Gender and Interaction Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou

Research on language and gender has now been carried out for almost 40 years, and has produced
a huge body of literature. I should mention here introduction to the subject by Eckert and
McConnell-Ginnet, a handbook by Holmes and Meyerhoff and even a journal Gender and Language
launched in 2007. Over time methods that have been employed and the types of explanations have
changed few times along with linguistics and gender studies it is an understandable development.
Concept of gender in language is known since the fifth century BC. However, the sense has been
changing. In the late 1960s along with the emergence of the womens movement the notion of
gender entered the field of linguistics from the point of view of sexism against women. Feminist
movements realized that language was one of the instruments of female oppression by males.
Language not only reflected a patriarchal system but also emphasized male supremacy over women.
The study of gender and language in sociolinguistics and gender studies is often said to have begun
with Robin Lakoff's 1975 book, Language and Woman's Place, as well as some earlier studies by
Lakoff. She raised questions such as: Do women have a more restricted vocabulary than men? Do
they use more adjectives? Since then, a central question has been how language and/or linguistic
interaction helps produce, consolidate and reproduce unequal power relationships between
women and men.
The study of language and gender has developed greatly since the 1970s. Prominent scholars
include Deborah Tannen, Penelope Eckert, Janet Holmes, Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Deborah
Cameron, and others. The 1995 edited volume Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially
Constructed Self is often referred to as a central text on language and gender.
Around 1990s a change in perspective happened. The balance gradually shifted from the more
system-oriented studies to empirical research on how gender relates to interaction, discourse, or
communication.
We will talk about those approaches which consider gender as an activity or performance. There are
three main ideas how gender relates to interaction:
o Gender interaction looks into constrains, linguistic as well as more broadly social.
o Gendered interaction focuses on research which associates certain interactional features
with specific genders.
o Constructing gender in interaction turns to making of gendered selves and gendered others
in interaction.
The transition from a non-feminist perspective on gender to a feminist perspective on gender is
echoed in the tension between the concepts of sex and gender. Sex is usually associated with the
reproductive function and divides human beings into men and women, while gender is regarded as
the product of social and cultural factors. The idea of gender as a social construct was articulated
for the first time by Simone de Beauvoir.
 Two approaches in the late 1980s have been very influential in this context.
o The first one is known as doing gender and was proposed by West and Zimmerman. Their
proposal was to understand gender as the product of social doings, rather than as a set of
traits, or a role. To do gender is to achieve being categorizes as a member of the female or
male sex and preserving this categorization.
o The second one is called gender performativity and is associated with the poststructuralist
philosopher Judith Butler. In her book Gender Trouble she argued that gender identity is
instituted through a stylized repetition of acts and through the stylization of the body. Butler
goes even a step further and says not only gender but also sex itself is a construction arguing
that bodies are cultivated.
Even though these two approached are significantly different they address the same issue: they both
argue against a pre-existing essential nature of gender and conceptualize it as an activity.
However, neither approach explains what is actually involved in constructing gender, what tools are
employed.
Two critiques could be articulated here:
o The differentiation between sex and gender is not as evident as assumed before.
o It has been taken for granted that the distinction between sex and gender made n English is
transferable also to other languages.

GENDERING INTERACTION understands the linguistic and sociocultural constraints that inform
interaction and which are invested with dominant gender ideologies. Constraints can be one of the
linguistic system or the sociocultural constraints.
It is amazing how a fluke of grammar can have an effect on how people think about things in the
world. A good example for constrain of the linguistic system is grammatical/lexical gender and sex
of the person denoted in Modern Greek: there are twice as many feminine nouns, but almost twice as
many masculine nouns denoting humans as feminine ones. Another example can be found in English
language: it is hard to talk about a third person without attributing sex to them.
Sociocultural constraints include gender stereotypes and norms. Stereotyping can be seen as a
particular kind of categorizing, or according to Talbot simplification, reduction and naturalization of
some real or imagined differences among social groups and then taking them as fixed and essential.
To give an example, women are considered to gossip, they chit-chat, chatter, or jabber. Man seems to
be almost semantically incompatible with this type of talk. These stereotypes prove to be very
persistent. The very approach to gender and interaction that looks for differences in the linguistic
behaviour of men and women is held to be reinforcing the stereotype that men and women are
different.
 GENDERED INTERACTION research was a direct follow-up to Lakoffs observation on the
characteristics of womens linguistic behaviour contrasted to mens. Its peak reached with Tannens
publication on the roots of miscommunication between women and men. A huge number of studies
with considerable diversity have been carried out. However, we will concentrate on Janet Holmes.
She argues that women tend to focus on the affective functions of interaction while men, on the other
hand, tend to interact in ways which will maintain and increase their power and status. Furthermore,
Holmes, continuing the Labovian tradition, argues that women use more standard forms than men
from the same social group in the same social context.
The observed differences can be explained by the dominance or the difference models. The
difference models are concerned with differences in the linguistic behaviour of men and women as a
consequence of their differential power in society. On the other hand, the dominance models see
differences as an outcome of social inewuality between men and women. Neither model can provide
an answer because both seem to include a problematic fundamental assumption that men and women
are different.

CONSTRUCTING GENDER IN INTERACTION is a result of a paradigm shift in the early

1990s that entailed: a social constructionist view of gender, a pragmatic perspective on
language use, and explicit delineations of context. Here should be mentioned the work of
Goodwin who argues that talk by the same individual will vary across different activities so that
social personae appropriate to the events of the moment can be constructed. Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet introduced the notion of community of practice, that is an aggregate of people
who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour.
These researched to gender and interaction open place for questions that move away from the search
for differences between women and men. For example: Eckert and McConnell-Ginet showed how
gender, class and power relations are mutually constructed within a particular institution. Since the
1990s there has been growing interest in communities of practice that develop in institutional and
workplace settings.
Lately increasing attention has been paid to the study of diverse femininities and masculities, to
gender as dissociated from sex, and to sexuality.