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gender revision - Coggle Diagram
gender revision
the Generic Masculine
generic means general, not specific
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key definitions
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lexical asymmetry
when a pair of words have similar denotative meanings, but are not equally balanced in connotative meaning. Usually gendered
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models
the Deficit Model
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Robin Lakoff (1975)
theorised that there are certain features of women's language that give an impression of being weaker than men
thinks language is fundamental to gender inequality, and that it could contribute to the lack of women's power reflected in both the language women use and the language used about women
observed that women use language in these ways, making them seem weaker and less certain than men:
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empty adjectives e.g. lovely, brilliant
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O'Barr and Atkins (1980)
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found that linguistic differences are situation-specific, relying upon who has the authority and power in a conversation, rather than the gender involved, denoting a "powerless language"
they studied courtroom cases for 30 months, observing a range of witnesses and examining them for the speech differences proposed by Lakoff
concluded that speech patterns were "neither characteristic of all women, nor limited to only women"
women who used the lowest frequency of "women's language" had an unusually high status, coming from middle-class backgrounds and being well-educated professionals
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the Difference Model
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favoured by Deborah Tannen in her book You Just Don’t Understand (1990). As part of her theory, she identified six pairs of contrasts between male and female talk: status vs support; independence vs intimacy; advice vs understanding; information vs feeling; orders vs proposals; conflict vs compromise.
the Diversity Model
a perspective which criticises all of the other models, stating that any differences between male and female language are due to other variables, such as education, class, age, etc
In her 2008 book The Myth of Mars and Venus, Deborah Cameron criticised the idea that there were innate differences between the way that men and women talk as being ‘one of the great myths of our time’. Any differences that did exist she saw as being due to other variables (education, age, class etc.)
Default Assumption
assumptions done in default of other evidence (we know that some surgeons are women but most are men, so before meeting a surgeon we might assume they are a man)
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Socialisation
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this shared understanding is part of our social knowledge, the framework we use to interpret the world, the understanding we have about to to operate in our environment and the knowledge of social rules that are part of our culture
the process by which we acquire this social knowledge is socialisation, and it starts from an early age