Linguistics/FemGen

156 Language and Gender Fall 2016

Penelope Eckert Teresa Pratt Rob Voigt
eckert@stanford.edu teresapratt@gmail.com robvoigt@stanford.edu



The purpose of this course is to offer you insight into the role of language in constructing,
reproducing, and changing the social order, and particularly the gender and sexual order.
And perhaps above all, the goal is to help you develop a critical perspective on gendered
linguistic practice in public and private life.

Readings will be from articles available on Canvas, and from the text: Eckert, Penelope and
Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2013. Language and Gender (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. I will donate my share of the royalties you generate to a gender-related
charity of the class’s choosing.

The assignments in this course are designed to help you engage with theory and data, and
above all to think new thoughts. Your work will be judged on the basis of thoughtfulness,
originality (e.g. not picking the obvious issues or examples), depth of analysis, and elegance
of presentation.

Above all, this course should be one long conversation, enriched by a series of assignments
designed to engage you directly with the linguistic practice around you. There will be two
data analysis projects, three small assignments, and a major final project. The final project
will be done in small groups, and you will have the choice of two kinds of project – a field
project and a persona analysis. Both of these should take advantage of everything you’ve
learned in this course. Each group will share their results with the class in an elegant
presentation during Dead Week.

Assignments have due dates and times. Because what you write plays an important role in
planning each class, we can’t allow late assignments. Grades on assignments received after
the due date/time will be reduced by 10%, and no assignments will be accepted after the
beginning of class on the due date.

Grading
Class participation 10%
Corpus project 10%
Discourse assignment 10%
Usage assignment 10%
Honey Badger assignment 20%
Issues assignment 10%
Final project 30%




Week 1 Sept. 27&29: Getting Started
This week will be an introduction to gender as a social construction, and to the many ways
in which language participates in producing, reproducing, and changing the gender order.
On Thursday, we will begin our engagement with language data by discussing the issue of
the gender binary and sharing stereotypes and hunches about binary differences in
language use, in preparation for the corpus project in week 2.

Reading for Thursday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapter 1. (pp. 1-21). (A PDF of this chapter is available on
Canvas in case there aren’t enough textbooks available.)

Week 2 Oct. 4&6: Looking for the Binary
Gender can show up in quantitative male-female differences in the use of particular
linguistic items and constructions. Once we find such differences, the challenge is to figure
out what created this linguistic binary, what it means, and where it breaks down. In this
second week, students will work with a large online corpus to seek such binary differences
in linguistic usage, and to consider what it means to find them or not find them.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapters 2&3. (pp. 37-87).
Acton, Eric (2011). On gender differences in the distribution of um and uh. University of
Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 17(2).
Be sure to download the materials for the Corpus Assignment before Tuesday’s class.

Week 3 Oct. 11&13: Beyond Binaries
This week we will get a feel for the kinds of issues that arise when we go beyond gender and
sexual binaries. We begin with your reports on last week’s projects, and the discussion will
focus on what these projects do and don’t tell us. We will then move on to the readings for
this week, which address issues that problematize gender and sexual categories.

Readings for Tuesday:
Eckert, P. (2002). Demystifying sexuality and desire. Language and sexuality: Contesting
meaning in theory and practice. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts and A.
Wong. Stanford, CSLI Publications: 99-110.
Hall, K. and V. O'Donovan (1997). Shifting gender positions among Hindi-speaking Hijras.
Language and gender research: Theory and method. J. Bing and A. Freed. London,
Longman: 228-266.
For all who are interested, we will show Bombay Eunoch, a film about the Hijras featuring Kira Hall,
at 5:00 PM Oct. 12 in Margaret Jacks Room 126.

Week 4 Oct. 18 & 20: Constructing Gender in Discourse.
Power lies in having your ideas heard and entered into “common knowledge.” The term
discourse refers not only to verbal exchange at a very local level, but to the belief systems
that result from the societal accumulation of exchange. For this reason, we talk about
gender as discursively constructed. This week we will focus on how this takes place, and on
the relation between discourse and power.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapter 4 (pp. 88-118).
Discourse Assignment due Monday, Oct. 17 @ 6:00 PM:

Week 5 Oct. 25 & 27: Politeness, Aggressiveness and Gender
Central to discourses of gender in our society are the notion that women are/should be
cooperative, polite, and unassertive, while men are/should be competitive, aggressive and
assertive. These beliefs create interaction norms, constraints and stereotypes, and play a
role in both the policing and interpretation of women’s and men’s linguistic performance.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapters 5&6 (pp. 119-163).
Usage Assignment. Due Monday, Oct. 24 @ 6:00 PM:

Week 6 Nov. 1 & 3: Gender Projects
Gender is wound up in the construction of communities and nation-states. We will illustrate
this with a focus on “Japanese women’s language.” There is a widespread stereotype of the
gentle, deferential Japanese woman and her distinctively polite and self-effacing speech
style, the product of a long and noble history. But up close, this “women’s language” is an
ideological project and a basis for resistance.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet Chapter 9
Inoue, Miyako. (2002). Gender, language and modernity: Toward an effective history of
"Japanese women's language”. American ethnologist 29: 392-422.

Week 7 Nov. 8 & 10: Constructing Gendered Personae
Social distinctions emerge in the kinds of personae people can legitimately present. This
week we will focus on the stylistic production of personae. We will begin with an analysis of
Randall’s flamboyantly gay parody of a nature film narrator in the Honey Badger.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapter 10
Barrett, R. (1994). "She is not white woman": The appropriation of white women's language
by African American drag queens. Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the third
Berkeley women and language conference. M. Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, L. A. Sutton and C.
Hines. Berkeley, Berkeley Women and Language Group: 1-14.
Honey Badger Assignment . Due Monday, Oct. 31 @ 6:00 PM

Week 8 Nov. 15 & 17: Stylistic Practice
Style is a powerful means of social differentiation and meaning-making, and one can think
of the social world as manifest in a stylistic landscape. Individuals construct personae as
they engage with this landscape, and innovative personae play an important role in social
change. This week we will focus on stylistic practice and the stylistic landscape.


Reading for Tuesday - choose 2 of the following:
Podesva, Robert (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in
constructing a persona. Journal of sociolinguistics 11: 478-504.
Zhang, Qing. (2005). A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the
construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34: 431-466.
Miller, Laura. (2004). Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese Kogals, slang, and media
assessments. Journal of linguistic anthropology 14: 225-247.

Week 9 Nov. 29 & Dec. 1: Implications for Life on Earth

This week we will discuss issues of language and gender in everyday public and private life,
from publicly discussed issues to issues that are never discussed, to changes that we see in
progress.

Reading for Tuesday:
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Chapter 9

Issues assignment. Due Monday, Nov 28 @ 6:00 PM.
Come up with an issue and/or change that you think would be particularly important and
interesting to discuss in class. Send us a brief write-up and be prepared to present it in class.

Week 10 Dec. 5 & 7 Dead Week
Final project presentations





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