Studying for Ways of Communication Exam
This section on performativity theory really intrigued me.
Performativity discusses the questions of when and why did certain linguistic (and other) features become associated with gender? And how did certain gender performances become associated with (biological) sex? When did empty adjectives (Lakoff, 1975), for example, become associated with 'female' ways of speaking?
The answer that Baker gives is that "gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of hte imitation itself'. So, as wtih the accents, ways of performing gender have developed graadually over time as power relationships between people in societies developed. Over time, then, speakers acquire an understanding about how such linguistic resources are uesd in different contexts, and develop, 'norms, preferences, and expectations regarding the distribution fo this work vis-a-vis particular social identities of speakers, referents, and addressees' (Ochs, 1991: 342). So, gradually, certain speech styles become associated with particular contexts or (stereo)types of identities- resources indirectly indexing social categories. The fact that such 'indexes of identity can shift over time could be partly due to linguistic innovators within social networks, e.g. people who use specific types of language in certain ways, whcih are then replicated by others (Milroy and Milroy, 1985). In Bodies That Matter (1993) Butler cited Derrida's theory of iterability, arguing that gender is a form of citationality: we ventriloquise or attempt to copy the acts of other speakers."
Oh this is an interesting point: "Butler also argues that the idea of there being two distinct 'genders' is dependent on heterosexuality, referring to a 'heterosexual matrix' (1990:5)." -Baker
Performativity discusses the questions of when and why did certain linguistic (and other) features become associated with gender? And how did certain gender performances become associated with (biological) sex? When did empty adjectives (Lakoff, 1975), for example, become associated with 'female' ways of speaking?
The answer that Baker gives is that "gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of hte imitation itself'. So, as wtih the accents, ways of performing gender have developed graadually over time as power relationships between people in societies developed. Over time, then, speakers acquire an understanding about how such linguistic resources are uesd in different contexts, and develop, 'norms, preferences, and expectations regarding the distribution fo this work vis-a-vis particular social identities of speakers, referents, and addressees' (Ochs, 1991: 342). So, gradually, certain speech styles become associated with particular contexts or (stereo)types of identities- resources indirectly indexing social categories. The fact that such 'indexes of identity can shift over time could be partly due to linguistic innovators within social networks, e.g. people who use specific types of language in certain ways, whcih are then replicated by others (Milroy and Milroy, 1985). In Bodies That Matter (1993) Butler cited Derrida's theory of iterability, arguing that gender is a form of citationality: we ventriloquise or attempt to copy the acts of other speakers."
Oh this is an interesting point: "Butler also argues that the idea of there being two distinct 'genders' is dependent on heterosexuality, referring to a 'heterosexual matrix' (1990:5)." -Baker