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Gendered Language

This material was written by Nicole Archard (Mayhew).

Description of the Module

How to learn to distinguish and evaluate the values expressed through texts

How to learn to distinguish how different texts are valued

Student Exercises

Resources

Description of the Module

In this Module students will explore and evaluate the ways in which language shapes and reflects culture and values. Students will develop their own understanding of values as well as the process of valuing.

Through the study of their prescribed and related texts students will consider the nature of the influence of social roles and expectations and examine the relationships between power, gender and language.

In the course of their study students will learn to identify the societal assumptions relating to the roles of males and females and analyse how these are portrayed through the visual and written language of a text. In identifying the gender assumptions that are imbedded in texts students will discern whether these portrayals of gender are the result of the composer's own contextual influence, either consciously or subconsciously, society's predetermined schemata of gendered roles or the readers own assumptions. Students will learn to question the purpose of texts, analyse how the reader is positioned by the text and determine how the constructions of gender are produced, regulated and challenged within a text.

Through close study of the prescribed and related texts students will develop:

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How to learn to distinguish and evaluate the values expressed through texts

  1. Demonstrate an understanding of the difference between gender and sex.
    "Gender is not something we are born with, and not something we have, but something we do - something we perform." (Lannguage and Gender, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, p10).

    Students need to demonstrate an appreciation that gender is a construction built upon by particular values and attitudes
    .
  2. Demonstrate an understanding of the definition of value and attitude in order to then apply these terms to the texts studied.
    "Values are ideas to which people attach importance, and on which they base their actions. People acquire their values from the social environment they live in. Texts can provide clues to a society's values through their language and structure, and through the way in which they are read and used." (Literary Terms. A Practical Glossary. Brian Moon).

  3. Identify the values found in prescribed and related texts and evaluating these in relation to their context:
    • roles of men and women
    • marriage
    • race
    • gender
    • social class
    • love
    • relationships

  4. Analyse how language exposes assumptions relating to gender and social roles in prescribed and related texts.

  5. Analyse the forms and structures of language in exposing assumptions relating to gender, including such things as:
    • syntax
    • register
    • discourse
    • narrative/metanarrative
    • linguistic signs
    • signifiers
    • speech tags
    • point of view
    • focalization
    • foregrounding
    • binary opposition
    • figurative language (including: metaphor, simile, metonymy, and symbol)

  6. Identify the schema for masculinity and exploring how it is represented in texts through language, eg:
    • strong
    • violent
    • authoritarian
    • hunter

  7. Identify the schema for femininity and exploring how it is represented in texts through language, eg:
    • beautiful
    • emotional
    • submissive
    • dependent

  8. Analyse and assessing how texts are both products of and influenced by:
    • the composers own contextual influence (imbedded either consciously or subconsciously)
    • the readers own assumptions of gender
    • society’s predetermined schemata of gendered roles.

  9. Demonstrate awareness that texts are the construction of the author and are therefore influenced by the author's gender, values and attitudes.
    Unlike other critical theory, the majority of critical theory on gender is written by women. Therefore it is often biased or opinionated towards the feminist perspective.

    Students need to learn to be objective when studying the works of theorists and question texts, motives for presenting men and women in particular ways. (See Review Essay: Selling the apolitical, on Deborah Tannen)

  10. Evaluate how representations of gender are forever evolving.
    Students should define the following terms:
    • Masculinity/Masculine/Masculinist/Masculinise
    • Femininity/Feminine/Feminist/Feminise
    • Patriarchy/Patriarchal
    • Matriarchy/Matriarchal
    • Metrosexual
    • SNAG
    • Genderless
    • Phallocracy
    • Misogynist
    • Femme fatale

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 How to learn to recognize how different texts are valued

  1. Ask the following questions of prescribed and related texts:
    • How are male and female characters represented in texts, conventionally, unconventionally? Why? To what purpose?
    • What do characters do? What roles do they perform?
    • Are they depicted in active or passive roles?
    • What kinds of character traits, plot structures and settings are associated with femininity and with masculinity?
    • What qualities are attributed to being male or female?
    • How do characters engage with other characters of the opposite sex? The same sex?
    • Do characters demonstrate the schemata of their gender? What happens when characters move outside of this?
    • How are gender assumptions being made in the text? Decide whose assumptions these are; society's, the author's or the reader's.
    • How is the reader positioned by the text? Are views relating to gender imposed on us by the author? Are these male or female views?

  2. Study the different contexts, genres and forms of prescribed texts and related texts.

    The Floor of Heaven : Postmodernist Verse novella; contemporary context.

    Twelfth Night: Play; Elizabethan context.

    Elizabeth :Film; Elizabethan context in which it is set and contemporary context in which it is made.

    Women and Men in Conversation : Non fiction; contemporary context.

  3. Interpret and analyse the conventions of written, spoken and visual language in the prescribed and related texts.
    Students should demonstrate an understanding of how these conventions convey attitudes and ideas in relation to gender and how form is also a reflection of the context in which the text is constructed.
    Written texts:
    • metaphor/simile/metonymy
    • symbolism
    • emotive/persuasive language
    • juxtaposition/binary opposition
    • recurring motifs
    • suffixes/prefixes
    • pronouns
    • prose/verse

    Film/Visual texts:
    • colour
    • light/shade/tone
    • mise-en-scene
    • vectors
    • salience
    • foreground/background
    • composition
    • perspective

  4. Identify and explain the following attitudes and ideas for the prescribed texts:

     The Floor of Heaven
    • Women and men presented as binary opposites.
    • Gender/identity of narrator is often unclear.
    • Gender assumptions implied through physical descriptions.
    • Postmodernist idea that life does not need to make sense or have meaning.
    • Text questions whether human behaviour is socially constructed or innate.
    • Text often presents antitheses in order to debate the role of men and women.
    • Women need to become masculine in order to gain power/control.
    • Men are defined through masculine traits (drinking/fighting).
    • Text deals with the transference of identity.
    • Men are no longer providers; they lose their ability to maintain control.
    • Financial success for men means a meaningful existence.

    Twelfth Night
    • Play conforms to rigid codes of gender behaviour/identity that were characteristic of the Elizabethan context.
    • Action of the text demonstrates that individuals are more fluid than society allows them to be (able to debate stereotypes).
    • Both Viola and Olivia are portrayed as capable women who are able to look after themselves, they have escaped patriarchal society (to what extent?).
    • Juxtaposition between imposed society and capacity of individuals of either gender.
    • Olivia's acceptance of Sebastian and Cesario leaving the play with Orsino, but still dressed as a man, asks the question: does gender really matter?
    • Does the play end with the triumph of marriage as reasserting natural order or is it the unnatural imposition of a discipline that suits the established social order?

    Elizabeth
    • Film both challenges and conforms to gender codes. Society is represented as patriarchal despite a female head of state.
    • For women to gain power within this patriarchal society they must abandon their femininity. Elizabeth must "become a virgin."
    • The cross genre of historical and romance film leads to conflicting attitudes and values regarding the representation of gender. These different genres are themselves the result of the two contexts applying to the film.
    • Masculine behaviour is portrayed as pragmatic, demonstrated through conflict, religion and politics.
    • Feminine behaviour is portrayed as emotional, demonstrated through interpersonal relationships and attitudes to love. For Elizabeth to gain power she must step outside of the emotional and instead choose the rational view to marriage by becoming "married to England".

    Women and Men in Conversation
    According to Tannen, "It's not that journalists, other writers, or everyday speakers are deliberately, or even unintentionally, 'sexist' in their use of language. The important point is that gender distinctions are built into language. The words available to us to describe women and men are not the same words. And, most damaging of all, through language, our images and attitudes are buttressed and shaped. Simply by understanding and using words of our language, we all absorb and pass on different, asymmetrical assumptions about men and women." (p243)

    This idea demonstrates our incapability of communicating, oral or otherwise, in an 'ungendered' way.

    The following terms and ideas presented by Tannen should be applied to the other prescribed and related texts in order to gain an understanding of the above assumption:

    • Metamessages
    • Genderlects
    • Symmetricalrelationships
    • Asymmetrical relationships
    • Report Talk
    • Rapport Talk

  5. Identify the relationship between power, gender and language in prescribed and related texts.  
    By using Tannen and other critical theorists, students should be able to identify how language both reflects and produces positions of males and females within society.

    Students should analyse the representation of gender in texts by asking such questions as:

    • Does women's speech render them as tentative, powerless and trivial?
    • Does men's speech employ them into positions of dominance and control?

  6. Analyse how language is a reflection of a variety of different contexts, such as:
    • social context
    • cultural context
    • historical context
    • political context

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Student Exercises

 Creative Tasks

  1. Language is a virus." Use this line as the basis for a piece of imaginative writing that explores and expresses the complex nature of language.

  2. Wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted, language is." Use this quotation as the title for a feature article for the Spectrum section of The Sydney Morning Herald.

  3. Compose articles or speeches by choosing one of the following headings:
    • Feminist Progression - Masculine Regression.
    • If Men are the head of the house then Women are the neck.
    • Women are not born they are made.
    • Men are not born they are made.
    • What are little boys made of? (slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails).
    • What are little girls made of? (sugar and spice and all things nice).
    • Behind every successful woman is herself.
    • I have yet to hear a man ask for advice.
    • We are becoming a genderless society.
    • A way to a man's heart is through his stomach.
    • When God made man She was only joking.
    • Bimbo / Macho: Constructing Gender.

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Analytical Tasks

  1. "Gender informs and complicates both the writing and reading of texts." Draw upon your study of gendered language to discuss this view.

  2. Language is the basis of meaning. As gender roles shift so too must language shift. Discuss your observations about the shifts in gendered language.

  3. Is The Floor of Heaven promoting sexist values? What effect do the Post Modernist features have on the text?

  4. Is the study of Gendered Language only useful for unmasking the subordination of women by men in a patriarchal culture? In your response refer to the texts you have studied as well as other texts of your own choosing.

  5. Choose 3 articles from the Resources list.
    In each article examine the following.
    • Gender/sexual identity
    • Class
    • Race
    • Religion
    • Family organisation
    • Public behaviour

    What attitudes do these texts implicitly or explicitly affirm?

  6. Throughout the study of this Module and Elective students should independently research related texts, collecting their information in a portfolio.

  7. Students should address the following questions for each text and reflect on their own understanding of gender:
    • How is the reader positioned by the text in regards to gender?
    • How is gender constructed by the text?
    • How are particular versions of masculinity and femininity constructed in the text?
    • How are constructions of gender produced, regulated and challenged within the text?
    • Identify the relationship between power, gender and language.

  8. Research a range of texts from a variety of contexts and selecting those most appropriate in conveying varying attitudes and values in relation to their representation of gender.

  9. You are to deliver a persuasive speech at a conference concerning young people of the future. Your topic is: “Too many texts position readers and viewers to accept stereotypical constructions of masculinity and femininity. “You should refer to a variety of text types from a range of contexts in your speech, showing how masculinity and femininity are constructed.

  10. Prepare and present a Power Point presentation, demonstrating knowledge and understanding of values in texts, how they are shaped and explaining the different ways of valuing texts.

  11. Evaluate the ways in which film directors shape and reflect the relationship between language, gender and power. Compare how your prescribed text Elizabeth and one related film of your own choosing shape and reflect this relationship.

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Resources

 Prescribed Texts:

Related Texts:

Related texts for this Module are not hard to find. However, it is important to choose texts that both confirm and challenge societal gendered assumptions.

Short Stories:

Newspaper / Magazine Articles:

(Find current articles. Gender issues appear on a daily basis in newspapers and magazines.)

Television Programs:

Songs:

Films:

Critical Readings:

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