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Variation and Gender and Sexuality

The preadolescent heterosexual market Penelope Eckert This project is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, following a cohort of kids from fifth to eighth grades. It examines changes in the gender order with the emergence of a heterosexual market, which forms the foundation of the adolescent social order. It examines the construction of linguistic styles as a function of participation in the heterosexual market. See my webpage on the elementary school study and/or my webpage on language and gender. Changing economics, changing markets: A sociolinguistic study of Chinese yuppies Qing Zhang This 2001 dissertation compared the use of a range of local variables in the speech of two groups of managers in Beijing Mandarin: Managers in foreign-based financial companies and managers in state-owned businesses. Managers in the foreign-owned businesses, commonly referred to as RChinese yuppiesS, were shown to be constructing a cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin, whereas the managers in state-owned businesses made greater use of local Beijing phonology. The work showed complex gender interactions, as a function of the kinds of personae women and men can successfully construct in the two work settings. This work also demonstrated that variation can be an integral part of social change. Tongzhi, Ideologies, and Semantic Change Andrew Wong Based on archival research, participant-observation and face-to-face interviews, this dissertation is a sociolinguistic and ethnographic study of the role of ideology in semantic change. Focusing on the on-going change in meaning of the Chinese word tongzhi from 'comrade' to 'sexual minorities' in Hong Kong, it investigates: (1) the actuation of this semantic change; (2) the extent to which this semantic change has spread from gay rights activists to other social groups (e.g. other lesbians and gay men, mainstream newspapers); and (3) how tongzhi is used differently from similar labels such as gay and tongxinglian zhe 'homosexual.' A popular address term in Communist China, tongzhi was appropriated by the gay rights activists in Hong Kong as a term of reference for sexual minorities in the late 1980s. While historical linguists have explored the conditions for and the causes of semantic change, sociolinguists have developed theories to account for the pejoration of social category labels. Since they study changes that took place in the past, they are unable to capture the social contexts and the discourse conditions in which changes occurred. To resolve this issue, my dissertation examines a semantic change in progress and adopts an approach that emphasizes meanings emergent in discourse rather than decontextualized meanings. Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) The re-appropriation of tongzhi. Language in Society. 34 (5). Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) New directions in the study of language and sexuality (Review Article). Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (1) Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) Language, cultural authenticity, and the tongzhi movement. Proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium about Society and Language - Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics. Clark, Eve and Andrew Wong. (2002) Pragmatic directions about language use: Words and word meanings. Language in Society. 31(2): 181-212. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). (2002) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew. (2002) The semantic derogation of tongzhi: A synchronic perspective. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 161-174. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew, Sarah Roberts and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. (2002) Speaking of sex. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 1-21. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew and Qing Zhang. (2000) The linguistic construction of the tongzhi community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 10(2): 248-278. Wong, Andrew. (2000) Explicit introductions in lexical acquisition: A case study. Issues in Applied Linguistics. 11(2): 149-174. Hackers and masculinity Kathryn Campbell-Kibler Not only is masculinity performed differently in different circumstances, with other social meanings, it changes over time. This project documents the ways in which members of the primarily male online community of alt.hackers construct the hacker identity and its relationship to masculinity. Although participants in the community emphasize their gender blindness and openness to women as members, and although there are a small number of women who participate in the community, the social work accomplished by the members serve to mark the community by gender in various ways. Members engage with and distance themselves from imagined global norms of masculinity, and construct an image of a hyper masculine Other with which they distinguish their own more moderate behavior. Use of gender neutral pronouns in online communities Kathryn Campbell-Kibler Over the years, there have been numerous proposals for the introduction of an epicene, or gender neutral, third person singular pronoun in English. None of these neologisms have been particularly successful, a testament to the difficulty entailed in the deliberate change of a central system of language. One partial exception to this rule of failure is the introduction of the pronouns "sie/hir" and "zie/zir" in the online world of Usenet news groups. Although not used across the system, these pronouns have been in regular use in certain communities almost since their inception. I propose that their relative success is related to the fact that they have taken on meanings not only related to gender and beliefs about gender, but also as markers of ingroup status. Side effects to prescriptive efforts to change language usage Emily Bender This study asks whether deliberate prescriptive efforts to change one aspect of language use can have effects beyond the intended one. The prescriptive drive in question is that against so-called gender-neutral 'he' (starting in the 1970s). The data studied are multiple editions of a sociology textbook and a corpus of ERIC abstracts. In these data, gender-neutral 'he' disppears over time, and the use of singular definite NPs with generic referents also reduce. Bender, Emily M. 1998. Are there any side effects to that prescription? Paper presented at NWAV(E) 27, Athens, Georgia.