Language and Gender: Week 7
KYUWON MOON
TYLER SCHNOEBELEN
Today’s plan
 Hijra’s language
 Chatper 7
 Categories and labels
 Patrolling boundaries
 Default categories & markedness
 Class stuff
Hijra’s sexual insults
 Hall (1997), “Go suck your husband’s sugarcane!”
 On Hijra’s curses and sexual insults
 “Hijras aren’t counted as women, after all. Hijras are just
hijras, and women are just women. If there’s a woman, she will
at least have a little shame…… But hijras are just hijras. They
have no shame. They’ll say whatever they have to say.” (Nonhijra, 1993)
 “We’ll give curses like women. We don’t give manly curses.”
(hijra, 1993)
Respect and solidarity
 Hijra’s curse
 “You worthless fool, good-for-nothing, son-of-a-bastard, may
your wife be eaten by a dog, may you be dark-faced, may god
shower calamities on you, you widower!”
 Why curse?
 To others: to reclaim respect
 Between themselves: to achieve solidarity
Categorizing
 These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies
recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain
Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly
Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant
pages it is written that animals are divided into
Types of animals
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(a) those that belong to the emperor;
(b) embalmed ones;
(c) those that are trained;
(d) suckling pigs;
(e) mermaids;
(f) fabulous ones;
(g) stray dogs;
(h) those that are included in this classification;
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad;
(j) innumerable ones;
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush;
(l) etcetera;
(m) those that have just broken the flower vase;
(n) those that at a distance resemble flies.
What is this?
And this?
…And this?
Categories are social constructs
 … and labels, too!
Patrolling boundaries
 Who you asks matters
 Eggplant to a botanist vs. a cook
 But some folks have more authority than others
 And there are lots of forces enforcing the sanctity of
social categories
I’m not a feminist, but…
 Risks of saying “I’m a feminist”
 Feminism: disparaged category
 What will come after “but”?
 Feminism (Wikipedia)
 “Feminism is the idea that women should have political, social,
sexual, intellectual, and economic rights equal to those of
men.”
People on the Border
 Categories under categories
 Marginalized categories
 Centrality: Some members are better examples than others
(birth mothers vs. adoptive mothers vs. working mothers?)
 Feminism only for middle-class white women?
 Being African American gay man (Barret 1999)
But, who isn’t?
 Who is not on the border?
 I’m on the border because I am…
- Asian
- Grad student
- Non-native speaker of English
- Female
- Married
- And many more
A rose by any other name…
 …would smell as sweet?
 Euphemism treadmill (Pinker)
 Words originally intended as euphemisms may lose their
euphemistic value, acquiring the negative connotations of their
referents
 negro → colored → black → African-American
 idiot/moron (originally neutral!) → retarded → mentally
challenged/special
Gender neutralization
 Examples:
 Stewardess→Flight attendant
 He→They
 Policeman→Police officer
 Chairman→Chairperson
 Le professeur→La proffeseure
 But there are no linguistic quick fixes
 Change isn’t always smooth
 You can’t control words once you put them out in the
world (e.g., politically correct)
Then, why should we bother?
 Gastil (1990)’s results
 Males still produce more male images even with “they”
pronoun
 But…
 “Changing schemes for categorization and changing labels are
part of changing social practice” (E&M-G 2003: 265).
If we still have time…
Gendered metaphor
 Vowels are feminine, consonants are masculine:
sound symbolism
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Just random?
Vowels: [+sonorant], consonants: [-sonorant] (with exception
of [m,n,l,ng])
Sonorant sounds are soft, deep, and resonant: traits that are
considered to be “feminine”
 “Father gives birth to a baby and mother raises the
baby.”
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What I learned from elementary school
Habitus?