The social ramifications of linguistic gender-bending-语言学性别偏移的社会分支.doc

The social ramifications of linguistic gender-bending Celeste Coleman December 14, 2004 Professor Lynn GoldsteinIntroduction The interaction between language and gender has become a hugely popular topic both in sociolinguistics and in the world at large. Numerous books have been written on the ways in which women and men speak, why they speak that way, and what that means for us as we go through our daily lives. However, the picture painted by much research in this area neglects the experience of individuals who do not fit neatly into the gender binary. What can be said about the speech of people who fall outside of the ‘typical’ definitions of masculinity and femininity? What of those people who adopt gender roles more often ascribed to the other gender, and the accompanying linguistic behaviors? Moreover, how is gender constructed, interpreted, and reproduced in interaction? In order to work toward an answer to these questions, I decided to conduct a review of the literature in this area. I will provide an analysis of four of the most pertinent essays I came across, which come from three different books on the intersections between language, gender, and sexuality. I will begin by summarizing all of the articles, and then I will compare and contrast their claims and findings. Lastly, I will share my opinion of the material covered in these articles. Article summaries Hall, K. (2003). Exceptional speakers: Contested and problematized gender identities. This article examines the speech patterns of “the linguistic deviant” (Hall, 2003, p. 353), which is defined as a speaker who “fails to follow normative expectations of how men and women should speak” (p. 353). Hall points out that the overwhelming majority of theories in the area of language and gender are based on the speech of white middle-class heterosexual speakers of English. She speaks of the two-cultures model of language and gender, in which men’s and women’s language differences are seen as a result