agenda

[Kenneth Allen Hyde]

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Mary Bucholtz wrote:

> c. Philosophy
> i. Relation to feminism
> ii. Informed by interdisciplinary studies or specific language and gender
> methodologies?

Well, I think that this is the latest issue up for debate, so I thought I
would throw some thoughts in.

With regard to the issue of GALA's relation to feminism, I would have to
say that I think this is a deceptively complicated issue.  It all depends
on what is meant by Feminism.  I think we've already established that we
certainly want to support a commitment to feminism if "feminism" is taken
as "supporting equal rights and opportunities for women, relative to men."
Beyond that, how far do we want to commit ourselves.

Bringing it down to the "front end" level of courses that we might all
find ourselves teaching, Jennifer Coates (among others, and in a number of
texts) has clearly identified to major approaches to gender study of
language, which she labels the "dominance" and "difference" approach.  Is
one of these approaches to be taken as "true feminism" and the other as
something else?  And if so, do we, as gender studies researchers want to
privilege the 'true' feminist approach above the other(s)?  Certainly,
some people would, and have, argued that the "dominance" approach is the
truly "feminist" one (among other authors, Freed, Troemel-Plaetz, Ehrlich
and King, and Richardson have all taken notably strong stances on this
issue).  On the other hand, equally noted authors such as Coates, Tannen,
Maltz and Borker, Cameron, and Jones have argued quite persuasively for an
approach which focuses on "difference" above issues of dominance.  Indeed,
the arguement between these two major approaches has been almost rancorous
at times (and possibly has spilled over into rancor outside of the
published records *grin*).

I think that it may be beyond the scope of this formative discussion to
try and pick one approach over the other.  And of course, these two
approaches are not the only ones that exist.  Functionalist approaches
and psychological approaches (particularly Freudian and Lacanian) are just
a few of the alternatives which have informed gender studies in general
and linguistics gender studies in particular.  There are probably as many
micro-theories as there are feminist and gender scholars.  Should we say
that any of these theories, hypotheses, or models are better and more
valid than the others?  That might make a good long-term goal (say after a
couple hundred years of study, discussion, and theory tweaking), but I
don't think it's a reasonable short-term goal.

In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would be very leery of
committing ourselves to a strong position on "feminism," since we would
necessarily have to then provide a clear (and unfortunately exlusive)
definition of what "feminism" means.  It seems as if it would be better to
say that our goal is to focus attention on language as it is affected by
ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality.  It seems to me that a relatively
theory-neutral descriptive account of the language behavior of a
particular gender group must be at least as valuable as a model of
how political and economic disadvantage is predicted to affect the speech
of women.

Finally, if we are to live up to our goal of being a "gender" focused
discipline, we cannot afford to let one framework, one lens dominate our
viewpoint, to the exclusion of others.  Could we or should we say that
"feminism" is somehow more valid as an approach to gender than "Men's
studies" or "Queer Studies" or "Cultural Studies" or any other rubric?  I
would hope not.  Even if we, as individuals, choose not to subscribe to a
particular viewpoint, I would hope that, as a collective entity, we would
be open to all of these viewpoints and more.  After all, the more
viewpoints we allow, the more we will see, and the closer we will come to
our goal of a complete understanding of gender and language.

May the seas be your solace and the forests a refuge for your spirit,


Kenneth Allen Hyde     |  No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife
Univ. of Delaware      |  between the shoulder blades will seriously
Dept. of Linguistics   |  cramp his style  -- Old Jhereg proverb
kenny at Udel.Edu         |  A mind is a terrible toy to waste! -- Me

//www.ling.udel.edu/hyde/prof/ken.html