New Generalizations and Explanations in Language and Gender Research
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Language in Society 28, 185–201. Printed in the United States of America New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research PENELOPE ECKERT Department of Linguistics Stanford University Palo Alto, CA 94305 [email protected] SALLY MCCONNELL-GINET Department of Linguistics Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853 [email protected] ABSTRACT Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men – but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations re- quire understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group whose joint engagement in some activity or enterprise is sufficiently intensive to give rise over time to a repertoire of shared prac- tices. Eckert’s ethnographic/sociolinguistic work (1989, 1999) in pre- adolescent and adolescent communities of practice illustrates ways in which gender and other aspects of identity are co-constructed. We use these and other sociolinguistic data to suggest some of the many different kinds of generalizations, emerging from studies of language and gender, that look to communities of practice. (Community of Practice, gender, variation, social practice, local meaning, ethnographic sociolinguistics, identity con- struction) At lunchtime in the spring of 1997, in an ethnically very heterogeneous junior high school in northern California, a crowd of Asian-American kids hangs out in a spot that is generally known in the school as “Asian Wall.” Girls stand around in their high platform shoes, skinny bell-bottoms, and very small T-shirts, with hips cocked. As they toss their heads, their long sleek black hair (in some cases tinted brown) swishes across their waists, the slimness of which is emphasized by shiny belts. Some of them talk to, some lean on, quiet-demeanored boys with © 1999 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/99 $9.50 185 PENELOPE ECKERT & SALLY McCONNELL-GINET baggy jeans and baggy shirts, with hair long on the top and shaved at the bottom. Linda turns away from her group of friends with a characteristic tilted head toss, bringing her hair around her shoulders; and with an exaggerated high-rise into- nation on the pronoun, she calls to a boy who’s standing nearby, “What are you?” Another girl, Adrienne, who happens to be walking by, answers on his behalf: “He’s Japanese-Filipino.” The boy smiles silently, and Linda turns back to her friends. What particularly concerns us in this vignette is the complex nature of social meaning in language use, and the challenge that it presents in the attempt to separate gender from other aspects of identity. This brief exchange was one move in the co-construction of gender, ethnicity, heterosexuality, life stage, and social status which is the order of business at Asian Wall. It was an individual move for those who spoke – Linda and Adrienne; for the Japanese-Filipino boy, who ac- cepted the exchange with a silent smile, it was a public move in the more general construction of the Community of Practice (CofP) at Asian Wall. ACofP is an aggregate of people who, united by a common enterprise, develop and share ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, and values – in short, practices. A CofP can develop out of a formally or informally constituted enter- prise: a choir, a gang, a secretarial pool, a family, a garage band, a friendship group, or an academic department. Once launched, it has its own life and devel- ops its own trajectory. The development of shared practices emerges as the par- ticipants make meaning of their joint enterprise, and of themselves in relation to this enterprise. Individuals make sense of themselves and others through their forms of participation in and contributions to the community. The community as a whole constructs a joint sense of itself through the relation between its practices and those of other communities. Thus a CofP is not isolated and inward-looking, but shapes its participants’ relations both among themselves and with the rest of the world. What makes theAsian Wall crowd a CofP is the participants’joint engagement in constituting a viable crowd on a par with the other large, ethnically based crowds in school. Side by side with the Latinos and the African Americans, the Asian Americans constitute a major community of color in this school. Koreans, Vietnamese, Hmong, Japanese, Filipinos, and Chinese are not a homogeneous group by any standard. But just as the internal diversity of the African-American and Latino populations has been erased in most dominant American construc- tions of ethnicity, so the notion of “Asian American” is a coherent category en- tering public discourse. Those at Asian Wall embrace the construction of Asian Americanness not so much out of a sense of pre-existing commonality, as out of a shared need to construct a commonality around which they can join forces. In the face of the other dominant peer groups in school, the Asian-American stu- dents see the value of foregrounding their commonalities to increase their num- bers and visibility, and hence to construct status. In this enterprise, knowing the differences among Asian cultures is as important as knowing the similarities; 186 Language in Society 28:2 (1999) NEW GENERALIZATIONS AND EXPLANATIONS both kinds of knowledge distinguish participants from non-Asian Americans. At Asian Wall, different Asian-American ethnicities are emphasized – and some are even marginalized – in the self-conscious construction of unity around a partic- ular set of differences. The mixed-gender crowds (Eckert 1996, 1999) that emerge in pre-adolescence and early adolescence are the locus of heterosexual practice in the age group, and the visibility and status of the crowd is an important aspect of the co-construction of heterosexuality and social status. At the same time, new adolescent gender practices develop around heterosexuality – making gender, heterosexual social practice, social status, and age inseparable. In this heterogeneous school, race is part of the co-construction as well. In the crowd at Asian Wall, as in the Latino and African-American crowds nearby, the joint enterprise is this process of co- construction. How, then, would we separate the construction of gender from that of status, heterosexuality, race, or age? Style is the key to the development of this CofP; it exploits many kinds of resources, some of which are unique to the Asian-American community, and some shared with other groups. Among these is an emerging Asian-American speech style observable in California schools, which includes a variety of vari- ables including vowels (Mendoza-Denton & Iwai 1993), stress shift, speed, and intonation. Linda’s exaggerated question intonation is among these, and is subtly distinct from the intonations heard in other crowds in the school. Linda’s question and Adrienne’s response are both public displays of boldness with boys – through aggressive questioning, and through the proprietary behavior of answering for boys. Neither of these is specific to Asian Wall; both arise more generally in late elementary-school heterosexual crowds. Both strategies establish girls as “play- ers” in the heterosexual market. The content of the utterances, however, is spe- cific to Asian Wall, and it constitutes one small step in the construction of community around Asian diversity. This distinctive style of speaking interacts with styles of movement, dress, and other forms of social engagement that the junior high kids use in constituting themselves as Asian Americans. While some of the Latinas also have long black hair, they don’t swish it in the same way, nor do they strive to emphasize small- ness of waist and backside. The whole issue of tossing hair is a hot one among the school’s African-American girls, as made evident in a girl’s comment about one of her peers: “Look how she’s tossing her hair – she thinks she’s white.” The emerging Asian-American style is embedded in the other aspects of life that are salient to seventh-graders, such as gender, heterosexuality, school orientation, gang orientation, and family relations. What brings them all together is not an abstract Asian Americanness, but the value of the CofP that has constituted itself around Asian Wall. The combination of choices among stylistic resources makes the stylistic prac- tice at Asian Wall what it is; the combination of concerns that bring together the CofP at Asian Wall imbues this style with its particular social meaning – which Language in Society 28:2 (1999) 187 PENELOPE ECKERT & SALLY McCONNELL-GINET lies at the heart of sociolinguistics generally, and of the study of language and gender specifically. Our understanding of what it means to be male or female – in a particular group, in the community, in society, and in the world – underlies our interpretation of gender differentiation in language use. Sociolinguists have tended to focus on the more abstract level of social structure in their interpretation of meaning, seeking global generalizations which, they assume, supersede local dynamics. But if variations in language use that have no clear referential differ- ences are used to encode local social meaning, then the nature of this meaning is a very central linguistic concern. To the extent that the CofP is the locus of this kind of meaning construction, it should be a key focus for sociolinguistic study. THE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger developed the CofP construct as the basis of a social theory of learning. (See Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998, which further develop and elaborate these ideas as an alternative to more traditional views of learning; see also the introductory article in this issue, by Holmes & Meyerhoff, for a very useful comparison of the notion of the CofP to other ana- lytic constructs used in sociolinguistics and in social theory.) The construct arose out of an examination of traditional apprenticeship, based on Lave’s ethno- graphic work among Vai tailors in Liberia.