wordplay, sexism and denial

[Amy Sheldon]

Since ideology is covert and hegemonic, why should we pay attention  
to "ideological" denials?

On Jul 25, 2009, at 6:36 PM, Bryan James Gordon wrote:

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