Language and Gender

KIRA HALL1 , RODRIGO BORBA2 , AND MIE HIRAMOTO3

1 Universityof Colorado Boulder, USA
2 FederalUniversity of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
3 National University of Singapore, Singapore

Introduction

The field of language and gender is methodologically diverse, encompassing approaches

that include conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, discur-
sive psychology, linguistic anthropology, and variationist sociolinguistics (Harrington
et al. 2008; Ehrlich, Meyerhoff, and Holmes 2014; Zimman and Hall 2016; Meyerhoff
and Ehrlich 2019). Within this diversity, ethnography has long been a key method
for interrogating the social semiotic complexities of gender, securing the field’s close
partnership with linguistic anthropology (Besnier and Philips 2014; Gaudio 2018;
Hall and Davis 2020). In fact, in his review of three historical shifts in the study
of language as culture in US anthropology, Duranti identifies language and gender
scholars working beyond linguistic anthropology as part of a cohort who “made
possible” the field’s shift to the third paradigm in the 1990s, citing their attention
to “the role of language in establishing gender, ethnic, and class identities” (2003,
332). This historical review outlines the prominent role played by linguistic anthro-
pology in the theorization of gender by highlighting its enduring methodological
and conceptual contributions, while also outlining the ways that interdisciplinary
scholarship in the field of language and gender – or rather, language, gender, and
sexuality, as the field is now often called – has shaped the course of linguistic
anthropology.

Early binary models of language and gender

The birth of language and gender as a field is often traced to second-wave feminism
in the 1970s and 1980s. The perspective known as “difference feminism” was especially
influential in the research of this period, leading to binary accounts of linguistic gen-
der that highlighted differences between women’s and men’s speech. Although sharply
criticized by later scholars working within a performative model of language and gen-
der, these accounts offered an important feminist revision of early twentieth-century
anthropological work on “women’s languages” and “men’s languages” in non-European
languages. Texts in the tradition of Chamberlain (1912) and Jespersen (1922), although
often referenced as descriptive, advanced a number of colonialist explanations for gen-
der differences in “primitive” languages, with little recognition that sex-based linguistic
differences also exist in European languages (Trechter 1999; Hall 2003). In refreshing
The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Edited by James Stanlaw.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786093.iela0143
2 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

contrast, Lakoff’s (1973) article “Language and Woman’s Place,” published in an early
issue of Language in Society and later made into a book with the same title (Lakoff 1975),
attributed differences between women’s and men’s speech – this time in English – to a
patriarchal system that places women in a subordinate status relative to men. Based on
introspective data, much of it drawn from popular US media, Lakoff defined “women’s
language” as a manifestation of the inferior status granted to women. In her analysis,
features of language used more often by women, among them hedges, tag questions, and
rising intonation on declaratives, indicate tentativeness and hence powerlessness. Male
dominance thus puts women in a linguistic double bind: if women use the features of
women’s language, they “are systematically denied access to power” (Lakoff 1975, 7), but
if they do not use these features, they are marginalized as unfeminine, non-conforming,
and socially inappropriate.
A generation later, Tannen (1990), a student of Lakoff, advanced another form of
difference feminism in her “two-cultures approach” to language and gender. Inspired
by Gumperz’s (1982) work on interethnic communication, Tannen proposed that
misunderstandings between women and men derive from the ways girls and boys are
socialized into gendered subcultures, with boys orienting to competition and girls
to cooperation (see also Maltz and Borker 1982). She thus promoted a very different
understanding of power from what is seen in Lakoff’s work, leading many scholars to
distinguish their perspectives as “difference” and “dominance” models, respectively.
Whereas Lakoff viewed gendered speech as an outcome of unequal power distribu-
tion rendering women inferior to men (dominance), Tannen eyed such differences
as separate but equal, thus removing structural power from her model’s analytical remit
(difference). Nevertheless, both perspectives perpetuated a binary view of women and
men as inhabiting different social and symbolic spheres (Bucholtz 2014). In an earlier
review of the field, Hall (2003) suggests that this view – typical in the literature of
the time – was enabled by the historical relegation of lesbians, gay men, and gender
non-conforming individuals to the footnotes.
Despite their theoretical differences, the empirical studies of language and gender
that these models inspired likewise have much more in common than their represen-
tatives often acknowledge. They are to be commended for close attention to gender
distinctions in linguistic practice; landmark texts and compilations include West
and Zimmerman (1977), McConnell-Ginet, Borker, and Furman (1980), and Coates
and Cameron (1988). Tannen’s (1994) more academic publications have provided
crucial methodological interventions into the ways phenomena such as interruptions,
indirectness, and topic raising are characterized in the literature, adding much-needed
linguistic complexity to the analysis of power and solidarity in interaction. Still, as
explained by Cameron (2005), the bulk of research during this period shares a set
of commonalities that motivated a subsequent generation of scholars to do things
differently. First, men and women were seen as binary opposites but internally homoge-
nous groups. Second, linguistic differences, to a great extent, were positioned as a
direct outcome of early socialization. Third, broad claims about language and gender
were based on studies of predominantly white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class
English speakers. And fourth, as Gal (1989, 1995) notes, the symbolic dimension
motivating the use of certain linguistic features was too rarely considered, so that the
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 3

field lacked agentive accounts of language as a resource for expressions of identity and
power.

Ethnographic interventions: Language and gender

as culturally situated practice

It is precisely these generalizing tenets of early research in the field that motivated
anthropologists to pursue ethnographic work in cultures with contrastive organizations
of language and gender. A case in point is Ochs’s study of the Malagasy of Madagascar
(published as Keenan 1974). Although not directly positioned against Lakoff’s work,
the study shows that Malagasy women are far from the subordinate, self-effacing
speakers described by Lakoff. In fact, their speech is viewed as direct, blunt, and
confrontational in comparison to men’s language, which is viewed as indirect, ornate,
and respectful. Through the use of ethnographic methods, Ochs uncovers that this
differential is linked to the roles taken by women and men in society. Women engage in
a kind of market bargaining that is made more successful by the use of conversational
directness, while men take part in political oratory forums that necessitate oblique,
metaphorical, and allusive uses of language. Yet as Ochs points out, these linguistic
differences do not mean that women have more social power than men. On the
contrary, Malagasy women are barred from political authority because of their crude
language and are rarely granted access to public meetings, in which overt conflict is not
allowed. Thus, Ochs’s work makes the important theoretical point that the link between
a linguistic feature and the power it conveys is culturally variable and contextually
determined.
The differential distribution of power is also central to the use of politeness strate-
gies in the Tenejapan village of southern Mexico studied by Brown (1980). Tenejapan
women use far more politeness markers than men to support goals of emphasizing soli-
darity and avoiding imposition. For the same reason, they often couch face-threatening
speech acts such as requesting, commanding, and criticizing in irony, a form that men
use very rarely. Brown interprets these linguistic differences not as empirical givens but
as strategies used by women to manage their social and physical vulnerability to men.
Through indirectness, women are able to show deference to men while also cultivating
extensive networks of solidarity with other women. Although Tenejapan “women’s lan-
guage” resembles many of the features Lakoff discusses, Brown emphasizes that it is not
simply a reflection of women’s powerlessness. Rather, it may be used as an interactional
strategy to challenge structural power in creative ways.
As very few features of language denote gender directly (Ochs 1992), ethnography
enabled early researchers to untangle the contextual, historical, and ideological com-
plexities of language as a central element in creating and challenging systems of power.
This kind of agency underlies the language choices of women in the Hungarian-German
bilingual town of Oberwart, Austria, studied by Gal (1978). Young women in Ober-
wart use German much more frequently (and more exuberantly) than men do. Yet Gal’s
ethnographic work uncovers a reason behind this differential. The women in this bor-
der town speak German to distance themselves from a peasant social order denoted
4 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

by Hungarian, which offers them little autonomy or access to places of power. In this
context, the use of German is a strategy used by speakers to show identification with
cosmopolitan, urban wage labor. The choice of German over Hungarian, Gal argues,
provides these women with a way out from their subordinate, powerless status in the
peasant hierarchy.
Ethnographic methods have similarly been used to complicate gender-exclusive
claims regarding children’s discourse practices. Early models of language and gender,
particularly Tannen’s two-cultures model, viewed linguistic differences between women
and men as originating in distinct childhood socialization practices in which girls
and boys acquire differing communicative styles. However, Goodwin and Goodwin’s
(1987) study of African American children’s playgroups shows that the supposed
“two cultures” of boys and girls are not as starkly separate as previously assumed. The
focus of the article is on how children argue within same-sex and mixed-sex groups.
In same-sex groups, they found that girls and boys do indeed use different arguing
strategies: boys are more direct and hierarchically oriented in their interactions while
girls tend to be more indirect, particularly when making accusations (what the authors
call the “he-said-she-said” arguing strategy, the title of M. Goodwin’s 1990 monograph
on this topic; see also Goodwin 2006). However, in mixed-sex groups, they found that
girls skillfully adopt the boys’ arguing styles. This suggests that girls and boys are not
socialized into two differing gender cultures; rather, they share a broader linguistic
repertoire that makes it possible for them to mobilize a multitude of linguistic styles in
cross-sex interaction.

Interdisciplinary coalitions: Indexicality meets gender

performativity

Together, these early ethnographic studies provide a complex canvas on which language
and gender relate. Power structures, language ideologies, and culturally specific views
of gender are intertwined and shape speakers’ linguistic performances. By analyzing
language as culturally situated practice, these scholars were able to provide multilay-
ered accounts of the intersection of language and gender. Nevertheless, gender was
rarely problematized in these studies, with authors continuing to equate social gen-
der with biological sex. In the 1990s, language and gender scholars working across the
fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics began to trouble this view, setting
into motion a close intellectual partnership that continues to this day. It was during
this decade that perspectives based on perceived gender differences gave way to plu-
ralistic approaches that recognized the role played by ideology in language practice.
This new collaboration of scholars approached language not as a structure that con-
strains speakers’ choices aprioristically, but as a resource that can be drawn upon to
take stances and perform actions that bring gender into being. This shift was facili-
tated by incisive conceptual and methodological contributions regarding the concept
of indexicality. In particular, work by Gal (1989, 1995), Ochs (1992), and Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet (1992) established a performative approach to language and gender
before Butler’s (1990, 1993) theory of performativity took root, preparing the ground
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 5

for its easy uptake in the field (on historical linkages between linguistic anthropology
and feminism, see Kramer 2016).
Gal’s (1989, 1995) influential work during this period is concerned with the mean-
ing attributed to silence in much of the feminist literature of the time. In such lit-
erature, silence was overwhelmingly viewed in negative terms as a strategy used to
exclude women from structures of power. However, in her review of ethnographic and
archival research on uses of silence in cultures as diverse as the Malagasy of Mada-
gascar, working-class African Americans in the United States, the Kuna of Panama, the
Laymi of Bolivia, and the Tenejapan of Mexico, Gal uncovers a diversity of meanings for
silence that goes well beyond subordination. In fact, she finds many instances in which
women use silence as a strategy to overhaul established power structures. This leads
Gal to conclude that “the links between power, gender, and linguistic practices are not
‘natural’ and can be constructed in quite different ways” (1989, 6). Put differently, the
link between gender and language is ideological, not empirical. In Gal’s view, speakers
draw from ideologies of gendered speech to situate themselves within relations of power
and even as particular kinds of people: “the categories of women’s speech, men’s speech,
and prestigious and powerful speech are not just indexically derived from the identi-
ties of speakers. Indeed, sometimes, a speaker’s utterance creates her or his identity”
(1995, 171).
Ochs’s (1992) comparative study of Samoan and North American mothering prac-
tices transformed the concept of indexicality into a guiding theory for ethnographers
of language and gender. Noting that identity categories are not produced through
a “straightforward mapping of linguistic form to social meaning of gender” (1992,
336–337), Ochs argues that gender is indirectly indexed from a complex of linguistic
features, social activities, stances, and acts. In other words, linguistic resources “may
index social meanings … which in turn helps to constitute gender meanings” (1992,
341). In this perspective, the use of tag questions, which for Lakoff is tightly bound to
the speech of women (though see Hall 2003 for an alternative reading of Lakoff), is not
directly derived from a speaker’s gender. Rather, tag questions may index uncertainty
while performing the act of requesting feedback, producing a combination of stance
and action that in some cultures may then be interpreted as feminine. Contrary to
the binary emphasis of early work in the field, Ochs argues that “the relation between
language and gender is mediated and constituted through a web of socially organized
pragmatic meanings” (1992, 341–342). This conceptual innovation inspired scholars
to focus on gender as built up from interactional practices, paving the way for more
dynamic portraits of how identity emerges within everyday interaction (for reviews,
see Bucholtz and Hall 2004, 2005).
Readers familiar with Butler’s (1990, 1993) notion of gender performativity may
readily see its parallel in these linguistic anthropological texts, published at approxi-
mately the same time. While Gal views “women’s language” and “men’s language” as
culturally available symbolic resources that any speaker, regardless of sex, may draw
upon, Ochs views language as an action that constitutes gendered realities. For both
authors, gender is not the cause of discourse but rather its effect – a central tenet in
Butler’s theory. Given linguistic anthropology’s long-term engagement with speech
act theory and particularly Austin’s (1962) treatise on performatives, this parallel is
6 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

perhaps not so surprising. Most significantly in this regard, Silverstein (1976) invoked
Peirce in the mid-1970s to retheorize speech acts as involving “presupposing” and “cre-
ative” indexicality, launching the nuanced theorization of indexicality that linguistic
anthropology is now known for. Since the publication of Silverstein’s article, indexical-
ity has been the warp and weft of performativity for scholars in the field, explaining
the conundrum behind what early speech act theorists, following Anscombe (1957),
described as the dual direction of fit between world and word. In the texts reviewed
above, Gal and Ochs grant gender this same duality, illustrating how it emerges in new
contexts by presupposing what has come before. The special strength of their work,
when compared to that of Butler, is the emphasis placed on the creative directionality
of the arrow. This is the strength of ethnography more generally: How is the emergence
of gender transformed by the contextual particularities of local interaction?
The potential of ethnography for the study of language and gender was taken to a new
level when Eckert and McConnell-Ginet introduced their “communities of practice”
approach in the early 1990s (see also Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999). Writing from the
field of linguistics, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) published a ground-changing
article in the Annual Review of Anthropology that urged researchers to “think practically
and look locally.” Drawing from Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work on learning as both
communal and practice-based, they called for more fieldwork on the “mutual endeav-
ors” from which gendered styles of speaking emerge: “Ways of doing things, ways of
talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course
of this mutual endeavor” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992, 464). This important
methodological intervention again challenged the broad-scale generalizations made
about gendered speech in the early history of the field. But it also challenged the work
of anthropologists who had countered these early generalizations by looking at con-
figurations of gender in “cultures” elsewhere. A focus on gender as community-based
practice thus offered a number of distinct advantages for both language and gender
scholars and linguistic anthropologists. First, the recognition that people perform
gender for locally specific purposes enables a more multidimensional understanding
of gender as well as the power relations informing it. Second, if gender is learned in the
everyday practices that vary across communities, then gender identity is necessarily
plural instead of binary. Third, since gender is only one of many kinds of semiosis
emerging from practice, the study of language must be broadened to consider the
intertwinement of diverse types of signs, ranging from “vowels” to “hugging” to “nail
polish” (Eckert 1996). And finally, since it is through bodily actions that practices are
performed, the body itself must be brought into central consideration as a gendered
site of indexically loaded semiotic systems (Bucholtz and Hall 2016).
Once gender was no longer understood as indexically derived from the sex of the
speaker, the field opened itself to investigations of gendered language as a symbolic
resource that could be used agentively – whether to meet specific interactional goals,
to convey relations of power, to express identity, or all of the above. This new stage of
scholarship was facilitated by a series of conferences held at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, in the early 1990s, which brought together a diverse cohort of researchers
that included many of the scholars discussed thus far in this review (for compilations
of presented work, see e.g. Hall and Bucholtz 1995; Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton 1999).
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 7

But the conferences also involved a new generation of scholars, many of them graduate
students in linguistics, who had experienced firsthand the revolutionary sweep of But-
ler’s (1990) Gender Trouble across the academy. When the ethnographic innovations
discussed above were brought into conversation with gender performativity, the field
shifted more fully to a performative understanding of gendered speech as ideology that
emerges within the contextualized contours of everyday practice.
Articles published in the mid-1990s by McElhinny, Hall, and Barrett exemplify this
shift in their ethnographic accounts of some of the diverse purposes to which ideologies
regarding gendered speech may be put. McElhinny (1995) describes how female police
officers in Pittsburgh, as members of a traditionally male workforce, strategically adopt
a masculine bureaucratic style associated with the “non-projection of emotion” when
interacting with women victimized by domestic violence. Hall (1995) discusses the
commodification of a highly stereotyped performance of “women’s language” by work-
ers employed in San Francisco’s phone sex industry. And Barrett (1995) shows how
African American drag queen performers in Texas use a speech style associated with
middle-class white women to advance a critique of class and race relations. Situated
as interdisciplinary texts, all three studies engage deeply with feminist theorizations
of power. Hall, for instance, questions the tradition of anti-pornography feminism
by showing how language discussed in the literature as “powerless” is understood as
powerful by the sex workers who use it, while Barrett questions Butler’s celebration of
drag by showing how counterhegemonic performances may still reproduce misogyny.
In line with this new generation of scholarship, gender, race, and class come into
being in local contexts via the use of linguistic features that index culturally available
gendered meanings.

Intersectional approaches to language and gender

As suggested by the above review, the interdisciplinarity that characterized scholarship

in the 1990s initiated a number of research traditions that continue to evolve in the
twenty-first century. Researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that
configurations of language and gender intersect with other dimensions of social life (on
intersectionality, see Levon and Mendes 2016). This section outlines five of these inter-
sections – sexuality, race, institutions, embodiment, and media – with an eye to more
recent directions, particularly those emanating from locations beyond North America.
The 1990s may have moved linguistic anthropology across disciplinary lines, but the
2010s, benefiting from the establishment of the International Gender and Language
Association (IGALA) at the turn of the millennium, produced something altogether dif-
ferent. The pan-global consortium of language and gender scholars cited in this section
have crossed Western-based geopolitical, epistemological, and methodological bound-
aries to investigate gender and sexual orders from a more “undisciplined” set of vantage
points (Moita-Lopes 2006; Milani 2019).
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Gender and sexuality

Butler’s theorization of performativity for gender studies did not just inspire a new
understanding of gender. As suggested by Barrett’s study above, the theory’s reliance
on gender alterity likewise motivated queer interventions into (a mostly straight)
linguistic anthropology. In fact, much of the early research in this tradition was
produced by scholars who at the time identified more with sociolinguistics and cultural
anthropology than linguistic anthropology, as reflected by authors appearing in early
collections by Leap (1995), Livia and Hall (1997), and Leap and Boellstorff (2004).
Over the next decade, these and other researchers turned their analytical lens to how
sexual identity, as closely intertwined with gender identity, is produced, negotiated, and
contested in specific ethnographic sites, with a view to understanding its performative
and indexical production. Many of these studies diversified the linguistic anthropolog-
ical canon (as well as Leap’s 1996 pioneering focus on “gay men’s English”) by focusing
on communities identifying with non-normative systems of sexuality and gender in
varied cultures, such as ‘yan daudu in Nigeria (Gaudio 2009), hijras and kotis in India
(Hall 2005), travestis in Brazil (Kulick 1997; Borba and Ostermann 2007), and fakaleiti
in Tonga (Besnier 2002). While giving empirical impetus to Butler’s densely abstract
theorizations, these studies also exposed the limits of queer theory for capturing the
complexities of social life, much like linguistic anthropology had done with respect to
speech act theory two decades earlier.
Scholarship in this vein gave rise to a tradition of research that has now come to
be characterized as queer linguistics, a field focused on the shifting indexical processes
that constitute heteronormativity as well as its exclusions. A recent example of this
approach is Barrett’s (2017) monograph on diverse US gay male subcultures that include
drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, and barebackers. Advancing the idea
of indexical disjuncture (“the use of indexical signs counter to normative expectations
of the relationship between form and context”), Barrett offers vivid empirical detail on
how language use makes or breaks regulatory frames that render members of these
subcultures culturally unintelligible. Cashman (2017), also writing about the indexi-
cal manifestations of heteronormative exclusion, shows how belonging, identity, and
bilingualism shape the identity practices of queer Latinxs in the southwestern United
States. She finds that the ways her participants narrate their ethnic and sexual identities
do not match dominant understandings of intergenerational language shift in sociolin-
guistic theory, which continues to rely on heterosexual family-based models. Finally,
Levon’s (2010) ethnography of lesbian and gay activists in Israel explores the friction
between tradition and innovation in language use as it informs sexual identity politics.
He shows how a range of linguistic phenomena in Hebrew that are ideologically asso-
ciated with femininity and masculinity – mean pitch, creaky voice, prosody, syntax,
morphology – are differently mobilized by mainstream and radical LGBT activists as
they negotiate a multitude of fleeting sexual subjectivities within Israeli national, gen-
der, and religious systems.
These ethnographies shed light on the complexities of how gender and sexual dissi-
dents use language to construct themselves as legitimate beings vis-à-vis norms that
disenfranchise them (see also articles in Zimman, Davis, and Raclaw 2014; Hall, Levon,
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 9

and Milani 2019). Importantly, they demonstrate that a queer linguistic approach
provides empirical animus to theoretical discussions of normativity by showcasing
how norms not only constrain language practice but also offer the means for their
own contestation. The above review has focused on communities organized around
sexual or gender alterity as agents of this contestation, but of course heterosexual
and cisgender communities are also of interest in this regard. In addition, sexual
practices, whether heteronormative or homonormative, are likewise implicated in
systems of normativity (Cameron and Kulick 2003; Motschenbacher 2018). Following
theoretical advances in linguistic anthropology, queer linguistics views identity as built
up from practice, analyzing these two dimensions of social life as mutually constituting
and intimately interwoven (Hall 2013). The discussion that follows accordingly
includes research on sexual practices alongside sexual identities as foundational to the
field.

Gender and race

As researchers went to the field to counter linguistic anthropology’s erasure of sexuality
from discussions of gender, a parallel tradition of research emerged to challenge the
omission of race and ethnicity. Influenced by developments in multicultural feminism,
which had since the 1970s challenged the whiteness of feminist theory, ethnographers
began to expand the language and gender canon with accounts of language practice
in North American communities of color. A precedent for this intersectional tradition
was established early on by Mitchell-Kernan (1972), whose richly ethnographic
work on African American women’s signifying practices predated Lakoff’s (1975)
Language and Woman’s Place. Important turn-of-the-century texts include Zentella’s
(1997) “anthropolitical” analysis of bilingual practices in a New York Puerto Rican
community, Morgan’s (2002) review of African American women’s speech styles,
Mendoza-Denton’s exposition of language practices among Latina youth gangs, and
Jacobs-Huey’s (2006) multi-sited exposition of practices and discourses surrounding
African American women’s hair. These ethnographies thickened the portrait of
women’s language practices by exposing their diversity within as well as across lines
of race and gender. For instance, Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) ethnography focuses on
intragender differences in the social semiotic practices of two rival Mexican American
girl gangs in a school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Attending to micro-linguistic
details such as pronunciations of the Chicano English vowel /I/, language attitudes
toward English vs. Spanish, and bodily adornment practices such as clothing and
make-up, she uncovers the ways that Norteño and Sureño gang members perform
contrastive femininities orienting to the United States and Mexico, respectively.
The strength of this tradition lies in its focus on intersections of gender, race, and
class as emergent within local communities of practice. Subsequent work turned the
lens on whiteness as a dimension of social life that achieves its power by remaining
unmarked. Central in this regard is Bucholtz’s (2011) ethnography of “white kids” in
a Bay Area high school, which exposes how separate cohorts of female nerds, pop-
ular kids, and hip-hop fans develop contrastive styles that are nevertheless informed
10 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

by the hidden prestige of whiteness. More recently, scholars have begun to explore
the transcultural identities that emerge through movement across geographic, cultural,
and linguistic boundaries, as exemplified by Tetreault’s (2015) work on creative uses
of linguistic politeness by French-Algerian teenage girls in Paris housing projects and
García-Sánchez’s (2014) work on the linguistic lifeworlds of Moroccan immigrant girls
in Spain. These texts enter a new frontier regarding language and gender in European
communities marginalized by Islam as well as Arabic, a topic requiring urgent femi-
nist attention and sensitivity. Within the context of the United States, Baran (2017) has
examined practices of gender and sexual identification among immigrants in diverse
communities, viewing their language choices as strategic to the multiplicity associated
with the immigrant experience.

Gender and institutions

Many of the texts cited in the previous section focus on schools and colleges as sites that
cultivate discursive hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality (see also Shankar
2008; Pichler 2009; LaDousa 2011; Nakassis 2016; Smalls 2018). Much of this work
extends Eckert’s (1989, 2000) variationist work on language and class in a Detroit high
school; her theorization of stylistic practice has resulted in highly fruitful collaborations
between sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Eckert and Rickford 2001). This
harkens to a robust tradition within linguistic anthropology regarding the role played
by institutions in shaping gender relations. Language and gender scholars have been
at the vanguard of this tradition (e.g., Gal 1989; McElhinny 1997, 2014; Philips 2014),
exposing the ways that institutions give meaning to gender and influence its material-
ization in interaction. Carr’s (2010) ethnography of an addiction treatment program for
homeless women is powerful in this regard: she shows how clients who are dependent
on the institution for food and shelter learn to perform prescribed ways of speaking
during their clinical assessments and self-help sessions (see also Borba 2019b on the
talk of trans clients in a gender identity clinic in Brazil). The role played by institutions
in influencing talk has led Philips (2020) to advocate for multi-sited discourse analysis
(or in her terms, “anthropological discourse analysis”), a method she used for under-
standing gendered language ideologies in Tonga. By examining how gender is organized
in interactions associated with different types of institutions, we can gain a more robust
understanding of the broader social system informing gender relations.
This approach is used to good effect by Ostermann (2003a, 2003b) in her ethnog-
raphy of language and gender in two all-female Brazilian institutions addressing
violence against women: a police station and a feminist crisis intervention center.
Whereas the policewomen show little attention to victims’ face needs, much like the
policewomen studied by McElhinny (1995), the self-identified feminists in the crisis
intervention center use a variety of cooperative and face-saving communicative strate-
gies. Ostermann argues that these differences arise from the participants’ institutional
identification. A cooperative style is not valued in the Brazilian male-dominated
police system and is thus avoided, even in contexts of domestic violence reporting.
In contrast, the women in the intervention center tap into linguistic acts of solidarity
with their interlocutors as a means of diminishing power differentials. Ostermann’s
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 11

ethnography demonstrates that gendered speech styles emerge from the dynamics
of social difference and power that characterize an institutional context. Attention
to these kinds of ethnographic and linguistic details reveals that institutions work as
microcosms within a larger culture and may therefore reiterate or challenge oppressive
gender orders, which in turn shapes the form and content of local interactions.
This is vividly seen in Ehrlich’s (2001) research examining how the testimony of
witnesses in sexual assault trials is shaped by the institutional setting and the broader
ideologies of gender and sexuality it prioritizes. Institutions also play a gatekeeping
role with respect to violence against women, a process documented in Trinch’s
(2003) large-scale ethnographic study of Latina victims of domestic violence who
attempt to secure restraining orders to prevent their partners from having contact
with them.

Gender and embodiment

Renewed attention to embodiment in language and gender research has shed light on
the material, fleshy dimensions of performativity. As Pinto (2012, 105) explains, “speech
acts necessitate the body” since speaking and writing are bodily acts. This strand of
research has paid attention both to the speaking body and to what is spoken about the
body. Research on the first of these dimensions has highlighted how the combination
of linguistic and bodily acts such as gesture, gaze, proxemics, and pitch may produce
certain forms of hegemonic masculinities (Goldstein, Hall, and Ingram 2020) as well
as genderqueer (Corwin 2017), intersex (King 2016), drag queen (Calder 2019), trans-
masculine (Zimman 2017), and gay subculture identities (Barrett 2017). The body may
even contribute to transgressive forms of sexual citizenship, as demonstrated by Milani
(2015) and Provencher and Peterson (2018).
Research on discourses about the body, on the other hand, has illustrated the
role played by ideologies (of gender, sexuality, nationality, race, language) in the
understanding of what counts as a legitimate, culturally intelligible body. This is the
case in Glapka’s (2018) study about how Black South African women simultaneously
reiterate and challenge colonial tropes of beauty imported from the West in conversa-
tions about their hair (see Jacobs-Huey 2006). This invites comparison with Billings’s
(2013) ethnography of beauty pageants in Tanzania, where women escaping poverty
and patriarchy develop creative strategies to make their beauty visible within a global
economic system that prioritizes English and its associated semiotics. Focusing on
the Brazilian media and its obsession with exuberant bodies, Borba and Milani (2019)
discuss the case of a man’s unconventional bum size in news reports and show that
both journalists and their readers revive colonial discourses of femininity and race
that animalize and dehumanize the man in question. These two strands of research on
embodiment are brought together by Peck and Stroud’s (2015) work in Cape Town,
which entwines ethnography and linguistic landscape methodologies to study how
inscriptions of the body such as tattoos performatively produce the materiality of the
body while also inscribing it in spacialized power relations that are, inter alia, changed
by the mobility of tattooed bodies.
12 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

Gender and media

A consideration of media was anecdotally built into Lakoff’s (1975) early analysis of
“women’s language,” yet it took another 20 years before media analysis became fully
integrated into language and gender research. Scholars working in both gender studies
and media studies have consistently problematized mainstream media representations
as too often relying on simplified dichotomies of femininities and masculinities (e.g.
De Lauretis 1989). This perspective found a home in linguistic anthropology when its
emphasis on ethnographic methods evolved to include mediatized and archival data.
A case in point is Miller’s (2004) ethnographically grounded study of media repre-
sentations and self-representations of kogyaru (“kogals”), young Japanese women who
challenge dominant expectations of behavior in their cultural and linguistic practices.
Condemned by the media for their loud voices and unconventional uses of slang in
both writing (gyarumoji, “gal script”) and speaking (gyarugo, “gal language”), kogals
embrace their representation as “misbehaving” girls to construct a female-centered sub-
cultural identity. Gagné (2008) similarly draws from a combination of ethnographic
interviews and subcultural media resources to understand the multifaceted styles asso-
ciated with young Japanese women known as gosurori (“Gothic-Lolita”). He demon-
strates that these styles, while denigrated, provide relief from prescribed female molds
offered to women in a traditionally patriarchal society. These and other studies of medi-
atized youth styles, in apparent support of Lakoff’s early claim, suggest that girls’ lan-
guage behaviors are rarely viewed by the media in positive terms. Yet scholars have also
uncovered how this kind of gendered typecasting is often bound to complex critiques
of elite class and race positionalities, as seen in work by Slobe (2018) on online paro-
dies of “mock white girl” and Reyes (2017) on online tests targeting Philippine conyo
language.
In addition, studies on language and masculinity in Asian film have provided
an important corrective to Eurocentric assumptions that often guide theoretical
discussions of masculinity, such as Nakassis’s (2019) work on the “ontological politics”
of a spoof film parodying masculine heroic figures in mainstream Tamil cinema.
Hiramoto (2012) analyzes conversational patterns in martial arts films to illustrate
what she terms “Chinese-specific” views of masculinity. While Western-derived
discussions of masculinity often theorize its production as involving the absence
of affect, Hiramoto shows that in these martial arts films it is feeling, not thinking,
that becomes essential to manhood. With attention to the intertextual background
that gives meaning to formulaic speech styles and visual imagery, she shows how
these characters deviate from dominant theorizations of hegemonic masculinity by
using “reticence” and “taciturnity.” A related line of research focuses on gender in
non-traditional Asian media, such as Robertson’s (2017) analysis of Japanese manga
and Starr, Wang, and Go’s (2020) investigation of the role played by gender ideology
in the construction of affective stance in Mandarin ASMR (autonomous sensory
meridian response) videos. These studies are part of a broader global trend focused
on the ways language and gender relations are being transformed by technological
innovations, especially new communication technologies. Most prominently, research
has focused on ideologies of gender arising from varied digital media practices, such as
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 13

texting (Jones and Schieffelin 2009), posting selfies (Georgakopoulou 2016), promoting
six-pack abs (Hiramoto and Lai 2017), sexting (Thurlow 2017), advertising a porn
persona (Padgett 2018), and even breaking up (Gershon 2010). From a somewhat
different direction, Ehrlich’s (2019) analysis of the Ohio-based Steubenville rape trial
reminds us that social media evidence blurs distinctions between public and private in
ways that demand sociolinguistic investigation.
This brief review of a vast body of media scholarship has focused especially on work
applied to Asia to highlight this subfield’s robust contribution to language and gender
studies. The preponderance of work on Japanese is not accidental: Japan is the home
of a parallel tradition of language and gender research that took root before the emer-
gence of language and gender research in North America. Much of this research revolves
around what is often discussed as “Japanese women’s language” (JWL), a set of gen-
dered linguistic distinctions that can be traced back to novels of the late Edo period in
the 1800s. Features noted for JWL include sentence-final particles such as ne and wa,
the first-person personal pronoun atashi, the beautificative prefix o-, diverse forms of
polite speech, and exceptionally high-pitched voice (Ide 1982; Shibamoto Smith 1985;
Ohara 1997; Okamoto 1995; SturtzSreetharan 2008; Hiramoto 2010). This tradition of
research is foundational to the development of language and gender studies in North
America, inspiring Lakoff’s (1972) early turn to “language in context” as well as Ochs’s
(1990) theorization of gender as indirectly indexed by the taking of stances in conver-
sation. More recently, the cross-pollination of ideas between these two parallel tradi-
tions paved the way for Inoue’s (2003, 2004) influential media contributions regarding
the role played by elite “listening subjects” in constituting this language variety, a pro-
cess she identifies as inverse indexicality. While Ochs sees gender as emergent from
bottom-up interactional stance-taking, Inoue uncovers the top-down processes that
bring gendered language into being, focusing in particular on late-Edo/post-Meiji nov-
elists’ use of jogakusei kotoba “schoolgirl speech” (see also Nakamura 2006). As show-
cased by the research reviewed in this entry, the investigation of both bottom-up and
top-down indexical directionalities is linguistic anthropology’s “super power” within
language and gender studies.

Conclusions: Moving southward and forward

This review concludes by emphasizing the importance of research by scholars in the
Global South to the linguistic anthropological investigation of language and gender.
Since the millennium, the field of language, gender, and sexuality has expanded sig-
nificantly to diverse parts of the world (see e.g. Ostermann and Moita-Lopes 2014 on
Brazil; Al-Wer 2014 on the Middle East and North Africa). Trespassing well-established
disciplinary and geographical boundaries, this emerging consortium of language and
gender scholars has turned their attention to the lingering effects of colonial divisions
of the globe into North/West vs. South/non-West. Their work has begun to uncover the
material fallout of this division in the everyday lives of gendered, raced, and sexualized
subjects, bringing into question the geopolitics of knowledge production and the rela-
tions of power that undergird it. Most critically for the field of linguistic anthropology,
14 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R

their work stresses the importance of “undisciplining” language and gender through a
transnational theoretical consideration of Southern epistemologies.
The preceding discussion attempted to move outside the North-based box of lin-
guistic anthropology by acknowledging important contributions from scholars in the
Global South. This proved difficult. Linguistic anthropological work continues to rely
on a singular axis of scholarly interpretation, whereby academics from the Global North
(particularly the United States) write about non-Western contexts. This perspectival
singularity, according to Miskolci (2014), perpetuates a power imbalance in which the
North is seen as the producer of theories while the South is understood as the place
from which to extract data. Recently, however, language and gender scholars Milani
and Lazar, in a special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, suggest that researchers
should “strive for more inclusive transnational theoretical projects” by repositioning the
South as a “conceptual and analytical lens through which to understand the discursive
dynamics of gender and sexuality in non-Northern contexts” (2017, 311). This revision,
deeply consistent with the reflexivity that defines feminist and ethnographic method-
ologies, is imperative to the success of the field’s pan-global future.
The challenge ahead for language and gender scholars involves much more than the
odd reference here and there to a Global South scholar. On the contrary, it involves
the envisaging of Southern epistemologies as a vantage point from which to vent fresh
air into overly disciplined understandings of social life. In their introduction to a 2012
issue of Gender and Language on Sub-Saharan Africa, Atanga et al. suggest that this
turn in perspective brings light to phenomena that language and gender scholars have
only faintly considered: “respect for the elderly, the importance of religion … family
networks … stark gaps between rich and poor and sharp juxtapositions between
the traditional and the modern” (2012, 4). Scholars speaking from varied Southern
loci of enunciation (Bhabha 1994) have accordingly questioned the usefulness of
Northern theories for understanding language and gender practices in local Southern
contexts (Atanga 2012; Ellece 2012; Luyt 2012). Still others have examined language
use from Southern perspectives as a means of demonstrating the analytical richness of
the South as an epistemological and political heuristics (Borba 2017, 2019a; Deumert
and Mabandla 2017; King 2017; Lazar 2017; Ostermann 2017; Shaikjee and Stroud
2017). Importantly, these studies demonstrate the analytical affordances of theoretical
cross-fertilization. This does not entail doing away with Global North epistemologies
but rather expanding them with Southern perspectives. The idea is to pave a two-way
road, so to speak, on which knowledge flows bi-directionally.
In sum, this intervention suggests that moving southward is the way forward for the
future of language and gender. This is a distinctly feminist turn, requiring heightened
attention to the geopolitical walls that stop knowledge from crossing the border. It also
demands careful theoretical collaborations with world researchers who acknowledge
their locus of enunciation, including its privileges and oppressions. This reflexive geopo-
litical project carries the potential to challenge the colonial histories that shape our ways
of seeing the world, leading to more nuanced and locally sensitive understandings of the
place of language, gender, and sexuality in everyday life.
 L A NGU A GE & GE ND E R 15

SEE ALSO: Agency; Body, Embodiment; Feminism and Language; Language and
Identity; Language Ideology; Language and Power; Language, Sexuality, and Desire;
Language and Sexuality: Language and LGBTQ+ Communities; Media Representation
of Language and Writing Systems; Performativity vs. Indexicality

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