ANTH 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Polyamory, Language Ideology, Genderqueer
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Anth. 120 Week Nine Lecture Notes
● Language and Gender
○ Things about speaking/language that allows people to guess someone else’s
gender (a big part of our gender expression)
■ Topical/content
■ Pitch range
■ Intonation curves/patterns
■ Taciturn
■ Reactions: listening cues
■ Address terms: hon, honey, bro, sis
■ Pace
○ What makes us ‘sound’ our gender?
■ Our ways of speaking are ways we have been socialized to speak based
on the gender we were socialized as
○ Gender expression: Can think of as a continuum between feminine and
masculine or anywhere inbetween with androgynous in the middle
○ Gender identity: The way in which we think about our own gender, who we feel
we are
○ Gender not equal to sex
○ Sex
■ Reproductive organs (testes/ovaries)
■ Genitalia
■ Genetics (XX/XY)
○ Around 1 to 2 % of the population are intersex, having male and female sexual
characteristics, about as common as redheads. A physiological variation not
always aligned with gender
○ Cisgender: Sex aligns with the gender assigned at birth
○ Transgender: Sex does not align with gender assigned at birth, maybe feels the
opposite gender they were assigned or somewhere in the middle don’t identify
with either gender (non-binary)
○ Sexuality: The gender/sex to whom we feel attracted to which is also really a
continuum with heterosexual (straight) and homosexual (gay) the two ends of the
spectrum and bisexualiry or polyamory in the middle
■ Sexual behaviours may not align with our sexuality
○ Gender is performed, it is something we do and it is collaborative, it is learned
(similar to language socialization) and involves asymmetry
● Widespread language ideologies
○ Women are more talkative
○ Women’s talk is more cooperative, polite, and collaborative
○ Men are less talkative
○ Men’s talk is more competitive, confrontational, and directive
● It’s more about social power and position than gender
○ Lexical features used by people with power: