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Gender, Language and Society
Associate Professor Begonia Echeverria
Graduate School of Education
Course: HASS 092-02E
Call #: 19784
Thursday, 2:10-3:00pm, Sproul 1339

This course examines the role language plays in the social construction of gender identities, and the ways in which gender impacts language use and ideologies. Its focus will be Western societies and the United States in particular, although students are encouraged to examine other cultures in the paper assignments. The main goal of the class is to introduce students to the complex ways in which gender and language interact. A second goal is to give students an opportunity to conduct original research on topics introduced in the class.

Reading List:

Week 1: Gender Bias in Language

Spender, Man Made Language (excerpts)
Romaine, "English - a man-made language?"
Romaine, "What's gender got to do with grammar?"
Ehlich and King, "Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon"

Week 2: Women's Language: Difference as Deficiency?

Lakoff, Language and Women's Place (excerpts)
O'Barr and Atkins, "Women's Language or Powerless Language?"
Freed and Greenwood, "Women, men and type of talk: What makes the difference?"

Week 3: Media Representations of Women

O'Barr, "Analyzing social ideology in advertisements"
Goffman, "Gender Advertisements"
Romaine, "Advertising gender"

Week 4: Discourse as dominance or cultural difference?

West & Zimmerman, "Small insults: A study of interruptions in cross-sex conversation between unacquainted persons"
Fishman, "Interruption: The work women do"
Maltz & Borker, "A cultural difference to male-female miscommunication"
Uchida, "When difference is dominance: A critique of the anti-power-based‚ cultural approach to sex difference"

Week 5: Counter-examples across cultures

Keenan, "Norm-makers and norm-breakers: uses of speech by men and women in a Malagasy community"
Kulick, "Anger, gender, language shift, and the politics of revelation in a Papua New Guinean village"
Okamoto, "Tasteless‚ Japanese"

Week 6: Language, Gender and Class

Trudgill, "Language and social class"
Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (excerpts)
Gordon, "Sex, Speech and Stereotypes: Why women use prestige speech forms more than men"
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, "Constructing meaning, constructing selves"

Week 7-8: Children, Adolescents and Language Use

Thorne, Gender Play
Cook-Gumperz, "Reproducing the discourse of mothering"
Mendoza-Denton, "Language attitudes and gang affiliation among California Latina girls"
Woolard, "Between friends: Gender, peer group structure and bilingualism in urban Catalonia"

Week 9: Gender and bilingualism

Gal, "Peasant men can‚t get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilingual community"
Heller, "Gender and public space in bilingual settings"
Zentella, "Multiple codes, multiple identities"

Week 10: Performing gender through language

Butler, Gender Talk (excerpts)
Cameron, "Performing gender identity: Young men‚s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity"
Pujolar, "Masculinities in a multilingual setting"
Ohara, "Finding one's voice in Japanese: A study of the pitch levels of L2 users"

Brief Biographical Statement:

I am a sociologist of language whose research examines the intersection of language and identity (gender, ethnic and identity). My sole-authored work focuses on the Basque case, using ethnographic and archival methods to examine language use and gender in particular. I have also been a collaborator in several projects examining language and identity issues (including gender) among ethnic minorities in the US.

I have taught this class to undergraduates at UCLA and UCSD, where it was very well received. I am looking forward to teaching it again.