Linguistics 156: Language and Gender

SPRING 2012

TTH 2:15-3:45
ROOMS Tuesday: 540-103 and Thursday: 420-286

Instructor: Penny Eckert
eckert@stanford.edu
108 Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460)
Office hours: Thurs 1-2

Useful Links

TA: Annette D'Onofrio
annetted@stanford.edu
040-D Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460)
Office hours:Tuesday 4-5

Cool Stuff

check out last year's cool stuff
Stanford research on Gender in the math classroom
Nick pursued the study he mentioned in class about who talks more, and came up with some great links:
Mark Liberman's entry in Language Log. You'll be looking at a lot of Mark's blogs because they're terrific.
The apparent culprit Louann Brizendine whose book The female brain has some pretty spurious stuff in it.
In fact, check out Mark Liberman's blog about Brizendine: Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes
and a 2007 article in Science that actually recorded college students and came up with some interesting results.
The 5 most insulting ways products are advertised to men.
Geoff Pullum's The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax
Language Log's Eskimo-words-for-snow-myth watch
the Pejic phenomenon Thanks, Rachel!

General Information

The main purpose of this course is to teach you to think analytically about gender, about sexuality, and about language; and about the relations among them. The goals are inseparably intellectual and political: Responsible scholarship and citizenship require the ability and eagerness to go beyond stereotype, common belief and the popular press, to evaluate claims for oneself in a knowledgeable way. This course will provide facts, theory, and analytic tools with which to consider issues related to gender and sexuality, and their relation to language.
The readings for this course will be mostly articles from journals or edited volumes. Each week's readings will be accompanied by a question designed to help you integrate, interpret, and think beyond, the readings. By 5:00PM on Monday, you will email a one-page response to the week's question to both of us (eckert@stanford.edu;annetted@stanford.edu). We will return these responses in class on Tuesday, and they will serve as starting points for class discussion.
In order to engage you in relating the issues in this course to the language around you, there will be four small research projects in which you will deal with language data. The first three assignments will be predetermined, and you will decide what to do for the fourth. The corpus assignment will be done in groups, and you can decide whether to do the fifth assignment alone or in a group. Each of the first three projects will be due at 8:00 AM on Thursday, and will form the basis of discussion on Thursday and in some cases will provide a corpus that you can use for analysis. The final project will culminate in a carefully planned oral presentation to the class, followed by discussion.

Syllabus and Assignments

Here are Tyler's slides

Caution: The Syllabus is always subject to modification. Most particularly, material might be changed or added as the course progresses, so consult it regularly.

Week 1 (April 3, 5)	The Gender Binary and the Study of Language and Gender
Week 2 (April 10,12)	The Discursive Construction of Gender: The Lexicon	Collocations due Thursday
Week 3 (April 17,19)	Parody, Crossing and Stylistic Practice: Is There a Gay Style?	Honey Badger due Thursday
Week 4 (April 24,26)	Stylistic Choices
Week 5 (May 1,3)	Analyzing Interaction
Week 6 (May 8, 10)	Theories of Gender and Interaction	Corpus Assignment due Thursday
Week 7 (May 15, 17)	Gender and the Media
Week 8 (May 22, 24)	Language, Gender and Social Change
Week 9 (May 29,31)	Gender and Language Reform
Dead Day (May 5)	Project Presentations Tuesday

Assessment

The course grade will be determined as follows:

Reading Questions 20%

Collocations Assignment 5%

Honey Badger Assignment 20%

Corpus Assignment 25%

Final Project %25%

Class Participation 5%

Late Assignment Policy: Unavoidable late assignment submissions (due to illness, death in the family, etc.) should be approved in advance by Annette or Penny.

Students with Documented Disabilities: Students who have a disability which may necessitate an academic accommodation or the use of auxiliary aids and services in a class must initiate the request with the Disability Resource Center (DRC). The DRC will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend appropriate accommodations, and prepare a verification letter dated in the current academic term in which the request is being made. Please contact the DRC as soon as possible; timely notice is needed to arrange for appropriate accommodations. The DRC is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone 723-1066; TDD 725-1067). See http://www.stanford.edu/group/DRC/ for more information.