Sex & Gender and the Connection between Language and Gender

Sex vs. Gender vs. Sexuality

Sex

Sex is biologically founded.

All embryos are identical for the first 8 weeks of gestation

Prenatal production of male hormones produces the male pattern

Absence of these male hormones produces the female pattern.

Hermaphroditism or intersexuality

Definition:  state of a person or animal whose sex is neither male nor female or both at the same time

Cause of intersexuality can be chromosomal or hormonal:

• Some infants have a “mosaic” chromosome pattern: XY/XO
• Some infants have XY cells but cannot process testosterone
• Hormonal imbalances can masculinize the genitals of XX children
• An inherited condition called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency triggers an apparent female-to-male sex change at puberty

A woman is a woman in all communities, and a man is a man in all communities: there is (almost) no cultural variation

For a true story about hermaphroditism and the consequences of sex-change operations, see The true story of John Joan written by John Colapinto and published in Rolling Stone, December 11, 1997, pp. 54-96 (with interruptions).  Cf. also his book:

Colapinto, John. 2000. As Nature Made Him; The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

For a recent academic article on intersexuality:

Blackless, Melanie, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne, and Ellen Lee. 2000. How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology 12:151-166.

See also the site of the Intersex Society of North America for much relevant information:  http://www.isna.org/.

Gender

Definition:  a socially-constructed notion of what is feminine and what is masculine

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952, p. 267)

Sex is typically considered to be a binary category
• female
• *more female (* = ungrammatical, cannot be said)
• *most female
• *less female
• *least female

Gender is a continuous category: a person can be more or less feminine or masculine
• feminine
• more feminine
• most feminine
• less feminine
• least feminine

In our western societies, we tend/try to impose a binary categorization of gender

Examples of third genders (source: Lorber 1994):

Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press.

• berdache:

 In some Native Indian communities, an institutionalized cross-gendered role that legitimates males doing women’s work

• ninauposkitzipxpe ‘manly-hearted woman’ in the North Piegan (Blackfoot) community.  Typical of less egalitarian Native American societies

• warrior women in Plains Indians communities: “Among the Mohave, a girl’s refusal to learn women’s tasks could lead to her being taught the same skills boys learned [...] her status as a man allowed her to marry a woman and to do men’s work of hunting, trapping, growing crops, and fighting.  She was also expected to perform a man’s ritual obligations. [...] Sexually, cross-gendered females were homosexuals, but, like berdaches, their marriages were always heterogendered–they did not marry or have sexual relationships with each other.”

• hijras: “Hijras, a group in northern India, consider themselves intersexed males who have become women [...] Hijras are required to dress as women, but they do not imitate or try to pass as ordinary women; rather, they are as deviant as women as they are as men”

Because gender is a social construct, it changes across time, communities, and even individuals; e.g.:
•    USA in the 1950's (cf., e.g., The good wife's guide) vs. USA in the 21st century
•    western world vs. fondamentalist Islamic communities
•    an older person vs. a younger person
•    a very conservative person vs. a very progressive person

What role do nature and culture play in defining men and women?

Is the “maternal instinct” genetic or cultural?

Do boys and men tend to be more active and aggressive because of their hormones? (cf., e.g., The he-hormone in the New York Times Magazine)

Is the more collaborative interactive style of women a consequence of their genes which make them better designed for some types of tasks?

Very difficult to determine which behaviors are cultural and which might be natural because of experimental difficulties

Physiological differences between men and women:
• genitalia
• bearing children
• patterns of fat distribution
• color blindness
• etc.

But culture appears to play a role even with some physiologically-based differences: voice pitch
• crosscultural evidence
• prepuberty differences between girl and boy voices

Sexuality

Definition: sexual attraction toward and activity with other human beings

Homosexuality: attraction toward members of the same sex

Heterosexuality: attraction toward members of the other sex

Bisexuality: attraction toward members of both sexes

Sex, gender, and sexuality are 3 independent dimensions

All combinations are possible:
• gays: effeminate vs. macho
• lesbians: butch vs. femme (or lipstick)
• heterosexual women and men can be more or less feminine, more or less masculine
• how masculine or feminine a male or a female depends on which groups they belong to (e.g., working class vs. middle class, age)

Interesting article about the role of biology in distinguishing men and women

Bing, Janet. 1999. Brain sex:  How the media report and distort brain research. Women and Language 22,2:4-12.  (Available through GenderWatch)

4 different views of the relation between language & gender

1.     Language reflects gender divisions in society

•    Language does not create gender divisions, it reflects them
•    The fact that women tend to be more polite than men reflects the fact that they tend to occupy subordinate positions (secretary vs. boss, nurse vs. doctor, dental hygienist vs. dentist, etc.)
•    The fact that words referring to doctors, ambassadors, professors, lawyers, etc. are all masculine in French reflects the fact that, until recently, these positions were occupied almost exclusively by men
•    Gender differences in language may be interpreted as sexist only if the community where this language is used is sexist
•    What must change is society rather than language

2.     Language creates and/or promotes gender divisions in society

•    Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:  each language embodies a specific world-view and constrains the way we categorize what surrounds us
    •    It is claimed that Hindi has only 1 word for both ice and snow
    •    Leg in English vs. patte 'animal's leg' and jambe 'human being's leg' in French

•    What effect do pairs of words such as the following have on English speakers' perception of social structure?

                   doctor         vs.     woman/lady doctor
                   nurse         vs.     male nurse
                   wizard         vs.     witch
                   bachelor     vs.     spinster
                   master         vs.     mistress

•    What effect does the polite behavior of women have on their careers?

3.     Interplay between language and social structure

•    How do pairs of words like those above arise?
•    Do boys and girls grow up thinking that they can become doctors?
•    Do boys and girls feel the same pressure to get married?
•    Does the fact that women interrupt less often than men at business and academic meetings arise from their socially subordinate position and does it prevent them from gaining the same type of recognition that men obtain?

4.     No influence:  gender in language is a purely grammatical notion

•    In French, all nouns must be either masculine or feminine, and, in many cases, whether a noun is masculine or feminine has nothing to do with maleness and femaleness
    •    le livre 'the book' is masculine
    •    la revue 'the magazine' is feminine

•    Académie française (The French Academy): no need to create feminine forms of the nouns that refer to ambassadors, ministers, etc.

•    Is a society that speaks a language that treats men and women equally necessarily less sexist than one whose language can be described as being sexist?