KYUWON MOON

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Language and Gender Week 7

• KYUWON MOON
• TYLER SCHNOEBELEN

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Todays plan

• Hijras language
• Chatper 7
• Categories and labels
• Patrolling boundaries
• Default categories markedness
• Class stuff

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Hijras sexual insults

• Hall (1997), Go suck your husbands sugarcane!
• On Hijras curses and sexual insults
• Hijras arent counted as women, after all.
  Hijras are just hijras, and women are just women.
  If theres a woman, she will at least have a
  little shame But hijras are just hijras. They
  have no shame. Theyll say whatever they have to
  say. (Non-hijra, 1993)
• Well give curses like women. We dont give
  manly curses. (hijra, 1993)

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Respect and solidarity

• Hijras 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

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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
  

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Types of animals

• (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.

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What is this?
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And this?
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And this?
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Categories are social constructs

• and labels, too!

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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

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Im not a feminist, but

• Risks of saying Im 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.

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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)

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But, who isnt?

• Who is not on the border?
• Im on the border because I am
• - Asian
• - Grad student
• - Non-native speaker of English
• - Female
• - Married
• - And many more

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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

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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 isnt always smooth
• You cant control words once you put them out in
  the world (e.g., politically correct)

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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
  (EM-G 2003 265).

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If we still have time
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Gendered metaphor

• Vowels are feminine, consonants are masculine
  sound symbolism
• 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.
• What I learned from elementary school

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Habitus?