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Gender_grammar_Schnoebelen.ppt
- 1. You have avery naughty salad Questions? Tyler Schnoebelen tylers at stanford
- 2. (Key to readingthis deck now that it’s posted) • Most of the content is in the notes field. • Check out Appendix A for logistics and follow- up stuff that Lauren started the class off with • Appendix B has stuff we didn’t get to in class but is probably useful for reviewing
- 3. Let’s get startedwith some non-gender categories
- 4. Animals of NewGuinea • Ralph Bulmer went and studied the Karam of New Guinea. They have a number of animal categories (think, “mammal”, “fish”, “bird”, “pet”, etc). • Kobity • Yakt • Kayn • Kaj
- 5.
- 6. The kobity isa category of its own • It’s a strange beast – Lives wild in the forest – Walks on two legs (doesn’t fly) – It’s furry – Lays eggs – Has wings – Has a heavy skull – When hunted, its blood shouldn’t be shed
- 7. So a kobityis a yakt (bird), right?
- 8. The kobity isirritated now
- 9. Go ahead, tryto tell me it’s a bird • It’s just absurd • It can’t fly • It’s really heavy • It can kill children and dogs • It can’t be hunted with arrows • It’s our cross-cousin • “The more Bulmer probes, the more elements are brought in by his informants that prevent the kobity from being a yakt.” (Latour 200)
- 10. From the prompt •“When pressed on their choices, my respondents actually pushed back, citing more detail and finding more features that support their gender assignment.” • Versus • “I asked WAY more than three people what gender my objects were, because I wasn't getting any answers beyond, "I don't know," "Male, I guess -- I don't know why," and, "I don't know... I really don't know.“”
- 11. What to doinstead • You can learn a lot from perturbations – “The number of points linked, the strength and length of the linkage, the nature of the obstacles” (201-202). – In other words, examining a web of connections that join things together. – By denying a claim or shaking an association, we can see how things are joined together, “what holds tightly and what gives way easily, what is negotiable and what is not.”
- 12. (Feel free toperturb this system)
- 13. How many gendersare there?
- 14. Gender ≠ grammaticalgender
- 15. Grammatical gender • Imaginethere were some nice morphemes (little wordlets) for marking gender in English, so that we would say: – Frank manwent to the store – Manbig Frank is always mangoing to the store – Louise ladywent to the store – Ladybig Louise, she’s always ladygoing to the store – Thelady table is ladybig – Theman chair is manpetite
- 16. From other languages •French – Une petite boîte est arrivée de Paris (‘A small box has come from Paris’) • Old English – Seo brade lind waes tilu and hire lufod (‘That broad shield was good and I loved it/her’) • Zulu – umfana omkhulu (‘large boy’) – isihlahla esikhulu (‘large tree’)
- 17. Dyirbal groupings • Bayi:men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc. • Balan: women, anything connected with water or fire, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidnae, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc. • Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake. • Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yam sticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises, language, etc.
- 18.
- 19. What’s the basisof the system?
- 20. Well, gender ~grammatical gender?
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24. Right. Gender ≠grammatical gender.
- 25. ‘Hammer’ 12 out of13 Indo-European languages have ‘hammer’ in the masculine Just chance? Not arbitrary?
- 26. Why? • Hammers areactive, mighty, associated with blacksmiths; all these things make them men • Alternatively, the answer written in to The Washington Post when it asked people to assign genders to English nouns – “male, because it hasn’t evolved much over the last 5,000 years, but it’s handy to have around”
- 27.
- 28. How would youclassify ‘pistol’/’gun’?
- 29. The awful Germanlanguage • (Can I get two volunteers?) • Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip? • Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen. • Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? • Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.
- 30. Dude! Grammatical genderand gender—what’s the story?
- 34.
- 35. Where to look •Colors
- 37. Where to look •Colors • Time • Spatial orientation • Grammatical gender
- 38. Bugaboos in linguisticrelativity • Are you only testing inside the language? • If you’re testing multiple languages, how do you know the translation is really the same? – Use bilinguals and keep the test language consistent? • If you’re judging thinking, can you rule out linguistic interference? – Have them count or something else while performing the task? • What strategies are participants going to use to answer your direct questions? – Can you be more covert?
- 39.
- 40. Take-away • Since thetest was in English, “The semantic representation of gender (once it has been established) is not language specific” (Boroditsky et al 2007: 69). • Why is this? – If ‘toaster’ is masculine, maybe you pull out ‘metallic’, ‘technological’; if it’s feminine, maybe you think ‘warmth’, ‘domesticity’, ‘nourishment’. – Here’s a place where the construction of gender is going on!
- 41. Gimme some adjectives aboutbridges German: Beautiful Elegant Fragile Peaceful Pretty Slender Spanish Big Dangerous Long Strong Sturdy Towering Now English speakers take those adjectives and say “+1=fem, -1=masc” (not knowing where the adjectives came from)
- 43. And there arereal consequences
- 44.
- 50. The power ofgrammatical gender • Tuma:Ta/Tama:Ta ‘tomato’ (fem.) • khya:r ‘cucumber’ (masc.)
- 53. Lak genders • 1:Male rationals • 2: Female rationals • 3: Other animates (and some inanimates) • 4 Other stuff • Question: Where is duš (‘girl’, ‘daughter’)? • It’s in (3) instead of (2).
- 54. Change • But thishappened over time—as a sign of politeness for addressing young women (especially those earning their own living). • All sorts of nouns for these young women have moved to (3). • In fact, you should use (3) for any woman outside your immediate family. • So (2) (the ‘feminine’) is restricted to ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’. There aren’t many nouns left in it, actually.
- 55. Similar in Konkani(west coast of India)
- 56. And in southerndialects of Polish
- 57. Categories! • In Lak,Konkani, and some dialects of Polish we’ve seen the ‘feminine’ gender subdivide • Young women/out-group women move to a different category • What’s left in the feminine gender are the in- family, married, older women • How do we interpret the division? – Are some women more female than others? – Is it about politeness? – Independence? – Sexual availability?
- 58.
- 59. Okay, then let’slearn Gumbuzi • A made-up language; some words are soupative, other are part of the oosative gender • Native English speakers have to learn 20 words – 4 males soupative – 4 females oosative – 12 inanimate objects (randomly assigned to the two genders) • Now gimme the adjectives!
- 60. Oh yeah? Butyou’re still using words
- 61. Let’s use picturesand block language • Take Spanish and German natives, test them in English • Ask them to assign similarities between pictures • But make them say randomly generated letter strings at the same time so they aren’t secretly whispering the gender of the things they’re comparing • Do this again with the folks who learned Gumbuzi
- 64. Maybe gender isjust special
- 67. Meaning making bycategorization!
- 68. Some other items •Objects seem to each be associated with gender in their own way – A large pan is more feminine than a small pan – A large hammer is more masculine than a small hammer – (Recursivity!)
- 70. Here’s Boroditsky’s take-away •More than just a quirk • Spanish and German speakers are doing different things – Even in English – With unlabeled pictures – While doing a verbal suppression task
- 71. How? • Deliberately lookingfor similarities between things in the same category – And finding them – Which is to say, constructing them
- 72. The French don’tknow French
- 73. A problematic baseline •56 native French speakers (14 adults, 42 teens) • 93 masculine words – Uniform agreement on 17 • 50 feminine words – Uniform agreement on 1
- 74. Adult (n=14) Teenagers(n=42) Significance (p) Victime ‘victim, casualty’ 71.4% 42.9% .008 Équivoque ‘ambiguity, misunderstanding’ 64.3% 97.6% .032 Superbe ‘arrogance’ 64.3% 23.8% .003 Oasis ‘oasis’ 50.0% 16.7% .014 Primeur (avoir la primeur de l'information) ‘to be the first to know’ 42.9% 2.4% .001
- 75. Ties that bind(differently for different people/different languages) • We want to know “whether the habits that people acquire in thinking for speaking a particular language will manifest themselves in their thinking even when they are not planning speech in that language” (Boroditsky et al 2007: 62) • Habits! Naturalization! Ideology!
- 78. Will Boroditsky etal get taken up as part of the “the hall of mirrors”? (Discuss!)
- 79. The crucial partof hall of mirrors • Selective attention to results that confirm male-female difference • Including non-significant results • And ignoring results that don’t confirm stereotypes
- 80. If gender isa construction…is it real?
- 81. God’s impact onhumans
- 82. God’s impact onhumans
- 83.
- 84.
- 85. Logistics • Extra Credit:Experimental Participation, but not watching films! • Online Blogs: Min 300 words, Max 350 words (this week & following posts don’t require this, but you may want to revise old posts if they don’t cut it!)
- 86. Uptalk • Has anyonenoticed it more since last Thursday? • Have you noticed if your perceptions of it vary depending on the speaker?
- 87. Answering Unanswered Qs •Minor keys as “masculine” & “feminine” – Composers in the Classical Period – The Sonata Principle • to strive for balance between two musical themes • “masculine” key was to always appear first, aligned with the narration; “feminine” key was the later counterpoint, aligned with the opposing characters • e.g., Wagner’s operas
- 88. Answering Unanswered Qs Publishedby U of Minnesota Press, 2002
- 89. Answering Unanswered Qs •Indirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity – Iconization is a process; Iconicity is a feature • Iconicity: when the properties of a sign convey something about the properties of the object • Iconization: “The creation of an apparently natural connection between a linguistic variety and the speakers who use it” (E&McG: p277)
- 90. Answering Unanswered Qs •Indirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity – Think of iconization as a potential end product, or a most extreme example, of indirect indexicality – The reading for Thursday (E&McG, Chapter 8) will address this again, in a new context (esp. p.293)
- 91. Important Readings • Thursday:E&McG, Chapter 8 • Section: “Peasant Men Can’t Get Wives” • (Besides the April 2nd lecture) This is your intro to Variationist Sociolinguistics • IPA reference: http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ chapter1.html
- 92. Your Call Your callfor more current examples of good research in language & gender… … is what this part of the quarter is all about! TODAY: Gender, Grammar, & Thought
- 93.
- 94. Putting it together •We’re problematizing the gender binary • But we wouldn’t want to deny its importance
- 95. Discussion! • How shouldwe study gender? • How should we study things when we think gender might play a role (but in which gender isn’t the main focus)? • What does it mean to “go beyond gender”?
- 96. Some ideas • Lookingfor male/female difference is okay if you are careful about interpreting results (consider alternate possibilities) – Split your data between boys and girls, but try other stuff like teacher’s pet/non-teacher’s pet – See what the structure is within the boy/girl division (we’ve alluded to this with Eckert’s study of burned-out burnout girls; sports jocks vs. corporate jocks) • This will get you thinking about recursivity and how binaries are constructed – Lab methods are good, but you also need ethnographic methods • These allow more nuances to emerge. • In other words: use multiple methodologies to get at your research question – Again, the key is not to take any of our categories/assumptions for granted. If we question those, we stand a pretty good chance of not being part of the problem.
Editor's Notes
- #8 That’s what Bulmer thought. He calls it a cassowary and looks for why the Karam separate it from birds (when OBVIOUSLY it’s a bird).
- #9 So are the Karam.
- #10 “Do they mind if Bulmer says it is a bird? Yes, they seem to mind a lot. They throw up their hands in disgust. They say it is absurd. If Bulmer insists, many arguments are brought in as to why it cannot be a bird; the cassowary cannot be hunted with arrows, it is a cross-cousin, it lives in the wilderness...The more Bulmer probes, the more elements are brought in by his informants that prevent the kobity from being a yakt.” [Latour: 200]
- #11 http://ling156.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-xbox-controller-a-thermos by Geoffrey Woo http://ling156.ning.com/profiles/blogs/i-got-nothin by Eva Grasrud
- #12 Each word activates various other words. Meaning emerges from the relationships that people assign to what’s been activated. The connections are the interpretation and this is what allows the user to act. While close analysis of speech can help uncover many expectations, expectations around categories can be clear even without a complete transcript. When we get categories “wrong”, we are essentially denying a claim or shaking an association, and this helps us see how sets of elements are tied together. “Trials trace the limit of a paradigm, that is the set of elements that have to be modified for some association to be broken away or for some new one to be established” [Latour: 201]. You don’t know in advance what shape it has, but you learn by probing “what holds tightly and what gives way easily, what is negotiable and what is not.” Latour’s point here is that you can’t reveal systems of associations without such perturbations and questions. His concept of a paradigm (and a culture) is that it’s one of the consequences “of building longer networks and of crossing other people’s path” [Latour: 201]. Disambiguation—indeed the entire enterprise of creating categories—involves crossing users’ paths, reflecting the connections we find, and giving room for new ones to emerge.
- #13 That is, contradict, interrupt, ask questions, etc.
- #15 Gender derives etymologically from Latin genus, via Old French gendre, and originally meant ‘kind’ or ‘sort’. We use “noun class” and “gender” interchangeably when speaking about grammatical agreeement.
- #17 French and Old English have genders that are based around biological sex; Zulu’s system isn’t.
- #18 For a long time, metaphors were neglected children of philosophy and linguistics. People saw them as unimportant curiosities. Starting in the 70s, George Lakoff—who you’ll find over in the East Bay at Berkeley—started changing that. One of his early books was called, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. And by the way, people who know of this book often get the title wrong. It is telling that they remember it as “Women, fire, and other dangerous things.” This book, in part, is about the way different languages classify things. One of the aboriginal languages of Australia is Dyirbal. Whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence, the noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words: bayi, balan, balam, bala. These words classify all objects in the Dyirbal universe and to speak Dyirbal correctly, one must use the right classifier before each noun.
- #19 Feature 30: Number of genders Nigerian Fula is exceptional, having around twenty genders, depending on the dialect (Arnott 1967; 1970: 67-75; Koval´ 1979; Breedveld 1995: 295-460).
- #20 Feature 31: Basis of noun class/gender (based on sex or not?)
- #21 Given that most of the genders in language are sex-based (when they exist), maybe gender and grammatical gender are connected…but…
- #23 Fwiw, in most of the 13 languages reported, ‘wind’ is actually masculine.
- #25 Well, all that looks arbitrary. But not so fast. (What I’m doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. There’s something there, but we don’t get much—other than trouble—by saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)
- #26 (Greek has neuter)
- #27 English and Spanish speakers tend to think of natural objects as feminine and artifacts as masculine (Mullen 1990; Sera, Berge, and del Castillo 1994). English speakers are pretty consistent with gender assignments even though English doesn’t have a formal grammatical gender system (Sera, Berge, and del Castillo 1994). English speakers tend to match animal categories in Spanish, German, and Russian (Boroditsky and Schmidt 2000). Found by Boroditsky: The Washington Post asked its readers to assign a gender to a noun of their choice and explain their reasons: KIDNEYS -- female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs. HOT AIR BALLOON: male, because to get it to go anywhere you have to light a fire under it... and, of course, there's the hot air part. HAMMER -- male, because it hasn't evolved much over the last 5,000 years, but it's handy to have around. REMOTE CONTROL -- female. It gives man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.
- #28 Ah, but not so fast. (What I’m doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. There’s something there, but we don’t get much—other than trouble—by saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)
- #29 What’s your guess for ‘pistol’? Feminine (7/14): Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Albanian, Kurdish Masculine (5/14): French, Irish, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian Neuter (2/14): Dutch, Greek
- #30 But let’s even look inside a language. Here’s a translation of German that Mark Twain gives us (http://www.yolanthe.de/stories/twain01.htm).
- #31 Ah, but not so fast. (What I’m doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. There’s something there, but we don’t get much—other than trouble—by saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)
- #32 From Lera Boroditsky The idea is that categorization may affect object representation.
- #33 Some Amazon reader summaries: 1. "The Languages of Pao," by Jack Vance, is set in part on the planet Pao, a world populated by the descendants of human colonists. Pao's huge population is extremely docile by nature. Because the people's passivity makes them easy prey for conquest and exploitation, the planet's monarch seeks help from Lord Palafox, an official from the technologically advanced world of Breakness. Palafox's plan is to make the Paonese able to defend themselves in the following way: newly created languages will be used as tools to transform Pao's culture and mass psychology. 2. "The Languages of Pao" was first published in 1957. It is written in the classic style of my favorite SF author. The story is set on one of those typical, out-on-the-edge-of-the-galaxy worlds that Vance loves to create, complete with the typical flowery anthropological descriptions of eccentric human societies he is famous for. Beran Panasper is the "Medallion," heir to the throne of his father, the "Panarch" or emporer of the planet Pao. The Panarch is assasinated by Bustamonte, the "Ayudor," Beran's uncle, who becomes regent. Bustamonte tries to kill Beran so that he can become emporer. Beran is saved by Lord Palafox, a dominie of the Breakness Institute, where he takes Beran for safety. Palafox has a plan to change the character of the docile people of Pao by creating new languages which will morph them into technicants, warriors, merchantilists and diplomatic managers, depending on which language is learned. This is Jack Vance in his relative youth and a very enjoyable story.
- #34 Comic by Stephanie Shih: http://moralessfunology.blogspot.com/
- #35 This is what Benjamin Whorf really looked like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf
- #37 Where do you divide up the color wheel? Is it based on the words you have for colors? If we do perception tests, are Russians and Japanese speakers different from English speakers since they lump green/blue together?
- #38 For time: Imagine that you had a meeting on Wednesday but then someone said it had been moved forward two days. When is the meeting? About to get off the train: overwhelmingly Friday In the middle of their journey: split pretty evenly, slight preference for Friday For spatial orientation, consider that some languages don’t have “left” and “right” and only use cardinal directions—”the teaspoon is north of the cup”. The question is whether that changes their behavior in tasks about moving around in space.
- #40 Well, Borotidsky et al (2002) control for whether your language has ‘apple’ as a feminine or a masculine (or a neuter). You’ll get 24 objects with male/female names and then they’ll quiz your memory. Do you remember the names better when they match the grammatical gender? (Yes.)
- #43 Here, Michelangelo makes Dusk (on the left) a man and Dawn (on the right), a woman. We often see representations in art go along with the language’s gender. Examples: Days of the week in different languages “Sin” (feminine in German, masculine in Russian) Death in fairytales (Russian vs. Brothers Grimm)
- #46 What do these look like? Tomatoes.
- #47 Dangerous and tempting. "Okay," he relents, "what else might it resemble? Notice it is red, like a woman's lipstick. It is soft and round. Get it? It reminds you of a woman's flesh."
- #48 And what about these? What do cucumbers look like?
- #49 Do I have to spell it out?
- #50 How could you do this to Patrick?
- #51 You can use grammatical categories to understand the world around you.
- #52 When I originally encountered the idea that cucumbers and tomatoes shouldn’t be put together (in a salad or anywhere else), I thought it was some ridiculous misunderstanding by Americans stationed in Iraq. American commanders cite al-Qaida's severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland said. http://www.blnz.com/news/2007/04/20/Iraqi_insurgents_fighting_each_other_ther.html But it seems to be real. For example, http://muslimlawprof.org/2008/07/21/stupidity-and-the-sharia-in-our-times.aspx. No cucumbers and tomatoes together. Even placing them side by side in these crates would have led at least to a whipping, maybe death. I was puzzled, my brother in law was not. He told me that in fact when he was in Kirkuk the graffiti forbade three things: salads (which in Iraq is basically cucumber and tomatoes), shorts and beauty products for men. This was hard to understand. "Look at this," the vegetable seller said to me, holding up a tomato. "What does it look like?" "A tomato," I said. "No, it is a tomato, but what does it look like." "It looks like a tomato, that's what leads me to conclude it is a tomato. If it looked like a horse, I'd say it was a horse. It does not. It looks like a tomato. It is a tomato." I think I am making a philosophical point, maybe Hume or something, but it's almost 120F outside and I don't want to be dilly dallying asking about Al Qaeda. If the terrorists don't get me, the police might. Hume can wait. "Okay," he relents, "what else might it resemble? Notice it is red, like a woman's lipstick. It is soft and round. Get it? It reminds you of a woman's flesh." "I see," I said. But I thought, man do you need a wife if you look at a tomato and think that. Then he picked up the cucumber and was about to ask me what I thought it looked like, when I cut him off. That one I could follow better. If a tomato was a woman, I could well assume what a cucumber was. "So the idea is that it reminds people of sex, it's the mixing of the man and the woman, the cucumber and the tomato, and unlawful sex at that, and so they forbade it."
- #53 Here, find the Daghestan Highlands by looking for “Lak”.
- #55 See Xajdakov 1963: 49-50 about the politeness strategy. Within the family, older women such as ninu ‘mother’ and amu ‘grandmother’ are addressed and referred to using gender II forms. Thus gender II is semantically restricted and is left with extremely few nouns in it.
- #56 Something comparable has happened in Konkani (Indo-European; west coast of India; Miranda 1975: 208-13), where the word for ‘girl’ was neuter. Where human referents are concerned, the neuter has become the gender for young females (or those relatively younger from the speaker’s standpoint), while the feminine is for old, or relatively older, females.
- #57 A similar change in the core meaning of genders has occurred in some southern Polish dialects (ZarOba 1984-85). The meaning of the feminine has changed in both dialect types, being restricted now to denote married women. (Feminine nouns which are not semantically motivated also remain feminine.) For further details on all these, and suggestions as to how they have arisen, see Corbett (1991: 24-26, 99-101).
- #59 Here’s a potential criticism Boroditsky et al will need to address. They want to show that something is going on in the brain—that cognition is different, not just behavior.
- #62 Ps—If you use people who have different degrees of familiarity with Spanish/German, you can predict similarities based on which one they are better at.
- #63 From Lera Boroditsky
- #64 From Lera Boroditsky
- #71 (Of course she allows that maybe our verbal suppression tasks are suppressive enough.)
- #72 Or just because they have the same category name (not feature similarity)? But Boroditsky et al (2002) rule that out by mixing up Gumbuzi genders. People do stuff randomly then, assigning no special meaning to the category. See Boroditsky et al (2007): 74 for a run-down.
- #73 http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005411.html
- #74 If you’re studying how people learn French in college, you want to be able to compare them to native speakers (who will get everything pretty much right on your proficiency assessment tests). Ayoun (2007) finds that native French speakers really don’t agree on the gender of many nouns, though! Ayoun was looking at some “anecdotally tricky” nouns, but many of them were just plain old nouns.
- #75 These are all in the dictionary as feminine…although you might find some dictionaries allowing oasis to be masculine.
- #76 What’s your folk explanation of why something is a particular grammatical gender? It’s a quick road to saying that the object has some essential quality. It seems fairly plausible that you need to create some story, even as a native language learner, to keep track of what object is what gender.
- #77 Language and culture aren’t really things like hats that we can take on and off at our own leisure.
- #78 Sometimes when you put on a hat you’re stuck with it. If this woman wears this hat everyday, what does it mean for her to say, “Well, I’m not really the sort of person who wears parsley on my head”. Habitus: Internalized structure (derived from pre-existing external structures) that determines how an individual acts in and reacts to the world (Throop and Murphy 2002). It functions below the level of consciousness. You can't control it or really be introspective about it. "They embed…values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body--ways of walking or blowing one's nose, ways of eating or talking--and engage the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world" (Bourdieu 1984). Hexis: The way of experiencing and expressing one's own sense of social value. (Bourdieu 1984) Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s wholly social informed relation to the world, are expressed. […] The most frequent articulatory position is an element in an overall way of using the mouth (in talking but also in eating, drinking, laughing etc.) […] in the case of the lower classes, articulatory style is quite clearly part of a relation to the body that is dominated by the refusal of ‘airs and graces’ […] Bourgeois dispositions [esp. petit bourgeois] convey in their physical postures of tension and exertion … the bodily indices of quite general dispositions towards the world and other people, such as haughtiness and disdain. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 149)
- #79 From Lauren: My feeling is that Lera's research is outside the hall of mirrors because she's exactly interested in questioning if language structures/reflects/reproduces gender, and furthermore, is analyzing the results across speakers of different genders, looking for a gender result shared by men and women by the virtue of the language they speak, and not their gender.... While most of the examples of the hall of mirrors are things like "men do this, women do that," bringing evidence to the table that perpetuates particular ideologies, Lera's task of having people rate adjectives as masculine or feminine is tapping into existing ideologies to test how they're reproduced in language.
- #80 I ask the question about hall of mirrors because I think there’s some misunderstanding about it. Here’s the sitch.
- #81 So one of the things we don’t want you to walk away with is the sense that thinking of gender as a construction means that gender doesn’t have a real impact. That means that the question on this slide isn’t quite worded right. What does it mean to be real?
- #82 Here, imagine a Judeo-Christian-Islamic god (but any other will do, probably). If such a god exists, the effects are total and complete (eternal damnation, everlasting salvation).
- #83 But even if such a god DOESN’T exist, the effects are HUGE—in history as well as in individuals’ personal lives. Not infinite, but ENORMOUS and worthy of study. Certainly “real”.