Third
Wave Feminist Linguistics and the Analysis of Sexism
School of Cultural Studies,
Abstract: This
paper critically examines Third Wave feminist linguistics, a form of anti-essentialist
analysis which challenges Second Wave feminist linguistics' analysis of
the language of women and men as homogeneous groups.
Rather than assuming that men and women necessarily speak in different
ways, men being direct and forceful, women being hesitant, polite and apologetic,
a Third Wave feminist linguistics analyses the complex negotiations undertaken
by women and men with gendered domains (those sets
of linguistic routines or contexts which appear to be gendered, for example
public speaking, intimate conversation), and
gendered stereotypes of what it is assumed that women and men should
do (that is, women should be co-operative,
men should be competitive). In this way, Third Wave feminist analysis
makes it possible to analyse the language use of women and men, without assuming
that all women are powerless, all males are powerful, or that gender always
makes a difference. Thus Third Wave Feminist linguistics examines, for example,
the language of women who adopt primarily masculine forms of speaking in the
public sphere. However, rather than just focusing on the individual, this
form of analysis also examines the role
of context and social forces on the individual, in that these ways of speaking
may be judged by others as incompetent, aggressive, unprofessional and unfeminine.
Third Wave feminist linguistics is therefore concerned with moving the analysis
of gender and language away from the
individual alone towards an analysis of the individual in relation to social
groups who judge their linguistic behaviour and also in relation to hypothesised
gendered stereotypes. However, this article does not wholeheratedly advocate
the adoption of a Third Wave feminist perspective. It seems that within this
type of analysis sexism becomes difficult to analyse or challenge, and this
I suggest that rather than seeing Second
and Third Wave feminist linguistics as chronological, they need to be seen
more as approaches which may be more or less appropriate depending on the
context and social situation. In the case of sexism, for certain types of
sedimented sexism a Second Wave feminist approach is more applicable, whereas
in others a more locally-oriented and context-specific Third Wave approach
is preferable. Thus Second Wave feminism needs to be integrated into Third
Wave feminist linguistics, so that both local and global issues can be addressed.
Keywords:
Third wave feminism; Second wave feminism; linguistics; sexism; stereotypes
