22.4071, Disc: Review of 'La Realizaci ón de Quejas en la Conversación...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-22-4071. Tue Oct 18 2011. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 22.4071, Disc: Review of 'La Realización de Quejas en la Conversación...'

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1)
Date: 16-Oct-2011
From: Virginia Acuña Ferreira [virginia at uvigo.es]
Subject: Review of 'La Realización de Quejas en la Conversación Femenina y Masculina'


-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:05:29
From: Virginia Acuña Ferreira [virginia at uvigo.es]
Subject: Review of 'La Realización de Quejas en la Conversación Femenina y Masculina'

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Dear Zahir Mumim,

Thank very much for your detailed review of my book, 'La realización de 
quejas en la conversación femenina y masculina. Diferencias y semejanzas 
en el habla cotidiana de las mujeres y los hombres'. In this message, I 
would like to clarify some important points made on it, following the order in 
which they are commented. 

Summarizing the book, it is stated that "Acuña Ferreira aims to dispel 
stereotypical opinions about common characteristics of women's speech 
(i.e. euphemistic) and provide more empirical notoriety to prominent traits of 
men's speech (i.e. aggressive)". I find it necessary to explain more precisely 
what led me to collect and analyze data of complaints about third persons 
both in female and male conversations, i.e., to clarify the aims of the book. 

In the General Introduction, I explain that language and gender studies have 
given much attention to popular beliefs and social stereotypes about 
"women's language", because these devaluate formal characteristics of the 
way women (are supposed to) speak, such as the use of euphemistic 
words, but also certain content features of female talk such as the practice 
of gossip and other similar conversational genres focused on third parties 
discussion. Following, I stress that many language and gender studies have 
challenged this devaluation of female speakers resulting from stereotypes, 
arguing, for example, that women are not euphemistic but polite and gentle, 
or that they are not "malicious" in talking about other people but they use 
gossip to obtain information, to manage conflicts indirectly, to construct 
intimacy and to express moral and emotional support… 

However, this tendency to "celebrate" women's discursive practices 
(Johnson, 1997) has been criticized as it contributes to reinforce popular 
beliefs on gender differences between women's and men's talk; for 
instance, research which defends gossipy practices among women does 
not consider the possibility that similar discursive activities can also be 
found in talk among men. Language and gender research, it has been 
claimed, has given little attention to "men's language" and has made too 
emphasis on "gender differences" (Johnson, 1997), what unavoidably leads 
to a strong reification of social stereotypes. 

In response to these problems, the present book aims to highlight that 
women's and men's talk in same-sex interaction can show differences but 
also important similarities, in order to weaken the extreme polarization of 
their characteristics that results from social stereotypes, and that has been 
often reinforced by language and gender research. To illuminate this point, 
the book focuses on complaint discourse about third parties as one of the 
wide range of gossipy activities that have been attributed to women in many 
languages and cultures in a pejorative way. Drawing on the collection and 
analysis of data from female and male conversations among 
Spanish/Galician bilingual speakers, which were obtained through 
observant participation in "natural" settings, the book is oriented to 
demonstrate that both conversation in female and male groups can focus in 
the practice of this stereotypically "feminine" discursive activity, and thus be 
commonly oriented to the construction of solidarity and emotional support. 
Such similarities, it is argued, could be overlapped by certain differences in 
content and style, as women's and men's complaints can refer to different 
matters, and be expressed according to social norms on appropriate 
"feminine" and "masculine" ways of speaking. At the same time, the analysis 
is intended to offer a detailed description of the characteristics and kinds of 
discursive work involved in complaint activities. 

Regarding Chapter 1, it should be clarified that this chapter is offered as an 
overview of language and gender research as the field to which the book 
should be more specifically appointed; it has been written and organized to 
explain how interest on language and sex/gender emerged with social 
stratification studies that discovered the importance of sex as a social 
variable in the use of standard/vernacular grammatical forms and patterns 
of pronunciation, the so-called "gender sociolinguistic pattern" (Fasold, 
1990), and how thereafter the field exploded with the development of 
pragmatics and discourse analysis, orienting to a search for "gender 
differences" in discourse; such differences, however, are searched and 
explained from two main different angles or points of view, according to 
many other handbooks and articles on the field (e.g. Talbot, 1998; Kendall & 
Tannen, 2001; Mills, 2003): that of the so-called "dominance" paradigm, in 
which differences are primarily seen as mirroring gender inequalities, and 
that of the "difference/cultural" paradigm, in which they are seen as a 
consequence of women's and men's socialization in different cultural 
groups. Each paradigm puts emphasis on aspects of gender as male 
dominance and female subordination versus gender as culture, but they are 
commonly based on a search for differences in women's and men's 
communicative behavior that has defined several decades of research in 
the field, and which has been more recently criticized as offering a too 
simplistic picture of reality, and an extreme polarization of female and male 
communicative patterns. This is argued at the end of the chapter, but it is 
important to stress that this way of organizing and explaining several 
decades of language and gender research is based on most recent reviews 
of the field (Talbot, 1998; Kendall & Tannen, 2001; Mills, 2003; Sunderland, 
2006). Thus, this is a chapter in which the author "tells the story" of 
language and gender studies until the 90's, and finally evaluates their 
development as excessively focused on "gender differences", in agreement 
with other overviews appeared in the last years. Also, the author supports 
the notion of "linguistic sexism" and studies on it, as a really controversial 
area, which has been severely questioned and criticized. 

Having stressed the excessive focus on "gender differences" as an 
important problem after many years of language and gender research, 
Chapter 2 remarks the need for a new theoretical conceptualization of 
gender which allows more dynamism and flexibility in the description of 
women's and men's discursive styles. This theoretical framework is the 
constructivist/performative approach, in which gender norms and 
stereotypes about women's and men's talk are seen as resources for the 
construction of multiple gendered identities in interaction. The main 
difference in comparison with previous approaches to "gender differences" 
is that women and men are not seen as a kind of robots who produce 
"feminine talk" and "masculine talk", respectively, always in concordance 
with gendered norms, stereotypes and expectations, but they can be 
"creative" and mix features from one type and the other in different ways, 
depending on the particular context. Thus, from this perspective it is 
possible to explain, for example, women's employment of linguistic devices 
linked to "men's language" and vice versa. It is one of the frameworks that 
are currently being explored in the field. 

In addition, it is important to indicate that Chapter 2 also includes a review of 
studies on the links between women and gossip, starting from a comment 
on the proverbs that establish them in different languages and cultures, and 
continuing with a review of feminist approaches to "women's gossip", 
defending its important social functions; following, these approaches are 
criticized to the extent they do not consider "men's gossip" and thus 
reinforce the stereotype, as it was briefly explained in the General 
Introduction. On the other hand, studies that tend to "celebrate" women's 
gossip are also criticized as they do not take into account certain varieties 
or subgenres, such as bitching (Guendouzi, 2001), which functions among 
women as a discursive form of competition for "social capital" that 
contributes to the reproduction of sexism (Jones, 1980). In sum, feminist 
approaches to this issue are criticized because of their exclusive focus on 
women's gossipy practices, and because they tend to overlook their 
negative aspects (see also Acuña Ferreira, 2004).  

Having established these problems, the rest of the chapter focuses on 
Günthner's analysis of complaint stories about third parties as a narrative 
genre closely tied to gossip and women, and the establishment of the 
hypotheses which gave rise, from this author's speculations, to the 
constitution of a corpus of complaint activities about third parties in men's 
and women's everyday talk and its analysis in the following chapters (3-6) 
of my book. 

Regarding the final evaluation, the review continues "The introduction of the 
book clearly establishes current problematic issues regarding the analysis 
of women's speech by providing examples of stereotypical women's speech 
characteristics, such as frivolousness and lack of authority, which are often 
intuitively accepted by the general public". I must insist that this book is 
focused on the stereotypical relationship between women and gossip, or 
"talk about third parties" (Guendouzi, 2001), and this is what is advanced 
and emphasized in the General Introduction, to be more extensively 
explained in Chapter 2. Overall, I miss some reference to the gender-
specific attribution of gossip in this review, as this is an essential issue in the 
book; in Chapter 2, stereotyped images of talk among women as "gossip" 
are contrasted with stereotyped images of talk among men as "shop talk" 
(see e.g. Romaine, 1999), i.e., as "serious" conversation on politics, sports 
or economy. While the book addresses gender stereotypes about language 
use in general, and descriptions and characterizations of female and male 
talk in language and gender research, the stereotype of the gossipy or 
nagger woman is the point of departure for the analysis of data here offered, 
and the reason why it is considered that men's complaints about third 
parties demonstrates an important similarity with women's talk that should 
be remarked. 

In respect to the extensive discussion of Lakoff's pioneering work in 
Language and woman's place (LWP) that is offered in Chapter 1, the review 
also comments: "I argue that Lakoff's assumptions may be linguistically 
applied to not only the approaches of domination and difference, but also to 
the constructivist approach, in order to integrate the coherence of discourse 
interaction". I agree that LWP can be actually seen from different theoretical 
perspectives, i.e., though it has been generally appointed to the "dominance 
approach", because Lakoff's particular insistence on social norms about 
"talking like a lady" as a mechanism of social control on women's 
subordination and inequality, her overall description of "women's language" 
is also of interest, of course, for the "difference paradigm" and the 
"constructivist framework". But this something that is recognized in the 
book; in the final part of Chapter 1, both "dominance" and "difference" 
approaches are criticized because of their opposition when they should be 
seen as complementary; on the other hand, when explaining the 
constructivist framework in Chapter 1, I stress that Lakoff's Language and 
woman's place is currently greatly valued as a guide or point of departure 
for the analysis of feminine speech and the display of gendered identities. 

Finally, I would like to stress, once more, that the book focuses on 
stereotypes of female conversation as gossip and talk about third parties, 
oriented to the construction of support and solidarity, in contrast to 
stereotyped views of male talk as "shop talk", oriented to competition for 
expertise and status; these stereotyped images of female and male 
conversation are taken as the background against complaint activities about 
third parties are emphasized as something done both by women and men in 
the data collected and analyzed, as a communicative activity that is 
practiced both in female and male conversation to achieve similar 
communicative goals (affiliation, support, solidarity), drawing on a wide 
range of common devices; Chapters 3-5 are intended to show the three 
basic kinds of discursive work involved in complaint discourse, i.e., the 
dramatic staging of the events, the moral censure of third parties' behavior, 
and the display of emotions; by combining extracts from both female and 
male talk in the analysis here offered, these chapters are also intended to 
illuminate that female and male participants draw on the same resources. 
The exception, the "gender difference", is addressed in Chapter 6, where it 
is argued that female and male participants construct specific styles for 
emotions display, based on certain linguistic devices for displaying affect 
that are framed as "feminine" and "masculine". 

Sincerely,

A. Virginia Acuña Ferreira
University of Vigo


References

Acuña Ferreira, V. (2004). "Complaint stories in male contexts: The power 
of emotions". Spanish in Context 1, 181-213. 
Fasold, R. W. (1990). The Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Basil 
Blackwell. 
Guendouzi, J. (2001). "You'll think we're always bitching": The functions of 
cooperativity and competition in women's gossip". Discourse Studies 3, 29-
51. 
Johnson, S. (1997). "Theorizing language and masculinity: a feminist 
perspective". En S. Johnson & U. H. Meinhof (eds.), Language and 
masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell, 8-26. 
Kendall, S. & D. Tannen (2001). "Discourse and gender". En D. Schiffrin, D. 
Tannen & H. E. Hamilton (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis. 
Oxford: Blackwell, 548-567. 
Lakoff, R. (2004 [1975]). Language and woman's place. Text and 
commentaries. Ed. M. Bucholtz. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press. 
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy 
Press. 
Romaine, S. (1999). Communicating gender. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence 
Erlbaum Associates. 
Talbot, M. (1998). Language and gender. An introduction. 
Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press.



Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
                     Sociolinguistics





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