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men who talk like women
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Date: Wed, 2 Feb 94 10:47:38 PST
From: Tom Burke
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____________ TWO SOCIOLINGUISTICS TALKS on Saturday, 5 February 2:00 p.m., Kimball Hall lounge Bay Area Sociolinguistics Association
Men Who Talk Like Women: Language and Gender in Hausa Muslim Society Rudi Gaudio Stanford Linguistics gaudio@csli.stanford.edu
This talk derives from research that is very much in progress: I recently returned from a year of field work in northern Nigeria, and will be going back into the field next month. My project investigates the linguistic behaviors of 'YAN DAUDU, a class of men in Hausa Muslim society whose speech, gestures and work activities are said to be womanlike. When considered in the context of the linguistic behaviors of Hausa men and women generally, this investigation will shed light on the ways in which masculine and feminine identity are constructed in Hausa society, and the ways people use language both to reproduce and to challenge those constructions.
Broader theoretical goals include (1) problematizing "gender" as an analytical category in sociolinguistic research; (2) critiquing the notion of the "speech community" as a bounded unit encompassing linguistic rules and attitudes that affect all members equally; (3) highlighting sexuality as a crucial factor informing speakers' sociolinguistic roles and behaviors as gendered subjects.
------ Coquettish Cursers and Foul-mouthed Flirts: Shifting Gender Positions in the Discourse of Hindi-speaking Hijras Kira Hall UC-Berkeley Linguistics
In this paper I refer to a series of interviews I conducted last year with Hindi-speaking "hijras" in Banaras, India, in order to question previous characterizations of women's speech and men's speech as discursive styles indexically derived from the gender of the speaker. The hijras, variously referred to in anthropological scholarship as "transsexuals" or "eunuchs," occupy a unique position in the Indian social matrix, as their ambiguous gender identity provokes conflicting responses of respect, fear, and hatred. Their use of language in particular reflects a lifestyle that is constantly self-defining: they study, imitate, and parody dichotomous constructions of gender in an effort to gender themselves. Not only do they switch between feminine and masculine morphological forms in their everyday discourses, they also employ a mixture of conversational styles variously associated with either femininity or masculinity.
Since verbs and adjectives in Hindi are marked for feminine and masculine gender, with verbs showing gender marking in all three persons, the hijras' attempts at alternating constructions of female and male selves becomes apparent in quite basic choices of feminine and masculine verb and adjective forms. I will discuss the shifting uses of these forms by hijras in three different communities, giving secondary attention to journalistic and scholarly representations of hijras by various Indian researchers, who regularly portray the hijra as a social and linguistic maverick. With reference to recent developments in feminist and gender identity theory, I suggest that linguistic negotiations of gender, although perhaps particularly overt in the Hindi-speaking hijra community, are not unique to alternative identities; rather, women and men of all communities manipulate cultural expectations of feminine and masculine speech in order to establish varying discursive positions. I conclude by discussing how cultural interpretations of the body can influence language use, calling for a theory of language and gender that devotes more attention to the roles of both agency and sexuality in conversational exchange.
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