6 - Voice and empowerment in gender and sexuality

Summary

This chapter is concerned with the language, discourse and social aspects of women's speech communities and the effects of linguistic and discourse features that are indexed as gendered. It is also concerned with changes and emerging issues in speech community norms regarding gender and sexuality. Across cultures, different communication styles flourish at various levels of complexity in terms of language use and semiotic resources. The language and interaction practices of gendered speech communities are not special and unique to women. Rather, they are practices that are indexed in societies and culture as women's speech. These range from the poetry of Bedouin society (Abu-Lughod 2000), the wedding songs of British Gujarati women (Edwards and Kaatbamna 1989) and the signifying laughter of African American women (Morgan 2002, 2003) to online communities that mirror gender stereotypes in face-to-face-interactions (Herring 2005). This chapter reveals how language mediates and constructs identity, how we associate language with gender and sexuality, and how values and attitudes regarding gender are represented, enforced, resisted and manipulated. To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on both public and popular culture and African American women's speech.

Women and place

Speech communities that are formed around women's lives, groups and activities abound throughout the world. This is true even though many women live in societies where, because of their gender, their voices are treated as different from those of men. As social dominance theory argues (Sidanius and Pratto 2001), group hierarchies ranging from dominant to subordinate are common in all cultures and societies. Ideologies and myths that legitimize inequitable status also circulate within most societies. These ideologies include beliefs, attitudes, values, stereotypes, and rituals that justify practices and policies that benefit dominant and powerful collectives. Therefore it is not surprising that Sidanius and Pratto (2001) have also found that, in relation to gender, social dominance orientation tends to be elevated in men, who tend to be involved in authoritarian roles such as the police, military and business that exacerbate the hierarchy. At the same time, women tend to be involved in roles such as caregiver, social worker, etc. that attenuate this hierarchy (Pratto 2005).