Wednesday, 27 January 2016
Language and Gender, Language and representation #traditionallysubmissive
This is a really interesting area for Language study. I posted about a similar movement about what feminism means last year and this response to it, which are both interesting and worth following up on. Here, Muslim women are representing themselves with declaratives, often in sentence fragments that simply stand as a response to the negative connotations of David Cameron's adjective phrase "traditionally submissive". Have a look at the ways in which these phrases create a different representation than Cameron's phrase.
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I think that the idea which was conceived by a Cambridge University movement of writing reasons as to why people need feminism on boards, was a very interesting and effective method of transmitting the feminist message to the public. People sharing personal experiences, tragic events in history, or even how they feel society treats different groups, adds perspective to the issue. However, I feel that sometimes an unintended adversarial effect is created, when divisive language is used. For example, on Cambridge article there is a picture in which a woman has written "I need feminism, because you should respect the vagina you came out of". I find that the use of "you" creates the impression that it is an "us vs them" situation. This is not what feminism is trying to achieve, but nevertheless, I fell that this is what some people believe. Perhaps this could be resolved by using inclusive language, such as 'everyone', rather than divisive language such as 'you' and 'they'
ReplyDeleteI agree that the use of direct address with the second person pronoun "you" is so common (see 'synthetic pesonalisation') that the reader of that board feels spoken to and perhaps accused (I liked the adjective "adversarial" that you used, Fin) but it is important to remember that, as our language becomes more informal over time (see Fairclough's theory of 'informalisation') we have lost the use of the impersonal pronoun 'one' except in very formal contexts. I think she means 'one should respect the vagina that one came out of' - but you just wouldn't say that as the register would put off many more readers. I agree wholeheartedly that indefinite pronouns e.g. 'everyone' or 'everybody' would be clearer but, for context marks, remember that they are writing on boards with limited space and so, at least subconsciously, must be aiming for concision.
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