G&L (print) issn 1747–6321

Gender G&L (online) issn 1747–633X

and
Language Article

Can the term ‘genderlect’ be saved?

A postmodernist re-definition

Heiko Motschenbacher

Abstract
This article is an attempt to reclaim the term ‘genderlect’ as a valuable sociolinguis-
tic concept. It shows that ‘genderlect’ in its traditional sense as a variety according
to speaker sex is just as much a myth as are early sociolinguistic theorisations of
‘women’s/men’s language’. From a postmodernist perspective, genderlects can instead
be seen as stereotypical resources for gendered stylisation practices that are not to
be equalled with how women and men actually speak. This is illustrated by using
material from a comprehensive study on linguistic gender stylisation in advertising
discourse. Moreover, it is suggested that the strictly binary genderlect concept be
abandoned and replaced by another one that sees genderlects as context-dependent,
community-based and therefore infinite in number. A postmodernist genderlect con-
cept should be able to deal with hegemonic as well as subversive gender styles and
at the same time acknowledge that what is generally judged to be hegemonic in one
context might be subversive in another (or vice versa).
keywords: genderlect; postmodernism; advertising discourse; stylisation;
deconstructionism

Affiliation
Institute for England and America Studies (IEAS), Linguistics Department, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University,
Germany
email: [email protected]

G&L vol 1.2 2007 255–278 doi : 10.1558/genl.v1i2.255

©2007, equinox publishing LONDON
256 Gender and Language

This article takes the traditional ‘genderlect’ concept as a starting point, a

concept which originated in early sociolinguistics and contrasts female and
male speech styles as two stable, clear-cut and opposite gendered varieties.
It is argued that this traditional approach to gendered variation is no longer
acceptable in contemporary sociolinguistics because it does not do justice to
the way women and men actually use language. However, genderlectal features
cannot be ignored as a potent means of stylising particular female and male
identities. Instead of entirely abolishing the term ‘genderlect’, I shall propose to
re-define it in accordance with postmodernist conceptualisations of gender as
a performative construction. The theoretical considerations discussed in this
article originate from a comprehensive study on linguistic genderisation in
advertising discourse (Motschenbacher 2006). In this context, ‘genderisation’
and ‘gendering’ are terms to denote all stylistic means that may contribute to the
process of performative gender construction (explained more thoroughly below
as a central concept of postmodernist gender theorisation). The constellation
of genderlectal features results in two specific stylised forms of femininity and
masculinity that cannot be taken as representative for the macro-categories of
women and men as a whole.

Early sociolinguistic folklore: ‘women’s/men’s language’

In the early days of sociolinguistic research (up to the 1970s), gendered
variation was often dealt with under the label of ‘women’s language’ or ‘men’s
language’ (see e.g. the chapter The woman in Jespersen 1968 [1922] or the
references in the bibliography of Thorne and Henley 1975: 269ff). Seen from
today’s perspective, early sociolinguists were socially biased in many respects.
A strong tendency can be felt to locate ‘women’s/men’s languages’ in (from a
Western perspective) exotic cultures where the sexes at first glance seemed
to use gender-specific forms (even though gender-specificity might be more
clear-cut in Western examples; cf. Glück (1979: 81) on Thai and Polish; see
Trechter (1999) for discussions of exoticizing practices in the study of gender
in Lakhota). Another bias can be seen in the fact that it is most of the time
‘women’s languages’ that are described, which creates the impression that male
varieties are the norm. Finally, a tendency can be detected to see gender as
the sole and independent factor for language variation, which is problematic
because gender usually interacts with other parameters such as class, race, age
or context. But even in Western contexts, a term like ‘women’s language’ was
not unfamiliar when talking about gendered varieties up to the 1970s (see, for
instance, Lakoff (1975) on American English). 1 Since Glück’s (1979) article
‘Der Mythos von den Frauensprachen’ (‘The myth of women’s languages’),
it must have been clear that strictly gender-specific language varieties are a
 h. motschenbacher 257

rare exception (if they exist at all). Even the cases in which a gender-specific
variety seems relatively plausible must raise suspicions because the features
declared gender-specific in these languages can also be used by members of
the opposite sex in certain contexts. Chukchi (an East Siberian language),
for example, is often cited to have gender-specific phoneme inventories.
On closer examination, however, it turns out that both women and men
can use both phonemic sets (e.g. in quotations) and that the ‘female’ set
also occurs generally in Russian lexical borrowings (Glück 1979: 68f.). In
the North American Indian community of Gros Ventre, ‘female’ voiceless
velar stops seem to correspond with ‘male’ affricates. Nevertheless, there are
people who use both sets (mostly the elderly or people considered bisexual
(see Coates 2004: 29)). Moreover, the ‘female’ forms are used by children of
either sex and by adults when talking to foreigners (Hellinger 1990: 15; for
further examples, see Hall 2003). Other historical examples, such as Prakrit
(the ‘female variety’ of Sanskrit) or Emesal (the ‘female dialect’ of Sumerian),
can be reconstructed only in part with respect to their functional breadth.
Sanskrit was the liturgical variety used by the priest caste in India, which
consisted entirely of men. Nevertheless, Sanskrit can hardly be considered
a ‘men’s language’ but rather the variety of an elitist religious group. Prakrit,
on the other hand, was spoken by the lower castes in general, i.e. by women
and men (Glück 1979: 60). Emesal can only be found in literary documents
where it is usually used by women or goddesses. However, it is also used by the
so-called gala–officiants (invariably male), who were considered effeminate
and/or homosexual (Schretter 1990: 129).

The traditional genderlect concept

What Glück (1979: 61f) considers more appropriate than the notion of
‘women‘s/men‘s language’ is the concept of ‘genderlect’, which first occurs in
the gender-oriented sociolinguistic literature of the 1970s (Haas 1979; Kramer
1974a) and is defined in parallel to other types of sociolinguistic variation
(other ‘-lects’, such as dialect, sociolect, idiolect) as a ‘linguistic variety or code
used predominantly by one sex/gender’ (Holmes 1996: 720). The classification
of a variety as a genderlect would then be based on a gender-preferential rather
than a gender-specific distribution of certain linguistic features. This may seem
much more reasonable on first glance, but it is still problematic (Cameron 1997:
25). The concept of genderlect corresponds to the ‘difference’ paradigm within
feminist linguistics (see especially Tannen 1990), which has been criticised
for several reasons. First of all, the notion of gendered subcultures in which
girls and boys learn gender-typical speech behaviour is not applicable to most
Western societies, where the sexes can communicate freely with each other. To
258 Gender and Language

explain gendered language variation as being parallel to miscommunication

in inter-ethnic encounters is to misrepresent the fact that gendered variation
fundamentally differs from other kinds of variation. Whereas dialects and
sociolects are based on differences that result from regional and social distance,
this cannot be claimed for gendered variation, which seems to be a product of
socially constructed difference (Trudgill 1983: 163). Especially socialisation in
early childhood is much more likely to be confined to communication within
one and the same social class and region, whereas mixed-sex interaction is often
part and parcel of family life.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a stable, context-independent female
or male variety. Even if differences between women and men can be retrieved
from language data (which is very often not the case), they can only be judged
with respect to the specific context or the role they play in a specific community
of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). Even if we find differences
in female and male linguistic behaviour, this does not necessarily mean that
gender is the main (or maybe sole) factor responsible. This raises considerable
problems for gender-relevant sociolinguistic research on large-scale language
corpora. Even if speakers who are (demographically) female or male use a
certain feature significantly more often, this does not mean that they speak
‘as women’ or ‘as men’ in all of the contexts investigated. Research designs
that map demographic sex on language data without differentiating between
more specific groups of women or men will inevitably contribute to the
stabilisation of strictly binary gender conceptualisations. As a consequence,
the notion of a genderlect spoken by the two macro-categories of women
and men hardly seems to be applicable to the way individual women and
men actually speak. Whilst binary genderlects may have a commercial value
in the sense that ‘big stories’ sell much better in the public arena, their value
for studying real-life identity constructions via language in contemporary
sociolinguistics is doubtful.

Postmodernist conceptualisations of gender

Apart from the problems voiced within sociolinguistics proper, others arise
when one looks at how gender is theorised in contemporary sociology and/
or philosophy. Contrary to common-sense dominant discourses, which
see gender as a strictly binary, natural and constant property, performative
approaches no longer treat gender as a characteristic a person has, but as
an activity a person does (‘doing gender’), making it difficult to think that
people speak genderlects as a consequence of their demographic gender
category. To treat gender as a pre-discursive fact and to map linguistic
behaviour on demographic criteria, as is often done in traditional socio-
 h. motschenbacher 259

linguistics of the difference paradigm, does not do justice to the fluidity

which exists with respect to gendered behaviour (and identities in general).
Poststructuralist thinkers, such as Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), see gender
as a normative construction that even shapes sex, which is conventionally
understood as biological (see also Bing and Bergvall 1996). Butler sees gender
as a normatively constructed, discursively performed social category and as
the result of a practice of steady citation and re-citation which, over time,
gains the appearance of a natural fact. Moreover, being gendered for her
is a prerequisite for being granted the status of a subject. This leads to the
popular notion that all people are either female or male (for life), that this
binarism is natural and unchangeable and that deviations from that scheme
are pathological. Hegemonic (‘intelligible’) gender identities take one of the
following forms along the dimensions of sex, gender and sexuality: [female
– feminine – desires men] or [male – masculine – desires women]. All identi-
ties that deviate from these two schemes are considered ‘unintelligible’ and
have to fear social sanctions such as public discrimination, prejudice or even
violence. For Butler, the so-called ‘deviations’ are of primary interest, because
they expose the constructive mechanism behind gender binarism.
Butler’s theoretical considerations have only insufficiently found their way
into linguistic research (notable exceptions are, for instance, McElhinny 2003,
McIlvenny 2002, Speer and Potter 2002) although a general shift from ‘modern’
to ‘postmodern’ approaches can be felt within sociolinguistics (Cameron 2005).
This is a shortcoming in so far as in Butler’s theories language and discourse
play a central role, especially in the formation of gender. As a consequence
of Butler’s performative notion of gender, gendered practices would have to
be studied contextually in actual language use and not primarily on the level
of the language system (as has been done by many early feminist linguists). 2
Butler has been criticised for providing a highly theoretical gender concept
without any connection to real life practices and without any considerations
of how to apply it methodologically to everyday interactions (Speer 2005: 67).
In fact, sociolinguistics could be one of the disciplines to deliver exactly that
connection between Butler’s postmodernist thinking and its consequences for
actual gendered practices. At the very heart of postmodernist gender linguistics,
then, would be the aim to show how gender binarism is constructed linguisti-
cally and what alternatives to normative binarism could look like. A shift in
focus, from inter-gender difference to intra-gender diversity, is a necessary
step to acknowledging that women’s and men’s (linguistic) behaviour is more
alike than different. Finally, gender fluidity is a concept that would have to be
addressed much more frequently and reconceptualised as the norm rather than
the exception. The femininities/masculinities a person stylises may vary to a
260 Gender and Language

great extent depending on the context of interaction (compare, for instance,

family contexts with business contexts).
With respect to variationist linguistics, talking about ‘women’s/men’s lan-
guages’ as well as using the term ‘genderlect’, in its traditional sense, are
instances of further materialisation of gender binarism. The notion of a
‘women’s/men’s language’ or a ‘male/female genderlect’ strengthens discourses
that emphasise differences between men and women and which cover up
the huge area of similarity in female and male language behaviour. Both
concepts, therefore, have to be considered as constructed myths (Dyck 1993).
Nevertheless, the term ‘genderlect’ does not have to be dismissed entirely. It
can be used in the knowledge that it plays a significant role in the performa-
tive construction of gender. This does not mean that all women and men
use a female or male genderlect respectively. People have a multitude of
speech styles at their disposal which they use depending on context (Kotthoff
2003: 132). A postmodernist re-definition of the genderlect concept is due
also with respect to the fact that some researchers in social sciences such
as media and communication studies, sociology or anthropology seem to
use it without asking whether it is still a legitimate concept in its traditional
sense, uncritically assuming that women and men in general speak differ-
ently (which in many contexts is not the case). Examples include Gamble
and Gamble, whose textbook for communication studies contains a chapter
entitled ‘We Speak Different Genderlects’ (2003: 75) or Wienker-Piepho’s
(1999) usage of the term ‘genderlect’ in folkloristic narratology to talk about
gender-specific (!) modes of narration. But even within linguistics proper,
one can detect uncritical uses of the term genderlect (see, for example, Blair
2000; Brown 1996; Nedashkivska 2002). 3 Blair (2000), for instance, studies
classroom interactions in a multicultural US junior high school and postulates
two contrasting genderlects, which she terms ‘girl talk’ and ‘boy talk’. Both
genderlects seem to conform to traditional stereotypes of how women and
men use language, i.e. boys are described to speak in a competitive way to
outdo their male peers, whereas girls are said to engage in cooperative talk to
establish social networks. Finally, teachers are even advised to treat girls and
boys differently in order to remedy the perceived inequality between them.
A positive re-evaluation of the girls’ interactional style is recommended to
prevent them from being dominated by the boys’ interactional patterns. In
another study, Nedashkivska (2002) even tries to postulate genderlects for
written communication. She analyses readers’ letters, letters to the editor and
editorial replies and comments published in Ukrainian periodicals that either
have a female or a male or a mixed-sex target group. She concludes that female
writers generally use a ‘female genderlect’ (a personal, intimate and coopera-
tive style) in order to create closeness with the addressee, whereas male writers
 h. motschenbacher 261

use a ‘male genderlect’ (an impersonal, distanced and generalising style) in

male-targeted periodicals. Studies like the two mentioned here are instances
of further materialisation of gender difference. They are usually conducted
with the aim of establishing differences between women and men as two social
macro-groups and thereby contribute to the discursive construction of gender
as binary and opposite. Moreover, they adhere to entrenched stereotypes
of gendered communicative behaviour in the description of their findings.
Inter-gender similarity and intra-gender diversity are usually not addressed in
these studies, even though it must seem doubtful that all boys and all girls in
the classroom study behaved in the same way or that all female and male letter
writers were equally fond of using ‘appropriate’ genderlects. This must seem
the more suspicious in the latter case because the letter writers do not form a
coherent community of practice and female- vs. male-targeted publications
were treated as two monolithic blocs, not allowing for variation within each
of these two sectors. Finally, it is only a short distance from setting up these
dichotomies to creating normative gender practices that present girls, boys,
women and men with standards to live up to.

Linguistic genderisation as style

A useful theorisation must take into account that a genderlect is a stereotypical
construct that must not be equalled with women’s/men’s speech behaviour
and that, nevertheless, can be used in actual language behaviour to symbolise
feminine/masculine identities. 4 A performative notion of gender is related to
approaches in linguistics that interpret gendered language variation as register
or style. 5 These have existed for quite some time (Register approaches can be
found e.g. in Crosby and Nyquist (1977): ‘female register’; Rosenblum (1986):
‘female/male register’; Sturtz Sreetharan (2004): ‘manly speech register’. Style
approaches are used e.g. by Hiatt (1980): ‘women’s prose style’; Lakoff (1979):
‘feminine/masculine style’; Mulac and Bradac (1995): ‘women’s style’; Palander-
Collin (1999): ‘male and female styles’; Rubin and Greene (1992): ‘gender-typical
style’; Sandig and Selting (1997): ‘gender styles’). 6 The term style is compatible
with the postmodernist premise that identities are created in discourse itself
and do not exist pre-discursively. Irvine argues that with the notion of style
one places less emphasis on a variety as object-in-itself and more emphasis
on processes of distinction, which operate on many levels, from the gross
to the subtle. Research on ‘registers’ has often concerned relatively stable,
institutionalized patterns and varieties, perhaps having explicit names within
their communities of use, and/or being connected with institutionalized
situations, occupations, and the like (‘sports announcer talk,’ for instance).
262 Gender and Language

Style includes these, but it also includes the more subtle ways individuals
navigate among available varieties and try to perform a coherent representa-
tion of a distinctive self – a self that may be in turn subdividable into a dif-
ferentiated system of aspects-of-self (Irvine 2001: 31f).
This notion of style is an appropriate starting point for the description of
linguistic genderisation as a process of identity construction that may exhibit
context-dependent intra-gender, and even intra-individual, diversity.
The term ‘style’ can be understood in a number of ways. In traditional
variationist sociolinguistics, style was seen, very narrowly, as attention paid
to speech. In this paradigm, non-standard features (mostly phonological)
were quantified for contexts of different degrees of formality (cf. Labov’s
(1966) casual style, interview style, reading style, word list style, minimal pair
style) and then correlated with the demographic characteristics of the speak-
ers (such as class, sex, race and age). Ethnographic approaches use a more
context-sensitive notion of style that recognises not just formality as the
sole dimension, but also others, such as intention, topic, genre or audience.
Moreover, other linguistic levels apart from phonology are considered to
contribute to style in these approaches (Bell and Johnson 1997: 1). More
recent branches of sociolinguistics see style as a distinctly social phenomenon
(Bell 2006; Eckert 2001; Fought 2006; Irvine 2001; Yaeger-Dror 2001). This
also holds for interactional stylistics which is based on a theory that sees style
as interactively achieved (Selting 1997, 2001; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003).
Style and context are mutually dependent: on the one hand, a certain context
may make a certain style more likely; on the other hand, a style is a means of
creating a context. Stylistic language use, as a consequence, is an essential part
of social stylisation and performing identities (Bucholtz 2002: 38; Cameron
2006: 737).This position is especially useful for postmodernist gender linguis-
tics because it sees gendered identities as performative. Whereas traditionally
binary gender conceptualisations would, for instance, define femininity as
non-masculinity (and vice versa), a pluralist approach is more amenable to
distinguishing certain kinds of femininities or masculinities from each other
(Cameron and Kulick 2003: 91). 7
A well-documented example of gender-relevant styles as performed in
communities of practice is the research done at the Bay City High School by
Bucholtz (1999, 2002). She studied a community of nerd girls who differ in
their identity symbolisation from the so-called cool girls. They do not practise
styles that are stereotypically associated with (hegemonic) femininity revolving
around topics such as looks, makeup or fashion. Rather, they prefer to stylise
themselves alternatively around key concepts such as intelligence and humour.
This also shows in their linguistic practices because nerd girls use fewer ‘trendy’
 h. motschenbacher 263

fronted vowels (as part of the California Vowel Shift) or be all constructions
as quotation markers (‘And I was all ‘I don’t like you either’’) (Bucholtz 1999;
2002: 38ff). 8
The concept of style or stylisation is compatible with the notion of genderlect
as a stereotype. Even Lakoff, whose discussion of ‘women‘s language’ has been
understood as dealing with actual female speech behaviour, explicates that she
sees gendered varieties as stereotypes that need not necessarily correspond to
real speech:
[…] [W]omen’s language is accessible to every member of this culture as a
stereotype. Whether the stereotype is equally valid for all women is certainly
debatable; but the fact of its existence, overt or subliminal, affects every one
of us and its assumptions are generally agreed on. (Lakoff 1979: 53)
The performative aspect in Lakoff ’s theorisation becomes quite obvious when
she illustrates ideal embodiments of ‘women’s/men’s language’ with figures
such as Marilyn Monroe or Clark Gable, i.e. with people who are known much
more as the (gendered) characters they play than as the actual persons they are
(Lakoff 1979: 66). 9
Another aspect that makes style an adequate point of departure for a theorisa-
tion of genderlects is the fact that it can be used not only for linguistic stylisation
practices but also for non-linguistic ones (e.g. gendered clothing styles, hair
styles or acting styles) and therefore enables linguistic gender research to become
one facet in the interdisciplinary study of gender. In a more general sense, styles
can be understood as forms of performance. Genderlect styles, then, are the
variable ways people do gender linguistically. These gender practices are not
specific to certain communication genres. They can be exploited, for instance,
in advertising, love letters or conversation among other genres. Whereas a
register approach would ask what is done (i.e. advertising, love letters etc.), a
style approach asks more specifically how something is done (e.g. advertising
by doing gender; Sandig 1995: 28; see Table 1). 10 When using the concept of
style for theorising gendered symbolisation, problems arise only from the way
the term style has been traditionally used, i.e. in a non-postmodernist sense.
Early sociolinguistic research theorising gendered variation adhered to the
strict binarism of female vs. male style and thereby contributed to the further
materialisation of this normative construction. This is something a postmod-
ernist approach has to abandon. It has to acknowledge the fact that there is an
infinite number of genderlect styles which do not necessarily support a strictly
binary categorisation. This can be done, for instance, by respecting other social
variables besides gender as influential factors (age, sexuality, lifestyle, education
among many others) and by using more fine-grained methods of analysis such
as the community of practice approach.
264 Gender and Language

Level of action (What is done?)

Advertising Oral Conversation Love Letter

Style: Doing Gender Style: Doing Ethnicity Style: Doing Age

Level of manner (How is it done?)

Figure 1: Linguistic doing gender as style

Linguistic genderisation in advertising discourse

The following section will specifically deal with advertising discourse as a site of
linguistic gender stylisation (see also Motschenbacher 2006). 11 Advertising dis-
course is particularly relevant here because it illustrates that identity stylisation
can be achieved performatively without necessarily being based on the notion
of a speaker whose socio-demographic characteristics are reflected in the way
he or she uses language. The original study uses the methodological framework
of Critical Applied Linguistics (Pennycook 2001) to deconstruct gender, seeing
it as an identity constructed by advertising discourse in order to sell products.
In the course of the study, 2000 advertisements from a women’s and a men’s
magazine (Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health; UK and US editions; 1999–2001)
were analysed with respect to genderising language features. Cosmopolitan
and Men’s Health were chosen for comparison because they both represent
gender-targeted general interest lifestyle magazines with a core readership that
could roughly be described as young and middle-class. The title Men’s Health
is misleading because it does not only cover health issues but also aspects like
fashion, relationships or cooking. It can be seen as a strategy to make a maga-
zine genre that traditionally has been associated with the female market sector
more attractive to men (for more details, see Motschenbacher 2006: 79–84). 12
The linguistic picture of femininity and masculinity that emerges from this
investigation is a highly stereotypical one which is reminiscent of the traditional
genderlect concept. This clearly shows in the distribution of such stereotypically
gendered language features as gendered personal nouns and pronouns, 13 socially
gendered body part vocabulary, colour terms, sports vocabulary, intensifiers
and emotional vs. neutral adjectives of appraisal. Generally speaking, features of
genderlectal styles may come from all kinds of linguistic levels although some
areas are less associated with gendered stereotypes than others (Gottburgsen
2000: 97). For advertising discourse in Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health, it turned
 h. motschenbacher 265

out that stereotypically gendered stylisation is primarily lexical in its makeup

because other linguistic levels (phonology, syntax) index gender in a more
subtle way that, in most instances, is harder to retrieve as a form of gendered
stylisation by the recipients. 14 The following examples from the advertising
corpus illustrate this.
(1) COVERGIRL©
Fall in Love
ROMANTIC NEW COLORS FOR AUTUMN
ROMANCE AND ROSES AND PASSIONATE PINKS FROM THE DEEPLY
DRAMATIC TO A MOST FLIRTATIOUS WINK!
COVERGIRL Kadra shines in NailSlicks in Pink Wink and Smoothers Gel
EyeColor in Midnight Rose.
COVERGIRL Lonneke glows in Continuous Color© Lipstick and NailSlicks©,
both in Pink Wink; Smoothers Gel EyeColor in Pink Ice; Eye Enhancers© in
Rose Mist; Cheekers© in Snow plum & Pro Mascara in Black.
easy breezy beautiful COVERGIRL
(Cosmopolitan US, 10/1999, p. 8–9)
In advert (1), femininity is done linguistically in a hegemonic way, i.e. in
accordance with traditional stereotypes of femininity that are to be judged
highly intelligible. This is certainly the case because gendered norms in the
synthetic community of practice (cf. Mullany 2002) of Cosmopolitan pre-
scribe a role model of women being attentive to beauty and appearance. This
prescription is not to be seen as a unidirectional mechanism from advertisers
to recipients. It is rather an interactive achievement affected just as much by
the expectations of the readers who buy the magazine. Linguistically, this is
expressed by using a multitude of diversified elaborated colour terms (in bold
print). Other stereotypically feminine elements include a discourse on romance
and seduction (fall in love; romantic, romance, flirtatious wink; passionate); ref-
erence to female beauty (beautiful; verbs of shining: shines; glows); intensifiers
(deeply dramatic; most flirtatious); gendered personal nouns/names (Covergirl;
Kadra; Lonneke) and reference to body parts associated with female beauty
(nails, eyes, lips, cheeks as parts of the product names). All of these stylistic
features can hardly be imagined to serve as a means of doing masculinity in a
hegemonic way. Their presence in cooperation with the absence of ‘oppositely’
gendered features serves to create Cosmopolitan as a synthetic community of
practice in which gender is highly salient and whose members are sketched
266 Gender and Language

as a female ingroup to be differentiated from a male outgroup. 15 At the same

time, this particular version of femininity embodied by Cosmopolitan is clearly
different from other forms of femininity. Advertising discourse in a feminist
women’s magazine, for example, would certainly be markedly different. Similar
mechanisms are at work in the following example from Men’s Health:
(2) SAVE FACE/ Skin fitness made easy/ POLO SPORT RALPH LAUREN
These days you’ve got to look your best to get the competitive edge. And yes,
that means taking better care of your skin – soap and water alone just don’t cut
it anymore. ‘My God, man,’ you’re thinking, ‘is my medicine cabinet about to
become more crowded than a Super Bowl parking lot?’ Relax. A man’s skin care
needs are blessedly straightforward. Enter Polo Sport Basic Training fragrance-
free line: multipurpose skin care for men – no more, no less.
(Men’s Health US, 05/2000, p. 40–41)
Sports vocabulary associated with traditionally male sports (e.g. Polo Sport,
Super Bowl) is used in example (2) to do masculinity as ritualised practice
in Men’s Health. Just as in example (1), this advertisement is for cosmetics.
Nevertheless, beautification is notably absent in advert (2), in which skin
care is equalled with skin fitness or basic training. Male beauty is suggested to
be an undesirable surplus, male skin care a necessary duty that must not be
exaggerated or celebrated in too much detail (no more, no less). This shows
that advertising cosmetics to men is (still) a face-threatening act, giving the
headline SAVE FACE a double meaning. Ironically, it is a stereotypically
male dislike of cosmetics that is used here to advertise cosmetics to a male
target group. This is also expressed in the male-perspectivised quotation ‘My
God, man, […] is my medicine cabinet about to become more crowded than
a Super Bowl parking lot?’ or the statement that male skin care is blessedly
straightforward which can be interpreted as symbolising thought processes
that are in accordance with mainstream hegemonic notions of masculinity.
These statements are supposed to position men in opposition to the female
outgroup, whose consumption of cosmetics is implied to be rather intensive
and therefore incompatible with traditional normative masculine identities.
Strategies like these bear witness to a homophobic treatment of the male body
in Men’s Health, where its explicit aestheticisation and objectification for the
male gaze is avoided. The stereotypical need of a man to be competitive is to
be felt in key words such as competitive edge, and comparative/superlative
expressions (better care; look your best; cut it). The repeated use of direct
(unmitigated) imperatives (save face; relax; enter) is a feature associated with a
stereotypically male genderlect. Finally, the product is explicitly designated as
a male-only product (a man’s skin care; skin care for men) which must be seen
 h. motschenbacher 267

as a commercial construction because it is doubtful that female and male skin

really differs to such a fundamental degree that gender-specific skin care is
necessary. Again, these gendered practices do not seem to be easily applicable
to a symbolisation of hegemonic femininities which would rather stress that
skin care is essential and must be practised with due intensity. Additionally,
this version of hegemonic masculinity marks also a distinction from other
types of (less hegemonic) masculinity.
The following examples are unusual in that they directly stage stereotypically
female and male communication behaviour, which is not normally done in
advertising. Example (3) is an advertisement for a form of tableware which
stages stereotypically female communication:
(3) ‘I’d love to have my nipples pierced.
Oooh, Helen… no way. That’s disgusting! Think of the pain./
Think of the gain. Imagine Anthony’s reaction when he saw it./
HE’D HATE IT./
HE’D LOVE IT./
He’s not, you know, into all that kinda stuff… is he?/
What are you suggesting, Sarah?/
Well, you know… the adventurous kind./
Let’s just say, the dining room table isn’t always used for entertaining./
Fancy more dip?’
(Cosmopolitan UK, 02/2001, p. 41)
Gendered symbolisation in this advertisement is exclusively on a linguistic
plane, because there are no people portrayed in the picture (which only shows
two bowls filled with food). The advert stereotypically symbolises intimate
female conversational behaviour as gossip between two women (Helen and
Sarah) about a man (Anthony). The interaction is clearly reciprocal with turn-
taking and adjacency pairs as typical signs. Other stereotypical features include
the use of hedges and euphemisms to tone down the subject of sex (He’s not, you
know, into all that kinda stuff… is he; Well, you know… the adventurous kind),
hortative let’s, questions and tag questions, references to extreme emotions
(love; hate; disgusting) and emphatic exclamations (Ooooh; exclamation marks).
Male communication is not symbolised in a similar manner in Men’s Health.
Instead, the instances to be found in the corpus are notably non-reciprocal,
consisting of questions without any answer provided by the recipient party:
268 Gender and Language

(4) ALRIGHT STEVE?… WE’VE JUST GONE 1–0 UP. HAVE YOU SCORED
YET? CHEERS, BRIAN. (Men’s Health UK, 01/1999, p. 33)
(5) HEY YOU, CELL-DAMAGING FREE RADICALS, WANNA STEP
OUTSIDE?
(Men’s Health US, 03/2001, p. 53)
Both of these examples have an ironic tone in their treatment of stereotypical
masculinity that is often used in men’s lifestyle magazines (cf. Benwell 2004).
This is done to construct a communication context to which women as an
outgroup have no access. In example (4), advertising a mobile phone, the text
is pictured as an SMS on a mobile phone display. Stereotypically masculine is
the reference to sport (in the form of a score) and the sexist question whether
Steve was able to ‘score’ with an implied woman. Example (5) is adapted from
hegemonic cowboy masculinities of the Wild West and comes from an adver-
tisement for a vitamin drink. The headline poses a threat to the cell-damaging
free radicals, asking them to step outside and have a fight – a speech act stere-
otypically associated with men.

Hegemonic and non-hegemonic gender styles

Generally speaking, both hegemonic and non-hegemonic gender styles are
possible. Hegemonic gender styles are a sign of what is stereotypically associ-
ated with femininity and masculinity in a culture. Non-hegemonic styles are
subversive in the sense that they deviate from intelligible/coherent gender
styles. This distinction of hegemonic/non-hegemonic results from taking a
mainstream perspective. There are, however, certain communities of practice
where subversive styles belong to the norm. Subversiveness, therefore, can
only be understood in comparison to mainstream practices. It is important
to grasp that one and the same linguistic behaviour can be judged subversive
or non-subversive depending on the context in which it takes place. Feminine
stylisation practices might appear non-subversive for women in general, but
may be considered subversive in (some) gay male communities where they are
used by men to index that they belong to a gay ingroup. Inside the community
of gay men, these practices may not be judged to be that subversive at all,
being a ritualised way to signal a form of male group identity that, to some
extent, revolves around being open to stylisation practices that might clash
with mainstream discourses of hegemonic masculinity.
Language plays an essential role in gender passing. This becomes obvi-
ous, for instance, when it is used as a gendered standard to measure up to.
Cameron (2004: 134f) provides a fine example for this: the so-called Gender
 h. motschenbacher 269

Genie 16 – a computer program developed to identify (with a high degree of

probability, it is claimed) a person’s gender by analysis of a text passage writ-
ten by that person. In the end, it transpires that people hardly ever use the
program for its original purpose but rather to test whether their own linguistic
performances correspond to gender norms or, in other words, how they fare
compared to normatively adequate gendered performances. Behind these
tests lies people’s need for an evaluation of their gendered performances, i.e.
whether they are ‘real’ women/men. Hegemonic gender stereotypes of how
women and men (ought to) speak are usually taught to transsexuals to render
their gendered performances more successful (Bucholtz 2004; Kulick 1999:
606). That maximally stereotypical gender performances like these not only
provide their performers with the benefit of passing but also with communi-
cative risks becomes evident in an illuminating study by White (1998) who
investigated the speech behaviour of a male-to-female transsexual working
as a sales representative (Marty). Marty sees herself confronted with two
dangers. On the one hand, she must not behave too stereotypically feminine
in order to be an effective salesperson. On the other hand, she must not be too
masculine in her style in order not to expose her (from a traditional position)
biological incoherence.
Similar premises exist for gendered advertising symbolisation because adver-
tisers must construct gender so as to sell their products but at the same time
so as not to clash with the gendered intelligibility notions of the audience (i.e.
neither too stereotypical nor too subversive). Gender-subversive features, such
as lexically female personal nouns used to refer to men or vice versa, are absent
in the advertising context of Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health. This is also true
for stereotypes that may be ‘correctly’ gendered for the respective target group
but do not have any prestige in that community (e.g. symbolisation of the male
sex symbol as hunk in Men’s Health or constructions of weak femininity by
using hedges in Cosmopolitan). On the other hand, it becomes clear from the
advertising material that those stereotypes that have negative connotations for
the actual target group may well be acceptable in the ‘opposite’ community, i.e.
the symbolisation of sexy men in Cosmopolitan has similar commercial prestige
as the stylisation of weak women in Men’s Health. This amounts to a clash
between gendered auto- and hetero-stereotypes. 17 The corpus data, moreover,
leave the impression that the male role model in Men’s Health is even stricter
than the female one in Cosmopolitan because oppositely gendered features
occur more rarely. Therefore, gender unintelligibility seems to be a greater
threat to the male role model.
What is particularly useful about the notion of style is that it can cope with
hegemonic gender performances (such as those mainly found in Cosmopolitan
and Men’s Health) as well as subversive ones. The latter can be said to have a
270 Gender and Language

gendered sense even if gender is not done successfully with respect to hegem-
onic gender norms. 18 The decisive point is that both subversive and hegemonic
gender styles are judged against the same background, i.e. that of stereotypical
femininity/masculinity.

A re-definition of the genderlect concept

As has been shown throughout this essay, the traditional genderlect concept
is no longer practicable for contemporary sociolinguistics. However, it does
seem possible to redefine it in postmodern ways, if we understand genderlect
as standing for a linguistic style that performatively stages gendered language
stereotypes. It is not to be equated with the actual speech behaviour of women
and men in the sense of a stable, context-independent gendered variety. Most
people do not speak as intelligible gender stereotypes dictate, let alone over a
range of contexts. Nevertheless, genderlectal features can be part of linguistic
behaviour in contexts where speakers have corresponding symbolisation inten-
tions or where these symbolisation practices belong to the ritualised practice of
a community. The aim here is not to treat genderlect styles as a form of social
variation, but to study the role genderlectal stylisation plays in the discursive
formation of gendered identities. Genderlects accordingly are not indexes or
symptoms of pre-existing gender identities. They rather cite reference points
that have over time been materialised in their performative connection to
gender. Genderlects, therefore, provide resources for gendered identity per-
formances which can be exploited strategically (for instance in advertising)
or used as a form of ritualised practice (in people’s everyday communities).
Genderlectal features are all linguistic features that stereotypically index gender
(Ochs 1992). They range from forms symbolising people as gendered beings
(e.g. gendered personal nouns) to markers associated with a stereotype of
how women and men are said to speak (e.g. intensifiers, sports vocabulary).
If they are constructed in the traditional sense, as female vs. male genderlect,
they contribute to the further materialisation of gender binarism. A more
subtle differentiation, into an infinite number of genderlects corresponding
to specific groups of women/men or men/women within certain communities
and contexts, helps to see gender no longer as a strictly binary construction and
allows for overlap in the way certain women and men behave. 19
The performative character of genderlects makes them, in principle,
independent of any biological basis (McIlvenny 2002: 141). Whether these
performances are to be judged intelligible or subversive depends heavily on
context and perspective. Traditionally feminine language practices, for example,
may be judged as intelligible from a mainstream perspective when used by
women and as unintelligible when used by men. In the context of some gay
 h. motschenbacher 271

male communities, however, they may belong to those ritualised practices that
successfully index ingroup membership. 20
Rather obvious forms of genderlect are typically encountered in media
contexts where the language behaviour observed cannot be claimed to rep-
resent real speech behaviour and is highly planned (such as in advertising
or soap operas). In these contexts, they often serve as a means of effectively
communicating intelligible (commercial) gendered identities. Queen’s (2006)
study of the US television sitcom Ellen demonstrates that gay male characters
in the series are staged as using higher pitch and more instances of standard
–ing-forms (‘doing’) compared to straight male characters. Similarly, the lesbian
characters use lower pitch and more instances of non-standard forms (‘doin’)
compared to heterosexual female personae. Finally, genderlects are more likely
to be found in highly gender-salient contexts. Advertising in Time Magazine,
for example, is certainly much less gendered than advertising in Cosmopolitan
or Men’s Health.
Media contexts illustrate very well how gender can be done linguistically
without any speaking subject behind discourse. The (gendered) identities
performed in advertising or in TV films are pure constructions of identity.
In any case, the postmodernist analysis of genderlects demands a switch in
perspective that no longer locates the speaking subject alone at the centre of
interest. Linguistic genderisation as a way of passing is just as much a matter of
the performer as it is a matter of the recipients. Moreover, gendered linguistic
performances are not a mere reflection of a person’s demographic and biologi-
cal characteristics or his/her true inner self. They have gained their gendered
implications through an everlasting process of citation and re-citation and
have thereby achieved the status of a materialised fact in public opinion. As
a consequence, speakers cannot be said to perform gender because of their
pre-existing gender identities. Rather, gendered identities are (re)formulated
in the very moment of genderlectal performance.

Notes
1 The terms ‘women’s language’ and ‘men’s language’ have never died out com-
pletely. A recent instance of their usage is by Baur (2005) who claims that
she has documented a variety called Frauensprache (‘women’s language’) in
Russian.
2 Nevertheless, there also are more recent approaches within feminist lin-
guistics that manage to contribute to gender deconstruction even though
they operate from a systemic point of view. For an approach that deals with
gender linguistically by deconstructing it into grammatical, lexical, social and
referential gender, see Hellinger and Bußmann (2001).
272 Gender and Language

3 This is even less acceptable considering the fact that genderlects have tended
to be seen as stereotypes for quite some time now (e.g. Hoar 1992), even
though they were not explicitly connected to postmodern thinking.
4 It might even be worthwhile to consider the question whether other types
of variation (dialects, sociolects etc.) might be just as stereotypical in their
makeup as genderlects. Not all people from a certain geographical region
display the same dialectal variety in all contexts, for example. But dialectal
features, of course, can come to the fore if the context demands it or speakers
have the intention to symbolise themselves as coming from a certain region.
5 A linguistic register is generally defined as a variety according to use. Adver-
tising language then would be a register that is used in the process of adver-
tising. Accordingly, a variety that is used for doing gender can be considered
a gendered register.
6 For a detailed discussion of whether register or style is the more adequate
term when talking about gendered language variation, see Motschenbacher
(2006: 364ff.). Up-to-date overviews of research on registers and styles can
be found in Dittmar (2004), Gadet (2005) and Spiller (2004).
7 As Lakoff already notes in the 1970s, the variety she calls ‘women’s language’
is neither used by all women nor used only by women. She attributes it, for
example, to other social groups such as male academics or homosexual men,
who identify much less with traditionally intelligible notions of masculinity
(see Lakoff 1975: 10 & 14).
8 Other relevant examples can be found in Eckert’s (2001) research on the
jocks and burnouts at a Detroit high school, Keim’s (2001) study on the
Power Girls (a group of Turkish migrant girls in Mannheim, Germany) or in
Georgakopoulou’s (2005) case study of Greek girls’ categorisations of men.
9 For a historical example see also Treharne (2002: 114), who deals with the
linguistic staging of femininity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.
10 The styles and genres mentioned in the diagram are illustrative examples.
Other identity styles can easily be imagined.
11 For more details on the advertising corpus and the methodology used, see
Motschenbacher (2006: 66–73). The text sample was not confined to certain
product groups. The only prerequisite for an advertisement to be included in
the corpus was that at least one of the central commercial text parts (head-
line, body copy or slogan) was present and consisted of more than just a
product name. The concentration on language can only be legitimised by the
main purpose of the study. Advertising discourse is by definition multimo-
dal. As gendered representations have been studied to a great extent with
respect to visual symbolisation, the aim was to show that genderisation also
takes place in advertising language.
 h. motschenbacher 273

12 The parallel magazine of the title Women’s Health did not exist at the time of
data collection (2001).
13 At first sight, it might seem unusual to count gendered personal nouns/
pronouns as genderlectal features. Nevertheless, they are to be considered a
(stereotypical) means of performing gender, dramatically contributing to the
materialisation of gender binarism (see Hornscheidt 2006; Motschenbacher
forthcoming b). The same holds for body part nouns which can be seen as
a synecdoche for persons (see Motschenbacher forthcoming a). Intensifiers,
colour lexicon, empty adjectives, on the other hand, are well-known features
of Lakoff ’s (1975) stereotypical ‘women’s language’.
14 This became evident when I asked native speakers to identify which fea-
tures of a particular advertising text they saw as contributing to discourse
genderisation. Respondents overwhelmingly identified individual lexical
items within the advertisement that, in their opinion, clearly pointed to the
intended target group.
15 This is not only true for advertising discourse but also for magazine arti-
cles and other non-persuasive text genres contained in Cosmopolitan (see
Kramer 1974b; Machin and van Leeuwen 2003 and 2005).
16 See http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html Accessed 6 October 2006.
17 Auto-stereotypes are stereotypes a certain social group has about itself,
whereas hetero-stereotypes are those stereotypes it has about an outgroup.
18 See Sandig and Selting (1997: 143) on style as deviance.
19 One could view the language used in Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health as two
specific genderlects for that matter.
20 See also Barrett’s (1999) discussion of genderlectal performances by Afro-
American drag queens.

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