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Sexed Texts (Difference (PC (Some have argued that making people change…

- - - - Women's role is to preserve purity of language
        
        Claimed women spoke without thinking, didn't know how to use adverbs, couldn't finish sentences and had a limited vocabulary
        
        Purity is maintained due to women avoiding "coarse and vulgar expressions" and preferring "veiled and indirect expressions."
        
        Claimed that women spoke too much
      - Men's role is to be innovative and creative with language
        
        Emphasises that without men, language would be "languid and insipid."
        
        Described men as having a "slower intellect" than women.
        
        Claimed that men were usually at extremes of "idiot" or "genius" while women were closer to language norms.
      - Data was unscientific, collected from fiction and women Jespersen personally came across
        
        Talbot (1998) suggested that women being restricted from accessing education may be why Jespersen observed these things, rather than an inherent flaw with women's language.
      - Deficit model comes from position of studying women's language as different to (and worse than) men's, rather than evaluating both equally.
  - - - Lakoff claimed that women's language use was politer than that of men's, and that women used linguistic features which framed them as subservient.
        
        Also claimed that women's language was inferior due to less ability to tell or understand jokes, as well as due to being interrupted by men more.
        
        Lakoff frames these features as a consequence of a patriarchal society in which women's powerlessness is reflected in their language.
        
        Has been argued that these features may be features of powerless language rather than female language.
      - Only observed her peer group of educated, white middle-class women. She does however admit this and makes the point that this is still a group worthy of study.
    - - Interactional shitwork carried out by women is a reflection of inferior social position.
      - Positions women as victims of male power and suggests that they need to learn to "speak like men" in order to gain social power.
        
        However women are criticised for their language and behaviour regardless of how masculine or feminine they may act.
    - - Claims that language and material resources are used as tools of oppression against women.
      - Women's language being seen as inferior to men's will persist as a consequence of patriarchy continuing.
      - Sexist language is a deficiency of the social order, not of women.
  - - - Deborah Cameron (1994) defends PC as a result of younger generations of radicals emphasising the importance of our linguistic choices as reflective of our thoughts and attitudes, as well as threatening the idea of any one group prescribing linguistic standards.
  - - - Found evidence of the different topics discussed by men and women.
        
        Men talk about sport, politics and cars.
        
        Women talk about child-rearing and personal relationships.
        
        Maltz and Brooker (1982) looked at children's language in the playground.
        
        Boys play in large hierarchical groups with competitive speech styles.
        
        Girls play in smaller "best friend" groups with more supportive styles of speech.
    - - Claimed that men and women grow up with different conversational rules.
        
        Men grow up in a world where conversation is a contest.
        
        Women grow up in a world where conversation is a way to exchange confirmation and support.
        
        Argues that different norms are not an issue, but being made to conform to them is.
      - Critics (such as Troemel-Plotz, 1991) argued that this stance is "non-engaged and apolitical," and furthers the "cementation of patriarchy."
  - - - Pejorative slang used by heterosexuals
      - Secret insider slang used by gay men to protect and affirm in-group members
    - - A homogeneous gay subculture exists in America
      - Vocabulary cuts across other social boundaries except gender
      - Increasing tolerance of gay people would result in outsiders learning more gay slang
      - She also identified two types of vocabulary: core and fringe
        
        Core vocabulary is known to many within the group
        
        Fringe vocabulary is only known by a few within the group
      - She also identifies six methods of word formation
        
        Compounds
        
        Rhyme compounds
        
        Exclamations
        
        Puns
        
        Blends
        
        Truncations
        
        Others consider gay language in groups based on overall metaphor
        
        Royalty
        
        Theatre
        
        Food
        
        Animals
    - - Secret GaySpeak, used to prevent outsiders identifying users as gay
      - Social GaySpeak, used humorously and theatrically around other gay men
      - Radical activist GaySpeak, a politicised form of language used to describe the rhetoric of gay liberation
- - - - Cis people are privileged over trans people in Weiss' system
      - Bornstein establishes a pyramid of power, with white, male, middle-aged, wealthy, heterosexual men at the top, as an ideal form of masculine male gender identity.
    - - She also identifies three other typologies for masculinity: subordination, complicity and marginalisation.
        
        Subordination refers to the gender relations between groups of men, such as the heterosexual male dominance over gay men. Gay men are subordinated due to heteronormativity, negative representations, laws and homophobic violence and abuse.
        
        Complicity refers to how people who do not fit the standard of hegemonic masculinity may act in a way that is complicit with hegemonic masculinity, therefore reinforcing patriarchy. This may include women giving up their careers to raise their husband's children, women acting "like men" to gain power, or gay men saying they dislike "camp" gay men and prefer gay men who are "straight-acting," as all three of these behaviours reinforce hegemonic masculinity as positive or the ideal.
        
        Marginalisation refers to how people who are considered "outside the relations internal to the gender order" suffer as a result of hegemonic masculinity (eg, lesbian women) or do not benefit from it the same way others of their group might (eg, black men.) Holders of hegemonic masculinity control who is subordinate or marginalised.
    - - Gramsci applied this idea to socialist theory, suggesting that the Marxist prediction of a socialist revolution had not occurred not only due to physical and economic power, but ideological power. He suggested that a culture of consensus developed, with even the proletariat maintaining the status quo due to identifying with the values of the bourgeoisie.
- - - - Advertisers focus on an idealised, desirable gay identity in terms of self-description and the description of the desired partner.
      - Stereotypically masculine description and disavowal of the gay "scene" and "camp" men in favour of "straight-acting" gay men, with many of the men advertising seeking a person who would "normally" be considered straight, and others presenting an "authentic" masculine identity through mentions of enjoying sports, etc.
      - Adverts presenting themselves as exceptions through "less-than-perfect" attributes such as loneliness or self-depracating comments about their appearances also reinforce hegemonic homosexuality as these exceptions to a rule require a rule to exist in order to be exceptions.
- - - - Members of a speech community are connected to each other in social networks which help to reinforce vernacular norms.
        
        Cheshire identified boys as all using non-standard forms where only a certain group of girls used them.
        
        She therefore claims that social networks are organised around gender differences and this results in boys and girls using non-standard features differently.
        
        Eckert (1998) studied phonological variation at a Detroit high school, focusing on "jocks" who enthusiastically engage with school culture and "burn-outs" who rejected it.
        
        Jock girls use the fewest non-standard forms, fewer than jock boys, while burn-out girls use the most, more than burn-out boys.
        
        Eckert attributes this to women being marginalised in the linguistic marketplace and therefore having to work harder than their male counterparts to be seen as good members of their social group.
    - - Queen (1997) argues that lesbian identities were constructed from these imagined communities, drawing linguistically from lesbian, queer, female, ethnic and class identities.
  - - - He also claimed that established sign relationships were fixed, although post-structuralists such as Derrida (1974) and Burr (1995) disagreed, pointing out that conflict and power relations cause change in what is agreed upon.
        
        Judith Butler (1990) introduced the theory of gender performance, building on earlier theory from feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir (1969) who argued that one becomes a woman, and is not born one.
        
        Butler notes that parodic repetitions of the "original" concept of being a woman reveal the original to itself be a parodic repetition, as gender is a repeated but different process reinforced by everyone in society.
        
        She rejects the idea of gender identity, claiming that there is no identity behind gender, with identity only performatively consisting of the expressions of gender that are said to be the results of this identity.
        
        She also claims that the idea of two distinct genders is dependent on a "heterosexual matrix."
        
        Butler has been criticised for being too academic (Nussbaum, 1999), not socially specific or real enough (McNay, 1999), ignoring material and experiential aspects of identity (Grant, 1993, Kotthoff and Wodak, 1997 and Hekman, 1999) and for rejecting the idea of identity-driven movements which include suffragettes, gay liberation movements and civil rights movements.
        
        She emphasises that gender performance is not voluntary.
- - - - Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally forced on women.
      - She argues that heterosexuality needs to be recognised and studied as a political institution.
        
        She supports this by arguing that in a more equal context, it would not be as obvious a choice for a woman to choose heterosexual coupling and marriage.
      - She gives examples of compulsory heterosexuality in the forms of men denying women their sexuality, men forcing their sexuality on women, men using the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid labour, men controlling women's children, men confining women physically, men using women as objects in male transactions, men cramping women's creativity and men withholding them from large areas of societal knowledge and culture.
      - She suggests that the lesbian experience is an extension of feminism, and decreases male power over women.
- - - - Some argue that it encompasses marginalised gender and sexual identities, while others see it as exclusively referring to gay and lesbian people, while others even consider some straight people who do not conform to heteronormativity in the expected way to be queer.