the life of the deceased. They are able to interspere their dirges with many anecdotes from the deceased’s and his/her clan’s live. There is a certain order in who bewails whom and how much. For example, on the occasion of a child’s death, its mother will be the principal wailer. Should she lack the requisite skills, however, another woman will assume this role. In every case the women take turns in lamenting, since they grieve all day during daylight hours for three to five consecutive days. Usually several women alternate in lamenting. The family of the deceased is not left alone with its grief. The loss is borne by all, thus affirming the social network of the entire grieving community.7 The women continue to lament at the cemetery until the coffin is lowered into the grave.8 On the seventh and fortieth days after death, and once more a year later, they lament again. The dominant form of ritual wailing is called “xmit na»tirlebi”. “Xmit na»tirlebi” means “crying loudly with one’s voice”. Also called “motkmiti t» irili” (spoken weeping or wailing with the voice), this genre belongs to a special form of ritual communication. Sometimes, a woman laments and others hum the melody with weeping sounds, a stylized background wailing called “zari”. The lament performer orients herself to the deceased, to other deceased, and to various present and absent addressees or the audience in general. There are many formulaic phrases which appear again and again. Every lament, however, is created individually for the deceased person and present persons, and large parts of each lament normally consist of improvisations. An “aesthetics of pain” (Caraveli 1986) is placed on stage. I became acquainted with women’s laments9 only after having lived in Georgia for many months. The “xmit na»tirlebi” are still widespread in rural areas, and in many regions (particularly in the Eastern mountain regions of Pšavi, Mtianeti, Xevsuretia and Tušetia) only women lament. In Svanetia and Samegrelo, West Georgian areas, men also practice special parts in ritual wailing (Bolle-Zemp 1997).10 In the mountain villages the dirges are sung and are accompanied by forms of self-aggression like pulling one’s hair out. Grief styles differ regionally within Georgia. In the valley they are today often performed without a song melody; the lament has completely died out only among the Tbilissians in the capital of Tbilisi (not among immigrants). However, even among Tbilissians the deceased is mourned for three to five days by a circle of women who gather daily around the coffin. In contrast to Northern or Western
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Lamentation at the cemetry of Muxrani 1995, photo taken by Helga Kotthoff
European cultures, this activity indicates that grieving in Georgia is a very expressive and time consuming undertaking. The lamenting women demonstratively put their grief and attachment on stage, falling on their knees before the dead, crying, kissing and hugging him/her. In Eastern Georgia, only women are present in the room where the deceased lies, while the men stand silently in the doorway or in the yard. Women address their sorrow to other women, but men acknowledge it as well. A few regional elements of the mourning ritual are exclusively performed for men, which expresses the patriarchal orientation of the culture. In the Eastern Georgian mountain regions widows cut off their hair and place it in the grave with their husband as a symbol that they continue to be their wives. It is regarded as morally bad if a widow remarries, since she still belongs at least in part to her deceased husband. A husband, in contrast, belongs to his deceased wife only for a short period of time; then he normally begins a new life with another woman. The intensity and duration of a lamentation signifies the social value the deceased is ascribed. Various Georgian informants have explained to me that “a man who had provided great benefits to the village would be grieved longer and in many more forms than an insignificant person”. Likewise, people who die at an early age are more profusely lamented than very old people. In former times a woman’s wailing talent was seen as an important criterion for a good wife.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 287
Young men watched the young wailers in order to choose a wife. To have a good wailer as a wife meant to have someone who would involve herself into making his transition into the hereafter easier. It is considered a terrible malediction for a man to insinuate that no woman will bewail him. Those who are seen as criminals are not (necessarily) granted the honor of a lament. In the village of Muxrani, near Mcxeta, people told us of a man who allegedly did not work, who drank and beat his wife and children. When he died, neither his family nor his (female) neighbors wanted to “soften the earth” for him, which indicates the religious function that is ascribed to laments in Georgia. Shortly before burial, an old women staged a lament in which she set forth that she did not want to have a bad conscience before the mother of the deceased in heaven because she had not softened the earth with tears of grief for her son. A lament is never only dedicated to the actual deceased but to her/his whole clan as well. The length of mourning, the frequency of commemorative celebrations, the abundance of the funeral meal, the beauty and intensity of the lamentations, the number of guests and many other details indicate what place the deceased and his or her family is assigned in the social hierarchy of the community. There are many oral rituals in Georgia which also embody the secrets of social order.11 Most of these genres,12 such as drinking toasts and forms of verbal duelling, are gender-related activities. They help people to exercise control over affective processes in a gendered way. Men, for example, must display self-control during the performance of drinking toasts, which are usually offered under the strong influence of alcohol (Kotthoff 1995b). Women, by contrast, tend to give expression to suffering in performing dirges, but they must at the same time conform the expression of their feelings to demanding conventionalized forms (as will be shown). The gender difference is not that men control their emotions and women let them take their course, but that both sexes practice emotion work in a specific way. Men are largely obligated to maintain silence in the situation of death. As a visual display of grief, they are allowed to tear scraps of cloth from their shirts and to beat themselves on the chest.13 In addition, the men of a village will often refrain from shaving for many months following their loss. Bearded men were once assumed to have lost a loved one, usually their wife. Symbols of “letting oneself go” as a sign of mourning have been found in many societies. In this context expressive sadness is not only permitted for women, but is considered their duty. Women assume this role in the emotional division of labor in many societies (Finnegan 1970, Caraveli-Chaves 1980, Stubbe 1985, Seremetakis 1991).14 By commenting on the life of the deceased and those who
288 Helga Kotthoff
are present they also serve important functions for the production and reproduction of societal morality. This is one reason why lamentation is not just a discourse of powerlessness. In any case, laments symbolize a kind of final summing up for a member of society. Cultural gender politics is carried out in that respective feelings are devolved on women as the principal mourners; they must be expressed during the rite of transition. As lamenters women gain high respect. In addition, as an institutionalized form of expressive speech activity, lamentations offer a framework for expressions of many sorts of overpowering grief and pain in the lamenters’ own lives which can also be channeled in this fashion. In the countryside women play only a minor role in the community life outside the home. Only in a state of grief do women become public figures who are allowed to speak for the community. Private space then becomes public space. Lamentation thus also plays an important role as a form of folk religious ritual. Religious practice is not limited to churches (Luckmann 1991); the genre of lamentation is extremely important for the constitution and manifestation of folk religion in everyday life. One reason for the survival of the genre could be that it fulfilled functions of cultural resistance in Soviet times. Through mourning the Georgian local communities recreated their own values against those of the dominant Soviet (Russian) regime. Ritual mourning allowed people to show each other that their religious (and thereby national Georgian) identity was still alive. Another reason is, of course, that oral genres of morality and religion require a close-knit society because they depend on social knowledge; the Georgian villages fulfill these survival conditions even today. In the post-Soviet era the Orthodox Church has regained power. Women play only minor roles within the official Georgian Orthodox Church. A significant aspect of the lament still is its religious dimension, because it constitutes metaphysical communication outside the official church.15 Within the unofficial religious life of their villages women still act as mediators between the realm of the living and that of the dead. In Georgian folk religion attachment to the deceased is extraordinarily marked. One assumes that the deceased can influence life on earth and that one must remain in continual contact with them in order to positively influence them. Throughout Georgia, even today people are still strongly convinced that the soul of the deceased person continues to live on for a while after death. We see in the transcripts that the deceased person is
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 289
directly addressed and appealed to, for example, as the addressee of stories. One reason for the extensive mourning and memorial work lies in the conviction that the deceased person should feel good in the afterlife, and that it will be better for those left behind if the deceased are content. The fictionalization of life in the hereafter is parallelized to life in this world. The mourning meal following the burial must, for example, be very abundant so that the deceased will be greeted with an equally generous meal in the hereafter. The lamentations which we have collected are full of messages for other deceased persons, for example, in the form: “Tell my mother that we have finally moved into our new house. But please do not tell her that we have lost our house in Abxasia.” The deceased must be kept in good spirits. Women also reproduce emotional womanhood in this genre. Deeply felt grief is regarded as a sign of being a good woman. The mourners display behavior that is considered feminine by society. The general ascription of emotional expressiveness, especially suffering, constitutes femininity in many cultures (Grima 1991, Mills 1991). Conventions of feeling demand that women’s grief and sadness be especially deep and long-lasting. In Georgia the ability to express grief is definitely part of female body politics. In contrast to Western body politics, whose essence nowadays consists in making the traces of experienced life, of fear, suffering, aging and despair as invisible as possible (women attempt to continuously display the same flawless freshness and youthfulness), in Georgia the chief concern is, to the contrary, to iconically embody suffering and to portray expressive forms of suffering and grief through the body. Wailers sit bent over, with stooped shoulders, arms and head. They sob and often rest their heads in their hands. Movements become heavy and slow. Older women in general move more ponderously in Georgia than in the West. But we can observe changes nowadays. Young women have started orienting themselves to Western values. They also refrain from wailing. Further research must answer the question of how contact with Western ways of living influences grief rituals and gender politics. Grief rituals represent special ties among women. Women not only lament the loss of the deceased, but also praise and support each other in their dirges. Their joint suffering and support constitute a social tie among them. In principle, every woman can lament; however, some women are seen as outstanding because they have developed special skills. We were often told that only women who have experienced social tragedies are able to lament beautifully and move others. These lamenters are well-known and venerated throughout their village. When someone passes away, the lamenters hurry to the house in
290 Helga Kotthoff
which the deceased lived. They honor the dead and her/his family by lamenting for her/him. The family announces the death of a person by crying loudly. As lamenters, women fulfill important anthropological functions which interpenetrate one another, including the thematization of a basic human experience, the communilization of that experience, aesthetization and handing down memory to the next generation. The intensity of the presented and aroused empathy is the primary evaluative criterion for the lament’s performance. The lament performer should transfer her pain to others. The value of formal beauty consists in its ability to create and support strong feelings of empathy in the audience. Laments represent a mixed form between formulaic and improvised texts, as is typical for most oral ritual performances (Finnegan 1970, Edwards/Sienkewicz 1990). 1.1 Women praise each other As I already said, the wailers also use the genre to praise other women present. I present a short segment taken from a lament for the 86 year old woman Mariam performed in the village of Muxrani in 1994 (40 km from Tbilisi) on “panašvidi” — the last day before the burial. The full text is presented in the appendix. Methodologically I prefer a data-centered ethnography. That means to take a close look at textual details of the wailing. I do not, however, claim that the text itself tells us everything; I do believe, though, that we ought to take people’s actual modes of behavior and dialogues as the starting point for theories of their social organization and relevance structures. We, Elza Gabedava and me, also talked about ritual wailing with many practicing lamenters in Georgia and will integrate their views on that practice into our discussion. When the sequence presented below took place, visitors one by one entered the room where the deceased, the 86-year old Mariam, lied. The female relatives and neighbors are seated around the coffin. The chief lamenters are the daughters, Liziko (L) and Ciala (C). By the head of the deceased stands a small table, on which candles and photos of persons who had died previously are arranged. Tamara (T), a neighbor and cousin, enters. I did not transcribe all the soft background wailing of the onlookers. She then becomes the addressee of praise for her care. We will pay attention to the content that is communicated here and to an interesting formal feature of Georgian dirges: the constant crossing and shifting of address. I see it as an index of social unification.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 291
Sequence 1 1 Tamari: 16
2 Ciala:
how beautifully you have prepared yourself, Aunt Maro, genacvale [
3 4 T: 5 C:
no, Aunt Tamari, you don't know what you are doing, woman,
so much deference, I don't know what we could do, Aunt Tamara, oh my
6 T:
everyday, every evening, every morning [
7 C:
but you have prepared yourself , genacvale, [
8 T:
I do not know what pleasure I could give you, genacvale, [
9 10
11 12 13 14 15 C: 16 T:
you come from a large clan !
there you will meet our cousins, all the good are there.
genacvale, you will also meet my mother there, you know how good natured she was 'H:: " 'H:: ! share these flowers with everyone there, I implore you, you
but my heart aches that you are leaving your dear children
you are leaving them and going away from them
it means so much to look at them, [
" # # $", you % ### &&&
you, however, have left not only your eyes, but also your heart with your 18 children
292 Helga Kotthoff
17
18
19
20 C:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
'H:: marus, Seni Wirime, ar vici kargi, bevri tirili 'H:: marus, Ueni Airime, ar vici Qargi, bevri Ririli Marus, let me bear your suffering, I cannot cry well and much ra wyalSi Cavvarde ra PYalUi Iavvarde into what water should I throw myself [minda bevri rame giTxra minda bevri rame gitxra I would like to say so many things to you [gaixare, Tamara deida Sen Svilebsa da SviliSvilebSi gaixare, Ramara deida Uen Uvilebsa da UviliUvilebUi may you be happy, Aunt Tamara, about your children and grandchildren gagaxaros RmeTma gagaxaros Tmertma God give you joy deda, ramden pativsa gcems Seni biZaSvili, deda deda, ramden WaRivsa gcems Ueni biOaUvili, deda Mother, how many favors your cousin has been doing for you, mother dRe da Rame aq aris Tamara, dTe da Tame ak aris tamara, Tamara is here day and night, deda avadac iyavi, rom Rameca mTxovda es daRlil daqanculi qali deda avadac iYavi, rom Tameca mtxovda es daTlil dakanculi kali during mother’s illness this exhausted woman asked me if she could also SenTan davrCebi, Svilo, Sen gverdiT davrCebio Uentan davrIebi, Uvilo, Uen gverdit davrIebio 19 stay with you at night, child, I would stay with you (she said) da me ar vuSvebdi da me ar vuUvebdi but I did not let her Tamara deida, daRlili xar, qalo, wadi saxlSi, tamara deida, daTlili xar, kalo, Padi saxlUi, Aunt Tamara, you are tired, woman, go home, damanebe qalo Tavi, ra ginda CemTan erTad meTqi deda damanebe kalo tavi, ra ginda Iemtan ertad metki deda 20 21 leave me, woman, you do not need to stay (I said ) mother [riT gadavuxado, deda, es pativiscema, qalo rit gadavuxado, deda, es Wativiscema, kalo how can I, mother, pay back this honor, woman
Tamara directly addresses the deceased Aunt Maro (a diminutive of Mariam) with a compliment on her way of dressing. She pretends that Maro had dressed herself to be ready for the journey into the hereafter. To portray the deceased as active is typical in dirges. The line ends with the formula “genacvale”. Laments are permeated with this formula which often marks the beginning
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 293
or the end of a line. “Genacvale” expresses the process of immersing oneself in a person’s sorrow and can be translated as “I take your place”. “Genacvalos deda” accordingly means “I take mother’s place”. Boeder (1988) writes that in a certain contextual position one can as well translate the formula as “I die for you”. “Genacvale” is one of the special sympathy formulae which describe a strong religious wish for self-sacrifice. Formulae which communicate the wish to take over another person’s burden or even death play a major role in Georgian everyday life, not only in dirges. These formulae presuppose a possibility of transcendence which leave the realm of realism, imagining supernatural and magic powers. First, there are the abundant, often-repeated formulae whose fundamental semantic pattern states, at least etymologically, the following: the speaker wishes to shoulder the burden of pain (the illness, misfortune…) which the person addressed suffers. The addressee’s misfortune should be conveyed to the speaker; the lamenter wants to symbolically shoulder the suffering person’s pain. (Boeder 1988: 12; translated by H. K.)
In line 17 we find the formula “šeni cˇ» irime” (“your pain over me” or “let me bear your suffering”) which even more strongly expresses that the speaker would like to assume the addressee’s misfortune, suffering, travail and even death. Despite its high level of conventionalization, the formula “šeni cˇ» irime” has a strong claim to authenticity. As well the lines 18 (into what water should I throw myself) and 21 (God give you joy) are highly conventionalized. The repetition of formulae communicates iconically: we will be united in our suffering. The unification in suffering is also indicated by continuous address shifting. Ciala directs her words in line 2 to Aunt Tamara and thanks her for having done so much for her mother. Tamara directs her words to the deceased Mariam. Sudden address shifts are typical in Georgian lamentation. Line 2 means that Tamara is always trying to find things she could do for her neighbors. In line 3 we find the word “p» a»tiviscema” (deference, honor), a central concept in Georgian everyday life, not only in the ritual of wailing. Many activities are integrated into a system of giving and receiving respect and honor (Kotthoff 1999). Ciala underlines Tamara’s involvement (5) in a three-part list. Hyperbole in praising and thanking is among the characteristics of the lament-performance. In line 6 Aunt Tamara addresses the deceased again. The metaphor of travelling is important in representing death and highly frequent in dirges (not only in Georgia). In line 7 Ciala refers again to how she could return the honor and support she received from Tamara. Tamara, who is also Mariam’s cousin,
294 Helga Kotthoff
imagines that grandmother Mariam will meet members of her clan in the hereafter; they are said to be good. Typically, in dirges the deceased are imagined as being better than the living. Among others, Mariam will meet her mother, to whom good-nature is attributed (10). She again directly addresses Mariam. In line 11 she suggests to Mariam to bring the flowers to those in the hereafter. A religious conception holds sway that the deceased, at least as long she has not yet been buried, takes note of all the messages presented to her and upon arriving in the hereafter passes them on to the relevant persons. In most lamentations those deceased persons are named with whom the deceased will later be reunited in the kingdom of the dead. In lines 12 ff. Tamara recalls the children with kind words. In telling Mariam that it means much to look at her children, she indirectly compliments the present children. I call this strategy address-crossing. The deceased often becomes the official addressee, others present the inofficial ones. She is told praise stories about those present, who can be the praise objects or just the listeners. In any case, good deeds and characteristics are made public that way. In line 13 Tamara repeats that Mariam is leaving her good children now. This is of course an indirect way of complimenting Ciala and Liziko, the main wailers. Ciala returns the indirect compliments in line 15. Tamara addresses the deceased again in line 16. In line 17 we find the formula “šeni cˇ» irime” (your suffering should be mine) we already discussed. In other segments presented in the article we will discover many formulae which communicate that a person wants to carry all the sorrow and suffering for another person. These formulae show a high degree of involvement and sympathy. The phrases in 18 and 19 are also formulaic. In line 20, Ciala takes the turn again and appeals to God to assist Tamara and her family. From line 22 on Ciala again tells her mother how much Aunt Tamara had done for all of them, another case of address-crossing. She talks to the deceased Mariam as though she were alive. This is one of the feature that characterize the discourse as religious. The wailing women tell her everything that present and absent people (mostly women) have done for each other. Thereby they indirectly praise and thank each other. They celebrate their readiness to help, their friendship, and their support. By constantly changing addressees, a community which still includes the deceased is indexically associated. In very concrete scenes Ciala continues showing everybody how helpful Tamara was. She presents herself unwilling to accept so much help and as not knowing how to pay back such a great support. We will return to these strategies of community formation later. It is evident that lamentations represent a genre of women’s care for the bond of friendship.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 295
1.2 Women form family relationships Lamentations also (re)construct images of good relationships within the family, for example, between wife, wife’s mother and husband: The topic was already shifted to other deceased family members some lines before. Now Ciala’s deceased husband is brought into the center of attention. Starting in line 58 she asks her mother a rhetorical question of whether her husband gave her too little respect (p» a»tivi). This is only the start of praising him for paying so much attention to her mother’s well-being, thereby staging him as a man of high morals. In lines 60 and 61 she constructs a dialogue with her husband. He is presented as urging her to please her mother. In line 61 she quotes her own words. In line 62 she again cites her husband’s words and then talks about him and her mother in the third person. The cited formulation “p» a»tivi eci” — (pay her respect/do something good for her) runs through the lines now. It is not easy to translate “p» a»tivi” because it designates the Georgian concept of interactional honor (Kotthoff 1999). From line 65 on, she again speaks with her mother and tells her all the things her husband would have done for her. She also reminds her mother in line 67 how much she had pitied her when her husband died. The mother now becomes the addressee of her grieving for her lost husband. Indexically, Ciala also creates ties among the deceased. She refers to her own long state of grief (wearing black costume for the past twelve years), which in Georgia symbolizes good womanhood. In line 70 she tells her mother, thereby including all the others present, that people think she should finally put aside the mourning dress. She lets everyone know that she is still unhappy about her husband’s death, thereby overfulfilling all cultural mourning norms for wives. In line 73 the focus is again shifted to the death of her mother. Now she has a new reason for mourning. We do not know much about the truthfulness of Ciala’s narrative. At least we do not know how representative the narrated dialogue is for her husband’s behavior. But it is evident that this is the behavior she favors and portrays as ideal. Lamenting women form social relationships (and especially the ideals of those relationships) in praising certain ways of acting. Lamenting thereby becomes a form of public discourse that sets moral standards in the interest of women. Women in this genre tell their social world what they like and what they don’t like, what kind of behavior impresses them and what not.
296 Helga Kotthoff
Sequence 2 58 59 60 61 62
63 64 ? 65 C:
66
67 68 69
70 71
E
did my husband respect you less, mother? my husband
how much, how much my husband liked you FF
Ciala, do something good for mother, do 'something good for her E
then I said to him, man, what could I still do for her? " !
do something good for her, he did not give me a moment's rest when mother visited us [
do something good for her, genacvale [(? B CCC B G HHH G
if he were alive now, mother, if he were alive now, E
he would have done everything for you, mommy, would he have had someone else do that, mother? D #
you pitied me, mother, because I was unhappy, didn't you HHH
because I was unhappy, I had no one to care for me, mother " " &&& ! ! &&&&&&
what a husband I have lost, mother, for tvelve years I have worn mourning dress # # # & & &
mother, I should put aside my mourning dress, so they said to me B G
nothing can bring cheer to my heart, why should I cast aside my mourning dress, (I replied), mother
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 297
72
73
nothing cheers me, but if I should feel happy again, I will myself cast aside my mourning dress (I said) ########### &&&&&&&&
now, could I become happy, Mother, now, genacvale (? ?)
1.3 Reported dialogue as indexing communality Durkheim (1915), Van Gennep (1924), Radcliffe-Brown (1964), Feld (1982) and many other anthropologists argued that the function of ritual weeping by those left behind is to affirm the existence of social bonds between the living. In the case where the social tissue is threatened by the departure of a person, the social structure is knit together again by sharing emotion and common culture. The Georgian “xmit na»tirlebi” also simultaneously combine several purposes: They allow people to overtly express feelings of sadness on the occasion of death, they reaffirm strong expressions of sorrow as a woman’s activity — and they bind the community together by sharing grief and reaffirming its moral values. They not only claim social bonding but stage it as a drama of different voices in interaction with one another. A community of the living and the dead is animated in lamentation (to use Goffman’s term 1981). Let’s again have a look at some lines which show animated dialogue in sequence 1. Tamara’s speech is quoted by Ciala in line 25. In lines 27 and 28 Ciala directly quotes her own speech. Directly reported dialogue is an involvement strategy (Tannen 1989). To be exact, we should say “constructed dialogue” or “animated dialogue”; there is no claim and no evidence that real dialogues are being accurately reported. Constructing dialogues is an effective strategy for animating the imagined speakers in a specific way. The voicing used in lamentation performances can be understood in terms of Soviet cultural semiotics (Bakhtin 1981, Voloshinov 1978), which analyzed the functions of direct and indirect quotation in fiction. Voloshinov (1978: 153) distinguished two types of reported speech in fiction. The type which works with indirect quotation is said to be concerned with the stylistic homogenity of a text. The other type individualizes the language of characters and also the language of the teller. He refers to this as relativistic individualism and finds examples in the works of Fedor Dostoevski and Andrej Belyi. Characters are identified through their own quoted speech, through direct citation. Direct citation permits ellipses, omissions and a variety of other emotive tendencies
298 Helga Kotthoff
which would be lost in indirect quotation. He demonstrates this, among other examples, by the exclamation, “What an achievement”, which in indirect quotation one would have to transform into the clumsy phrase, “She said that it was a real achievement…”. Direct quotation evokes “manner of speech”, not only individually, but also typologically. It is ”speech about speech, utterance about utterance” (Voloshinov 1973: 115). Tannen (1989), Brünner (1991), Günthner (1997, 1999) and CouperKuhlen (1999) have shown that reported dialogue can contain verbal and intonational characterizations through which — on the basis of stereotypes — images of persons, social groups, etc. are transmitted. By the ‘polyphonic layering of voices’ (Bakhtin 1981) protagonists are implicitly stylized and evaluated. The speaker anchors the voices in a storyworld and animates them in a way that corresponds to her current intention. As a specificity, lamentations contain quotations of deceased persons as we saw in sequence 2. For example, in lines 60, 62, 63 Ciala animates her husband’s voice in a dialogue with herself. This way, lamenters dramatize again and again aspects of their life with the deceased. In a sense they dramatize their memory. Throughout the text the voices of the deceased are intertwined with those of the living. Thereby a community of the living with the dead is indexicalized. The existence of this community is one of the basic religious convictions of most Georgians. It is conversationally (re)created. The lamentation sequences discussed so far show how much community members mutually reinforce one another in lamentation dialogues. The death of a person is taken as an occasion to praise each other, to remind each other of good times spent together, to strengthen the common bonds. Ritual wailing imports collective reassurance of the group into the disrupted domestic sphere. This function, which is frequently conjured up by anthropologists like van Gennep and many others, is activated by concrete performance strategies. Repetition, reported dialogue and imagery are among the most important involvement strategies of lamentation.
2. Communicating emotions The language and communication of emotions have seldom been focused on in modern linguistics. They have been declared a psychological question about which we linguists have little to say. Only recently has the dogma that emotions are internal, irrational and spontaneous been exposed and questioned (e.g.,
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 299
Irvine 1982, Wierzbicka 1986, 1987, Lutz/Abu-Lughod 1990, Ochs/Schieffelin 1989, Günthner 1997, Niemeyer/Dirven 1997). As Irvine (1990) points out, two of linguistics’ most stellar figures, Jakobson (1960) and Sapir (1921, 1927), thought otherwise: Affect, or emotion, according to them, was a fundamental dimension of human life and a factor cross-cutting all levels of linguistic organization (1990: 126). Anthropological linguists, such as Irvine (1982, 1990), Ochs and Schieffelin (1989), Besnier (1990), Fiehler (1990), Caffi and Janney (1994) and the contributors to Niemeyer and Dirven (1997), have begun trying to find a new place for emotional discourse within linguistics. They consider themselves well-placed in a solid linguistic tradition. For Sapir, an important question was how much the communication of emotions is culturally constructed and culturally variable. He thought that the communication of personality and emotional states is culturally organized in a speech community. By studying the emotion work23 carried out in mourning rituals we obtain a perspective from which to view the individual (female-male), interaction, societal norms, and social structure. It allows us to inspect the relation among emotive experience, emotion management, feeling rules, actual behavior and ideology (Hochschild 1979: 551). Such an interactive perspective on emotion work and emotion performance in Georgian mourning rituals also provides a way to observe the reproduction of societal arrangements between the sexes. The death of a human being has always been an event which arouses strong feelings. But historically and cross-culturally these feelings have not been the same (Stubbe 1985). The internal states of the persons left behind are diverse, and so are the external, conventionalized ways of expressing grief (the latter are the central point of interest in anthropological linguistics). The study of oral genres and of registers is a convenient way to look at emotional performance and the way it is gendered. With Ochs and Schieffelin (1989: 7) we take affect to be a broader term than emotion, to include feelings, moods, dispositions, and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations. Sadness is an emotion which combines with other affects. Our particular concern as anthropological linguists is to study the conventional display of emotion and affect through semiotic means and by understanding its social meaning; we are not concerned with the ‘truth’ of feelings. We are very concerned with how cultural masculinity or femininity is made accountable by performing certain affects. A few authors (e.g., Feld 1982, Urban 1988) point out that while the vocal and verbal styles of ritual keening and lamenting are interculturally different, they display common semiotic features and share in common certain resem-
300 Helga Kotthoff
blances with what we call “wailing” and “crying”, and there are many icons and indices associated with bowing and being lowered into the ground: As a semiotic device, wailing is linked to affect, just as at the core one assumes ‘crying’ as a formal device is linked to ‘sadness’ (Urban 1988: 386).
As well in Georgia, cries of grief and appeals to the deceased occur. They are spoken or sung in lines (pulse units), using crying sounds, voice changes, drawn-out sighs, slowly falling intonation contours with integrated peaks, bowed bodily postures and an expressive lexicon. In comparison to the examples discussed in the literature (e.g., by Urban on Amerindian Brazilian ritual wailing 1991: 148 ff) Georgian laments are much richer in their poeticity. They contrast in detail a desolate present with an idyllic past, praise the deceased person and those present, giving detailed descriptions of pain and also of scenes from the shared former life, show a complex management of address and intertextuality by reporting numerous dialogues in which either the deceased, other deceased friends and relatives or those present are involved. They implore the deceased to deliver several messages from them to the dead persons whom she/he will soon meet. Lamenting women involve themselves in a moving and line-structured dialogue about life on earth and in the hereafter. Ritual wailing fulfills many functions simultaneously. First of all, it helps to communalize and structure feelings evoked by the death of a person. Death, with its finality and inexplicability, is one of the strongest emotional experiences of mankind (Ariès 1988), one which is, however, differently externalized and worked out in each culture. Societies create “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979, 1983) as the aspect of ideology that deals with emotion. If a close person dies, “feeling rules” demand sadness; there are cultural appropriateness standards for this. In Georgia (as well as in many other cultures) sadness is practiced in a symbolically stronger way by women than by men. It is women who stay with the sick during their transition from life to death. It is obligatory that a woman sit at the bedside of a dying person. Society uses this “liminal” phase (van Gennep 1960, Turner 1969: 94–130) to reproduce its gender order. In Georgia being-a-woman is not only associated with the liminal phase of giving life but also with accompanying it to the end. Rituals of transition (and other rituals), however, fulfill no instrumental functions, but have many-layered social functions. These interconnected functions likewise combine with affects. We see these affects as social indexicals. Along with Hochschild (1979, 1983), Urban (1988, 1991) and many other anthropologists and linguists (e.g., Fiehler 1990:96), we assume that the ritualization of affect touches many levels simultaneously.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 301
Also Heller (1980) criticizes naturalistic emotion- and need theories which view human emotional life in terms of a few organically-anchored, substantively fixed strivings. In agreement with ethology, she argues that mankind has only residual traces of an organically anchored instinct system. Human drive- and emotion potentials are, to the contrary, formable: They have embodied very different forms of action historically. In human beings, emotions, needs and embodied symbols are transmitted together in comprehensible interpretive patterns. As well grief is not simply a biophysical reaction, but rather transmitted through the social-psychological orientational patterns of the culture and includes specific linkages which we will call, following Urban, “meta-affects”. Urban described one (and only this one) meta-affect for wailing in Amerindian Brazil as follows: That is to say, one emotion (sadness) points to or ‘comments upon’ another emotion (the desire for social acceptance). Seen in the context of social action, ritual wailing involves the signaling by one actor of a feeling of grief. But the signal is emitted in a way that other actors consider appropriate. Hence the sadness itself is rendered socially intelligible, and it is through this intelligible sadness that the basic intelligibility and acceptability of the social actor emerges. Thus, an actor’s own affect must be controlled as a means of signaling who one is. In short, affect becomes meta-affect. (1988: 386)
I assume a higher degree of complexity and greater diversity of meta-affects in the case of ritual mourning. I conceptualize such dispositions as meta-affects, which in the case of ritual coming to terms with a death are also of affective significance for the community. With the term “meta-affect” I emphasize the affective dimension of the aspects of gender, religion, regional identity, morality, social hierarchy, and communality, which are important in the ritual process. I would like here to focus on the affective perspective; obviously each of the named phenomenal domains could also be viewed from a different perspective, e.g., purely text analytically or functionally. Functions suggest an instrumental perspective. Affects suggest the perspective of embodied performance. Meta-affects have indexical values which are all linked. The indexical associations we already discussed influence the affect management and performance in the complex of mourning. One affect comments on another: they are all interconnected. Gender politics, e.g., takes on the Gestalt of a specific affect management and performance. It has an influence on the production of empathy, religion, social hierarchy, community and regional identity, and conversely as well.
302 Helga Kotthoff
White (1990) points to the fact that there are prototype schemata for emotive discourse which give an indication of the types of inferential paths that make emotional speech a moral idiom. Specific emotions, such as grief, designate interactive scenarios with known evaluative and behavioral implications. The formalized emotional discourse of lamentation promotes social harmony with all its implications of recreating tradition.
3. The Dialectic of distance and involvement Georgian lamentations meet a high standard of oral poetry, combining verbal art and social purposes. To meet such a high standard of poetic performance demands emotion work. We would be mistaken in regarding lamentation as a form of letting oneself go. There is a dialectic between a certain degree of distancing that is necessary to perform the ritual and the involvement it creates for the audience present. Emotion work in Georgian ways of managing grief starts with ritualization. Beginning at the first moment after recognizing the death of a person, feelings begin to be formed in accord with cultural conventions. According to Leach (1968, 1976) and many other anthropologists, a form of behavior is considered ritual if it is stereotypical and, within the framework of cultural conventions, in itself powerful, however ineffective in a rational, technical sense.24 In rituals a second symbolic layer suceeds denotative meanings. The way a ritual is performed carries the most significant social and emotional meaning. A ritual becomes empty if the linkage to the corresponding emotions is lost, as was already established by Durkheim (1915/1965). Before we look again at a lamention sequence, we take into consideration what lamenters tell us about their art. In 1998, a couple of women aged from 50 to 70 in Muxrani 1998 told us that they performed xmit na»tirlebi when their hearts burned very much (guli 8alian dameco). One of the women, ženia, put it like this: My nephew, he was 12 years old when he died. To put it simply, I cried and cried. Nobody could make me silent. Nobody, no, everybody wanted to lament, but I let no one. I wanted to lament alone. And I wanted all the time to keep standing on my feet. All the time crying and lamenting and shedding tears. All the time my tears were running. People tried to stop me, but I couldn’t.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 303
Lamentation is presented as a physical need. She cannot but lament. All the wailers we talked with told us that it must “come from heart”. They strongly entertained the ideology of the naturalness of behaviour thereby implicitly confirming Durkheim’s thesis. Performance aspects are also taken into consideration. Standing on one’s feet while lamenting is more highly estimated than sitting or even lying. She refers to physical reactions (tears were running) but also to her efforts. 3.1 Poetic strategies Although (and because) the lamenter’s “heart burns” she struggles with wording. Georgian dirges are not only rituals, they also have a strong artistic dimension, which consists in specific “sound and sense strategies”. In her book Talking Voices Deborah Tannen writes that conversational involvement is created by the simultaneous forces of music (sound and rhythm), on the one hand, and of mutual participation in sensemaking, on the other (1989: 135). Poeticity is an important sound strategy. It is by no means only found in the canonical, written text, but rather everywhere where a conspicuous artistic/stylistic orientation becomes evident. Syntactical, semantic and intonational parallelisms, recurrences of formulae, assonances, specific rhythms and melodies, line structures and expressive metaphors above all characterize the performance of dirges as poetic in Georgia. Here a concept of poetry is fundamental which goes back to Roman Jakobson (1960). The latter presented in various articles his basic thesis that poeticity consists in a focus on wording and a principle of equivalence of formal structures. The recognition of the same evokes a sense of aesthetic pleasure. Poeticity varies in intensity. It is quite easy to identify a line structure in the dirges because of the special exclamation intonation. With Hymes (1981), I view speaking in lines as characteristic of a poetic structure. It points to the prosodic similarity of the lines, to a patterned intonational contour. Lamentations demand this specific style of presentation, which is found in no other genre. Stylization is in this case a form of body politics. As a lamenter a woman enters into the suffering and at the same time acts it out for the community in a beautiful style. The special style of the lamentation consists in clusters of icons, which are firmly associated with grief in the discourse history: In fact, the relationships among styles within the broader configuration of culture are grounded in similarity as well as difference. Ritual wailing and
304 Helga Kotthoff
origin myth telling are constructed from features that occur elsewhere, features that have indexical values in those other styles. Ritual wailing and origin myth telling, so to speak, import those features in order simultaneously to sneak in their associated values. In this way, they become, in effect, clusters of icons through which one looks out at the larger history of discourse and draws the indexically relevant meanings into the present (Urban 1991: 120).
Not only in dirges, but in the everyday codes, drawn-out syllables, faltering voices, singsong lines with downward tonal slopes, repeated callings, formulae and crying breaks are associated with intense grief. This potential is exploited in dirges. The downward melody stylizes grief and mourning, on the one hand, and secures, on the other, a line structure; repetition facilitates text creation and garantees a certain automatism for both the performer and her public. The melody makes the text easier to memorize. Every Georgian region has its own lament melody, although there are strong similarities among them. People have told me that listening to the melody of their own region awakens much stronger feelings of sadness than listening to an unfamiliar wailing melody.25 There are also other differences in singing style. Our data from Megrelian mourning chants, for example, show an extensive use of a creaky voice which the other laments do not show. I will not go into every detail of the poetic structure of the text, but I would like to point to the many alliterations and sound parallelisms, as, e.g., the /ara/group (ve˙rara, a˙rar ici, ra˙ra, a˙rar icit and ar vici) in 2, 3, 7, the anadiplose in 12 und 13 (stoveb), and in 15–16, 52–53, 55–56, 56–57, 67–68 etc., the epiphora, e.g., with genacvale in 1, 6, 7 etc., with (v)iqavi(t) in 45, 47, 50, and the line endings with deda/mother in 22, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, etc. It is evident that the wording has a value in itself. There are also many double- and triple structures, as, e.g., in lines 5, 16, 25 or in 31, 36, 43, 44, 50, 55, 56, etc. Reduplications and three-part structures dramatize what is being said and give it a rhythmic effect. The orientation of the performer to the community is preserved especially through the aesthetics of the text. No mourner can simply draw back within herself. Her social attention always remains dominant through the demands of the form. The fact that people later discuss the performances in other contexts can be seen as a further device for its artistic dimension. When a death is spoken about, Georgian people necessarily also talk about the excellence of the oral lament performances presented on that occasion. Excellence is judged by the perfect fulfillment of the generic norms, and originality is judged by the creativity used
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 305
within the given presentation.26 Both should be optimally matched. Relatives thank the performers of the best and saddest laments. 3.2 Literary strategies: Detailing and imagery Lamentations are not only poetical, but also literary. The ethnolinguist Bright (1982) holds that the term “literature” should be reserved for texts which are regarded as possessing value in a society, which are preserved, repeated and handed down in similar forms. Not only stories from the life of the deceased, but also conceptions of the afterworld are continually celebrated in a consistent form in Georgia mourning rituals. A major form of creating conversational involvement in sensemaking is organized by imagery: the power of images to communicate meanings and emotions resides in their ability to evoke scenes, as we will see in an excerpt from a lament. Also details, like reported dialogues, create vivid pictures, and understanding is derived from scenes in which people are placed in relation to each other. Individual imagination thereby becomes group imagination. Thus, a collective memory of the time spent together is not only organized but celebrated. The lamenting women play a big role in creating and celebrating social memory. The particularity and familiarity of details such as those communicated in the dialogue with Eliko (starting in line 80) is very moving. We will look at conversational detailing and imagery as strategies of giving the text a literary quality. The lamenting women describe the life of the deceased in vivid images. Details and imagery play an essential role in making the xmit na»tirlebi easy to memorize. Ciala praises her mother Mariam for doing everything for her children. In line 77 she uses a conventional, but powerful metaphor to communicate her mother’s engagement for her children. The commentary in line 78 does not belong to the wailing. In line 80 the dialogue with Eliko starts which we will examine closely. In line 80 Ciala suddenly addresses Eliko, who is in the audience. She opens up a special dialogue with her. She first speaks about her in the third person and then addresses her directly. Ciala talks about her life with Eliko, about their school days. Now the speech is presumably directed at the entire group. She tells that they shared a room (82). Eliko says something which could not be made out. Ciala tells that Eliko came from a rich family, hers was poor (84, 86). The contrast is also iconized on the level of wording: She uses three adjectives to characterize Eliko’s situation and only two (one adjective and one inflected
306 Helga Kotthoff
Sequence 3 76 C:
' % )
she wanted us to lack nothing, with her limited strength 77
)
78 ?:
she would have cut off her own flesh for us so that we would not go hungry [
79 ?: 80 C:
one can certainly get through here, there is enough space, you can get through [(? ?)
! &
Eliko also knows that well, isn't that so, Eliko? 81
82
we learned together, lived together, me and Eliko [
83 E: 84 C:
we lived in one room [(? [ ) )
85 ?: 86 C:
Eliko came from a well-to-do family, pampered, from a rich family [(? ) %
87 E:
I came from a poor family, it was hard for us [
88 C:
oh, that. [
89 E:
what is there to hide here, Eliko, [
90 C:
let me take on the burden of your suffering [
her mother and my mother always came to visit us together 91
! "
what laughter. Eliko, those were times, those were times when they sent us out ((to get this and that)) 92
#$"# "
once they sent us out to get beer, me and Eliko
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 307
93
94 E:
95 C:
96
97 E: 98 C:
99
100 ?:
maSin sad vcxovrobdiT, eliko, saburTaloze? maUin sad vcxovrobdit, eliQo, saburtaloze? where did we live then, Eliko, in Saburtalo? zemelze, zemelze zemelze, zemelze on Semmel Street, on Semmel Street ramdeni gviTxres? bevri gviTxres moitaneTo, da ramdeni gvitxres? bevri gvitxres, moitaneto, da how much did they tell us? we should bring back a lot of ((beer)), and vaime, deda, Senc xom giyvarda sicili, unda gavacino vaime, deda, Uenc xom giYvarda sicili, unda gavacino Oh, God, mother, you always liked to laugh, I must people laugh [(? ra muclis xeTqva gmarTebT meTqi, me uTxari, amdeni rom dalioT, amis deda, ra muclis xetkva gmagtebt metki, me utxari, amdeni rom daliot, HEHE amis deda, you deserved that your bellies will burst, I said, if you drink so much beer, [sicili da kiskisi edgaT iseTi, neta im dros, deda! davrbodiT sicili da QisQisi edgat iseti, neRa im dros, deda: davrbodit she laughed and giggled so, those were times, mother, we walked along [HE HE HE (? ?)
verb) to characterize hers. In line 89 Eliko utters one of the central formulae in dirges. We do not only take semantics into account (the wish to suffer for the other person) but also the role the utterance plays in context: Here it is important that Eliko gets actively involved in lamenting. In line 90 Ciala points out that Eliko’s mother and her own came together to visit them. After stating differences, she now focuses their togetherness. This again contains the implicit message: Eliko’s mother didn’t bother about differences in wealth. Money didn’t play an important role. Eliko’s short objection in line 87 can be understood in the sense that it is not worth mentioning their not paying attention to the wealth difference. In line 91 Ciala evokes the shared joy of the past. The detailing leads up to telling her mother (and the audience) that they were once sent out for beer (92) and to asking about the street where they lived; Eliko answers that question (Semmel street, 94). The question in line 93 goes along with a shift in address. Again and again in the recollections images of her mother and their social life are evoked. In line 98 Ciala cites her own words. Then she informs the audience about her mother’s laughing and giggling. In the middle of the line she shifts address again, reminding her mother of the
308 Helga Kotthoff
wonderful times they had together. Here, laughter occurs in the middle of a lamentation. For a moment the past good times win over the sad present moment. Especially the details give the narrative a touch of intimacy that everybody present is allowed to share. Going into details enables Ciala, Eliko and the audience to refer to their memories and construct images of scenes: people in relation to one another and engaged in recognizable activities. Detailing evidently belongs to the strategies of creating involvement. It is implicitly evaluative. Ciala states explicitly that Eliko’s family made no distinctions based on wealth. But she also implicitly shows the way Eliko’s family ignored differences which are considered important by many people, not only in Georgia. In lamentation we find both implicit and explicit evaluations of persons, activities and situations. Tannen (1989) suggests that images are more convincing and easier to memorize than abstract propositions. Internal evaluation by images, details and reported dialogues is more persuasive than external evaluation. The dialogue with Eliko is especially rich in details: In line 101 Eliko adds concrete details to the remembering. Ciala continues the evoked image of walking in the streets of Tbilisi. Now there is a lot of turn taking. In line 105 Ciala addresses her mother again. Tamara joins in the joy of memorizing. Lines 107 to 110 in particular show how naturally the deceased aunt Maro is integrated into the dialogue just by talking to her. Religious bonds to the departed are not merely asserted in Georgian dirges, but rather created in speech. The story of what they experienced together with Eliko and her mother continues as a dialogue in which many concrete scenes are evoked. In line 117 the evocation of memories shifts again to cries of grief addressed to her mother. Ciala thanks her mother, and Eliko as well, for everything they have done for her. The relational work which mourners perform is evident here. Ciala repeats the memory of wearing Eliko’s dress and coat as a question to her mother. Eliko’s crying shows her being moved by the memories she contributed to herself. From line 123 onwards Ciala sums up what she already made clear: Her mother did everything for her. Tamara adds under which difficult conditions Mariams activities took place. As can be seen, laments play an important role for women’s social life in Georgia. They act out their attachment to the deceased and to those living, create moving dramas to make everybody share similar feelings, thereby shaping morals and memory.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 309
Sequence 4 101 E:
[ B B G G
102 C:
we went to Lenin Square on foot wearing house slippers [ N
103 ?: 104 E:
all the way along Rustaveli we held hands, and you were also happy, [(? [
105 C:
106 T: 107 E: 108 C: 109 E: 110 T: 111 C:
112 ?: 113 E: 114 ?:
115 116 C: 117
P
# [
(? we lived together all our lives, mother
?)
!
how wonderful youth is, how many memories cleave to it. [ BO upro sQ it was better then, Aunt Maro, you were young then N P
you did not feel the difficulties,
and you were children D # # "came, if they had something, brought it to us
they left us money for the rent " O ! Q
they wrote , do this and that in the evening, go out and get aubergines. " !
we forgot that once, but ran out of the house and they were forced to do everything
when we came back everything was already prepared for us #
everything was already prepared for us H::::: O Q
Mother, how many times I wore Eliko's dress, mother
310 Helga Kotthoff
118 E:
[ vaimeh vaimeh
119 C:
alas alas [ ramdenSer eliQos WalRoti mivlia, deda,
120 E: 121 C:
how many times I wore Eliko's coat, mother, [%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% [
genacvale, de:::da, me mainc madlobeli viYavi Ueni, Uen meRi ar UegeOlo,
122 E: 123 C:
dear mother, still I was grateful to you, you could not have done more for us. [%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Uen sulac ar gemdurebi, deda, imiRom rom, rac UegeOlo,
124
I am not mad at you, mother, because you did everything for us [ Iven arapers ar gvaQlebdi
that you could, we lacked nothing
Concluding remarks In contrast to Greece, Russia or Sicily, in rural Georgia laments still enjoy a high reputation. Like Greek lamentations (Alexiou 1974, Caraveli 1980, 1986, Seremetakis 1991), Georgian dirges are still seen as unofficial forms of religious expression. For one thing, during Communist rule the practice of religion was not in favor in the USSR and, for another, the currently very popular Georgian Orthodox Church assigns women only background positions and functions. In the unofficial folk religion, however, women have a very significant status as “artists of pain” and mediators between the living and the dead. The genre is, however, tied to a high form of privacy. Women’s verbal art is revealed in a private realm and emerges for a very sad reason. The most beautiful and creative formulations are lodged in the memory of the people as momentarily or as permanently as the occurrence of death itself. The genre of lamentation shows the connection of emotion, religion, gender and culture. The above-mentioned affects and functions are all linked. Analyzing the culturally defined and socially situated activity of lamentation we may discover how the attribution of gendered emotion creates cultural knowledge about the desirability or undesirability of activities. “Doing Gender” (ethnomethodologically speaking) in the case of mourning rituals is multidimensional.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals
The gravity of the loss to the community is worked out in laments. The social hierarchy of a village is thereby reproduced in a lament’s performance. However, as we saw, social hierarchy has not only to do with authority and power, but also with social popularity. Lamentation does not just reproduce the socioeconomical order of a community. To the contrary, it reflects much more the social influence of the deceased person. In a sense it can be seen as a counter discourse. For example, in praising qualities of a dead husband women communicate what they see as a good husband’s acting. In lauding a mother’s deeds they make them visible for everybody. The lamenters’ moral standards are mostly in line with common Georgian value orders. Insofar the dirges are far from being revolutionary. They just allow forms of renegotiating or correcting these values. For example, male alcoholism is practically quite accepted in everyday life. By praising men who did not drink wailers can take their chance to implicitly criticize certain behaviors. I have presented an approach which combines text analysis and ethnography of communication. Understanding a culture depends on using all the data which the natives dispose of. I would like to finish my article by citing the words of Dell Hymes (1981) about native American ethnopoetics, which I consider also true for my kind of work (especially in Germany, where linguistic anthropology is not an established academic field): There is linguistics in this [book], and that will put some people off. ‘Too technical’, they will say. Perhaps such people would be amused to know that many linguists will not regard the work as linguistics. ‘Not theoretical’, they will say, meaning not part of a certain school of grammar. And many folklorists and anthropologists are likely to say, ‘too linguistic’ and ‘too literary’ both, whereas professors of literature are likely to say, ‘anthropological’ or ‘folklore’, not ‘literature’ at all. But there is no help for it. As with Beowulf and The tale of Genji, the material requires some understanding of the way of life. Within that way of life, it has in part a role that in English can only be called that of ‘literature’. Within that way of life, and now, I hope, within others, it offers some of the rewards and joys of literature. And if linguistics is the study of language, not grammar alone, then the study of these materials adds to what is known about language. (1981: 5)
311
312
Helga Kotthoff
Transcription conventions % (-) (- -) (0.5) (?was that so?) (? ?) …[…… …[…… = H ’H ? . , : (…) blabla ((sits down))
crying one hyphen indicates a short pause two hyphens indicate a longer pause (less than half a second) pause of half a second; long pauses are counted in half seconds indicates uncertain transcription points to an incomprehensible utterance shows overlap; two simultaneous voices latching of an utterance by a speaker; no interruption audible exhalation audible inhalation high rising intonation falling intonation ongoing (slightly rising) intonation (“more to come”) indicates that preceding sound is elongated crying fat print means louder and higher non-verbal actions or comments
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals
Appendix Lamentation for Grandmother Mariam (Maro), Muxrani (Kartli) 199427 Aunt Tamari, relatives and neighbors of the deceased enter bringing flowers.
1 Tamari: rogor gamzadebulxar, [maro deida, genacvale rogor gamzadebulxar, maro deida, genacvale how beautifully you have prepared yourself, Aunt Maro, genacvale 2 Ciala: [veRara, Tamara deida, aRar ici raRa qna, qalo, veTara, tamara deida, aTar ici raTa kna, kalo, no, Aunt Tamari, you don't know what you are doing, woman, 3 [amdeni pativiscema, aRar vici ra vqnaT, Tamara deida, uime, amdeni WaRiviscema, aTar vici ra vknat, tamara deida, uime, so much deference, I don't know what we could do, Aunt Tamara, oh my, 4 T: [(? 5 C: [yovel dRe, yovel saRamos, yovel dilas Yovel dTe, Yovel saTamos, Yovel dilas everyday, every evening, every morning 6 T: [mainc gamzadebulxar, genacvale, mainc gamzadebulxar, genacvale, but you have prepared yourself , genacvale, 7 C: [ar vici ra gasiamovno, genacvale, ar vici ra gasiamovno, genacvale I do not know what pleasure I could give you, genacvale, 8 T: [didi gvaris xalxi xarT didi gvaris xalxi xart you come from a large clan 9 iq SemogxvdebaT Cveni biZaSvilebi, sul kargebi gvyavs iqa. ik Uemogxvdebat Iveni biOaUvilebi, sul Qargebi gvYavs ika. there you will meet our cousins, all the good are there. 10 genacvale, Cemi dedac Semogxvdeba, ici, ra keTili, qali iyo genacvale, Iemi dedac Uemogxvdeba, ici ra Qetili kali iYo genacvale, you will also meet my mother there, you know how good natured she was 11 'H:: es vavilebi yvelas gaunawile, agremc Semogevle, Sena 'H:: es Yvavilebi Yvelas gaunaPile, agremc Uemogevle, Uena share these flowers with everyone there, I implore you, you 12 bareRam guli mtkiva, rom am kai Svilebsa stoveb bareTam guli mRQiva, rom am Qai Uvilebsa sRoveb but my heart aches that you are leaving your dear children 13 stoveb da midixar sRoveb da midixar you are leaving them and going away from them
313
314 Helga Kotthoff
14
15 C:
16 T:
17
18
19
20 C:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30 ?: 31 C:
amaTi cqera Rirs erT rameda, amati ckera Tirs ert rameda, it means so much to look at them, [Sen gaixare, Sen, Uen gaixare, Uen, you should have joy, you, [Sen ki Tvalic dagrCa da gulic dagrCa Sen Svilebzeda%%% Uen Qi tvalic dagrIa da gulic dagrIa Uen Uvilebzeda%%% you, however, have left not only your eyes, but also your heart with your children 'H:: marus, Seni Wirime, ar vici kargi, bevri tirili 'H:: marus, Ueni Airime, ar vici Qargi, bevri Ririli Marus, let me bear your suffering, I cannot cry well and much ra wyalSi Cavvarde ra PYalUi Iavvarde into what water should I throw myself [minda bevri rame giTxra minda bevri rame gitxra I would like to say so many things to you [gaixare, Tamara deida Sen Svilebsa da SviliSvilebSi gaixare, Ramara deida Uen Uvilebsa da UviliUvilebUi may you be happy, Aunt Tamara, about your children and grandchildren gagaxaros RmeTma gagaxaros Tmertma God give you joy deda, ramden pativsa gcems Seni biZaSvili, deda deda, ramden WaRivsa gcems Ueni biOaUvili, deda Mother, how many favors your cousin has been doing for you, mother dRe da Rame aq aris Tamara, dTe da Tame ak aris tamara, Tamara is here day and night, deda avadac iyavi, rom Rameca mTxovda es daRlil daqanculi qali deda avadac iYavi, rom Tameca mtxovda es daTlil dakanculi kali during mother’s illness this exhausted woman asked me if she could also SenTan davrCebi, Svilo, Sen gverdiT davrCebio Uentan davrIebi, Uvilo, Uen gverdit davrIebio stay with you at night, child, I would stay with you (she said) da me ar vuSvebdi da me ar vuUvebdi but I did not let her Tamara deida, daRlili xar, qalo, wadi saxlSi, tamara deida, daTlili xar, kalo, Padi saxlUi, Aunt Tamara, you are tired, woman, go home, damanebe qalo Tavi, ra ginda CemTan erTad meTqi deda damanebe kalo tavi, ra ginda Iemtan ertad metki deda leave me, woman, you do not need to stay (I said ) mother [riT gadavuxado, deda, es pativiscema, qalo rit gadavuxado, deda, es Wativiscema, kalo how can I, mother, pay back this honor, woman [(? Tqvens gvars venacvale, deda, CugaSvilebis %,gvars venacvale, deda, tkvens gvars venacvale, deda, IuguaUvilebis %gvars venacvale, deda, I like your clan, mother, the Tshuguashvilis clan, mother,
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals
32
33 ?: 34 C:
35
36
37
38 T:
39
kai gvaris qali xar, qalo, nu gamowydebi mag gvarSi, deda::::::, Qai gvaris kali xar, kalo, nu gamoPYdebi mag gvarUi, deda::::, your clan is good, woman, you must not leave this clan, mother, (? aRaravin ar darCa CuguaanTSi, rom ar movida da ar mogikiTxa, deda aTaravin ar darIa IuguaantUi, rom ar movida da ar mogikitxa, deda there is no one in Tshuguaanis who would not come and express sympathy, mother yvelam cremlebi dagayara, deda Yvelam cremlebi dagaYara, deda everyone showered you with tears, mother kargi iyavi, Wkviani qali iyavi, yvelas uyvardi, deda, Qargi iYavi, Akviani kali iYavi, Yvelas uYvardi, deda, you were a good, wise woman, everyone liked you, mother [genacvale, deda, mag tkbil janSi, deda genacvale, deda mag RQbil SanUi, deda genacvale mother, I like your nice character, mother [Sen genacvale, biWo, rad dagvtove Uen genacvale, biAo, rad dagvRove you, you our dearest, why did you leave us (? ?)
((Near the head of the deceased is a small table; on it are arranged a candle, a cup of wheat and the photos of previously deceased relatives and neighbors, among them as well a photo of Tengiz, the choirmaster of Muxrani, who sang very well, played musical instruments, and died at age 50. It is customary that people also mourn these photos; people also used to mourn the deceased's garments, but now only photos are wept over. Aunt Tamari was also related to Tengiz; all the Tshuguashvilis were proud of Tengiz and liked him very much. Now Ciala turns to his photo and mourns for him. She thereby reminds the relatives of him and attempts to tell them thereby that the others have also experienced the same or a still worse misfortune.)) 40 C:
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vaime, [Tengiz, Tengiz, Sen mogikvdes deidaSvili, Tengiz vaime, tengiz, tengiz, Uen mogikvdes deidaUvilli, tengiz oh my, Tengiz, Tengiz, your cousin ought to die, Tengiz [(? ra kargi xar, biWo, ra Qargi xar, biAo, how good you are, boy Tengiz, Cven rada vadT cocxlebi Sens mere tengiz genacvale tengiz, Iven rada vart cocxlebi Uens mere tengiz genacvale Tengiz, why are we still living after your death Tengiz genacvale rada varaT cocxlebi, Tengiz, ratom ar davixoceniT Sens mere rada vart cocxlebi, tengiz, raRom ar davixocenit Uens mere why we are still alive, why didn't we also die when you died [Tengiz, genacvale, Cven xom Tanatolebi viyaviT, tengiz, genacvale, Iven xom tanaRolebi viYavit, Tengiz, genacvale, we were the very same age, [(? pirvel klasSi erTad viyaviT, gajibrebuli viyaviT, romeli vajobebdiT Wirvel QlasUi ertad viYavit, gaSibrebuli viYavit, romeli vaSobebdit we went to first class together and emulated each other (in good learning)
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swavlaSi, Tengiz, sPavlaUi, tengiz, tried to learn better than the others, Tengiz, genacvale, Tengiz, oqro iyavi genacvale, tengiz, okro iYavi my dear, good soul, Tengiz, you were gold [Wkviani, kargi, gamgebiani iyavi, yvelaferSi kargi iyavi Aqviani, Qargi, gamgebiani iYavi, YvelaperUi Qargi iYavi you were wise, good, understanding, you were good at everything [gamgebianic iyo da Segnebulic da yvelaferi, gamgebianic iYo da Uegnebulic da Yvelaperi, he was understanding and tactful and everything, Tengiz, Seni Wirime, ratom cocxali ara xar exla, rato tengiz, Ueni Airime, raRom cocxali ara xar exla, raRo Tengiz, let me bear your suffering, why are you not alive now, why [rato cocxali ara xar da ar guguneb, Tengiz, Seni Wirime raRo cocxali ara xar da ar guguneb, tengiz, Ueni Airime why are you not alive so that you could roar, Tengiz, let me bear your suffering [(? Tengiz, genacvale, Senma sikvdilma, vanuas sikvdilma, lenas sikvdilma tengiz, genacvale, Uenma siQvdilma, vanuas siQvdilma, lenas siQvdilma Tengiz, genacvale, your death, Vanua's death, Lena's death, suyvelas sikvilma, Cemi qmris sikvdilma ar imoqmeda dedaCemis gulze? suYvelas siQvdilma, Iemi kmris ciQvdilma ar imokmeda dedaIemis gulze? all your deaths, has the death of my husband left no traces in my mother's heart? ar imoqmeda? ar imokmeda? has not affected her? naklebad pativsa gcemda, deda, Cemi qmari? naQlebad WaRivsa gcemda, deda, Iemi kmari? did my husband respect you less, mother, my husband? rogor uyvarda, rogor uyvarda Cems qmars rogor uYvarda, rogor uYvarda Iems kmars how much, how much my husband liked you cial, pativi eci dedas, pativi eci cial, WaRivi eci dedas, WaRivi eci Ciala, do ’something good for mother, do 'something good for her vetyodi, kaco, raRa pativi vce? vetYodi, Qaco, raTa WaRivi vce? then I said to him, man, what could I still do for her? pativi eci, ar momasvenebda, rom Camovidoda, erTi wuTi mosvenebas ar momcemda WaRivi eci, ar momasvenebda, rom Iamovidoda, erti Puti mosvenebas ar momcemda do something good for her, he did not give me a moment's rest when mother visited us [pativi eci, genacvale WaRivi eci, genacvale do something good for her, genacvale [(?
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals
65 C:
) &&& )
if he were alive now, mother, if he were alive now, 66
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he would have done everything for you, mommy, would he have had someone else do that, mother? 67
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you pitied me, mother, because I was unhappy, didn't you 68
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because I was unhappy, I had no one to care for me, mother 69
$ $ $ $$$$$$
what a husband I have lost, mother, for tvelve years I have worn mourning dress 70
$ $ $
mother, I should put aside my mourning dress, so they said to me 71
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nothing can bring cheer to my heart, why should I cast aside my mourning dress, (I replied), mother 72
nothing cheers me, but if I should feel happy again, I will myself cast aside my mourning dress (I said) 73
$$$$$$$$
now, could I become happy, Mother, now, genacvale (? ?) 74
! % $$$$
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Mother, I should take on the burden of your suffering, mother, mother, mother, we have no father, she was mother, she was father to us
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she wanted us to lack nothing, with her limited strength 77
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she would have cut off her own flesh for us so that we would not go hungry
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Helga Kotthoff
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[aris gasesvleli, gasasvleli aris, didi adgilia, gaivlis
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one can certainly get through here, there is enough space, you can get through [(? ?) Torem elikom kargad icis, ho eliko? ! *
Eliko also knows that well, isn't that so, Eliko? 81
erTad vswavlobdiT, erTad vcxovrobdiT me da eliko
82
we learned together, lived together, me and Eliko [erT oTaxSi vcxovrobdiT
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we lived in one room [(? [eliko SeZlebuli ojaxidan iyo, ganebivrebuli, mdidari ojaxidan ' '
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Eliko came from a well-to-do family, pampered, from a rich family [(? me sawyali ojaxidan viyavi, gviWirda ' %
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I came from a poor family, it was hard for us [o, kargi erTi.
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oh, that. [ra aris dasamali, eliko,
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what is there to hide here, Eliko, [Sen genacvale
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let me take on the burden of your suffering [magis deda da dedaCemi erTad Camodiodnen xolme da erTad gvnaxulobdnen
her mother and my mother always came to visit us together 91
ra sicil kiskisi!. eliko, neta im dros, neta im dros, ro gagvgzavnidnen
what laughter. Eliko, those were times, those were times when they sent us out ((to get this and that)) 92
erTxel "pivaze" gagvgzavnes me da eliko,
once they sent us out to get beer, me and Eliko 93
maSin sad vcxovrobdiT, eliko, saburTaloze? *
where did we live then, Eliko, in Saburtalo? 94 E:
zemelze, zemelze n
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Semmel Street, on Semmel Street
ramdeni gviTxres? bevri gviTxres moitaneTo, da *
how much did they tell us? we should bring back a lot of ((beer)), and
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 319
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vaime, deda, Senc xom giyvarda sicili, unda gavacino vaime, deda, Uenc xom giYvarda sicili, unda gavacino Oh, God, mother, you always liked to laugh, I must make people laugh [(? ra muclis xeTqva gmarTebT meTqi, me uTxari, amdeni rom dalioT, HEHE amis deda, ra muclis xetkva gmagtebt metki, me utxari, amdeni rom daliot, HEHE amis deda, you deserved that your bellies will burst, I said, if you drink so much beer, [sicili da kiskisi edgaT iseTi, neta im dros, deda! davrbodiT sicili da QisQisi edgat iseti, neRa im dros, deda: davrbodit she laughed and giggled so, those were times, mother, we walked along [HE HE HE (? ?) [leninis moedanze fexiT avediT, flostebiTa leninis moedanze pexit avedit, plosRebita we went to Lenin Square on foot wearing house slippers [mTeli rusTaveli xelSi gveWira, Tqvenc gixarodaT mteli rustaveli xelUi gveAira, tkvenc gixarodat all the way along Rustaveli we held hands, and you were also happy, [(? [icinodiT, kiskisobdiT icinodit, QisQisobdit laughed, giggled [mTelicxovreba erTad gavatareT, deda mteli cxovreba ertad gavaRaret, deda (? ?) we lived together all our lives, mother [ra kargia axalgazrdoba. ramden rames gaixsenebs kaci ra Qargia axalgazrdoba. ramden rames gaixsenebs Qaci how wonderful youth is, how many memories cleave to it. [maSin ufri sjobda, maro deida, axalgazrda iyaviT maUin upro sSobda, maro deida, axalgazrda iYavit it was better then, Aunt Maro, you were young then [(? gaWirvebas vera grZnobdiT, vera gaAirvebas vera grOnobdit, vera you did not feel the difficulties, Tqvenc bavSvebi iyaviT tkbenc bavUvebi iYavit and you were children Camovidodnen, rame hqonda Camogvitandnen Iamovidodnen, rame hkonda IamogviRandnen they came, if they had something, brought it to us saxlis qiras dagvitovebdnen saxlis kiras dagviRovebdnen they left us money for the rent [(? dagviweravdnen, es gaakeTeT saRamoze, badrijani moitaneT. dagviPeravdnen, es gaaQetet saTamoze, badriSani moitanet. they wrote , do this and that in the evening, go out and get aubergines.
320 Helga Kotthoff
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(? dagvaviwydeboda xolme, Cven gavcvivdebodiT, isev eseni gaakeTebdnen dagvaviPYdeboda xolme, Iven gavcvivdebodit, isev eseni gaaQetebdnen we forgot that once, but ran out of the house and they were forced to do everything da eseni dagvaxvedrebdnen xolme da eseni dagvaxvedrebdnen xolme when we came back everything was already prepared for us dagvaxvedrebdnen xolme% dagvaxvedrebdnen xolme% everything was already prepared for us [H::::: deda ramdenjer elikos kabiT mivlia, deda, [H::::: deda ramdenSer eliQos Qabit mivlia, deda, Mother, how many times I wore Eliko's dress, mother [vaimeh vaimeh %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% vaimeh vaimeh alas alas [ramdenjer elikos paltoTi mivlia,deda, ramdenSer eliQos WalRoti mivlia, deda, how many times I wore Eliko's coat, mother, [%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% [genacvale, de:::da, me mainc madlobeli viyavi Seni, Sen meti ar SegeZlo, genacvale, de:::da, me mainc madlobeli viYavi Ueni, Uen meRi ar UegeOlo, dear mother, still I was grateful to you, you could not have done more for us. [%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Sen sulac ar gemdurebi, deda, imitom rom, rac SegeZlo, Uen sulac ar gemdurebi, deda, imiRom rom, rac UegeOlo, I am not mad at you, mother, because you did everything for us, [Cven arafers ar gvaklebdi Iven arapers ar gvaQlebdi that you could, we lacked nothing [qmari Tavze ar edga am sacodavs, uqmrod gagzardaT am sacodavma kmari tavze ar edga am sacodavs, ukmrod gagzardat am sacodavma she had no husband, poor thing, without a husband she raised you, poor thing
Notes * I am grateful to Elza Gabedava for help with the Georgian language and her continuing cowork.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals
1. See Mills (1991) and Grima (1991) on a similar role of suffering in women’s performance in South Asian folklore. 2. See Kyratzis and Cahill in this volume. 3. “Mo»tirali” means female wailer, “mo»tiralebi” is plural. 4. Drinking toasts also demand emotion work and emotional performance by men, as is described in Kotthoff (1995b), but wailing is not a component of this work. Toasts are often delivered in a pathetic keying. 5. This functional ascription is found throughout the rich literature on mourning rituals (Malinowski 1925, van Gennep 1960, Feld 1982, Stubbe 1985). 6. In order to maintain contact with the dead, food is placed on graves. The people of Georgia bring food and drink to their dead on all religious holidays; in Eastern regions they bring xašlama, a porridge made from cooked veal and mutton. The dead receive forty days’ provisions for their journey into the afterlife; that is, they are customarily brought a plate of food on the second, seventh, and fortieth days, and also a year after death. Wine is poured over the grave. In addition, mourners carry a burning candle. Later, there is at least one commemorative day per year. 7. I taught German language and linguistics for six semesters as a lecturer of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at a university in Tbilisi (1988–1991). I first did not go to Georgia with the intention of researching ritual communication. The unusually rich variety of oral poetic rituals became accessible to me only gradually (Kotthoff 1993, 1995a,b). Later, I integrated my interests into research projects. 8. Every region in the Caucasus has its own ritual peculiarities (CocaniŠe 1991, NakašiŠe 1993, Kotthoff 2000a). Thus, e.g., in Xevsuretia horses are integrated into the burial ritual. A horse is decorated (=equipped for the journey) and carries all the food that the deceased person is given in the grave (for use on the coming journey in the afterlife). The deceased is supposed to use the horse in the hereafter. After the burial the horse is given to a close relative. The latter may only use the horse for riding and must give it dignified treatment, since it is in the religious belief already serving in the hereafter. Lamenters also cry over a carpet which holds the clothes of the deceased. NakašiŠe (1993) differentiates four forms of lamentation for Xevsuretia: three forms of lamentation with words and one without words. The forms with words are classified as zaxilit t» irili (wailing with shouting), datvlit t» irili (wailing with reason) and xmit tirili » (wailing with voice). Xmit t» irili is the most widespread form, the one dealt with in this article. Datvlit t» irili consists mainly of reproaches to the deceased for having left their relatives. They are sung especially in the first hours after the death. Zaxilit tirili » is only expressed by the sisters of the deceased. Each region has its own norms for dressing the deceased and its own semiotics of culinaria. Meat is forbidden during the period of mourning in many regions and is likewise not offered in the “kelexi,” the mourning meal. Each region is, on the one hand, convinced that its way of treating the dead is superior to the customary forms of other regions, on the hand, multicultural Georgia practices great tolerance in accepting others’ customs.
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Regional identity is extremely strong in Georgia. Even in Tbilisi a person who already belongs to the second generation living there is still introduced as a Mengrelian or a Kachetian. In laments the deceased person’s region of origin is constantly referred to. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the many peculiarities of the Georgian regions. It will only be maintained that mourning rituals are viewed as a central element of regional identity, which is thereby confirmed. 9. See, e.g., Kotthoff (1995 a, b) for other Georgian ethnopoetic genres which communicate moral values. 10. Bergmann/Luckmann (1994) and Günthner/Knoblauch (1995) define genres as communicative forms with a high degree of stability. Members of societies develop recurrent orientations to communicative patterns which can lead to speech genres. Stabilized communicative genres which contain evaluative judgements about people and human activities are considered genres of moral communication. Morals are understood in Durkheim’s sense (1915) as what people do for the community and has a communityoriented meaning which can be evaluated according to the criteria of good and evil. 11. According to Stubbe these forms of self-flagellation are found in many cultures. The practice of savagely lacerating one’s face, likewise mentioned in Stubbe’s study, is also found in Georgia. 12. In November 1995 a symposium was held at the University of Paderborn on the topic of “The Gender of Gestures — Grief” (the articles are edited by Gisela Ecker 1999). The symposium also confirmed that there is a gender-specific division of labor in rites, images, symbols and art representations of grief (= female). 13. Caraveli (1986) describes a similar function for Greek lamentations. 14. She alludes to the common metaphorics of travelling. She means: prepared for the long journey into the hereafter. 15. “Uime” or “vaime” is an interjection of pain. 16. She means that she will stay in contact with her children. 17. In Georgian it is possible, by adding an “o” to the last word in a phrase, to indicate that speech is being quoted. Quoting in the second or third person is marked by this morpheme. 18. Quotations in the first person are marked with “metki”. 19. What is meant is that they should both watch over Mariam at night during her illness. 20. Literally the phrase means “pay honor to mother;” in practice it means that she should do something for her mother. 21. “By ‘emotion work’ I refer to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling. To ‘work on’ an emotion or feeling is, for our purposes, the same as ‘to manage’ an emotion or to do ‘deep acting’” (Hochschild 1979: 561). Hochschild (1979: 558) speaks of “deep acting” and “surface acting” in regard to “emotion work.” Both are subject to sociocultural rules and gender. ‘Surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’ are combined in lamentation. 22. See also van Gennep (1960), Turner (1969), Werlen (1984) and Senft (1987) on rituality. There are, of course, many different positions on what constitutes rituality; a discussion of this would exceed the scope of this article.
Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals 323
23. We also taped some cross-cultural lamentations. See for the managment of regional style differences in Georgian wailing Kotthoff 2000a. 24. Wienold (1971) discusses excellence and originality as general evaluative criteria for poetic texts. 25. Recorded by Nina Maxarašvili who kindly provided us with the cassette. 26. Important metaphor for crying. 27. She means herself; formula.
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Luckmann, Thomas 1991 Unsichtbare Religion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lutz, Catherine and White, Geoffrey M. 1986 “The anthropology of emotions”. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436. Lutz, Catherine and Abu-Lughod, Lila 1990 Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, Margaret A. 1991 “Gender and verbal performance style in Afghanistan, in Arjun Appandurai”. In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, F. J. Korom, and M. A. Mills (eds). 56–81. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. NakašiŠe, Ketevan 1993 Gruzinskie PlaIi. Working Paper of the SavaxiUvili Institute, Tbilisi. Niemeyer, Susanne and Dirven, René 1997 The Language of Emotions. Amsterdam: Niemeyer. Ochs, Elinor and Schieffelin, Bambi 1989 “Language has a heart”. Text 9: 7–25. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1964 The Andaman Islanders. New York: The Free Press. Sapir, Edward 1921 Language. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1927 “Speech as a personality trait”. American Journal of Sociology 32: 892–905. Senft, Gunter 1985 “Trauer auf Trobriand: Eine ethnologisch/linguistische Fallstudie”. Anthropos 80: 471–492. Seremetakis, Nadia C 1991 The Last Word. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sherzer, Joel 1987 “A diversity of voices: Men’s and women’s speech in ethnographic perspective”. In Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective, S. Phillips, S. Steele, and C. Tanz (eds). 95–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sokolov, Yuri 1950 Russian Folklore. New York: Macmillan. Stubbe, Hannes 1985 Formen der Trauer: Eine kulturanthropologische Untersuchung. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Tannen, Deborah 1989 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiwary, K. M. 1975 “Tuneful weeping: A mode of communication”. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 27. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Dev. Laboratory. Turner, Victor 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Urban, Greg 1988 “Ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil”. American Anthropologist 90: 385–400.
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1991 A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals. Austin: University of Texas Press. Voloshinov, Valentin 1926/1976 “Discourse in life and discourse in art. In Freudianism. Transl. By I. R. Titunik, 93–117. New York: Academic Press. 1926/1978 “Reported Speech”. In Readings in Russian Poetry, L. Mateijka and K. Pomorska (eds.), 149–175. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 149–175. Werlen, Iwar 1984 Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen und Handeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr. White, Geoffrey 1990 “Moral discourse and the rhetoric of emotions” In Language and the Politics of Emotion, Lutz and Abu-Lughod (eds), 46–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wienold, Götz 1971 Formulierungstheorie, Poetik, strukturelle Literaturgeschichte am Beispiel altenglischer Dichtung. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Wierzbicka, Anna 1986 “Human emotions: Universal or culture-specific?” American Anthropologist 88(3): 584–594.
Theorizing gender Feminist awareness and language change Rachel Giora
1.
Introduction
Most recent research into gender and language challenges the dominant sexdifference oriented approaches which maintain that women are different from men, whether essentially or by socialization (e.g., Coates 1986, 1996). This sexdifference view either condemns women’s different speech as socially dysfunctional and deficient (e.g., Lakoff 1975; Kendall and Tannen 1996), or embraces it as a ‘different but equally valid’ culture (e.g., Tannen 1990). The ‘different and deficient’ approach is criticized for implying that, to improve their social status, individual women should transform their style, and adjust themselves to men’s linguistic norms (e.g., Crawford 1996). Findings of difference have been largely appropriated, and serve to oppress women: They either give rise to industries of self-correction, or are misused to consolidate and justify women’s inferior social position (Cameron 1996). The apolitical cross-culture model (e.g., Maltz and Borker 1982; Henley and Kramarae 1988, 1991; Tannen 1990) also implies affirmation of inequality: Viewing women and men as belonging to two equally valid but different cultures calls for no change, thereby maintaining the prevailing social structure (Troemel-Ploetz 1991). Thus, if ‘communication failures’ are a result of culture cross-blindness, no one is to blame. Indeed, analysis of talk about violence against women (acquaintance rape) reveals that such a view leads to victim blaming, deflection of accountability from violent men, and a focus on monitoring women’s but not men’s behavior. After all, if women and men “hold different systems of meanings about consent, ‘miscommunication’ is inevitable and no one is culpable for rape” (Crawford 1996: 175). Difference, concludes Cameron (1996), following Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992), is a conse-
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quence of inequality, and tolerance to difference propagates it: “To suppose that […] if only we valued women’s styles as highly as men’s there would be no problem, is reminiscent of right-wing pseudo-feminism which enjoins us to honor the housewife and mother for doing the most important job… feminism is not about giving housewives their due, it is about changing the conditions of domestic labor altogether” (Cameron 1996: 44). Both the ‘different and deficient’ and ‘different but equally valid’ approaches, then, are problematic politically: They result in maintaining inequality. However, they are also inadequate as descriptive theories. There is a growing body of evidence (e.g., Ariel and Giora 1992a, b, 1998; Crawford 1996; Freed 1992; Freed and Greenwood 1996) disconfirming the difference view. For example, the consensual belief that women are cooperative, employing addressee-oriented speech behavior, whereas men are dominant, employing speakeroriented speech behavior (e.g., Maltz and Borker 1982; Cameron 1985; Coates 1986; Tannen 1990; James and Drakich 1993; James and Clarke 1993; West 1995), has not gained support (e.g., Ariel and Giora 1992a, b, 1998; James and Drakich 1993; James and Clarke 1993). Neither has the widely accepted association between women and standard speech and men and nonstandard speech (e.g., Eckert 1998; James 1996; Hibiya 1988; Rickford 1991; Salami 1991). Greenwood and Freed (1992: 206) found that “neither sex nor age alone can account for the distinct variations” in using questions in conversation. Even highly ‘feminine’ behavior, such as polite speech is not uniquely feminine. In Javanese, for instance, women have been observed to behave more politely than men within family circles, but in public, it is men who behave more politely (Smith-Hefner 1988). Moreover, a speaker’s social identities may fluctuate across a lifetime of communicative events. Trabelsi (1991), for instance, has shown that young Tunis women employ speech markers which suggest identification with men and modernity. Older Tunis women manifest speech markers which suggest that they identify with Tunis traditional values. Middle-aged Tunis women waver between the two styles, depending on their interlocutors. In addition, Jabeur (1987) and Trabelsi (1991) found that young Tunis women do not always align themselves with men. For instance, unlike Tunis men, they use French borrowings to project identification with freedom from Arab society. “To summarize, then, part of a Tunis woman’s communicative competence lies in managing a number of social identities. Because different identities may be of primary salience in a particular communicative event, her communicative competence lies in choosing the linguistic variables that express these identities” (Meyerhoff 1996: 206).
Theorizing gender
But most importantly, women and men can be very much alike: Wetzel (1988) found that Japanese men speak very much like Western women. In fact, Freed (1992) accused Tannen (1990) of misrepresenting Maltz and Borker’s (1982) and Goodwin’s (1980) findings, presenting them as supporting a ‘difference’ theory, while the researchers themselves emphasized the similarity between the sexes. Also, as Uchida (1992) notes, Tannen (1984, 1986) herself showed that gender was not a significant factor in conversations between two ethnic groups. The alternative to the difference hypothesis, then, stresses the similarity between the sexes. To show that women’s and men’s linguistic behavior is much more alike than different, Freed (1992) and Freed and Greenwood (1996) examined the effect of social context on people’s behavior. They focused on symmetric talk between friends of both sexes. Looking into the conditions of use of two typically ‘feminine’ features of speech: ‘You know’ and questions, they found no difference in amount and use of these hedges between women and men. Rather, the use of these devices was found to be sensitive to situations, and to vary with respect to the demand of the task. In a similar vein, Crawford (1996: 17) proposes to view language as “a set of strategies for negotiating the social landscape — an action oriented medium”. This constructionist view (following Potter and Wetherell 1987) conceptualizes gender as a system of social relations operating at the individual, social structural, and interactional levels. Instead of focusing on isolated features of speech, constructionist oriented research centers on interactional analysis. “It opens the way for analyzing how social groupings, hierarchies, and power relations structure interaction, constrain speakers’ options, and affect the kinds of social feedback speakers receive” (Crawford 1996: 171). For Crawford, women’s and men’s speech is best conceptualized as a collaborative social activity rather than being grounded in essential individual traits. However, conceptualizing speech as a collaborative social activity where each party has a(n equally valid) role, or designing an experimental environment which places women and men in symmetrical social tasks are just as problematic as looking for differences. It masks the real problem. A homogeneous picture of similarity helps maintain the unequal social structure just as much as the ‘different but equal’ approach does. The claim that women and men are more alike than different (e.g., Fuchs-Epstein 1988) may disguise the problem of inequality, thereby implying that no change is necessary. Though women and men may exhibit similar linguistic behavior in a given situation, this does not preclude the possibility that they act under different social
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constraints. For instance, women and men could behave alike, not because they are really alike, but because women, as a powerless social group, employ an assimilation strategy and copy the ways and values of men. Or consider, again, Freed and Greenwood’s (1996) findings. So far they have been able to show that men can master ‘feminine’ or ‘powerless’ talk. However, it still remains to be seen whether women and men will fare similarly when the task requires use of what is considered ‘masculine’ or ‘powerful’ linguistic behavior (cf. Kendall and Tannen 1996). Findings of similarity, then, may be illusory, and may propagate inequality just as findings of difference. If feminism is about changing the world — findings of similarity will not provide the right drive. Apart from being problematic politically, the similarity hypothesis is also problematic theoretically. Just as the difference hypothesis is deficient in handling findings of similarity, so is the similarity oriented approach; it cannot handle findings of difference. The basic weakness inherent in both hypotheses is that they mainly study features rather than strategies (and resultant features). Features are a superficial and local phenomenon. They don’t necessarily tell us much about the strategies which inspire them. Different surface behaviors may be induced by the same motivation, while similar styles may be a function of different linguistic strategies. In recent studies (Ariel and Giora 1992a, b, 1998; Giora 1996, 1997) Mira Ariel and I proposed to consider the interface of social identity (e.g., gender) and language. We focused on the relation of a certain linguistic behavior and its motivation, i.e., the strategy that induces it. We assumed, following group relation theories (e.g., Giles 1984; Tajfel 1978) that (feminist) awareness should incite divergence strategy, while lack of it should result in convergence strategy. For women divergence implies adopting a Self point of view in language, whereupon an ingroup member identifies with her own group’s objectives, values, and interests. Convergence implies adopting an Other point of view in language, whereupon an ingroup member identifies with an outgroup’s objectives, values, and interests. Given group relations theories, then, nonfeminist female speakers would employ a convergence strategy, exhibiting a linguistic behavior similar to that of men’s. In contrast, feminists’ linguistic behavior would differ from both nonfeminist female and male speakers’. Upon such a view feature similarities and differences are just a by-product.
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2. Self vs. Other point of view What does it mean to adopt a self point of view in language? To adopt a self point of view one should be oriented towards one’s group’s interests. Thus one should focus on ingroup rather than on outgroup members. Focusing on the Self rather than on the Other predicts, among other things, that, in women’s writings, female characters would outnumber male characters. Similarly, when one adopts a Self point of view, one’s ingroup members should be foremost on one’s mind. Linguistically this means that the Self should serve as a point of reference to the Other. Thus, when anchoring one character onto another (‘X’ is the anchor in ‘X’s friend’, and ‘friend’ is anchored, e.g., Peter is Mary’s friend), ingroup members should be assigned the role of anchors. Outgroup members should outnumber ingroup members in the role of anchored, dependent characters. For female speakers, then, to have more male than female characters as anchored, and more female than male characters in the role of anchors is to adopt a Self point of view. For the Self, all the Others are alike (e.g., Linville and Jones 1980), while one’s ingroup members are each distinct (e.g., Secord, Bevan and Katz 1956; Tajfel, Sheikh and Gardner 1964; Malpass and Kravitz 1969; Chance and Goldstein 1975; Brigham and Barkowitz 1978; Stephen 1985). To adopt a Self point of view in this respect means to individuate ingroup members. Individuating can be achieved by e.g., naming. To adopt a Self point of view, female speakers should name more female than male characters. They should do so by means of full or last names, since last names individuate characters much more effectively than first names, because (in Western culture) there are many more last than first names (see Weitman 1987). Portraying ingroup members as independent is adopting a Self point of view, since (in Western culture, at least) dependency implies lack of control over one’s life. To adopt a Self point of view, women writers, especially fiction writers (who need not be constrained by reality), should portray more women than men as functional. In contrast, family descriptions, which portray an individual as part of a larger whole rather than as a self-sufficient entity, should be assigned to outgroup members. For the Self, the Other may be conceived of as a means to an end: an object. To adopt a Self point of view, women should objectify men rather than women; they should use more external descriptions (i.e., those based on look and bodily characteristics) for male than for female characters, and use more sex-based descriptions for males (e.g., ‘male’, as opposed to ‘person’) than for females.
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When one adopts a Self point of view, one’s ingroup members should not only play the role of protagonist (see above), but this protagonist should not be destroyed or die. Between the options of being either a victim or an aggressor, ingroup members should not be victims. Rather, they should victimize outgroup members. Being in power is considered a positive state in Western culture. Hence, between the alternatives of either being in control or under control of others, especially under control of outgroup members, a Self perspective should prefer the former. To adopt a Self point of view, ingroup members should be portrayed as powerful, exerting power on outgroup members, e.g., by trying to affect the Other’s behavior, as in commands, or threats, or more generally by using what Green (1975) has termed impositive speech acts (i.e., speech acts which impose the speaker’s will on the addressee). Moreover, an actual compliance of the addressee with the speaker’s wish testifies to the speaker’s power. Hence, when outgroup members comply with the ingroup more than with outgroup members, this suggests setting out from a Self point of view. Thus, to adopt a Self point of view, women writers should portray more female than male characters as powerful, i.e., as attempting to impose their will on male characters, and more male than female characters complying with their will. Cooperation involves acting in the best interest of another person. To adopt a Self point of view, one should cooperate with ingroup rather than with outgroup members (Tajfel 1978; Doise 1976; Dion 1979; Wyer and Gordon 1984). Speech may be cooperative when it is addressee-oriented, (e.g., speechacts such as offer, advice). To adopt a Self point of view, one should be cooperative (e.g., advise or offer) when engaged with ingroup members. Or, one should obey ingroup rather than outgroup members’ impositive speech acts. For women to adopt a Self point of view, they should portray female characters who cooperate with or obey female rather than male characters. Given women’s powerless social status, women may find it difficult to substantiate their own perspective. We, therefore, expected nonfeminist women speakers and writers to adopt an Other point of view. Adopting a convergence strategy on the part of women should result in a speech product similar to men’s. Feminist speakers and writers, however, are expected to set out from a Self point of view, employing a divergence strategy. The result of such strategy is a speech product different from men’s. Since men make up the dominant group, they should have no difficulty setting out from a Self point of view, even unknowingly.
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While current theories predict either difference between women and men’s speech behavior (the difference hypothesis) or similarity between women and men’s speech behavior (the similarity hypothesis), a group relation based theory has different predictions altogether. It groups nonfeminist female and male speakers on the basis of their similar speech products, and feminist female and male speakers on the basis of their similar strategy — setting from a Self point of view. Feminist and nonfeminist female speakers have nothing in common: neither speech nor strategy.
3. Findings 3.1 Style One feature of style we looked into is introductory patterns. We examined how Israeli female and male authors introduce female and male protagonists. Our data come from short stories by Israeli women and men writers, both modern (1965–1982) and early, pre-state (1928–1940).1 Our data on introductory patterns in feminist writing, come from a contemporary Israeli feminist magazine, Noga (23, 1992), edited and written by feminist writers, catering to a primarily female readership. As a nonfeminist counterpart to Noga, we chose the most popular women’s magazine, Laisha (2369, 1992: 5–56; 109–112). For each text, we checked the number of characters and female characters and whether they received a description stemming for a Self or an Other point of view. To set out from a Self point of view, female authors should have given their female characters a name, preferably a full or a last name, a functional as well as an anchoring description. Their male characters should have been given a family description as well as external, sex-based, and anchored descriptions. For an illustration of our analysis, consider the following translated examples: (1) a.
His [anchoring] sister [family+anchored] Bilha [first name], who works with him, an architect [functional] too, a woman [sex-based] divorced three times [family] (Hareven 1982: 14).
b. An ugly and noisy [external] woman [sex-based] (Oz 1965: 45). c.
A woman [sex-based] to receive customers [functional]. An assistant [functional] (Cahana-Carmon 1966: 115).
Our findings show that only male and feminist female authors tend to set out from a Self point of view (female authors do it in 50% of the cases, male
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authors do it in 100% of the cases). Feminist authors introduce female characters applying similar descriptions used by men to introduce male characters: Both name these characters (either using last or full names) and assign them functional and anchoring descriptions. Similarly, both introduce outgroup members by external, sex-based, family and anchored descriptions, either failing to name them or giving them first names only. Though male and female feminist authors set out from the same (Self) point of view, their styles, as a result, are completely different. Less-feminist writers adopt an Other point of view, resulting in a style similar to men writers’. Both male writers and nonfeminist female writers describe women as outgourp members (giving them either first names or failing to name them, assigning them external, sex-based, family and anchored descriptions), and men as ingroup members.2 While for male writers this style is inspired by a Self point of view, for female writers having the same style is a result of adopting a different strategy — setting out form an Other point of view (see also Ariel 1988; Ariel and Giora 1992a, 1998). 3.2 Narrative structure Another way of testing the above hypotheses (Section 2) is to investigate narrative structure and narrative change. Recall that the assumption is that (feminist) awareness — i.e., setting out from a Self point of view (for women) — should induce products different from men’s and women’s who lack such awareness. In Giora (1997), I looked into women’s narratives dealing with abuse of female protagonists. According to the awareness hypothesis, feminist writers should portray female protagonists who defend themselves, retaliate or ruin their abusers instead of complying with the role of victim. Less-feminist women writers should copy men’s narratives in which the abused female protagonist accepts her victimhood and destroys herself instead of acting in self defense and harm her abuser (as do the suicidal heroines of Flaubert’s (1955) Madame Bovary, or Tolstoi’s (1951) Anna Karenine). The narratives studied were short stories, novels, and scripts written by women before and after the feminist revolution of the 1970s. It was assumed that women writers following the feminist revolution should be more affected by feminist awareness than women writing in the period preceding the feminist revolution. Findings indeed support the hypothesis. They show that following the 1970s, works by female authors portray more retaliating female characters than earlier works. Earlier works abound in self-destructive heroines (e.g., The story
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of an hour and The awakening by Kate Chopin (1899/1976), Virginia Woolf ’s The voyage out (1915), A Room of One’s Own (1929), Lappin and Lapinova (1939/1944: 60–68), The legacy (1940/1944: 107–114), Kritut (Divorce) by the Hebrew author Dvorah Baron (1943), To room nineteen by Doris Lessing (1958), or The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)). In contrast, later works allow for more violent female characters. Consider, for instance, How did I get away with killing one of the biggest lawyers in the state? It was easy by the African-American author Alice Walker (1971), The collector of treasures by the South African author Bessie Head (1977), Baby Blue by Edna O’Brien (1978), the French film Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Akerman (1979), Cry, the Peacock by the Indian writer Anita Desai (1980), the Dutch film A question of silence by Marleen Gorris (1982), the teleplay The burning bed by Rose Leiman Goldemberg (1984, following the book by Faith McNulty), the last diet by Ellen Gilchrist (1986), Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (1987), Blue Steel (Katherine Bigelow 1990), and Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott 1991, screenplay by Callie Khouri), Un crime maternel by Fay Weldon (1991), The revenge, by the Singaporean author Catherine Lim (1993), The golden snake by the Palestinian author Hanan Michaili Ashrawee (1990), Women at point zero, by the Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi (1975), The fall of the Imaam by the same author, (El Saadawi 1988), Malice, by Danielle Steel (1996).3 In fact, by the early 1970s, the theme of ‘getting even’ has become a main stream topic in American movies about women. Abuse, particularly rape, became “not only a deed deserving of brutal retribution, but a deed that women themselves (not cops, boyfriends, or fathers) undertook to redress” (Clover 1992: 16). It seems that as feminism gets a stronger hold, women tend to set out from a Self point of view more often, which affects narrative change from the male ‘norm’. Consider, however, another angle taken by Adrienne Rich (1973: 25), where murder does not suffice, since it does not change the world: The phenomenology of Anger Fantasies of murder: not enough: to kill is to cut off from pain but the killer goes on hurting Not enough. When I dream of meeting the enemy, this is my dream:
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white acetylene ripples from my body effortlessly released perfectly trained on the true enemy raking his body down to the thread of existence burning away his lie leaving him in a new world; a changed man.
3.3 Power and cooperation To examine the way women and men manipulate power and cooperation in conversation, male and female characters’ speech in scripts written by Israeli female and male script-writers during the late 1980s was analyzed (see Ariel and Giora 1992b, 1998). The focus was on impositive speech acts (Green 1975), because impositive speech acts encode power and cooperation (e.g., threaten, command, demand, request, warn, reprimand, suggest, advise, instruct, indirectly command, indirectly request, indirectly suggest, mutually command, order, soothe, mutually suggest, mutually advise, invite, offer, ask for permission, remind, beg). A command indicates a relatively powerful speaker. Begging indicates that the speaker is relatively powerless. Giving advice or offering something to the addressee show some concern for the addressee, and are thus indicators of the speaker’s cooperation with him. Note that power and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. Begging implies a powerless speaker, but not a cooperative one, while suggesting, which implies a more powerful speaker, is a cooperative speech act. All the impositive speech acts in seven Israeli movie scripts written during the late 1980s were examined for manifestations of Self point of view in speakers’ attempts to impose their will on others. The parameters of power and cooperation included: a. Power relations between the speaker and the addressee. The speaker may be superior, equal or inferior in status to the addressee. b. Amount of talk. Who holds the floor and issues more impositive speech acts? c. Power of speech act. The speech act power is a function of linguistic components measured
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against the context, with the understanding that the very same act can be perceived as less or more powerful, depending on the context. The linguistic components include (i) strength of illocutionary force (e.g., command versus suggest), (ii) the presence of mitigators (e.g., please) or intensifiers (e.g., come on), which either weaken or strengthen the speech act power, (iii) repetition and/or (iv) justification of the speech act, which imply lack of compliance and hence speaker’s powerlessness. Partly following suggestions made by Brown and Levinson (1987), the contextual aspects included (i) the speaker’s relative status vis-à-vis the addressee (the power of the speech act depends on whether it is uttered by a superior to an inferior or vice versa), (ii) the relative intimacy/distance between them (a command issued to an intimate is less powerful than when the recipient is a stranger), (iii) the extent to which it is necessary to perform the act (extinguishing a fire, as opposed to closing the door), and (iv) the degree of imposition required in order to comply with the impositive speech act (e.g., bringing some water in the desert as opposed to bringing it from the kitchen). d. Rate of compliance by the addressee. Who obeys whom by actually performing the act requested? e. Rate of cooperation with addressee. Who issues to whom more cooperative speech acts? The translated examples in (2) below illustrate how impositive speech acts were analyzed: (2) a.
Rosy to Eli: Enough already [command], ass hole [intensifier] (Gabison and Aroch 1989: 27). b. Frieda to Simcha: You know what? Go lie down [suggestion]. We’ll continue some other time [justification] (Zvi-Riklis 1984: 73). c. Tmira to Elit: Tell her again that I’m sorry… [request] Elit, tell her I’m sorry [request + repetition] (Yaron-Grunich 1987: 26).
Given that the female script writers of the late 1980s must be (at least partially) influenced by feminist ideas, it was predicted that this awareness should affect the way their female and male characters speak. More specifically, given the Self perspective hypothesis, female characters in female writers’ scripts should exert power over male characters and cooperate with female characters. We collected our data from Schorr and Lubin (1990) who assorted scripts written during the 1980s.4 Results support the hypothesis only partly. They
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show that, contrary to the Self perspective hypothesis, female characters in female writers’ scripts do not exert power over male characters. Rather, when they can, they exert power over equaly powerful or weaker characters, such as ingroup members (i.e., women) and children. In this respect, their characters adhere to the male oriented perspective. That is, both female and male script writers produced female characters who obey male characters, and male and female characters who exert power over female characters. However, while for female writers this means setting out from an Other point of view, for male writers this means adopting a Self point of view. Here, again, adopting different strategies results in similar products. However, when it comes to cooperation, female writers do adopt a Self point of view: Their female characters cooperate with ingroup rather than with outgroup members. In this respect, they adopt a strategy similar to that of male script writers’ whose male characters too cooperate with male rather than with female characters (adhering to a Self point of view). While male writers always set out from a Self point of view, women, being a powerless group, may find it difficult. The feminist awareness of the Israeli female script writers of the late 1980s allowed them to set out from a Self point of view only partly, thus producing only partial change from the stereotypic male ‘norm’. They created female characters who diverge from the stereotype upon which women are cooperative across the board, not least with men (a stereotype made manifest in the male writers’ scripts).
4. In conclusion Our findings, thus, pose a problem for both the similarity and difference hypotheses. The difference hypothesis predicts that differences should cluster around the gender dichotomy, thereby failing to account for the similaritybased findings. The similarity-hypothesis fails in that it obscures difference in the strategies employed. Our findings (and others’) are best accounted for in terms of adopting different strategies, i.e., different points of view in language. The more aware the female writers, the more extensively they diverge from the ‘norm’, setting out from a Self point of view. This interpretation of the findings using Self versus Other points of view as a classifying criterion, categorizes feminists, nonfeminist women, and men quite differently. Both men and feminists behave alike in that they adopt a Self point of view. In contrast, nonfeminist women adopt an Other point of view.
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Our analysis does not preclude the possibility that women’s and men’s language may both differ and be similar in terms of ‘features’. Rather, the proposal is to avoid considering ‘features’ on their own, without studying the social constraints that either allow or disallow them. Our analysis neither precludes the possibility of evaluating findings in different ways. For example, for women to set out from an Other point of view may result in products similar to men’s, i.e., using a male-biased portrayal of women, which, in themselves depict women as different from men. Features then don’t tell us much. What we have tried to show is that the question of interest is what motivated a certain feature: In the realms of social identities relatively low rank may be universally linked to stances and acts of accommodation. Interlocutors may universally display lower rank through displays of attention and willingness to take the point of view of a higher-ranking party or otherwise meet that party’s wants or needs. By implication, these same stances and acts of accommodation universally mark the other party’s higher rank. Higher rank as well may be universally linked to rights to direct others through such acts as ordering and summoning (Ochs 1996: 426). But since “members of societies are agents of culture rather than merely bearers of a culture that has been handed down to them and encoded in grammatical form” (ibid, p. 416), language users may change the world by projecting their own point of view. We have only to look at the language of working women in management positions to see how their language practices constitute alternative conceptions of leadership in the workplace (e.g. decision making as consensual versus authoritarian); or take a look at minority and female lawyers whose insistence on the use of personal narrative in legal argumentation challenges status quo expectations. Language socialization is potent in that it is our human medium for cultural continuity and change” (ibid, p. 431). Though to adopt one’s own point of view (at least to a certain extent) is a rational strategy, the one we should all aspire to substantiate, because, among other things, it will make the world a better place for those whose point of view is suppressed, this strategy may not be equally available to all language users. In this respect, powerless groups such as women and other minorities differ from the male dominant group. They are more constrained. They, may, however, compensate themselves for their lack of autonomy by developing a social awareness. Still, even this may be too difficult to follow. Social pressures might be too punitive, and women and other powerless groups compromise at times and assimilate.
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Notes 1. The early women writers are Baron (1943), Bichovsky (1976) and Puchachevsky (1930: 59–168). The modern women writers are: Cahana-Carmon (1966) the first eleven stories, Almog (1969, 1971: 7–19) and Hareven (1982). The early men writers are: Shoffman (1942: 11–170), Smilansky (1934, 1955: 117–137) and Steinberg (1957: 219–263). The modern men writers are: Oz (1965), the first seven stories, Yehoshua (1972), the first five stories and Ben-Ner (1980). The year of publication of the early writers usually documents the collected writings of the author rather than the original date of publication. The basis for selection was the historical fame of the authors. They all appear in anthologies that reflect the spirit of their time. 2. This description does some injustice to early female writers writing during the 1930s. Their plots and themes were affected by feminist awareness. However, their awareness was insufficient to induce style change. 3. Note that the feminist awareness of the early female authors was insufficient to allow for a narrative change. Recall that this is the case with the early Israeli female authors who did not challenge men’s style (see note 1). 4. The women script writers are: Menahemi (1987), Troppe (1986), Yaron-Grunich (1987) and Zvi-Riklis (1984). The men script writers are: Gabison and Aroch (1989), Heller (1986) and Waxman, Haspary and Levins (1987).
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Laisha 2369 1992 (Sept. 7) A weekly women’s magazine. Menahemi, Ayelet 1987 Orvim [Crows]. In R. Schorr and O. Lubin (eds.), 115–160. Noga 11 1985 (March) A bi-annual feminist magazine. Noga 23 1992 (Winter) A bi-annual feminist magazine. Oz, Amos 1965 Artzot ha-tan [Jackal countries], 9–159. Ramat-Gan: Massada. Puchachevsky, Nechama 1930 Ba-kfar u-va-avoda [In the village and at the workplace]. Tel-Aviv: Hedim. Schorr, Renen and Lubin, Orly (eds.) 1990 Tasritim 1 [Scripts 1]. Tel-Aviv: Kineret. Shoffman, Gershon 1942 Be-terem arga’a [Before relaxing]. Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved. Smilansky, Moshe 1934 Bnei-Arav [The Arabs]. Tel-Aviv: Hitachdut-Haikarim. Smilansky, Moshe 1955 Im preda [On departing]. Tel-Aviv: Tversky. Steinberg, Ya’akov 1957 Kol kitvey Ya’akov Steinberg [The collected writings of Ya’akov Steinberg]. TelAviv: Dvir. Troppe, Zippi 1986 Tel-Aviv Berlin Unpublished manuscript. Waxman, Daniel, Haspary Shimon and Levins R. 1987 Ha-meyuad [The Designate]. Unpublished manuscript. Yaron-Grunich, Nirit 1987 Yalda Gdola [Big Girl]. In R. Schorr and O. Lubin (eds.), 25–58. Yehoshua, A. B. 1972 9 sipurim [9 stories], 9–156. Ramat-Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Zvi-Riklis, Dina 1984 Coordania. In R. Schorr and O. Lubin (eds.), 59–84.
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Jabeur, M. 1987 A Sociolinguistic Study in Tunisia. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Reading. James, Deborah and Clarke, Sandra 1993 “Women, men and interruption: A critical review”. In Gender and Conversational Interaction, D. Tannen (ed.), 231–280. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Deborah and Drakich, Janice 1993 “Understanding gender differences in amount of talk”. In Gender and Conversational Interaction, D. Tannen (ed.), 281–312. New York: Oxford University Press. Kendall, Shari and Tannen, Deborah 1996 “Gender and language in the workplace”. In Gender and Discourse, R. Wodak (ed.), 81–105. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lakoff, Robin 1975 Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper and Row. Linville, P. W. and Jones, E. E. 1980 “Polarized appraisals of outgroup members”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38: 689–704. Malpass, R. S. and Kravitz, J. 1969 “Recognition for faces of own and other races”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 131: 330–334. Maltz, D. N. and Borker, R. A. 1982 “A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication”. In Language and Social Identity, J.J. Gumperz (ed.), 196–216. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meyerhoff, Miriam 1996 “Dealing with gender identity as a sociolinguistic variable”. In Bergvall et al. (eds.), 202–227. O’Barr, William and Atkins, Bowman K. 1980 “’Women’s language’ or ‘powerless language’?” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Broker and N. Forman (eds.), 93–110. New York: Praeger. Ochs, Elinor 1996 “Linguistic resources for socializing humanity”. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds.), 407–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Jonathan and Wetherell, Margaret 1987 Discourse and Social Psychology. London: Sage. Rich, Adrienne 1973 Diving into The Wreck. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Rickford, John R. 1991 “Sociolinguistic variation in Cane Walk”. In English around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspective, J. Cheshire (ed.), 609–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Salami, L. Oladipo 1991 “Diffusion and focusing: Phonological variation and social networks in Ife Ife Nigeria”. Language in Society 20: 217–45. Secord, P. F., Bevan W. and Katz, B. 1956 “The negro stereotype and perceptual accentuation”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 53: 78–83. Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. 1988 “Women and politeness: The Javanese example”. Language in Society 17:535–554. Stephen, W. G. 1985 “Intergroup relations”. In Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds.), 599–658. New York: Random House. Tannen, Deborah 1984 Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Norwood: Ablex. 1986 That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others. New York: Morrow. 1990 You Just Don’t Understand. New York: Morrow. Tajfel, Henri (ed.) 1978 Differentiation Between Social Groups. London: Academic Press. Tajfel, Henri, Sheikh, A. A. and Gardner, R. C. 1964 “Content of stereotypes and the inference of similarity between members of stereotyped groups”. Acta Psychologica 22: 191–201. Trabelsi, Chedia 1991 “De quelques aspects du langage des femmes de Tunis”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 87: 87–98. Troemel-Ploetz, Senta 1991 “Selling the apolitical”. Discourse and Society 2: 489–502. Uchida, Aki 1992 “When ‘difference’ is ‘dominance’: A critique of the ‘anti-power-based’ cultural approach to sex differences”. Language in Society 21: 547–568. Weitman, Sasha 1987 “Prenoms et orientations nationales en Israel, 1882–1980”. Annales EconomiesSociete-Civilisations 42 (4): 879–900. West, Candace 1995 “Women’s competence in conversation”. Discourse and Society 6: 105–131. Wetzel, Patricia J. 1988 “Are “powerless” communication strategies the Japanese norm?” Language in Society 17: 555–564. Wyer, R. S. and Gordon, S. E. 1984 “The cognitive representation of social information”. In Handbook of Social Cognition, Vol. 2, R. S. Wyer and T. K. Srull (eds.), 11–149. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Subject index A academic discourse xix, 213, 244, 248–252, 274, 276, 280 academic setting 212 adolescence vii, ix, 19, 52, 75–95, 90, 99–132, , 145, 175–207, 249 aesthetics 285, 304, 325 agency 9–11, 23, 40, 100, 127, 153 anthropological perspective 48, 134 appearance 10, 38, 46, 92, 100, 102, 105, 107, 108, 112, 119 argument 5, 9, 11, 14, 15, 25, 213, 219, 237, 240 asymmetry 23, 26, 213 attachment 114, 201, 286, 288, 308 authority xvi, 11, 35, 78, 101, 113, 126, 127, 140, 151, 211, 214, 224, 231, 234, 237, 245, 256, 269, 273, 278, 311 B binary xi, 7, 9, 10, 71 biography 13, 54, 160 body x, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 5, 10, 14, 17, 21, 33, 77, 99–127, , 131, 133–136, 141, 151, 155, 156, 157, 170, 249, 256, 277, 284, 289, 303, 330, 338 boys vii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 6, 12, 18, 22, 23, 27, 29, 31–36, 39, 40, 46–49, 51–74, , 77, 79, 83–97, 102–105, 112, 117, 123, 129, 130, 139, 143, 148, 150, 151, 198, 211, 241, 249, 250, 279, 345 C camera xvi, 99, 101, 103, 109–111, 114, 118, 128, 131 capital xvii, 28, 105, 131, 169, 172, 247, 248, 252, 274, 285
career 140, 142, 241, 244, 253 childhood vii, ix, 19, 36, 40, 47, 49, 74, 75, 85, 93, 96, 129, 249 class x, xi, xv, xvii, xxii, 4, 6, 11, 12, 32, 38, 43, 46, 51–54, 72, 77, 78, 88, 102, 103, 104, 106, 129, 130, 134, 135, 142, 143, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154, 155–157, 161–165, 169, 171, 251, 252, 256 classroom x, 6, 9, 18, 29, 30, 33, 54, 55, 75–95, 102–104, 130, 245, 249, 250, 266, 267 community formation 294 concession 231, 239, 240 conflict xviii, 46, 52, 53, 72–74, 119, 149, 199, 201, 212, 231, 234, 344 context x, xii, xiii, xv, xviii, xxiv, 6, 9, 11, 13, 17, 40, 47, 48, 54, 55, 65, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76, 108, 121, 129, 144, 147, 156, 168, 175, 176, 181, 190, 204, 205, 211–214, 216, 221, 226–228, 235, 242, 244, 245, 252, 253, 269, 278, 280, 287, 301, 307, 331, 339, 344 control xi, xiv, xix, xxi, 11, 21, 25, 27, 36, 100, 101, 105, 107, 115, 119–122, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132, 184–186, 190, 198, 201, 248, 250, 254, 283, 287, 333, 334 conversation analysis xii, 4, 9, 176 cool 90, 100, 120 criticism xix, 211, 219–221, 227, 231, 237–239, 241, 256–261, 263–274 cultural prism 101 cultural representation 100 D dance 82, 102, 103, 107, 118, 120, 124, 130 debates xix, xxiii, 139, 165, 211, 279
350 Subject index
deficit hypothesis 211 discussion x, xviii, xxii, xxiii, 15, 31, 39, 69, 100, 101, 105, 116, 123, 132, 159, 161, 163, 170, 171, 180, 182, 202, 211, 212, 214, 217, 219, 223, 224, 226–228, 231–234, 237, 239, 252, 255, 257, 265–267, 272, 274, 275, 276, 278, 290, 322 doing gender xi, xxiii, 6, 18, 25, 97, 156–159, 171, 174, 179, 245, 310 domestic play xiv, 27, 33 dominance xv, 18, 22, 25, 49, 65, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 163, 170, 171, 231, 245, 249, 252, 274, 276, 278, 347 E education iii, x, xvii, 9, 18, 48, 49, 70, 95–97, 107, 130, 135, 139–141, 147, 172, 201, 202, 241, 250, 251, 254, 279 embodiment vii, 7, 10, 99, 105, 106, 111, 119, 121, 127, 133, 155 emotion(s) vii, viii, x, xiii-xv, xxi, 7, 12-14, 51-59, 61, 65, 68-71, 73, 100, 135, 140, 283, 287, 297-302, 305, 310, 321-327 essentialism 22 ethnography 1, ii, iii, iv, xii, 11, 12, 14, 97, 290, 311 ethnomethodology xxiv, 4, 14, 156, 172, 179 everyday experience 4 exploratory style 224 expository style 224 F face xvi, xix, 3–5, 8, 27, 38, 68, 75, 88, 94, 125, 168, 179, 216, 221, 228, 231, 234, 239–241, 256, 257, 261, 266, 269, 271, 273, 322 face-to-face xvi, 3–5, 8, 75, 88 fashion xvii, 69, 103, 111, 114, 131, 217, 241, 288 female talk xi femininity 1, ii, iii, iv, viii, ix, xi, xiv, xvi, xvii, 5, 9, 13, 35, 36, 38, 45–47, 49,
61, 62, 83–85, 90, 92–94, 100, 105, 106, 108, 112, 119, 126, 136, 153, 157, 209, 242, 256, 273, 277, 289, 299, 344 fiction 9, 47, 297, 333 formula 292–294, 323 friendship vii, xiv, xv, xvi, 22, 30, 37, 39, 44, 46, 51–70, 73, 75–97, 110, 128, 294 friendship cliques 81–83, 91 G gender ascription 283 gender neutrality 24, 250 gendered subjectivity 8, 100 genetic difference 22 girls vii, x, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 4, 6, 8, 18, 21–49, -51–55, 58, 61, 62, 63, 67, 71–97, 99–132, 134, 135, 139, 148, 191, 196, 198, 200, 202, 211, 242, 244, 249, 250, 279, 345 gossip xvi, 83, 92, 93, 109, 111, 117, 130, 196 H habitus viii, xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, 130, 153–161, 163, 165, 167, 169–171, 175, 178–183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192–194, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202–204, 250, 251, 254, 255, 258, 266, 271, 273–275 health vii, xvii, 79, 124, 139–151 hedging 220, 223, 227, 237 hierarchy xx, 12, 124, 141, 219, 231, 248–250, 252, 254, 267, 287, 301, 311 honor viii, xviii, xix, 71, 73, 175, 181, 183–188, 190, 194, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 284, 287, 290, 293, 295, 322, 330 I identity ix, x, xiii, xviii, xxii, xxiii, 3, 6–8, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 44–48, 61, 62, 65, 68, 70, 71, 73, 78, 100, 106, 113, 115, 119, 123, 129, 132, 133, 153, 171, 172, 176, 206, 231, 245, 279, 288, 301, 322, 332, 346
Subject index
ideology x, xi, 7, 23, 24, 52, 94, 114, 147, 299, 300, 303 image xiv, xvi, 39, 40, 42, 45, 99, 111, 113–115, 122, 129, 166, 167, 170, 224, 241, 308 indexing 48, 53, 284, 297 inequality 6, 11, 140, 154, 155, 157, 158, 266, 267, 329–332 instinct 131, 301 institution 141, 176, 213 interaction order xii, 3, 11, 13, 17 interactional accomplishment vii, 21, 22, 32, 45, 47, 64, 68, 69, 71, 244 interactionist tradition xiii, 4, 10 intercultural 325 interruption 5, 9, 11, 34, 312, 346 intersubjectivity 4, 15 involvement 52, 58, 92, 119, 129, 148, 194, 198, 283, 284, 293, 294, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305, 308 K knowledge xviii, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 16, 45, 64, 65, 69, 101, 105, 106, 114, 129, 131, 136, 161, 177–179, 203, 206, 211, 213, 214, 226, 227, 237, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254, 274, 275, 278, 279, 288, 310 L lamentation xxi, 283, 286, 288, 293, 297, 298, 302, 303, 308, 310, 311, 313, 321, 322, 325 language change viii, 329 layering of voices 298, 325 M masculinity 1, ii, iii, iv, vii, ix, xi, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiv, 5, 9, 12, 13, 61, 68, 89, 90, 93, 129, 133, 137, 139–148, 151, 153, 157–159, 164–171, 187, 247, 277, 299, 344 metaphor 122, 136, 293, 305, 323 mimesis 101, 114, 125, 127, 130 miscommunication 48, 73, 245, 329, 345, 346 mixed-sex x, 4, 52, 73
modes of knowledge 105 mothers xiv, 12, 21, 26–29, 36, 38–40, 43, 45, 51, 52, 71, 106, 119, 140, 148 mourning ritual 286 N nonverbal communication 4, 17 nursery school vii, xiv, 21–49, ,71, 73, 244 O opposition 13, 25, 26, 35, 72, 220 otherness 100, 116 P performance xi, xii, xxi, 16, 100, 147, 156, 157, 283, 284, 287, 290, 293, 298, 299, 301–303, 311, 321, 324–326 play ix, x, xiv, xv, xvi, 16, 18, 21, 22, 25–27, 29–40, 42–44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 59, 60, 62–65, 67, 72, 74, 89, 97, 99, 100, 106, 109, 112, 114, 115, 121, 122, 124–129, 136, 146, 234, 247–249, 251, 254, 256, 266, 267, 271, 273, 283, 284, 288, 293, 305, 307, 308, 334 poetic performance xxi, 283, 302 poetry 260, 302, 303, 327 politics xvii, xxi, 17, 32, 36, 47, 49, 133, 134, 150, 151, 165, 172, 241, 247, 280, 284, 288, 289, 301, 303, 325–327 postgraduates 253, 254, 274 poststructuralism xii preference 12, 223, 224 prestige ix, xx, 111, 140, 162, 214, 231, 237, 241, 243, 248 prosody 53, 177, 227, 324 public culture 38 R racism 115 relationships xiv, xv, xvi, 7, 8, 12, 23, 37, 38, 46, 74–76, 80, 82–85, 87, 89–95, 100, 109, 119, 128, 130, 142, 148, 164, 165, 169, 177, 188, 190,
351
352 Subject index
191–193, 198, 202, 203, 205, 252, 283, 295, 303 reported speech 297, 324, 325, 327 reproduction 12, 23, 47, 76, 92, 93, 99, 154, 156, 159, 288, 299 resistance xiv, 6, 12, 38, 39, 46, 60, 109, 190, 221, 272, 275, 288 rituals viii, xix, xxi, 6, 241, 283, 284, 287, 289, 299, 300, 302, 303, 305, 310, 321, 322, 324, 325, 327 romance xvi, 36, 48, 86, 93, 94, 97, 109, 114, 220 romantic love 38 S school vii, xiv, xv, 4, 9, 11, 15, 18, 21, 23–25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37–40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73–97, 102, 107, 111–113, 115–117, 126, 134, 141, 143, 149, 185, 200, 201, 204, 211, 244, 249, 250, 281, 305, 311 self-presentation 119, 176 seminars viii, xix, xx, 244, 247–249, 251–256, 258, 261, 265–267, 269, 272, 273, 274–276, 278 semiotic xi, 299, 300 sexuality 6, 9, 11, 24, 25, 49, 97, 105, 125, 131, 133–135, 142, 147, 152, 183 silence xxiv, 48, 275, 279, 287, 337 social class 4, 6, 11, 12, 129, 154, 155, 251 social construction xxiii, 10, 21, 95 social identity 48, 70, 73, 206, 245, 332, 346 social network 128, 283, 285 social structure xiii, xxi, 3, 8, 10–12, 14, 155, 156, 284, 297, 299, 325, 329, 331 socialisation 107, 130, 157
sociolinguistics x, xiii, 3, 4, 206, 244, 326 status ix, xx, 5, 11, 48, 90, 93, 105, 108, 113, 114, 130, 144, 155, 162, 163, 165, 211–214, 216, 221, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231, 237, 241, 245, 248, 251, 252, 254, 272, 276–278, 280, 310, 329, 334, 338, 339, 341 stereotypes xiv, xv, 36, 38, 40, 52, 148, 213, 250, 255, 267, 298, 343, 347 students xx, xxi, 9, 13, 30, 54, 65, 75–77, 87, 92, 102, 103, 115, 126, 177, 201, 203, 211, 212, 249–255, 257, 258, 261, 266, 267, 271–278 subjectivity xvi, 8, 38, 47, 99, 100, 106, 216, 223, 231 suffering 40, 121, 194, 287, 289, 293, 294, 303, 321, 324 sympathy 293, 294 T teenage girls vii, x, 37, 47, 75, 99–132 television 108, 125, 142, 146, 212 touch 5, 6, 11, 44, 66, 109, 110, 116, 129, 131, 230, 308 turn-taking 177, 231, 244, 275 U unity of the body 100 V variation xii, xv, xxii, 6, 54, 238, 252, 266, 344, 346, 347 video xiii, 99–132 W Women’s Liberation Movement 4 working class x, 38, 72, 106, 129, 151, 152, 157, 251 Y youth 100, 107, 112, 115, 119, 124, 128, 129, 132, 145, 149, 205
In the PRAGMATICS AND BEYOND NEW SERIES the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. WALTER, Bettyruth: The Jury Summation as Speech Genre: An Ethnographic Study of What it Means to Those who Use it. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1988. 2. BARTON, Ellen: Nonsentential Constituents: A Theory of Grammatical Structure and Pragmatic Interpretation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 3. OLEKSY, Wieslaw (ed.): Contrastive Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989. 4. RAFFLER-ENGEL, Walburga von (ed.): Doctor-Patient Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989. 5. THELIN, Nils B. (ed.): Verbal Aspect in Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 6. VERSCHUEREN, Jef (ed.): Selected Papers from the 1987 International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. I: Pragmatics at Issue. Vol. II: Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. Vol. III: The Pragmatics of Intercultural and International Communication (ed. with Jan Blommaert). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 7. LINDENFELD, Jacqueline: Speech and Sociability at French Urban Market Places. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 8. YOUNG, Lynne: Language as Behaviour, Language as Code: A Study of Academic English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 9. LUKE, Kang-Kwong: Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 10. MURRAY, Denise E.: Conversation for Action. The computer terminal as medium of communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 11. LUONG, Hy V.: Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings. The Vietnamese system of person reference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 12. ABRAHAM, Werner (ed.): Discourse Particles. Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 13. NUYTS, Jan, A. Machtelt BOLKESTEIN and Co VET (eds): Layers and Levels of Representation in Language Theory: a functional view. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 14. SCHWARTZ, Ursula: Young Children’s Dyadic Pretend Play. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 15. KOMTER, Martha: Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 16. MANN, William C. and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 17. PIÉRAUT-LE BONNIEC, Gilberte and Marlene DOLITSKY (eds): Language Bases ... Discourse Bases. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 18. JOHNSTONE, Barbara: Repetition in Arabic Discourse. Paradigms, syntagms and the ecology of language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 19. BAKER, Carolyn D. and Allan LUKE (eds): Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. Papers of the XII World Congress on Reading. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 20. NUYTS, Jan: Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On cognition, functionalism, and grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 21. SEARLE, John R. et al.: (On) Searle on Conversation. Compiled and introduced by Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992.
22. AUER, Peter and Aldo Di LUZIO (eds): The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 23. FORTESCUE, Michael, Peter HARDER and Lars KRISTOFFERSEN (eds): Layered Structure and Reference in a Functional Perspective. Papers from the Functional Grammar Conference, Copenhagen, 1990. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 24. MAYNARD, Senko K.: Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 25. COUPER-KUHLEN, Elizabeth: English Speech Rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 26. STYGALL, Gail: Trial Language. A study in differential discourse processing. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1994. 27. SUTER, Hans Jürg: The Wedding Report: A Prototypical Approach to the Study of Traditional Text Types. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 28. VAN DE WALLE, Lieve: Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 29. BARSKY, Robert F.: Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse theory and the convention refugee hearing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 30. WORTHAM, Stanton E.F.: Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 31. WILDGEN, Wolfgang: Process, Image and Meaning. A realistic model of the meanings of sentences and narrative texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 32. SHIBATANI, Masayoshi and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 33. GOOSSENS, Louis, Paul PAUWELS, Brygida RUDZKA-OSTYN, Anne-Marie SIMONVANDENBERGEN and Johan VANPARYS: By Word of Mouth. Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 34. BARBE, Katharina: Irony in Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 35. JUCKER, Andreas H. (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 36. CHILTON, Paul, Mikhail V. ILYIN and Jacob MEY: Political Discourse in Transition in Eastern and Western Europe (1989-1991). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 37. CARSTON, Robyn and Seiji UCHIDA (eds): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 38. FRETHEIM, Thorstein and Jeanette K. GUNDEL (eds): Reference and Referent Accessibility. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 39. HERRING, Susan (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 40. DIAMOND, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a closeknit social network. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 41. VENTOLA, Eija and Anna MAURANEN, (eds): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 42. WODAK, Ruth and Helga KOTTHOFF (eds): Communicating Gender in Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 43. JANSSEN, Theo A.J.M. and Wim van der WURFF (eds): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996.
44. BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI, Francesca and Sandra J. HARRIS: Managing Language. The discourse of corporate meetings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 45. PALTRIDGE, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 46. GEORGAKOPOULOU, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 47. CHESTERMAN, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 48. KAMIO, Akio: Territory of Information. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 49. KURZON, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 50. GRENOBLE, Lenore: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 51. BOULIMA, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 52. GILLIS, Steven and Annick DE HOUWER (eds): The Acquisition of Dutch. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1998. 53. MOSEGAARD HANSEN, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 54. HYLAND, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 55. ALLWOOD, Jens and Peter Gärdenfors (eds): Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and cognition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 56. TANAKA, Hiroko: Language, Culture and Social Interaction. Turn-taking in Japanese and Anglo-American English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 57 JUCKER, Andreas H. and Yael ZIV (eds): Discourse Markers. Descriptions and theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 58. ROUCHOTA, Villy and Andreas H. JUCKER (eds): Current Issues in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 59. KAMIO, Akio and Ken-ichi TAKAMI (eds): Function and Structure. In honor of Susumu Kuno. 1999. 60. JACOBS, Geert: Preformulating the News. An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. 1999. 61. MILLS, Margaret H. (ed.): Slavic Gender Linguistics. 1999. 62. TZANNE, Angeliki: Talking at Cross-Purposes. The dynamics of miscommunication. 2000. 63. BUBLITZ, Wolfram, Uta LENK and Eija VENTOLA (eds.): Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to create it and how to describe it.Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24-27 April 1997. 1999. 64. SVENNEVIG, Jan: Getting Acquainted in Conversation. A study of initial interactions. 1999. 65. COOREN, François: The Organizing Dimension of Communication. 2000. 66. JUCKER, Andreas H., Gerd FRITZ and Franz LEBSANFT (eds.): Historical Dialogue Analysis. 1999. 67. TAAVITSAINEN, Irma, Gunnel MELCHERS and Päivi PAHTA (eds.): Dimensions of Writing in Nonstandard English. 1999. 68. ARNOVICK, Leslie: Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven case studies in English illocutionary development. 1999.
69. NOH, Eun-Ju: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Metarepresentation in English. A relevance-theoretic account. 2000. 70. SORJONEN, Marja-Leena: Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish. 2001. 71. GÓMEZ-GONZÁLEZ, María Ángeles: The Theme-Topic Interface. Evidence from English. 2001. 72. MARMARIDOU, Sophia S.A.: Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. 2000. 73. HESTER, Stephen and David FRANCIS (eds.): Local Educational Order. Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. 2000. 74. TROSBORG, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. 75. PILKINGTON, Adrian: Poetic Effects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. 76. MATSUI, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. 77. VANDERVEKEN, Daniel and Susumu KUBO (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. 78. SELL, Roger D. : Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. 79. ANDERSEN, Gisle and Thorstein FRETHEIM (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude. 2000. 80. UNGERER, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000. 81. DI LUZIO, Aldo, Susanne GÜNTHNER and Franca ORLETTI (eds.): Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. 82. KHALIL, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. 83. MÁRQUEZ REITER, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and apologies. 2000. 84. ANDERSEN, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. 2001. 85. COLLINS, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001. 86. IFANTIDOU, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. 87. MUSHIN, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative retelling. 2001. 88. BAYRAKTAROG LU, ArFn and Maria SIFIANOU (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. 89. ITAKURA, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in first and second language contexts. 2001. 90. KENESEI, István and Robert M. HARNISH (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. 91. GROSS, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. 92. GARDNER, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. 93. BARON, Bettina and Helga KOTTHOFF (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002 94. McILVENNY, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. n.y.p. 95. FITZMAURICE, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. n.y.p. 96. HAVERKATE, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. n.y.p.
97. MAYNARD, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of Pathos in Japanese discourse. n.y.p. 98. DUSZAK, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. n.y.p. 99. JASZCZOLT, K.M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1. n.y.p. 100. JASZCZOLT, K.M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2. n.y.p.
