Language

Language is central both to gender ideologies and to gender and sexual identities as they are performed in the course of social practice. What people say (or write) and, as importantly, what they do not say but imply or take for granted by their utterances, is critical in constructing, maintaining, and challenging assumptions about sex, gender, and gender relations. Different languages offer different resources to their users, and broader sociocultural and historical contexts also affect just how language enters into matters of gender and sexuality. But though details differ, sometimes dramatically, language is always critical for understanding gender and sexuality in social life.

CONTENT

U.S. second-wave feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s pushed language reform, emphasizing how English represented women and when it seemed to obscure their presence. One target was sexually charged, derogatory, or trivializing terminology to refer to girls and women, such as cunt, chick, bitch, girl (for mature women), and baby (for nonintimates). Another involved the nonparallelism of male and female forms, as in cleaning lady versus the nonexistent garbage gentleman; in the absence of marital status information in the male social title Mr. versus its presence in Mrs. and Miss (Ms. was introduced to parallel Mr. but it cannot do that with Mrs. and Miss still in use); and in the laudatory ring of stud (sexually promiscuous male) versus the derogatory tone of slut or whore (sexually promiscuous female). Also targeted was he/man language, the use of the same forms to talk about both humans in general and male humans in particular—for example, the pronoun he in certain generic contexts or the use of man in speaking of humanity. Efforts to change such usages often met with resistance (Harvard University linguists of the early 1970s cried "pronoun envy!"), but nonsexist guidelines had been widely adopted by the end of the twentieth century, and he/man language was rare in public contexts by the early twenty-first century.

Other cultures have looked at content issues somewhat differently, sometimes apparently for linguistic reasons. For example, in French-speaking Canada and other places using languages with grammatical gender (such as France, Spain, and Germany), rather than seeking to get gender-neutral terminology in occupational terms (such as how Americans substituted flight attendant for stewardess), shifts have been more toward creating feminine gender forms to pair with traditional male ones. Studies of metaphorical source domains for speaking of women or of sexual activity have been done in many languages. Often women are spoken of using the terminology of food (especially fruits and desserts, but also sometimes less-appetizing substances), small animals, or flowers, and heterosexual engagement is represented in terms of eating or violent combat. But there is considerable variety and ongoing change in many societies using very different languages.

New or reclaimed terminology has helped change gender and sexual relations. Terms such as sexism (on the model of racism), date rape, queer (as a prized oppositional identity), and transgender do not just label phenomena independently identified but facilitate people's collective work on new political analyses of their situations and their selves. Innovations are not confined to North America or English-speaking countries: Hong Kong activists, for example, adopted tongzhi (comrade) to designate those whose erotic preference is for same-sex partners.

Content goes far beyond word meanings. Messages conveyed implicitly in ongoing discourse count as much or more. Conflating humanity with maleness can happen without apparently ambiguous forms such as man—as in "pioneers and their wives." And content itself can be debated: Consider the discussion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on whether marriage is appropriately applied to long-term committed relationships of two people of the same sex. What matters is how people engage with one another in ongoing discourse—drawing inferences (often unnoticed and unintended by the speaker) and actively making meanings, sometimes challenged and sometimes effective.

STYLE

How people say what they say (or write or speak) is as important as what they say, especially in constructing social identities and relations. To explore vocal dimensions of gendered and sexual identities, linguists have looked at vowel pronunciations and voice quality, intonation and pitch, rhythm and tempo, and volume along with many other subtle but significant features of sound. Vocabulary (content domains, slang or learned terminology, euphemisms, obscenities) and grammatical choices (sentence structures, choice of competing forms) have also been investigated, as have higher-level features of language: kinds of speech events or activities, narrative structure, and genres.

Early research on linguistic dimensions of sex and gender seemed to assume that identities somehow automatically produced styles. A woman would speak women's language because that was who she was (albeit perhaps made who she was through social forces). A gay man would display the voice because he was gay. (Less attention has been paid to the possible social forces that might have led gay men to speak in certain ways.) Male-to-female transsexuals were instructed to choose supposedly feminine vocabulary, breathy voices and swoopy intonations, apologetic requests, and hedged assertions or directives. Research, however, continued to show that real women (and real men) were very diverse, with access to far wider arrays of speech styles than stereotypes might suggest.

By the 1990s much research embraced Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity, that is, that gender (and sexual) identities are not (merely) properties people have—ways they are—but depend on what they do and are sustained in ongoing performances that echo but do not completely reproduce previous performances. Linguists began exploring the fine linguistic texture of the social construction of identities.

How could linguistic resources be deployed to convey (varieties of) femininity and masculinity or straightness or gay or lesbian identification, all interwoven with other identity features? Looking at people who sometimes deliberately perform identities quite different from those they might claim or have attributed to them in other contexts (often thought authentic identities) shows what social meanings speech patterns can convey. African-American male drag queens, for example, draw on (and frequently exaggerate) speech features canonically linked to middle-class European American women. Phone-sex operators who in private life identify as lesbian or bisexual or straight and as female or male effectively present themselves over the phone line as heterosexually desirable and desiring young women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Discovering how people manage these explicit performances gives some insight into more everyday and less self-conscious uses of language in styling oneself as a certain kind of person.

Exploring how a single individual's speech changes from situation to situation is another good tool for better understanding the social meaning of linguistic choices. A young gay male physician is likely to operate in very different linguistic styles in interacting with patients, in exchanges with colleagues, and in backyard parties with close friends. A middle-aged woman scientist who is also the mother of a school-age child will use different styles in discussing her research with peers at a conference, during a meeting with her child's teacher, and at the dinner table with her partner and children.

As with content, available styles keep changing, and their changes help constitute changes in other social practices. English-speaking students of Japanese are often told about its women's language, marked by certain honorification devices, sentence-final particles, pronouns, and verb forms. Letters to Tokyo newspapers in the early twenty-first century continued to bemoan the way so many young women reject these traditional forms, speaking roughly. But even their mothers and grandmothers may well have seldom, if ever, used the canonically feminine forms, which were associated with a Tokyo elite and were foreign to those in other social groups and regions. Miyako Inoue (2006) argues, offering evidence from many different sources, that Japanese women's language was given currency as a form to aspire to during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of efforts to develop Japanese national pride and solidify a modern but non-European, non-North American Japanese state. Early twenty-first-century Japanese women (and men wanting to sound feminine) can still exploit some women's language features for various purposes, but linguistic practice in Japan is far more complex and variable than Japanese language classes for foreigners have standardly conveyed.

LINGUISTIC PRACTICE

Ultimately, what matters for both content and style is how linguistic resources enter into doing the many things that constitute gender and sexual dimensions of social practice. Analysts cannot look just at linguistic forms in isolation but must consider their functions in flirting, condescending, bossing, deferring, suggesting, imploring, joking, gossiping, insulting, arguing, and everything else people do linguistically. And such speech acts and activities do not happen in isolation. They are part of parties, classes, job interviews, playground confidences, sports team practices, family dinners, TV watching, backyard barbecues, coming on, coming out, and the rest, and as such they are deeply embedded in social practice.

Since the early 1990s sociolinguists have tended to emphasize how language functions in gender and sexual practice. Of course, this has made research more difficult. It is easy to count linguistic forms: How many times did she say sorry or did he say dude? How many times did he say goin' or going? How often does she use the singular they ("every student has handed in their paper")? It is far more difficult to figure out what those forms are doing—the significance of their use.

Some insight into the work linguistic forms are doing has come from observations of language use in friendship groups, workplace units of various kinds, families, informal play groups, and musical or sports groups—what have been called "communities of practice" (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). More abstract and larger communities have been useful for analyzing language in magazines aimed at teen girls or at gay men, or in online discourse of various kinds (chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites).

INTERPRETATION AND METALANGUAGE

Linguistic interpretation has been less systematically studied than has production, with analysts often assuming it is essentially automatic. Assigning functions or meanings to utterances, however, can be influenced by interpreters' assumptions about those who produce the utterances. A woman may be heard as unsure if her declarative ends with a rise, whereas a man doing the same thing may be heard as checking on whether the hearer has understood. (Of course, both might be at play in many utterances.) Even what sounds are detected is affected by assumptions about who has produced them. But it would be wrong to conclude that speakers alone determine the meanings conveyed by their utterances. Though some might intend marriage to include same-sex couplings, they cannot always succeed in conveying that. And though some might intend praise by labeling a person or project feminist, not all interpreters will so understand that label. Interpretation involves inferences that go beyond simple decoding of linguistic expressions: Interpreters are actively involved in the meaning-making process.

Linguists and other scholars of language have often been dismissive of ordinary people's ideas about how language is used and structured, dubbing them folklinguistics, and about self-conscious efforts to regulate language use, called prescriptivism and sharply criticized. But since the 1980s, research on language, gender, and sexuality has increasingly highlighted language ideologies as important subjects of scholarly investigation in their own right as well as important influences on actual language use. And attempts by feminists and queer activists to reform language—through, for example, nonsexist language guidelines or hate-speech policies—have been seriously studied along with other instances of what Deborah Cameron (1995) dubs verbal hygiene.

Not surprisingly, ideologies of language compete, and students of language themselves are not immune to taking sides. Is language and gender about separate cultures in which girls and boys grow to be women and men? Or is it about male power and female subordination? Even those seen as advocates of the difference or the dominance approach do not take these questions as adequate for framing investigations of language and gender. Nonetheless, debates about separation versus sexual politics continue to some degree into the twenty-first century. In the area of language and sexuality, there has been debate about what matters in thinking about language: sexual identities—being gay or lesbian or bi or straight or …, or sexual desire—how linguistic practices not only express but help shape erotic preferences and activities. Here too, most researchers find this a false dichotomy, pointing to interrelations of identities and desires and to the necessity of studying both.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergvall, Victoria L.; Janet M. Bing; and Alice F. Freed, eds. 1996. Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. London: Longman.

Bucholtz, Mary; A. C. Liang; and Laurel A. Sutton, eds. 1999. Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.

Cameron, Deborah. 2006. On Language and Sexual Politics. New York: Routledge.

Cameron, Deborah, ed. 1998. The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick, eds. 2006. The Language and Sexuality Reader. London: Routledge.

Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ehrlich, Susan. 2001. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge.

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                                    Sally McConnell-Ginet