INTELECTUAL DIARY
“Major Gender In The Textual Study”
Marini Dondo from Class D
Gender is the most important lens through which we view people and life. It is often
difficult to understand exactly what is meant by the term ‘gender’, and in what sense
it differs from the closely related term ‘sex’. While sex refers to the biological and
physiological characteristics that are defined for men and women, gender refers to
the roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society constructs for men
and women and which are considered appropriate for them (World Health
Organization). In other words, sex is a fixed concept which does not change across
societies while gender is in a state of flux and varies from one society to another.
About half a century after Simon de-Beauvoir’s (1952, p. 267) well-known statement
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”, Deborah Cameron (1995, p. 43)
argues that “One is never finished becoming a woman or a man.” In a similar vein,
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003, p. 30) opine that “As we age, we continue to learn
new ways of being men and women.” Goffman (1977, p. 316) opines that even
walking into a public toilet does gender,
DIFFERENCE VS. DOMINANCE PARADIGM
Over the past years, the studies on gender and communication could be categorized
under two frameworks:
1. Gender as cross-cultural difference
2. Gender as social power/dominance
- Difference Paradigm
The advocates of the difference/cross-culture approach believe that women and men
speak differently because of fundamental differences in their relation to language,
perhaps due to different socialization and early (childhood) experience (Tannen,
1990). Adopting Gumperz’s (1982) cross-cultural perspective, the proponents of the
difference model locate the cross-sex miscommunication in early sex-segregated
behaviours in which boys and girls learn “genderlect” (Maltz and Broker, 1982)
which is carried into adulthood and is the main reason for miscommunication
between two gender groups. For the proponents of cross-gender model the
difference in male-female language usage is so broad that they see it as a cross-
cultural difference. Having a sociolinguistic perspective towards the differences
between men’s/women’s speech styles, the difference approach places emphasis on
the idea that women and men belong to two different sub-cultures.
For Deborah Tannen, a well- known advocate of this approach, men and women’s
linguistic behaviour are so different that she calls cross- gender communication as
cross- cultural. In her book You just Don’t Understand (1990) she posits that the main
reason for the difference between men-women’s speech is that men and women try to
accomplish different things with talk. Men approach conversation as a contest.
Thus, they prefer to lead a conversation in a direction in which they can take central
role by for example telling a joke, displaying information or skill, which Tannen calls
“report talk” (public speaking). While most women’s conversation is a way of
establishing community and creating connection, which she calls “rapport talk”
(private speaking) (Tannen, 1990, p. 74-95). She believes that men approach the
world as a place to achieve and maintain status while women approach it as a
network of connections to seek support and consensus. Tannen is not only
concerned about how people communicate and interpret in conversation, but also
identifies a number of stylistic strategies they use to create rapport/intimacy. Topic
choice, pacing, narrative strategies and expressive paralinguistic features such as
pitch and voice quality are among the identified features suggested by Tannen who
believes that the use of these features characterize a “high involvement style”(1984,
p.31). She sees the style differences in conversational behaviour as the indication of
equal but different modes of behaving. The various ways women make use of
conversation in order to establish intimacy with others, confuses men. One of these
ways is what Tannen (1990, p. 53) calls “troubles talk.” She states that for women,
talking about troubles is the essence of connection. I tell you my troubles, you tell me
your troubles, and we are close. Men, however, hear trouble talk as a request for
advice, so they respond with a solution. When a man offers this kind of information
the woman often feels as if he is trying to diminish her problem or cut her off (p. 49-
53). According to Tannen (1990, p. 32-33) the miscommunication between men-
women occurs when “a meta message” (individual’s interpretation of how a
communication is meant) is read by a receiver through his/her communication filter
and not through that of the sender. She indicates that ‘male as norm’ view point is
what has led many people to believe in the existence of the ‘other’ kind of language
for women as opposed to two separate styles. Furthermore, she makes the point that
both sexes need to understand the inherent differences in their communication
styles which is the main reason for the miscommunication between them. She goes
on by suggesting that if men and women have an understanding of the other’s ways
of talking, they are able to communicate more effectively. Tannen concludes her book
by alluding to Neal Armstrong (the first man on the moon) that: “Learning the other's
ways of talking is a leap across the communication gap between men and women,
and a giant step towards genuine understanding (1990, p. 298)”.
Tannen’s style of writing has been criticized for being very impersonal and casual
which is incompatible with scientific literature. She conveys her information by
mixing examples from her own life with other examples from the real world. Aki
Uchida’s study entitled ‘When difference is dominance’ (1992) was among those
critical responses to Tannen’s book. He critiques the stance taken by the ‘difference
paradigm’ for two main reasons: (ibid, p. 547)
1. This approach is too simple to account for the things that happen in mixed-sex
conversations.
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2. The dichotomization of ‘power’ and ‘culture’ as two separate, independent
concepts is improper (he believes that social interactions always occur in the
context of a particular society).
Tannen’s informal anecdotal style of writing is both informative and entertaining,
however, it does not provide the reader with a specific framework she utilized for
analyzing her data. Her analysis of the conversations relies mainly on her personal
intuition rather than the use of a precise and comprehensive scientific
framework.Furthermore, the experimental evidence she collected for her book belongs
to American women entirely. Thus, whether the results are applicable to other
societies/cultures is unclear.
In a somewhat similar vein, American anthropologists Maltz and Broker (1982) in
support of their stand with regard to a two-culture model, (difference approach)
argue that the main reason for the miscommunication in male-female interactions is
that they learn and use ‘genderlect’ i.e., two separate sets of rules for engaging and
interpreting conversation. They refer to a number of areas in which men and women
use different conversational rules. The interpretation of ‘minimal responses’ is one of
these areas. According to their findings (1982, p. 421) minimal responses, such as
‘yes’, ‘yeah’, ‘mmhmm’ have different meanings for men and women which lead to
occasionally serious miscommunications. To women, minimal responses mean
something like ‘I’m listening to you; please continue’, while men attach much
stronger meaning to them, such as ‘I agree with you’, ‘I follow your argument so far’.
They believe that these norms were acquired in childhood single- sex peer group
interactions (e.g., through segregated educational system) rather than mixed –sex
groups and the issue is therefore one of (sub-) culture miscommunication rather
than social inequality.
Analyzing naturally occurring stories told by women and men in the New Zealand
conversations, Janet Holmes (1993) explored the ways New Zealand women and
men use stories in their daily interactions to construct gendered identities. At the
end of her study, she concluded that men and women do gender by telling stories but
in different ways. Women tell stories as a way of keeping in touch with friends while
in men’s stories ‘doing gender’ involves presenting themselves as being
knowledgeable and competent or, if things go wrong, as having self-awareness, being
sophisticated and reflective.
- Dominance Paradigm
The dominance model, a feminist oriented perspective, stresses that differences
between men’s and women’s speech style arise because of the male’s dominance
over women which persists in order to keep women subordinated to men.
Associated with this paradigm are scholars such as Dale Spender (1981), Deborah
Cameron (2003, 2006), and Pamela Fishman (1980, 1983), to name a few. Through
the social inequality and patriarchy lenses, the proponents of dominance paradigm
voiced their objection to cross-gender model of the difference camp. In a speech
delivered at Leeds University entitled ‘Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth’
Deborah Cameron (2003, p. 145) while addressing John Gray’s book Men are from
Mars, Women are from Venus (1992) clearly articulated the underlying premise for
much of her work. She opines that “any difference in men’s and women’s way of
communication is not natural and inevitable but cultural and political”. In her latest
article (2010) Cameron argues that in mixed-sex conversations, women try to
“disarm potential threats by displaying a submissive or non-provocative attitude
while with other women it is rational to try to form protective alliances by displaying
solidarity and mutual regard. Men are ‘less polite’ not because they cannot use these
strategies, but because in most situations they feel no need to” (p. 185). She criticizes
the ‘difference theorists’ for seeing childhood socialization as the most important
gender constructing process. She (2006) believes that all versions of the myths
regarding men’s/women’s different speech style share some or all of the following
premises:
1. Women are more verbally skilled than men.
2. Language and communication matter more to women than to men.
3. Men’s goal in using language is to get things done while women’s is making
connections with other people.
4. Men’s way of using language is competitive while women’s is cooperative.
While the advocates of the ‘difference paradigm’ argue that women as a sub-cultural
group have different but preferred conversational strategies, the ‘dominance
theorists’ point out that some groups are heavily disadvantaged by their
conversational styles, i.e. the conversational styles of some groups have
unfavourable material consequences for their members (see e.g., Fishman, 1980).
Thus, speakers who employ a less assertive style of speech are less likely to get floor,
to be heard seriously and to be able to control the conversation flow.
The main concern of the difference/dominance paradigm is to focus on the men-
women speech from a sociolinguistic perspective and to look for the sociological
causes of the difference/similarity between their linguistic behaviour. Thus,
reviewing the scholarly studies that carried out on male-female discourse
contributes to the better understanding of the nature of the existing
differences/similarities. It could, further, help to make a connection between the use
of DMs and the sociological facets of interaction by focusing on those interpersonal
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needs the interlocutors have in fulfilling their social roles endowed to them by the
society from which they come from.
Gender is the most important lens through which we view people and life. This study
has outlined findings of previous studies on gender and language, a pervasive topic
since 1970s. The current study was an attempt to challenge such stereotypes as women
are talkative, they gossip more, they are super polite, they are being interrupted more
and they are mainly looking for intimacy and establishing friendship while men speak
more comfortable in public and use more curse and rough language. In other words,
women speak a language of connection and intimacy while men speak a language of
status and independence. To the author, culture is a significant factor in allowing
women/ men to express themselves. For instance, certain ethnic backgrounds allow
“private/ public” talk for a specific gender group or in some cultures ‘overlap’ is a token
of engagement and interest while it is considered rude and impolite in others. The next
time we ask the question of whether men and women have different conversational
styles, we need to take into account the context of cross-cultural communication.
