“Because I’m a lady and I don’t use that kind of language” Linguistic Research of Gender in Desperate Housewives Ilse Verwulgen Masterproef Ter behalen van de titel van Master in de Taal - en Letterkunde: afstudeerrichting: Engels Academiejaar 2007–2008 Promotor: Prof. Dr. A.-M. Simon – Vandenbergen Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 1. INTRODUCTION 2 2. LANGUAGE AND GENDER: THEORY AND METHODOLOGY 4 2.1 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW AND GENERAL THEORY 4 2.2 DIRECTIVES, SILENCING DEVICES AND GENDER PERFORMANCE 7 2.3 DATA SELECTION 10 3. DIRECTIVES 12 3.1. METHODOLOGY 12 3.2. STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS 14 3.2.1. GENERAL PATTERN 14 3.2.2 HEDGES 20 3.3. ANALYSIS OF SCENES 23 3.3.1 POWER STRUGGLES 24 3.3.2 ONE OF US… 25 3.3.4 IT’S TIME TO 26 4. SILENCING DEVICES 29 4.1 THEORY 29 4.1.1 TURN-TAKING VIOLATIONS 29 4.1.2 TOPIC VIOLATIONS 30 4.1.3 PATRONIZING STATEMENTS 31 4.1.4 PARALINGUISTIC SILENCING 32 4.1.5 NON-SERIOUS COMMENTS 32 4.2 ANALYSIS 33 4.2.1 GENERAL ANALYSIS 33 4.2.2 TURN-TAKING VIOLATIONS 36 4.2.3 TOPIC VIOLATIONS 39 4.2.4 PATRONIZING COMMENTS 42 4.2.5 PARALINGUISTIC SILENCING 44 ii 4.2.6 NON-SERIOUS COMMENTS 45 4.3 CONCLUSION 47 5. GENDER CONSTRUCTION IN THE DISCOURSE 48 5.1. METHODOLOGY 48 5.2. ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOURSE 49 5.2.1 PARENTHOOD AND HAVING/RAISING CHILDREN 51 5.2.2 BEING A MAN/WOMAN 58 5.2.3 BEING A HOUSEWIFE 62 5.2.4 CONCLUSION 66 6. CONCLUSION 67 BIBLIOGRAPHY 69 Acknowledgements This dissertation would never have seen the light of day if I had not been inspired and supported by so many people around me. First, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. A.-M. Vandenbergen, my supervisor, without whose valuable advice I would have been stuck a lot more often. Secondly, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. A.-M. Vandenbergen, Prof. Dr. K. Willems, Prof. Dr. C. Crocco, Prof. Dr. S. Slembrouck and Prof. Dr. K. Maryns, for their inspiring and memorable lectures which I attended during my four-year education at this university, all of whom have had, in various ways, some influence on my choice of topic. I also want to thank my friends from Purl & Stitch, for those few weekly hours of utter relaxation we all needed in these stressful times, and my family, for their perpetual support and their trust in me. Finally, I want to thank my boyfriend, for his never-ending support, his never-faltering faith in a happy ending and his inexhaustible patience. 2 1. Introduction Since the Women‟s Movement in the 1960‟s, gender has become a research area in many disciplines, including literature, sociology, but also linguistics, which is where this dissertation is to be situated. In a world where women and men do not have the same possibilities, gender research becomes an important tool to uncover the differences and the mechanisms which maintain these differences, which are sometimes very subtle. Only by uncovering the differences can gender equality at some point in the future be reached. Gender is not a static and binary construction like sex. Sex is a biological term, which refers to the genetic code each human being has. Normally, a chromosome combination XY indicates the human being is male, while XX indicates the human being is female. Biology tries to present this system as binary, but other combinations exist as well. These are, nevertheless, explained as genetic aberrations. Gender, on the other hand, is a continuum along which people can position themselves. As Talbot points out, the difference between sex and gender is represented in the English grammar: “[g]rammatically we can have masculine, more masculine, most masculine but not male, *maler, *malest (1998:7, emphasis in the original). Gender is a socio-cultural construct, which differs with each culture, each language, and each individual. Linguistic gender research has pointed out that men and women speak in different ways, and that they have different expectations about conversations and conversational rules (Maltz and Borker, 1998). Most of the research concerning gender has been conducted on the basis of natural data, which was produced either in a natural setting (e.g. Coates, 1996) or in a more artificial setting (Tannen, 1994). Therefore, the literature has come up with theories of men‟s and women‟s speech, which are based on what is found in reality. This dissertation wants to apply some of these theories to artificial language use, that is to say, the language that is used in soap series. The language in such series is supposed to resemble natural language closely, although the situations in which the conversations are produced are highly artificial, not to mention the language itself, which is written down by scriptwriters, interpreted by both actors and directors, and only then acted out and produced. Viewers see the scenes on their TV‟s, and think that the conversations seem natural. What they really see is the product of a long process of interpretation, acting and cutting. 3 But if the language seems so real, would it not be possible that some of the linguistic gender differences are represented in these series as well? This is what I want to find out in this research: how do soap series reflect linguistic gender differences? The elements I will focus upon are directives, silencing devices and the construction of gender in the discourse. For this research, I have decided to use the first series of Desperate Housewives as my data. First of all, the series focuses on women with marital and domestic problems. Therefore, there are a lot of conversations between husband and wife, which is exactly what I was looking for. Many people seem to recognize themselves in the characters and the situations they end up in. This familiarity is a second reason for choosing the series. It is the purpose of this dissertation to see if the language also resembles reality. Thirdly, the series is recent and very popular. It was written in 2002, and first aired in 2004 on ABC. The series is not only popular in the United States, where it is situated, but all over the globe. In Australia, for example, the première attracted most viewers ever in the history of soap series premières of Australian television. The first series was the fourth most watched prime time television programme in the United States, with some 23.7 million viewers per week. In April 2007, a survey reported that the series had over 115 million viewers in more than 130 countries all over the world. This indicates that the series presents the problems of the housewives in such a way that people all over the world can identify with them. (www.wikipedia.org, last accessed 21 May 2008). A last reason is that I have the DVD‟s myself, and therefore access to the data was not a problem. In the next chapter, I will give a brief historical overview of linguistic gender research, followed by a more detailed description of my research question and some information about the data I used. Then I will continue with the analysis of my data, concentrating first on directives, then on silencing devices, and thirdly on the construction of gender in the discourse. Each subsection consists of a description of my methodology and an analysis of the results and/or relevant scenes. In the final chapter, I will recapitulate the results of each section individually and draw a general conclusion. 4 2. Language and Gender: Theory and Methodology 2.1 Historical overview and general theory Early studies of the connection between language and gender tended to reproduce stereotypes and prejudices about women‟s language. These theories were hardly ever based on research. They compared women‟s language to men‟s language, though never explicitly. Jespersen, for instance, devoted an entire chapter to women‟s speech in his study Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922), praising women for “their instinctive shrinking from coarse and vulgar expressions and their preference for refined, and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions” (Jespersen, 1922, as quoted in Talbot, 1998: 37), but afterwards condescendingly stating that women‟s vocabulary was smaller than the vocabulary of men. Both of these statements were pure conjecture on his part. Needless to say that Jespersen did not devote a separate chapter to men‟s language: his entire study was based on the written language use of men (as were most of the studies of language of that era). Lakoff‟s Language and Woman‟s Place (1975) signalled the start of extensive research on gender differences in language, and on characteristics of men‟s and women‟s speech. The work itself was, again, based on intuitions and also introspection, but not on data-based research. Lakoff claimed that women use a kind of language that reflects their status in society, and proposed as specific characteristics of women‟s language “uncertainty, weakness and excessive politeness” (Talbot, 1998:38). She enumerated some specific features which she thought were typical of women‟s language. Later empirically based research, however, suggested that although Lakoff had guessed correctly about some features, her explanations were sometimes wrong. Holmes (1984), for instance, criticized Lakoff‟s monolithic view of question tags. Lakoff thought women used more question tags, and that they represented their insecurity about what they said. Holmes discovered that question tags have different functions, and that women do not always use more of them than men do, but they tend to use them in different ways (for more details, see Holmes, 1984).