Reposting message from last week

[Kenneth Allen Hyde]

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Alice Freed wrote:

> This approach admittedly abandons the worthy ideal of having everyone
> participate in getting the organization started but it doesn't seem to
> be working.

Hear, hear!

>      What I would like to suggest is that we/you/someone take a
> position on the sort of organization GALA (or whatever we choose
> to call it) will be and then see who wants to join. As they said
> in the movie "Fields of Dreams" -- build it and they will come.

Actually, given the discussion so far, it shouldn't be that hard to come
up with a fairly coherent blueprint for an organization which everyone can
be happy about.

As I see it, the only thing that has really been a major bone of
contention (if such it can be termed) has been the issue of whether to
make this organization a "feminist" one as a matter of policy.

> But that doesn't mean that we can't have a feminist orientation as do
> most women's studies organizations and journals.

Okay, here's a question.  Suppose someone was working exclusively on the
language behavior of men in homosocial contexts.  Or even masculine
behavior in heterosocial contexts.  Clearly, this would be an example of
Gender and Language research, but would it be "feminist"?  Would this sort
of research be outside the pale of GALA, if we chose to make this an
explicitly feminist organization?  This is not simply a pipe-dream
situation, either.  Most of you will be familiar with the MBU scenario
which was reported by Susan Herring, Deborah Johnson, and Tamra
DiBenedetto in "Participation in Electronic Discourse in a 'Feminist'
Field" (in 1998 _Language and Gender: A Reader_, Jennifer Coates (ed.)
Oxford: Blackwell).  The debate that is reported and analyzed in this
paper was started when the idea of "men's literature" was challenged
as being innappropriate or unfeminist.  I'm not prepared to argue about
that (although I tend to lean towards agreeing that there is something
inherently "non-feminist" about "men's literature"--although I should add
that I don't think that "non-feminist" means "bad").  However, it seems
that many people are.  My one real worry, which I have stated before (and
many of you are probably sick of hearing *grin*) is that by making GALA a
"feminist" organization, we either open ourselves even more to these sort
of divisive debates, or we artificially preempt them by excluding any
masculine-focused research.  At which point, we are no longer an
organization for research about "gender" and language, we are an
organization for research about women and language.

>      For me, "feminist" means something related to both theory
> and practice. The theoretical: the pursuit and creation of new
> knowledge resulting from the investigation of new questions and
> diverse experiences that have been neglected by traditional
> scholarship because these were established according to male norms.
> (white, heterosexist male norms.)

I think that calling this "feminist" is a bit limiting.  After all,
studying gay men and taking their experiences as valid objects of study
certainly would fall into this definition, but it wouldn't be "feminist,"
would it?  For that matter, studies of any marginalized group would fall
into this definition.

> The practical: This knowledge should be used to create a world in
> which issues related to sex and gender difference are minimized
> (eliminated?) and equal opportunities and possibilities exist for
> everyone. (How could anyone disagree with this?!)

Well, apparently, there are some poor benighted souls who do disagree (can
you say "fundamentalists," boys and girls?).  However, I agree that this
is a great ideal to strive for.  And it is certainly something that I
think this group, if it is to be worthy of it's name, should reify.

Maybe I'm being essentialist (if that term can even be applied to semantic
notions in a meaningful way), but "feminist" seems to me to center study
on "women" or the feminine and exclude anything else from this central
position.  It always seems, to me, to encode an out-of-balance, one-sided
view of human experience.  "Gender Studies" on the other hand seems to
place the focus on the system of categorization that gives us both
traditional masculine and feminine ways of being, as well as the
potentially vast number of other genders.  Maybe it's just a personal
quirk of mine (okay, some people have said it's a massively annoying
obsession of mine), but I think that the systems are generally more
interesting than the objects.

>      4. What I would most like to see beyond the sorts of things
> outlined above is a journal that deals specifically with rigorous
> theoretical and/or data-based work on language, sex and gender.
> No such journal presently exists.

I agree whole-heartedly.  The question that I have is whether this
research is being done frequently enough, and on large enough a scale to
support a journal?  Although, I suppose, if we have the journal, it might
encourage more people to do this sort of work.

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