wordplay, sexism and denial

[Bryan James Gordon]

This just occurred to me, and I wonder if anyone's done research on it.

I've got in arguments before over whether saying "son of a bitch" as an
interjection is sexist. This is different from the predicative usage, "s/he
is a son of a bitch", or from the naming usage, "son of a bitch" in
reference to a person. Interjective "son of a bitch" is used to express
strong surprise, and can express either strongly positive or negative
stance, usually towards an event which has just happened, as in "Son of a
bitch that was a great rollercoaster" or "Son of a bitch I can't believe all
these red lights."

Do speakers still have a sexist representation in their minds? I think so. I
hear people playing with words all the time, and I have heard "son of a
whore", "son of a skank", "son of a mother fucker", in addition to the more
traditional euphemism "sun of a gun" (which itself has a sexist history,
albeit less obvious).

Searching for new constructions on Urban Dictionary with more than 10 thumbs
up, I found "son of a fuckfaced bitch", "son of abortion", "son of a
mother", "son of a motherless goat" (which has some racialisation hints in
its review), "son of a fuck" (reviewed as closely related to "son of a
whore"), "son of a vagina", "son of a fucking bitch", and the appalling "son
of a mother fucking shit cunt bitch" (27 thumbs up); and phonological
euphemisms for bitch such as "son of a biscuit", "son of a batch of
cookies". Versions based on male indexicality such as "son of a cock" were
universally rated low. The only popular replacements for "bitch" that were
not overtly misogynistic were "son of a crap", "son of a monkey" and "son of
a diddly", the latter directly derived from the euphemism practices of the
Simpsons character Ned Flanders. "Son of a preacher man", thank heavens,
appears to have escaped all this indexicality thus far.

In constructionist terms, this is evidence that there is a "son of a X"
construction, where the X slot is limited to misogynist words, and its
prototype is "bitch". Some wise constructionist on Urban Dictionary even
noted for the "son of a" entry that it was really "son of a bitch" minus the
"bitch"; and many other headings mentioned their relation to "son of a
bitch" as well. For people to invent new "son of a" expressions properly, or
to be able to interpret them properly when they hear them, they must have
this representation in their mind. (This interpretation half is akin to what
Jane Hill means when she says people have to know negative stereotypes about
Mexicans in order to "get the joke" of Mock Spanish.) I would guess that
anyone who has spent time in an English-speaking country has a "son of an X"
representation, replete with the misogyny requirement, although the usage
specifics of how it gets recombined may vary from country to country and
region to region.

Yet people who use the construction fiercely protest labelling it as sexist,
including many people who have been taken in by the dowdy-faced schoolmarm
image of feminism that Bucholtz and Hall criticised queer theory for
harbouring. Being relatively convinced of Silverstein's idea of indexicality
"all the way down", I think such usages are quite sexist, but that it's
important to recognise the ideological covertness under which this sexism
masquerades. Most people I talk to think that what they are doing when they
use such usages is "just" expressing surprise. In typical cases, iconisation
causes e.g. a 4th-degree indexical to be read as a 1st-degree indexical, and
degrees 2 and 3 are erased. But what we have here is the opposite, where
it's the sexist history of the utterance - degrees 5+ - that are erased. Is
this a different kind of iconisation/erasure? Whatever it is, the process of
ideological denial occurs in many, many different linguistic arenas,
including the aforementioned Mock Spanish and even overtly racist joking.
>From a political standpoint, what to do?

-- 
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Bryan James Gordon, MA
Joint PhD Program in Linguistics and Anthropology
University of Arizona
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