Reaction Paper in

“One Man in Two is a Woman”: Linguistic Approaches to Gender in Literary Texts

Anna Livia

Gender in literary texts does encompass the boundary of what it is and what it is to be. Many linguists
formulate different approaches in order to analyze the role of gender in literary texts. It was seen as
cultural property of the author as it involves female style of writing and as a morphological property of
the text.

In the male and female literary styles, it is evident that the reviews of Virginia Woolf discuss the
difference between the male and female style in writing, explaining the elasticity of women in Dorothy
Richardson’s Revolving Lights 1923. In Richardson’s The Tunnel 1919, Woolf explained that the
gender has been covered with the use of interior monologue which has the property of breaking down
the boundaries between character and narrator. In this way, the avoidance of specifying the gender of
the character or narrator will be achieved coining the character as also the narrator by using the
pronoun “I”.

In some romance novels like of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s, the feministic side of being a woman was
revealed. Here, Sara Mills was able to showcase what is it to be a man and a woman. That the male acts
while the woman feels. It is in nature among women that there is still submissiveness lying in each’s
heart. It shows the great difference in treatment when it comes to male and female.

Nevertheless, there are still writings in feminist style wherein females are presented as confident
being. This clearly explaining the changes that happens in the life of women writers specially of their
styles. The novels can highly be distinguished if its of women writers or men and this is because of
their content. Due to this, there are male writers who were assumed to be female because of the
content and styles, specifically, Dinty Moore when he published a short story in an anthology of
reminiscence of a Catholic girls’ school.

Moreover, the study of Susan Ehrlich emerged and became popular wen she compares the work of V.
Woolf to that of Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. She discussed that James depends heavily on
the use of cohesion and anaphora wherein he introduces the characters and narrator at the beginning
and replace the identity with the use of pronoun. This is common nowadays even with the works of
students, a traditional style. Hemingway on the other hand makes use of the repetition of the
characters name. Woolf in contrasts, use much greater variety of cohesive devices including
grammatical and lexical cohesion as well as semantic connectors. The study of Erhlich provides a
concrete set of standard by which we can distinguish different literary styles.

I have read two novels written by Virginia Woolf from which she used two styles in writing. The Waves
is about the small circle of friends reminiscing their childhood days. In here, she uses stream of
consciousness and made use of the narrator as also the characters at the same time. In this novel,
artistry of Woolf was explored in the discussion of characters through entering their minds. No
dialogues at all but purely narration with shifting. The second novel is Between the Acts it talks about
the mounting, performance, and audience of a play at a festival in a small English village, just before
the outbreak of the Second World War. It is the last novel of Woolf. She made use of varied cohesive
devices in order to achieve cohesion in different scenes in the acts. I admire her in this novel although
it was published shortly after her death.

In the study Anna Livia regarding literary uses of linguistic gender, the role of gender reflects in the
use of stylistic effects such as focalization, empathy, and textual cohesion from which it was used as
device to express some aspect of character. On the other side, Judith Butler studied the role of gender
as performative obeying the gender norms and so stabilizing the role of speakers and of characters as
male and female. She argue that when the gender norms faded, the female will be of no culturally
intelligible subjects. This has become the key tenet of queer theory, which “investigates and analyzes
the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality.”
In contrasts with Butler’s study, Livia refute the claim that gender, and particularly linguistic gender,
is rigidly confining and explore the different messages it can convey. In her study of Pronoun Envy,
2000, shows that the realm of what is “culturally intelligible” is much wider and diverse that queer
theorists have supposed and the gender norms are often used as a foil against which more
experimental positions are understood.

Livia discusses many writers of French and English who make use of genderless narrator and
characters using the pronoun I. Through this, writers were able to avoid the use of gender in order to
avoid such things that might affect the readers perspective. But for me, this somehow gave confusion
to the readers of who is this and who is that. I have seen this in the work of V. Woolf from which in her
entire novel, she made use of the first person pronoun I. Due to the intelligence and artistry of Woolf,
she avoided this confusion with the use of cohesion.

On the other works of English and French avoiding the gender, those were successfully published and
be the subject of debate. Even with the description of body parts are sometimes confusing without
mentioning the characters’/narrators’ private organs. Clearly, the text produces a very different effect
from one which follows a more traditional pattern of reference. Readers can give different
interpretations with every different reading of the text. They may produce different interpretations due
to their different perspectives in life.

In this study, one caught my attention in avoiding gender preference, this is the science fiction author
Ursula Le Guin who used the possibilities offered by new biologies to invent imaginary communities
whose gender propositions are very different from those of twentieth century. Here, Le Guin
introduces the ambisexual characters whose gender status changes at different phases of their life
cycle. They change their gender during their mating phase; the result can be male or female organs.
This work is something interesting to read and so using same gender perspectives in same characters.
This work provides a new technique in addressing the characters. This might require great focus and
interest in the life of the characters.

In the part of gender and translation, two types of analysis come together: discussion of writing styles
and discussion of uses of linguistic gender. Translators work both as interpreters of the original text
and as guides to the culture which produced the text. And so they must decide what to naturalize, what
to explain, and what to exoticize. It depends on the context of the text tallied with culture in the milieu
of the text. Translators need to be very careful in translating the content of the text and so not giving
any offensive information regarding the content.

In the study of Sherry Simon, she observed that translations themselves have been seen as “beautiful
but unfaithful” just like of women they can be beautiful or faithful but not both. There are struggles
existing between the translator and the author which can be highly sexed, and heterosexed. With this,
the translator must take away the work from the original author and so translating the text itself and
not depending on the author. There are languages which gender reference are pervasive and other
languages who made use of the same pronoun for the same gender which differs only to the number.
This instance may give an attempt in translating the text not exactly. Still, the readers before making
theirselves as translators may even understand the text more when stated in the same context. These
are just of small problems that may arise in the translation the text with regards to gender.

To sum it up, this study of Anna Livia provides answers to some of my questions regarding the gender
preferences of the characters by the author, their styles in writing, their perspective in different gender
in different context, and the linguistic sense used by the writers in producing their works. This is a
good material for my students in explaining the gender boundary and overlapping and sometimes
ignoring. This will give them new perspective in looking gender with varied lenses.

Prepared by:

Mary Ann J. Tolentino

 Reaction Paper in
Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology
Bonnie McElhinny

This paper is about to look gender in the linguistic behavior determined by sociocultural factors and
the society itself: how this gender was accepted or ignored in different social contexts and different
perspective of interlocutors; how this gender has been analyzed as a factor in contributing social
growth or development; how the language play the crucial role in gender; how gender dictates
boundaries in the society; and, how people resists or react with such boundaries defined by studies
related in gender.

It has started before history which sums up that it is all about politics, public policy, and famous
individuals and was tested when women encompass the notion that they are not passive reservoir of
men. Feminist sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists ask questions about the fundamental
analytic concepts that must be revalued when women and gender are taken seriously. The studies deal
about the hypercorrection definitions of speech community.

In related studies of early sociolinguists, assumption is that gender should be studied where it was
most important, and that gender was considered most important in cross-sex or same-sex interaction
in gender specific tasks. This has led to a series of insightful studies of the linguistic style of men and
women in romantic heterosexual relationship or in experimental settings designed to fake
relationship. Women might use the language differently based on their listeners: women-women vs.
women-men. This has been seen greatly with the behaviors of women during interaction.

The relationship of gender to sex and sexuality has been one of the controversial issues in critics.
Gender is different from sex; sex refers to the biological attributes of human being and gender deals
with the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. This might
explain the set of categories to which we can give the same label crosslinguistically or crossculturally
because they have some connection to sex differences. One might say that his sex is male but his
gender is somewhat not typical as being a male. We can conclude therefore that gender varies form
one language to another, one culture to another, in the way in which they order experience and action.

So, instead of asking “what are the gender differences?”, post-structuralist or deconstructive feminist
leads one to ask “what differences does gender make?” and “how did gender come to make
difference?” These questions may lead us to the thought of asking how gender is constructed.
Before feminist revolt with their rights and pleas of maltreatment from society and of men, great
distinction between gender has been determined. Women cannot be seen in offices and worse that
women's voice cannot be heard; the society was built with the men ruling in it, with the men governing
women’s actions. After this, the boundary of gender between men and women is overlapping. Subjects
deviate from normative conceptions of how sex, gender, and sexuality should be aligned.

Post-structuralist models of gender have been so readily embraced by sociolinguists and

anthropologists working on gender. Language may lend itself to an ability to focus on gender and the
social construction of “sex.” It is inevitable to recognize the language used by women than of the men
and so with the way of delivering it and acting it. But let us not limit ourself in identifying such gender
by simply analyzing the linguistic sense of subject’s language. There are still considerations needed to
consult regarding the economic contexts of the subjects.

In gender as an activity and relation, we cannot deny that everyone has gender, and that gender is
considered as an attribute of a person who is characterized essentially as pregendered substance or
“core” called the person, denoting a universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation or language. The
only thing to be considered is that how this gender play a role in the activity of persons towards
reacting in gender norms prescribed by the society. It has been proven that girls and boys in their
talking build systematically different social organization and gender activities. We can recognize the
subject based on the level the language used and the manner of delivery. This also suggests that
individuals have access to different activities, and thus to different cultures and social identities
including a range of genders.
As before the discussion ends, we might ask the question that deals with the relevance of gender, “Is
gender always important and relevant?”

Gender division is always highlighted when we try to examine the environment we are in. Boys and
girls form their own groups. It is like that they are making theirselves different from those who they
don't consider having the same gender, in individuals and in groups. These gender-marked scenarios
might expose us in the truth that gender is really existing in society and it can make changes that
might bring society in its best or in its worst. Gender and language co-vary. We can predict social
relations by means of looking the gender its relation in the society.

Moreover, the question of relevance has been extensively discussed within conversational analysis.
When woman speaks to anyone, we cannot say that she always speaks as a woman as what she did in
earlier stand. The gender preferences of subjects vary in social contexts that can easily be adopted by
different sexes just because they are used to it. We can recognize gender in terms of the roles play in
conversation. We can say that gender is important but we cannot say when would this be relevant.

On the other side, feminists reacted in such that gender is not that so relevant in such social
construction. Some studies focus merely on the individualization and left the gender behind. They
argue that gender is somewhat salient in a way that it can affect sexes’ life wherein the society can
swallow them whole due to the lack of acceptance. Women of those in masculine figure and men of
those in feminine figure can no longer be accepted holistically than those of women and men who
appear under gender norms. The solution to this problem may not focus on when gender is relevant
but on how it is relevant.

Language is a referential index of gender. In the English language, there is just he, she, him, her which
refer to the gender. In any community, there is only a small set of linguists forms that referentially, or
directly and exclusively, index gender. We can now say that in this reference of gender in the language,
language can be used to build different social orders that member of the society are agents of culture
rather than bearers of culture that has been handed to them and encoded in grammatical form.

In the gender sense, there are entries intended to use by specific gender, such that of tag questions can
be frequently observed used by female speakers. This might show their feminine side in undermining
the harsh meaning of the sentence or of the utterance. Even there is no specific entry intended to use
by the female groups or of the male groups, there just such words used frequently by most and so
coining their own which prevent the other from using it in order to define their gender. But since
members of the culture do not accept the same parts of the world as granted, in part because people’s
horizons of relevance are shaped by the tasks in which they are engaged.

To sum it up, it is still a good topic in debate the issue of sex and gender in the society. As a feminist, I
can say that gender sense might give the members of the society a better understanding of such
occurrences in the world. Yes not all reference has reference but if we will just have this sort of wider
view and understanding of gender, we may intake the positivity of it and might give us a lighter life
living in the positive land. There is nothing wrong about your preferred gender, this will be wrong
when you make actions under the norms or standard of what you want to be; make use of it but don't
abuse it.

Prepared by:

Mary Ann J. Tolentino