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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