Ethnographies of Language and Gender
Recently Elise Berman asked colleagues via the LINGANTH email list to recommend recent ethnographies of language and culture. Several people responded; some titles and links to publishers are collected here.
Recently Elise Berman asked colleagues via the LINGANTH email list to recommend recent ethnographies of language and culture. Several people responded; some titles and links to publishers are collected here.
The Fresh Air interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin makes me look forward to Thorpe’s film, “Do I Sound Gay?” But Sankin’s suggestions that women and young people’s speech is pathological leads me to re-read Robin Lakoff, Deborah Cameron, and Nelson Flores.
Several colleagues have suggested film and video clips that may be useful in teaching about language ideologies, including the value of standard and non-standard varieties, social stereotypes, and style shifting. This post includes several YouTube videos.
Gabriel Arana recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. He notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion – up-talk, like, and creak – are somewhat questionable, however.
This clip from the TV show Friends demonstrates a media representation of male and female interactional styles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGoC8FTLKSI&feature=related [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGoC8FTLKSI&feature=related[/youtube]
In “Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo” Hideko Abe shows how identity positions are constructed and claimed through language use. One passage, which shows how use of the word futsuu (ordinary) includes homosexual and heterosexual subjects in the same category, bears additional analysis.
“You have lots of ‘splaining to do”… Senator Tom Corburn (R-Oklahoma) interrupted Supreme Court candidate Sonia Sotomayor’s explanation about gun laws with this phrase, which echoes… Read More »Sotomayor “You have lots of splainin to do”
I currently have the privilege of TAing Intro to linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto and in the previous weeks the students read and… Read More »Piecemeal Comments on Language and Gender (or PCs)
This week’s Roundup comes from the sports department.
Caster Semenya, gender tests, and bodies out of place
Sumo scandal
World Cup woo woo