Gender and Language

Gender and Language ISSN: 1747-6321 (print) ISSN: 1747-633X (online)

Editors

Bonnie McElhinny

Ann Weatherall

Department of Anthropology 19 Russell St. Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S2 Canada

School of Psychology Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600 Wellington New Zealand

Reviews Editor Georgina Turner

Elizabeth Stokoe

epartment of Social Sciences D Loughborough University Loughborough Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK

Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University Loughborough Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK

www.equinoxpub.com Sheffield

Copyright

© Equinox Publishing, 2011. All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher. See back of journal for information about reproduction permissions.

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Gender and Language ISSN (PRINT) 1747-6321 ISSN (ONLINE) 1747-633X

Gender and Language is the journal of the International Gender and Language Association. It is an international forum for research on and debates about feminist research on gender and language. Gender is defined broadly, as a key element of social relationships often loosely linked to perceived differences between the sexes as well as a primary arena for articulating power in complex interaction with other dimensions of power, like class, race, and sexuality. It welcomes research employing and investigating a range of different linguistic approaches (including, but not only including, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, variationist sociolinguistics, stylistics and pragmatics) which focus on a range of different linguistic phenomena. Gender and Language welcomes empirical and theoretical articles which display originality in terms of their theoretical developments, use of empirical materials, timeliness, and/ or methodological innovations. Other pieces could include critical essays, interviews, exchanges, commentaries and responses, brief translations of key articles originally published in languages other than English, discussions of innovative strategies for teaching language and gender to diverse audiences, profiles of key figures in the field, and reviews of recent books on gender and language and related topics.

Associate Editors Paul Baker (Reading University, UK) Lia Litosseliti (City University London, UK) Louise Mullany (University of Nottingham, UK)

Editorial Board Lilian Atanga (Cameroon) Rusty Barrett (USA) Bethan Benwell (UK) Mary Bucholtz (USA) Penelope Eckert (USA) Ann-Carita Evaldsson (Sweden) Janet Holmes (New Zealand) Veronika Koller (UK) Michelle Lazar (Singapore) Sally McConnell-Ginet (USA) Paul McIlvenny (Denmark) Sara Mills (UK) Momoko Nakamura (Japan) Pia Pichler (UK) Susan Speer (UK)

Frederick Attenborough (UK) Judith Baxter (UK) Niko Besnier (The Netherlands) Deborah Cameron (UK) Susan Ehrlich (Canada) Majorie Goodwin (USA) Allyson Jule (Canada) Neill Korobov (USA) Claire Maree (Australia) Bonnie McElhinny (Canada) Miriam Meyerhoff (New Zealand) Emma Moore (UK) Ana Ostermann (Brazil) Robin Queen (USA) Jane Sunderland (UK)

Submissions

Articles submitted to the journal are subject to a peer review process. See the guidelines for submission at the end of this issue and the full notes on the Equinox website (www.equinoxjournals.com)

Production Equinox Managing Editor (Linguistics): Heidi Robbins Typesetting: S.J.I. Services, New Delhi Printed and bound in Great Britain by ??

Gender and Language 2011 Volume 5.2

Contents EDITORIAL Bonnie McElhinny, Ann Weatherall, Elizabeth Stokoe ARTICLES Special issue: Recasting language and masculinities Introduction: Recasting language and masculinities Tommaso M. Milani Masculine identity and identification as ethnomethodological phenomena: Revisiting Cameron and Kulick Bethan Benwell The interactional construction of desire as gender Scott Kiesling

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Incomprehensible language? Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school Tommaso M. Milani and Rickard Jonsson

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The strategic marginalization of working-class masculinity in a batterers’ treatment programme Susan Ehrlich and Susan Levesque

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Special Issue: Gender, language and leadership in the workplace Introduction: Gender, language and leadership in the workplace 297 Louise Jane Mullany Leadership discourse in a Māori workplace: negotiating gender, ethnicity and leadership at work Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra Leadership in Hong Kong. Is gender really not an issue? Stephanie Schnurr and Bernie Mak ‘We are in a masculine profession...’: Constructing gender identities in a consortium of two multinational engineering companies Jo Angouri

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How effective is ‘feminity’? Media portrayals of the effectiveness of the first Spanish woman Defence Minister 395 Mercedes Bengoechea

G&L (PRINT) ISSN 1747–6321 G&L (ONLINE) ISSN 1747–633X

Gender and Language

Editorial

In this editorial we reflect on and celebrate the first five years of the journal, provide our annual profile of contributors, announce important changes to the editorial structure, and describe some up-coming changes to the journal to respond to its continuing expansion and development. Five years of Gender and Language Although the journal Gender and Language has been publishing now for five years, the earliest discussions of the journal occurred over a decade ago. When a number of us first discussed the proposal for the journal at the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) conference in Lancaster in 2002, there was a debate there that echoes a long-standing one in women and gender studies – the debate about whether a separate journal would constitute a significant forum for work otherwise not fully represented, or a ghetto. Ultimately most of us decided the former. It is worth continuing to think about which kinds of articles on language and gender are submitted to or published in this journal, and which are submitted and published elsewhere. However, one of the significant accomplishments of the journal is creating space, in the kind of peer-reviewed format that counts most heavily in hiring, promotion, and tenure, for scholarship on language and gender. Our journal alone now publishes about ten articles a year, and that number is about to increase (see up-coming changes, below). In our early discussions about the journal, some scholars noted that if we were to start such a journal, we needed to use it to raise the bar on language and gender scholarship. To this end, we have devoted considerable amounts of time to editing articles, with some articles going through two, three or four iterations. This form of mentorship is markedly unlike that of other journals – and perhaps ultimately not sustainable, as the number of contributions to the journal continues to grow. What raising the bar might mean, and how to engage in a conversation of this kind with the wider community of gender and language scholars (including the organization, board and reviewers), continues to deserve discussion. Which bodies of scholarship to ask people to be responsible to is a question that is even more important, and more vexed, when one considers the international mission of the journal.

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In the inaugural issue of Gender and Language we asked contributors to address the theme of ‘Unanswered Questions and Unquestioned Assumptions’ in the study of language and gender. Some of the questions raised in that issue have been taken up more fully than others over the course of the past five years. An issue we would like to bring to the fore here is globalization and what that means for gender and language research, IGALA and Gender and Language. Challenging matters include how to ensure wider circulation of scholarly work to ever more diverse audiences and what being ‘international’ means. Global representation in all aspects of the journal is a commendable goal but difficult to accomplish in practice. Further discussion is clearly needed. The journal has seen a number of significant changes over the past five years. We moved to an on-line submission system when Equinox Publishing chose our journal as the first one in their list to implement a free-ware on-line system. In our original proposal for the journal we proposed the occasional special issue. In fact, the journal has evolved as a key site for the publication of thematic issues, with approximately every other issue now being published in this format. But special issues come at a cost. Publishing them means delaying the publication of issues of individual articles. With special issues (and edited books) there are concerns with quality of scholarship and coverage – sometimes a slightly weaker paper nonetheless addresses an important area hitherto unaddressed in the field. In a number of different editorial sites, editors are flagging up the need for additional financial support for the enormous amount of work that a journal requires. Gender and Language is a relatively small journal, published by a relatively small organization with a relatively small publisher, but its work is no less significant for all that. Editorial assistants have been subsidized by the publisher, Equinox, as well as by personal stipends from the editors’ institutions. We need to continue to ask how to provide appropriate and adequate financial support for the journal, from contributors, board members, and IGALA members. Annual profile of contributors and decisions made In this section, we present the annual update on submissions. Since the journal’s launch, it has gone from strength to strength, with a number of significant achievements. The journal now attracts about 50 submissions per year, from a wide range of countries, although the USA and UK still provide the highest number of submissions. Gender and Language has evolved as a key site for the publication of individual articles on language and gender but also, in a way not anticipated seven years ago, as a key site for publishing special issues.

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The overall number of manuscripts submitted since November 2010 (so just under a year’s worth) is 67, a substantial increase on the last year. Table 1, below, gives detailed information. Table 1: Author’s Country of Affiliation Country

Number of Authors

United Kingdom United States of America Greece Spain Sweden Denmark Switzerland Japan Serbia/Montenegro Finland China Pakistan Georgia Egypt France South Africa Canada New Zealand Hong Kong TOTAL

17 18 1 5 3 3 1 2 1 2 1 3 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 67

Of these publications, 18 (27%) were authored by men, with 49 (73%) by women. Currently, 32% of these have been accepted; 10% have been rejected, with the remaining 58% being currently under review. Bonnie McElhinny Ann Weatherall Editorial transition and changes to the journal In our first issue of the journal, we noted a commitment to regular rotation of editors, to ensure that a range of voices and perspectives will be represented in the journal. With this issue, the term of Bonnie McElhinny, the second of our two founding co-editors (the other was Sara Mills), comes to a close. Our thanks to those members of the editorial board and of IGALA who agreed to serve on the search committee for this replacement. We are pleased to announce that Elizabeth Stokoe agreed to accept the position of co-editor, effective July 1, 2011, for a three-year term. The new editorial

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team proposes a number of revisions to the journal, in light of on-going experiences and developments. Elizabeth Stokoe will work with Ann Weatherall, who replaced Sara two years ago. Elizabeth is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. She has worked in the gender and language field since beginning her PhD in 1993 and, like Ann, her disciplinary background is in social psychology. Her research interests are in conversation analysis, membership categorization, and discursive psychology. She has worked across numerous everyday and institutional settings, including classroom interaction, police interviews, mediation, speed-dating, and everyday talk between friends. She has published over 70 articles and book chapters; written Discourse and Identity (2006, with Bethan Benwell), and co-edited Conversation and Gender (2011, with Susan Speer). She has held Economic and Social Research Council grants to support her work on neighbour disputes and mediation. As well as sitting on several other editorial boards, for the past two years Elizabeth has been one of a team of Associate Editors at the British Journal of Social Psychology. Elizabeth’s experience at British Journal of Social Psychology has prompted our decision to adopt a revision of the editorial structure at Gender and Language. We have appointed three Associate Editors to broaden the scope and expertise of the Editors, as well as ensure that incoming papers are dealt with smoothly and efficiently. As a team of five editors, we are all committed to promoting the journal and ensuring its success. We are delighted to welcome three new Associate Editors: Paul Baker, Lia Litosseliti, and Louise Mullany, who will work with us to process incoming papers. Paul Baker is Reader in Corpus Based Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. He is also the commissioning editor for the journal Corpora and has published ten books including Sexed Texts (2008), Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis (2006) and Public Discourses of Gay Men (2005). His research interests include corpus linguistics, language, gender and sexuality, and critical discourse analysis. He has recently had Economic and Social Research Council grants examining the representation of Muslims and refugees in UK newspaper data. Lia Litosseliti is a Senior Lecturer in linguistics in the Department of Language and Communication Science at City University London, UK. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Lia is the author of Gender and Language Theory and Practice (2006); Using Focus Groups in Research (2003); co-editor of Discourse Analysis and Gender Identity (2002, with Jane Sunderland), co-editor of Gender and Language Research Methodologies (2008, with Kate Harrington, Helen Saunston and Jane Sunderland), and

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co-editor of Research Methods in Linguistics (2010). Her research interests are in the discursive construction of gender identities. Currently, she is researching gender issues in speech and language therapy. Louise Mullany is Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has published extensively, and is the author of The Sociolinguistics of Gender in Public Life (2012), Language, Gender and Feminism: Theory and Methodology (2011, with Sara Mills), Introducing English Language: A Resource Book for Students (2010, with P.J. Stockwell), Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace (2007), and co-edited The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics (2007, with C. Llamas and P.J. Stockwell). Her research interests are in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. She is particularly interested in investigating professional and institutional discourse and has conducted research in business, health care and media settings. She is also interested in electronic discourse and the language of the internet, particularly how sociolinguistic identities are performed in online communication, and is currently working on an Economic and Social Research Council grant on the language of adolescent health communication and the internet. The appointment of Associate Editors will broaden the scope and expertise of the Editors, as well as ensure that incoming papers are dealt with smoothly and efficiently. As a team of five editors, we are all committed to promoting the journal and ensuring its success. We are delighted to welcome a new Book Review Editor, Georgina Turner. Georgina is a part-time lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, UK, where she completed her PhD analyzing the construction of collective identity in Diva magazine. She is also a freelance writer and journalist, writing regularly for the Observer, the Guardian and Sports Illustrated, and has published her academic work in Journalism Studies and Social Semiotics. Please contact her to make suggestions of books to review – your own or other people’s, as well as if you would like to review a book yourself. We are also keen to encourage Review Essays, which take two or three related titles as the basis for a longer critical piece. Georgina will replace Chantal Tetreault, whom we would like to thank for her hard work with the journal in recent years. Chantal has served as the Book Review Editor of the journal for four years; we wish her luck in her continuing research on gender and ethnicity in the interactional styles of French adolescents of Algerian descent (some of the earliest results of which were originally published in the pages of this journal!) We are also very happy to welcome Sarah Hussell as Editorial Assistant. Sarah Hussell is an editorial assistant for Gender and Language. She is studying for an MA in Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield and also works as an assistant at Equinox Publishing. We thank Sharon Kelly

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for her three years of work on the journal; she adopted key roles in the management of on-line submissions, in correspondence with authors, in submitting manuscripts for production, and in compiling statistics for this editorial. We wish her the best of luck with the completion of her dissertation work on the attempts to transform a Toronto housing project into a mixed-income neighbourhood. In the first issue of the journal, we noted that members of the Editorial Board would be appointed for five years, and that there would be regular rotation to ensure that the full range of interests in the field was represented. We are grateful to those Board members who have served the journal so well during their five years with the journal, and say farewell to Jennifer Coates, Susan Gal, Kira K. Hall, Catherine Kitetu, Marcyliena Morgan, Sarah Ogbay, Anne Pauwels, Daniela Sorea, and Mary Talbot. We are also happy to announce the newly formed and extended Editorial Board. We are very happy to continue working with Niko Besnier, Mary Bucholtz, Deborah Cameron, Penelope Eckert, Susan Ehrlich, Marjorie Goodwin, Janet Holmes, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Bonnie McElhinny, Paul McIlvenny, Miriam Meyerhoff, Sara Mills, Momoko Nakamura, Jane Sunderland, Deborah Tannen and Ruth Wodak. And we are delighted to welcome new members: Lilian Atanga, Frederick Attenborough, Rusty Barrett, Judith Baxter, Bethan Benwell, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Allyson Jule, Veronika Koller, Neill Korobov, Michelle Lazar, Claire Maree, Emma Moore, Ana Ostermann, Pia Pichler, Robin Queen, and Susan Speer. Again, our aims in extending the Board have been to broaden the base of its expertise, including members from all around the world, who we hope will all have a stake in supporting the journal as we move forward. Finally, we are making other changes to the journal. We intend to publish three issues per year, from 2013. This will enable us to publish papers more quickly, and demonstrate the journal’s momentum. The publisher, Janet Joyce at Equinox, is currently applying on the journal’s behalf to be included in the ISI Web of Knowledge, so that Gender and Language will be able to begin to report its impact factor. This is very important for the journal’s current and future profile. We are also aiming to publish papers online, as soon as they have been allocated to a volume and issue, so that authors can promote their work before a paper version of the journal is actually published. Ann and Elizabeth, the Editorial Board, and IGALA executive board members, extend their thanks to Bonnie McElhinny for her work during her five-year term, although, in actuality, the time she spent with the journal has been much longer. Her work included drafting, with Sara Mills, a proposal for the journal, circulating it to various publishers, and working with Equinox to set up the journal, as well as the editorial work associated

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with the journal’s first five years. We are grateful to Bonnie for establishing the foundations of this important journal and hope to build on its current success into the future. We hope that the changes listed in this Editorial demonstrate our commitment to the journal, its international success, its increased (and official) impact, and its strong development. We therefore thank you, the readers and contributors, for your support and interest in Gender and Language, and ask you to continue to consider us as an outlet for your work, and to recommend us to colleagues. Ann Weatherall Elizabeth Stokoe The 7th International Gender and Language Association Conference will take place between June 20–22nd, 2012, in Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), Brazil (www.unisinos.br/eventos/igala/index.php/ igala/IGALA7)


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Article

Introduction: Recasting language and masculinities Tommaso M. Milani Where are we coming from...? This special issue of Gender & Language, which aims at ‘Recasting language and masculinities’, does not emerge in an intellectual void. Rather, it is the product of an academic conversation that started with a workshop of the same title organized by Sally Johnson and myself within the context of Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 held in Amsterdam in 2008. Over ten years after the publication of the collection Language and Masculinity (Johnson and Meinhof 1997), the main idea underlying that workshop was to re-rethink the linguistic/discursive study of masculinities in the light of (then) recent theoretical debates that had arisen in conjunction with the later and not always uncontroversial volume Language and Sexuality (Cameron and Kulick 2003a). It lies outside the scope of this introduction to enter into the details of these debates here (see Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Cameron and Kulick 2005). Suffice it to say, however, that Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick argued for the need for a queering of research on language and sexuality. In their view, such a queer enterprise would entail (amongst other things): (1) working out how sexuality and gender have been ‘casually entangled in knots that must be undone’ (Butler 1998: 225–226); (2) going beyond identity as a form of conscious claim-staking, and accounting instead for sets of unconscious and often conflicting identifications; (3) engaging with the notion of desire; (4) mapping out the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect and become salient alongside and in conjunction with other forms of social differentiation; and (5) scrutinising the possibilities as

Affiliation University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg email: [email protected]


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well as the constraints of discourse, i.e. not just what is legally prohibited but also what is culturally taboo, and therefore cannot be uttered. At the Amsterdam workshop in 2008, Sally Johnson and I invited the various contributors to engage critically with the theoretical proposals put forward by Cameron and Kulick. In driving such an academic agenda, we were moved by both theoretical and empirical motives. On the one hand, we strongly believed that Cameron and Kulick’s reflections could provide us with a conceptual apparatus through which to offer a more nuanced and complex picture of the ways in which discursive constructions of masculinities are bound up with the reproduction of power imbalances. On the other hand, we also wanted to fill an empirical and methodological gap. Very few studies had heretofore attempted to operationalize Cameron and Kulick’s notions in the context of actual data (for notable exceptions see, however, the special issue of Language and Communication (Cameron and Kulick 2003b) as well as del-Teso-Craviotto 2006; Georgakopoulou 2005; Kiesling 2005; Kulick 2003). Therefore, taking masculinity as a case in point, we wanted to understand whether, and if so, how such theoretical constructs could be put to work in a range of empirical linguistic/discursive investigations. Rather than summarizing each article of this special issue in detail, in what follows I will choose those aspects that will allow me to foreground the affordances as well as the difficulties encountered by the various authors in operationalizing Cameron and Kulick’s proposals. I will then conclude with a few comments on what I see as the need for a re-casting of language and (heterosexual) masculinities within the scholarship on language, gender and sexuality. Enacting masculinities: identity or identification? One of Cameron and Kulick’s (2003a) most controversial arguments is that we should move beyond identity as an analytical construct in the study of sexuality. This is because, in their view, ‘[i]dentity still tends to suggest a kind of conscious claim-staking by a subject who knows exactly who s/he is, or wants to be (or who s/he isn’t and doesn’t want to be)’ (2003a: 138). Of course, Paul Baker reminds us that it would be naïve to deny that ‘people do self-identify and are labelled by others as male, female, gay, lesbian or heterosexual, etc. These identities “exist” within discourse, shaping the minds, bodies and lives of many people’ (2008: 194). By the same token, Cameron and Kulick (2003a: xi) are not arguing for a complete dismissal of identity. But the point that they are trying to make is that, if we limited our analytical scope to the discursive manifestations of sexual identities (that is, asserting a gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, or transgendered identity),

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we would fail to fully capture the complexity of sexuality as perceived, embodied and lived by people in their social contexts. One reason for this is because we would be unable to incorporate into our analyses the meaning of sexuality for those who, say, might ‘publicly’ self-identify themselves as heterosexual, but desire and engage with sexual practices with individuals of the same sex in more ‘private’ contexts (see however Fairclough 1995; Milani, in press; Koller and Wodak 2010 for problematizations of the public/private divide). In addition, too narrow a focus on sexual identities might also blind us to the incoherences and inconsistencies on which such identities are nonetheless built. As a solution, Cameron and Kulick (2003a) suggest distinguishing between identity and identification. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Judith Butler’s (1990) performativity theory (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973), they propose that, if we want to grasp sexuality in all its complexity, we should attend to the ways in which the (sexual) subject comes into being in interaction through more or less unconscious and contradictory identifications. And these are structured by affirmations as well as rejections and disavowals. This distinction between identity and identification can appear analytically enticing. However, the question remains as to whether such a division is epistemologically well-founded. Put differently, it might be tempting to separate between conscious and unconscious discursive acts of subject positioning. But, as Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (2004) have pointed out, can we, as sociolinguists and discourse analysts, draw a clear-cut boundary between the two? And if so, what are the ‘warrants’ (cf. Swann 2002) for such a separation operated by the analyst? How are we able to verify whether certain discursive acts of positioning are above or below the level of consciousness? This particular epistemological dilemma, i.e. how to separate acts of identity from forms of identification, is addressed in the opening article of this special issue by Bethan Benwell, entitled ‘Masculine identity and identification as ethnomethodological phenomena’. In re-reading some of the interview data collected for a project on men’s lifestyle magazines in the UK (see also Benwell 2002; 2003; 2005; 2007), the author argues that the men in her study do identity work by drawing upon culturally familiar discourses of gender and sexuality. For example, by saying ‘these women are HOT [...] they’re all five REALLY really hot women’, one of participants grants himself a heterosexual position in a focus-group interaction in which three other men are present. At the same time, the use of the adjective ‘hot’ allows him to align himself to those discourses of masculinity circulated by men’s lifestyle magazines in the UK. Interestingly, however, all the participants present, with the exception of the speaker who pronounced those

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utterances, laughed. As Benwell suggests, laughter could be interpreted as a strategy through which the other participants distance themselves from the content of the utterance. And this is most likely the result of their knowledge that their speech will be analyzed by a researcher on gender and language. Furthermore, with regard to this interaction, Benwell argues that ‘the participants [...] are enacting “identity” – it is a selfconscious, unambiguous alignment to a culturally familiar subject position, which echoes the colloquial language employed by the lad magazines themselves’. Whilst there is no doubt about the ‘unambiguous alignment’ to a cultural discourse of masculinity in circulation in the UK, in my view, we cannot be completely sure whether the linguistic strategies employed in these interactions are tokens of conscious acts of claim-staking. Following Pierre Bourdieu (1992), one could propose an alternative reading – one which highlights the ways in which the stances taken by these men emanate from the encounter between habitus and field. That is, these are stances that stem from the dynamic interface between unconscious habits of thoughts and behaviour embodied through a specific form socialisation, on the one hand (i.e. being brought up as a heterosexual man in the UK; reading a specific type of magazine), and the conditions that underpin a particular interaction, on the other (i.e. a focus-group interview that will be subsequently analysed by a feminist academic). A perhaps more clear-cut distinction between what counts as ‘conscious’ identity positions and ‘unconscious’ forms of identification emerges in the later section of Benwell’s article which deal with the readers’ comments on the phenomenon of ‘gross-out’ features in men’s lifestyle magazines. Here, some readers consciously align themselves to the values of gross out, whilst others unconsciously disavow masculinity by inhabiting ‘feminine’ positions in relation to such a phenomenon. Furthermore, all the participants employ different distancing strategies when talking about gross-out. Overall, one could conclude that the distinction between identity and identifications is a promising one because it allows us to separate more coherent form of alignments to existing cultural discourses from the more ambivalent and conflicting inconsistencies and disavowals through which the speaking subject emerges in discourse. However, if one takes an ethnomethodological approach inflected by Critical Discourse Analysis, as Benwell does, the distinction between gendered identity and identification is epistemologically grounded only on condition (1) that the researcher warrants her conclusions through a fine-grained analysis of what is present in the text as well as through charting the demands/constraints of the interactional context; and (2) that the researcher does not pre-posit the gendered meaning of a particular discourse (e.g. gross-out as a ‘masculine’


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phenomenon), but buttresses such gendered components through careful ‘multi-sited’/‘intertextual’ observation. Desire and identity in (inter)action In their attempt to question what they see as the problematical conflation of sexual identity and sexuality, Cameron and Kulick do not only distinguish between identity and identification but also encourage researchers to engage with the notion of desire. This, they see as ‘encompass[ing] more than just the preference for partners of the same or other sex: it also deals with the non-intentional, non-conscious and non-rational dimensions of human sexual life’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003a: 140) – dimensions which in much psychoanalytical thought are said to be structured by some form of lack or absence. Crucially, Cameron and Kulick add that desire is not limited to the field of the erotic but, as Jay Lemke puts it, encompasses (together with fear) ‘powerful feelings’ that ‘shape social action’ (Lemke 2007: 23). In order to understand the pervasive role of desire in the making of the social world, Cameron and Kulick draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988), proposing that we should map a geography of desire – one in which desire is to be foregrounded ‘as something that is continually being dis/re/assembled. Thus attention can focus on whether and how different kinds of relations can emit desire, fabricate it and/or block it, exhaust it’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003a: 111). Pointers towards such a geography of desire are precisely what emerge in Scott Kiesling’s article, ‘The interactional construction of desire as gender’. As a theoretical entry point, Kiesling draws on Stephen Whitehead’s (2002) notion of ‘ontological desire’. Here the assumption is that acts of identity function as acts of ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1991); they are ways through which the speaker constantly aims at granting a stable and authentic position for the ‘Self ’. But, given that the ‘Self ’ according to poststructuralist theories can only manifest itself in discourse, such attempts at establishing ‘ontological security’ are always multiple, unstable and transient. Accordingly, stability and authenticity are destined to remain a pursuit – a constant but ultimately unrealizable ideal. With regard to masculinity, Kiesling reminds us how this notion of desired ideal accords well with Robert Connell’s (1995) concept of hegemonic masculinity – the dominant and most ‘authentic’ form of masculinity in a specific cultural and political context that no one fully embodies but that the subject strives for in order to be, and be perceived as, masculine. By exploring different interactions in an American college fraternity in the United States, Kiesling illustrates that performing masculinity is indeed the discursive materialisation in social interaction of a desire for hegemonic

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masculinity. This, in turn, is enabled by constantly invoking available, often conflicting, cultural discourses about what counts as being a ‘real’ man in the US. Needless to say, such claims for hegemonic masculinity always go hand in hand with attempts to gain a position of power. What Kiesling is also able to show us in his article, however, is the way in which a comprehensive theoretical account of desire presupposes a consideration of the ways in which speakers are shaped by the desire to have their identities endorsed by the members of a present or imagined audience. In other words, the pursuit for a masculine identity position always requires ‘authenticators’ (cf. Bucholtz and Hall 2004). This is perhaps most patent in a flirting interaction that occurs between two young people, Jen and Pete, in a bar. Here Pete and Jen are enacting gender-stereotypical roles in a US context: Pete displays himself as rational and self-confident whilst answering Jen’s questions very briefly; conversely Jen positions herself as insecure whilst playing the role of the ‘conversational shitworker’ (Fishman 1978) who keeps the interaction going. In this instance, Kiesling maps out the complex interplay between heterosexual desire, identity and cultural discourses, whereby heterosexual desire is co-constructed asymmetrically in interaction and mediated through conventionalized ideas about what counts as ‘masculine’ vs ‘feminine’. As was the case with the issue of identity vs identification raised in the previous section, however, we might want ask ourselves: how do we operationalize desire? And what are the ‘warrants’ for the analyst’s insight into desire? A possible way forward according to Kiesling lies in the careful analysis of the many alignments and disalignments on which interactions are built. As Kiesling concludes: Finding desire in interaction is thus not a simple matter of seeing interactions move smoothly with everyone aligned, affiliated, and involved. Rather, it is a matter of seeing interactants put work into trying to align and create involvement, work that they do perhaps because they desire the alignment they don’t have. A very different kind of warrant for desire is explored in the contribution by Tommaso M. Milani and Rickard Jonsson in their article entitled ‘Incomprehensible language? Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school’. Working with ethnographic data collected through participant observation of a group of male adolescents in a Swedish school, the authors argue that male adolescents’ engagement in ‘exaggerated talk’ about their sexual prowess is ultimately driven by a desire to transgress the boundaries of what is considered ‘taboo’ for a teenager when an adult (the researcher/ethnographer) is present in the school environment. Such a conclusion is buttressed by bringing together the researcher’s local knowledge accumulated through ethnographic


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observation with a careful analysis of many paralinguistic features – the laughter, giggles and other vocalizations of juissance – that characterize the interaction in question. Whether we rely on alignments and disalignments on the one hand, or on ethnographic insights and paralinguistic features on the other, (or, ideally, both), it is nonetheless my own contention that we should be continually asking one particular question: ‘Yes, but is it desire?’ (cf. Swann 2002) – and if so, ‘Whose desire?’ When masculinity intersects with other forms of social categorization What is patent in both Benwell’s and Kiesling’s data is that the participants in their studies are not just doing gender – performing different forms of masculinity – in the interactions in question, but they are also doing sexuality, i.e. performing heterosexuality. These findings could be taken as empirical evidence that the ‘relationship between gender and sexuality is special’ (Baker 2008: 8). However, Cameron and Kulick remind us that, notwithstanding the unique entanglement between gender and sexuality, ‘it is also important to consider the ways in which sexuality – whether viewed from the perspective of identity or desire – will also be inflected by other kinds of socially salient differences’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003a: 144). Admittedly, this argument is not new. Through the notion of ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1989), Black feminist theorists were pioneering in their attempts to grasp the ways in which power operates through complex axes in which gender criss-crosses with social class and race. However, whilst there is a large body of scholarship in sociology and cultural studies that investigates the ways in which hegemonic masculinity operates through the marginalization of the ‘Other’ (cf. Connell 1995) along lines of class and race, we still know too little about the ways in which such multilayered process of social ‘othering’ (Jaworski 2007) operates through language/ discourse. This empirical gap is partly addressed by Susan Ehrlich and Susan Levesque in their article ‘The strategic marginalization of working-class masculinity in a batterers’ treatment programme’. What is particularly interesting in their study are the discursive strategies through which men with apparently similar sociological profiles in terms of age, class, education, and race, differentiate from one another when commenting on their progress during a batterers’ treatment programme. Notably, each of the men positions himself as ‘intelligent’, ‘educated’ and ‘middle-class’ whilst at the same time invoking some kind of ‘macho’ working-class masculinity for the other members of the programme. Through detailed analysis of field

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notes as well as transcripts of recordings, Ehrlich and Levesque illustrate how all the men in this study displace violence onto an invoked ‘Other’ – the working-class man, from whom they distance themselves. And, as the authors suggest, this is not just a strategy through which these men seek to diminish the severity of a violent act, but, in terms of identity work, it is also a subtle way through which they try to construct an essentially ‘good’ and ‘non-violent’ Self from which they deviated on a few allegedly exceptional occasions. In other words, they discursively construct middleclass men’s violence as ‘atypical’. As was the case in Benwell’s interview data on the phenomenon of ‘gross out’, the identity constructions in the men in the batterers’ programme are not coherent but are filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Although Ehrlich and Levesque do not employ the distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’, one could argue that, in striving to produce a coherent, non-violent, middle-class masculinity, these men end up producing a series of more or less unconscious identifications with the kind of working-class masculine behaviour from which they elsewhere try to distance themselves. And this, according to Ehrlich and Levesque, is the result of particular interactional demands. In fact, in order to show the interviewer that they were truly engaging with the batterers’ programme, these men have to explicitly acknowledge their violent behaviour. Quite a different scenario emerges in Milani and Jonsson’s article ‘Incomprehensible Language’. Analogous to Ehrlich and Levesque’s study, Milani and Jonsson provide us with a case in point of processes of social differentiation, in which gender is bound up with other forms of social categorization. In this specific case, the authors illustrate how youth masculinity is linked to representations of language use as well as sexuality and ethnicity. The rationale of the paper is to seek to demystify a discourse currently at work in the Swedish media – a discourse in which suburban slang is tied to sexism, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. As has been showed elsewhere (Milani 2010), such discourse is bringing into being the cultural model of the ‘immigrant young man’ (invandrarkille) who does not speak ‘proper’ Swedish, but only masters a ‘second-class’ slang that is incomprehensible, sexist and homophobic. Looking at ‘micro’ interactions in a school environment, Milani and Jonsson show how the adolescents in their study indeed engage with a range of sexist and homophobic behaviour. However, whilst the ‘macro’ discourse in the media would tend to suggest that sexism and homophobia are inherently tied to the fact that these adolescents are not ‘ethnically Swedish’ – whatever this may mean – Milani and Jonsson show that homophobia does not ‘naturally’ emanate from the young men’s ethnicity, but is part of the school at large and is a key component in the teaching


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strategy of a Swedish teacher. What the article also demonstrates is that the language used by the adolescents in school interaction is far from being unintelligible. Rather, it comprises meaningful semiotic resources that allow the young men in the study to negotiate a ‘local masculine order’ (Evaldsson 2005: 764) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested. Why re-casting language and (heterosexual) masculinities? During the lively discussion that concluded the workshop at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 in Amsterdam, the audience showed some scepticism about the need for a re-casting language and masculinities. Two main points of concern were raised: (1) why focus exclusively on heterosexual men and not instead look at the ways in which masculinity is also performed by women, gay men, transgendered individuals, etc, and (2) what is the ideological agenda that underpins this academic project? The fact that all the contributions to the workshop and hence this special issue have brought heterosexual masculinities into the spotlight is to some degree accidental; it stems from the academic interests and choices of the individual authors of the papers. Of course, one might counter-argue that inviting certain researchers (and not others) might have inherently constrained the scope of analysis. Whether accidental or not, however, I want reiterate a point that has been made many times in the study of language, gender and sexuality, namely that analyzing heterosexual masculinities performed by men does not mean that female masculinity, gay masculinities, transgenderism and so forth should not be brought under empirical investigation. Indeed, ‘dislocating masculinity’ (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994) from men is an arena of inquiry that I want to pursue elsewhere; but this in turn should not make us forget that a focus on heterosexual male informants does not inherently exclude the study of other dimensions of gender, race, sexuality. As almost all articles in this special issue show, the construction of heterosexual masculinity relies on a positioning in relation to such other dimensions. In arguing for a focus on heterosexual masculinities, I am definitely not trying to suggest that heterosexual men, pressured by feminist advancements, are undergoing something of an oedipal masculinity crisis, and therefore need protection from ‘castration threats’ (Johnson 1997: 17). Quite the contrary, a critical perspective on heterosexual men is necessary because, from the point of view of queer theory, we should not only pay attention ‘to the cases in which bodies/relations/desires “deviate” from the norm, but also those cases in which they do not’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003a: 149). Such a view is underpinned by the belief that a

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deeper transformative project of the social world can only be initiated by unravelling those processes through which certain bodies, identities and desires (and not others) become unmarked, normal and normative. In other words, it is through the deconstruction of what counts as ‘normal’ that we can undermine claims of biological and/or cultural essentialism, revealing instead the deeply social roots of such ‘norm-ality’. In the case of gender and sexuality, only by questioning the conditions that enable the production of heterosexual masculinities as default and normal in many contexts – no matter what different guises they might take – can we start shaking the profound foundations on which the gender and sexual orders are built. That’s why it is imperative for me to re-cast the programmatic statement made by Sally Johnson over a decade ago that: What we really need is to know more about the complex role played by ‘difference’ in the construction of ‘dominance.’ The study of language and masculinities is not simply one way of exploring such a role – I find it difficult to envisage how this can be done without looking at men (Johnson 1997: 25).

As a queer researcher, I find such an enterprise impossible without looking at heterosexual men... Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sally Johnson who shared many of the original ideas which initiated the academic conversation on language and (heterosexual) masculinities that have materialized here. This special issue is dedicated to her and to our long-lasting friendship. About the author Tommaso Milani is Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. References Baker, P. (2008) Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Equinox. Benwell B. (2002) Is there anything ‘new’ about these lads? The construction of masculinity in men’s magazines. In J. Sunderland and Litosseliti (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis 149–174. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benwell, B. (2003) Ambiguous masculinities: Heroism and anti-heroism in the men’s lifestyle magazine. In B. Benwell (ed.) Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines 151–168. Oxford: Blackwell.


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Benwell, B. (2005) ‘Lucky this is anonymous!’ Men’s magazines and ethnographies of reading: A textual culture approach. Discourse and Society 16: 147–172. Benwell, B. (2007) New sexism? Readers’ responses to the use of irony in men’s magazines. Journalism Studies 8: 539–549. Bourdieu, P. (1992) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2004) Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33: 501–547. Butler, J. (1998) Afterword. In S. Munt (ed.) Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender 225–230. London: Cassell. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003a) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (eds) (2003b) Language and Desire. Special issue of Language & Communication 23. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2005) Identity crisis? Language & Communication 25: 107–125. Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cornwall, A. and Lindisfarne, N. (eds) (1994) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–167. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press. del-Teso-Craviotto, M. (2006) Language and sexuality in Spanish and English dating chats. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 460–480. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2006) Staging insults and mobilizing categorizations in a multiethnic peer group. Discourse & Society 16: 763–786. Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Arnold. Fishman, P. (1978) Interaction: The work women do. Social Problems 25: 397–406. Georgakopoulou, A. (2005) Styling men and masculinities: Interactional and identity aspects. Language in Society 34: 163–184. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Malden: Blackwell/Polity. Jaworski, A. (2007) Language in the media: Authenticity and othering. In S. Johnson and A. Ensslin (eds) Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies 271–280. London: Continuum. Johnson, S. (1997) Theorizing language and masculinity: A feminist perspective. In S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 8–26. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, S. and Meinhof, U. H. (eds) (1997) Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kiesling, S. F. (2005) Homosocial desire in men’s talk: Balancing and recreating cultural discourses of masculinity. Language in Society 34: 695–727.

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Koller, V. and Wodak, R. (2010) Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres. In R. Wodak and V. Koller (eds) Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere 1–17. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kulick, D. (2003) No. Language & Communication 23: 139–151. Laplanche J. and Pontalis, J. B. (1973) The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: The Hogarth Press. Lemke, J. L. (2007) Identity, development and desire: Critical questions. In C. Caldas-Coulthard and R. Iedema (eds) Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities 17–42. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Milani, T. M. (2010) What’s in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14: 116–142. Milani, T. M. (in press) Language ideologies and public discourse. In C. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Swann, J. (2002) Yes, but is it gender? In L. Litosseliti and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis 43–67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Whitehead, S. (2002) Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.


Gender and Language

Article

Masculine identity and identification as ethnomethodological phenomena: Revisiting Cameron and Kulick Bethan Benwell Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore possible discourse and conversation analytical approaches to articulations of masculinity in and around sites of popular culture. The research presented in this paper arises from work on the relationship between men’s magazines, constructions/discourses of masculinity and lived cultures of masculinity. My particular interest in this paper is to explore the process by which we assign gendered identities to familiar cultural discourses, and in doing so, to engage critically with the ideas of Cameron and Kulick (2003; 2005) who have postulated a distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ as a means of reconceiving the relationship between discourse and sexuality. By adopting an ethnomethodological approach to conversational data, I will argue that it is possible to demonstrate how gendered identities – both the explicit alignments and claim-staking of ‘identity’ work, as well as the more ambivalent, shifting and contradictory footings that could be thought to characterise ‘identification’ – are available for analysis on the surface of talk. In a final analysis, I move beyond strict ethnomethodological principles in order to extend this consideration of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ to a particular popular discourse – that of ‘gross out’ – whose intuitive labelling as masculine can be traced and supported by the forms and contexts of the various intertexts within which it occurs. Keywords: masculinity; Cameron and Kulick; identity; identification; ethnomethodology: ‘gross out’

Affiliation University of Stirling, UK email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.187

www.equinoxpub.com

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Introduction In their recent contributions to the field of language, gender and sexuality, Cameron and Kulick (2003; 2005) have argued that identity needs to be theorised beyond a simple ‘claim-staking’ by individuals and that we need to look to more psychoanalytically inspired models of ‘identification’ to enrich our understanding of the relationship between language and identity. In this paper I will attempt to bring into dialogue some of the methodological preoccupations and principles of both Conversation Analysis (CA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in order to engage with Kulick and Cameron’s ideas. CA, for instance, might be criticised for its narrow reliance upon a speaker’s verbalisation of an identity category within talk in order to provide a warrant for the relevance of said identity to the speaker. On the other hand, CA furnishes the analyst with the kind of fine-grained, systematic tools of analysis by which to chart, through talk, the ambiguities, inconsistencies, disavowals and affiliations ‘that may both structure and disrupt a person’s claim to a particular identity’ (Cameron and Kulick 2005: 114). CDA, with its roots in Foucauldian theories of discourse, is concerned to situate identity in a broader, genealogical context and to identify culturally available discourses through which a subject position emerges. In this way a broadly CDA approach complements Cameron and Kulick’s desire to study ‘how key aspects of the social, cultural and political order (its heteronormativity, for instance) come to be internalized and reproduced (or not) in individuals’ (Cameron and Kulick 2005: 122). CDA’s reliance on the analyst’s perspective in identifying such discourses has, however, been subject to criticism (particularly from the ethnomethodological perspective of CA), and a more accountable, participant-oriented means of ascribing identity labels to particular cultural scripts, attitudes and behaviours advocated. After a discussion of Cameron and Kulick’s particular thesis on the relationship between discourse and identity, I will attempt to apply their concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ to empirical data from interviews conducted with readers of men’s magazines (see also Benwell 2005), in which appeals and references to masculinity are salient. I will then conclude the paper by focusing on the discourse of ‘gross out’ (a discourse commonly assigned the identifying label ‘masculine’) which can be found in contemporary men’s lifestyle magazines, but also in sites of everyday talk and other popular discourses that both feed into and reflect the magazine culture. What I propose in this analysis, is that aspects of Cameron and Kulick’s notion of ‘identification’ (particularly those that refer to the emergence of subjectivity as a position in relation to available discourse) can be usefully deployed to engage with enactments of gender identity (necessarily bound

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up with discourses of sexuality) which are not always explicitly encoded as such by the speakers. Such an analysis therefore provides an alternative kind of warrant for the labelling of a discourse as ‘masculine’ without relying on explicit mentions by participants. Identity vs identification Within the emergent ethnomethodological tradition of discursive research outlined above, masculinity (and gender more broadly) as a term belongs to the theoretical realm of the ‘macro’, rather than the discursive realm of the ‘micro’. By this, I mean that ‘masculinity’ tends to be an analyst’s term (although see debate between Edley (2001) and Speer (2001a; 2001b)), abstracted from a tradition of theoretical discussion and description, and applied by scholars to particular instantiations of culture. The macrosociological status of masculinity as a term means that it is rare (unless it is explicitly invoked by an interviewer under research conditions) for speakers to talk about their ‘masculinity’ as such, and so, as language and gender researchers, we have tended to make certain speculative assumptions about what constitutes alignments (or otherwise) to ‘masculinity’ or ‘masculine discourse/behaviour’ in stretches of naturally occurring talk. The limitations of such speculation have been amply documented and debated over the past ten years (e.g. the series of debates in Discourse and Society initiated by Schegloff ’s 1997 paper: ‘Whose text, whose context?’) and they tend to be framed in terms of an opposition between ethnomethodological approaches (Conversation Analysis, Discursive Psychology) and Foucauldian, poststructuralist forms of Discourse Analysis (Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discursive Psychology, Positioning Theory). In my own work looking at the discussions of readers of men’s magazines (Benwell 2005; 2007; Benwell and Stokoe 2006) I have started to explore critically the process by which we intuitively ‘gender’ familiar cultural discourses (e.g. the idea that men who pay too much attention to their appearance are non-traditionally masculine), and to subject such assumptions to a research methodology which attempts to secure a clearer ‘warrant’ for such labelling (see also Stokoe and Smithson 2002; Swann 2002). One means of doing this is to pay attention to the various intersecting and intertextually linked sites of culture within which identities are articulated. In the conclusion of my paper I focus on discourses of ‘gross-out’, which are commonly assumed to be inextricably linked to cultures of masculinity, and whose links to masculinity can be traced intertextually across other discursive sites. Before arriving at this analysis, however, and in line with the remit of this Special Issue, I wish to explore a series of recent theorizations of sexuality and gender (and identity more broadly) by Cameron and Kulick (2003;

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2005), Cameron (2005) and Kulick (2003), which in turn have provoked exchanges with Bucholtz and Hall (2004a; 2004b). Although the linguistic tradition in which these four authors are situated is more broadly sociological/anthropological than the ethnomethodological or conversational traditions outlined above, similar preoccupations to those debated between CA and CDA concerning the relationship between micro-discursive and macro-theoretical contexts emerge in their debates. Cameron and Kulick’s 2003 text, Language and Sexuality, offered a rallying call to language and identity researchers to reconceptualise and problematise sexuality as a form of ‘identification’, rather than merely an ‘identity’ attached to, or consciously embraced by an individual. In their text they posit a distinction between ‘performance’, a conscious, agentive process of identity work: ‘something a subject does’ (Kulick 2003: 140), and ‘performativity’, the Butlerian framework (Butler 1990) which describes subjectivity as a product of prevailing, normative cultural discourse: ‘the process by which the subject emerges’ (Kulick 2003: 140). To these two terms, the allied concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ have been attached respectively. In Cameron and Kulick’s words, ‘identity’ is ‘a subject’s more or less conscious allegiance to a particular subject position’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 114), whereas ‘identification’ is ‘a concept that allows for the recognition and investigation of conflicting affiliations that may both structure and disrupt a person’s claim to a particular identity’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 114). ‘Identification’ is a psychoanalytical concept which carries a trace of repressed, absent, unspoken or disavowed identities which inflect the process of identity work, as well as point to the presence of conflicting, contradictory affiliations to familiar and stable identity positions. Furthermore, ‘identification’ involves the assimilation of ‘an aspect or property of an other and are in that process, transformed’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 139). There are two major challenges that might be levelled at Cameron and Kulick’s articulation of ‘identity’, and particularly the distinction proposed between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’. Both challenges have been expressed by Bucholtz and Hall (2004a) in their critique of Cameron and Kulick’s book. The first is that a distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ is a false one that holds only if one adopts a very narrow definition of ‘identity’ as a conscious, claim-staking, identity politics (e.g. ‘speaking as a feminist’). As Bucholtz and Hall rightly point out, most researchers working on identity in the broad fields of sociolinguistics or discourse analysis have rejected such a formulation of identity as an essentialising, unnuanced account which does not accurately reflect current theorizations of identity: The authors base their critique on the incorrect assumption that linking linguistic practice to identity is essentialist. More current research…avoids


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essentialism by drawing on theories of indexicality and performativity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004b). In this sense, ‘identity’ has been reconfigured as a kind of ‘straw man’ category which does not reflect its analytical use by many researchers of discourse and identity. The second complaint against Cameron and Kulick’s conceptualisation of ‘identification’ is the analytical vagueness and undemonstrable nature of the psychoanalytical approach in which it is situated, despite a commitment to a socially mediated theorisation of desire (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 131). There is little empirical research presented alongside Cameron and Kulick’s position that adequately demonstrates the linguistic workings of ‘identification’ as a process. Billig’s (1999) discursive psychological work on Freud’s case histories comes closest to illuminating the ideas of how repressed or disavowed identities may be articulated on the surface of discourse, but even here, Billig does not deal with interactional material. Cameron’s chapter on ‘Performing Gender Identity’ (1997) is also invoked by Cameron and Kulick (2003: 122) to demonstrate how repressed desire is displaced onto the despised ‘other’ (here, a classmate who does not conform to traditional styles of masculine behaviour) as part of the process of shoring up their heterosexuality. In this instance, the desire, Cameron and Kulick argue, is homosexual desire, revealed in the fascinated detail of description of body and clothes of the classmate. However, the attribution of ‘desire’ (and thus conflict, ambivalence and disavowal) is an entirely subjective one in the context of the data; another reading could easily suggest that the detail of description is a rhetorical strategy that simply reinforces difference without any of the ambiguity that Cameron and Kulick’s (2003) re-reading implies. The relationship between psychological states, intentions and interaction has been subject to considerable debate, particularly within the field of psychology. The approach of Discursive Psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992) first arose in order to challenge a communicative model of interaction in which underlying cognitive states such as memory, emotion or intention were assumed to determine the outcome of talk. Rather, Discursive Psychology (DP) sought to respecify these psychological states as topics or interactional resources that accomplish certain social actions. So, for instance, it is possible to analyse actual instantiations of ‘disavowal’, such as the explicit repudiation of a particular identity, idea or ideology (‘I’m not that kind of man’), as a means of working up particular versions of identity for oneself, of being accountable with respect to a particular morality or ideology, or arguing for an idea or version of the world, all within the local, contingent and sequential constraints of the discourse situation. In critical response to the ideas of DP, there has been a recent attempt by some social

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psychologists, dissatisfied with what they perceive to be a neglect of the inner psychological world of experience, to revisit language (particularly narrative) as a site for exploring psychological states (e.g. Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman 2003; Gough 2004; Hollway and Jefferson 2005). However, these approaches rely on the importation of assumptions by the analyst about what hidden mental states ‘really’ motivate the language choices of their subjects rather than focusing on what the subjects actually say. As Edwards points out, such mental states ‘are not strictly beyond the reach of observational study… but are approachable as the kind of business that is invoked and managed in talk-in-interaction’ (D. Edwards 1997: 86). Despite these theoretical and methodological challenges to Cameron and Kulick’s thesis, and in line with Edwards’s statement above, I believe there are productive possibilities to be explored in relation to the distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ which might be more clearly exemplified by a more fine-grained, ethnomethodological and interactional approach to data which I will now go on to explore in relation to my own data. Applying concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ to interactional data In my research into accounts of consumption practices by readers of men’s magazines, I identified a series of what could be broadly termed ‘gendered subject positions’ emerging in their interview talk. The following examples draw on a qualitative study of male consumers (Benwell 2005) which took the form of two lengthy, informal, unstructured interviews led and guided by a male researcher who also circulated reading material to prompt discussion. The first group consisted of two 17-year-old males still at school in Scotland. The second group consisted of four 21-year-old male students at a Scottish university. The interview was set up to elicit the reading habits, practices and accounts of a range of dedicated readers of men’s magazines with particular reference to issues of consumption and gender. Responses to specific advertisements, articles and images were also elicited. Much of the interviewees’ identity work was explicitly related to the arguably gendered discourses of consumption and to the uneasy relationship between traditional forms of heterosexual masculinity and the feminised realm of grooming, health and beauty which forms an important part of lifestyle magazine culture, including magazines aimed at men. Some of these subject positions were culturally familiar, dominant forms of masculinity, to which the participants unambiguously aligned themselves. For instance, in response to a specific feature in one of the magazines, ‘Girls on the Sofa’ one group of readers respond as follows:


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Extract 1 1 M: well, these women are HOT 2 G: (laughing) yeah. 3 D: no yeah (laughing) they are 4 I: (laughing) yeah. 5 M: it’s like they do that sort of single woman like 6 she’s sort of available sort of like looking for a 7 date or whatever but it’s not always a stereotypical 8 girl it’s still a fit woman sort of scantily clad 9 G: but you would10 M: they’re all five REALLY really hot women.

In this example, the participants (and M in particular) are performing ‘identity’ (to use Cameron and Kulick’s term); it is a self-conscious, unambiguous alignment to a culturally familiar subject position, which echoes the colloquial language employed by the lad magazines themselves (‘hot’, ‘fit’). Various culturally available identities or categories are invoked by M (‘that sort of single woman’) whose very generic familiarity and expectation that the other participants will recognise them is indexed in the talk itself by the formulation ‘that sort of ’ placed in conjunction with the item ‘like’. Stokoe refers to such examples as ‘categorial formulations’: Categorial formulations often co-occur with items such as ‘y’know’ lending an almost idiomatic quality to these formulations. These are the building blocks of intersubjectivity, producing recipients as having mutual cultural knowledge of a category’s features and the ‘wider social contexts’ that may be relevant. (Stokoe 2008: np)

Such formulations, or discourses, whose very cultural ‘availability’ is indexed within the talk itself, become in this way resources by which to accomplish gender identity work in talk, and are suggestive of the ‘regulatory practices of gender formation’ theorised by Butler (1990: 16) which constrain the way in which identities are achieved and performed in social life. There is arguably a heteronormative alignment in this sequence that does important homosocial identity work: i.e. the expression of heterosexual desire is an important aspect of gender socialisation. It is, however, worth noting that, with the exception of M, all the participants, including the interviewer (I) laugh whilst concurring with M’s evaluation of the women. The laughter may signal some kind of distance from the content of M’s turn, possibly linked to the situational context of the interview (e.g. knowledge that the arguably sexist talk will be evaluated by a researcher specialising in language and gender). This reading is supported by M’s subsequent turn (3) where he reiterates his opinion (yeah.. they are), and prefaces it with ‘no’ which arguably orients to what he perceives to be mild disapproval or disagreement from other members to his rather simplistic

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and unproblematically ‘laddish’ categorisation of the women as ‘hot’. He then goes on to elaborate and clarify his initial assessment. In this way, M is doing a form of accounting which demonstrates that what supports his view of the women as ‘hot’ is a more considered and thoughtful opinion that this is ‘not always a stereotypical girl’. Having offered this qualification (i.e. having accounted for his opinion) he then goes on to reiterate legitimately the initial assessment ‘they’re all five REALLY really hot women’. This extract illustrates the collaborative enactment of heterosexual male desire – a cornerstone of dominant masculinity and one of the key rationales underpinning ‘New Lad’ magazines (see also Benwell 2002). The inextricable relationship between gender and sexuality (as discussed by Cameron and Kulick) is present in this extract, so that although masculinity (or any other male category, such as ‘lad’ or ‘bloke’) is not explicitly mentioned as an identity, we can infer that the expression of heterosexual desire combined with the objectification of women is a behavioural attribute of the category ‘traditional’ or ‘laddish’ masculinity. Another example ascribes ‘identity’ through the use of categorisation devices. Here one of the participants is responding to an advert for Ford Fiesta cars in one of the magazines: Extract 2

what lad is going to go out and go “yeah, Ford Fiesta for me please”?.

The disjunction between ‘lad’ and ‘Ford Fiestas’ in this example is a piece of cultural knowledge clearly oriented to and reaffirmed by this speaker and might be assumed to form part of his cultural beliefs and assumptions. It signals clearly to the listeners (by the use of the rhetorical question) that Ford Fiestas are incompatible with, or mutually exclusive of, the category of ‘lad’. Although the speaker does not explicitly align with the subject position of ‘lad’ here, he ‘does’ identity work by reaffirming to the group what is meant by ‘lad’ and by extension ‘masculinity’ within this particular cultural context and in this particular time and place. In both of these examples, ‘masculinity’ (and, more specifically, ‘new lad’ masculinity) is being consciously, explicitly and unambiguously indexed – either as a shared cultural category, or as a subject position to which the participants align. These examples could therefore be seen as an example of what Cameron and Kulick term ‘identity’. In other examples we can see more ambiguous forms of identity work, which might be framed in terms of the process of identification outlined by Cameron and Kulick (2003):


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identifications are structured just as much by rejections, refusals and disavowals as they are structured by affirmations. In addition, identifications are not imagined to constitute a coherent relational system. In other words, the processes that constitute an individual as a certain kind of subject are not harmonious. Rather they are conflicting and contradictory, undermining conscious attempts to produce and maintain subjective coherence and consistency (p. 139).

Here two readers are responding to the interviewer’s questions about why a feature on grooming for men is framed by humour in the magazine: Extract 3 1 D: I think humour is a good way of getting around 2 touchy subjects, like y’know … if you asked a 3 normal kind of lad who’d be like ‘oh I’m not 4 going to go and have a facial’ or something 5 I: having read it, would any of you be interested in 6 those kinds of product? 7 M: great! If I had the money I’d have a go at it.

This exchange reveals what the assumptions, values and anxieties of a ‘normal lad’ are. It also implies that the two speakers do not identify with this heteronormative construction, and with the mention of ‘normal’, an opposite construction (‘abnormal’, ‘alternative’, ‘subversive’, ‘feminine’ or ‘gay’) is invoked. This disavowal is done in a number ways: firstly speaker D employs third-person, distancing strategies (‘a normal kind of lad’), where the prosodic emphasis on ‘normal’ and the hedge, ‘kind of ’ create a generic identity (similar to that observed in the earlier extract: ‘that sort of single woman like’) but which is not explicitly aligned to by the speaker. The generic identity is also attributed a certain predictability by his stereotypical response: ‘who’d be like “oh I’m not going to go and have a facial” or something’, where the general extender (Cheshire 2007) ‘or something’ indexes something formulaic. Similarly, the use of the colloquial quotative ‘like’ has a curious dual function here of introducing (imagined) reported speech whilst simultaneously indexing something stereotypical, a phenomenon also observed by Buchstaller, Rickford, Traugott, Wasow and Zwicky (2010) in their longitudinal analysis of the use of the quotative ‘all’. The speaker deliberately distances himself from this kind of generic or predictable masculine response and construct. Secondly he provides an explicit, positive, non-ironic alignment to the grooming feature, ‘Great! If I had the money I’d have a go at it’. At the same time, speaker D acknowledges that it may be desirable for commodity culture to accommodate the needs of anxious masculinity (‘I think humour is a good way of getting around touchy subjects’).

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Most of this is at odds with the normative masculinity built up around earlier discussions with the same speakers about one member’s foray into a traditionally ‘feminine’ preserve: Extract 4 1 J: I remember doing a Nivea thing that I bought Nivea 2 after reading it years ago like y’know how they have 3 like articles 4 I: an article rather than an advert 5 J: yeah it was like a sponsored article6 M: (laughing) Lucky this is anonymous! (laughter from all)

J describes his consumption of a ‘grooming’ or ‘beauty’ product in ways which suggest he is already aware of its problematic status in gender terms. ‘A Nivea thing’ is a strategically vague formulation that implies it was an experience not significant or memorable enough to be characterised in precise terms. The vagueness is supported by the information that this experience occurred ‘years ago’, which implicitly invokes a different, younger self, one who is distanced from the current J in terms of experience and possibly, by extension, disposition. Unsurprisingly then, given the cues in his own talk, J’s story prompts teasing laughter from the rest of the group, as well as an orientation to the fact that their discussion is being recorded (‘lucky this is anonymous’). This laughter, and reference to the desirable state of anonymity, tells us that J has breached some sort of normative code, and is now occupying what Wetherell (1998) calls a ‘troubled’ subject position. One reading is that his position is ‘troubled’ because he has bought a ‘feminine’ grooming product. This provides evidence of a tension between versions of masculine identities (arguably ‘new lad’ versus ‘new man’), operating in the cultural sphere of this group. In this instance, a cultural consensus is temporarily worked up that aligns the group’s values with those of the traditional, ‘normal kind of lad’ (later in the interview disavowed in the extract we analysed above) who rejects the feminine connotations of grooming products and acknowledges the humiliation of their associations. Across a single period of talk (an interview lasting two hours), participants reveal a range of contradictory dispositions, of alignments to contrasting and even oppositional gendered subject positions, and disavowals of particular identities and behaviours. This finding is also consistent with evidence of ambiguous constructions of masculinity within men’s magazines themselves. I have argued elsewhere (Benwell 2003) that the identity of ‘new lad’ occupies an ironic space somewhere between traditional, hegemonic realisations of masculinity and a humorous, anti-heroic, self


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deprecating masculinity. The continuous oscillation between multiple identities is arguably a condition of modern masculinity, ensuring that no clear and unambiguous gender ideology can be permanently affixed to it, thus enabling it to achieve a kind of ideological inscrutability. What is also clear from this analysis is that the invocation of these particular acts of either ‘identity’ or ‘identification’ is usually clearly tied to the local and situated conditions of the talk: participants’ identities emerge accountably in response to either the cultural frame constructed by the academic interviewer’s presence or questions (e.g. the laughter that accompanies the expression of male heterosexual desire), or in response to the collective values and assumptions of the rest of the group (the fact that J’s alignment with an arguably ‘feminine’ behaviour is censured). The microdiscursive contexts which frame, limit and determine what can and cannot be said at particular moments in time are also suggestive of the conditions and constraints of discourse alluded to in those aspects of Cameron and Kulick’s work which draw explicitly on Butler’s theories of performativity: ‘how key aspects of the social, cultural and political order (its heteronormativity, for instance) come to be internalized and reproduced (or not) in individuals…’ (Cameron and Kulick 2005: 122). What this analysis arguably demonstrates is that methods of microdiscursive discourse analysis which analyse the explicit indexing of references, or interpret alignments to masculine categories or masculine discourses in the talk itself, are capable of analysing both identity and identification equally. Such an approach aims to furnish the analyst with the kind of fine-grained, systematic tools of analysis by which to chart either explicit and conscious affiliations to familiar gendered identities, or the ambiguities, inconsistencies, disavowals and affiliations ‘that may both structure and disrupt a person’s claim to a particular identity’ (Cameron and Kulick 2005: 114). Furthermore, such ethnomethodological discourse analytical methods carry out their enquiry without getting bogged down by undemonstrable appeals to ontology or ‘reality’: EM does not take up a particular ontological position with regards to the nature of ‘reality’. Instead it ‘respecifies’ (Button, 1991: 6) issues of what is real and authentic, including what is ‘true’ about identity, as matters for ‘members’ themselves to deal with (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 51).

Ethnomethodological approaches look at how people ‘do’ or ‘deal with’ identity in everyday interaction – whether this is as a conscious ‘claimstaking’, a positive investment, or an ambiguous, contradictory, inconsistent series of alignments, distancing strategies or disavowals. And ethnomethodology is committed to analysing what is available on the rich surface of discourse:

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There is no realm of subjectivity, unconscious feelings, or objective reality, that language does not reach – indeed, the writings of those who are primarily concerned with such ostensibly language-independent and almost ineffable matters, is reflexive testimony to the adequacy of language for dealing with them (Edwards 2006: 42).

In this way, ethnomethodological approaches cannot or do not deal with Cameron and Kulick’s exhortation to look below the surface of language at ‘repressed’ or absent states, desires or ideologies. And it is hard to conceive of an approach that reliably did. Even if we were to focus on the implication of the ‘other’ which is invoked by phrases like ‘a normal kind of lad’, we cannot reliably claim that this spectral identity inflects or is ‘assimilated’ into the speaker’s identity, thus ‘transforming’ it. Cameron and Kulick (2003: 118–119, 125) reference Discursive Psychology and in particular the work of Michael Billig (e.g. Billig 1999) as an example of an approach which looks at psychological states (such as repression) as an interactional accomplishment (for instance, taboo language is indirectly signalled through commands to a child about how to speak politely). Yet this example has more precision than the ‘unspoken’ or ‘repressed’ homosexual desire of Cameron’s (1997) frat boys, which has to be subjectively and unreliably inferred by the analyst from their detailed and fascinated descriptions of the classmate’s appearance (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 122). Unless the rich surface of discourse can reveal these orientations to be part of the participants’ own sense-making, then we can do no more than speculate about these possible ‘unconscious’ meanings. So far we have seen how Cameron and Kulick’s distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ can be fruitfully deployed in analyses of talk in which masculinity is both salient and ambivalent. In the examples analysed above, categories and attributes of masculinity, femininity and heteronormativity were explicitly indexed, even if they were aligned to in varying and sometimes contradictory ways. But what of discourses which we might intuitively label ‘masculine’ without such clear analytical ‘warrants’ for their identification as such? An intuitive analysis of the ‘gross-out’ discourse referred to at the start of this paper (and see extract and analysis below), for instance, might easily ascribe it with the label ‘masculine’. Because of its almost exclusive appearance in men’s magazines (rather than other lifestyle magazines including women’s), ‘gross out’ could be argued to have a particular masculine inflection. But apart from this situational factor, what other warrant do we have for ‘gendering’ such discourses? In the final part of this paper I will continue my exploration of a possible interface between discourse or conversation analytical approaches to gender identity, and the distinction made by Cameron and Kulick between conscious acts of identity and a more psychoanalytically inspired process


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of ‘identification’ with or against existing regulatory discourses through which subjectivity emerges. Additionally, I will pay analytical attention to the existence of various intertexts across which discourses and meanings coalesce, circulate, become reified, and are shared, and in which ‘gross out’ becomes a discourse inflected with masculine meaning. ‘Gross out’ – A discourse of masculinity? A regular and (to me) slightly perplexing feature of men’s magazines is the ‘gross-out’ feature. A curiously graphic, visual display of variously scatalogical, unhygienic, gory or insect or rodent-related incidents, ‘gross out’ is presented for the apparent entertainment of readers. It occurs in most of the ‘lad’ magazines (loaded, Front, FHM and Maxim) and in FHM it is explicitly labelled as such (for instance FHM, March 2003: ‘Gross-out Special’). A detailed internet search for items involving ‘gross out’ (calling up over 10 million hits on Google search engine) reveals that one of its most common contexts is the established genre of the anarchic ‘gross-out movie’ or comedy, such as There’s Something About Mary, Porkys, Animal House, American Pie, Jackass: the Movie, Borat, and the TV cartoon, South Park, featuring sight gags usually involving bodily fluids (‘bodily fluids’ is a highly common collocate for ‘gross out’). The other most common context is commercial sites aimed at children (‘gross-out fun’) such as Halloween confectionary and practical joke props. There are even commercial websites dedicated to gross-out games, TV, jokes and facts. The target audience of these various commercial genres are almost exclusively children or teenagers (grossout.net (now defunct) suggests its target audience is 7–11 year olds), suggesting that ‘gross out’ has a perceived appeal for a younger market and arguably immature connotations (‘puerile’ was also a common collocate), which chimes with critical and media commentary about the regressive, infantile culture of ‘lad’ magazines (T. Edwards 1997; Whelehan 2000). A slight pattern emerged in this search which linked males to ‘gross-out’ culture (‘teenage boys’, ‘gross-out books for boys’, ‘juvenile male humour’), an observation supported both by the presence of the ‘gross-out’ feature in men’s magazines as well as critical research (e.g. Gardiner 2000). The rationale of these features in men’s magazines and their probable reception has been speculated about variously by critical commentators. Rutherford (2000) suggests it is a response to masculinity-in-crisis and represents a desire to return to the corporeal. I have speculated (Benwell 2003) that the array of ‘frostbitten limbs, gangrenous wounds, sceptic bites, diseased flesh, death, degeneration and assorted deformities’ may actually represent a ritualistic rejection of fragile embodiment, because ‘it does

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not directly implicate, and therefore threaten the reader, and because it is presented as a voyeuristic fascination for the reviled “other”’ (Benwell 2003: 15). Gill suggests that a ‘preoccupation with gore’ may be linked to the masculine imperative to disavow femininity by a focus on violence (Gill 2003: 46). The ability to ‘deal’ with such images, in this reading, might therefore be a measure of one’s masculine credentials. All of these accounts are informed by feminist psychoanalytical theory and rely to some degree upon an appeal to the unconscious workings of the psyche, but (as discussed in relation to Cameron and Kulick’s thesis of ‘identification’ above) remain theoretical rather than analytically verifiable as participants’ concerns. These speculative interpretations of the meaning of gross out can, however, be supplemented by naturally occurring data in which ‘gross-out’ preoccupations are invoked as a resource to perform social actions and assert particular social relations. This then provides further explication of how the phenomenon of ‘gross out’ functions in lived culture, and how the symbolic and cultural meanings that are attached to it are revealed by its invocation, which must be read in analytical conjunction with our existing observations. In Men Talk (2003), Jennifer Coates includes a ‘gross-out’ extract entitled, ‘Chinese Maggots’ where a male speaker relates an anecdote about maggots to two female friends, ostensibly to elicit disgust. The female responses are in italics. I have a maggot anecdote right? what the Chinese do with maggots right? and it’s a huge delicacy in China [yeah] well what they do right? they get some dead animal and they leave it out in the sun for just an hour or so [yeah] and they put it in a breathable but perfectly sealed capsule and they bury it [...] and what happens is the flies in that hour land on this dead animal [mhm] and obviously maggots get bred. [...] and after a while they start eating each other [eugghh!] and then they eat each other and eat each other and eat each other until there’s just two left two maggots and then it comes down to a battle and in the end there’s just one big big maggot left that is disgusting and that is a Chinese delicacy THAT IS REALLY RANK that is so revolting I can’t believe that


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it’s lovely it’s all about dog eat dog and all that (Coates 2003: 142)

Coates suggests that this sequence is artfully set up by the male speaker in order to display his ‘rational masculinity’ and provoke their ‘emotional femininity’ and that the story is ‘designed to maintain gender boundaries’ (Coates 2003: 143). Coates’s interpretation lends support to a plausible interpretation about the relationship between ‘gross out’ and gender performativity, which was expressed by the critics cited above. We are able to arrive at similar conclusions precisely because popular discourses about masculinity are a shared, rather than individualised resource: ‘language shapes meanings but also permits intersubjectivity’ (Miller and Glassner 1997: 103). Whilst Coates’s analysis in isolation could be said to arrive at its gender conclusions with insufficient supportive evidence, in combination with similar readings of naturally occurring data, we start to build up a more persuasive warrant for reading deployments of ‘gross out’ as a masculine performance. The ‘meaning’ of the phenomenon of ‘gross out’ cannot be understood simply by examining isolated textual realisations or speculating about its probable psychoanalytical symbolism or gender inflection. However, if we are able to trace discursive connections across a range of sites within which this ‘repertoire’ has been articulated we come closer to gaining support for an intuition about how a particular discourse comes to be ‘gendered’. In the spirit of complementing these broadly derived interpretations with qualitative data, we can compare these patterns to data derived from the ‘reception’ context of men’s magazines via conversation analysis of interview data. In this way, we incorporate into our analysis the way in which readers themselves frame their own responses to such images. In a series of unstructured interviews, two groups of male readers were asked about their responses and interpretations of the ‘gross-out feature’ in men’s magazines and looked at a particular example involving images of violent deaths in Ice magazine. What is interesting about all three sequences is how alignments to the values of ‘gross out’ shift rapidly within and between turns, reminding us of the shifting footings in relation to categories and attributes of masculinity we observed in the interactional data analysed above, and their possible relevance to Cameron and Kulick’s account of identity and identification. Extract 5 17 year olds 1 I: what do you think of this kind of article (.) this 2 um (.)‘Death by any other name’ 3 A: extreme whoever thought of this

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4 M: it is actually it’s more like [**] 5 M: (2.0) mm 6 I: I mean how do you feel about these [in the magazines 7 M: [y’see I c’n I c’n 8 look at it but I’m thinking that (.) it might just be 9 a little too extreme (0.5) for a magazine 10 I: Mm 11 M: I don’t (.) look at it anyway 12 I: yeah 13 M: (1.0) but it seems a little bit (.) too (2.0) I 14 dunno it seems like too like sort of extreme 15 I: why do you think they have these in these 16 magazines I mean why do you think their readers (.) 17 they think their readers might be interested 18 A: it’s just interest just looking at stuff like 19 this isn’t it(0.5) accidents and stuff like that.. 20 it is just interest Extract 6 21 year olds 1 I: I mean does does that appeal to any of you? [mm] (1) 2 do you tend to look at any of these articles? 3 C: I used to find them quite funny some of them y’know 4 how you’d see a shark bite with the guy’s (.) half a 5 leg is hanging off that’s kind of 6 (laughter) 7 two or three years ago (.) yeah (.) but not now 8 M: we used to read the ‘true stories’ y’know at High 9 School y’know the true stories on the back of them 10 ‘cos they were always quite amusing 11 I: what do you think is the appeal of them because 12 they’re quite popular in these magazines 13 (2.0) 14 G: I think it’s the whole ‘Jackass’ syndrome as well 15 though (.) 16 M: yeah 17 G: a little bit 18 M: people like to see stupid things happening to 19 them 20 I: yeah indeed 21 G: it’s laughing at other people’s misfortunes (Later, after being introduced to the specific article, ‘Death by any other name’) 22 M: are these real dead people? 23 I: yeah these are real dead people 24 C: Go:d 25 I: now wha[t.. 26 M: [eurrggh! (2.0) is that somebody’s head! 27 I: yep


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28 M: dear oh dear (3.0) 29 J: y’see I wouldn’t buy that (1.0) there’s a 30 curiosity thing(0.5)you have to look at it they’re 31 always trying to go like one step further y’know 32 like diseases then they show people with their 33 heads cut off and stuff(.) I don’t know how they’re 34 going to be able to kind of top that if you know what 35 I mean= 36 M: =well you can kind of justify that in a men’s 37 magazine

The responses to the feature by the 17 year olds in extract 5 are censorious (‘extreme’). The use of the token ‘extreme’ indicates that there is a tacitly agreed ‘reasonable’ threshhold of violence or gore which this feature has breached, and the repeated mention of ‘extreme’ by both speakers is suggestive that they are adopting a gatekeeping role legitimised by their status as knowledgeable and otherwise affiliated members of the community of ‘men’s magazine readers’. In this way, the speakers do not reject ‘gross out’ as a discourse outright, but reject the excessive form it adopts. In line 4, M signals a disagreement or even ‘other-initiated repair’ (Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson 1977: 378) through the use of ‘actually it’s more like’, though the end of the turn is unclear and not taken up by any other speaker. The next turn by the interviewer is a reformulation (‘I mean’) of his first turn which is oriented to the feelings of the readers (rather than what they simply ‘think’ of the type of feature). This appeal to feelings prompts a more positive alignment to the values of gross out whereby speaker M states ‘I c’n ..look at it’. In this statement, M is embedding shared, hegemonic knowledge that such features are difficult and require courage to look at, whilst simultaneously claiming that courage for himself – a kind of performative ‘claim-staking’ (to use Cameron and Kulick’s term) function. Our knowledge that such insouciant acts of ‘courage’ are culturally associated with masculinity is a discourse imported into the analysis from other sites of discourse, but might be situated, theoretically, as an example of the kinds of regulatory discourses discussed by Cameron and Kulick in their explication of ‘identification’. The use of the modal ‘can’ also suggests something potential rather than actual, a potentiality that is further supported by his immediate next utterance (‘I don’t look at it anyway’) which counters the suggestion of a positive orientation to the feature, and makes explicit his lack of membership of the imagined group of ‘affiliated reader of gross-out features’. The repeated observation that the feature is ‘too extreme’ is hedged and mitigated in lines 13–14, suggesting a slight retreat from the censoriousness of the initial, more categorical assessment. Possibly mindful of these mitigating features and the potential they have to index discomfort about articulating their own ‘feelings’ on the matter, the interviewer then

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produces a further reformulation of his question (line 15) in which the informants are invited to comment upon likely reader responses, rather than their own reception (‘I mean why do you think their readers .. they think their readers might be interested’, my emphasis), involving further distancing by the self repair (they think’, my emphasis) which places the focus, not on readers, but on editorial intention. The rather unelaborated explicit explanation for the appeal of such features by the 17 year olds in extract 5 (i.e. ‘interest’) effects a distance between the readers’ own dispositions and a more ‘generic’ account. But it is also heavily, and arguably defensively, downgraded by the repetition of the minimising ‘just’ (‘it’s just interest just looking at stuff like this’ (18)) implying that, whilst there may be more significant or troubling kinds of interest available (e.g. morbid, fascinated), this kind of interest is really quite benign. This final account of the function of gross out is arguably cued by the design of the interviewer’s question which invites, not personal accounts or experiences, but general motives of general readers. At this point, however, the readers retreat from the more censorious and critical assessment of the features, possibly to avoid the suggestion that they are judging a community of readers to which they belong. The 21 year olds in extract 6 are also constrained by the design of the interviewer’s question (‘does that appeal to any of you?’) to articulate their own experiences or reception of gross-out features. Rather than presenting ambivalent, even contradictory responses as the 17 year olds did, these readers effect a strategic distance by expressing a ‘past-time perspective’ in which they are able to discuss their involvement with ‘gross out’ as a nostalgic, shared construction of their younger selves (‘I used to find them quite funny’ (3), ‘two or three years ago.. not now’ (7), ‘we used to read... y’know at High School’ (8–9)). This distancing strategy allows them to articulate the probable appeal of such features (‘quite funny’ (3), ‘quite amusing’ (10)) whilst preserving the identity of ‘mature, uninvested reader’ to which they may suspect the interviewer is oriented. In lines 11–12, the interviewer reformulates the question, just as he did with the 17 year olds, to elicit a more general, objective opinion of what the ‘appeal’ of such features might be. In response, one of the 21 year olds shifts to a different kind of distancing tactic – this time by presenting a series of ‘generic’ observations or truisms which protect the readers from being seen to adopt a personal alignment to such features. In line 14, G references an intertext, ‘Jackass’ – an American TV show, targeted at and watched predominantly by a male audience, in which male presenters perform dangerous, crude and sometimes self-harming stunts. The explicit referencing of a ‘gross-out’ intertext is a rare moment of textual evidence demonstrating the fact that ‘gross-out’ discourses have a provenance and set of shared meanings (partly


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indexing masculinity) which circulate beyond and inform each articulation in local contexts. The ‘shared knowledge’ embedded in this utterance is further indicated by the formulaic expression ‘the whole Jackass syndrome’ which, by its vagueness and elliptical construction, is an appeal to a shared frame of reference. The accounts of the probable appeal of gross out are characterised, as they were in extract 5, by distancing strategies, generic formulations and truisms (‘people like to see’ (18) , ‘it’s laughing at other people’s misfortunes’ (21)) which avoids the implication of personal engagement. Such generic formulations could also (as discussed in relation to the earlier analysis) be argued to be textual instantiations or explicit indexing of what Cameron and Kulick describe as the prevailing, normative cultural discourse through which subjectivities emerge in processes of ‘identification’. The detachment displayed in the first part of this sequence (extract 6) can be starkly contrasted with the spontaneous appalled and incredulous reactions provoked by the images shown to the same respondents in Ice magazine in the second stage of the sequence (‘Go:d’ (24), ‘eurrggh’ (26), ‘dear oh dear’ (28)). Interestingly, the responses of the 21-year-old readers, in their spontaneous reactions to the ‘extreme’ gross-out feature, echo that of Coates’s ‘feminine’ response to ‘gross out’ discourse. If being able to withstand these images is a badge of masculinity within these men’s magazines, then these informants signally fail to inhabit a traditional gender role at this point, and it can be contrasted with the disclaiming protestation of M in extract 5 (‘I c’n look at it’ (7–8)). The spontaneity of the response was a rare unselfconscious moment of ‘real–time’ reception, largely avoided in the rest of the interview, which provided a useful contrast to the more reflexive and carefully accountable responses in this sequence. At line 29, J upgrades the more emotional utterances of M and C as an explicit moral stance or ‘claim staking’ (y’see I wouldn’t buy that’), but then goes on to counter or temper this account by acknowledging a possible appeal for other readers (‘there’s a curiosity thing’ (29–30)), as well as the commercial motives or impulse on the part of the magazine (‘they’re always trying to go like one step further’ (30–31)) and in doing so partially realigns to the value of ‘gross-out’. M consolidates this realignment further and perhaps with it, his orientation to masculine values, by a now-familiar strategy of defence: that the magazine is not to be taken too seriously (‘well you can kind of justify that in a men’s magazine’ (36–37) (my emphasis)). The discourse marker, ‘well’, functions here to index contrast or disagreement (Pomerantz 1984), suggesting that M is effecting an explicit reorientation of the previously unfolding set of judgements. A psychoanalytical approach such as Cameron and Kulick’s thesis of ‘identification’, which aims to describe the workings of the unconscious

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lurking below the surface of discourse, might be inclined to analyse the distancing strategies described variously above as examples of repressed or displaced desire: a desire to look at the repulsive, the abject, which is conventionally prohibited in ‘civilized’ contexts because of its taboo nature. But another reading could equally argue that these distancing strategies are conscious, rhetorically contrived and prompted by the sequential and situational context: a means of responding to the local and polite constraints of the interview with an academic researcher, by publicly managing one’s identity as restrained and mature (i.e. rejecting the puerile connotations of ‘gross out’). Both respondents and interviewer design their turns in response to the cues in one another’s turns. Thus the readers accommodate to the interviewer’s question about ‘feelings’ by offering accounts of their own actions in relation to such features, which are nonetheless hedged and ambivalent (‘I c’n look at it’; ‘ I don’t look at it’). Similarly, the interviewer tactfully redesigns his question in response to the negative formulations in the seventeen-year-old informants’ replies and their explicit disclaiming of any engagement with such features (‘I don’t (.) look at it anyway’ (11)). In this way a joint construction of a censorious orientation to ‘gross-out’ that positions it as stigmatised, and thus not something that these readers would be assumed to enjoy, is built up through this sequence. This stigmatisation reflects, as discussed above, the critical discourses surrounding such phenomena which characterise it as ‘crass’, ‘puerile’, ‘offensive’, and alert us to the fact that participants are managing, through their talk, a series of often competing ideological discourses. The final ‘retreat’ from a straightforwardly negative assessment in both sets of extracts is also arguably triggered by the design of the interviewer’s question which reframed the question of motive in terms of ‘typical’ readers, upon whom the respondents may feel to sustain their critical focus would comprise a moral judgement. A sequential analysis of the unfolding turns of these short extracts enables us to chart precisely the complex and shifting orientations, alignments and identity work of participants as they account for their responses to ‘gross-out’ features to each other and to an academic researcher, without recourse to speculation about underlying psychological states, repression or unconscious impulses ‘disrupting’ attempts at coherent identity management. Indeed, the value of an ethnomethodological approach is precisely that it can describe equally the variability and inconsistency of identity (frequently determined by the micro contingencies of the immediate context), as it can our efforts to present ourselves as rationally consistent and allied to explicit identities. Whilst ‘gross out’ is not explicitly indexed in this talk as gendered, there are useful insights to be afforded from noting similarities between some of the details of the readers’ talk with existing explanations and critical


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accounts which do posit a more obviously gendered reading. Besides the more implicit orientations to this kind of feature, three main explanations for its appeal are explicitly offered: ‘interest’ (‘gross out’ is compulsively fascinating: ‘a curiosity thing’, ‘you have to look at it’); humour at the expense of others’ misfortunes (which supports the view that gross out in masculine culture is linked to a form of ‘othering’); and finally, a measure of courage (‘I c’n look at it’) supporting existing commentaries that link gross out to masculine performance and imperatives (Gill 2003; Gardiner 2000). Through the combination of evidence from a larger, more impressionistic corpus and the insights afforded by this more fine-grained, participantoriented analysis, we begin to build more warrant for interpreting ‘gross-out’ discourse as a gender-inflected phenomenon. In this paper I have attempted to show how an ethnomethodological approach to interactional data is able to illuminate equally the conscious ‘claim-staking’ of ‘identity’ as well as the contradictory, ambivalent and inconsistent alignments and disavowals of ‘identification’ as it performatively emerges in talk, with or against prevailing cultural discourses. In this way, the empirical emphasis of CA presents a possible solution to those theorists keen to demonstrate how subjectivities are achieved in discourse, but who find this element neglected by Foucauldian accounts. However, I concluded that approaches such as CA are largely incompatible with Cameron and Kulick’s interest in analysing the ‘unspoken’, ‘absent’ or ‘repressed’ dimension of identity, unless ‘what is not said’ can be somehow indexed in talk (e.g. the possible ‘morbid or unhealthy’ interest that might be invoked by the mention of ‘just interest’). There is certainly no scope in an ethnomethodological analysis to speculate, however, about how such spectral presences might inflect or even transform identities in interaction. An ethnomethodological approach to talk in interaction may also help to illuminate the processes by which gender is enacted or performed. I have argued here that ‘gross out’ is a discourse which is invoked in order to define and realise aspects of masculine identity in the context of the reception of men’s magazines. By analysing the fine-grained, sequential detail of talk here, it is possible to chart conscious claim staking (‘identity’) – i.e. an alignment to ‘gross-out’ values, as well as more ambivalent alignments, conflicting assessments and disavowals (‘identification’). CA and other ethnomethodological approaches are able to chart the identity work of shifting selves, which, as we saw above, are partly contingent on the unfolding demands of the talk’s sequential environment. However, the full range of cultural meanings attaching to a piece of data can arguably only be realised by combining these kinds of local insights with more broadranging conclusions about the interpretations, resonances and provenance

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of particular cultural scripts and discourses available in the intertexts circulating around a single interactional moment. Such a synthesis is a promising way of moving towards an intertextual approach to the interpretation of gender and its inscription in society. The analysis presented here represents a first step in this direction. Acknowledgements Thanks to Tommaso Milani, Ann Weatherall and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions greatly enhanced the argument of the paper. About the author Bethan Benwell is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Stirling with a long interest in the relationship between gender and discourse. She has published chapters and articles on discourses and representations of masculinity in popular culture, discursive and ethnomethodological approaches to reading and reception (including a focus on male readers of men’s magazines), and (with Elizabeth Stokoe) on tutorial discourse and student identity. She is the editor of Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines (2003, Blackwell) and co-author (with Stokoe) of Discourse and Identity (2006, EUP), which was shortlisted for the BAAL bookprize in 2007. She was co-investigator (with Kay, Procter and Robinson) on an AHRC-funded project (2007–2010) examining the relationship between readers, location and diaspora literature: http://www. devolvingdiasporas.com/ from which an edited collection, Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception (Routledge 2011), a Special Issue of New Formations (2011), and a monograph, The Odyssean Reader, co-authored with Procter, are forthcoming. References Benwell, B. (2002) Is there anything ‘new’ about these lads? The construction of masculinity in men’s magazines. In L. Sunderland and J. Litosseliti (eds) Discourse Analysis and Gender Identity 149–174. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benwell, B. (2003) Ambiguous masculinities: Heroism and anti-heroism in the men’s lifestyle magazine. In B. Benwell (ed.) Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines 151–168. Oxford: Blackwell. Benwell, B. (2005) ‘Lucky this is anonymous!’ Men’s magazines and ethnographies of reading: A textual culture approach. Discourse and Society 16 (2): 147–172.


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Benwell, B. (2007) New sexism? Readers’ responses to the use of irony in men’s magazines. Journalism Studies 8(4): 539–549. Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E. (2006) Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Billig, M. (1999) Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconcsious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, Mary, and Hall, Kira (2004a) Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33(4): 501–547. Bucholtz, Mary, and Hall, Kira (2004b) Review of Cameron and Kulick’s Language and Sexuality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(4): 92–929. Buchstaller, I., Rickford, J., Traugott, E., Wasow, T. and Zwicky, A. (2010) The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data. Language Variation and Change 22(2): 191–219. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Button, G. (1991) Introduction: Ethnomethodology and the foundational respecification of the human sciences. In G. Button (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences 1–9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (1997) Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell. Cameron, D. (2005) Language, gender and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics 26(4): 482–502. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2005) Identity Crisis? Language and Communication 25: 107–125. Cheshire, J. (2007) Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2): 155–193. Coates, J. (2003) Men Talk: Stories in the Making of Masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell. Edley, N. (2001) Conversation analysis, discursive psychology and the study of ideology: A response to Susan Speer. Feminism & Psychology 11(1): 136–140. Edwards, D. (1997) Discourse and Cognition. London: Sage. Edwards, D. (2006) Discourse, cognition and social practices: the rich surface of language and social interaction. Discourse Studies 8(2): 41–49. Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992) Discursive Psychology. London: Sage. Edwards, T. (1997) Men in the Mirror: Men’s Fashion, Masculinity and Consumer Fashion. London: Cassell. Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2003) Taking a stand: Using psychoanalysis to explore the positioning of subjects in discourse. British Journal of Social Psychology 42: 39–53. Gardiner, J. (2000) Blue Men, anality, and market masculinity. Men and Masculinities 2(3): 251–271.

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Gill, R. (2003) Power and the production of subjects: A genealogy of the New Man and the New Lad. In B. Benwell (ed.) Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines 34–56. Oxford: Blackwell. Gough, B. (2004) Psychoanalysis as a resource for understanding emotional ruptures in the text: The case of defensive masculinities. British Journal of Social Psychology 43(2): 245–267. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2005) Panic and perjury: A psychosocial exploration of agency. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44 (2): 147–164. Kulick, D. (2003) No. Language and Communication 23: 139–151. Miller, J. and Glassner, B. (1997) The ‘Inside’ and the ‘Outside’: Finding realities in interviews. In D. Silverman (ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice 99–112. London: Sage. Pomerantz, A. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessment: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structure of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutherford, J. (2000) Keynote address to ‘Posting the Male’ Conference, Liverpool John Moores. Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G. and Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organisation of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361–82. Schegloff, E. A. (1997) Whose text? Whose context? Discourse & Society 8: 165–87. Speer, S. (2001a) Reconsidering the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Feminism and Psychology 11(1): 107–135. Speer, S. (2001b) Participants’ orientations, ideology and the ontological status of hegemonic masculinity: A rejoinder to Nigel Edley. Feminism & Psychology 11(1): 141–144. Stokoe, E. (2008) ‘Typical guy response’: Categorial reference and the construction of gendered contexts. Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium, Amsterdam. Stokoe, E.H. and Smithson, J. (2002) Gender and sexuality in talk-in-interaction: Considering conversation analytic perspectives. In P. McIlvenny (ed.) Talking Gender and Sexuality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Swann, J. (2002) Yes, but is it Gender? In L. Litosseliti and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis 43–67. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wetherell, M. (1998) Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse & Society 9(3): 387–412. Whelehan, I. (2000) Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: The Women’s Press.


Gender and Language

Article

The interactional construction of desire as gender Scott Kiesling

Abstract Recently there have been spirited debates about the role of desire in the study of language, gender and sexuality – debates largely centred around the publication of Cameron and Kulick’s (2003) volume, Language and Sexuality. In the present paper, I address two important questions arising from this debate: defining evidence of desire in interaction, and the relationship of this ‘interactional desire’ to gender and masculinities more specifically. First, I argue for a definition of desire that goes beyond sexual desire, in a direction indicated by Cameron and Kulick; following Whitehead (2002:205–221), I suggest that another kind of desire that we should think about (in addition to interpersonal desire) is ontological desire – essentially the desire to have or emulate qualities of a particular identity. Second, I use the notion of alignment to discover interactants ‘doing’ desire of different types in interaction. Finally, I argue that these alignments and how they are accomplished are not a separate part of masculine (and other gender) constructions of performances, but are at the centre of such identities. I use three excerpts, selected for their likelihood to have desire as an issue in the speech event, to illustrate these points. keywords: sexuality; desire; alignment; masculinities; discourse

Affiliation University of Pittsburgh, USA email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.211

www.equinoxpub.com

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Introduction Recently there have been spirited debates about the role of desire in the study of language, gender and sexuality – debates largely centred around the publication of Cameron and Kulick’s (2003) volume, Language and Sexuality. In the present paper, I address two important questions arising from this debate: defining evidence of desire in interaction, and the relationship of this ‘interactional desire’ to gender and masculinities more specifically. First, I argue for a definition of desire that goes beyond sexual desire, in a direction indicated by Cameron and Kulick; following Whitehead (2002: 205–221), I suggest that another kind of desire we should think about (in addition to interpersonal desire) is ontological desire – essentially the desire to have or emulate qualities of a particular identity. Second, I use the notion of alignment to discover interactants ‘doing’ desire of different types in interaction. Finally, I argue that these alignments and how they are accomplished are not a separate part of masculine (and other gender) constructions of performances, but are at the centre of such identities. I use three excerpts, selected for their likelihood to have desire as an issue in the speech event, to illustrate these points. I begin with a discussion of desire, and then consider some ways that alignment has been used and defined in the discourse analytic literature in order to arrive at some concrete strategies for finding alignment or non-alignment in talk. I then move through each of three excerpts to show how alignments negotiated by the interactants can be considered a kind of desire. Desire Cameron and Kulick (2003) opened up the study of language and sexuality with their arguments that we should study the desire in sexuality as well as in sexual identity. They argue that sexuality is at heart about desire – a homosexual man is homosexual because he desires other men – while sexual identity is about being recognized as part of a culturally relevant category of sexuality, such as ‘gay’. The desire they discuss, however, need not be conceived of as the ‘inner’ or ‘hidden’ desire of psychoanalysis, but rather should be thought of as – in some instances at least – performative. That is, certain social practices and speech forms can be recognized as creating desire: ‘there is a “social semiotic” of desire: a set of meaningful resources that both constrain and enable the choices individuals make when they communicate desire’ (2003: 114). With several examples, they show how we can use desire as an axis of analysis in language and sexuality research. However, they also argue that ‘desire is not always and necessarily

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sexual’ (2003: 113). We need to consider, then, what other sorts of desire we might find. Following this line of argument, in this paper I attempt to use desire as a central construct in the way I understand masculinities and language (and identity more generally). First, consider the desire to be a particular person, or ontological desire. As with much understanding of human social behavior, men’s behaviour is often understood as behaviours that men are constrained to do – that, for example, men are constrained to not act like women through the social censure they receive if they do. However, I am of the view that it is not so much that a majority of men feel constrained not to act like women, but that they want to act like men and not women. Their desires have been shaped so that the choices they attempt to make in their practices are in line with the cultural discourses of masculinity. The diversity of masculinities arises because many men simply don’t desire them, or don’t have the genetic fortune (for example, in terms of body type or demeanour) or economic luck to have the resources to easily act in concord with such discourses. Although I am here discussing desire that is somewhat different from that of sexual desire, in a general way it is the same – a person’s want of something for themselves that they don’t have, or are trying to keep it if they do. (Although sexual desire can also be seen as desire for an identity, and so the two are again linked.) Stephen Whitehead (2002) discusses desire extensively in the context of his discussion of masculine ontology. Masculine ontology for Whitehead is ‘the pursuit of being and becoming masculine by the masculine subject’, (2002: 210) where the masculine subject can be translated for our purposes as ‘speaker’. In this pursuit of being and becoming masculine, the masculine subject searches for an authentic self (sometimes referred to as ‘ontological security’, following Giddens 1991). But since the self is contingent and unstable, the masculine subject must achieve masculine ontology only through a ‘constant engagement in those discursive practices of signification that suggest masculinity’ (2002: 210). In other words, the psychological sense of identity is gained (and continually reaffirmed) through performing acts recognized in cultural discourses as being associated with the masculine self. The desire discussed by Whitehead is then the desire to have a self, and especially the desire to construct this self relationally and in full view of other subjects, who will validate the self and contribute to its ontological security. This conception of self and identity assumes that the psychological is at root a social phenomenon: the sense of identity is not simply something passively believed by the subject but must be enacted by the subject (see work in discursive psychology, e.g., Edwards and Potter 1992).

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We can thus view subjects’ desires by viewing their social practices. In understanding language and gender identity, then, it is essential to understand how acts are recognized as feminine or masculine; here I address masculinity. There is thus a common thread to desire and gender: the recognition of it through a ‘social semiotic’ or performative acts that index desire and gender. The general strategy for analysts is then to uncover the processes in which interactants use linguistic forms and actions to perform and recognize desire and gender. More accurately, analysts need to understand the process in which interactants work collaboratively at understanding the social relationships created in interaction, including interpersonal desire, ontological desire, and gender. We thus need something that, in the case of masculinity, can be recognized as masculine and seen as being desired. I take up that issue in the next section. Masculinities One of the most important developments in the study of masculinities in the nineties was the introduction of the idea of hegemonic masculinity by Connell (Carrigan et al. 1985; Connell 1987; 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). There was much that was (and still is) innovative about Connell’s work, but there were three elements that were most important: 1. masculinities are multiple; 2. there is an ordering among them; 3. hegemonic masculinity often represents an unattained (or even unattainable) ideal. Men who do not attain this ideal nevertheless understand that it is the most valorized form, and resist or continue to strive for it. The second and third elements add the hegemonic aspect, such that men create social contexts and climates that naturalize their dominance as normal, including in some cases naturalizing their physical dominance. Connell has recently revised this concept somewhat (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), but these core ideas remain in place. The definition of hegemonic masculinity remains relatively unchanged: ‘Hegemonic masculinity was understood as the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832). What particular practices comprise hegemonic masculinity are thus heavily context-dependent, both in terms of interactional and cultural contexts. In order to make this concept more useful for interactional analyses, we need to be more explicit about what hegemonic masculinity


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consists in for the men in a particular interaction; if hegemonic masculinity represents form(s) of masculinity most valorized, we should be able to articulate them, even if only in general terms. For the components of this hegemonic form I use the term ‘cultural discourses of masculinity’ or ‘cultural discourses of hegemonic masculinity’. I will use cultural discourses for short. The term ‘discourse’ is meant in the Foucauldian sense and is elaborated in Kiesling (2005; 2006). We should therefore define masculinity as social performances semiotically linking the performing subject to men, and not to women, through cultural discourses. By ‘social performances’, I mean anything that is recognized by social others (real or imagined). By ‘semiotically linking the performing subject to men’, I mean that there is some way that a community understands the performance to be related to men (this making masculinity performative in the sense of needing to be recognized as such). Most often, this linking will be indexical and presupposing (see Silverstein 1976); however, indexical links can be quite complex, as pointed out by Ochs (1992) and diffuse and multiple, as pointed out by Eckert (2008). Notice that in this definition masculinity can be performed by women, as long as they are understood as doing something linked to men (see Halberstam 1998). Finally, in actual use I assume that this linking occurs in a specific way – through cultural models and discourses. Cultural models (cf. Holland and Quinn 1987) are more specific, usually narrative-like, models of ideal cultural practices and types of people. The following, then, are the general cultural discourses of hegemonic masculinity I claim for the fraternity men (and for these men only, although they are likely to hold for the majority of men in the US; even those who resist these discourses are resisting, not ignoring, these discourses and thus acknowledging their pervasiveness): 1. Gender difference is a discourse that sees men and women as naturally and categorically different in biology and behaviour. This discourse is present in most cultures around the world; see Connell (1987 and 2002) or Cameron (2008) among many others for a discussion. 2. Heterosexism is the definition of masculinity as heterosexual; to be masculine in this discourse is to sexually desire women and not men. For a particularly strong articulation of the role of this discourse in masculinity, see Kimmel (2001), and for studies that show how it is constructed in talk see Cameron (1997), Kiesling (2005) and Korobov (2006). 3. Dominance is the identification of masculinity with dominance, authority or power; to be a man is to be strong, authoritative and

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in control, especially when compared to women, and also when compared to other men. That men are oriented to dominance, whether or not they achieve it, is probably one of the oldest claims in gender research. However, dominance comes in many forms. See Connell (1987), Bourdieu (2001) and Whitehead (2002), among many others for discussions of how this discourse manifests in different societies. For an articulation of the value of performing dominance in language, see Kiesling (2005) and Tannen (1990). 4. Male solidarity is a discourse, not often discussed in masculinities literature, that takes as given a bond among men. Men are understood to normatively want (and need) to do things with groups of other men exclusive of women. The best-known discussion of homosociality is probably Sedgwick’s (1985) Between Men, in which she argues that men’s heterosexual rivalries produce a homosociality among men that marginalizes women. For more discussion see Cameron (1997) and Kiesling (2005: 702–703). Some of these discourses can easily clash, such as heterosexism and male solidarity. I argue that they are all always potentially in play, and it is the desire of men to follow these cultural discourses and the specific cultural models of hegemonic masculinity that drive them to interact in the ways that they do. I emphasize that these discourses are the hegemonic ones; one other attraction of the term hegemonic masculinity is that it implies that there are non-hegemonic masculinities, so that there are also competing, non-hegemonic, even resistant, cultural discourses. I argued above that one goal of interaction can be considered the construction of a desirable identity, and of having that identity recognized, thus creating desire in the interlocutors. In Kiesling (2005), I investigate some of the discursive strategies men use to create homosocial desire, especially the creation of desire to join the fraternity and the desire for the fraternity to want someone as a member. I rely on the cultural discourses to explain these strategies, as the men performed dominant, heterosexual identities and modelled male solidarity as well. I have so far discussed how desire can be thought of as having both an ontological aspect and an interactional aspect. I have further argued that desire is done in interaction in a way that is related to gender identity, and I specifically argued for the ways in which masculine identities are organized in order to be semiotically referred to, or indexed, in interaction. Before I proceed to discover how desires and masculinities are related in particular interactions, in the next section I develop some strategies for finding desire in interaction more generally.


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Desire in talk Finding evidence of desire in interaction, unless somehow explicitly stated, is a topic that researchers have not addressed (although Cameron and Kulick 2003 give some examples that point to methods for doing so). The reason for this lack of focus is probably because in most traditions of discourse analysis the leap from the text representation of talk (i.e. the transcript) to desire requires more interpretation than can be easily argued from the transcript. In this section, therefore, I suggest some ways we might ‘find desire’ in talk. Let us return first to thinking about what we mean by desire generally: the wish to ‘have’ something one doesn’t have. ‘Have’ in this sense must be considered in a very wide sense of not just owning but also experiencing, or creating a relationship or bond with another person. This is a more general sense of desire than seen in psychoanalytic treatments, mainly because it is not solely focused on sex – anything can be desired, as long as it is perceived by the desirer to be lacking). However, it is similar to the approach taken by Deleuze and Guattari (1996; see also Deleuze and Parnet 1987), as explained by Cameron and Kulick (2002: 110–111), who explicitly argue that desire is more than sexual desire: ‘Sleeping is a desire. Walking is a desire. Listening to music, or making music, or writing, are desires. A spring, a winter, are desires. Old age is also a desire. Even death’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 95, as cited by Cameron and Kulick 2003: 110). These are important observations, but they don’t really help an analyst with finding desire because it is everywhere, and thus useless. In interaction, in fact, interactants must desire to interact and maintain that interaction in the first place. So while understanding that desire can be thought of in this way, in terms of seeing it in interaction an analyst will need something more specific. For now, I will note the importance of engaging in an interaction and working with other interactants to maintain some sort of shared definition of what is going on, or their frame (Goffman 1974; Tannen 1979). In order to discuss how identity is related to desire, we also need to think about what is meant by identity in interaction. If we consider that identities are not something that we have, but something that must be continually created, then desire is a continuous motivator for constructing an identity we wish to ‘have’ or (momentarily) accomplish. Of course, this desire ties into the desire of others if we wish to ‘have’ a relationship with someone via interaction, then we will perform identities we think that they will desire (which suggests a view similar to Grice’s 1975 Cooperative Principle). The final step in this logic is then to recognize that an actual performance of identity is relational to the person or people one is interacting with: how do we imagine them responding to the performance? How do we

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negotiate the interaction, among the many possible choices of we have for our utterances? The performativity of identity is important in this line of reasoning as well. Performativity as it is discussed by Butler (1993) relies not on a ‘performance’ to others but on the fact that actions are recognizable and interpretable by an audience in particular ways. Speakers rely on this performativity – a kind of conventionalization – for creating identity, in that they count on their actions to be recognizable to their interlocutors. Desire in interaction is going to therefore rely to some extent on the conventionalization of various forms and actions as indicating desire, especially for an identity. This interpretation of desire will happen whether it is ‘intended’ or not, as Goffman (1959) famously noted regarding information ‘given off ’ as opposed to information given. In the discourse analytic literature, one can easily find descriptions of interactions similar to the processes of desire just outlined. One of the most striking similarities is in analyses of alignment and involvement in conversation. Accordingly, below I explore this co-creation of desire in interaction, by expanding on the proposition that when desire happens, participants reach a kind of involvement or alignment with each other that resonates with the cultural discourses. This view is in line with work in interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982; Tannen 1989) that argues for involvement as an important (shared) goal of conversation. As discussed by Tannen (1989) there are two ways that this tradition understands involvement. First is the sense she attributes to Gumperz: ‘an observable state of being in coordinated interaction, as distinguished from mere copresence’ (1989: 11). Second is ‘an internal state which shows itself in observable linguistic phenomena’ (1989: 11). It is the former sense of involvement that I will refer to as alignment, and the latter I will continue to refer to as involvement. Involvement thus describes a kind of result or state in an interaction, while alignment can be seen as one of those ‘observable linguistic phenomena’ that show us that involvement is happening. Alignment is thus a more concrete term than involvement: involvement is a general goal of conversation, and alignments are one way it is accomplished in interaction and hence available for analysis. Alignment is thus achieved when interactants are cooperative in the project of creating an interaction, and must be continually maintained in an interaction. This definition is not the same as saying they agree about denotational content, but only that they are on some level engaged in moving the conversation forward. Agreement on some proposition could be one kind of alignment, but there are others, such as activity alignment in which two interactants ‘work together’ to argue. There are thus multiple ways of seeing or showing alignment in transcripts of talk. Charles Goodwin has produced a number of analyses of ‘mutual engagement’ or


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alignment, focusing both on the talk of participants as well as physical aspects of interaction, especially gaze (see, for example, Goodwin 1981). While my data are not of the kind that can address gaze (there is no video), Goodwin’s work is relevant and important nevertheless because he shows how gaze is important for alignment (or disalignment) in interaction. This informs us about how speakers accomplish alignment more generally in interaction. Tannen (1984; 1989) provides some more resources for finding alignment through her discussions of involvement, such as repetition of others’ utterances, matching pacing with another interactant, and contributing to story rounds. A good example of alignment at work is Stivers’s (2008) analysis of alignment in storytelling, which makes a distinction between alignment and affiliation. Alignment for Stivers is as I have outlined it above – being ‘cooperative’ in the activity that is ongoing. Affiliation is when ‘the hearer displays support of and endorses the teller’s conveyed stance’ toward ‘the event(s) being described as, for example, funny, sad, horrible, or exciting’ (2008: 35–36). In Stivers’s data, this means that the person being addressed by the storyteller provides verbal and physical tokens that align with the activity of storytelling, such as providing tokens to continue, but may or may not affiliate with what is being said. Stivers presents assessments as canonical ways in which listeners affiliate to narratives (showing sympathy, agreement, and so on; C. Goodwin and M. H. Goodwin 1987; 1992; M. H. Goodwin 2006: 190–209). A speaker can therefore be aligned and involved, but not be affiliative. An example of such a disjunct is Schiffrin’s (1984) analysis of ‘Jewish argument as sociability’, in which she shows that for the Jewish speakers in her data, argument (disaffiliation) does not lead to dislike because it is the alignment of speakers as willing to engage in that argument with each other that creates involvement and thus ‘sociability’. Certainly affiliation may be one way of creating desire, but as shown by Schiffrin (and Tannen 1984), alignment is often more important, and I will thus focus my analysis on alignment. It is important to realize that while we are discussing interactants’ alignment, involvement and affiliation, we must be careful not to reify them and the interaction. That is, we need to keep in mind that interactions have a ‘logic’ and flow of their own, apart from the interactants. What emerges from a conversation is not the result of conscious planning on the part of either interactant, but process all its own, apart from the psychological motivations and intentions of the interactants. This view is central to conversation analysis (see e.g. Hutchby and Woofitt 1998), and made by many other observers of interaction (Johnstone 2002). Thus we need to keep in mind in an analysis that we are analysing the traces of a process created in such a manner. But this also allows us to argue that these

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traces come about from a more general orientation of the participants in an interaction toward one another. If we find alignment in the conversation, then there is evidence that the interactants more generally had a desire to be in that conversation, or even a desire ‘for’ the other interactant(s), in the sense that engaging in conversation is a kind of ‘having’. Interpersonal desire in interaction Given this background, I can now proceed to uncover interactants doing both ontological and interactional desire in conversation. The first two excerpts are taken from the same situation, while the third is a very different interaction with very different gender dynamics. My data come from my participant observation in an American college fraternity in the United States (the Washington DC suburbs). Fraternities are all-male students’ social and philanthropic organizations at many US colleges. (There usually exists a female equivalent, sororities.) I spent over a year going to events, interviewing members, and ‘hanging out’ in the spaces that the fraternity men use. I studied this community because I was interested in how men use language to ‘be men’, which is the motto of the fraternity. It is a community in which hegemonic masculinity is highlighted, and men’s identities as men are evaluated, sometimes very explicitly, especially during the time in which new members are chosen, known as the rush period. Accordingly, my focus for the first two excerpts will be on a stretch of talk from a speech event during rush. During this period, sanctioned by the University, the fraternity has events to attract, meet, and evaluate prospective new members (called variably rushes or rushees). The event is not unlike courtship, in which each party is simultaneously evaluating the other and also trying to create a ‘positive impression’ on the other. In short, each is trying to create desire in the other and determining their own level of desire. Of course in this situation one party is an institution – the fraternity. The event I recorded was organized around watching basketball (all the events are organized around some defined activity – watching a game, playing pool, having a barbecue, ice skating, etc.). There are four main interactants in the conversation. It begins as Mick, a senior member of the fraternity and currently the president, walks up to a rush named Luke and begins to engage him in conversation. Mick was wearing a wireless lapel microphone. After they talk for a while, two other members, Saul and Alex, join the conversation. Both are older members of the fraternity, and Saul is in charge of the rush process for the fraternity (the ‘rush chair’). The conversation begins as Mick, wearing the microphone, walks through the room until he encounters Luke.


Excerpt 1 01 Luke: hey wh|at’s up 02 Mick: |Luke 03 hey you doin man 04 Luke: you called last ni|ght 05 Mick: |yeah how= 06 you doin’? 07 (0.5) 08 Luke: you see you woke me up 09 cause I was like 10 who the fuck is this 11 and you’re like this is Bill 12 an’ I was just like 13 (1.1) 14 Luke: and I was like w:hat= 15 fraternity you’re like 16 Gamma Chi Phi 17 and I was (?) oh yeah: he 18 (0.7) 19 Mick: so how’s everything goin man= 20 you like this place or what 21 (1.2) 22 Mick: goin’ good? 23 you still livin’ at home= 24 though right? 25 (0.7) 26 Luke: Yeah 27 (0.3) 28 Mick: That’ll make it a little= 29 rough I’m sure 30 (0.6) 31 Luke: guess I’d say I try to stay away= 32 from there as much as possible 33 (0.4) 34 Mick: are your parents pretty= 35 lenient with that shit 36 like they’ll let you go out= 37 and drink |and (??) 38 Luke: |well see my Dad= 39 doesn’t live with us 40 (0.3) 41 Mick: oh 42 (0.4) 43 Luke: a:nd my mom she works from= 44 eleven o’clock= 45 till seven thir|ty 46 Mick: |ah:: so you can= 47 come in trashed the whole time=

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48 you want 49 Luke: actually I don’t drink I just= 50 |(??) 51 Mick: |oh you don’t 52 (1.3) 53 Mick: that’s good actual|ly dude 54 Luke: |yeah |so= 55 Mick: I stopped myself 56 (0.8) 57 Luke: okay goo|d 58 Mick: |I’ve been goin on like 59 (2.8) 60 Mick: weeks 61 (1.7) 62 Luke: te he |he 63 Mick: |no wait I’m thinkin’= 64 there’s more than a week 65 yeah right it was more than a= 66 week 67 it was a week 68 (0.9) 69 Mick: no it was 70 (0.6) 71 Mick: yeah it was 72 it was a week 73 (0.6) 74 Mick: it was two weeks on Thursday

The conversation moves from a greeting, in which Luke acknowledges Mick’s previous phone call (line 4, you called last night), to Mick’s inquiry about Luke’s living situation (lines 23-24, you still living at home though right). In this first segment (lines 1-24), we see the two participants begin to align to one another, but not smoothly. First, while Luke aligns to Mick and shows recognition of him and a connection to a previous interaction, he does not return a preferred second pair part for a greeting, which is another greeting. Furthermore, Luke notes that he could not remember the fraternity that Mick is a member of in lines 14-15 (I was like what fraternity). This lack of memory could be taken as lack of interest (Luke is likely rushing several fraternities, who are competing for his membership). Moreover, after Mick asks if Luke likes this place (referring to the fraternity in metaphorically geographic terms) in line 20, all Mick gets in response is 1.2 seconds of silence, which is another move of non-alignment. Mick then reformulates his initial question in line 22 with goin’ good? Both Luke’s lack of memory of the fraternity and his initial non-response to Mick’s question about the fraternity indicate a possible lack of desire on his part for this fraternity, since we would expect him to remember the name of Mick’s


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fraternity and to respond to Mick’s question if he were interested in the fraternity. There are other explanations (such as he just couldn’t remember having met so many men and fraternities, and that he may have been distracted), but the conversation nevertheless begins somewhat one-sided in the expression of desire, as expressed in the asymmetry of alignment. That is to say, it is clear from Mick’s turns that he is showing interest in Luke and a desire to attract him to the fraternity, especially in line 15 (you like this place or what?), but that enthusiasm does not seem to be shared by Luke, as seen by his lack of alignment. This lack of alignment leads to silence and a lack of involvement. This show of interest in Luke by Mick continues as Mick asks about Luke’s living at home in lines 23-24. While Luke doesn’t come out and say ‘I hate living at home’, he indicates that he avoids home in a rather long and wordy answer: guess I’d say I try to stay away from there as much as possible. This line begins with a ‘double hedge’: a lexical hedge (guess) and a grammatical, conditional one (I’d), and this hedging suggests that there may be more to say than is forthcoming, perhaps indicating an unwillingness by Luke to discuss the topic. Alternately, he could just be verbally playing with how he presents this stance towards his home (trying to be ‘cool’). Mick forges ahead, using moves that seem to attempt to create connection and involvement by showing interest in this personal topic (as Tannen 1984: 54–58 argues). This interest does not elicit the desired involvement, as shown by Luke’s responses to Mick’s inquiries, which are disaligning. Mick’s main question creates a stance that affiliates with Luke’s experiences, in that Mick shows he remembers that Luke is living at home, and that this situation may not make it so that Luke is goin’ good (line 16), as shown by Mick’s though in lines 23-24 (you still livin’ at home though right?). Since though creates an implication that a previous assertion is partially or completely false, it suggests that living at home falsifies the possibility that things are goin’ good for Luke. As noted, Mick seems to be correct in this assumption. In lines 36-37, Mick asks a question that pries more into the situation, presuming that Luke has similar concerns as Mick would if he were also living at home. In this case, Mick suggests that, even if Luke lives at home, his parents may give him some freedom to go out and drink. Luke first cancels one of Mick’s presuppositions, that he lives with more than one parent. Mick’s single, short acknowledgement token – oh – is evidence that he was not expecting this kind of response (see Schiffrin 1987: 89), and Luke’s prefacing his second pair part with well suggests that he also considers his line 25 to be a dispreferred response (see Schiffrin 1987: 102–127). These are both indicators of non-alignment and continues an asymmetry of apparent desire in this conversation.

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Once Luke volunteers some more information about his home life in lines 43-45 (my mom she works from eleven o’clock till seven thirty), Mick tries again to show affiliation and alignment by enthusiastically noting that his mother’s schedule gives Luke more freedom than most children living with their parents. Note Mick’s ah:: which begins before Luke finishes his turn. Goodwin and Goodwin (1992: 159) show how a move almost exactly like this shows alignment toward an ‘assessable’ in conversation, and it is clear here that Mick takes Luke’s description of his mother’s schedule as an assessable, and proceeds to find grounds to positively assess it. That is, Luke can come home drunk (the meaning of trashed) whenever he likes. This assessment is positive in that it negates the restrictions on Luke’s freedom imagined by Mick (which Mick presumes is one of the problems with living with one’s parents). Yet again, however, Luke stops him cold, negating a presupposition -- that Luke likes to get drunk. In line 49, again using the dispreference marker actually (the use of actually is actually more complex, but a deep discussion will take us too far afield at this point; see Clift 2001). The knowledge of not drinking goes against the normative practice of the fraternity – drinking alcoholic beverages, and ‘binge drinking’ in particular, are highly valued practices for the fraternity members, so this revelation is probably surprising for Mick. It certainly goes against the assumptions he made in both lines 36 ([your parents] let you go out and drink) and 46-47 (you can come in trashed). But after an acknowledgement in line 51 similar to the oh of line 26, and a 1.3 second pause, Mick in a sense pivots his stance in order to affiliate with Luke, producing a positive assessment: that’s good actually dude. This pivoting is evidenced in Mick’s that’s good, which explicitly assesses Luke’s non-alcoholic practices positively, although the actually suggests that there was an expectation that Mick would assess such practices with the opposite polarity. In addition, dude provides alignment through its indexing of solidarity (as shown by Kiesling 2004). In the rest of the excerpt Mick then supports his claim by giving evidence that he has been practising alcoholic abstinence recently as well, creating affiliation not only through a positive assessment but also by a shared practice, and an alignment by expanding the topic. Clearly Mick is trying to build involvement and trying to align and affiliate himself with Luke, but having trouble doing so at many points. Nevertheless, these verbal gymnastics suggest that Mick is working hard to make this interaction a good one, with a goal of involvement and solidarity. I am suggesting that in this alignment – even in the face of difficulty – we see a kind of desire. The desire is to include Luke in the fraternity, to have him like Mick and the fraternity, and to share their practices and values. In this case, the conversation is not easy, and this trouble makes the work Mick


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is doing, and his desire, somewhat more visible for the analyst. However, we can generalize and suggest that this effort toward alignment is what we look for when we look for interpersonal desire in conversation. This view of desire in language can be extended to sexual desire, so that ‘flirting’ shows specific kinds of alignment by both participants in the flirting behaviour. Such alignment need not be agreement. Indeed, consider Excerpt 2, which is on the face of it a very different interaction in which one of the fraternity men is flirting with a woman in a bar (initially analysed in Kiesling 2001 for other purposes). I have presented this excerpt to language and gender courses for seven years as example data, and when asked to characterize the speech activity, the students invariably agree that it is flirting. Flirting is generally thought of as one way of playfully expressing sexual desire, and here it is heterosexual desire. What is most interesting for the purposes of my current argument are the similarities between this interaction, which is interpreted as one that is infused with desire, and Excerpt 1 (which, as a rush function, is also infused with homosocial desire). In Excerpt 2, Pete and Jen play complementary, gender-stereotypic roles as they talk, and it is this complementary rather than symmetric cooperation that (in part) gives the impression of flirting. The interaction takes place in a bar around 6pm. Pete, a member of the fraternity, has gone there with me and another man who is not a member but is a friend from out of town of another member. We had been sitting at a table for around half an hour when Jen comes in, greets some female friends at another table, and then comes over to our table. Pete notes ‘now I gotta watch what I say’, and when Jen arrives she pointedly eschews an empty chair to sit next to Pete on a bench. Excerpt 2 093 Jen: God I haven’t been here= 094 in a long time. 095 Um, what time do have to leave? 096 Do you really have to go to class? 097 Pete: |Yes. 098 Dan: |Can we have another glass? 099 ((to waiter)) 100 Jen: You do? 101 Dan: No rush. 102 ((as if to waiter, who had left)) 103 Pete: What time is it? 104 Jen: I’m parked over there is that OK? 105 (?) 106 Six twenty-five 107 Pete: Forty five? 108 Jen: Twenty-five. 109 Jen: What time do you have to leave?

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110 Pete: I have to leave by seven. 111 Jen: No:. Seven fifteen. (.) 112 Do you have a test in your class? 113 Pete: Yes. 114 Jen: Oh well then OK (?) 115 Pete: I’ll leave at (.) ten after. 116 Jen: Greta’s coming here too. 117 Pete: Greg? 118 Jen: No. 119 Y’know what-? 120 Pete: Greg was s’posed to come. 121 Jen: Alex called, was like 122 Can you tell Greg to um 123 he owes us a hundred and= 124 twenty dollars for his bills. 125 I was like 126 he doesn’t live here now. 127 (3.1) 128 Pete: (Guess that’s Greg’s problem.) 129 Dan: You want another one? 130 Pete: Yeah I want another one. Huh. 131 (3.7) 132 Dan: I told him to get you a glass. 133 Jen: (I got kicked outta here one time) 134 Pete: Why? Were you being= 135 obnoxious and rowdy? 136 Jen: Oh: my God. 137 I can’t tell you how drunk I was. 138 Don’t even remember anything. 139 Pete: Shouldn’t drink so much. 140 Jen: Are they gonna card me? (.) 141 Pete: Huh? 142 Jen: Are they gonna card me? 143 Pete: Pro|bably.| 144 Jen: |I’m| nervous. he ha 145 Pete: I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

This interaction is characterized by Jen’s questions and Pete’s short, unelaborated answers, except for one question by Pete in lines 134–135. While Pete is aligning with Jen in this activity by answering questions, he is not doing so with enthusiasm and emotion. In fact one could argue that his short, clipped answers are minimally aligning, while at the same time skirting non-alignment. Similar to the interaction in Excerpt 1, this creates an asymmetry, with Jen asking questions that variously ask permission (line 104: I’m parked over there is that OK?), suggests she wants Pete to stay longer (line 111, when she tells him to stay longer), and expresses nervousness about being carded for her identification (lines 140 and 142).


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Pete answers in ways that do not engage her in wider conversation (except in lines 134-135, when he asks her Why? Were you being obnoxious and rowdy?). This question is uttered with a sarcastic sounding intonation, as if he is not serious about the question, and followed by a laugh. Given that they are also talking about getting ejected from a bar when very drunk (something everyone knows Pete is capable of ) it is unlikely that Pete is criticizing Jen, but if anything aligning with her. In other words, given the cultre of drinking and partying that the two are involved in, this is not necessarily a criticism, just something that happens when one is inebriated. Here again we can see desire being created as one participant only barely aligns with another, while the second works hard to align and create talk. In addition, the asymmetries created by the alignments and non-alignments in excerpt 2 are instantiations of hegemonic masculinity in which men are more confident and knowledgeable about the world; indeed, Pete’s question in lines 134-135 is almost patronizing. Given these two interactions, it seems clear that creating desire is not simply a matter of agreeing, or even completely aligning with another in conversation. We know that there is desire being created (or being attempted) in these situations because of the definition of the speech event (rush) and the reactions of native speakers (in the case of Pete and Jen). In both of these cases, one party is not quite aligning, while the second party needs to work to keep re-aligning. This observation returns us to the idea that desire has to do with wanting something that one doesn’t have; in this case, complete alignment. So it seems that interpersonal desire can be created or seen most easily in these slightly asymmetrical situations, but they may only be a special case that brings desire into relief, and that alignment in general is where we find desire. Further research in this direction will be needed to tease this question apart. Ontological desire in interaction Excerpt 3 is somewhat different, and produces more evidence for ontological desire, especially through a narrative. It takes place only moments after Excerpt 1 (the line numbering in Excerpt 3 is an extension of that in Excerpt 1). In the intervening period, Mick and Luke have discussed the microphone he is wearing and my project. Also, they have been joined by some more fraternity members in their conversation, notably Alex and Saul (and at the end, one further member whose voice I could not identify; it may have been another rushee). In this excerpt I will focus on Luke’s short narratives, which are part of a ‘story round’ about ice skating, a topic that arises because skating is one of the rush activities to be held later that

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week. At the beginning of the excerpt, Mick is finishing a ‘small story’ (Georgakopoulou 2007) relating that his girlfriend taught him how to ice skate in a single day. As he finishes, Luke begins a narrative about going ice skating and falling down in front of his friends. In fact several narratives are told in this passage, which is almost a contest among the men to have done the most embarrassing thing, or dressed in the most ridiculous manner when they were 11 years old. Excerpt 3 078 Mick: ONE DAY man I fuckin’ learned= 079 in one day 080 Luke: we were at home and= 081 |I was like 082 Mick: |she’s a good tea|cher though 083 Luke: |all my= 084 |friends who= 085 Mick: |little Suzie Chapstick 086 Luke: =never go skating? 087 (1.5) 088 Luke: I’m like all you= 089 scru:bs ma:n 090 I’m gonna teach you= 091 how to skate 092 (0.2) 093 Luke: I set foot on the ice 094 (0.7) 095 Luke: BOOM 096 bust A:SS in front of= 097 e:verybody 098 (0.8) 099 Mick: see it’s so fuckin’ different 100 (0.4) 101 Alex: I remember in fifth grade= 102 when I was |(??)= 103 Saul: |he he he EASY= 104 fifth grade story 105 Alex: =skat- skatin’ pa|rty 106 Mick: |Alex you= 107 can remember back that far 108 | dude? 109 Alex: |Yes I can because there’s 110 |(??) 111 Mick: |that one brain cell that’s= 112 left man 113 Alex: fifth grade I was like a (??) 114 sellin’ this shit to her= 115 you know


116 (0.4) 117 Alex: hey you want a piece of 118 Bazooka Joe gu:m 119 ((lots of overlap unintelligible)) 120 Alex: right on my ass (??) she’s like 121 oh you’re not such a bad ass= 122 after all 123 Saul: ((laugh)) 124 easy now 125 (0.3) 126 Saul: Alex with his parachute pants= 127 ON ice 128 Michael Jackson glo:ve 129 (0.2) 130 Mick: no man he had he had his fuckin’ 131 tight black leathers on= 132 RED LEATHER pants 133 (1.0) 134 Mick: big socks shoved down there 135 Alex: you wore them 136 Alex: I could see you |wearin’ (??) 137 Luke: |yeah= 138 you know Jeff Bart|lett? 139 Saul: |my mom would 140 never buy me parachute pants= 141 twenty dollars back then= 142 that was a lot of money= 143 back then dude 144 Mick: Luke’s Luke’s bein’ pretty= 145 quiet on this I think he has= 146 hisself a few pairs of those pants 147 Alex: |YEAH yeah 148 Saul: |yeah 149 Mick: the red leather 150 (0.6) 151 Alex: he went to school with that one..= 152 one glove you know 153 ??: yeah he did 154 Mick: got his Mom to put some like= 155 fake diamonds on there and shit 156 (0.6) 157 Alex: he wore those158 remember those shades we= 159 used to wear with the 160 (1.5) 161 ??: No you just wore ‘em 162 Alex: the leather 163 (0.5) 164 Alex: the leather like covered..up..=

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165 the si|des 166 Luke: |see I don’t like to look= 167 back on those years back in= 168 those years I was a DORK 169 ((lots of laughter)) 170 (0.3) 171 Mick: I think we all were= 172 tell you the truth 173 (0.4) 174 Luke: no no you: do not fuckin’= 175 understand 176 (0.3) 177 Luke: I had... 178 |freckles all over 179 Mick: |did they beat you up a-= 180 did they beat you up 181 Luke: oh no I whipped their ass 182 Saul: |((Laughs)) 183 Alex: |here you go 184 (0.2) 185 Saul: hold it now he was a geek 186 but he was a tough geek man 187 |((laugh)) 188 Luke: |I had I had the bo::wl haircut 189 (0.5) 190 Luke: but I mean it was all over= 191 the fuckin’ place 192 and I had um .. 193 no- freckles all over 194 I’s sho:rt 195 (0.5) 196 ??: your mom got you garanimals= 197 right dude? 198 (0.5) 199 Saul: got those garanimals toughskins 200 Luke: and I got I got I got I mean I= 201 got pushed around= 202 a lot and never really defended= 203 myself 204 one time I did I took a binder 205 and slapped this kid across= 206 his face 207 Mick: damn 208 (0.4) 209 Luke: I mean 210 (0.4) 211 Luke: I was- and then w-= 212 everyone started gettin’ bigger= 213 than me in


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214 seventh grade I was still= 215 a little fuckin’ runt= 216 they beat the shit outta me 217 (0.6) 218 Luke: THEN 219 (0.7) 220 Luke: freshman year in high school= 221 I just went psh: 222 I- I- I- went to this size I 223 (0.6) 224 Luke: beat the shit outta |all those 225 Mick: |did you= 226 play any sports or anything 227 Luke: I played football 228 (0.4) 229 Luke: I got I got 230 (1.1) 231 Luke: the hardest hitter 232 (0.5) 233 Luke: because I just wanted beat= 234 those fuckers up so ba::d 235 Saul: easy Rudy 236 (1.4)

With this excerpt I will explore the kind of persona that Luke (as well as Alex, to some extent) creates with these stories, and to discuss how such an analysis shows us desire in masculine ontology – a desire for a persona that aligns with the cultural discourses of masculinity. I focus mostly on the discourses of masculine solidarity and dominance, which in some ways conflict and therefore produce the kind of ‘banter’ seen in this interaction. Despite the fact that Luke tells one story in which he embarrassingly falls (line 96: bust ass) while ice skating, through most of these narratives he shows a dominant persona. In the ‘bust ass’ story, the falling is in contrast to his actual talent on the ice compared to the scrubs he was skating with. The story is humorous not just because he falls, but because he falls in spite of being a good skater. The humour thus requires the listeners to assume he is a good skater. Alex’s story that follows is a similar one about falling on the ice after boasting, and this affiliation (through parallel content) is reinforcing of the alignment displayed by engaging in the story round activity. Note Mick’s reference to Alex’s memory in lines 106-108. Alex is noted in the fraternity for his abuse of drugs and alcohol, and this reference to his memory (and his one brain cell that’s left) shows that knowledge of this reputation. This move does not so much create desire but show solidarity; that is, an acknowledgment of in-group status, approval and familiarity. I argue that to some extent this solidarity is something the members are performing for Luke in order to create a desire in him for this masculine

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solidarity (an argument I elaborate in Kiesling 2005, which is principally focused on this topic). Saul sends the conversation off into the styles of dress when these men were in fifth grade, which would be in the early 1980s. Here they are working to create solidarity through a shared past, each showing his knowledge of the styles of the time (Saul in line 128 references a Michael Jackson glove, and Mick in line 132 red leather pants). Here again the banter works to show off their solidarity, and Mick explicitly brings Luke into this banter in lines 144-146 (Luke’s bein’ pretty quiet on this I think he has hisself a few pairs of those pants). Luke responds (after being made fun of for his imagined fashion during those years in lines 149-165) by admitting that I don’t like to look back on those years back in those years I was a DORK (lines 166-168). Here again, Luke seems to be setting himself up in a non-masculine, subordinate position. However, note that from it we can glean that he didn’t want to be this way, that he desired in fact not to be a dork (a liminal social category similar to nerd, geek or lame, although there are subtle differences among these categories). Mick is again conciliatory to Luke in lines 171-172 (I think we all were to tell you the truth), but Luke pursues his deep ‘dorkness’ by explaining what made him such a dork (lines 174-175: you do not fucking understand). However, in the end, he comes out triumphant and dominant as he beat the shit outta all those [guys] (line 224), and (after Mick inquires) he turns out to be one of the hardest hitters on the football team, because I just wanted to beat those fuckers up so bad (lines 233-234). By presenting this physical dominance through his story, Luke is not only displaying power (after a previous experience in a disfavoured, powerless category) but showing a desire for an identity that is dominant. Moreover, he contrasts his later (and current) non-dork self with the earlier, such that he can show he can overcome being such a person. The outcome of the story is evaluated positively by him and the others. Saul’s easy Rudy (line 235) is a reference to the film Rudy, which is about a boy who doggedly becomes a member of the Notre Dame College football team. Through this address term, Saul positions Luke as the hero of that film, whose qualities of endurance, strength, and determination are admirable (although there could be an element of teasing, teasing is an expected activity in this event and as I have already shown is a positive, affiliative activity). Luke, then, is not just telling a story about growing up, but a story about his desire to be ‘a Rudy’, and not a dork. The banter the men engage in also collectively connect them to discourses of masculinity in a number of ways. First, note that in the way such speech activities work, insults and related innuendo align the speakers, creating and indexing solidarity – masculine solidarity. This solidarity does not clash


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with heterosexism though, because such banter keeps distance between the men. Finally, the men are also displaying an ability to engage in contest and not be hurt by such insults, which, while not making them dominant, at least indexes that discourse. The connection to the discourses of masculinity are not therefore a straightforward pointing to one discourse or another, but a balancing of all of them, within the restrictions of a particular interaction. These stories therefore show us the desire among Luke and these men for dominant identities, but not too dominant. Other narratives show other sorts of power and dominance, or heterosexuality, or gender difference (Kiesling 2006), or even male solidarity (Kiesling 2005). Of course, the telling of these narratives is not simply evidence for this desire; they are also ways in which the desire is created and continued. In other words, this exemplifies Whitehead’s (2002: 210) claim, also noted above, that the masculine subject must achieve masculine ontology only through a ‘constant engagement in those discursive practices of signification that suggest masculinity’. In this short story round, we see these men engaging in these very discursive practices. Of course, just telling a story is not direct evidence for desire, but in this speech event, we know that these stories are related to creating desire, because we know that Luke is presenting himself to these men and trying to create a desirable persona. Certainly not every situation has desire at its centre in this way, but by inspecting these situations we gain an insight into how desire might be important even when it is not so expected. Concluding remarks These excerpts thus show how we can go about discovering different sorts of desire in conversation. We have just seen how the interactants linguistically pursue being and becoming masculine, through actions in speech that connect them with discourses of masculinity. Excerpt 1 showed particularly how Mick shaped his talk in order to align with Luke, presumably (especially given the speech event) to help create desire. And the stories and the banter in general are ways the men performed identities they hoped would be attractive to Luke. One lesson learned from these analyses is that when discussing desire in analysing language and gender identity is to think about the desire we wish to create in others in order to gain approval of our identities (which could be said more colloquially as ‘we care what other people think’). While language and gender studies seem to have embraced the idea of identity as performance, the field focuses largely on the performer and not the audience, although in discourse studies and in linguistic anthropology this has been an important topic (Duranti and Brenneis 1986; Duranti and

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C. Goodwin 1992). In the interaction analysed here, however, all are speakers and audiences, so the perspective on who is creating desire changes. In Excerpt 1, Mick is trying to create desire, and clearly changing his talk to align himself with Luke. In Excerpt 2, both Pete and Jen seem to be working to create desire in the other in asymmetric ways. In Excerpt 3, however, Luke seems to be doing as much work to generate ontological desire as the other men. Explanations in language and gender (and identity) that take desire into account when making their explanations provide a way to take into account the important role of other interactants (‘the audience’) in identity performance. These are not performances with a quiet audience trying to hold back their coughs, but one that helps set the stage and co-creates the performances; they are co-actors more than audiences, providing cues as to whether the performativity of utterances has succeeded (and thereby contributing to their success and failure). In this way the relationality of identity comes to the fore when we consider that speakers are simultaneously desiring identities, and helping to shape others’ identities, and trying to create a desirable identity themselves. As noted above, one of the reasons that I can argue that desire is at issue in these excerpts is either through the very goals of the speech event (in the case of the rush interactions) or through the agreement of judgements of the speech activity by native speakers (in the case of Pete and Jen). Analysts do not always have these luxuries, but given the use of alignment in these interactions, I suggest that other analysts can and should attempt to find evidence of speakers creating desire in interaction through alignment and non-alignment. Especially important is the asymmetry of such interactions such as was seen in excerpt 1, in which there is just a slight non-alignment that forces another party to do more work to ‘get into alignment’. Finding desire in interaction is thus not a simple matter of seeing interactions move smoothly with everyone aligned, affiliated and involved. Rather, it is a matter of seeing the interactants put work into trying to align and create involvement, work that they do perhaps because they desire the alignment they don’t have. Transcription conventions | | Bounds simultaneous speech. = Connects two lines that form a single prosodic utterance (number) Silences timed in tenths of seconds. TEXT Upper case letters indicate noticeably loud volume. - Indicates that the sound that precedes is cut off, stopped suddenly and sharply. : Indicates the sound that precedes it is prolonged. , Indicates a slight intonational rise.


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? Indicates a sharp intonational rise. (text) Transcript enclosed in single parenthesis indicates uncertain hearing. ((comment)) Double parenthesis enclose transcriber’s comments.

About the author Scott F. Kiesling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. His work in language and gender has focused primarily on language and masculinities, drawing on data from fraternity men, including a 2004 article on the address term ‘dude’. He has also worked on language and ethnic identity in Sydney, Australia, and language and place identity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has more recently been focusing on developing the notion of stance as a way of connecting discourse and variation approaches to sociolinguistics. He is the author of Linguistic Variation and Change (University of Edinburgh Press 2011), is also the co-editor of Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings (Blackwell-Wiley, 2004), and the forthcoming Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Commmuncation. References Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Cameron, D. (1997) Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 47–64. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cameron, D. (2008) The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrigan, T., Connell, R.W. and Lee, J. (1985) Toward a new sociology of masculinity. Theory and Society 14: 551–604. Clift, R. (2001) Meaning in interaction: The case of actually. Language 77: 245–291. Connell, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Connell, R.W. and Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005) Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society 19: 829–859. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1996) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.

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Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press. Duranti, A. and Brenneis, D. (1986) The audience as co-author. A special issue of Text 63. Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (1992) Rethinking Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, P. (2008) Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453–476. Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992) Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–90. Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992) Discursive Psychology. London: Sage. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007) Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Malden, MA: Blackwell/Polity. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Penguin. Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, C. (1981) Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M.H. (1987) Concurrent operations on talk: Notes on the interactive organization of assessments. Pragmatics 1(1): 1–55. Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M.H. (1992) Assessments and the construction of context. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 147–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M. H. (2006) The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Grice, H.P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan, J. (eds) Syntax and Semantics, vol 3, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Gumperz, J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holland, D. and Quinn, N. (1987) Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchby, I. and Woofitt, R. (1998) Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Johnstone, B. (2002) Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Kessler, S. and McKenna, W. (1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Kiesling, S.F. (2001) ‘Now I gotta watch what I say’: Shifting constructions of gender and dominance in discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 250–273. Kiesling, S.F. (2004) Dude. American Speech 79: 281–305. Kiesling, S.F. (2005) Homosocial desire in men’s talk: Balancing and recreating cultural discourses of masculinity. Language in Society 34: 695–727.


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Kiesling, S.F. (2006) Hegemonic identity-making in narrative. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin and M. Bamberg (eds) Discourse and Identity 261–287. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kimmel, M. (2001) Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in the construction of gender identity. In S.M. Whitehead and F.J. Barrett (eds) The Masculinities Reader 266–287. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Korobov, N. (2006) The management of nonrelational sexuality: Positioning strategies in adolescent male talk about (hetero)sexual attraction. Men and Masculinities 8: 493–517. Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C.Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, D. (1984) Jewish argument as sociability. Language in Society 13: 311–335. Schiffrin, D. (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, E.K. (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Silverstein, M. (1976) Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. Basso and H.A. Selby (eds) Meaning in Anthropology 11–56. Albuquerque: School of American Research, University of New Mexico Press. Stivers, T. (2008) Stance , alignment , and affiliation during storytelling : When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41: 31–57. Tannen, D. (1979) What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In R. Freedle (ed.) New Directions in Discourse Processing 137–181. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, D. (1984) Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D. (1990) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books. Whitehead, M. (2002) Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.


Gender and Language

Article

Incomprehensible language? Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school Tommaso M. Milani and Rickard Jonsson Abstract In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a ‘matrix of intelligibility’ (Butler 1999 [1990]) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike dominant media representations which depict such linguistic practices as unintelligible as well as inherently sexist and homophobic, the aim of the present article is to take a queer stance and illustrate how ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynist talk are meaningful in the sense that they constitute a rich pool of interactional resources that allow the young men in our study to actively partake in the negotiation of a ‘local masculine order’ (Evaldsson 2005) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested. keywords: ethnicity; homophobia; language ideology; masculinity; queer; sexism

Affiliation Tommaso Milani: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Rickard Jonsson: Stockholm University email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.239

www.equinoxpub.com

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Tommaso M. Milani and Rickard Jonsson

Introduction ‘Few things are as disabling as a poor language with bad accent or incorrect pronunciation.’ That is how an announcer introduced a television debate under the title Kanon TV – språk i förfall? (Canon TV – Language in Decay?) – a programme which was broadcast on a Swedish private channel on 5th May 2006. In his preamble, the speaker went on to claim that: the Swedish language is undergoing a process of change. Swedish youth speak and write in bad Swedish, regardless of whether they are immigrants or native Swedes. A new variety of Swedish is emerging among young people in the suburbs of large urban areas, a language that is hardly comprehensible for those who speak usual Swedish. In the media, the so-called ‘Million Swedish’ is celebrated as something which must be acknowledged and respected. At the same time, literacy problems have increased among young people. What happens when our language, as we know it, dies? What happens to Swedes, the old and the new ones?1

At first glance, the introductory lines of this commentary may suggest that we are witnessing another instance of a generational anxiety expressed by adult media practitioners about youth language, preoccupations which are not dissimilar to those documented by Thurlow (2007) with regard to the so-called ‘teenspeak’ in the United States. In the extract above, however, the generational aspect is complicated further by the representation of an ethnic division among the adolescents in question – ‘immigrants’ vs. ‘native Swedes’. What should also be emphasized is that the ‘new variety of Swedish’ allegedly spoken by young people in the suburbs is measured against the benchmark of ‘usual Swedish’. Therefore, it is described as ‘hardly comprehensible’ and therefore as potentially impacting on young people’s literacy skills. Most importantly, this example is not an isolated instance of pronouncements about standard Swedish being encroached on, or even endangered, by a new variety developing in multicultural Swedish suburbs. But, as a growing body of sociolinguistic literature has shown, such pronouncements have been a common trope in the Swedish media landscape during the last two decades (see Jonsson and Milani 2009; Milani 2010; Stroud 2004). More commonly known under the name of rinkebysvenska (lit. Rinkeby Swedish), from the name of the suburb of Stockholm in which it allegedly originated, this ‘imagined “pan-immigrant” variety of Swedish’ (Stroud 2004: 197) has been represented in media discourse in highly negative tones as an inherently non-Swedish phenomenon, the cause of social trouble and educational underachievement. More recently, however, there have been public attempts to redefine the name, meaning and value of the linguistic phenomenon previously labelled as rinkebysvenska. For

Incomprehensible language?

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example in a print-mediated debate orchestrated by one of the most read Swedish quality newspapers Dagens Nyheter in 2006, the labels blattesvenska2 (lit. immigrant Swedish) and miljonsvenska3 (lit. million Swedish) were used and pitted against each other. As we have explained elsewhere (Jonsson and Milani 2009; Milani 2010), the usage of the names blattesvenska vs. miljonsvenska, instead of rinkebysvenska, is not a terminological triviality but ultimately reflects a deeper opposition between very different cultural images of the speakers to whom this linguistic phenomenon is said to refer. Analogous to the arguments in the extract above and the pronouncements investigated by Stroud (2004), this debate dealt with what was perceived as the incomprehensibility of the speech of the youth in the suburbs, together with its negative impact on their career success. Yet, one of the novelties of this debate lies in its overt gendered component. Put briefly, miljonsvenska is described by its proponents in positive terms as an example of linguistic creativity resulting from the interaction between young people, irrespective of their ethnicity and gender. This view, however, is opposed by those who, employing the label blattesvenska, portray it as an incomprehensible, sexist, and homophobic ‘multiethnic lads’ slang’ (Witt-Brattström 2006). One of the points that we have raised in our analysis is that the claims about sexism and homophobia are not substantiated by examples of actual linguistic practices, but rest on a ‘presupposed common representation’ (Chilton 2004: 181) of ‘multiethnic’ young males as inherently sexist and homophobic bigots. Moreover, we have argued that this ‘double discourse’ (Cameron 2003: 448), which simultaneously defines linguistic as well as gender deviance, has subtle nationalistic undertones in the sense that standard Swedish and Swedish men are implicitly represented as less sexist, less homophobic, more gender equal, and ultimately more ‘normal’ than the linguistic and ethnic Other (cf. de los Reyes and Mulinari 2005). Overall, these studies illustrate that, whether targeting rinkebysvenska, blattesvenska or miljonsvenska, metalinguistic pronouncements enabled by the Swedish media constitute a discursive terrain where complex negotiations of identities are played out. Viewed from a diachronic perspective, the intertextual and interdiscursive connections of these public debates also testify to a process of sedimentation – naturalization even – whereby linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs seem to have become icons (Irvine and Gal 2000), i.e. essentialized traits, of incomprehensibility, ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. In the light of this contextual background, the aim of this paper is to draw upon Judith Butler (1999 [1990]) and take a queer perspective (cf. Cameron and Kulick 2003: 149) that seeks to problematize the ‘matrix of

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intelligibility’ (Butler 1999 [1990]) about languages in Swedish society. In Butler’s original formulation, the matrix of intelligibility refers to ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’ (1999 [1990]: 194). However, we concur with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) that a queer stance can be expanded beyond the remit of gender and sexuality so as to encompass ‘the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these [i.e. gender and sexuality] and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses’ (Sedgwick 1993: 9, original emphasis). And, among these identityconstituting discourses, one should include discourses about languages, as the wide scholarship on language ideology (see Milani 2010) has pointed out. Therefore, we would like to suggest that a queer perspective on languages in Swedish society entails denaturalizing those dominant media discourses that promote images of certain linguistic practices as normal and intelligible while devaluing others as deviant and incomprehensible. To this end, we will investigate the ways in which a group of those ‘multiethnic young lads’ whose linguistic practices have been singled out as incomprehensible, sexist and homophobic in the Swedish media actually use language in a school in a suburb of Stockholm. Essentially, the argument is that the linguistic repertoire of the participants in our study indeed encompasses, though is not reducible to, ethnic, sexist and homophobic insults and jokes. However, such language use is by no means incomprehensible, but conveys specific social meanings and serves particular interactional purposes. Before delving into a detailed analysis of a few excerpts from these young men’s talk, however, we will offer some ethnographic insights into the educational environment in which these interactions have taken place. School in context: Swedish school policy, the local setting and the peer group The data used below come from an ethnographic study of a group of male pupils in a ‘compulsory school’ (grundskola)4 located on the outskirts of Stockholm. The data was gathered by the second author of the paper through participant observation – in classrooms and during breaks in the schoolyard and in the school’s hallway – about three days a week during one year. The researcher openly wrote down his field notes while observing different interactions, and tape-recorded some speech activities. In addition, semi-structured interviews (both individually and in groups) were conducted with some of the pupils and teachers. However, in order to explain why this particular group of male adolescents was chosen for the study, we first want to position this school within the broader context of Swedish educational policies.


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Although Swedish school policy in modern history has had a clear remit to offer all children an equivalent, democratic and compulsory education (Skollag 1985, 1 chapter, 2 §), different schools’ unequal conditions and resources have been noted in recent educational and sociological research. In particular, this scholarship has pointed to the emergence of a neoliberal shift in Swedish educational policies. Unlike in previous times when children were assigned to a public school depending on their place of residence, since the beginning of the 1990s there has been an increasingly higher freedom on the part of pupils (and their families) to choose the school which they prefer, public or private, irrespective of location. Such enhanced freedom has created a situation in which Swedish schools – similar to many other Western countries – are now involved in strong marketing campaigns which aim to attract prospective pupils. Whilst some commentators have interpreted this shift as positive because children from the suburbs can now attend more prestigious schools, often in city centres, others have highlighted that liberalization of school choice has not brought with it social change but has actually had segregating effects. Marketsceptical voices (Bunar 2009; 2010; Hartman 2005) have argued that it is mainly the families of the middle-class who have access to the necessary resources (information, time, economic resources etc) which allow them to make informed decisions in the educational market. Moreover, several researchers working in the field of intercultural education assert that the Swedish school system with its mission to foster pupils and to provide them with nationally defined knowledge objectives may contribute to the establishment of ethnic boundaries. Here, ‘Swedishness’ – whatever that might be – is constructed as normative whereas experiences of migration are considered as a deficiency which needs to be compensated for through education (Gruber 2007; Lahdenperä 1997; Runfors 2003). It appears clear then that understanding a school’s locality and its relationship to other schools, as well as its role in (re)producing forms of ethnic categorization, are critical prerequisites for making sense of the everyday interactions of the particular educational environment in which this study was conducted. Like many similar neighbourhoods in the outer surroundings of the capital, the suburb in which the school is situated has a specific place in the city’s socioeconomic and semiotic map: it is an urban space with a diverse population in terms of ethnic identification and income level. However, it is also quite an ‘anonymous’ neighbourhood in the sense that it has not been explicitly targeted by media narratives. Despite the fact that both the school and the neighbourhood have remained relatively unaffected by media attention, the link between ethnic Otherness and social problems is constantly tangible here. To mention just one example, the school principal seems to be in two minds with regard to the ethnic diversity

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of the school cohort. After proudly announcing that ‘we have got 50 per cent Swedish and 50 per cent immigrant pupils’, she quickly adds a note of reservation, arguing that high numbers of ‘immigrant’ children might nonetheless threaten the good reputation of the school (see also Jonsson 2007). Moreover, she emphasizes that ‘boys of immigrant backgrounds’ constitute a special segment that requires further research. It is partly as a result of these processes of ethnic and gender differentiation that the second author of this paper decided to focus in his fieldwork on a group of 10 pupils in Grade 95 who are addressed by many of their peers and teachers as ‘boys of immigrant backgrounds’ (killar med invandrarbakgrund), despite the fact that several of them were actually born in Sweden and are Swedish citizens. Needless to say, it is not purely the ethnic identity attributed to them that makes these boys a group. What singles them out as a rather discrete social network are both institutional and informal practices: the boys attend the same Swedish and English classes, but they also cluster together more freely during the breaks, a leisure time that they spend mostly sitting around some of the tables in the hallway beside the main entrance of the school. The tables are in a sense located at the school’s centre, which not only contributes to enhancing the visibility of the boys as a group, but might also have an effect on how they are perceived by other students. When the researcher asks about the young men in the hallway, the teachers as well as the other pupils seem to be aware of them, describing them in positive terms as good friends or as ‘popular’ or the ‘cool and funny guys’. On a more negative note, they are also portrayed as ‘cocky hip hoppers’ who ‘believe that they own the school’ by some of those who identify themselves as ‘Swedish guys’. On the whole, the ways in which they were categorized, coupled with their centrality in the school, made this group ethnographically salient for an analysis of the intersections between language, gender and ethnicity in this particular school environment. In the light of the ‘queer approach’ spelled out in the introduction, it might sound paradoxical that we have mobilized gendered and ethnic categories as premises for the choice of the participants in our study. But we concur with Warner that ‘Queer theorists are not sceptical that homosexuals exist; just as there is no doubt that women “really” exist, or that men do. If anything, these identity categories are only too real’ (2004: 324; emphasis in original). In a similar vein, it would be naïve, and would contravene the basic principles of ethnographic research, to ignore that some of the adolescents in the school under investigation are ‘really’ perceived as and called ‘boys with immigrant background’. What is required from a queer agenda, however, is to look at identities – be they gender, sexual, ethnic, and so forth – ‘as phenomena of an emerging subjectivity in a temporal, sociohistorical power structure’ (Warner 2004: 324). What we will show in


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the remainder of the article is how linguistic practices among those ‘boys of immigrant backgrounds’ actually go against current societal discourses that seek to secure closure around the intelligibility of these boys’ behaviour. Critical junctions: language practices, ethnicity, gender and sexuality The following extracts are taken from a series of interactions that took place in the context of the Swedish classes taught by Åsa, a teacher who places importance on developing students’ language skills as well as creating an educational environment where everyone should feel accepted and respected regardless of ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. As will emerge below, Åsa was worried about the lack of respect on the grounds of ethnicity expressed through certain words that she had heard among her students. Therefore, at some point, she took the decision to initiate a discussion about ethnic insults through a teaching and learning activity in which everyone should tell the class where they come from and what language(s) they speak at home. Extract 16 1. Åsa: 2. Nejib: 3. Åsa: 4. Nejib: 5. Åsa: 6. Nejib:

mmm Nejib? jag är från Marocko du är från Marocko. Du pratar? svenska nåt annat modersmål? vad har du hemma? svenska

(killarna skrattar)

7. Mengistu: hörru din arabfitta säg sanningen! 8. Nejib: jag pratar visst svenska hemma 9. Jamal: ja det är sant 10. Åsa: svenska, jag har för mig, du säger att du är, vad sade du att du var? 11. Nejib: marockan 12. Åsa: marockan, du kommer från? 13. Nejib: Marocko 14. Åsa: och pratar? 15. Nejib: svenska! 16. Åsa: ja, inget annat, inget annat språk? 17. Kille han är svensk, ser du inte det? 18. Mengistu (till Åsa): får jag bara fråga en fråga? tror du att jag är bög bara om jag färgar mitt hår blont?

(skratt från eleverna)

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19. Kille: 20. Åsa: 21. Mengistu:

ja, om du gör det va? tror du att jag är bög?

(Hakan kommer in sent)

22. Åsa: 23. Hakan: 24. Åsa: 25. Hakan (tyst): 26. Åsa:

Hakan öh, kan jag få tänka på din fråga lite grand Mengistu, men nu är det faktiskt Hakan Ja, Hakan? mmm av med huvan så att jag ser dig! Hakan ja, jag kommer från Turkiet mmm

1. Åsa: 2. Nejib: 3. Åsa: 4. Nejib: 5. Åsa: 6. Nejib:

mmm Nejib? I’m from Morocco! you are from Morocco. And you speak…? Swedish. any other mother tongue? what do you speak at home? Swedish

(the boys laugh)

7. Mengistu: 8. Nejib: 9. Jamal: 10. Åsa: 11. Nejib: 12. Åsa: 13. Nejib: 14. Åsa: 15. Nejib: 16. Åsa: 17. One of the boys: 18. Mengistu:

listen, you Arab cunt, tell the truth! I do speak Swedish at home! yes it’s true. Swedish, I thought, you said you were, what [nationality] did you say you were? Moroccan. Moroccan, you come from? Morocco. and speak…? Swedish! ok, nothing else? any other language? he’s Swedish, can’t you see? may I just ask a question? do you think I’m gay if I dye my hair blond?

(laugh from the students) 19. One of the boys: 20. Åsa: 21. Mengistu:

yes, if you do it. what? do you think I’m gay?

(Hakan enters late)

22. Åsa: 23. Hakan

Hakan, uh, may I think about your question a little, Mengistu? but now it’s actually Hakan’s turn. yes, Hakan. mmm.

24. Åsa: 25. Hakan (quietly) 26. Åsa:


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take off your hood so I can see you, Hakan. yes, I come from Turkey. mmm.

After everyone in the classroom had had their turn, Åsa provided a brief summary of what they had just discussed and spelled out the aim of this exercise. Extract 2 1. Åsa: vi talar om vad man pratar, om man pratar nåt mer modersmål än svenska, nu ska jag inte saga att ni kallar varann, men jag hör att ni, jag hör ord som arab och kurd och så hör jag ibland arab... 2. Emre.: fitta 3. Åsa: jag tanker så här, ni är stolta över var ni kommer ifrån och har andra nationaliteter och det ska så vara, sen är det en annan sak när vi är inne i ett klassrum, och när vi är på skolan, i [namnet på förorten], utanför oss så pågår mycket krig och så mycket elände, så mycket konflikter så mycket konflikter så jag tänkte att här inne... 4. Jamal: ska vi ha fred 5. Åsa: så tar vi och är stolta over var vi kommer ifrån, men vi försöker göra det lite neutral, för att inte saga mycket, för vad jag är rädd för är att det är någons nationalitet som man till slut inte kan va stolt over. Vi pratar svenska och har ett annat modersmål, men här inne så försöker vi jobba over konflikter och nationaliteter så långt det går 1. Åsa: we’re talking about what [language] one speaks, whether one speaks another mother tongue than Swedish, now I’m not going to tell you what to call each other, but I hear that you, I hear words like Arab and Kurd and sometimes I hear Arab… 2. Emre: cunt. 3. Åsa: I’m thinking this: you are proud of where you come from and have other nationalities, and that’s how it should be, but it’s different when we’re inside a classroom, and when we’re at school, in [name of suburb], outside there’re lots of wars going on and so much misery, so many conflicts, so many conflicts that I was thinking that in here…

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4. Jamal: we should have peace 5. Åsa: so let’s be proud of where we come from, but let’s try to make it a little neutral, not to say very [neutral], because I’m afraid that someone’s nationality will ultimately become something one cannot be proud of. We speak Swedish and have other mother tongues, but in here we try to work across conflicts and nationalities as much as possible.

For clarity of exposition, we want to begin by looking at the teacher’s remarks in Extract 2 because they will allow us to understand the discursive conditions in which these interactions took place. And these are conditions that are not specific for this particular classroom, but impinge more broadly on Swedish public discourse. This is insofar as Åsa’s last turn is perhaps the clearest textual manifestation in the data of a dominant ideology in Swedish society – one could call it an ideology of equality – according to which everyone should be treated as equal, irrespective of their social, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It lies outside the scope of this article to offer a comprehensive overview of the historical development of this ideology (see however Milani 2007, 2008 for a more detailed discussion). Suffice it to say, however, that dominant societal ideologies can be conceptualized pace Butler (1997) as forms of implicit censorship, in the sense that they subtly define the boundaries of what it is acceptable to say, or not, in public discourse (cf. Kulick 2005). These theoretical observations can be productively applied to the examples above because we believe that it is only in the light of this ideology that we can appreciate Åsa’s concerns as well as the unfolding of these (meta)linguistic exchanges. To begin with, it is interesting to note how the teacher constructs a spatial boundary between outside and inside the classroom. The former is portrayed as a place of dire conflict that little can be done to change. By contrast, the classroom and the school are represented as safe havens of equality where disagreement can be avoided, and the centrifugal forces of nationalism toned down. However, at the same time, Åsa’s utterances seem to reveal an essentialist view of ethnic and national belonging. This is perhaps most explicitly manifested when the teacher represents her pupils’ origins and nationality as other from the default mode: Swedish (Turn 3, line 2). As mentioned earlier, the image of some boys in the school as ethnically ‘other’ is not restricted to this particular instance, but has emerged frequently in the interviews with the teaching staff. The problematic aspect of the categories ‘immigrant’, ‘other’ or ‘non-Swedish’ lies in the fact that they more or less implicitly erase (Irvine and Gal 2000) the complexity of the ethnic background of these young men, most of whom were actually born in Sweden and are Swedish citizens. Finally, it should


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be observed how nationality/ethnicity, language, and conflict become controversially entangled in Åsa’s closing remark (Turn 5). The first deictic pronoun ‘we’ is ambiguous because it is unclear whether it only refers to the pupils in the classroom or encompasses more broadly the Swedish population in its entirety. Either way, what is relevant is that, through the deictic expression, the teacher is constructing an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]) of speakers, in which Swedish coexists with other mother tongues. Thus, the multilingual repertoire of the pupils and/or the Swedish population is acknowledged. However, the conjunction ‘but’ does important ideological work in this context. This is because it creates a contrast between: (1) ‘we speak Swedish and have another mother tongue’, and (2) ‘we work across conflicts and nationalities as much as possible’. Accordingly, the conjunction functions as a logic connector implying that multilingualism might be closely tied to conflicts and divisions. Overall, one could conclude that the teacher’s speech is framed within an ideological matrix that dictates that equality should be acknowledged and promoted. This leads to an overt attempt on her part towards the recognition of multilingualism and ethnic diversity among the pupils. That said, the teacher’s utterances could also be revealing of the belief that such diversity might be at the very heart of divisions and conflicts. Furthermore, these utterances seem to testify to a process of ‘othering’ (Jaworski 2007) whereby Åsa more or less explicitly portrays her pupils as ‘non-Swedes’. Crucially, it is this tension between an attempt to acknowledge diversity and essentialist forms of categorization that also underpins the exchange in Extract 1, to which we will now turn. This episode was generated by Åsa’s request for information about her pupils’ ethnic/national origin and their language choice at home. Whereas the teacher’s questions might appear to be fairly innocuous, they galvanized a discursive struggle for truth which is manifested in the prolonged opposition between Nejib’s statement that he speaks Swedish at home, on the one hand, and the teacher’s questioning of this claim, on the other. Of course, Åsa’s fill-in questions could be interpreted, in the light of the ideology of equality, as prompts through which she is trying to elicit answers that might help her to flag up the multilingual profile of the class. Conversely, her dismissal of Nejib’s replies could also be interpreted as the materialization of an essentialist language ideology which envisions a one-to-one relationship between language and ethnicity. According to this ideology, if you are not a Swede, you speak your ‘mother tongue’ at home, and this would certainly not be Swedish. But, as Foucault (1980) has cogently pointed out, struggles for truth are ultimately contestations of power and authority, and vice versa. Hence, Nejib’s adamant replies cannot simply be treated as an obstinate opposition to the teacher’s ideological

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standpoint, but should also be seen as a way of undermining her professional authority in the matter. Furthermore, this discursive struggle is not confined to Åsa and Nejib, but takes the form of a collaborative work that involves the other pupils as well. It is in this contest for power and truth that we can better understand Mengistu’s usage of the disparaging expression ‘Arab cunt’ directed at Nejib. Research on language and masculinity has urged us to move beyond a disapproval of verbal slurs, and instead try to grasp their social function in precise sites of interaction. In a groundbreaking study of a group of young people in Barcelona, Joan Pujolar i Cos (1997) has demonstrated how insults are linguistic resources through which the men in the group can bond together by ‘asserting and defending a particular form of masculinity associated with heterosexuality, physical strength and size, and a certain aggressiveness manifested in verbal terms’ (Pujolar i Cos 1997: 90). Reasoning along similar lines, Ann-Carita Evaldsson’s (2005) investigation of male pre-adolescents in a multiethnic school in Stockholm illustrates that ‘insulting is not primarily an adversary act […] [that] accomplishes more than simply to exclude particular boys by associating them with non-acceptable masculine behaviours. The use of exclusion is, simultaneously, inclusion into a particular local discourse’ (Evaldsson 2005: 777). In the same way, the ethnographic observations of the participants in this study have led the second author to conclude elsewhere that verbal duelling and slurs are linguistic means, through which these male adolescents (re)negotiate their social relations with one another in informal settings outside the classroom (see Jonsson 2007 for detailed evidence). In sum, if we pull together all these considerations and apply them to the extract above, we believe that we are better equipped to understand the meaning and purpose of the insult ‘Arab cunt’ in this particular context. There is little doubt that the compound word where a marker of ethnic identification is attached to a strongly derogatory label for female genitals allows Mengistu7 to subordinate Nejib by investing him with an ethnic and gendered position. More specifically, the process of subordination works here through the metaphorical assignment of a feminine position to a man, a position which relies on a misogynist discourse in which women are reduced to a sexual organ and therefore nearly dehumanized (cf. Coates 2007: 55; Kiesling 2002: 251). Hence, by tying a pejorative form of gender categorization to an ethnic marker, Mengistu devalues his classmate and weakens the truth value of Nejib’s answers, securing for himself at the same time an authoritative stance in agreement with the teacher. However, one could also argue, from a pragmatic perspective, that the choice of a verbal slur is a move through which Mengistu can enter a ‘particular local discourse’ (Evaldsson 2005: 777), in which derogatory expressions are


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an integral part of building rapport in informal conversations with his classmates. Thus, in using an insult in Åsa’s presence, Mengistu breaks the more or less overt rules of the classroom (see Extract 2); he downplays his stance of collusion with the teacher while showing solidarity with his peers, a form of solidarity which is reinforced by the fact that Nejib does not seem to take offence to being called an ‘arab cunt’ or to answer back in any way In contrast to Mengistu, another classmate supports Nejib (Turn 17) and challenges the teacher by playing along the lines of the same essentialist language ideology according to which ethnicity univocally correlates to language practices. According to this young man, Nejib is a Swede, and the implicature of this statement is that he certainly speaks Swedish at home. Admittedly, claiming that Nejib is a Swede complicates Nejib’s own act of identification as a Moroccan. However, this claim is humorous, resulting from the rhetorical strategy of paradox. If we agree with Harvey that, ‘In verbal paradox, two apparently contradictory notions or views are held simultaneously’ (2000: 244), the paradoxical element here is produced by the question ‘don’t you see it?’ which plays on the opposition between (1) what is ‘there’ and patently visible – Nejib’s bodily features (i.e. dark hair and skin) and (2) what is ‘not there’ but is performatively brought into being by the question itself – a conventional image of how a Swedish man looks. We argue that it is precisely this contrast that also triggers Mengistu’s ensuing concern about homosexuality (Turn 18). Clearly, Mengistu’s question is an example of how ‘the dread spectre of homosexuality’ (Cameron 1997: 61) is persistently lurking behind male adolescents’ self-perceptions in school environments (see Redman and Mac an Ghaill 1996). Yet, what is particularly remarkable in this context is how Mengistu associates a conventional trait of Swedishness (i.e. blond hair) with homosexuality, which is something that is both troublesome and enticing. On the one hand, we know that he has actually wanted for quite some time to dye his hair blond. On the other hand, he manifests his fear of how that bodily change might affect the general perception of his self. Of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tease out a posteriori the meaning of ‘blond hair’ in this context. In our view, however, it is highly implausible that the plan of modifying hair colour is a way through which Mengistu is trying to align himself with Swedishness. We are more inclined to believe that it is a way through which he emulates a practice fashionable at the time among several black sport players and hip-hop singers. Whichever the reason might be, what is crucial is the possible effect of a particular decision. In this specific case, it is Mengistu’s credentials as a heterosexual man that are at stake. Having said that, it would be an oversimplification to conclude that Mengistu’s concerns with homosexuality directly follow from his ethnic and/or cultural background, which is an argument, however, that

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more or less explicitly recurs in media discourse (see Milani 2010). Rather, as we will illustrate in the next section, heteronormativity and a negative portrayal of homosexuality are deeply embedded in teaching and learning activities. Enacting discipline and homosocial desire through homosexual innuendos In order to contextualize the episodes below, we want to note how most teachers in the school reacted with visible astonishment when asked whether they had had homosexual pupils or colleagues. Some of them justified their surprise by pointing out that schools are not an easy environment in which to come out as a homosexual. Others claimed that their pupils are too young – admittedly most of them are in full blown puberty – and might not yet have ‘discovered’ their homosexuality. This picture is not dissimilar from what other researchers have described with regard to other Swedish educational environments. Lundgren (2008) has demonstrated how many heterosexual teachers in the school that she investigates claim never to have had a homosexual colleague. Even when they do, these teachers openly admit that homosexual peers should play down their sexual identity at school in order not to influence their pupils’ conduct. Undoubtedly, according to such a view, homosexuality should be relegated to the domain of ‘the unspeakable’ (Butler 1997: 133) – the realm of the invisible even. However, what needs highlighting from a queer perspective is that heterosexuality is implicitly treated as unproblematic by the participants in Lundgren’s (2008) study, not least as a result of their lack of awareness that they qua heterosexuals might as well shape pupils’ choices and self-perceptions. This conclusion can be strengthened by the existing body of evidence that shows how heterosexuality might not be patently ‘flaunted’ in schools as well as elsewhere, yet is continuously (re)produced as a given through mundane semiotic practices, e.g. through pictures of heterosexual families on staff desks or the use of kinship categories husband and wife by female and male participants respectively (Ambjörnsson 2004; Jonsson 2007; see also Kitzinger 2005 for a compelling analysis of how heterosexuality is not necessarily the main topic of conversation but constitutes the unquestioned common ground on which talk in interaction unfolds). However, this more or less overt display of heterosexuality does not translate into a complete silencing of homosexuality. On the contrary, it is through subtle representations of homosexuality as bad and deviant that heterosexuality can uphold its normal and normative status (see e.g. Cameron 1997; Kehily and Nayak 1997). Therefore, it is perhaps not completely unexpected that


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same sex desire emerges in several interactions in our data, of which the examples below can be considered representative cases in point. The brief episode reproduced in Extract 3 is taken from a Swedish language class conducted by a heterosexual male teacher, Roger. After writing a few irregular verb forms on the white board, the teacher asked the pupils to form sentences conjugating those verbs. According to the ethnographic field notes, the pupils quickly started to become impatient seemingly not understanding what they had been asked to do. This led Roger to decide to explain the exercise again from the beginning. However, he did not succeed in gathering the pupils’ attention: Ibrahim freely talked to a classmate, and Ramiz burst out in a fit of anger. Extract 3 Ramiz: sug kuk Roger: era hobbies får ni ta på lunchen. Ibrahim, jag vet att du också vill vara med på ett hörn där, men det får du ta med dom sen! (Ramiz skrattar, ruskar på huvudet och vänd mot forskaren förklarar han att deras lärare har rolig humor.) Ramiz: Suck [my] cock Roger: You can do your hobbies during lunchtime. Ibrahim, I know that you also want to participate in a corner there but that’s something you can do with them later. (Ramiz laughs, shakes his head and, turned toward the researcher, explains that their teacher has a good sense of humour.) (Author 2’s field notes)

On another occasion, Roger has just asked the students to work independently on an exercise from the textbook when Johan and Mats started talking to each other and got involved in a lighthearted fight, possibly as a pretext to avoid doing the exercise. This led the teacher to make an explicit comment on the intimacy between two students. Extract 4 Roger: Johan och Mats ska alltid ta på varandra Ibrahim: jag såg dem slicka på varandra! Roger: Är du avundsjuk? (Alla ler) Roger: Ibrahim: Roger:

Johan and Mats always need to touch each other I saw them lick each other! Are you jealous?

(Everyone smiles) (Author 2’s field notes)

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It is important to clarify that the derogatory expression uttered by Ramiz in Extract 3 is not directed at the teacher but epitomizes dissatisfaction with his own inability to understand the topic of this teaching and learning activity. However, unlike in Extracts 1 and 2 where Åsa openly opposes verbal slurs, the swear word prompts a different strategy of classroom management from Roger. Instead of overtly reprimanding the student’s language usage, Roger makes a comment alleging homosexual activities between Ramiz and the other boys, a comment that is immediately extended to Ibrahim, who has been talking during the recapping of the explanation. By the same token, in Extract 4, the undisciplined behaviour of Johan and Mats is met by the teacher’s allegation that they are sexually attracted to each other. When Ibrahim seeks to support the teacher’s standpoint by providing further evidence of such homosexual attraction, he is immediately silenced by a remark about his jealousy of the boys’ intimacy. Roger’s comments can be described as innuendos to a purported same sex desire. Interestingly, their function is to serve as disciplinary tools in the service of classroom management. In other words, these innuendos are discursive strategies through which the teacher can expose a pupil to public humiliation, while allowing himself a position of control. This is realized by associating unruly behaviour to something else that is widely understood as ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’. As a large body of scholarship on masculinity has reiterated many times, there is nothing worse for a boy than ‘to have his attitudes and behaviors likened to those of girls or to be called gay’ (Francis and Skelton 2001: 15). This is insofar as anything that is culturally scripted as feminine represents the ‘constitutive outside’ (Butler 1997: 180) which polices the borders of masculinity. Or, to put it another way, culturally shared traits of femininity stand vis-à-vis the ‘symbolic universe’ of masculinity as its ‘defining limit or exteriority, one which, were it imported into that universe, would destroy its integrity and coherence’ (Butler 1997: 180). In the examples above, it is rather patent that homosexual innuendos are employed by Roger as ways in which to reprimand and silence the pupils. Nonetheless, their potentially disruptive force is toned down by a shared agreement that these allegations of homosexuality are ironic: they are ‘not meant literally’ and seem ‘to be intended to amuse’ (Tannen 2005: 164). That Roger’s remarks should be interpreted as ‘jokey’ is warranted further by Ramiz’ laugh, coupled with an appreciative comment on the teacher’s sense of humour in Extract 3, as well as by their smiles in Extract 4. To this, one should add that the teacher himself discloses in an interview that he finds it acceptable to make fun of homosexuality because everyone is the class is heterosexual. In order to justify this position and possibly protect himself from potential homophobic allegations, he adds that the pupils


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are well aware of his own commitment to equal opportunities. Espousing the same principles of the ideology of equality expressed by Åsa in Extract 2, Roger is adamant pointing out how he often puts emphasis on the importance of acknowledging everyone’s equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. As a corollary to this, he clarifies that sexual innuendos can be a fruitful teaching tool because they help him to keep order and discipline while creating a friendlier atmosphere in the class. Roger’s comments are not dissimilar from the remarks made by another male teacher explaining his flirtatious behaviour with a few female students in Francis and Skelton’s (2001) canonical study on heterosexual masculinity in British schools. The striking similarity between these teachers’ explanations lies in their explicit articulation of ‘classroom management as one which relied on “sociability”’ (Francis and Skelton 2001: 16). Such a teaching approach entails among other things the use of humour as a teaching strategy through which to establish friendly relationships with their pupils. Despite these similarities, the main difference lies in the homosocial (Sedgwick 1990) nature of the rapport between Roger and the young men in the study. It is at this juncture that we should remind ourselves that men’s homosocial desire – the need to bond with other men – brings with it an inherent conundrum. Dominant discourses of masculinity dictate that heterosexual men should strive to build solidarity with one another. But the more they pursue this bonding enterprise, the more they run the risk of being perceived as entering the realm of same-sex desire, which would paradoxically undermine the performance of their heterosexual masculinity (Kiesling 2005: 720). In the light of this, it is true that Roger is muscular and wears tight T-shirts that exalt his body-builder’s figure, literally embodying a near hypermasculine identity. Nonetheless, because of his preoccupation with appearance, he is often perceived by the pupils as ‘conceited’ – a potentially demasculinizing trait because of its conventional associations with femininity (see also Benwell 2002 for the challenge posed by body grooming to conventional forms of heterosexual masculinity in British men’s lifestyle magazines). Therefore, it is our contention that the displacement of same-sex desire into the domain of ridicule is a necessary pre-requisite for this teacher to engage in ‘safe’ homosocial banter with his male students, thus eschewing the danger of falling into the disruptive terrain of homosexuality. Furthermore, if read against the backdrop of the conditions and constraints of this Swedish public discourse, one could argue that the innuendos are a discursive manoeuvre through which Roger can reject homosexuality into indignity (cf. Bourdieu 1998: 46) without overtly contravening the rules set by the ideology of equality, namely, the unacceptability of public discriminatory discourse and harassment.

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This is because the ironic nature of the innuendos allows ‘a disjunction, opposition or contradiction between the surface form of an utterance and its underlying meaning or context’ (Benwell 2004: 4). Notably, this semantic instability not only makes ironic utterances difficult if not impossible to counter, but also helps speakers to mitigate their responsibility vis-à-vis the propositional content of their own speech (Benwell 2002: 163). All in all, one could reach a similar conclusion to that drawn by Cameron (1997) with regard to the social significance of gossip in informal all-male peer groups: homosexual innuendos are ‘not just one way, but the most appropriate way’ (Cameron 1997: 61) through which this particular teacher can keep discipline while staging homosocial desire and enacting heterosexual masculinity in relation to his male students in a Swedish class. This is not to say, however, that such complex social endeavour is by any means innocuous. Precisely because of their fleeting character – they are embedded in, and allegedly contribute to, a friendly and smooth flow of classroom activities – homosexual innuendos are but another example of those ‘banal’ (Billig 1995) linguistic foreclosures that, by associating homosexuality to troublesome classroom conduct, label it as ‘bad’ and ‘deviant’ and thereby implicitly legitimize its counterpart – heterosexuality – as ‘good’ and ‘appropriate’. However, as Sedgwick (1990) notes, the disavowal of homosexuality is not the only strategy through which homosocial desire can be acceptably upheld within the confines of heterosexual masculinity; talk and rivalry about women represent other key ingredients of the homosocial project (cf. Kiesling 2002), a topic that we will now move on to present. Negotiating a masculine order through desire In a well-known study on a group of teenagers in an American school, Eckert (1994) has illustrated how the transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by ‘demonstrating new “mature” behaviors. And, in pre-adolescence, those new behaviors involve engagement in the heterosexual market’ (1994: 3). The notion of a heterosexual market aims to capture the importance of heterosexual relationships – whether real, purported or fictitious – as a form of capital (Bourdieu 1991) through which boys and girls can purchase a position of prestige in the symbolic economy of peer group exchanges. However, as Eckert (2002) points out, active participation in the heterosexual market has less to do with ‘real’ involvement in intimate relations with a partner of the opposite gender, than to talk about such relations. In a similar vein, it was rare to see the boys in this study overtly engage in acts of affection with girls at school, although women are a very common topic of their talk in informal situations (see Jonsson 2007). It was


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with a view to understand the role played by women in lives of these male adolescents that the first author of the present paper initiated an informal discussion on this topic (see Extract below). Extract 5 1. Alem: det där var Anne i somras! 2. Nejib: ja, hon har jag hört, hon har jag hört, hon är nice. 3. Mark: hon hos Danne? 4. Alem: oh, det där var en omgång alltså! hon bara blow, jag bara (extatiskt röst) ahh! 5. Mark: Alem, du var den femte! 6. Alem: sug min mammas död, jag var den första! horunge, jag var den första som fick blow! hon bara kom såhär. 7. Mark: ja, men du baza [knulla] henne fem! 8. Alem: jag baza aldrig henne! 9. Mark: du sa ju det! du bara, vilket hål ska jag stoppa in den i? 10. Alem (skriker): jag är oskuld! (skratt) 11. Mark: du sa så här, vilket hål ska jag stoppa den i? (skratt) 12. Alem: nej, alltså, jag drev men... 13. Mark: ljug inte! ... du var femma! 14. Alem (högt): jag var etta! 15. Mark: efter alla hade pippat henne, han pippa henne! 16. Alem: jag hade aldrig fått nåt, jag stod mot väggen så här bara, åh nu kommer jag snart, hon bara drog ner byxorna, hon tog fram den då var den redan bånge! (Alem visar med handen i luften). den såhär det var svårt du vet, ah! (skratt) sen jag, jag vet inte vad som hände...vad var det? (många skratt) det var mörkt också, jag kunde inte se vart fittan var! (skratt) jag bara vart ska jag stoppa in den? hon stod där, hon mecka med den som en bilmotor så här. (Alem visar med handen i luften)

(killarna skrattar)

17. Forskare: 18. Alem:

vaddå Mark, att han var femma? var ni flera som hade sex med henne? ja (skratt) [---]

(En diskussion uppstår om olika namn på killar som var med och Alem tillägger att de senare fortsatte ut till en badplats, där sexet skulle ha fortsatt)

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19. Emre: 20. Mark: 21. Alem: 22. Emre: 23. Mark: 24. Alem: 25. Calle:

fick Salle baz då? hur länge red hon, en timme? alltså, mitt ute vid badplatsen, sen, hon bara börja blowa honom, vi bara, hon driver med mister president [penisen], så här. ey, vad heter hon? [---] vad heter hon? Anne. vem fan vill ha henne nu liksom, hon är fan knullad överallt!

1. Alem: 2. Nejib: 3. Mark: 4. Alem: 5. Mark: 6. Alem: 7. Mark: 8. Alem: 9. Mark: 10. Alem:(yells) 11. Mark: 12. Alem: 13. Mark: 14. Alem: (loud) 15. Mark: 16. Alem:

that was Anne last summer! yeah, I’ve heard about her, I have heard about her, she’s good. at Danne’s? oh, that was really a round! she like blew, I just like (ecstatic voice) ahh! Alem, you were the fifth! suck my mother’s death, I was the first one! bastard, I was the first one who got sucked! she just came like this. yeah, but you fucked her fifth! I never fucked her! you said you did! you said, which hole should I stick it in? I’m a virgin! (laughs) you said like this, which hole should I stick it in? (laughs) no, I mean, I did but ... don’t lie! … you were fifth! I was first! after everybody screwed her, he screwed her! I had never gotten any, I just stood against the wall like this oh now I’m coming soon, she like pulled down my pants, she took it out and it was already hard! (Alem shows with his hand in the air). like this it was difficult you know, ah (laugh) then I, I don’t know what happened... what was it? (many laughs) it was dark outside too, I couldn’t see where the pussy was! (laughs) I’m like, where should I stick it? she stood there, she worked with it like a car engine like this (Alem shows with his hand in the air)

(the boys laugh)

17. Researcher: 18. Alem:

what do you mean Mark, about him being fifth? were there several of you who had sex with her? yes (laughs) [---]


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(A discussion starts about different names of boys who participated ensues, and Alem adds that they went to a beach where the sex supposedly continued)

19. Emre: 20. Mark: 21. Alem: 22. Emre: 23. Mark: 24. Alem: 25. Calle:

did Salle get some then? how long did she ride, an hour? well, right outside at the beach, then she started blowing him, we like, she’s playing with mister president [the penis], like this. ey, what’s her name? [---] what’s her name? Anne. who the hell wants her now, she’s fucked all over!

If we cast a cursory glance at the form of this episode, it would not be particularly contentious to conclude that this interaction is a typical instance of male antagonism (between Mark and Alem), which is broadly in tune with the many examples provided by Coates (1997) in her analyses of all-male talk in the British context. As for content, we might well infer that this extract is a textual manifestation of misogynist discourse, in which the female character (Anne) is reduced to a sexual commodity, an object that, having been used, no one wants any more. However, as we will illustrate in the remainder of this section, such interpretations, albeit not unwarranted, are too simplistic, not least because they fail to do justice to the multilayered complexity of this interaction. If we set aside for a moment the sexist undertones of the narrative and concentrate instead on how the story builds up, this episode can be described as a ‘small story’ (Georgakopoulou 2007: 598) in the sense that, unlike a lengthy monologue, it is an interactionally achieved, relatively short-lived narrative that literally unfolds as it is being told. And this is the result of both competition and co-operation between the participants (cf. Cameron 1997: 58–59). The competitive element is patent in Mark’s dual challenge towards Alem as the narrator and main character of the narrative, the two being closely intertwined. In fact, Mark disputes the truth value of the content of Alem’s account viz. what specific type of sexual activity took place, i.e. oral vs. vaginal intercourse. What is particularly relevant, however, is how Alem shifts his line of argument after Mark’s threefold objection (Turns 7, 9 and 11). Of course, the discrepancy between Mark’s and Alem’s viewpoints on the matter, coupled with Alem’s sudden backtracking, could be interpreted as indices of the fictional nature of this story. As it would be pointed out several months later, it was only ‘exaggerated talk’. Alternatively, Alem’s backtrack could also be interpreted as a textual cue of his co-operation in constructing a shared narrative together with Mark. According to such a view, accommodating to Mark and admitting to having had vaginal sex are by no means signs of failure.

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Rather, they are strategic moves through which Alem takes advantage of a challenge emerging within the interactive situation, and appropriates it so as to display himself as a more sexually experienced young man. The accomplishment of this powerful heterosexual masculine identity, however, is undermined by Mark’s textual attacks directed at Alem as a character in the story. First, no sooner has Alem started to describe the pleasure resulting from the sexual act than he is immediately undermined in his role of protagonist. This is insofar as Mark questions his classmate’s position in the hierarchy of the other participants in the group sex activity. Needless to say, being first (and not fifth) is a highly valuable position. It is obvious then that the questioning of such primacy generates the immediate reaction of Alem, who counter-attacks with the derogatory expression ‘Suck my mother’s death!’ Here the creative combination of two formulaic insults – ‘suck my dick’ and ‘I swear on my mother’s death’ – allows Alem to swear himself free from an accusation without sounding compliant; through the verb ‘suck,’ he can defend himself and be offensive at the same time. Mark’s second textual attack targets Alem’s sexual skills. In this respect, it is interesting how Mark skilfully manages this potentially face-threatening accusation by attributing to Alem the question: ‘Where should I put it in?’ Whether Alem ‘really’ asked this question is ultimately beyond the point. But what is key for the purpose of this interaction is that, by displacing the authorship of the question on to Alem, Mark downplays his responsibility and thereby contributes to mitigating the negative force of his attack. That said, Alem reappropriates and recontextualizes the utterance attributed to him. Through recontextualization, the meaning of the question changes in such a way that it has rather less to do with his sexual (in)experience than with the darkness of the location in which the sexual act allegedly took place. Thus, in making fun of himself, Alem not only takes control of the accusation, but also employs humour as a strategy through which he can tone down his potential failure and save face. Finally, one should observe Mark’s and Alem’s ‘non standard’ usage of the adverb bara (lit. just/only) as a quotative, which is reminiscent of one the functions of the discourse marker ‘like’ in American English (Cameron 1997). It is now well-established that the usage of bara as a quotative is age-dependent and characterizes youth language, irrespective of gender and ethnic identification. These findings have recently been substantiated further by a study (Svensson 2009) that shows how bara and its shortened form ba are the most frequent quotative marker in the conversation of twelve female teenagers in the city of Malmö. Interestingly, Svensson argues that, from a pragmatic perspective, bara in itself does not indicate any form of cooperation between the participants in her study; its usage ‘as


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a quotative marks nonetheless [a sense of ] belonging to youth language. Therefore, a sense of community and proximity is enhanced among those who use this discourse particle’ (Svensson 2009: 225, our translation). To sum up, the storytelling reproduced in Extract 5 is indeed competitive. This does not mean though that competition necessarily rules out cooperation. As Cameron puts it, ‘Participants in a conversation or other speech event may compete with each other and at the same time be pursuing a shared common project or common agenda’ (1997: 59). In our view, interactional enjoyment constitutes another vital component of the common project in this speech event. The notion of desire will help us to explain this point. However controversial and fuzzy this concept might be, we concur with Cameron and Kulick (2003: 138ff ) that desire can help us to move beyond the description of palpable ‘acts of identities’ (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985) in talk in interaction, so as to grasp what remains partly unsaid, but can be perceived (among other things) through ethnographic observation. This is not equal to saying that identity is irrelevant in the extract above. What Alem does (with the help of Mark) is to display himself as a heterosexual young man who vocalizes – quite literally – his erotic attraction to women. In turn, the reinscription of heterosexuality is a warrant for homosociality not to fade into homosexuality. Yet, to the extent that sexuality is not only about sex, desire cannot be reducible to the domain of the erotic only (Bucholtz and Hall 2003; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Eckert 2002), but, together with fear, captures more broadly the role played by ‘powerful feelings in shaping forms of action’ (Lemke 2007: 23). Therefore, desire allows us to highlight another important aspect of this episode, namely the fact that these male adolescents are engaged in the joint creation of enjoyment. Semiotically, this not only emerges as sexual juissance in Alem’s ‘response cry’ (Goffmann 1981) (Turn 4), but is also manifested more mundanely in the many giggles, laughs and friendly atmosphere. Moreover, if we agree with Kiesling (this issue) that we cannot understand identity performances without taking into account audiences as well, the shared production of enjoyment in Extract 5 is only meaningful if related to the person for whom this interaction is ‘staged’, namely the male researcher who initiated the discussion (cf. Rampton’s 2006 notion of ‘artful performance’). On the basis of the ethnographic perception of this particular interaction, coupled with more long-standing observations of similar speech events, we would argue that the driving force behind the enjoyment of the participants is a powerful desire for transgressing the boundaries of what is considered ‘taboo’ for a teenager when an adult is present in the school environment. This leads us to conclude along similar lines to Eckert (2002: 108) that ‘exaggerated talk’ about real or purported

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sexual activities is not just about sex; nor is it only about performing heterosexual masculinity, but it is also about displaying oneself as ‘tough’, ‘daring’ and ‘mature’. In conclusion, this small story can be taken as an example of how the boys in our study construct a joint narrative event in which competition and cooperation are important strategies through which positions of power, authority, and solidarity are negotiated in a same sex environment in which a male researcher is present (cf. Kiesling 1997; 2002). Crucially, this apparently ephemeral hierarchy is not unrelated to the more stable structural positions of power occupied by the boys in the peer-group (cf. Kiesling 1997). Fieldwork observations attest to Alem’s leading role as skilled orator in the group, one who has mastered the art of telling enjoyable stories and delivering quick lines, and therefore he occupies a position of privilege and respect among the boys. What this particular conversation exemplifies, however, is how status and prestige are not irreversible givens in the peer group, but can be undermined by an act of resistance on the part of Mark, who is otherwise quieter and more withdrawn. His sharp and persistent comments put Alem in a less favourable position; he who is normally ‘at the top’ of the group is portrayed as number five, or last. Hence, Mark challenges – albeit momentarily – the hierarchy in the boys’ structural arrangements. Concluding remarks Butler provocatively proposes that ‘If the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’ (1993: 228). Put differently, inherent to queer is a destabilizing force which never bends itself to any pressure emanating from political and academic conformism, and thus produces often uncomfortable stories which seek to debunk dominant discourses of language, gender and sexuality. It goes without saying that we have not employed the term queer as a shorthand for gay and lesbian. Rather, the queer dimension of this paper lies in the attempt to denaturalize the matrix of intelligibility in Swedish society according to which ‘multi-ethnic lads’ slang’ is an incomprehensible jabbering. Unlike dominant media representations which depict such linguistic practices as inherently homophobic, we have shown how heteronormativity and homophobia do not ‘naturally’ flow from the young men’s ethnicity, but are part of the school as a whole, as well as key components in the teaching strategy of a Swedish teacher. Furthermore,


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we have shown how ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynist talk are far from being unintelligible, but are deeply meaningful in the sense that they constitute a rich pool of interactional resources that allow the young men in our study actively to partake in the negotiation of a ‘local masculine order’ (Evaldsson 2005: 764) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested. About the authors Tommaso M. Milani is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Rickard Jonsson is lecturer ar CEIFO/ department of Child andYouth Studies, Stockholm University. Notes 1 All translations from Swedish are our own. 2 It is important to mention that the translation of the word blatte as ‘immigrant’ fails to render the complexity of its referential and social meanings. According to Svenska Språknämnden (the Swedish Language Council), the word is attested in written form as a derogatory synonym of invandrare (immigrant) or utlänning (foreigner) from 1986 (cf. Jonsson 2007: 10).However, Lacatus (2008) explains that blatte does not simply index ethnicity in the sense of anyone who is (perceived as) non-Swedish, but is a fluid concept encoding the link between particular ethnicities, social class, and cultural background. Furthermore, Lacatus (2008) insists that the derogatory loading is not inherent in blatte but depends on who uses it, in what context and for what purpose. 3 Miljon (lit. ‘million’) alludes to a social and architectural project which took place in Sweden in the mid-1960s – the so-called Miljonprogrammet (lit. ‘Million Programme’). The Social Democratic government of the time set out to construct one million dwellings within a period of ten years (1965–1974). Rising immigration rates, together with particular housing allocation policies and practices, led to an increasingly high concentration of migrants living in the high-rise buildings of the Million Programme. 4 ‘Compulsory school’ is the official translation of grundskola given by the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket). It refers to municipally run mandatory education for children between the age of 7 and 16. 5 It is the last year of mandatory education. 6 Text in round brackets ( ) explain acts, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. By [---] we show that information has been left out, whereas information in [ ] has been added to make the translation more idiomatic. In order to indicate a pause, we use … whereas italics have been employed to mark emphasis.

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7 Mengistu was born in Sweden and is of Somali descent. When asked how he identifies himself, Mengistu quickly answers: ‘I call myself black’ (jag kallar mig svart). We reveal this information because, as one of the anonymous reviewers aptly pointed out, Mengistu’s usage of the slur ‘Arab cunt’ would have a very different meaning if he identified himself as ‘Arab’. In that case, it would be a semantic reappropriation from within the category ‘Arab’.

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Gender and Language

Article

The strategic marginalization of workingclass masculinity in a batterers’ treatment programme Susan Ehrlich and Susan Levesque Abstract In this paper, we consider how ideologies about heterosexual working-class masculinity play a symbolic role for middle-class, educated men in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme. We suggest that the middle-class, educated men who are the focus of this paper create identities for themselves by a process of differentiation, in particular, by distancing themselves from the majority of the men in the batterers’ group who supposedly embody a heterosexual working-class masculinity. More specifically, we argue that this kind of identity construction is an integral part of the middle-class men’s accounts of their violence: by differentiating themselves from those who they represent as ‘real abusers’ they manage to diminish and minimize their responsibility for their acts of violence against their domestic partners. keywords: masculinity; domestic violence; violence against women; identity

Affiliation York University, Toronto email: [email protected]; [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.267

www.equinoxpub.com

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Susan Ehrlich and Susan Levesque

Introduction R.W. Connell, in his well-known work on masculinities (e.g. 1987; 1995), has argued for the necessity of recognizing multiple masculinities and the relations among them – relations of alliance, domination and subordination. In particular, the interplay of gender with other structures such as race and class creates these kinds of relationships among masculinities, legitimizing and protecting some versions – what Connell calls hegemonic masculinity – and marginalizing and subordinating others. For example, Connell (1995) talks about how race relations in the United States play an integral role in the power dynamic among masculinities. He argues that ‘in a white supremacist context, black masculinities play symbolic roles for white gender construction. For instance, black sporting stars become exemplars of masculine toughness, while the fantasy figure of the black rapist plays an important role in sexual politics among whites, a role much exploited by right-wing politics in the United States’ (Connell 1995: 80). In this paper, we want to consider how ideologies about a different kind of heterosexual masculinity – working class masculinity – play a symbolic role for middle-class, educated men in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme. We suggest that the middle-class, educated men who are the focus of this paper create identities for themselves by a process of differentiation, in particular, by distancing themselves from the majority of the men in the batterers’ group who supposedly embody a heterosexual workingclass masculinity. More specifically, we argue that this kind of identity construction is an integral part of the middle-class men’s accounts of their violence: by differentiating themselves from those who they represent as ‘real abusers’ they manage to diminish and minimize their responsibility for their acts of violence against their domestic partners. In previous work on class-based masculinities, Pyke (1996) has suggested that the hegemonic masculinity associated with white, middleclass and upper-class men and the subordinated masculinity associated with lower-class men are constructed in relation to one another. In particular, Pyke (1996: 531) claims that the kind of hyper-masculinity found among working-class men ‘can be understood as both a response to ascendant masculinity and its unintentional booster’. By this, she means that working-class men, in a compensatory response to their subordinate status vis-à-vis middle- and upper-class men (often in the workplace), represent their version of masculinity as the ‘true’ masculinity, characterizing more privileged men as effeminate or as ‘wimps’. At the same time, middle- and upper-class men display disdain for the physical violence and misogyny that characterize working-class masculinity and, in expressing such disdain, according to Pyke, ‘reaffirm their superiority over lower-class

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men and disguise themselves as exemplars of egalitarianism in their interpersonal relations with women’. Pyke’s comments here resonate with those of Ehrenreich (1983), who, following Tolson (1977), argues that workingclass masculinity can be understood as a way of signifying power in workplace relations with management, i.e. with middle- and upper-class men. While Ehrenreich (1983: 135) is suggesting here that ‘“working-class male chauvinism” might be an expression of class, rather than gender, antagonism’, she also says that this does not prevent middle-class men from invoking stereotypes of working-class men as macho and misogynist in an attempt to excuse and minimize their own sexist beliefs and behaviours. In Pyke’s words, they ‘disguise themselves as exemplars of egalitarianism’. What we see in the work of Pyke and Ehrenreich, then, is the significance of class-based relations among men for the formation of different kinds of masculine identities. Under the accounts of both Pyke and Ehrenreich, middle-class men invoke the physical violence and misogyny associated with working-class masculinity as a way of differentiating themselves from, and asserting superiority over, working-class men. In keeping with the work of Pyke and Ehrenreich, in this paper we are also interested in how men use class distinctions in order to construct their masculine identities. However, rather than assuming a priori that certain versions of masculinity are dominant and others subordinate, as much work in the sociology of masculinity does, we, by contrast, explore how these relations of dominance and subordination are actively accomplished by men in particular interactional contexts (see Wetherell and Edley 1999 for a similar approach). Put more specifically, rather than assume that hegemonic masculinity is embodied by white middle- and upper-class men who control economic and political institutions, as Pyke (1996) does, or that hegemonic masculinity can be equated with a particular style of masculinity, as Connell’s early work does,1 we explore how men discursively produce these hierarchies of masculinities. Furthermore, we examine the production of these hierarchies in local discursive contexts because we believe, following Wetherell and Edley (1999: 337) that ‘hegemonic strategies can vary across different parts of a social formation’ at any point in time.2 So, for instance, while certain traits of working-class masculinity, specifically macho masculinity, have often been associated with hegemonic masculinity (see Wetherell and Edley 1999), in the context of this batterers’ treatment programme we argue that working-class masculinity is discursively constructed as non-hegemonic. In other words, it is discursively subordinated and made marginal by the middle-class, educated men as they attempt to accomplish certain interactional goals. Indeed, we suggest that the precise ways in which masculine identities are constituted in our data and, correspondingly, the ways in which some masculinities are

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produced as dominant and others as subordinate are influenced to a great extent by the local discourse context in which the men’s talk is produced – an interview conducted by a feminist academic researcher. This is not to say that we are inattentive to the broader cultural discourses that our men draw upon in constructing their identities; rather, our argument is that the particular cultural discourses our men draw upon – those that denigrate and marginalize working-class masculinities – are fitted to their interactional goals in this particular context. By differentiating themselves from a version of masculinity that is strongly associated with physical violence, these middle-class men attempt to diminish the magnitude of their own physical violence against their domestic partners. Discourse and identity In considering the way that masculine identities are produced in discourse, we adopt a ‘broadly social constructionist’ approach (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 4) to discourse and identity. Under such an approach, identity is not viewed as a stable, pre-discursive construct residing within an individual, but rather as a construct that emerges in discourse and in other semiotic practices. This approach has its genesis in a variety of intellectual traditions, for example, ethnomethodology where individuals are conceptualized as ‘doing’ identity (Fenstermaker and West 2002; West and Zimmerman 1987) and postmodern approaches to identity (Butler 1990) where individuals are understood as ‘performing’ or enacting identity.3 The ‘performing’ or ‘doing’ of identity is probably most evident when nonnormative identities are involved. In other words, the theoretical claim of Butler’s (1990) – that identities do not exist beyond their expression – is probably most transparent when an individual’s ‘expressions’ of identity depart from what we take to be their ‘true’ identity. Hall (1995), for example, investigated the discursive identities projected by telephone sex workers in California, demonstrating that many of them were consciously and deliberately performing versions of femininity that deviated from their so-called ‘true’ identities. African-American women performed white identities, white women performed Latina identities and a majority of the workers were lesbians performing hyper-stylized versions of heterosexuality. (Indeed, one of the workers was a man.) While Hall’s work shows very dramatically how identities emerge within discourse (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), the claim we are making, following much contemporary research on identity, is that even the most normative of identities are discursively produced. That is, like the telephone sex workers of Hall’s study, individuals do not simply act out pre-existing identity categories; rather, they are always actively involved in the ‘doing’ of identity work.


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The idea that identity does not arise from a ‘true’ self ‘lurking behind discourse’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 4) – but rather is constituted in discourse – underlies our investigation of the identity work accomplished by middle-class men in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme. As noted above, we demonstrate below how these men discursively produce hierarchies of masculinities, constructing their identities by distancing themselves from the majority of the men within the group who supposedly personify working-class masculinity. However, because we assume that identity unfolds in concrete social interactions in response to the everchanging needs of interlocutors and of situations, we also elucidate contradictions in the talk of the men. That is, the identities constructed by the men at times exhibited inconsistencies in keeping with the emerging and shifting demands of the interactional context in which their talk occurred. Previous research on interviews with batterers Previous research on interviews with men who have battered their domestic partners has shown that they typically employ discursive strategies that downplay and minimize their responsibility for such violence. A number of researchers, for example, have documented the types of excuses, justifications and rationalizations that batterers employ in mitigating their culpability for the abuse of their partners (e.g. Adams, Towns and Gavey 1995; Cavanaugh, Dobash, Dobash and Lewis 2001; Dobash, Dobash, Cavanaugh and Lewis 1998; Hearn 1998; Ptacek 1990; Wood 2004). Following the work of Goffman (1971), Cavanaugh, Dobash, Dobash and Lewis (2001) characterize such accounts and explanations as ‘remedial work’ – discursive work that, according to Goffman, has the effect of transforming morally offensive behaviour into behaviour that is viewed as socially acceptable. Still other researchers have attempted to make links between batterers’ accounts of their violence and the construction of masculinity (e.g. Anderson and Umberson 2001; Hearn 1998; Mullaney 2007). Taking an approach to discourse and identity that is similar to the one adopted in this paper, Anderson and Umberson (2001: 359) argue that ‘batterers attempt to construct masculine identities through the practice of violence and the discourse about violence they provide’ (emphasis ours). While beliefs about masculinity are implicated in men’s violence and in the explanations they provide for such violence, at the same time, these are practices ‘that domestically violent men use to present themselves as masculine actors’ (Anderson and Umberson 2001: 374). Ultimately, researchers such as Anderson and Umberson (2001) and Mullaney (2007) argue that batterers’ discourse about violence, like the violence itself, functions to

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reproduce a gendered hierarchy. In this paper, we are also interested in the social hierarchies that are produced in the talk of batterers; however, our findings suggest, following Connell (1995), that batterers’ talk is another site where masculinities are not only produced in relation to femininities but also in relation to each other. Put somewhat differently, unlike other work that has been conducted on interviews with batterers, our interview data demonstrate the relevance of class-based relations among men to the formation of masculine identities and to the construction of masculine hierarchies. The batterers’ treatment programme The data presented in this paper come from audio-taped interviews with three men who were completing a sixteen-week batterers’ treatment programme in Toronto, Canada and from field notes compiled during group sessions that form an integral part of the programme.4 This treatment programme, called Next Steps, aims to provide men who have pleaded guilty to or have been found guilty of domestic violence-related crimes with new understandings of their violent and controlling behaviour and with strategies that will allow them to make choices that are non-violent in the future. In particular, the programme facilitators, some of whom have themselves been abusers, seek to interrupt clients’ talk in which the clients minimize and/or deny their violent behaviour and to replace it with talk where the men assume responsibility for their choice to behave violently. These groups include men who are court-mandated and men who are socially mandated. Men who are court-mandated are required to attend the programme as part of their sentence or as a condition of their parole; men who are socially mandated are typically pressured by their partners to attend the programme. The vast majority of the men who attend the programme are court-mandated, and this was true of the three men who are the focus of this paper. The Next Steps programme uses a modified version of the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) curriculum, a curriculum that employs something called the ‘Equality Wheel’ as a means of identifying behaviours that provide the basis for an egalitarian relationship between a man and a woman. The facilitators in the programme are meant to ‘focus on the man’s behaviour’ as opposed to his partner’s behaviour ‘in order to keep the abuser looking inward at his values and choices rather than [at] what [his partner] needs to do to keep him from being abusive’ (Pence and Paymar 1993: 5). Significant for our purposes is the fact that the curriculum focuses on reconfiguring gender identities and roles under the assumption that masculine codes of behaviour in the West promote and authorize the aggression and


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control that often leads to men’s violence against women. According to Schrock and Padavic (2007: 626), the goal of the Duluth curriculum ëisÖto change men from patriarchal authoritarians bent on controlling women into pro-feminist men. Doing so, the program philosophy assumes, will mitigate participantsí violence.’ The programme employs a broad definition of abuse, including, for example, financial abuse, emotional abuse and, of course, physical abuse. While the programme itself does not rank the various kinds of abuse on a hierarchy of severity or seriousness, it can be seen in what follows that the men in the group often do. That is, men in the group often regard physical abuse to be the most serious kind of abuse that they can inflict upon their domestic partners. The men’s hierarchy of abuse is undoubtedly related to culturally salient understandings of physical violence as more serious than other kinds of abuses of power and also to the fact that many forms of physical abuse are criminalized. Indeed, for the vast majority of men in the group, it was criminal acts of physical violence that brought them to the group in the first place. We return to some of these issues in the analysis section of the paper. In order to give readers a sense of how the group sessions operate, and how the facilitators use questions to disrupt the belief-systems that clients deploy to minimize and/or deny their violence, we present the following two examples taken from the second author’s field notes. (Note that because these examples are based on field notes and not audio-taped or video-taped recordings, they are not verbatim records of what transpired in the groups.) In both of the examples below, we see the Next Steps clients attempting to downplay their responsibility for the acts of violence they have committed by (1) minimizing the degree of harm done to their (ex) partners, (2) representing their violence as mutual, and/or (3) placing blame on other individuals or circumstances. The two examples are drawn from introductory in-group interviews with one member of the counselling staff, Tobias, and two clients, Cam and Ethan, who were attending their first session in the programme.5 Whenever men enter the treatment programme, they are asked to talk about three things in their first group session: their name, what brought them to the programme and what they hope to get out of the programme. Example 1 Tobias: Let’s start by naming what brought you here and what you would like to change in the program? Cam: I had an argument with my wife. It got out of hand. I pulled her hair and now I’m here. Tobias: You were charged with assault? Cam: [nods]

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Tobias: What have you done to your wife that was violent or controlling or abusive, just hair pulling? Cam: We were drinking a bit. We were both arguing, then she left and called the cops. Usually she doesn’t drink. Tobias: Was she surprised? Why do you think she called the police? Cam: I don’t know. Tobias: How you feel about being here? Cam: Well, I am embarrassed. Tobias: [talks about his own abusive behaviour with his wife] Tobias: What would you like to get out of the program? Cam: I would like to be a little calmer. But we don’t have a lot of problems. We get along well.

In Example 1 we see Cam identify ‘an argument with [his] wife’ that ‘got out of hand’ as his reason for being in the program. While he admits to pulling his wife’s hair, he follows this admission with a simple ‘and now I am here’. Thus, an out-of-hand argument and the pulling of his wife’s hair constitute his initial explanation for his court-mandated attendance at Next Steps. In offering ‘an argument’ as the reason for his attendance at Next Steps, Cam suggests that the conflict, and the resulting violence, was mutual, thereby diminishing his responsibility for the events. Similarly, he says that the argument ‘got out of hand’ as though the argument is an active agent and a wilful participant in the events. Furthermore, although Cam acknowledges that he pulled his wife’s hair, he provides no other relevant information. Indeed, what is particularly interesting at this point is Tobias’s follow up question, ‘You were charged with assault?’, which constitutes a challenge to Cam’s minimization of the severity of his violence. That is, the question demonstrates that Cam’s behaviour was serious enough to result in assault charges. When Cam fails to elaborate, Tobias asks a direct question about the specific behaviour that gave rise to the charges. Cam’s reply is evasive: ‘We were drinking a bit. We were both arguing, then she left and called the cops. Usually she doesn’t drink.’ Again, Cam plays down his own responsibility for the violence by highlighting mutuality (‘we were both arguing’) and then points to alcohol as an explanatory and exculpatory factor. In particular, by calling attention to the unusualness of his wife’s drinking, Cam implies that it is his wife’s behaviour that is relevant to the violence that ensued. Example 2 below resembles Example 1 in that, Ethan, like Cam, avoids taking responsibility for his abusive behaviour by (1) minimizing the degree of harm done to (ex) partners, (2) representing the violence as mutual, and/ or (3) placing blame on other individuals or circumstances. Example 2 Tobias: Who’s next, Ethan? What happened? Ethan: My ex-girlfriend, Amy, cheated behind my back.


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Tobias: How do you know? Ethan: [no response] Tobias: How do you feel being here? Ethan: Pissed off. Plain and simple. I was trying to leave and she started hitting me. [laughs] The problem is women have too many rights. All she has to do is make a statement and the police believe her. Tobias: Can you tell us what happened? Ethan: [shrugs] Sometimes push comes to shove. Tobias: What were you charged with? Ethan: Assault. Assault with a weapon. It was a four-year relationship. There were lots of arguments. Tobias: Have you ever broken anything around the house? Ethan: The phone. Tobias: Were you violent in other relationships? Ethan: The relationship was abusive on both parts [Ethan describes Amy’s ‘screaming and yelling’] Tobias: You’re saying that she would get angry and yell at you but we are not here to focus on Amy, we need to focus on your behavior. Ethan: My behavior? There would have been no behavior if she had let me leave. Tobias: If you could do it all again what would you do differently? Ethan: I would have left sooner Tobias: [Tells a story about a man who at the end of the program said he punched his wife so many times he doesn’t remember how many. He also says that a big theme in the program is the theme of choices that the men will learn they commit choices] Tobias: What do you want to learn from the program? Ethan: I want to learn. I want to learn control and to leave before it happens.

Ethan responds to Tobias’s initial question ‘What happened?’ with the reply ‘My ex-girl friend, Amy, cheated behind my back.’ This response goes some way in holding Amy responsible for the violence Ethan inflicted upon her as it invokes the idea that girlfriends who cheat on their partners deserve punishment. Tobias not only resists this idea, he also overtly questions the truth-value of Ethan’s claim. As a strategy of intervention, then, Tobias highlights the often-insufficient evidence jealous partners have when reacting to their spouses’ supposed infidelity. As we saw in Example 1, Tobias asks Ethan, ‘How do you feel about being here?’ and Ethan offers in reply ‘Pissed off plain and simple.’ Ethan continues by identifying ‘the problem’: women have too many rights and the police are too eager to believe them. The fact that Ethan asserts this baldly and unapologetically in the context of a batterers’ educational programme speaks to the relative acceptability of this kind of sense-making framework. At the least, Ethan must believe that his comments will resonate with the

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other men in the group. Following up on ‘Can you tell us what happened?’, Ethan shrugs and says, ‘Sometimes push comes to shove.’ Ethan’s response echoes the simplicity and seeming inevitability of Cam’s reply above. Like ‘I pulled her hair and now I am here’, Ethan’s ‘Sometimes push comes to shove’ signals that he acted in some common-sensical and logical way. Tobias continues by asking the question ‘What were you charged with?’, highlighting, as he did with Cam, both the criminality and the responsibility that is denied in Ethan’s narrative. While Ethan answers the question concerning the specifics of the charge, he elaborates by reintroducing the theme of mutuality. His next few turns attempt to present a mutually volatile relationship where Amy, his ex-girlfriend, should be seen as (equally) culpable. Tobias attempts to reroute this other-blaming and focus Ethan on his own behaviour. Ethan insists that without Amy ‘there would have been no behaviour.’ Ethan’s attempts to focus blame on his ex-girlfriend remain largely ineffective in his intake interview. It is, in fact, quite common for the men to implicate their spouses in the events that led to their arrest and attendance in the programme. It is also typical that these descriptions of women partners provoking the men’s violence remain unexplored in the group sessions, that is, they are not granted legitimacy by the facilitators. As we see in Example 2, Tobias re-routes this kind of talk with a question that encourages Ethan to focus on his own behaviour. The preceding two examples are meant to provide readers with a sense of what goes on in the group sessions of the batterers’ treatment programme, in particular, how the clients attempt to deny or minimize their violence and how the facilitators attempt, through their questioning, to help the men take responsibility for their violent behaviour. We now want to turn to the three interviews that are the focus of the remainder of the paper. These were follow-up interviews conducted by the second author at a point in time when all three men were close to the end of their sixteen-week programme. Each interview lasted between 45 minutes to an hour and was audiotaped and later transcribed. Interviews were conducted at the location where the group sessions took place at a time either immediately before or immediately after a group session. The interviews were semistructured; the questions that structured the interviews are included in the appendix to this paper. The second author was familiar to all of the men in the group as she had been an observer of their group sessions for a period of approximately eight weeks. The men knew she was not part of the staff of the Next Steps programme, but rather that she was a graduate student in Women’s Studies who was conducting research on the Next Steps programme and men’s violence against women for her dissertation project. That is, the men understood that she was an outsider to the organization, yet all had agreed


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that she could attend the group sessions for the purposes of her research. While she requested follow-up interviews with all of the men participating in the group, it is perhaps not surprising that the vast majority of those who agreed to the follow-up interviews were middle-class, educated men with white-collar jobs. Indeed, the three men whose interviews we focus on here were all middle class and educated, had white-collar jobs, and all received ‘favourable’ reports upon completion of the program. (All of the men who completed the programme received reports that were forwarded to a judge or a parole officer. These reports were classified as either ‘favourable’ or ‘unfavourable.) Identities defined by distinction and differentiation One of the most striking aspects of the interviews was the way that all three men attempted to differentiate and distance themselves from other members of the group as a way of making sense of their presence in a batterers’ treatment programme. Bucholtz and Hall (2004a; 2004b; 2005), in their framework for the analysis of identity in interaction, call this kind of identity tactic (what they refer to as a ‘tactic of intersubjectivity’) ‘distinction’, that is, a process whereby social boundaries are created between individuals or groups through the erasure of likeness and the highlighting of difference. Kiesling (2006: 264–265) describes a similar kind of process in his discussion of ‘hegemonic identity-making’, but, for Kiesling, this process does not only create distinction, it also creates hierarchy. More specifically, ‘marking the Other’ is ‘a discursive meta-strategy which situates the speaker as a member of a dominant, or central, social group by creating an “other,” marginalized category’ (Kiesling 2006: 264–265).6 While the vast majority of the men in the Next Steps groups, including the middle-class men who are the focus of this paper, were there because they had been convicted of domestic violence-related crimes (indeed, most of them had pleaded guilty to these crimes), the tactic of distinction adopted by these three men downplayed this similarity and created a hierarchical distinction between themselves and the other members of the group. Indeed, the three men invoked their position as middle-class, educated men as a way of differentiating themselves from ‘working-class’ masculinity, a version of masculinity that they discursively marginalized because of its associations with machismo, brute force and physical violence. Previous research on men who have battered their domestic partners, as noted above, has shown that they typically employ discursive strategies that downplay and minimize their violence. What is unique about the men whose talk we analyse in this section is their strategic use of ideas about heterosexual working-class masculinity in achieving such goals.

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For example, Hearn (1998: 81) makes the point that men who have been violent to their partners generally represent themselves as atypical violent men. They present themselves ‘as other than, separate from some supposed centre of violence’ (emphasis in original). Hearn elaborates: Men in different agency contexts are well able to define themselves as not typical ‘men who are violent to women’ or ‘wife batterers.’ They are (almost) always exceptions. They may define their violence as occasional, infrequent, ‘one-off ’, as a response to ‘the relationship’, or a reaction to alleged provocation (by the women) (Hearn 1998: 81).

In a similar way, Wood (2004) identifies the theme of ‘dissociation’ in the talk of incarcerated men who have committed intimate partner violence. According to Wood (2004: 571), men who employed this theme in accounts of their violence actively repudiated ‘identification with “abusers” or “really violent” men’. And, like the men Hearn discusses above, Wood’s participants asserted that by limiting the degree and frequency of their violence, ‘they evaded the category of abusers because real abusers do not limit their violence’ (emphasis in original). Finally, Stokoe (2010) shows how male suspects (within the context of police interrogations) denied accusations that they assaulted women by constructing different categories of men – those who hit women and those who do not – and locating themselves in the latter category. The work of Hearn, Wood and Stokoe, then, demonstrates how violent men will attempt to distance themselves from what Hearn (1998: 81) calls ‘some supposed centre of violence or violent men’. While the men discussed in this section of the paper also make efforts to differentiate themselves from men who are ‘real abusers’, they do not locate this ‘centre of violence’ in an abstract kind of man (e.g. ‘the abusive man’ or ‘the kind of man who hits women’), like the men in Hearn’s, Wood’s and Stokoe’s studies do. Rather, they invoke class-based relations among men and situate the ‘centre of violence’ in the heterosexual working-class masculinity that they claim is embodied in the majority of men in the Next Steps group. Constructing working-class men as violent

In the following examples, we see Nicholas, Edward and Callum invoking attributes and activities symbolically associated with working-class masculinity (e.g. machismo, booze, abuse, brawls, etc.) and ascribing such attributes to other men in the group. By using other kinds of categories and attributes to describe themselves, the three men manage to distance themselves from the category of working-class masculinity and from the physical violence that is apparently at its core.


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In Example 3 below, Nicholas, a high-school teacher, is responding to a question about why he thinks he has made ‘great progress’ in the programme (Nicholas has just reported that a facilitator characterized his progress in this way in Week 4 of the programme) while other members of the group have been ‘very resistant’ to the philosophy of the Next Steps program. Example 3 Nicholas: I’m not (.) I don’t have much of those macho attitudes in my life. I just can’t remember being like that. I suppose I obviously was when I did this but I’ve never been one of those types of guys ah beer [drinking,] S.L.: [mhm ] Nicholas: sports loving, uh bar fights. S.L.: Well (.) you are a reader, I mean you [are ]7 Nicholas: [Some] of these chaps in the meeting talk about getting in bar brawls, I mean, this kind of attitude. I know these types of people I grew up with some of them, used to hang around with some of them when I was in high school.= S.L.: =mhm= Nicholas: =But to actually do it is just foreign to me.

Nicholas asserts that many of the men in the group are the ‘types of guys’ and ‘types of people’ who have ‘macho attitudes’, who are ‘beer drinking’ and ‘sports loving’ and who engage in ‘bar fights’ and ‘bar brawls’. By contrast, Nicholas doesn’t have ‘much of those macho attitudes’ and participating in these other activities is ‘just foreign to [him]’. In his well-known work on membership categorization devices, Harvey Sacks (1992) showed that it was possible to introduce a membership category into a scene by mentioning activities or attributes that were especially characteristic of that category’s members. So, while Nicolas does not explicitly name the type of guy he believes his fellow clients to be, he does describe their activities, or what he believes to be their activities. And, because these activities are stereotypically associated with the category of heterosexual working-class masculinity, Nicholas implicitly asserts their membership in this category. In a similar way, when Nicholas denies his participation in activities that are characteristic of this category, he, by extension, denies his membership in the category. Edward, a business executive, also makes reference to activities and attributes associated with working-class masculinity when describing the ‘other’ men in the group – a group that he has stated he does ‘not want to be a part of ’. When S.L. asks Edward, ‘what is it that you don’t want to be a part of ’, he responds in Example 4 with the rhetorical question ‘who are those guys’ (referring to the ‘other’ men in the group) and then proceeds to answer the question by saying that they are like the guys ‘you see on the street’ and, more specifically, that they are ‘bad news’ or ‘just bad’.

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Example 4 Edward: Okay uhm, who are those guys. ((long pause)) I don’t know man they’re they’re they were (.) like (.) they are the guys you see on the street sort of the guys where you drive into some town and you pop into go have a dinner somewhere or a drink somewhere and you see those guys in a corner. And you just know they are bad news. You know um I have I am well travelled I have been around the block a few times (.) and (.) I try not to judge (.) but out of the group of guys that I was with, you could take at least 70 per cent of those guys and you know they’re just they’re just bad.

In Example 5 Edward continues his characterization of the ‘other’ guys in the group. Example 5 Edward: In the way that they are not well travelled, in the way that they are not well educated, in the way that it’s safe to say that that that unfortunately, not that they chose to, but unfortunately they’ve grown up in bad families, you know, I am sure there’s been booze, I am sure there’s been abuse, you know, and where I look at myself and uhm I had two loving parents.

Here we see that the ‘other’ men in the group are ‘not well travelled’, ‘not well educated’ and ‘they’ve grown up in bad families’ where there has been ‘booze’ and ‘abuse’. Again, we would suggest that the activities and attributes that Edward ascribes to his cohorts in the group are those symbolically associated with working-class masculinity. By implication, then, the ‘other’ men are categorized as working-class men and Edward, through his description of himself (in Example 4) as ‘well-travelled’, as having ‘been around the block a few times and (in Example 5) as having ‘had two loving parents’, denies his membership in this category. The final example of this type comes from Callum, an executive chef. In Example 6 Callum is responding to a question about a previous statement he has made in the interview – that he does not think he is a monster. Example 6 Callum: I guess being here and (.) I I consider myself a fairly fairly intelligent educated person. Just seeing and hearing some of the things some of the things that go on out there I think it’s terrible. I didn’t realize that it’s that bad out there. I think that (.) a lot a lot of men out there are monsters. Right. Whether uhm (.) whether they’re aware of how damaging their behaviour is or not is irrelevant. You know you can (.) I think I think you can you can tame the beast.


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Again, a contrast is drawn between attributes such as intelligence and education, which Callum claims to possess, and the attributes of ‘monsters’ and ‘beasts’, which are imputed to the ‘other’ men in the group. Here, Callum conjures up stereotypes of working-class men as primitive, uncivilized and culturally retrograde (Ehrenreich 1983) and, at the same time, distances himself from such a stereotype with descriptions of his education and intelligence. What is also interesting about this example is the essentialist view of identity that Callum seems to espouse. While the ‘beastly’ nature of other clients can be ‘tamed’, it seems that the essential ‘beast’ remains. In the following two examples, we see Edward creating an even greater distinction between himself and the ‘other’ men in the group. Rather than invoking membership categories through the use of category-bound activities or attributes (Sacks 1992) Edward directly asserts his membership in categories that contrast quite strikingly with the category of workingclass masculinity. In Example 7, Edward is describing the violent incident that led to his arrest. Example 7 Edward: You know, I’ve never opened the door and attacked her I’ve never been so angry that I held her by the throat and choked her or hit her or or done god knows what I heard in there, you know. Ah (.) but that night (.) what happened was that we had just hit a point (.) and you know the first swing came from her. And again I am not saying that she did this so that allows me to do x. She came at me and I would say as a human defense mechanism maybe you would say or somebody else a third party would say as a male defense mechanism you would attack back, which is what I did. You know, and when the cops arrived, I put on my coat because I knew I was going to jail.

In this extract, Edward frames the discussion of his own violence with a description of some of the extreme cases of violence that he has heard about in the group (i.e. attacking a woman, holding a woman by the throat, choking a woman, hitting a woman) – acts of violence that he asserts he has ‘never’ committed. Moreover, the one act of violence that he admits committing is characterized as a ‘human defense mechanism’ as opposed to a ‘male defense mechanism’ (emphasis ours). By categorizing his behaviour as ‘human’ as opposed to ‘male’, Edward suggests that his violence was not motivated by the kind of power and control that is associated with masculinity and masculine codes of behaviour. Put somewhat differently, Edward seems to be rejecting the philosophy of the Next Steps programme and its attempts to make connections between the construction of masculine power and privilege and violence against women, at least in relation to his own violence.

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In Example 8, Edward is responding to a question about whether his experience in the group has changed his understanding of the connections between masculinity, male privilege, sexism and violence against women. Example 8 Edward: Uhm (.) and that was a scary realization to think yeah that is true. You think because you are a guy that you are somewhat different. And I have never thought that (.) I have never put those thoughts together.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: =But I lived by that rule.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: Uhm and yeah I mean maybe maybe I am not the best subject I guess because with regards to violence towards woman, I was sort of you know female. ((long pause)) I’ve always been the guy that I knew of when when I was in high school. I knew of one guy that beat up a girl (.) and (.) he was shamed out of the school.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: =You know, you just don’t do that. But that was like direct violence. Like he beat a girl up.

Edward begins his answer by acknowledging that it ‘was a scary realization’ to think about the relationship between male privilege and his own violence against his wife. He admits that ‘he has lived by that rule’. Soon after, however, Edward seems to want to distance himself from this ‘scary realization’. He states that ‘with regards to violence towards women’, he ‘was sort of…female’ and that maybe he is ‘not the best subject’. Edward seems to be saying here that he may not be the best candidate for the Next Steps programme, given that his relation to violence is more like that of a woman’s. Like Example 7, then, in Example 8 he is also categorizing himself as something other than a man, and, likewise, is characterizing his violence as something other than the violence of men. In Edward’s last turn in this excerpt, we see a description of the kind of violence Edward is trying to distance himself from: it is what he calls ‘direct violence’ and can involve ‘beat[ing] a girl up’. Moreover, ‘guys’ who engage in such violence are marginalized and ostracized: ‘the guy who beat up a girl…and was shamed out of the school.’ With Examples 3–8, we have attempted to show how Nicholas, Edward and Callum construct identities for themselves – through the use of categories and/or category-bound activities and attributes – that are in striking contrast to the working-class masculinity their fellow clients supposedly personify. In Examples 3–6, the men seem to assume membership in a kind of middleclass masculinity, one that is associated with intelligence, education and a loving, non-abusive family structure. And, in Examples 7 and 8, Edward


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works so hard at differentiating himself from the heterosexual working-class masculinity of the other men in the group that he ends up abandoning his masculinity altogether (at least temporarily). Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Hearts of Men (1983), has argued that the invoking of stereotypes of workingclass men as macho, physically backward and culturally retrograde may allow middle-class men to excuse and minimize their sexist beliefs and behaviour. We suggest, following Ehrenreich, that our middle-class men are using ideologies of working-class masculinity in precisely this way. By producing a hierarchy of masculinity and locating ‘real physical violence and abuse’ in a working-class masculinity that is embodied in ‘other’ men, Nicholas, Edward and Callum can view their own violence as anomalous and atypical, thereby preserving a view of themselves as essentially ‘good’ and ‘non-violent’ men. Constructing middle-class men’s violence as ‘atypical’

As noted above, Hearn (1998) and Wood (2004) both argue that one of the ways violent men are able to maintain a view of themselves as ‘non-violent’ and ‘non-abusive’ is by representing their violence as exceptional (Hearn 1998) or as limited in either in its frequency or degree (Wood 2004). These kinds of representations are also evident in the interviews of Nicholas, Edward and Callum. All of our interviewees, for example, talk about the violent events that led to their assault charges and convictions and their mandatory attendance at the Next Steps programme as exceptional, that is, as their only acts of violence against women. Consider Examples 9 and 10 below where Callum is answering a question about what led him to attend the programme. He characterizes the violence he perpetrated against his wife as a ‘one-time’ event. Example 9 Callum: The stress with the store, the stress with with uhm with Rory and the kids. And and I thought that was the reason I hit my wife. I hit my wife once (.) never hit her before never hit her since.

Example 10 Callum: It’s been it’s been very enlightening.= S.L.: =mhmCallum: You listen to other people’s stories ((long pause)) I think that (.) I don’t think that I’m a monster in any way. Like I said it was it was a one time incident.

Of added interest in Example 10 is the fact that Callum says that he doesn’t think he is ‘a monster in any way’, citing the ‘one time’ nature of his violence as evidence for this claim. Recall that this was the term he used to describe other men in the group in Example 6.

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In Example 11, Nicholas also describes the limited nature of his violence against his wife in answer to a question about how he defines his problem. Example 11 S.L.: Is that how you define your problem (.) is that the parameters of your problem. Nicholas: Oh god no (.) after being [in this program] S.L.: [Okay so then tell me] about that. Nicholas: As I said one day I looked at all my relationships [ever since] I was a lad S.L.:[mhm] Nicholas: about twelve thirteen years old, going out with girls and I realized that in every one of them I I had done hurtful behavior to every girl. Whether it be a word, a gesture, a mood, or a comment (.) something that I’ve done with every person. S.L.: It sounds then like your definition of abuse has broadened.= Nicholas: =mhm= S.L.: =Do you think (.) that (.) the kind of abusive behavior you’re describing as problematic is typical of men or unusual of men? Nicholas: Typical. I’ve thought of myself as being (.) I can’t say enlightened, but certainly someone who regarded women as as I often say, the only paradise a man can know on earth.= S.L.: =mhm= Nicholas: =And I guess because I probably restricted the parameters to physical violence (.) which I had never done in my life until this incident (.) but of course now I realize I was doing other kinds of violence. S.L.: Your definition or your understanding of violence has changed.= Nicholas: =mhm= S.L.: It’s broadened. Do you think that maybe the kind of violent behavior that you’ve displayed and is problematic has has been fairly wide in your life but not so unusual compared to other men. Nicholas: I’ve seen (.) much more horrendous examples (.) I think (.) people that I have known in my life.

This is a particularly interesting excerpt because, on the one hand, it shows Nicholas making connections between the ‘hurtful behaviour’ he has displayed towards ‘every girl’ ‘since [he] was a lad’ (e.g. ‘a word, gesture, a mood or a comment’) and the physical violence that he inflicted upon his ex-partner. In other words, Nicholas seems to be adopting the kind of broad notion of abuse that is espoused in the Next Steps programme. On the other hand, in the course of making these connections, Nicholas is quick to point out that he has never committed physical violence against a woman ‘until this incident’. Moreover, when the interviewer attempts to pursue the continuity between his abusive behaviour and the abusive behaviour of other


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men, Nicholas states that he has ‘seen much more horrendous examples’ of violence against women. Note that here Nicholas is citing more extreme cases of violence as a way of representing his physical violence as relatively limited in its severity. (We saw Edward employing this same strategy in Example 7). What we see in Example 11, then, is N.K. representing his violence as limited, both in its frequency (e.g. ‘I have never done [physical violence] in my life until this incident’) and in its severity (e.g., ‘I’ve seen much more horrendous examples’). We will return to a discussion of the context in which these expressions occur below. Of additional interest in Nicholas’s representation of his violence as ‘exceptional’ and ‘atypical’ is his use of an ‘extreme case formulation’ and his use of the term, incident, in Example 11.8 Extreme case formulations (Sacks 1992; Pomerantz 1986) are ways of referring to an event or object that invoke its maximal or minimal properties, often appearing with words such as ‘never’, ‘always’, ‘forever’, etc. So, for example, when Nicholas says, ‘I have never done [physical violence] in my life until this incident’, his use of ‘never…in my life’ invokes a maximal property of the object, ‘his life’. Pomerantz (1986) has suggested that speakers use extreme case formulations in adversarial situations when there is an expectation that their claims may be undermined or challenged. (Presumably, the ‘extreme’ nature of the formulation makes it difficult for an interlocutor to question the validity or truth of the claim.) It seems to us that Nicholas’s use of an extreme case formulation in this context is consistent with, and indeed contributes to, the construction of his physical violence against women as ‘atypical’. Within the context of a batterer’s treatment programme, it is not unreasonable to assume that men have a history of abusing women: Nicholas seems aware of this presupposition and is attempting to resist it by representing the unsystematic nature of his violence with an extreme case formulation. Also related to Nicholas’s construction of his violence as ‘atypical’ is his use of the word, incident, as a way of describing the violent events that brought him to the Next Steps programme. In an examination of the strategic use of lexical items within the O.J. Simpson trial, Cotterill (2003) demonstrated that the word incident was used throughout the defence’s opening argument to refer to acts of violence committed by Simpson against Nicole Brown Simpson. Cotterill shows that a collocational profile of the word incident reveals its association with random and unrelated events. Unlike the prosecution, then, who represented Simpson’s violence as a series of repeated events that constituted a pattern of abuse, the defence, through its use of the word incident (among other lexical items), represented Simpson’s acts of violence as sporadic events that were unconnected to one another. We are suggesting that Nicholas’s use of incident functions in a similar way,

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further contributing to the characterization of his physically violent acts as ‘unsystematic’ and ‘exceptional’. Edward, like Nicholas, also represents his violence as limited in its frequency and severity. As has been noted above, Example 7 shows Edward downplaying the seriousness of his own violence by embedding it within descriptions of more extreme cases of violence that he has heard about in the group. The limited frequency of Edward’s violence is conveyed in a number of ways. First, he goes to great lengths in depicting his violence with other men as somewhat circumscribed: in Example 12, for example, Edward asserts that, while he loves a challenge, he doesn’t like a ‘physical challenge’ (emphasis ours); in 13, he insists that he has only been in one physical fight (with a man) in his life. These representations are, of course, consistent with Edward’s attempts to distance himself from working-class masculinity and its associations with physical violence. Example 12 Edward: Uhm ((long pause)) yeah as I as I said earlier on (.) uhm (.) I don’t know where I don’t know where it comes from. S.L.: What’s the it. Edward: What’s the it. The it is that in reality I’m a (.) I dunno (.) five seven, one hundred and fifty-five pound white male (.) in ah decent physical shape. Uhm (.) but I-I-I walk out that door and I’m not, you know. S.L.: No I don’t. Edward: I dunno I-I-I walk out that door, I’m on the street I’m two eighty six foot (.) nothing can bring me down.= S.L.: =Mhm= Edward: =Uhm (.) and I don’t know why. I’ve had (.) as I said earlier on I-I I love a challenge. Not a physical challenge not not a (.) I’m not going to walk into a (.) you know (.) a-a-a black dominated bar with a white hood on or something like that (.) I’m not stupid. But (.) not so much a physical challenge I like I enjoy challenges.

Example 13 Edward: Uh: grew up in a university town (.) so a lot of young guys and girls coming into town (.) excuse me (.) thinking they are all that. And in all of my life and all of the years that I went to bars (.) I have been in one fight.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: =One fight my whole life. And it was my friend started it and couldn’t finish it. And just being the guy that I was I stepped in to help him out and I was the one that that was (.) I got a couple of shots to the head and we drove home and he apologized. You know what (.) it’s whatever. So I have been in one physical fight in my life. With regards to violence to women (.) females (.) my wife is the first. ((long pause)) So that’s


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that’s that’s why I can I-I mean I have (.) Sue (.) I have no reason to lie to you.9

As far as violence against women is concerned, Edward says in Example 13 that ‘with regards to violence against women…[his] wife is the first’ and reiterates this in 14 below when he refers to the various forms that abuse can take, noting that ‘physically this is [his] first’. In Example 15, Edward refers to the events that led to his assault charges as an incident, again highlighting the unsystematic and exceptional nature of his acts of violence. Example 14 Edward: You are here, you are not being punished but you are here because you did something wrong. So you need to sort of (.) open yourself up to that. Okay. And uh: ((long out-breath)) you know specific moments attitude change were to think that (.) was to convince (.) the participants that what you had done was wrong. What you had done you had you had hurt somebody. Physically which is which is which is very bad and emotionally which is even worse you know.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: Uhm and it and it was describing all the (.) all the different ways that abuse exists. Okay an- and as I said, like physically (.) this is my first.

Example 15 Edward: Like I mean in physical violence (.) in in other forms of abuse which we have covered (.) oh yeah listen (.) I was all over the spectrum.= S.L.: =mhm= Edward: =All over it. I can I can I can point out in every relationship (.) with male friends, with girlfriends, with my mother, with my family. S.L.: you can point out what? Edward: Uh: heavy heavy controlling aspect (.) heavy. ((long pause))Yeah simple as that. S.L: So my question is this (.) has sixteen weeks in this program led you to think about those kinds of controlling tendencies differently (.) than when you were a fresh faced newbie in the programme. Edward: Of course (.) yes. S.L.: And tell me how. Edward: Ah: first of all they pointed it out. S.L.: Right. Edward: Cause before that I had (.) I didn’t know. S.L.: Mhm (.) so they pointed it out as problematic (.) as an aspect of abuse (.) as a type of abuse. Edward: They pointed it out as a behavior (.) a negative behavior.

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S.L.: Mhm Edward: Ok (.) uhm (.) and yes you could you could umbrella it under abuse (.) and it is abuse. Uhm yeah no no no what you said said is correct. It’s harsh but it’s correct. Uhm (.) and I never never in a million trillion years thought that. S.L.: Mhm Edward: I would have thought ((long pause)) I don’t know what I would have thought (.) I would have thought that somebody was just being wrong. You know (.) uhm (.) and yeah what happened was was after my incident (.) uhm (.) I have since (.) you know (.) spoken with my wife and I’ve been to counseling for other reasons.

What is particularly interesting about Examples 14 and 15 are the contexts in which Edward constructs his physical violence as ‘atypical’. Similar to Nicholas’s representations in Example 11, these occur in a context where Edward is entertaining the idea that abuse should be broadened to include more than just physical abuse and that his controlling (non-violent) behaviour should be regarded as abuse in the same way that his physical violence is regarded as such. Indeed, Edward asserts at the end of his first turn in Example 14 that emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse. More generally, then, these examples show Nicholas and Edward engaging with the philosophy of the Next Steps programme, specifically, the idea that there is a connection between masculinity, abuses of power and physical violence against women. At the same time, however, the men seem to be retreating somewhat from the Next Steps philosophy in the moments that they re-assert the limited nature of their physical violence against their (ex) partners. We repeat the crucial parts of 11 and 14 below in order to highlight their similarity: Nicholas: =And I guess because I probably restricted the parameters to physical violence (.) which I had never done in my life until this incident (.) but of course now I realize I was doing other kinds of violence. Edward: Uhm and it and it was describing all the (.) all the different ways that abuse exists. Okay an- and as I said, like physically (.) this is my first.

We stated earlier that the Next Steps programme does not necessarily regard emotional abuse or financial abuse as less serious than physical abuse, but rather focuses on the connections among different kinds of abuses of power and the construction of masculinity. While occasionally espousing these ideas (as can be seen in 12–15 above), Nicholas and Edward ultimately seem to view physical violence against women as the most egregious form of abuse. (This is perhaps not surprising, given that the culture at large and the criminal justice system also views physical abuse in this way.) And, by representing this most egregious form of abuse as an anomalous


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feature of their own behaviour (and a systematic feature of working-class masculinity), they attempt to construct themselves as non-violent men. Discussion Up to now, we have argued that the middle-class men who are the focus of this paper construct identities for themselves as a way of accomplishing certain kinds of social actions. By displacing physical violence onto a heterosexual working-class masculinity that is represented by ‘other’ members of the group, and by characterizing their own masculinity as something separate from, and superior to, this working-class masculinity, the middle-class men construct their violence as ‘atypical’ and ‘exceptional’ and themselves as essentially ‘good’ and ‘non-violent’ men. As noted above, our findings resonate with some of Ehrenreich’s (1983) comments about the symbolic role that working-class masculinity has played in the construction of middle-class masculinity. According to Ehrenreich (1983: 134), in the 1970s during the so-called men’s liberation movement, there was an ideology of egalitarianism – all men were supposedly oppressed by the same stereotypes and by the same oppressive male sex roles. However, Ehrenreich suggests that the so-called men’s liberation movement ‘not only shared but reinforced the liberal, middle-class perception of blue-collar males as culturally-retrograde “hard hats”’. Like Ehrenreich, then, we are arguing that working-class masculinity became the symbolic dumping ground for our middle-class batterers – a place where they could locate machismo and physical violence and thus protect their own identities as non-violent men. In making the argument described above, we have used Bucholtz’s and Hall’s (2005: 598) idea that identities are often constructed (i.e. acquire their social meaning) by way of differentiation from other identity positions and other social actors. As noted above, Bucholtz and Hall (2004a; 2004b; 2005) label this particular identity tactic ‘distinction’ and define it as a process whereby social boundaries are created between individuals or groups through the erasure of likeness and the highlighting of difference. In constructing their identities by way of distinction, then, our middle-class men highlighted the differences between themselves and other men in the group and downplayed the similarities. But how successful were our interviewees in actually suppressing the many similarities that existed between themselves and other men in the group? Like the vast majority of the men in the group, our interviewees were there because they had been convicted of domestic violence-related crimes. Did these similarities among the men in the group undermine our middle-class men’s attempts to claim a coherent and consistent identity for themselves?

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Inconsistencies and contradictions in the middle-class men’s identity constructions

In reviewing our interviewees’ talk, we return to a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in their interviews. In Example 7, for example, Edward characterizes his violent act as a ‘human defense mechanism’, at the same time acknowledging that others might see it as a ‘male defense mechanism’. In Example 8, he positions himself like a woman with respect to violence against women, but only after admitting that he has enjoyed male privilege (i.e. he ‘lived by that rule’). In a similar way, Nicholas, in Example 3, uses an extreme case formulation in stating that he has never been a beer-drinking man with macho attitudes while simultaneously remarking that he supposes he was when he acted violently towards his partner. Thus, at the same time that Edward and Nicholas are attempting to distance themselves from a certain kind of masculinity in these examples, they are also both acknowledging, at least momentarily, that their violent behaviour towards their domestic partners may have been connected to the power and control associated with masculinity. Similar kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions have been discussed above in relation to Examples 11, 14 and 15. In these examples, both Nicholas and Edward are considering the idea that there are connections between their controlling behaviour vis-à-vis women and the physical violence they have inflicted upon their domestic partners. These efforts to engage with the philosophy of the Next Steps programme are attenuated, however, when both men remind the interviewer that they have only physically abused a women once in their lifetime. In other words, in a context where they are saying that abuse of power, in all of its many forms, has characterized many of their relationships with women, both men feel the need to re-assert the exceptional nature of their physical violence against women in a way that is perhaps inconsistent with the ideas they are grappling with. So, how do we make sense of these contradictions and inconsistencies in our interviewees’ identity constructions? As noted above, we view identity, not as a stable construct located in individual psyches, but rather as a construct that ‘emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 585) and ‘is contingent on the local conditions of the interactional context’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2000: 17). Thus, in attempting to account for the inconsistencies and contradictions in our data, we have found it useful to consider the kinds of competing interactional goals that our interviewees may have had in these particular interactional contexts. As we have noted above, our data is drawn from interviews conducted by the second author when she was a graduate student in Women’s Studies researching the topic of male violence against


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women. The men whose interviews are the focus of this paper all knew the interviewer and her research topic because she had attended their group sessions for eight weeks and, indeed, had requested follow-up interviews with men in the group who were interested. Moreover, because she was present at many of the group sessions, the men knew that she was aware of the Next Steps mandate and the way in which facilitators implemented that mandate within the group sessions. Moreover, as can be seen in the appendix of this paper, many of the questions that the second author asked of our interviewees concerned the possibility that they had developed new understandings of their violence against women as a result of their attendance at the Next Steps programme. While it seems clear that the men wanted to downplay and minimize their violence by distancing themselves from men they viewed as intrinsically violent, it is also very possible that they wanted their interviewer to know that they had performed well in, and had benefited from, the Next Steps treatment programme. (Some evidence for this claim comes from the critical remarks that all three interviewees made about men in the group who did not understand the philosophy of the programme and/ or who resisted the philosophy.) But, notice the contradictory nature of these two sets of goals: if our interviewees are to show that they benefited from the Next Steps programme, then they need to acknowledge that they understand, first, the links between masculine attributes, such as power and control, and violence against women and, second, the links between such attributes, their own violent behaviour and the violent behaviour of other men in the group. Put somewhat differently, if the men show that they are engaging with the Next Steps philosophy, then, at the same time, they are asserting their similarities to other men in the group. We suggest, then, that the kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions that we have identified in the men’s talk correspond to the competing demands of these interview contexts. It was often at moments when the men were attempting to display their engagement with the philosophy of the Next Steps programme that they also (re)asserted their difference from other men in the group and the working-class masculinity that the other men supposedly embodied. Put more generally, the men’s desire to show their interviewer that they were conscientious and responsible students of the Next Steps programme at times undermined their attempts to produce a coherent and consistent identity as non-violent, middle-class men. Conclusion We began this paper by suggesting that our interviewees subordinated and made marginal working-class masculinity as a way of accomplishing

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certain kinds of interactional goals in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme. Unlike other work in the sociology of masculinity, we have not assumed a priori that certain versions of masculinity are dominant and others subordinate; rather, we have tried to show how hierarchies of masculinities are actually produced in local interactional contexts. Moreover, our analysis has demonstrated the ways in which ideologies about class may assume an important role in the production of masculine hierarchies. Our interviewees located physical violence and machismo in the working-class masculinity supposedly embodied by other men in the batterers’ treatment programme, thereby representing their physical violence and abuse as anomalous and not an essential part of their identities as middle-class men. While our interviewees generally adopted a kind of middle-class masculinity associated with education and intelligence as a way of differentiating themselves from, and marginalizing, the working-class masculinity personified by other members of the group, it is not the case that the masculinities constructed as dominant in these interviews were necessarily consistent and coherent. Indeed, one of the interviewees went as far as characterizing himself as feminine in his attempts to distance himself from the other men in the group. At other times, in order to demonstrate that they had successfully engaged with the mandate of the Next Steps programme, the interviewees represented themselves as pro-feminist men, more specifically, as men who had become sympathetic to (or, at the least, were grappling with) a feminist analysis of violence against women– an analysis that includes the proposition that there are links between masculinity, power, and violence against women, and, thus, the interviewees’ own masculinity and violence against women. Kiesling (2006: 269) argues that there are ‘multiple competing hegemonic forms at any time, some compatible, but some in conflict’. We would agree, suggesting, as we did in our introduction, that the versions of masculinities produced as dominant and subordinate at any point in time are contingent upon the nature of the local contexts in which they are produced. For example, while we have shown working-class masculinity to be marginalized by middle-class men in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme, it is not difficult to think of other contexts, for example, certain kinds of sports events, where working-class masculinity and its association with machismo and physical strength would be valorized by middle-class men. Thus, in keeping with a view of identity as emergent within local interactional contexts and ‘as intersubjectively rather than individually produced’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 590), we have suggested that our interviewees drew upon, and simultaneous produced, conflicting and contradictory notions of hegemonic masculinity in a way that served them well in an interview context with a feminist researcher: they managed to represent themselves as essentially


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non-violent men and as men who were responsible and conscientious in dealing with the mandate of the Next Steps programme. Indeed, it could be argued that the strategic flexibility that these men displayed in constructing various kinds of masculine identities also allowed them to skillfully negotiate the discursive demands of the Next Steps programme and ultimately receive a favourable outcome. In previous work on batterers’ treatment programmes, Schrock and Padavic (2007: 635) suggest that participants may learn to rhetorically ‘take responsibility’ for their violence and ‘espouse egalitarianism’ within such programmes, or learn how to ‘talk the talk’ in the words of Miller, Gregory and Iovanni (2005), but that such rhetoric is relatively superficial. While we have no way of determining how committed our interviewees were to the ideas of the Next Steps programme that they sometimes espoused, we did find, like Schrock and Padvic (2007: 644), that our interviewees ‘honed their rhetorical skills in presenting themselves as egalitarians…committed to nonviolence’ and that such rhetorical skills may have functioned as a powerful discursive resource in the context of a batterers’ treatment programme. Schrock and Padavic (2007: 644) ultimately suggest that the powerful rhetorical skills acquired by at least some participants in batterers’ treatment programmes may explain the finding that victims of such programmes’ graduates ‘are more likely…to continue living with their batterers’ than victims of such programmes’ drop-outs and less likely to press charges when battered again’. In other words, the powerful rhetorical skills acquired in these programmes by batterers may not be serving the interests of women battered by their domestic partners, who may be unjustifiably seduced by the egalitarian language and the rhetorical commitment to non-violence. Given these kinds of problems with batterers’ treatment programmes (documented by Schrock and Padavic 2007; Miller, Gregory and Iovanni 2005 and others) we would hope that the kind of analysis represented in this paper – in particular, the analysis of how our interviewees discursively deployed various kinds of masculine identities to accept and or deny their use of violence – may have productive implications for both the curriculum and the discursive interventions used in batterers’ treatment programmes. About the authors ???

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Appendix: Interview Questions 1. How did you feel the first time you came to the group? 2. Tell me about what led you to attend this programme. 3. What, if anything, have you gained or learned from participating in this programme? 4. Do you remember a moment or aspect of the programme that felt particularly powerful or influential for you? 5. What is your impression of how or why this group works or doesn’t work? 6. Is there any way that you can tell if the programme has been especially valuable for someone, or not very valuable at all? 7. Do you see any difference between the speech you gave when you came into the programme and your graduation speech? 8. What does masculinity mean to you? Notes 1 But, see Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) for a rethinking of this view. 2 Kiesling (2006: 269) adopts a similar approach to hegemonic masculinity. He argues that ‘there are multiple competing hegemonic forms at any time, some compatible, some in conflict’. See also Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) and Dellinger (2004). 3 See also Schwalbe and Mason-Shrock (1996) for a similar approach to identity within the discipline of social psychology. 4 The second author of this paper attended the group sessions for a period of eight weeks, compiled the field notes, and conducted the one-on-one interviews with the three men. 5 All names used in this paper are pseudonyms. 6 Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock (1996: 139–140) describe ‘this kind of othering’ as ‘oppressive identity work’ because it involves ‘a casting of members of other groups as less worthy and capable human beings.’ 7 Nicholas has characterized himself earlier in the interview as a voracious ‘reader’ and has talked at length about his readings about matriarchal vs. patriarchal societies. 8 Note that Callum also uses the term incident to describe his violence in Example 10. 9 Edward uses an extreme case formulation, ‘one fight my whole life’, in one of the descriptions of his violence against other men.


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Gender and Language

Article

Gender, language and leadership in the workplace Louise Jane Mullany Introduction Research on gender and language within workplace settings has grown considerably in recent years, and this expansion of interest is inextricably linked to the ‘rapid increase in numbers of women in the workplace worldwide’ which has taken place over the last four decades (Barrett and Davidson 2006: 1). ‘Workplace’ is being defined here as an overarching general term to incorporate a full range of contexts including businesses, organisations and institutions where at least one interlocutor is involved in some form of official employment. Workplace research on gender and language thus far has focused on a range of domains. A good deal of investigation has taken place in corporate businesses and organisations (Baxter 2003; Ashcraft and Mumby 2004; Holmes 2006; Mullany 2007; 2010a; Iyer 2009), as well as other areas including police forces (McElhinny 1998; Ostermann 2003), medical professions (West 1990; Charteris-Black and Seale 2010; Mullany forthcoming) and the political domain (Wodak 2003; Shaw 2006; Walsh 2006). One important area of focus that has emerged has been on women in leadership roles, to assess the language that women are using to enact their authority when they occupy positions of power previously held only by men (Kendall and Tannen 1997; Baxter 2003; 2008; 2010; Martin-Rojo and Gómez Estaban 2005; Marra, Scnurr and Holmes 2006; Mullany 2007; 2010b; Schnurr 2009). Leadership has proved to be a very difficult concept to define, but from a linguistic perspective, researchers have focused upon how leadership is constructed through the linguistic choices that are made. Leadership

Affiliation University of Nottingham, UK email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.297

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is seen as being enacted within discourse (Schnurr 2009; Baxter 2010). As Baxter (2010: 12–13) points out, ‘every time a leader speaks, they are making a linguistic choice about how to perform leadership, and indeed, every time they open their mouths, they are being judged…their use of language is of course intimately bound up with the exercise of power, and with colleagues’ perceptions of how well they exercise this authority’. Despite studies that have been carried out thus far, the topic of gender, language and leadership in the workplace is an area that requires further investigation if the complex relationship between these topics is to be more fully articulated and understood. As long as significant gender inequalities in workplaces throughout the world are still present, it remains fundamentally important for gender and language scholars to investigate workplace practices and produce empirical evidence which can make a contribution towards redressing persistent gender-based inequalities. Latest statistics compiled by the United Nations show that, worldwide, only one in four managers/senior officials are women; women worldwide are paid 17% less than men and only 15 heads of State or Government are currently women (UN Women 2010). In Africa, Asia and the Pacific the percentage of women in leadership/managerial positions is even less than one in four, between 13%–15% (see Mills and Mullany 2011). Women currently only make up 18.4% of parliamentary membership around the world (IDEA 2010). The lack of women in leadership positions is commonly referred to as the problem of the ‘glass ceiling’ (Morrison, White and van Elsor 1987), the barrier which hampers women from reaching the higher echelons of power within workplaces. All papers within this collection examine a different socio-cultural setting where a woman leader has succeeded in breaking through the glass ceiling in their particular workplace. From an optimistic perspective, the articles within this special issue are thus providing positive illustrations of women who have gone beyond this most persistent career obstruction, demonstrating how more traditional barriers are being broken down. However, it is important to realise that just because some women are breaking through the glass ceiling this does not suddenly mean that equality has been achieved – increased participation does not simply result in gender struggles being over. Indeed, Cameron (2009: 11) makes the crucial point that ‘one thing feminists have had to face up to since the 1970s is that removing institutional barriers to women’s participation in certain activities, or their access to certain social settings and resources, does not automatically produce equality. Old divisions and patterns of behaviour can persist long after the original structural bases for them have disappeared.’ This viewpoint clashes with what Koller and Wodak (2008: 9) describe as a ‘growing public discourse of “post-feminism” which claims that once

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indicators of women’s participation in public life have been met, as is the case in modern industrialised societies, then gender discrimination ceases to exist’. This draws attention to inaccurate and misleading views circulating within popular culture, perpetuated by the mass media, that feminism is no longer needed as gender equality has already been achieved (see Mills and Mullany 2011 for further discussion). Such a ‘post-feminist’ perspective hides persistent political problems and gender ideologies regarding women in leadership positions. One of the key aims of this special issue is to show that, although certain women may have succeeded in gaining positions of power, this does not mean that equality of opportunity has been achieved in the socio-cultural settings where the data analysis has taken place. In response to calls that the focus of gender and language studies needs to broaden out from their tradition of Anglo-American dominance (McElhinny and Mills 2007; Mills and Mullany 2011), this special issue comprises gender and language research on leadership conducted in two European countries, Spain and Greece, the Asian context of Hong Kong and the Australasian context of New Zealand. Collectively, the articles focus upon four different women in leadership positions who work within these four different geographical locations. The importance of producing analyses of language and masculinities alongside femininities has been established now for some time (Johnson and Meinhof 1997; Kiesling 2001; Coates 2003). Despite the primary focus on women leaders in this issue, masculinities, and in particular, dominant hegemonic masculinities, play a fundamental role in all four papers. Due to powerful gender ideologies that operate within the societies under study, maintaining and perpetuating gender binaries, femininities and masculinities reify each other, and to look at one without the other would leave analyses of gender and language incomplete. Additionally, within the overwhelming majority of workplaces women leaders continually interact with and are assessed/evaluated by both men and women – all four papers include either analyses of mixedgender interaction or critical analyses of representations and evaluations of women leaders by both women and men. In the first paper, Holmes and Marra’s focus is also on the additional interplay between gender, leadership and ethnicity, as they examine the interactional strategies of Yvonne, a Māori managing director of a Māori commercial organisation in New Zealand. This accords with recent moves within gender and language studies to explore gender alongside other social identity variables including ethnicity, which is still significantly under-researched within the discipline (cf. Morgan 2007). Schnurr and Mak examine the interactions of Sabitha, the owner and current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a commercial company in Hong Kong. Angouri’s paper examines the interactions of Chloe, a senior engineer in

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a heavy construction firm. It is worth noting that these three papers use pseudonyms for their women leaders, all other workplace participants and the companies themselves, in-keeping with confidentiality agreements and research ethics policies when dealing with real-life workplace interactions. In contrast, the final paper broadens the focus of the Special Issue away from commercial workplaces and instead examines the public sphere of the political arena. Bengoechea’s article focuses on Carme Chacón, Spain’s first woman Defence Minister, who came to power in 2008. Approaches and Methods All four papers take a social-constructionist approach to conceptualising gender identity, influenced, in part, by Butler’s (1990) work on performativity. They also all draw upon the concept of the gendered workplace (Holmes and Stubbe 2003a), that is, the view that workplaces can be seen as a continuum from feminine to masculine and thus workplace interactions take place in gendered social spaces. All authors also stress the dominance of masculinist norms, including language norms, within their workplaces, which operate to contain and constrain their women leaders far more than their male counterparts. All papers also acknowledge the importance of examining the wider, overarching social-cultural context where the analysis is taking place, through a consideration of broader socio-cultural practices. The individual contributions presented here thus illustrate the diversity of fruitful approaches that can be taken when investigating gender, language and leadership in the workplace, as well as exemplifying the range of integrated methodological techniques that researchers are currently employing. Both spoken and written textual analyses of real-life empirical data are included. The focus of Holmes and Marra’s and Angouri’s papers is predominately upon the spoken interaction of women leaders within their respective commercial organisations. It is notable that the speech event which figures heavily in both of these papers is the business meeting. This reflects the importance and frequency of meetings within workplaces in general; as Holmes and Stubbe (2003b: 57) describe, meetings are the ‘very stuff of work’. The overall usefulness of meetings for observing gender and the enactment of institutional power can be seen through Boden’s (1994: 81) comment that through meetings researchers can witness ‘the very social action through which institutions produce and reproduce themselves’. In addition to examining the spoken interactions of Sabitha within meetings in Hong Kong, Schnurr and Mak also include instances of interactions from what they term one-to-one encounters, which includes dyadic conversation in open-plan offices and dyadic conversation outside


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of meetings, as well as including written analysis of the hybridised form of email discourse. Email is an under-researched medium of communication in gender and language workplace research. Schnurr and Mak are keen to expand the workplace focus away from just looking at meetings, and their work demonstrates the value of examining newer forms of communication technology that leaders use to enact their authority, alongside more traditional analyses of spoken interactions. Bengoechea’s paper focuses solely on written textual analysis of paper and online political media discourse, where she analyses the representations of the gendered identity construction of Carme Chacón in Spain’s government through discursive representations of her by journalists (both women and men) across right-wing and left-wing publications. She tracks written representations of Chacón throughout her first year in office. Her analysis is based upon a corpus of 63 articles taken from 33 different Spanish daily publications (she also includes one article from the British press). Holmes and Marra explicitly identify their approach as interactional sociolinguistics and this sub-disciplinary categorisation can also be applied to Schnurr and Mak’s paper. Both papers draw upon key theoretical concepts and analytical frameworks currently circulating within interactional sociolinguistics, including indexicality and stance following Ochs (1992), and the communities of practice framework (Eckert and McConnellGinet 1992). Angouri’s paper is arguably somewhat closer to conversation analysis in its approach, as she only analyses gender when participants orientate to it in the data. However, she differs from a ‘pure’ CA approach (cf. Stokoe 2008) as she uses interview data to help her pinpoint when gender is relevant within an interaction. She also draws upon the interactional sociolinguistic concepts of communities of practice, indexicality and stance when conceptualising identity. Following Fairclough (1989) and Lazar (2005), Bengoechea’s written textual analysis can be best classified as part of feminist critical discourse analysis, though it is notable that she also successfully blends this approach with previous work on gender and leadership from within interactional sociolinguistics. In terms of different languages covered in the special issue, Bengoechea’s article provides political media data in Spanish in all but one of her 63 newspaper articles.1 Holmes and Marra’s focus on a Māori workplace includes a consideration of Māori as a powerful tool that can be drawn upon by those proficient in the language within New Zealand businesses. Holmes and Marra point out that, although English is the unmarked language variety of the majority Pākehā group (European descents), in Māori companies, Māori is employed as an additional linguistic resource for those who have the communicative competence to use it.

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The dominance of English as a lingua franca within the globalised world of business communication is shown particularly in Angouri’s paper, where the multinational organisation she focuses upon, which has a base in Greece (as well as other European locations), uses English as its medium of intercultural communication. English is also the official language of Schnurr and Mak’s business in multilingual Hong Kong. In the corporate businesses where fieldwork has been undertaken, all authors demonstrate the value of a multi-method approach to spoken data collection. In addition to audio- and video-recordings of meetings, Holmes and Marra also use ethnographic techniques gained through observation and interviews with participants. Similarly, Angouri draws fairly extensively on interview data to help her pinpoint gender as a topic within meeting discourses. She employs the ambitious method of both pre- and postmeeting interviews, which gives her a broad range of data to draw upon to aid her interpretations of meeting interaction. In addition to collecting email data, Schnurr and Mak use audio-recording to collect spoken data and their meeting data interpretations are also supplemented by written document analysis. Overview of individual papers Holmes and Marra demonstrate how Yvonne engages in a range of complex, hybridised identity performances in her role as a Māori women leader including gendered norms associated with both femininity and masculinity. They draw attention to the fact that some Māori norms are consistent with normatively feminine speech, including facilitative and collaborative behaviour, though there are also dimensions which they describe as being culturally distinct in New Zealand, such as privileging the group over the individual, which contrasts with dominant, western Pākehā norms. They find that Yvonne uses a variety of strategies including facilitative and consultative stances in meetings, along with directness and the enactment of more authoritarian, decisive stances. The overarching importance of Māori values of facilitation and collaboration come through clearly in their analysis. Holmes and Marra summarise that she manages to successfully navigate many different sets of socio-cultural expectations. However, despite Yvonne’s successes, Holmes and Marra go on to argue that, at the overarching level of the macro socio-cultural context, dominant hegemonic masculinist gender norms and Pākehā ethnic norms are always relevant; they covertly influence and constrain people’s (unconscious) interpretations and evaluations of each other in terms of how individuals do both gender and ethnicity.


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Schnurr and Mak highlight how their article contributes to the significantly under-researched area of gender and language in Asian workplaces. They find that Sabitha adopts a range of normatively feminine and masculine strategies depending upon the particular context in which she is interacting. In less formal, one-to-one interactions, she uses strategies that are closer to the feminine end of the gendered speech styles continuum. In meetings, she moves more towards the masculine end, and in her choice of written email language the strategies she selects are the most direct and thus the most normatively masculine out of the three different interactional contexts. However, like Yvonne in New Zealand, despite positive evaluation and success as a leader, Schnurr and Mak point out that there is a clear masculinist bias at a socio-cultural level in Hong Kong within the workplace domain, which Sabitha always has to very carefully negotiate. They conclude by stressing the importance of investigating different contexts alongside meetings, including electronic discourse, and they also argue for further research in Asian contexts. Angouri’s study of Chloe focuses upon her performances in meetings and the opinions and attitudes she expresses in interview. Angouri aims to analyse what she terms ‘covert’ ways of doing gender, and also draws on McConnell-Ginet’s (2000: 279) concept of examining ‘backstage semantics’. Alongside gender, Angouri focuses on the concept of culture and what she terms the ‘intercultural reality’ of her multinational business. She argues that previous models of culture do not take into account the complexities or dynamics of social interaction. In her analysis, Angouri draws attention to instances where Chloe does not join in with humour relating to football, and in interview expresses how boring she finds this as a regular part of pre-meeting talk. Angouri interprets this as evidence of the discourse of gender difference in Chloe’s everyday workplace life. Angouri also draws attention to how Chloe attempts to protect Mary, a female trainee manager, including trying to make sure that Mary does not get stuck performing stereotypically feminine roles such as secretarial work. Like Yvonne and Sabitha, Chloe can also be seen as enacting both authoritarian, normatively masculine styles and normatively feminine styles. In terms of her analysis of culture, Angouri concludes that, although the four managers whose interactions she focuses on come from four different countries, national identities appear to be typically unmarked in this multinational organisation. Bengoechea argues that Carme Chacón can be seen as adopting hybridised identity performances in her communication strategies, as she also blends stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine speech styles. She analyses the ways in which Chacón’s communicative identities are represented within media discourses, along with assessing how ‘effective’ she is perceived to be by the press. When Chacón first

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came to power there were examples of sexist discourses, especially from male journalists, who foregrounded her gender and portrayed her role as tokenistic. However, Bengoechea also demonstrates some positives in the way that the media allow for a degree of fluidity in terms of the subject positions they ascribe to her. For example, elements of the press portrayed her as speaking with authority, using a firm tone to sound trustworthy and serious. She also mixes this with elements of relational discourse. However, these positive evaluations do not last. After taking the decision to remove Spanish troops from Kosovo, where she informed troops first instead of going through official channels, Chacón is subject to a substantial amount of negative evaluation based upon her gender. Instead of performing orders, she is portrayed as engaging in negotiation, interpreted across the media by both women and men journalists as weakness. The media portray her as overly emotional and uncontrolled, too feminine to carry out the Defence Minister role. Reports claimed that such a decision would never have been taken by a man. Bengochea points out that Chacón’s attempt at a more co-operative and democratic view of leadership is interpreted as inappropriate and ineffective, thus undermining her authority. The media’s reaction and rejection of Chacón reinforces the dominant masculinist discourse of institutional power. Workplace leadership research and political commitments Cameron (2009) argues that the overwhelming focus on gender identities in recent gender and language research has resulted in obscuring the underlying political aim of studies, what she terms the ‘What is to be done?’ question. Although there is a primary focus on gender identities in all four papers, along with a combined focus on ethnic identities in Holmes and Marra’s paper, the ‘What is to be done?’ question is addressed to a degree in all articles. A commitment to working on behalf of those whose data you are analysing is a long-standing and oft-cited principle of the internationally acclaimed New Zealand Language in the Workplace project, the project from where Holmes and Marra’s data is taken. Language in the Workplace and its commitments to working alongside practitioners has had a noticeable influence on the approaches taken by Schnurr and Mak and Angouri. Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003: 14) clearly articulated the need for language and gender scholars to reframe their research as a form of ‘social activism’, and the Language in the Workplace project provides a prime example of this, especially in terms of engagement with and raising awareness of gender and language issues outside of academia. This includes those who have been participants in studies themselves, through activities


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including feedback workshops, training sessions and various forms of written reports. Within this special issue, Bengoechea’s paper arguably emphasises its political aims most explicitly in her firm and frequently articulated commitment to feminism. She also explicitly articulates her own feminist political perspective when providing assessments of Chacón’s actions. Bengoechea’s overt commitment to feminism accords with an argument made by Mills and Mullany (2011) that, in order to ensure Cameron’s (2009) ‘What is to be done?’ question is brought firmly back to the forefront of gender and language research, a commitment to feminism as a political movement, serving to foreground action-centred research, needs to be highlighted much more so that it operates as a fundamental principle for all gender and language research. The intention behind this is to address the recent criticism that there has been a ‘loss of a broader practical political perspective’ within recent gender and language research (Phillips 2003: 226). Of course, there are many different types of ‘feminism’ which can be adopted (cf. McElhinny 2007), but one element that unites all feminist perspectives is a commitment to emancipation by redressing gender inequalities (Mills and Mullany 2011). The articles presented here show that, despite the fact that all four women from each geographical context have broken through the glass ceiling, equality is still far from being achieved. Holmes and Marra draw attention to the broader socio-cultural context in New Zealand where there is still an ideological hegemony positioning masculinity as the dominant norm for leadership positions – a key reason why so few women occupy top workplace leadership positions. Additionally, Māori women leaders are also required to be bicultural. This hegemony provides an additional layer of challenge for Māori women (and men) working in Pākehā organisations. Schnurr and Mak draw attention to the inaccurate and ideologically maintained perception of equality in Hong Kong, which accords with the ‘post-feminist’ perspective highlighted earlier. Despite perceptions of ‘equality’, women are still significantly under-represented in leadership positions and face the struggle of having to negotiate very carefully with the dominance of masculine gendered norms for workplace leadership on a day-to-day basis. Bengoechea’s focus on Spanish politics provides an example of a quota policy in action to get equal numbers of women in parliament. As Bengoechea points out, 2008 was the first year that a predominantly female cabinet was elected in Spain (with 9 female ministers out of a total of 17 posts), although her analysis shows that inequalities based on gender still persist.2 Angouri’s work shows how under-represented women are in the multinational engineering organisation under study, with only one woman

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out of 80 senior engineers. Angouri also demonstrates the many struggles faced by Chloe and trainee manager Mary within this significantly maledominated domain. She views Chloe’s ability to dismiss stereotypical behaviour and actively negotiate gender as positive, but the overwhelming fact remains that individuals in this company have a very clear ‘good engineer’ persona who is always a man. Overall, this collection shows how the problems of the glass ceiling, the ‘glass cliff ’ (Ryan et al. 2007) and the ‘double bind’ (Lakoff 2003) persist, along with the continuance of sexism. As the United Nations Entity for Women points out, ‘serious challenges persist to women’s full and equal participation in senior decision-making positions, including negative stereotypes about women’s leadership roles, lack of commitment by political parties, inadequate funding and training for women candidates and government officials, and high levels of violence and intimidation against women in public office’ (UN Women 2010: 4). As it is through language that leadership roles and identities are enacted and co-constructed, linguistic analyses of real-world examples of women fulfilling leadership roles are crucial in exploring these continuing political problems further. It is the overall intention that this special issue will make a timely contribution to the field of gender and language leadership research in this politically important area of investigation. There are some positives here, including examples of successful role models, and evidence of women leaders engaging in mentoring, but there is also clear evidence of a number of deeply ingrained, persistent gender inequalities which require further interrogation in future gender and language workplace studies. About the author Louise Mullany is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. Her research focuses on sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches to discourse and gender in professional and institutional contexts. She has conducted studies in business, medical and media settings. Publications include Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace (Palgrave, 2007), shortlisted for the IGALA book prize 2008, Introducing English Language (with P. Stockwell, Routledge, 2010) and Language, Gender and Feminism: Theory and Methodology (with S. Mills, Routledge 2011). She is currently working on her next monograph, The Sociolinguistics of Gender in Public Life (Palgrave 2012).


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Notes 1 2

The author has translated these into English in her paper. The original Spanish versions can be found in the links given in the article’s Appendix. This predominately female cabinet in the 2008 Spanish Parliament was a consequence of a commitment to a quota system. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA 2010) points to gender quotas as a key way to redress imbalances in political participation. IDEA points out that Rwanda superseded Sweden in 2010 as number one in the world for female political representation due to implementation of a gender quota system, with 56.3% of political positions occupied by women, compared with Sweden’s 47%. Such quota policies are undeniably positive political moves, though, as demonstrated here, increased participation does not simply mean equality, and women who are brought into power by one of these policies may be negatively evaluated as a consequence.

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Holmes, J. and Meyerhoff, M. (2003) Different voices, different views: An introduction to current research in language and gender. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 1–17. Oxford: Blackwell. Holmes, J. and Stubbe, M. (2003a). ‘Feminine’ workplaces: stereotype and reality. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 573–599. Oxford: Blackwell. Holmes, J. and Stubbe, M. (2003b) Power and Politeness in the Workplace. Harlow: Pearson. IDEA (2010) Gender quotas: Getting the numbers and balance right. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. http://www. idea.int/gender/quotas_numbers_balance.cfm accessed 6th June 2010. Iyer, R. (2009) Entrepreneurial identities and the problematic of subjectivity in media-mediated discourses. Discourse & Society 20: 241–264. Johnson, S. (1997) Theorizing language and masculinity: A feminist perspective. In S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, S. and Meinhof, U.H. (eds) (1997) Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kendall, S. and Tannen, D. (1997) Gender and language in the workplace. In R. Wodak (ed.) Gender and Discourse 81–105. New York: Longman. Kiesling, S. (2001) Stances of whiteness and hegemony in fraternity men’s discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1): 101–115. Koller, V. and Wodak, R. (2008) Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres. In R. Wodak and V. Koller (eds) The Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere 1–19. Berlin: Mouton. Lakoff, R. (2003) Language, gender and politics: putting ‘women’ and ‘power’ in the same sentence. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender, 161–178, Oxford: Blackwell. Lazar, M. (ed.) (2005) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marra, M., Schnurr, S. and Holmes, J. (2006) Effective leadership in New Zealand Workplaces. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts 240–260. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Martin-Rojo, L. and Gómez Esteban, C. (2005) The gender of power: The female style in labour organizations In M. Lazar (ed.) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis 66–89. Basingstoke: Palgrave. McConnell-Ginet, S. (2000) Breaking through the glass ceiling: Can linguistic awareness help? In J. Holmes (ed.) Gendered Speech in Social Context: Perspectives from Gown to Town 259–282. Wellington: Victoria University Press. McElhinny, B. (1998) ‘I don’t smile much anymore’. In J. Coates (ed.) Language and Gender: A Reader 309–327. Oxford: Blackwell. McElhinny, B. (ed.) (2007) Words, Worlds and Material Girls: Language, Gender and Globalisation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


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Gender and Language

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Leadership discourse in a Ma\ori workplace: negotiating gender, ethnicity and leadership at work Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra Abstract Masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people's unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender, ethnicity and leadership. Drawing on material from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, we present a case study exemplifying the construction of a complex and hybridised identity in a challenging sociocultural context. The discourse of a female Māori Managing Director of a commercial organisation is analysed to illustrate how she ably negotiates the complexities of gender, ethnicity and leadership in her everyday talk at work. It is proposed that the analysis of such instances of the effective performance of a hybridised identity may contribute to an increased understanding of the complexities of managing workplace discourse in culturally diverse and gendered institutional contexts. keywords: identity; gender; leadership; ethnicity; workplace discourse

Affiliation Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand email: [email protected]; [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.311

www.equinoxpub.com

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Introduction1 In recent papers our analyses of talk in New Zealand workplaces have explored the challenges that women and men in leadership positions must negotiate in order to manage the often conflicting demands of constructing both a convincing professional identity and an acceptable gender identity (Holmes 2005; 2006; Marra, Schnurr and Holmes 2006). In this paper, we focus on the discourse of a specific leader, the female Māori Managing Director of a commercial organisation, analysing the ways in which she negotiates the complexities of power, gender and ethnicity in her everyday talk at work. The situation of women in positions of authority has been widely recognised as involving a classic ‘double bind’, namely a conflict between the attributes normatively associated with leadership and those stereotypically associated with femininity. ‘By fulfilling people’s expectation concerning leadership, women violate conventions concerning appropriate female behaviour’ (Grabe and Shibley Hyde 2006: 194). Women in leadership positions often attempt to resolve this conflict by drawing on discourse strategies associated with acceptable feminine leadership roles, such as ‘mother’, which licence women to behave in authoritative ways.2 Moreover, in recent years, expectations regarding appropriate ways of enacting leadership have broadened to encompass recognition of the value of the relational skills, normatively associated with a more feminine stance (Cameron 2000; Baxter 2008). Nonetheless, stereotypical expectations regarding appropriate behaviour for women in the workplace have proved remarkably persistent, with cooperative, supportive, facilitative and relationally oriented discourse strongly associated with femininity (Baxter 2003; Sunderland 2004; Holmes 2006; Litosseliti 2006; Swann 2009), and more specifically expected of women leaders, as evidenced in the results from many attitude studies undertaken by leadership researchers (Karsten 2006; Eagly and Carli 2007). The conflict faced by New Zealand men has been less widely recognised, but it is nonetheless problematic for many men in leadership positions in New Zealand organisations (Holmes 2008; 2009). Its roots lie in the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, an Australasian concept referring to an aggressive commitment to equality and the tendency to try to ‘cut down to size’ those who excel in any way – whether intellectually, in status or wealth.3 In response to this conflict between enacting power in a stereotypically authoritative manner and adopting a more egalitarian style, leaders often seek ways of reducing status differences and emphasising equality with their colleagues. For women the stances involved are generally consistent with ‘doing femininity’. For men, one option for resolving the conflict is

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to integrate discourse strategies which construct normatively authoritative leadership alongside others which indicate they are ‘just one of the boys’, doing masculinity in the form of mateship (Phillips 1996; Holmes 2008).4 Yet another challenge facing some New Zealand leaders involves enacting ethnic identity in an appropriate manner. For those from the majority group, namely Pākehā New Zealanders (people of European origin), this is generally not a problematic issue. Behaving in culturally appropriate ways is consistent with normative ways of doing leadership and gender in Pākehā-dominated New Zealand society. For Māori leaders, however, the cultural requirements of leadership are more complex, and different leaders resolve them in different ways. We have described elsewhere (Holmes, Vine and Marra forthcoming) how two Māori male leaders responded to this challenge, enacting the transactional and relational aspects of leadership differently, yet in ways consistent with their fundamental commitment to Māori values. Here, we examine how a Māori female leader negotiates the dimensions of power, gender and ethnicity in her workplace interactions. For our focus leader, pseudonymed Yvonne, the challenge is to behave discursively in ways which satisfactorily construct her diverse identities, which include her identity as a Māori woman, a Māori leader, and a female leader in a hegemonic sociocultural context where masculinist (Baxter 2003; 2008) and majority ethnic group norms prevail. Some facets of these different identities are reconcilable and mutually compatible, allowing the construction of a cohesive social identity. So, for instance, normatively feminine behaviour is consistent with the positive value assigned in Māori culture to a collaborative and consultative approach in interaction; similarly, a modest demeanour is considered stereotypically feminine behaviour (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003), while also being expected of Māori individuals in many sociocultural contexts. There are also, however, dimensions of being Māori which are distinctive in the wider New Zealand context where a predominantly western set of values obtain, e.g. the importance of privileging the group above the individual, the high value placed on modesty and humility (whakaiti), and complementary distaste for boasting (whakahihi), a preference for indirect discourse conveying meaning implicitly rather than explicitly in some contexts, and the strong cultural proscription against shaming people through specific targeted criticism (Metge and Kinloch 1978; Metge 1986; 1995; Patterson 1992). Māori leaders are expected to explicitly respect such Māori values, enacting leadership in ways compatible with their ethnicity. We explore in this paper how one Māori woman leader negotiates the highly constrained route between different sets of sociocultural expectations. Clearly, this exploration entails a performative approach (Butler 1990; Cameron 1997a), demonstrating how different facets of social identity are ‘repeatedly and

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publicly displayed and constructed in accordance with certain cultural norms’ (McElhinny 2003: 275). It also requires a conceptualization of identity as dynamic, fluid, and flexible enough to account for the ways in which different facets of a complex social identity are instantiated through interaction. We begin with a discussion of the concept of identity and ways of analysing it through workplace discourse. Analysing identity through talk at work Managing different facets of identity has been widely recognised as a complex accomplishment (e.g. Allen 2007; Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema 2008; De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006). Before examining how our focus leader responds to this challenge, it is useful to consider the theoretical framework within which the analysis is positioned. Two basic aspects need to be discussed: first, the broader sociocultural context within which identities are constructed; second, the dimensions which are relevant in analysing the precise ways in which an individual’s social identity is constructed and negotiated in any specific social interaction. In developing a model for analysing workplace interaction (Holmes, Marra and Vine forthcoming), we have been concerned to take account of the fact that participants do not operate in a social vacuum. Talk is always deeply embedded in its sociocultural context. We bring to any interaction our knowledge of the broader societal constraints on appropriate and expected ways of behaving, our familiarity with societal norms, as well as our accumulated experience from previous interactions. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003: 87) point out, we orient to norms ‘as a kind of organizing device in society, an ideological map, setting out the range of the possible within which we place ourselves and assess others’. Cameron (2009) makes the same point: the construction of social identity: takes place within parameters which those engaged in it did not set, and to which in most cases they offer no radical challenge. To make sense of what they are doing as creative, agentive language-users, we also have to consider the inherited structures (of belief, of opportunity or lack of it, of desire and of power) which both enable and constrain their performance (2009: 15).

In order to interpret the significance of what people say in the workplace, then, we need to have a thorough understanding of every level of relevant contextual influence from the broadest societal or institutional norms, through the norms of the workplace culture of the participants’ organisation, as well as those of the specific community of practice or workplace team to which they belong. So, for example, taken-for-granted societal assumptions about the appropriate roles and behaviours for women in


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business or within an organisation legitimise the status quo and existing gender relations. Overall in New Zealand, as in other societies (Mullany 2007; Baxter 2003), masculinist norms prevail, especially in the workplace (Holmes 2006). Similarly, institutionalised norms about the appropriate language of business, or appropriate discursive ways of running business meetings, provide contextual constraints which minority group members with different norms must negotiate. Within different communities of practice, for example, the amount and type of humour varies (Schnurr 2009), and the relative formality with which meetings are conducted also differs in different workplace teams (Holmes, Marra and Vine forthcoming). These are constraints within which any individual constantly operates in constructing an appropriate professional, gender and ethnic identity. Furthermore, for all New Zealanders, but especially salient for a Māori woman leader, Māori norms for appropriate interaction cross-cut and underpin these other discursive constraints. As the language of the majority group, English is the unmarked code at the institutional level as well as the organisational level in most New Zealand companies.5 However, at Kiwi Productions, the organisation from which our dataset is drawn, Māori is an additional appropriate linguistic resource for those who have the linguistic competence to make use of it.6 At the level of the community of practice, or workplace team, some teams within the company make use of a considerable amount of Māori in their team meetings, as well as in one-to-one interactions. And throughout the organisation, the Māori language is heard much more often than in most New Zealand organisations. Māori values form a background to many interactions in New Zealand society, and are especially salient in interactions which involve Māori participants. Māori beliefs, interactional norms and values are fundamental in workplaces such as Kiwi Productions which we have described as an ‘ethnicised’ community of practice (Schnurr, Marra and Holmes 2007: 716), a workplace where ethnicity acts as a backdrop for people’s everyday communication; ethnic values underpin the norms which influence the way people interact, and the ways in which they construct different aspects of their identity, and especially their ethnicity. As indicated above, a number of fundamental Māori values are relevant in interpreting the material discussed in this paper, including the importance of privileging of the group over the individual, the high value placed on appropriate humility, and a strong propensity to avoid shaming an individual, especially in front of others, together with a stylistic preference for indirect implicit discourse (Patterson 1992; Metge 1995; 2001; Metge and Kinloch 1978). At a more detailed level, our analytical framework provides a means to examine how various facets of identity are instantiated and negotiated

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in any specific interaction. Lemke (2008: 17) notes that ‘the concept of identity functions in contemporary discourses as a mediating term between social-structural approaches and views of lived, interactional experience’. In pursuing how this actually works, the notion of discursive indexing is useful. As Ochs (1992) insightfully articulated, ways of talking are associated with particular roles, stances (e.g. authoritative, consultative, deferential, polite), activities, or behaviours. To the extent that these are ‘culturally coded as gendered …the ways of speaking associated with them become indices of gender’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 57). Equally, of course, ways of speaking may develop associations which mean they are interpreted as indices of ethnicity or leadership. We bring this sociocultural knowledge to our interactions, and we use it to assess and interpret the linguistic behaviour of participants. Gender, ethnicity and leadership are components of social meaning, aspects of social identity conveyed indirectly, through a range of stances indexed by the choice of particular linguistic and discursive features, which may of course be multifunctional (Holmes 1997; 2006). Through repetition over time particular stances come to regularly invoke particular social roles (Blommaert 2007); certain stances become normatively associated with particular social categories (Eckert 2008). In elaborating how the concept of indexical field may contribute to an understanding of how people use linguistic features in interaction, Eckert (2008: 469–470) proposes that speakers convey through their linguistic choices both ‘permanent qualities’ (e.g. educated, articulate, elegant), and momentary and situated stances (e.g. polite, angry, emphatic, careful). She emphasises the fluidity of these categories: people who are habitually angry, she suggests, ‘may become angry… people through stance accretion’, anger becomes a permanent component of their identity or habitual persona. Or, as Lemke says, ‘[w]hat links the long term to the short is precisely recurrence’ (2008: 25). Eckert’s approach provides, then, a dynamic way of characterising the different components or facets of social identity (professional, gender, ethnic, etc) that people are constantly indexing in workplace interaction. Through activating different stances, participants dynamically construct complex workplace identities appropriate to the specific discourse context in which they are interacting, and the specific interactional goals they wish to achieve from moment to moment. In some cases, this entails the complex integration of components from diverse identities, the construction of multiple and hybridised social identities across a range of social categories such as gender, ethnicity, culture, class, religion, and so on. Relevantly, in the context of this analysis, Lemke (2008: 33) suggests, ‘hybridity represents


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a compromise by the individual among the pressures and forces of multiple cultures and institutions which are seeking to control our identities’. In order to examine how these abstract and complex concepts are instantiated in social interaction, it seems crucial to focus on authentic workplace discourse. Our methodology was designed to permit analysis of the ordinary, everyday workplace talk of workplace participants, including our case study leader. Methodology The data used as the basis of the analyses in this article was collected by the Language in the Workplace (LWP) Project team, based at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.7 Our database currently comprises over 2000 interactions recorded in more than 20 New Zealand workplaces, including government departments, factories, small businesses, semi-public or non-government organisations (NGOs), and private, commercial organisations. The interactions include both business talk and social talk, informal talk and meetings of many different sizes and kinds, with participants from a wide range of different levels in the workplace hierarchy. The total corpus includes interactions from some workplaces with a relatively high proportion of women, some with a relatively high proportion of Māori workers, and a number with an ethnic and balance more closely reflecting the distribution of Māori in the total population (about 14%).8 As mentioned above, the analysis in this paper draws on a subset of this larger corpus, namely recordings made in one specific Māori organisation, pseudonymed Kiwi Productions, a company oriented to creative media-type outputs. Kiwi Productions is a white-collar, professional organisation with primarily commercial objectives, employing about 20 people, most of whom identify as Māori. There is a clear hierarchy of responsibility, comprising a number of managers, each of whom reports to the Managing Director. The company’s kaupapa (objectives, priorities, core business) is Māori-oriented, and those who work there are committed to promoting Māori values and furthering Māori goals. Māori cultural values, attitudes and beliefs are regarded as fundamental to the work being undertaken, Māori ways of doing things prevail, and the objectives of the workplace teams encompass achieving good outcomes for Māori people in general. In sum, ethnicity is an important and omni-relevant aspect of workplace interaction. This company, then, provides an invaluable site for examining the ways in which Māori ethnicity plays out in the wider Pākehā societal context, and in particular for investigating the ways in which the female Māori Managing Director manages the conflicting sociocultural demands of leadership, gender and ethnicity in her daily workplace discourse.

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The LWP methodology involves a participatory approach which gives participants direct control over the data collection; volunteers from the workplaces carry a voice recorder throughout their workday and record samples of their everyday interactions.9 Where possible, meetings are also video-recorded, again without any of the researchers being present. The cameras are set up before the participants enter the meeting room and removed after everyone has left, thus minimising the effects of the researchers on the data collected. This approach has proved very successful in collecting authentic workplace data, and the project’s methodology has been adopted by many others researching spoken interaction (e.g. Koester 2006; Richards 2006; Angouri 2007; Mullany 2007; Ladegaard 2008). This paper makes use of audio-taped small, relatively informal workrelated meetings and discussions involving two or three people, as well as data from larger, and generally longer, meetings which were both audioand video-recorded. In addition, in the well-established tradition of interactional sociolinguistic analysis, a rich fund of ethnographic information was gathered by means of interviews and observations to assist with interpreting the data. Analysis In this section we discuss selected extracts which typify the way in which Yvonne, our focus leader, balances and integrates the complex and competing demands of just three facets of her social identity – leadership, ethnicity, and gender. Our warrant for the selection derives from our confidence that the excerpts are typical and representative, based on our extensive familiarity with the data, as well as the reassurance on this issue provided by our participants with whom we have discussed our interpretation of recorded material.10 In order to represent the range of interactions in which Yvonne is engaged on a regular basis, the examples have been drawn from two interaction types. The first set illustrates Yvonne’s discourse in regular one-to-one meetings with employees in the organisation; the second set of examples has been selected from the monthly update meeting which involves most of the staff members in the organisation. Example 1 is a brief excerpt from one of the regular meetings between Yvonne and Gretel, a senior Pākehā manager in the organisation, and head of one of the four main divisions. Yvonne and Gretel treat each other with respect and overall their discourse instantiates a very equal relationship. As well as discussing a range of transactional problems, they frankly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different staff members, and share personal information. However, as illustrated in Example 1, at certain points Yvonne’s leadership role becomes apparent; most obviously it is she


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who issues the directives, albeit in an appropriately attenuated form, given the context and their mutually respectful relationship. Example 1 Context: One-to-one meeting of Māori Managing Director, Yvonne, with Pākehā senior manager, Gretel. 1. Y: see it’s probably more appropriate for whoever’s 2. the project manager to be managing … 3. because it’s all the staff and everything else 4. and then if we organise (sort if you’re) managing 5. with the active project coordinator 6. and then if we could actually just have a 7. I mean it might only be quarterly or even twice a year 8. G: yeah 9. Y: meeting with um …. (anyway) 10. you and I could go to or just I you know sort of depending 11. I think it would be good if you and I could //+ [drawls]: um:\ 12. G: /yeah I agree\\ 13. Y: but (it just) we probably need to check that out with [name] 14. G: yeah 15. Y: because I I don’t want him to think we’re going over his head 16. or anything it’s more for us just to get a bigger //pic\ture 17. G: /(mm)\\ 18. Y: of how other people see it

The discourse draws extensively on the participants’ shared knowledge, and includes a number of incomplete clauses (eg. line 11: it would be good if you and I could). This inexplicitness makes it difficult for outsiders to follow, but Gretel has no trouble in understanding Yvonne’s point. At the heart of the example is a complex directive for Gretel regarding the organisation of the various projects for which her team is responsible: each should have an internal active project coordinator (line 5), and together Gretel and Yvonne should represent the face of the organisation to the client (line 10). Rather than issuing the directive as a fait accompli, however, Yvonne hedges and presents her request as a negotiable idea (line 7 in particular), and appears to give Gretel the opportunity to agree or disagree with the suggestions (with Gretel agreeing in lines 8 and 14). The high proportion of attenuating devices (e.g. modals might, could, and pragmatic particles, I think, you know, sort of, probably, just, I mean) in this short excerpt, together with the use of the inclusive pronouns we and you and I, clearly index a consultative and collaborative stance. Furthermore, once the course of action has been decided upon, Yvonne explicitly takes account of the face needs of the particular project manager involved who, she notes, should be consulted so that he doesn’t think we’re going over his head (line 15). This short excerpt thus exemplifies the hybridity of Yvonne’s discourse: through the directive she enacts her leadership role, but it is expressed in an implicit

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style, a widely recognised feature of Māori interaction (Metge 1995), and it is appropriately attenuated in the light of her respect for Gretel. Overall, then, Yvonne’s approach can be characterised as collaborative, consultative and supportive, stances which index both her gender and her ethnic identity (cf. Mullany 2007). However, she also maintains her role as leader with overall control over the business needs of the organisation. In other words, Yvonne subtly asserts her authority when guidance is needed or a decision is required about how an agreed action is to be implemented. And this is achieved smoothly and fluidly as the interaction unfolds. On other occasions, Yvonne adopts a much more direct approach. When talking to one of her senior managers, David, for example, with whom she has a close relationship, she is direct and explicit when reprimanding him. David has described instances where his team have disagreed over a decision he has made. Example 2 Context: One-to-one meeting of Māori Managing Director, Yvonne, with Pākehā senior manager, David. 1. Yvonne: you have to try and not get this chitter chatter 2. sort of decisions made in the passageway… 3. so I think I think a way around it is 4. to actually make it much more formal 5. have proper formal meetings 6. David: mm 7. Yvonne: um yeah rather than her just coming to your office 8. you know with things.

In the first two lines of this example, Yvonne engages in a very different style of interaction, one which highlights the professional stance notable in her approach to leadership. In this turn she makes a direct criticism of the appearance of haphazard decision-making which is causing problems in David’s team. In the lead up to her reprimand, there has been an element of ‘he said-she said’ in David’s account of the ongoing difficulties with a particular member of his team who is overriding the decisions made in formal meetings. Yvonne draws a firm line between involvement in the evaluation necessary to further the organisation’s goals and gratuitous gossip about the company’s employees. In all her interactions with her senior managers, she steadily resists being drawn into gossip about others. When she judges things have gone too far, she is very capable of bringing things back on track, as illustrated by her explicit reproving comment. In lines 3-8 Yvonne skilfully moves David away from criticising others, and instead encourages him to focus on processes and formal procedures, where things are discussed and agreed and recorded. There are two important elements of their relationship which influence the way in which Yvonne


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negotiates with David. One is their close personal relationship which allows Yvonne to be extremely direct as in lines 1–2. Another concerns ethnicity. The advice Yvonne gives David to avoid criticising individuals aligns with the Māori cultural norm which promotes attention to the group over the individual. As mentioned above, the priority of the group over the individual is a fundamental Māori value; ‘face’ is shared rather than pertaining to an individual, and honour and dishonour, prestige and shame, accrue to one’s group rather than to individuals (Metge 1995). Hence harsh critical comments directed to individuals are typically avoided in Māori contexts; instead, the message is conveyed by means of a metaphor, or a narrative or a traditional proverb (Patterson 1992: 51–60). In Example 2, then, while both participants are clearly focused on Māori objectives and committed to this Māori organisation, Yvonne takes the opportunity to remind her Pākehā colleague of the relevance of the Māori rather than the Pākehā norm for managing criticism in this community of practice. In another one-to-one meeting there is evidence of the supportive mentoring role that Yvonne fulfils as a leader in the organisation. In her regular meetings with a more junior colleague, she spends time asking about his career progression and future plans, enacting a very up-front leadership role by helping him to set appropriate objectives and guiding him to focus on how to achieve them. In the extract below from an interaction with this colleague, Curtis, Yvonne pays close attention to various facets of his day-to-day work. She displays a caring and supportive stance, integrating indices of gender and ethnicity as she constructs her identity as a considerate and responsible mentor. The following key turns have been extracted from the interaction. Example 3 Context: One-to-one meeting of Māori Managing Director, Yvonne, with Māori staff member Curtis. 1. Y: how’s the [program] working is that program working 2. [...] 3. um are you alright with the [client] logo 4. [...] 5. you’re actually gonna draw it and everything are you 6. [...] 7. have you thought what you’re going to have on that 8. [...] 9. I think it’s better sending a hard copy than an h- you know 10. than a email card isn’t it

Rather than explicitly telling Curtis what to do, Yvonnne asks questions about his progress (lines 1, 3), and the steps he will be taking (lines 5, 7). And when she does want him to act in a certain way she presents her

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instruction as a hedged opinion (lines 9–10), respecting the expertise that Curtis holds. Again mitigating devices (I think, you know, and the tag isn’t it) express a facilitative and consultative stance, consistent both with feminine and Māori identity. Hence Yvonne’s discourse again exhibits features which instantiate a complex and hybrid identity, indexing not only leadership but also femininity and ethnicity In these three examples from one-to-one interactions there is evidence at different points of a strong direct leader, a collaborative, consultative colleague, and a supportive mentor. In each case Yvonne has a particular task to achieve and she skilfully negotiates her way through the interactions, drawing simultaneously on different facets of her complex social identity. She judiciously manages the challenge of maintaining the integrity of her ethnic and gender identity, while also enacting an effective leadership identity; in other words, she convincingly maintains consistency between the various stances which she activates in the interactions. In larger meetings, Yvonne’s leadership identity is always apparent, and there is also clear evidence of her co-construction by others as the most senior member of the organisation (Marra and Holmes 2005; Holmes 2006; Marra, Schnurr and Holmes 2006). In Example 4, Yvonne opens one of the large staff meetings which are held each month. She uses an ironically humorous statement to indicate that it is time to start the reporting process which is a regular feature of the full staff meetings. Example 4 Context: Monthly meeting of all staff in the organisation. Yvonne, the Managing Director, is chairing the meeting. 1. Yvonne: I’m sure each division has organised who’s going 2. to speak and what they’re going to speak about

As the most senior person in the organisation, Yvonne is the obvious person to chair these full staff meetings, a role which highlights her leadership position. However, her relaxed and humorous opening indexes her collaborative leadership style. By using a gently ironic tone to set the agenda, as in Example 4, she downplays her status as the meeting facilitator, and emphasises the collaborative nature of this Māori organisation in which any member of the various divisions within the organisation may be ratified to report on behalf of their team (cf. Schnurr 2009). Nevertheless, Yvonne is incontestably the person who controls the agenda and the direction of the meeting, identifying each speaker by a brief next, or sometimes by the direction of her gaze alone. In another of these large meetings, Yvonne adopts a more overtly authoritative and decisive stance, explicitly indexing her leadership role, by reminding the staff about the priorities in the organisation. This is


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illustrated in Example 5 where Yvonne sets out the overall mission for the group. Example 5 Context: Monthly meeting of all staff in the organisation. Yvonne, the Managing Director, is chairing. 1. Yvonne: ... what we’ve what we’ve done is made a commitment 2. (just) to clients or to director 3. or whoever (you’re) doing the work for 4. that this is what we’re going to provide 5. we’re going to provide a quality product 6. and we’re going to provide it on time and within budget

The significance of this statement of the explicit goals of the organisation could easily be overlooked given that the mission as articulated seems to be one to which all organisations would aspire, i.e. quality work on time and within budget. Its importance lies in its positioning: it serves as a timely reminder of these goals at this particular point when the media has been promoting negative public stereotypes about Māori organisations in New Zealand: i.e. claims that Māori are more likely to be late and overbudget.11 In Example 5, Yvonne is orienting to the ‘big picture’ and the macro-level goals of the organisation. In this context it is her leadership identity which is most relevant in providing vision and inspiration for the group (Jackson, Pfeifer and Vine 2006). Notably, her statement includes not a single hedge or mitigating device, while the repetition of the phrase we’re going to provide (lines 4,5,6) emphasises and intensifies her message. These linguistic features instantiate a decisive and authoritative stance, while the repeated use of the inclusive pronoun we emphasises the collaborative nature of the organisation, indexing ethnicity and shared values. In similar vein, commenting on how the company has dealt with a difficulty, Yvonne adopts a positive and optimistic stance, enacting a motivating leadership identity. Example 6 Context: Monthly meeting of all staff in the organisation. Yvonne, the Managing Director, is chairing. 1. Yvonne: ... I think for the company we’ve been able 2. to totally turn the losing [a big job] 3. into realise that actually it’s an opportunity for us ...

Yvonne here addresses the entire group, and (as in Example 5) again using the inclusive we and us, she emphasises the joint commitment of all its members to the organisation. Thus, while highlighting her leadership identity, through her detailed discussion of what they have all learned, she also acknowledges the collective nature of the organisation, a strategy

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particularly compatible with Māori collective values which orient to the group rather than the individual. Losing a big client is an opportunity for us, the people who make up the organisation. In the larger meetings, then, while Yvonne’s leadership identity is to the fore, she also behaves discursively in ways which are consistent with her ethnic and gender identity. The indexing of ethnicity and gender is particularly evident in Examples 7 and 8. Example 712 Context: Monthly meeting of all staff in the organisation. Yvonne, the Managing Director, is chairing and providing her monthly report. 1. Y: first of all I have to read you out in fact my first and only ever fan letter… [others laugh at her and throughout the recitation] 4. [she reads]: kia ora Yvonne happy new year + first up 5. may I thank you for giving me an invitation to [an event]… 6. [she reads in a mocking tone] I was very impressed 7. with the kaupapa that is driving you to succeed + 8. for more Māori to hear their story…. the Māori experience… 9. good luck Yvonne with what you’re doing + 10. I believe in what you’re about… 11. and you know the unlimited potential we can achieve 12. as Māori as people + anyway… [on to the next topic]

The writer of the letter describes the positive impact Yvonne has as a charismatic leader, and her important leadership role in the organization. The content of this ‘fan letter’ thus casts Yvonne as the company hero, a well-recognised leadership identity (Jackson and Parry 2001; Ford, Harding and Learmouth 2008). Reading the letter with an ironic, self-disparaging tone allows Yvonne to integrate two apparently inconsistent stances, each associated with a different aspect of her social identity. The content of what she chooses to read, for example, the references to the kaupapa (mission) of the organisation and its Māori values, and the focus for which she is being commended, are important to the ethos of this Māori organization, and to her position as a Māori leader within that organisation. By reading the letter, she allows the words of another to depict her as an influential leader in a Māori context. But, culturally well-recognised Māori norms, as well as stereotypical gender norms require that Yvonne adopt a modest and self-deprecating stance. She achieves this through the ironic, mocking tone of voice which she uses to distance herself from the content of the letter, adopting a linguistic strategy which allows her to behave in ways which are acceptable in the light of cultural, ethnic and gender norms. Reading out self-praise or self-promoting is behaviour incompatible with the Māori cultural norm of whakaiti (modesty, humility). Moreover, as noted above, Māori


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culture promotes the group over the individual, and boasting is considered especially unacceptable when it focuses on the individual rather than the group. Distancing devices, namely the use of the words of another, combined with an ironic tone of voice while quoting those words, permit Yvonne to enact her ethnic identity appropriately. Furthermore, instead of elaborating on the content of the letter or making her evaluation of the letter lexically explicit, Yvonne downplays its contents, and moves on to the next item on the agenda with the discourse marker anyway (line 12), thus reinforcing the modest stance she has adopted and appropriately indexing both her ethnicity and gender. Our final example illustrates Yvonne again skilfully integrating different facets of her social and professional identity. Example 813 Context: Monthly meeting of all staff in the organisation. Yvonne, the Managing Director, is chairing and providing her monthly report. 1. Yvonne: yesterday I talked I had to give a presentation 2. at the [name] conference I was invited by the Minister 3. I felt the presentation wasn’t that good 4. because my briefing was about a two second phone 5. [laughs]: call: laughter] and so I had no idea who was 6. going to be at the conference and ( ) what’s it about 7. I had no programme beforehand so I was a bit um /( )\\ 8. Sheree: //is this the one\ you had yesterday 9. Yvonne: yeah 10. Sheree: I loved it 11. Yvonne: //oh did you\ 12. All: /[general laughter]\\ 13. Sheree: I actually came home raving 14. Yvonne: oh that’s only because I had a photo of you 15. All: [loud burst of laughter] 16. Yvonne: so mm //but it’s just… anyway so that’s me +++ next

Yvonne here reports on the fact that, at short notice, she made a brief contribution to a conference in the area of the company’s interests. She also comments that she felt the presentation wasn’t that good (line 3), explaining that she had very little time to prepare my briefing was about a two second phone call (line 4), and that she was not provided with a programme in advance (line 7). Yvonne thus constructs herself as acting in an appropriate way as the company Managing Director, by responding positively to an opportunity to promote the company’s interests, but, consistent with Māori values, she also modestly denigrates her performance, commenting that she felt she had not done as well as she would have wished. This behaviour contrasts sharply with data from our Pākehā workplaces where we have no examples of a leader negatively evaluating their own

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performance in a formal, public context. Thus Yvonne’s self-deprecation is a culturally appropriate expression of whakaiti, as well as compatible with the widespread gendered expectation that women, including women leaders, should behave in modest ways (Eagly and Carli 2007). What follows demonstrates how other staff members co-construct Yvonne as an effective leader, while again illustrating Yvonne’s skilled negotiation of the competing facets of her identity. Sheree had also attended the presentation and she suddenly realises this is what Yvonne is referring to: is this the one you had yesterday (line 8), and when Yvonne provides confirmation she is fulsome in praise of Yvonne’s contribution I loved it…I actually came home raving (lines 10, 13). Yvonne’s first reaction is surprise oh did you (line 11), a reaction which our analysis of the intonation and tone of voice suggests is a very genuine one. When this elicits an upgraded compliment, Yvonne skilfully refutes it by suggesting Sheree’s positive response can be explained because a photograph of Sheree was a component of the presentation (line 14). This occasions general laughter and the humour effectively deflects attention from Yvonne and the compliment Sheree has paid her.14 As in the previous example, rather than elaborating or basking in the praise, Yvonne then passes the baton to the next contributor, so that’s me… next (line 16), indicating that her report is complete and the next speaker should begin their contribution. By adopting a humble stance, and deflecting a compliment which draws attention to her oratorical skills, Yvonne again behaves in a way that is totally consistent with the Māori value of whakaiti, while simultaneously indexing femininity. At the same time, Yvonne conveys the message that she is doing her job as leader of the organisation, by responding to opportunities and performing as well as possible in difficult circumstances. This short exchange thus neatly illustrates how Yvonne constructs herself both as a conscientious leader, and as an appropriately modest Māori woman. Discussion The examples discussed in the previous section have illustrated how a particular person in a specific organisation constructs a complex, hybridised social identity, simultaneously indexing leadership, gender identity and ethnic identity. Yvonne’s performance clearly instantiates Lemke’s proposal that ‘we construct our own identities out of the options afforded to us by our general positionality and our particular trajectory of experiences, encounters, options for action, and so forth’ (2008: 21). In Example 1, interacting with Gretel, a senior manager of the same sex, Yvonne conveys what she, as company leader, wants to happen, using a


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collaborative and negotiative stance most obviously indexing normative femininity, though such stances are also associated with Māori ethnicity, instantiating deeply rooted Māori values. In interaction with David in Example 2 and Curtis in Example 3, we see different facets of Yvonne’s leadership identity: an authoritative and decisive stance, expressed in a clear and direct statement in Example 2; and a less direct, mentoring, and even stereotypically maternal stance leading Curtis in an appropriate direction in Example 3. Ethnicity constitutes a taken-for-granted background in every interaction at Kiwi Productions, evident, for instance, in the way Yvonne dissuades people from criticism of individuals, and rather encourages them to focus on processes and formal procedures. Where a Pākehā leader might use linguistic mitigation (a strategy indexed as feminine), in making a criticism or complaint to an individual, Māori managers more often generalise the criticism, focussing on the group rather than the individual (Metge 1995; Schnurr, Marra and Holmes 2007), or on processes rather than specific behaviours (Holmes, Marra and Vine forthcoming). In the large group meetings, Yvonne’s leadership role is constantly manifest, as illustrated in Examples 4, 5, and 6 where the ways in which she takes responsibility for the organisation are very evident. She takes the role of chair in full staff meetings, she reminds people of the company’s objectives, and she motivates and energises them in the wake of a dispiriting disappointment. The authoritative and decisive stances she adopts at different points throughout these large meetings unmistakeably index leadership, and contribute to the convincing construction of Yvonne as an effective leader. At the same time, the mitigating humour in Example 4 and the affiliative encouragement in example 6 are consistent with a more normative feminine identity, and also with Māori values which orient to the group. Stances indexing ethnic identity, gender identity and leadership identity are also apparent in the account of the complimentary ‘fan letter’ in Example 7, as well as in Yvonne’s modest recounting of her unanticipated contribution to the conference in Example 8. Thus the large meeting context also provides very explicit evidence of the ways in which Yvonne constructs a more complex social identity, hybridising all three components which are the focus of this paper. In sum, Yvonne’s largely seamless integration of different facets of her social identity in her day-to-day workplace interactions, as illustrated briefly in this paper, may account at least in part for the fact that she is so widely regarded, not only within her organisation but in the wider business community, as a very effective and successful leader. In her performance as the leader of an organisation with a commitment to benefiting Māori, she demonstrates the kind of agency referred to by Lemke (2008), taking

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advantage of her position and experience to achieve her goals within the sociocultural constraints of the wider society, while sensitive to the values of her own culture. In interview she commented on the challenge of dealing with some influential clients who found it difficult to deal with a Māori woman in a leadership position: ‘there have been a few individuals like that, but you see it doesn’t hold me back’. She goes on to describe how she manages such problems strategically, in a way that means her organisation does not suffer from such sexist prejudices: ‘I can’t make headway with him that’s why I send Quentin over. Quentin will come back with a whole lot of information… you know it’s just boys like to share.’ On the other hand, she points out, ‘a lot of women I work with, they just prefer to work with women’. So Yvonne strategically exploits the ‘old boy’s network’, while concurrently nurturing her relationships with women in influential positions. Yvonne provides a case study of a person who in her daily interactions is constantly negotiating the often contradictory demands of different sociocultural expectations. While the expectation of her as a woman and as a Māori sometimes coincide (e.g. the positive value associated with a collaborative and consultative approach, and a modest demeanour), there are also dimensions of being Māori which are distinctive (e.g. the importance of privileging the group above the individual, and the tendency to focus on examining processes rather than criticising individual behaviour). Hence, in addition to the classic ‘double bind’ – the so-called contradiction between acting in ways that are considered stereotypically feminine and ways considered authoritative – there is the additional challenge for a Māori woman leader in that she must also be seen to be explicitly respecting Māori values and enacting her leadership identity in ways which are compatible with Māori culture. Enacting leadership as a Māori woman entails behaving rather differently than enacting leadership as a Pākehā woman (Diamond 2003; Jackson and Parry 2001). As we have indicated in this paper, a Māori woman leader must negotiate a highly constrained and complex route between many different sets of sociocultural expectations. As noted above, Lemke (2008: 33) suggests, ‘hybridity represents a compromise by the individual among the pressures and forces of multiple cultures and institutions which are seeking to control our identities’. But an alternative perspective could conceptualise hybridity as a creative and constructive force rather than as a negative compromise. Hybridised identities can be seen as innovative and positive responses to the tendency for individuals to view society as comprising hard-edged social categories, and to discriminate against those from other groups (Brewer 1997). Individuals in positions such as Yvonne have the potential to forge affirming hybridised identities, contesting traditional roles,


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undermining perceptions of social categories as hard-edged and mutually exclusive, and promoting tolerance of diversity (Brewer 2009; Brewer and Pierce 2005).15 From this perspective, Yvonne’s day-to-day discursive behaviour which skilfully enacts complex and diverse social identities can be seen as a challenge to established social categories and stereotypes, and a positive contribution to the development of tolerance, and even appreciation of diversity. Conclusion Gender is an omni-relevant social category, constantly used as a means of managing our social world. Gendered norms and expectations may constrain behaviour, including talk. For good reason, because the constraints tend to impinge more restrictively on them, women are often more aware of the force of gendered societal norms and expectations than are men (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). In the nineteenth-century New Zealand context, Phillips commented that ‘the sheer ideological hegemony of the male mythology served to disguise conflicts and obscure diversity within society itself ’ (1996: 284). The question posed by the media when the New Zealand government changed in late 2008, ‘who will be invited to the big boys’ table?’ (i.e. the new Prime Minister, John Key’s, cabinet table), suggests little has changed. In the USA, Grabe and Shibley Hyde note that, despite some gains, ‘women continue to be sparsely represented at higher levels of organizations and are extraordinarily rare in top managerial positions of businesses and corporations’ (2006: 183). The double bind is still a reality for women leaders in many contexts, especially business contexts, despite the progress made by women like Helen Clark (now working in a top level position for the United Nations). As Cameron (1997b: 33) has pointed out, ‘[b]eing a woman or a man … is about living one’s other social identities (such as racial, ethnic, regional, subcultural) in a particular and gendered way’. Yvonne provides an illuminating case study here. Doing ethnicity, like doing gender, is a performance enacted in relation to significant sociocultural constraints, constraints which generally go unnoticed by the majority group. Minority group members, of course, have a very different perspective. Unlike Pākehā New Zealanders, Māori are required to be bicultural. The way Pākehā do things is considered ‘normal’ from the point of view of the majority of New Zealanders, and interactional norms in the majority of New Zealand workplaces are typically those of the majority group. This hegemony provides obvious challenges for Māori working in culturally Pākehā organisations. For those relatively few Māori who work in Māori organisations, such as Kiwi Productions, the challenges are equally complex. As suggested

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in the opening section, broader societal constraints operate in all New Zealand organisations, but Māori organisations attempt to infuse all their activities with Māori values, and to use Māori norms of interaction and Māori ways of doing things. This is not easy within a context where these behaviours are always perceived as marked. In other words, masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people’s unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender and ethnicity. In this context, we have suggested, the challenge of enacting a convincing leadership identity is far from straightforward. We have explored some of this complexity by examining the ways in which one successful Māori woman leader negotiates this fissure-ridden, challenging territory on a daily basis. As Kendall (2008: 546) notes, ‘[e]ach case study occurs at the intersection of social and historical processes which make that case possible in a particular time and place’. Hopefully, our analysis of aspects of Yvonne’s effective performance of a hybridised identity in New Zealand in the early decades of twenty-first century may contribute to an increased understanding of the complexities of managing workplace discourse in culturally diverse contexts, and provide indications of constructive ways forward in countering negative societal perspectives and eroding hard-edged unhelpful social categories. Transcription conventions yes Underlining indicates emphatic stress [laughs] : : Paralinguistic features and other information in square brackets, colons indicate start/finish + Pause of up to one second ... //......\ ... Simultaneous speech .../.......\\ ... (hello) Transcriber’s best guess at an unclear utterance - Incomplete or cut‑off utterance … … Section of transcript omitted All names are pseudonyms

About the authors Janet Holmes is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington where she directs the Language in the Workplace Project and teaches sociolinguistics at every level. She has published on a wide range of topics including New Zealand English, language and gender, sexist language,


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pragmatic particles, compliments and apologies, and most recently on aspects of workplace discourse. Her most recent books are the third edition of the Introduction to Sociolinguistics (Pearson, 2008), Gendered Talk at Work (Blackwell, 2006) and Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 2011). Meredith Marra is a core member of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project and a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington where she teaches a range of courses in sociolinguistics. Meredith’s primary research interest is the language of business meetings, and she has published in the areas of humour and gender in workplace interactions in Language in Society, the Journal of Politeness Research and Text & Talk. She is co-author of Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Constructing Identities at Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Notes 1 We would like to acknowledge the contributions of other members of the Language in the Workplace team to the data collection and transcription on which this paper draws. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided extremely useful comment and suggestions which have improved this paper. 2 See Holmes and Marra (2004), Holmes (2005; 2006), Holmes and Schnurr (2006) for further discussion and exemplification. See also Kanter (1977), Mullany (2007) and Kendall (2009) on the attribution of terms such as ‘mother’ to effective women leaders. 3 Jackson and Parry (2001: 27) comment that ‘it would be difficult to find a nation that has institutionalized and ritualized…wealth and envy status’ or ‘lack of reverence for big business’ to the extent that Australasians have. 4 P.A. Vogt studying Ohakune, a small New Zealand town, wrote: ‘Employers, managers, foremen and supervisors are expected to be equally sociable, are often addressed by their forenames and are generally regarded as being workmates along with the others. Respect for seniority is, in fact, more forthcoming if the senior man overtly plays down his vocational position by being ‘one of the boys’ on an everyday, causal social level’. Cited in Phillips (1996: 285). 5 Māori people are a minority in New Zealand (14.7%: www.stats.govt.nz, 2006). 6 The name Kiwi Productions is a pseudonym. 7 See http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/lwp for further information. 8 This rich corpus thus includes material from Māori workplaces, from workplaces with a strong sympathy for Māori concerns, as well as from bicultural workplaces, all of which has provided valuable verification of the

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analyses in this paper which draw on material from two particular Māori workplaces. 9 For more information on the project, and especially details of data collection and methodology, see Holmes and Stubbe (2003) and Marra (2008). 10 The interesting issue of ‘warranting’ is well discussed in Cameron 2009; McRae 2009; Swann 2009. 11 See Marra (2005) for a discussion of Yvonne’s overt reaction to the media where she pointed out the need for Māori origanisations to be ‘whiter than white’. 12 This example also occurs in Marra and Holmes (2005) where it is used to illustrate narratives in business contexts. 13 This example is also discussed in Holmes (2007) 14 See Schnurr (2009) on the functions of humour in the construction of leadership identity. 15 Brewer and Pierce (2005: 9) conclude: a cross-cutting category structure and multiple social identities with awareness of ingroup diversity provide an effective formula for reducing intergroup prejudice.

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Gender and Language

Article

Leadership in Hong Kong. Is gender really not an issue? Stephanie Schnurr and Bernie Mak Abstract Although gender is an important issue in many Asian countries where women often face serious discriminatory practices, this topic is notoriously under-researched from a socio-linguistic perspective. We aim to address this issue by conducting an in-depth case study of leadership and gender in Hong Kong. Drawing on more than 30 hours of authentic workplace discourse and a sample of representative emails, we explore how a successful female leader does leadership and how she enacts her gender identity in ways that reflect and respond to the overall masculine culture of her workplace and the socio-cultural context of Hong Kong. Our findings illustrate that in addition to considering the socio-cultural context, workplace culture and the norms of communities of practice, the specific interactional context is also of crucial importance for an understanding of how leadership and gender are performed. We conclude that in contrast to general perceptions, gender is indeed an issue in the professional domain in Hong Kong, and is reflected not only in leadership discourse but also in the gendered and often discriminatory practices that are still prevalent in many workplaces. keywords: gender; workplace talk; leadership; hong kong

Affiliation Stephanie Schnurr: The University of Warwick; [email protected] Bernie Mak: The Chinese University of Hong Kong; [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.337

www.equinoxpub.com

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Stephanie Schnurr and Bernie Mak

Introduction Over the last decade or so research in language and gender has increasingly become interested in workplace contexts. However, most of this research has focused on workplaces in Western cultures (e.g. Mullany 2007; Holmes and Stubbe 2003b; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997), and only a handful of research studies have looked at gender issues in workplaces in non-Western, especially in Asian, contexts (e.g. Yoshida 2001; Ohara 2004; Schnurr 2010; Zhang 2007; Inoue 2007). This gap is particularly surprising since there is an increasing body of research on workplace discourse in Asia, including studies on Japan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Korea (e.g. Miller 1994; Gu 2002; Kong 2005; Jung 2005; Bilbow 1997; Hadina and Rafik-Galea 2005; Emmett 2003; Yeung 2003). But while most of this research focuses on cultural aspects of workplace discourse, very little attention has been paid to gender issues. Most of what we know about gender issues in Asian workplaces is based on research studies conducted in social sciences and management studies (e.g. Chan, Tang and Chan 1999; Chiu and Ng 1999; Ng, Patricia and Dawn 2002). We could only find a few studies that look at gender issues in workplaces in Asia from a linguistic perspective, namely Yoshida (2001), Inoue (2007), Abe (1998), and Ohara (2004) who conducted research in Japan, Zhang (2007) who did her research in Mainland China, and Lorente (2007) who researched Filipino domestic workers in Singapore. Yoshida and Ohara’s studies found that the men and women in the Japanese workplaces they looked at employed elements of stereotypical feminine and masculine behaviour in order to achieve their workplace goals. More specifically, in an analysis of speakers’ voice pitch levels, Ohara (2004: 223) observed that although women were ‘constrained in their pitch behavior’, both female and male employees strategically used a high-pitched voice ‘to accomplish the speech activities that constitute their roles and relations at their workplaces’. And in a study of female employees in a Japanese inn, Yoshida (2001) found that the behaviour of the women workers was markedly different when they did not serve their guests. When interacting with the guests, the women typically used ‘a formal, socially distancing style of speech, [and] move[d] in their kimonos in a graceful, feminine manner’ (Yoshida 2001: 361). However, when talking among themselves behind the scenes, the women’s language was characterized by their local dialects, rudeness, teasing, jocular abuse, sexual banter, and making fun of the few male employees at the inn. These behaviours, in particular the challenging and often abusive use of humour, constitute important ways for these women to make fun of the (often tragic) conditions of their private lives, to negotiate their professional and private identities, to ‘express sentiments about their

Leadership in Hong Kong

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work’ and ‘voice their everyday difficulties’, as well as to reinforce the men’s subordinate status (in the hierarchy of this particular workplace) (Yoshida 2001: 368). In her study of professionals in Bejing, Zhang (2007) observed that ‘[l]anguage and gender are shown to interact in such a way that the gendered character of recruitment and work imposes more constraints on women’s linguistic behavior than on that of their male colleagues’. More specifically, she found that those women who worked in foreign companies (or waiqi as they are referred to in the article) tended to produce considerably more non-local variants associated with a cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin. This differentiation between male and female waiqi professionals (which was not observed in the group of professionals in state enterprises) is interpreted as a reflection of gendered practices and norms that prevail in their workplaces: ‘[t]he greater use of the non-local features by waiqi women is inseparable from their work in front-end positions and their roles in serving the public face of their companies’ (Zhang 2007: 417). Studies like these provide interesting and important insights into the ways in which gender and professional identities are constructed in a workplace context. And they are important first steps into a largely under-researched area of interest. However, although these studies are fascinating, there is clearly a need for more research in this area. This paper aims to contribute to this emerging area of interest by conducting research on language and gender in a workplace in Hong Kong. Gender in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has been described as a place where ‘East meets West’ (Chan 2005: 75; see also Cheng 2003), and due to its historical, cultural and linguistic tradition it is a unique city in Asia and perhaps even worldwide. Hong Kong is not only ‘an international and cosmopolitan city with an international and diverse community’ but it is also deeply rooted in Chinese culture and traditions (Brooks 2004: 148), and traditional Chinese values and practices are vivid in many aspects of society, including many workplaces (see also Lee 2003). Based on traditional Chinese cultural beliefs, for example, women’s place is typically viewed as the home (de Leon and Ho 1994), and hierarchical and very patriarchal family structures which are also reflected in many workplaces view fathers and (typically male) leaders as absolute authority figures (Chee and West 2004; Cullen 1999). This combination of Eastern and Western elements and different cultural traditions is reflected in many aspects of social life, and is particularly salient with regards to gender representations and constructions (see Kang and Schnurr 2010).

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However, in addition to this unique cultural and historical set-up, what makes Hong Kong a prime site for an analysis of gender and language issues is the rather striking observation that the public consensus in Hong Kong appears to be that gender is not an issue, and more specifically, that gender discrimination does not exist. This rather optimistic view is based on the perception that women in Hong Kong enjoy a relatively high status in comparison to women in other Asian societies. In particular, the presence and participation of women in higher education, occupations traditionally occupied mainly by men (such as law and medicine), and in politics has made an impact on how the status of women is perceived in Hong Kong society. Based on these advancements, it is ‘commonly believed that sexual inequalities no longer exist in Hong Kong. And some people even think that the status of women has surpassed that of men’ (Women and Media Concern Group, AAF, 1992: 183). However, this ‘attitude of cosy complacency’ (Pearson and Leung 1995: 18), which characterizes the lack of awareness of the relevance of gender issues in Hong Kong, does not adequately reflect the workplace realities of many women in Hong Kong. In a previous study (Kang and Schnurr 2010) we have shown that rather than being a society in which gender does not seem to be an issue, a paradox exists in Hong Kong between the perceived high status of women and substantial evidence of continued discrimination against women (see also Kang forthcoming). Traditional gender roles, for example, which portray women as housewife and mother, or as celebrity and beauty, are still maintained and used to discriminatory effects in the media as well as in the workplace context (see Kang and Schnurr 2010). Although women make up almost half of Hong Kong’s overall workforce, in 2003 only 26% of all managerial positions were filled by women (The Women’s Foundation 2006: 43). The infamous glass ceiling that many women worldwide encounter as they are trying to make their way to top management positions thus seems to be particularly strong in Hong Kong. Although it has also been claimed that some women are holding important positions in politics and the economy (in particular in family-owned businesses (see Brooks 2004)), gender inequality and discrimination are still pressing issues for many women. Previous research has pointed out that women in Hong Kong are discriminated against and disadvantaged, for example, in terms of salary and promotion opportunities (The Women’s Foundation 2006; see also Chow 1995; Lee 2003; Pearson and Leung 1995; Ebrahimi 1999). According to key statistics, in some professions, such as community, social and personnel services, in 2006 women’s monthly salary was considerably (up to 75%) lower than that of their male counterparts (Women and Men in Hong Kong 2007: 91, 92).


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These discriminatory practices, in addition to the overall male-bias of Hong Kong society in general and the workplace domain in particular, pose serious challenges for women who want to succeed in this masculinist environment. The culture of Hong Kong has been described as masculine (Hofstede 1980), which is also reflected in the workplace realities that many women and men are faced with on a daily basis. In particular, women who aim to move into leadership positions as well as those who have made it to the top are constantly confronted with gender issues in different forms and disguises. However, there is only very little research that addresses these issues in the context of Hong Kong: in a recent publication on the current situation of women and girls in Hong Kong, The Women’s Foundation (2006) observes that there is a particularly dramatic lack of research on women in leadership positions in a workplace context. The authors conclude by noting that ‘[a]lmost every aspect of women in power and decision-making in Hong Kong requires further investigation’ (The Women’s Foundation 2006: 47). Our study aims to contribute to this research by conducting an in-depth case study of a very successful woman leader. Our particular focus is on how this leader negotiates her professional and her gender identities in her everyday workplace interactions – taking into account some of the masculine norms that characterize the culture of her workplace and the sociocultural context of Hong Kong. Leadership discourse as a gendered performance

Because leadership is often associated with masculinity (e.g. Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Eagly and Carli 2003; Martin Rojo and Gomez Esteban 2003; Sinclair 1998), women in leadership positions worldwide often face particular challenges in their performance of leadership: female leaders are often perceived as deviant exceptions to the (male) norm (Heilman, Block, Martell and Simon 1989; Trauth 2002: 114), and are often judged as less competent than male leaders (e.g. Ely 1988; Geis, Brown and Wolfe 1990). Even the so-called ‘female advantage’ (i.e. the observation that ‘effective leadership is congruent with the ways in which women lead’ – Eagly and Carli 2003: 810) has not advantaged women in male-dominated working environments (Fletcher 2004: 654). This male bias of the concept of leadership is also reflected in leadership discourse. Since leadership is not a gender neutral concept, it is perhaps not surprising that discursive strategies stereotypically associated with a masculine speech style, as well as behaviours often ascribed to masculine ways of doing things, are generally viewed as paradigmatic ways of performing leadership (Kendall and Tannen 1997; Pauwels 2000). As a consequence, masculine notions of leadership have become ‘deeply

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entrenched in thinking and language, so that the language of leadership often equates with the language of masculinity’ (Hearn and Parkin 1988: 21). Interestingly, this male bias persists in spite of the fact that more recent research has emphasised that many behaviours and speech styles associated with ‘effective’ leadership are actually ascribed to femininity (Eagly and Carli 2003). Elsewhere we have defined leadership discourse as a performance which by influencing others advances the goals of the organization (transactional behaviour) while also maintaining harmony within the team (relational behaviour) (Holmes, Schnurr, Chan and Chiles 2003; Schnurr 2009). Transactional behaviours describe activities that primarily aim at getting things done, solving problems and achieving set goals, while relationally oriented behaviours concentrate on ensuring group harmony and creating a productive working environment (see also Schnurr 2009). These activities are not only integral aspects of leadership performance (and can often not be separated from each other), but they are also indexed for gender: transactional behaviours are typically ascribed to masculinity while more relational behaviors are indexed for femininity. In this way, the very notion of leadership is already gendered. Moreover, the specific ways in which leadership is enacted discursively are also often associated with gendered speech styles. And by drawing on elements of different (gendered) speech styles, interlocutors evoke different stances and create different identities for themselves. More specifically, particular linguistic forms that index certain roles or identities (such as leadership) are at the same time associated with particular stances (such as decisiveness), which are also associated with particular social categories, such as masculinity and femininity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 595–596). Hence, by displaying, say decisive or outcomeoriented behaviours, individuals not only construct their professional identities (for example, as leaders) but they at the same time also evoke certain gendered stances (such as masculinity). In this way, as Cameron and Kulick (2003: 58) maintain, ‘the same way of speaking signifies both a professional identity and a gendered identity, and in practice these are difficult to separate: the two meanings coexist, and both of them are always potentially relevant’. In other words, through their linguistic choices interlocutors simultaneously create professional identities and gender identities (see also Holmes and Schnurr 2005). Thus, by doing leadership individuals at the same time do gender – these processes are inextricably intertwined with each other, perhaps even more so because of the gendered nature of leadership. In other words, because leadership is a masculine concept and because the notion of leadership as well as typical behaviours and discourses associated with leadership are indexed for masculinity, any attempt to do leadership inevitably involves


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doing gender. The processes of doing leadership and doing gender are thus intricately interwoven in a workplace context – perhaps even more so in a masculine society such as Hong Kong, where most people in positions of power and authority are male. Data and framework The data on which this research draws consists of more than 30 hours of spoken interaction recorded at Public Company,1 a very successful non-profit organization in Hong Kong. It was founded by Sabitha, the owner and current CEO, with the aim of making Hong Kong a better place to work by addressing a range of diversity and inclusion issues. At the time of data collection six staff members were employed on a permanent basis supported by several part-time staff. All permanent members were women. The working language at Public Company is English for both internal and external communication. The structure of the organization is strictly hierarchical with Sabitha, the CEO and founder, at the top. She is not only the public face of Public Company but is also involved in all aspects of the company’s business, and she is the initiator as well as the driving force of most, if not all, of the company’s projects. And although teamwork is an important aspect of the company’s values, this does not mean that members work together on equal terms: rather, teams are organized strictly hierarchically (with Sabitha at the top), and Sabitha is typically the one who makes the decisions (although this appears to be changing, as Sabitha mentioned in an interview) (see also Schnurr 2010 on Sabitha’s decision-making style). Moreover, as our analysis below indicates, task-orientation and competitiveness are crucial aspects of the everyday workplace interactions between Sabitha and her subordinates. Overall, staff seems to get along well with each other, their relationships are generally friendly yet distanced and purely professional. These aspects are also reflected in their communicative and behavioural practices: most of their talk centres around transactional topics and there are only very few instances of small talk in the data that we collected (and most of these small talk instances are indirectly work-related; see Holmes 2000a). Moreover, staff members do not socialize with each other outside the workplace, and they do not seem to play a role in each others’ private lives. Based on these aspects, then, Public Company could be described as what Hofstede (1997) calls a relatively ‘masculine’ workplace as it is characterized by hierarchical structures and a focus on transactional outcomes rather than relationships (Hofstede 1997: 93; Schnurr 2009: 100).

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This relative masculinity of the culture of Public Company has an impact on what are expected to be normative ways of doing leadership at this workplace: Hofstede (1997: 94) notes that for masculine (national) cultures leaders are expected to be ‘assertive, decisive and “aggressive”’, and they tend to focus on the accomplishment of tasks rather than on more relational aspects. These orientations are also reflected in the level of workplace culture (see Schnurr 2009) and are typically reflected in various levels of leadership discourse, such as the ways in which decisions are made and the ways things get done. And while we do not want to claim too much regarding representativeness, the overall masculine nature of Public Company makes this workplace a good case study which may provide interesting insights into the relevance of gender for leadership performance in Hong Kong. We take a social constructionist approach in order to explore how Sabitha does leadership, and how she portrays herself as a leader while at the same time negotiating her gender identity in the relatively masculine context of this Hong Kong workplace. Our data comprises a large, weekly staff meeting, and less formal, one-to-one interactions between staff members. We have also collected a sample of representative emails by all staff members sent over a period of one week. This primary data is supplemented by interviews with participants and with an analysis of organizational documents. Analysis We have chosen nine examples here to illustrate how Sabitha, the CEO and founder of Public Company, does leadership in a context that can be described as masculine, including the wider sociocultural context of Hong Kong (Hofstede 1980) and the specific culture of Public Company (see above). We aim to explore how the masculine perceptions and norms that characterize both the macro-context (Hong Kong) and the micro-context (Sabitha’s workplace) are reflected and negotiated in Sabitha’s everyday leadership performance. More specifically, we look at how Sabitha does leadership (by getting things done) in different interactional contexts: we explore her leadership discourse in a sample of internal emails, as well as larger meetings and one-to-one interactions with her colleagues. By getting things done in these different interactional contexts, Sabitha combines transactional and relational behaviours which, in turn, are indexed not only for leadership but also for gender. As our examples show, she skilfully moves along a continuum of transactional and relational behaviours which are at the same time associated with gendered ways of doing things. At the most masculine end of the continuum, leadership


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discourse is characterized by an orientation towards outcomes and the accomplishment of tasks, unilateral and autonomous decision making, direct and perhaps even challenging ways of getting things done, as well as competitive and aggressive discussions. The most feminine end, by contrast, is characterized by a clear orientation towards people and processes, collaborative, consultative and joint decision making, indirect and inclusive ways of getting things done, as well as collaborative and supportive team discussions. These behaviours, in turn, are often associated with feminine ways of doing things and have been ascribed to feminine speech styles (e.g. Holmes 2000b). Although such a distinction between feminine and masculine speech styles neglects the impact of other social factors on language use, such as stylistic variation across contexts and participants’ goals, it is still useful because it captures some of the elements people typically associate with feminine and masculine speech behaviours (Holmes and Stubbe 2003a: 575). And since the formulation of stereotypes often informs judgements about male and female behaviour and impacts on notions of what is appropriate (see for example Mills 2003: 184; Philips 2003), such a distinction between feminine and masculine styles seems to provide a useful starting point for an exploration of how gender and professional identities are constructed in and through discourse. Our analysis focuses on just one aspect of Sabitha’s leadership performance, namely getting things done. According to Holmes (2006) getting things done or giving directives is a gendered practice: more masculine ways of getting things done are typically characterized by relative directness, they often take the form of need-statements and imperatives, while more feminine ways of getting things done are typically less direct in that they include ‘interrogative rather than imperative forms’ as well as modals and ‘paralinguistic features such as hesitations and pauses’ and the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ (Holmes 2006: 37–39). However, as Holmes (2006: 40) notes, ‘[a]ny leader’s linguistic choices depend for their effect on where, when and to whom they are uttered, as well as what preceded them’. Clearly, none of these strategies performs only one function. We explore Sabitha’s interactional leadership styles in emails, a meeting and one-to-one interactions. Getting things done in emails

Emails become increasingly more important in workplace communication and they have started to replace other more traditional ways of communication (Waldvogel 2007). Although written language is typically less spontaneous than oral language, emails, in particular at work, encourage

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small, frequent communication, and with their ‘include previous message’ feature, emails also serve as an efficient correspondence and recordkeeping tool (Waldvogel 2005). Since emails have become an integral aspect of workplace communication, it seems crucial to also consider this medium in an analysis of leadership discourse. The examples that we discuss here are representative of the emails that we collected at Public Company. Examples 1 and 2 are emails sent from Sabitha to Faye, the Managing Director, and Examples 3 and 4 are group emails sent to several staff members. At the time of recording Faye had been working for Public Company for almost three years. She started as a volunteer and eventually became a permanent member of the team. Example 1 Email from Sabitha to Faye FW: Meeting with [client name] Can you work on this? Example 2 Email from Sabitha to Faye FW: ENGAGE in Hong Kong What are you doing about this?

Both emails are characterized by their direct and explicit style. They do not contain a greeting or a closing but just consist of a directive in the form of a question. In both emails Sabitha ensures that her subordinate (Faye) knows what she is expected to work on. However, the relative directness of the emails is mitigated to some extent by the question form of the directive and by face-to-face interactions that typically precede the emails. In the interview Sabitha mentioned that at Public Company the main purpose of emails is to function as a record-keeping device, to ‘constantly have a dialogue’ as she put it in the interview, and to update each other on latest developments. Examples 3 and 4 are also good examples of this record-keeping function of emails. Like the emails discussed above they are rather direct and contain only transactional information. Bonnie is the Diversity and Inclusion Manager of the organization, and she had been with Public Company for almost two years at the time of data collection.


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Example 3 Email from Sabitha to Bonnie; Cc Betty and Faye Bonnie An you pls write a blurb about this in Other events for our website Example 4 Email from Sabitha to Faye, Betty and Bonnie FW: Call from [name] I just spoke with [name] who is leaving [company] at the end of the month Betty – pls take her off the [name] list Betty – pls keep her name in our contacts and update with her mobile no below Thanks S

Other than the observation that Example 3 contains a minimal greeting (‘Bonnie’, the name of the main addressee), and that Example 4 contains a closing (‘Thanks S’), the style of these emails is similar to Examples 1 and 2. It is relatively direct, and the overall tone is primarily matter-of-fact. Albeit being sent to several of her colleagues, in Examples 3 and 4 Sabitha asks specific individuals (i.e. Bonnie and Betty) to do certain things. And although she uses ‘pls’ in her directives, it appears that this abbreviated version of ‘please’ functions here as a rather conventionalized politeness marker while leaving little doubt about the fact that people do not really have an option about complying. Overall, there was hardly any relational work performed in any of the emails that we collected. This absence of more relational aspects in the emails is particularly surprising since several studies have indicated that email is not only a valuable tool to convey transactional information but is equally suited for doing relational work (e.g. Rowe 2007; see also Sproull and Kiesler 1986). In her emails, then, Sabitha portrays herself as a decisive and authoritarian leader who is in charge of what people do. Her choice of linguistic strategies, most notably her directness and the general absence of relational behaviours, contribute to this construction of her leader identity. However, these transactional behaviours are not only indexed for authoritative and decisive leadership but they at the same time evoke notions of masculinity. Moreover, the rather direct and to-the-point email style is in line with

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the general style that characterizes the emails that we collected from all members in this CofP. It thus reflects and to some extent reinforces the discursive norms that characterize the rather masculine culture of this particular workplace. It could perhaps even be argued that these norms are further embedded within the wider sociocultural context of Hong Kong in which leadership behaviors that are associated with hegemonic masculinities have traditionally been regarded as the norm. However, this rather direct and unmitigated style may have something to do with the email medium. Emails are a hybrid medium combining features of oral and written texts. And while it has been suggested that ‘non-face-to-face exchanges are far less confrontational’ than face-to-face encounters (Cornbleet and Carter 2001: 75), this does not necessarily apply to emails, as the examples above illustrate. Instead, perhaps also due to the emails’ emphasis on referential functions, the ways in which Sabitha gets things done in her workplace emails are more direct and confrontational than her performance in the face-to-face encounters. Getting things done in meetings

The leadership style Sabitha typically displays in the internal weekly staff meeting, in particular the ways in which she gets things done, is slightly different to her email style: while it is also characterized by directness and a focus on the accomplishment of tasks, Sabitha also regularly employs more relational elements when getting things done in this context. We thus suggest placing her leadership style in the meetings a little closer towards the relational end of the continuum (when compared to her emails). We have chosen three representative examples here that nicely illustrate the ways in which Sabitha typically gets things done in the weekly staff meetings with her subordinates. Detailed transcription conventions are included in the appendix. Example 5 Context: Internal weekly staff meeting at Public Company. Sabitha is the chair. Participants are discussing the new layout of the office and in particular which furniture items to move where. 1 Sab: 2 ??: 3 Sab: 4 5 6 7 8 9

so the first thing Betty is (it will have to be ) print yeah I I’ll do that today and then we’ll set you arrange for I think what we should do m- move the stuff out of the door cause then we know we have an idea ++ and so what we should do is get um a ( ) booking for just one or two days and just use them to to move um and then everything’s out the door


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10 and then we use a ( ) to move the pantry 11 and then we can we can talk again next Monday 12 but if you can do both of those by this week and 13 this will give us a better idea and then 14 the other thing you do if you can do is book the 15 contractor [name] um [name] and anything else you 16 can find and we can have a meeting with them this week 17 before I go 18 Betty: (and the rest of the stuff?) [Sabitha then moves on to tell them about new cupboards she has had installed in her house recently]

This extract follows a brief discussion of the new layout of the company’s office. After Sabitha decides that this topic has been discussed sufficiently, she starts outlining what needs to be done (line 1). In particular, she tells Betty, her office manager, what she expects her to do to facilitate the refurbishment. Although the overall style in which Sabitha gets things done in this example is rather transactionally oriented, Sabitha also incorporates more relationally oriented behaviours. Throughout her turn Sabitha outlines two things she wants Betty to do, namely to arrange for a means of rearranging furniture (line 7), and to contact and book a refurbishing contractor (lines 14 and 15). However, although Sabitha is very explicit about what she expects her subordinate to do and when, for example in line 12 ‘but if you can do both of those by this week’, Sabitha also employs a range of strategies to mitigate this directness to some extent. For example, before outlining what exactly she asks Betty to do, she acknowledges what work she will do herself thereby taking over part of the responsibility of the process (line 3). And throughout her turn, Sabitha provides reasons for her decision (e.g. line 6), some explanations on how the different steps are linked with each other (e.g. lines 8–9, 11, 13), and also a detailed chronological breakdown of the various activities that are involved (e.g. lines 11, 12, 16). Moreover, the hedging phrase ‘I think’ (line 5), Sabitha’s frequent use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ (e.g. lines 5–7, 10–11) and the modal verb ‘should’ (lines 5 and 7) further mitigate the illocutionary force of her otherwise relative direct utterance. However, what is particularly interesting about this extract is the ways in which Sabitha skilfully combines transactional and relational behaviours by drawing on elements of masculine and feminine styles. Thus, in getting things done Sabitha portrays herself as a decisive and authoritarian leader who is in charge of delegating work and who is responsible for ensuring her subordinates know what they are expected to do. In doing this, Sabitha not only constructs her professional identity but she also negotiates her gender identity by combining speech elements that are often associated with masculinity (such as the high level of directness) with more feminine

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elements (such as the soft tone of voice and the use of ‘we’ to mitigate the impact of the illocutionary force of her directives). Example 6 Context: Same meeting as Example 5. Participants discuss the new layout of their office. [… some previous discussion of issue omitted] 1 ??: then what needs to be done can you repeat that 2 cause I I agree I think ( ) there and there 3 at least and tidy up //( )\ 4 Sab: /okay\\ I think what we’re required I tell you 5 the third stage is get rid of [drawls] :all: the 6 publications okay just keep few hundreds of each 7 okay I think the only exception to that is 8 maybe um + [name of publication] 9 yeah actually is two for everything 10 ??: you know when I //( )\ 11 Sab: /and what\\ I would like to recommend if 12 possible is to try and store it [drawls] :in 13 boxes: do we have boxes or no 14 [several people answer] 15 Sab: so for a start I think let’s get rid of 16 [drawls] :all the + all the: publications 17 ??: mm 18 Sab: so if you can do that by next Monday // \ okay 19 that’s the preference the second step I would 20 say is […] 21 ??: /yeah\\

This example occurred after participants have conjointly discussed how to best rearrange the furniture in their office. In line 4 Sabitha takes control over the decision-making process by outlining future actions (lines 4–9). The utterance initial ‘okay’ (line 4) functions as boundary marker here to close the previous discussion, signalling the beginning of a new stage in the decision-reaching process (Fung and Carter 2007). What is particularly noteworthy is a change in pronouns at this point: while previously Sabitha mostly used ‘we’ when referring to the members on her team, she now switches to ‘I’ and ‘you’, which can be interpreted as a strategy for reclaiming power and asserting her control over outlining future actions. Like in Example 5 Sabitha leaves little doubt about the fact that she is the one responsible for this and for making sure people know what to do and when. From line 4 onwards she explicitly outlines which future actions should be taken by her staff, and her meta-discoursal comment ‘I tell you the third stage is’ (lines 4–5) indicates that she is aware of her leadership role and high status here.


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Similar to her behaviour displayed in Example 5, the ways in which Sabitha gets things done in this example are very organized and predominantly transactionally oriented: most of her directives are ordered chronologically, i.e. reflect the order in which things need to be done, and frequent reference to the various stages of the process are made (e.g. lines 5–9, 15, 18 and 19). However, while Sabitha employs some mitigation strategies, such as the frequent use of ‘I think’ (lines 4, 7, 15) and ‘I would’ (lines 11 and 19), her way of getting things done in this example is even more direct, more authoritative than her leadership style displayed in Example 5. Sabitha’s behaviour in Example 6 is not only characterized by a high level of directness, but it contains several strategies that contribute to making this example an authoritative display of power which leaves little or no room for questions and contributions (and hence participation) by others. Sabitha’s repeated use of ‘okay’ (lines 4, 6 and 7), for example, does not seem to function as a device to check participants’ agreement but is used here as a way to quickly and efficiently move through the various stages and aspects of the decision of what to do with the publications. The impression that Sabitha does not exactly encourage participation from others at this stage is further reflected in her interruption of what seems like an attempt by one of her subordinates to make a contribution (line 10). Even Sabitha’s question about whether they have boxes in the office (line 13) does not invite comments on what needs to be done but rather asks for specific information she needs in order to decide how to proceed. Thus, perhaps even more so than in Example 5, in Example 6 Sabitha portrays herself as an authoritarian (perhaps even autocratic) and decisive leader who is solely in charge of making sure things get done. Since all these behaviours are indexed for masculinity and are typically associated with masculine ways of doing leadership, Sabitha also constructs her gender identity as rather masculine. A somewhat different way of getting things done is shown in the next example. As Baxter (2008) notes, individuals may draw on various different and sometimes even contradictory discourses when they construct their various identities. In interviews with 20 business leaders Baxter (2008: 209) found that informants ‘sometimes construct multiple and often competing identities for themselves within their interview narratives’. It is thus important not to lose sight of the fact that identities are fluid and constantly constructed in interaction, and that as a consequence, they can shift from moment to moment even within the same interaction (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). The next example is a good illustration of this fluid and highly dynamic nature of identity. Although the excerpt is taken from the same meeting as Examples 5 and 6, it shows a rather different way in which Sabitha asks her subordinates to get things done.

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Example 7 Context: Participants have finished discussing which items are outstanding for an upcoming publication. Chris reminds Sabitha that she is going to meet with a client today. 1 Sab: it’s not in my calendar for today cause you 2 remember she wrote back 3 ?: oh 4 Sab: and she said 30th or 31st 5 Chris: I need to try again //yeah\ 6 Sab: /ca\ can you do that? 7 Chris: OK (28) 8 ?: 30th right? 9 Sab: yeah 10 Faye: (we might) not be here till then 11 Sab: ( ) we see how okay? we’re moving on

Rather than explicitly telling her subordinates what to do in a very detailed way, Sabitha in this extract seems to follow Chris’ suggestion (line 6). Sabitha formulates her request as a question, which appears to leave the choice of checking the correct date to Chris. Together with the initial false start and the utterance-final rising intonation these strategies considerably mitigate the illocutionary force of the speech act. In this example, then, Sabitha does not tell her subordinate what to do but rather follows up on her suggestion. Moreover, she allows Chris to go and check up on the agreed date without continuing with the meeting or filling the waiting time in any other way (see the 28 second pause). Many of these relationally oriented behaviours, in particular the collaboration in getting things done, also evoke notions of femininity. However, after having confirmed the date with Chris (lines 8 and 9), Sabitha’s style moves towards the more masculine end of the continuum again: she cuts short Faye’s concern (line 10) by deciding not to dwell on this issue, and she closes this particular item by deciding ‘we’re moving on’ (line 11). Even the ‘okay?’ (line 11) seems to be a conventional way of moving on rather than a serious attempt to invite the other participants to provide feedback. These strategies, in particular the interruption and issuing directives, can be interpreted as relatively direct displays of power and authority which, in turn, are often associated with notions of masculinity. It almost appears that by drawing on elements associated with masculine speech styles to move on with the agenda, Sabitha is mitigating her earlier display of more relational behaviours. Such a behaviour could be interpreted as an attempt to ‘re-establish the status quo among group members’ (Schnurr 2009: 120) and to re-instantiate the overall rather masculine norms of interacting that characterize this particular workplace. In particular, Sabitha’s display of power and control over the meeting (line 11) which occurs immediately


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after her empowering behaviour re-establishes hegemonic power relations and normative ways of interacting in this workplace, and reinstates Sabitha as the one in charge. In the next section we look at how Sabitha gets things done in the one-to-one interactions with her subordinates. Getting things done in one-to-one interactions

In getting things done in the one-to-one interactions with her subordinates, Sabitha’s leadership style can typically be placed towards the more feminine end of the leadership continuum. As our examples below illustrate, in this context she regularly employs strategies that are indexed for femininity in addition to strategies ascribed to a masculine speech style. Example 8 Context: People are working at their desks in the open plan office. 1 Sab.: you guys can I tell you something very 2 disgusting? there was this little [drawls] :fly: 3 flying around the 4 office just like a li- like a mosquito but not really 5 mosquito smaller + I’ve just seen it hovering around 6 Chris’s back and then [drawls] :my desk: and then 7 just like hovering (something like) little fly 8 you’ve seen 9 these things right? cause this is really disgusting 10 and the I was talking to [name] and (I’m like) I have 11 something in my mouth //+\ and ( ) it was a little FLY 12 it’s not a fly it’s a it’s a THING // \ 13 so Bonnie what I want you to do mh 14 it’s disgusting but I think it’s out I haven’t 15 swallowed it // \ but I’ve seen these things 16 in the office below 17 before have you seen them before? + but it was on my 18 TONGUE 19 ??: /( )\\ 20 ??: /uh\\ 21 ??: /mm\\ 22 ??: ( ) 23 Sab.: no I just saw ( ) and it was like hovering 24 and I was ( ) and ( I was thinking ) 25 there’s something on 26 my TONGUE and I and it’s disgusting 27 anyway I’m telling you this because what I like 28 you to [drawls] :do: is every night we throw out 29 all the the food right? 30 Bon.: yeah 31 Sab.: but what I’d like you to do is get one day 32 in the next couple of weeks when I’m in

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33 Singapore cause I’m pregnant 34 get the pest control 35 Bon.: okay 36 Sab.: okay? //And\ just get everybody to 37 leave early and cause I can’t be here anyway 38 cause of my pregnancy right? 39 //+\ + imagine if I hadn’t been watching the thing 40 I would’ve thought it was food on my mouth and 41 I would’ve SWALLOWED it + (mm gosh) 42 I’m really freaked out 43 I think I should go and buy myself a bar of 44 chocolate as a [laughs]: treat: [laughs] ergh +++ 45 anyway I had meat I’m not a vegetarian wuah 46 Bon.: /yeah\\ 47 Bon.: /okay\\

Sabitha’s directives issued at Bonnie (e.g. lines 31–34, 36–41) are embedded in an amusing anecdote about how Sabitha almost swallowed a little fly that was flying around in the office. The purpose of this story, as Sabitha says herself, is to explain why she subsequently asks her subordinate to perform a certain task, namely to call pest control. What is particularly noteworthy about the ways in which Sabitha gets things done in this example is the observation that although her directives are rather explicit (e.g. lines 31, 34, 36), they are not as direct and threatening as most of the directives in the meetings and the emails. In particular, the illocutionary force of Sabitha’s utterances are mitigated to a great extent by the humorous anecdote which frames her directives (lines 2–12, 14–18, and 38–45), as well as by her explicit explanations (lines 27, 31–34), and her rhetorical questions (e.g. lines 9, 17, 28–29, 38). In this extract, then, Sabitha also constructs her professional identity and portrays herself as the leader of the team and the one in charge. However, she achieves this by combining transactional and relational behaviours, which is reflected in her discursive performance: for example, she utters her directives in relatively direct and unmitigated ways but she also employs several other-oriented mitigation strategies when getting things done (e.g. including others by providing explanations implicitly through the anecdote and more explicitly through her rhetorical questions and the inclusive pronoun ‘we’). Similar behaviours can be observed in the next example which occurred during an interaction between Sabitha and Faye, the Managing Director. Example 9 Context: Conversation between Sabitha and Faye. 1 Sab.: Faye I’ve been invited back to 2 [name of university] to give a talk in erm 3 October early October about business about (

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4 to undergraduate students (and graduate) students 5 I’ve done the talk before [drawls] :and: so 6 it exists erm (somewhere) would you like to do it? ++ 7 Faye: ( ) 8 Sab.: [drawls] :no no: 9 Faye: ( ) 10 Sab.: I know they sit and take notes but they erm 11 they listen and they will ask us things + 12 Faye: (how many) 13 Sab.: forty [phone rings] + it’s a great 14 opportunity I mean I’m happy to do if you 15 don’t like this or if ( ) I’m 16 happy to do it and you do it and then you sit 17 and then watch and take [quickly] :up to you 18 just let me know: [Sabitha answers telephone]

Rather than explicitly telling Faye to take over a particular commitment of giving a talk at one of Hong Kong’s universities, Sabitha asks her subordinate whether she is interested in doing it (line 6). When Faye does not seem to have made up her mind Sabitha seems happy to negotiate this issue with her by downplaying the work involved (e.g. line 5) and by offering to take over part of or even the entire responsibility (lines 13–15). And Sabitha’s comment at the end of the conversation ‘up to you just let me know’ (lines 17–18) indicates that she would not mind if Faye decided not to give the talk. These strategies which seem to aim at enhancing Faye’s cooperation (as opposed to telling her what to do) are in contrast to the ways in which Sabitha typically gets things done in the meeting and in her emails. Part of the reason for her rather liberal and empowering behaviour in this extract may be related to the fact that it is typically Sabitha’s responsibility to represent the company to the outside. Hence, giving talks is not normally part of Faye’s job. This may explain at least in part why this example of getting things done differs quite markedly from most of the other examples. We have included this example here precisely because it illustrates a rather different way of getting things done: most of the strategies employed by Sabitha in this example are indexed for femininity, such as the question-form of the request, her offer of help, and her overall clear orientation towards Faye. In this instance Sabitha seems to strive for consensus rather than directly and without discussion and explanation telling people what to do and when (as in some of the examples discussed above). And by drawing on these strategies she portrays herself as an approachable, egalitarian leader who empowers her subordinates, for example by including them in decisionmaking processes.

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Discussion and conclusion It was our aim to explore one aspect of workplace realities in Hong Kong, namely the ways in which women do leadership and assert themselves in this rather masculine environment. We have conducted a case study involving Sabitha, the successful CEO and leader of Public Company, with a specific focus on the ways in which Sabitha manages to do leadership while also asserting herself in the masculine context of her workplace and the masculine culture of Hong Kong in general. We looked at how Sabitha negotiates her gender and her professional identity through her leadership discourse in different interactional contexts including internal emails, a staff meeting and one-to-one interactions with her subordinates. The analysis of authentic leadership discourse has illustrated how Sabitha does leadership in this masculine sociocultural context. We have shown that while this masculine orientation is clearly reflected (as well as reinforced) in Sabitha’s leadership style, there is some variation in the ways in which she draws on speech styles ascribed to masculinity and femininity. In particular, when getting things done in emails, Sabitha was very direct, her contributions were typically characterized by an absence of greetings and closings, there were hardly any mitigation strategies in the emails we collected, and they were exclusively transactionally oriented. In her emails, then, a masculine style of doing leadership was the norm. However, these primarily masculine ways of doing things were contrasted to some extent by Sabitha’s leadership style displayed in the one-to-one interactions with her colleagues. Rather than being direct and authoritarian, Sabitha put more emphasis on involving her subordinates in the process of getting things done, for example by providing explanations and negotiating responsibilities. Her behaviours in the one-to-one interactions could thus be placed more towards the feminine end of the leadership discourse continuum. And in getting things done in the meeting, Sabitha also combined elements of masculine and feminine speech styles, although behaviours indexed for masculinity clearly prevailed. Her leadership style in the meetings could thus be placed somewhere between the emails and the meetings, but closer to the masculine end of the continuum. Our examples have thus illustrated that in addition to considering the sociocultural context, workplace culture and CofP norms, the specific interactional context in which leadership is enacted is also of crucial importance for an understanding of how leaders construct and negotiate their professional and their gender identities. In the three different interactional contexts we have looked at, Sabitha portrayed herself differently. Although in most examples she constructed herself as the one in charge, she portrayed herself as a very decisive and authoritarian (perhaps even almost


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autocratic) leader in the emails, while in the meeting and the one-to-one interactions she considered her subordinates’ views and concerns. In her emails and (to a lesser extent also in) the meeting, Sabitha’s emphasis was on transactional aspects and on making sure things got done, whereas in her one-to-one interaction, she paid much more attention to the relational side of leadership, for example by involving people in the various processes. This emphasis on transactional or relational aspects of leadership is also reflected in the ways in which Sabitha displays her power: most overtly in the emails as opposed to her almost empowering behaviour in the one-to-one interaction with Faye. By regularly drawing on elements of masculine speech styles and sometimes feminine speech styles when doing leadership, then, Sabitha has found effective ways of portraying herself as a successful leader in her masculine workplace in the overall rather masculine sociocultural context of Hong Kong. By regularly drawing on elements indexed for masculinity and by frequently displaying masculine leadership styles, Sabitha not only adheres to the masculine norms of the context in which she operates but she also contributes to what Holmes (2006: 67) described as ‘de-gendering’ of these linguistic strategies. Sabitha thus ‘make[s] it clear that they are tools of leadership discourse, and not exclusively of male discourse’ (Holmes 2006: 67; see also Schnurr 2010). Moreover, the substantial differences in Sabitha’s leadership style (as reflected in getting things done) in a variety of different contexts illustrate the crucial importance of looking at data from a range of different workplace contexts other than business meetings. Although business meeting data may often be comparatively easy to obtain, it is clearly important to also explore the ways in which things are done in other types of interactions, such as one-to-one conversations or emails. In particular, since emails become increasingly important and have started to replace more traditional means of communication in many workplaces, they constitute important sites for identity construction. Clearly, more research is needed in order to further explore and understand the complexities of leadership and gender in workplace contexts, in particular in Asia. More research should look at how individuals construct and negotiate their gender and professional identities by taking into account the sociocultural context in which professionals interact. This is particularly urgent for workplace contexts in Asia and other non-Western cultures. Although we do not want to claim too much here, the insights that we have gained from our case study seem to indicate that women in Hong Kong workplaces may face similar challenges to many women in Western workplaces, but they may face these challenges to a greater extent than their female colleagues in other countries and cultures – perhaps due to the

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often particularly masculine sociocultural context of their societies and, more particularly, the work domain. However, this seems to be changing to a certain extent, and women are found to increasingly make their ways into more senior positions, in particular in the government sector, as a recent news comment reported. While this trend is clearly positive and welcome, the fact that these kinds of trends are worthy of mentioning in the news illustrates that women in senior positions of power are still regarded as exceptions. Interestingly, Sabitha, too, seemed to be aware of these specific challenges that women leaders in Hong Kong face. In the interview she commented that in Hong Kong ‘leadership and corporate life have been described in a certain way and mostly by men’ so that certain discourses (such as the discourse of work-life balance and discourses of motherhood and femininity) are often ignored and are simply not part of the prevailing leadership discourse. And Sabitha (like many other women leaders (see Mahtani 2006)) maintains that these issues need to be raised and that this is particularly ‘the responsibility’ of those women who have made it to the top. So coming back to our initial question of whether gender is really not an issue in Hong Kong workplaces as common perceptions seem to suggest, we would argue that in contrast to what seems to be general consensus, gender is indeed an issue, in particular for women in leadership positions. As we have argued throughout the paper: the socio-cultural context of Hong Kong, as well as the workplace domain, and the concepts of leadership and leadership discourse are gendered and, more specifically, in our case study of a woman leader in Hong Kong, they have a male bias. As a consequence, professionals, in particular women in leadership positions, have to constantly negotiate and take into account these gendered realities in their everyday performances of leadership. In order to succeed in this masculine environment they, for example, have to understand that in this socio-cultural context leadership is a masculine concept and thus ‘doing leadership’ always to some extent (depending on the specific workplace and the individual CofPs) implies drawing on speech elements and displaying behaviours that are still often associated with masculinity. As our case study has shown, the relevance and implications of these gendered workplace realities are specifically reflected in those instances where interlocutors deviate from what are considered normative ways of doing leadership. In those examples (cf. Example 7) interlocutors need to do ‘extra work’ to mitigate their deviation from the (masculine) norms of interacting that not only characterize their workplaces but which are also perceived as normative and unmarked ways of doing leadership in the wider sociocultural context of Hong Kong. And while successful leaders like Sabitha contribute to ‘de-gendering’ the leadership discourse, expectations about appropriate


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ways of ‘doing leadership’ are still often associated with masculinity. We thus do believe that gender is still an issue for many women in Hong Kong, an issue which is reflected not only in the gendered and often discriminatory practices that are still prevalent in many workplaces, but also in the discourse of leadership. Transcription conventions [laughs] Paralinguistic features in square brackets + Pause up to one second …//…\ …/…\\ Simultaneous speech (hello) Transcriber’s best guess at unclear utterance ? Rising or question intonation VERY Capitals indicate emphatic stress […] Section of transcript omitted ke- Incomplete word [drawls] :…: Word between colons is drawled All names are pseudonyms. The transcription conventions are adapted from the Language in the Workplace Project. For more information please visit www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/research/lwp.aspx.

About the authors Stephanie Schnurr is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Her main research interests are professional discourse and medical communication. She has published widely on various aspects of gender, (im)politeness, humour, and workplace discourse with a particular focus on leadership performance. Stephanie is also the author of Leadership Discourse at Work. Interactions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture (Palgrave Macmillan). Bernie Mak Chun Nam is a PhD student at the Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He holds a BA and an MPhil in Language and Communication. Bernie has published and given talks on the topics of humour, small talk, workplace socialization, and gender in Hong Kong. His research interests also include written discourse and code-switching (between English and Chinese) in institutional and media settings. Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms. We would like to thank Sabitha and her colleagues for participating in this research. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Gender and Language

Article

‘We are in a masculine profession…’: Constructing gender identities in a consortium of two multinational engineering companies Jo Angouri Abstract The paper discusses the construction gender identities in a complex white-collar workplace. Recent work has repeatedly suggested that gender is not something people have or are but something people do. Despite this rich body of work, gender is still often operationalised as biological sex and is employed as an explanatory variable to account for perceived differences in interaction. By analogy, the paper also addresses the multinational profile of modern workplaces and also problematises the widely held assumption that people from different countries ‘do work’ in distinct ways. The paper draws on recordings of naturally occurring routine meetings and interview data. Special attention is paid to Chloe the only senior female member of the team. The analysis shows that the employees draw on both normatively masculine and feminine interactional styles according to the context of the interaction and the co-constructed norms of their community. However the industry is still perceived and constructed as by and large a ‘masculine’ domain. keywords: gender identities; male-dominated workplaces; multinational companies

Affiliation University of the West of England, Bristol, UK email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.365

www.equinoxpub.com

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Jo Angouri

Introduction1 Interview quote 1

1 2 3 4

[…] if you get pigeon-holed in here that’s it you will never be able to change roles. You have to constantly stand up for your decisions to take you seriously

The interview quote in the epigraph illustrates the topic of this paper; namely the perceived ‘experiences of gender’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003: 47) in multinational engineering companies. Gendered workplaces often constitute the focus of recent work in the field (e.g. Holmes 2006a) and the need for further study on the relationship between ‘gendered’ talk and power has been highlighted (e.g. Mullany 2007; 2008). This paper focuses on an industry that has a distinct profile as a) it is globally male dominated, b) it is characterised by intense mobility and hence multinational teams are often the rule rather than exception. Multinational workplaces are still underresearched from a linguistic point and as such constitute a fruitful area for research. The paper focuses on one community of four senior engineers in a consortium of two multinational companies in heavy construction.2 The team deals with the construction of an energy project. The paper pays particular attention to one of these engineers, namely Chloe3 who, out of the (approximately) 80 members of staff, is the only senior female employee. Even though current research on gender and language has repeatedly shown that ‘gender lines are anything but clear-cut’ (Holmes 2006a: 24) the concept of ‘difference’ is still prevalent (see e.g. Sheridan 2007), especially in popular business-related literature (e.g. Lieberman 2007). Often following (more or less directly) earlier sociolinguistic and variationist research that has shown features of women and men talk (e.g. Tannen 1994; Lakoff 1990), this work often has the laudable aim of cracking the ‘glass ceiling’ and frequently concludes by providing suggestions (in the form of dos and don’ts) for women to become more ‘influential’ communicators (e.g. Sanders 2004). Even though efficient communication is clearly important (Gunnarsson, Linell and Nordberg 1997) for individual employees, the actual operationalisation of the concept in popular readings (and in relation to gender) is not straightforward – the implication being that ‘efficient’ is what has been associated with normatively masculine norms of interaction (see Stubbe, Holmes, Vine and Marra 2000 for a discussion). This view, however, reinforces the concept of difference which can perpetuate stereotypical representations of ‘women’ and ‘women talk’ if no attention is paid to qualitative accounts and interpretation of quantitative research. Also it presupposes that women using normative masculine interaction styles

‘We are in a masculine profession…’

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are ‘successful’ communicators. This would then practically imply that an authoritarian style – traditionally seen as masculine – is always more efficient than a cooperative one – traditionally seen as feminine. However, research (e.g. Freed 2003 for an overview; Mullany 2007) debunked similar beliefs by showing how both men and women draw on normatively feminine or masculine styles depending on the local context of the interaction (Holmes 2005). Clearly, ‘efficient’ work-related communication is contextbound and cannot be reduced to a list of features that cannot capture the complexity of interaction. Sex-role common beliefs are very relevant in this respect. A recent study for Catalyst (2007) indicates the perceptions of managers (both male and female) who still seem to perceive ‘successful’ women in managerial positions in a polarised way (either as too soft or too tough but never right). Even though research has shown the various roles and identities women construct and negotiate at work (e.g. the ‘mother’ role to which I come back later in the paper), these popular studies, despite being oversimplified, are useful in revealing interesting contradictions. Regarding the dos and don’ts, picking up a masculine interactional style seems to lead to the well known ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ double bind for women. While a masculine interactional style from a male manager may be perceived as indicating confidence, when coming from a female manager in the same position may be labeled as pushy or bossy. At a different level, however, these findings of popular views once again highlight the discrepancy between what recent sociolinguistic studies have shown (see Litosseliti 2006; Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003) and the persistence of the difference stereotype in the lay view. Rhode (2003) provides a useful summary of studies in a number of fields which shows the struggle of balancing gender and professional identities which becomes particularly acute in male-dominated professions (e.g. the engineering industry which constitutes the focus here). The same collection provides with up to date statistics showing that inequalities in the workplace still hold good and the pace of change is slow. Rhode notes that ‘at current rates of change, it will be almost three centuries before women are as likely as men to become top managers in major corporations’ (2003: 7). Even though the male-as-norm model at an abstract level is still prevalent, the analysis of workplace interactions shows a more complex picture where interactional norms vary according to the styles of the different communities as well as the context of the interactions. Researchers (e.g. Cameron 2003; 2000) have also drawn attention to the dangers in associating interactional styles with lack of power and with positioning women’s talk under the ‘gender differences’ umbrella. As Cameron notes, this can provide ‘one more excuse for the raw deal women get, and one more ingenious strategy

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for not tackling the root causes of women’s subordinate status’ (Cameron 1995: 205) in workplace (and arguably not only) settings. Recent work (Harrington, Litosseliti, Sauntson and Sunderland 2008) makes a case for a social constructionist, performativity theory informed view of gender identity which moves away from polarisation. This is directly related to treating (gender or other) identity as a process. To take this further, a number of studies (e.g. Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003; Holmes and Marra 2004; Mullany 2007) have shown that people are not passive bearers of their gender (or other) identity but rather identities are enacted in the discourse. De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg (2006) draw on other work in the field and capture the conceptualization of identity from a constructionist point of view as a process that : (1) takes place in concrete and specific interactional occasions, (2) yields constellations of identities instead of individual, monolithic constructs, (3) does not simply emanate from the individual but results from processes of negotiation, and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) that are eminently social, and (4) entails ‘discursive work’ (Zimmerman and Wieder 1970) (De Fina et al. 2006: 2).

This view then repositions studies on language and gender as compared to earlier variationist and interactional studies where gender was often treated as a fixed social category (see Cameron 1996; 2005 and Swann and Maybin 2008 for an overview). And as Cameron has noted in response to attributing explanatory power to the concept,‘gender is the problem not the solution’ (1996: 44). This is not to deny the value of early work in the field. In summarizing findings of this rich body of work, Holmes (2006a) provides a list of features that are widely associated with masculine and feminine interactional styles (such as facilitative vs. competitive propositions, feedback vs. interruptions and so on). This list is particularly useful in providing ‘a summary of discursive strategies strongly associated with middle-class white men and women in the construction of their normative and unmarked gender identity’ (2006a: 6). An understanding of everyday views of what indexes large collectivities (e.g. biologically driven understanding of gender) is a powerful analytical tool in unpacking the different levels of identity work people do in interaction. Revealing the complex ways in which people draw on normatively feminine/masculine styles is salient for shedding light on how the gender order is negotiated and brought to scrutiny in workplace contexts. As Holmes says, ‘if gender is omni-relevant, then familiarity with what is unmarked in relation to doing gender identity is a necessary basis for engagement in any social interaction’ (2006a: 9). To take this further, a male-dominated workplace is not necessarily normatively masculine in terms of the ‘unmarked’ interactional style. The


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concept of gendered workplace is a useful starting point for the discussion that follows in the rest of the paper. As put by Holmes (2006a: 10) the terms ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ is ‘a matter of interactional style, rather than a reflection of the sex of those who work there’. A consortium of multinational companies is a particularly complex entity formed by a number of communities who come together for the purposes of a project. It is the case, however, that the frequent and explicit reference to gender bias in relation to engineering makes the industry an interesting research site for the study of perceptions of gender. As an example, Fielden, Davison, Gale and Davey (2000) show that in the UK the construction industry is second only to mining and quarrying in the under-representation of women in the workforce (see also Gale 1994). Instead of enforcing the binary opposition which problematises, this paper attempts to relate the discussion to the ‘real world concerns’ (Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003: 14) of engineers who interact ‘within a system of gender relations that give them meaning as gendered “masculine”’ (Martin 2001: 588) or feminine. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to analyse naturally occurring data drawn from routine meetings of a community of engineers, trying to shed light on the covert ways of doing ‘gender’ or the ‘backstage semantics’ in McConnell-Ginet’s terms (2000: 279). The paper discusses and focuses solely on data where gender was brought up as a salient issue by the participants rather than the researcher. The meeting data are complemented by interview data. This second dataset can provide an insight into powerful ideologies and existing (and/or perceived) inequalities in the workplace. Given the multinational profile of the consortium, interview data are also discussed in relation to the employee’s perceptions of their ‘intercultural’ reality.4 This paper is organised in four sections. I place this discussion in context by analysing some of the relevant features of the multinational white collar workplace in general and construction industry in particular (Section 1) and I then move on to the method and data collection procedures and the CofP theoretical framework (Section 2). In Section 3, I turn to my findings and discuss the conclusions that can be drawn from this study. I close the paper in Section 4 by showing how gender identities are enacted in discourse and indicate areas for further research. The multinational (engineering) companies: sites for doing ‘gender’ and ‘culture’ Multinational corporations (MNC) arguably influence international trade and contribute to the change and pace of the business activities globally.5 As one indication of the influence they exercise, a more recent UNCTAD

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document showed that MNC can account for up to two-thirds to threequarters of the world exports (see UNCTAD 1999).. Clearly MNCs constitute a focal site in the globalised socioeconomic world. Even though studies have seen MNCs as the ‘globalisation’s primary agent’ (Elias and Beasley 2009: 290), recent work suggests that globalisation is not ‘an economic, uniform and indeed top-down phenomenon’ (Elias and Beasley 2009: 288) but rather it is the globalisation discourses that construct MNCs as the ‘primary agent of neoliberal globalisation’ (Elias and Beasley 2009: 290). In other words, the role of MNCs is not to be seen as a monolithic phenomenon but it is enacted in relevant discourses highlighting the social construction of globalisation (Cameron and Palan 2004). In globalisation literature (e.g. Dunning and Narula 2004) MNCs are associated with values such as efficiency and competitiveness. These values however are ideological and not straightforward economic. As Deetz suggested, ‘concepts of organizational effectiveness tend to hide possible discussion of whose goals should be sought and how much each goal should count’ (Deetz 2003: 26; emphasis added). Gee, Hull and Lankshear (1996) in their influential work also discuss how ‘allegiance to core values are at bottom economic strategies for the business’s benefit in a global hypercompetitive marketplace’ (1996: 103). Supposedly neutral values such as efficiency, collaboration and equality, which constitute dominant discourses in relation to MNC, play a central role in the discourse of new/ post capitalist corporate companies and foreground powerful hegemonic ideologies (Gramsci 1971). In this context discussions on the gender order become relevant. The contested term ‘Hegemonic Masculinities’ (Connell 1987 and subsequent works), which refers to transnational normatively masculine business practices perpetuating a global gender order, has attracted a lot of interest and sparked debate (e.g. Elias 2007; Wetherell and Edley 1999). What is important for the needs of this paper is that work in this area has highlighted the ‘problematic of gender power’ (Wetherell and Edley 1999: 336) at a global level. Connell’s work on ‘Hegemonic Masculinities’ takes a macro-perspective and attempts to shed light on gendered global processes (e.g. competitiveness, division of labour, limited or no loyalties).6 Ellias and Beasley (2009) however suggest that more attention needs to be paid to ‘everyday practices and relationships’ (2009: 291) in order to relate the micro- to the macro-context. Accordingly this paper focuses on interactions and the ways in which employees account for the gender order as it becomes visible and relevant to them. Another interrelated aspect of this debate concerns operationalisations of the concept of ‘culture’. Gee, Hull and Lankshear (1996) make a clear case about the new meaning of ‘local’ and ‘global’ in the new capitalist workplace


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(and especially the MNC one). As suggested in this work ‘the “local” in the new capitalism…is often the protective coloring taken on by very large and global corporations’ (1996: 157). MNCs have been seen as ‘entities’ detached from ‘older loyalties to nation, business organization, family and marital partners’ (Connell 2005: xxiii in Elias and Beasley 2009: 286). This echoes the discussion on the ‘cultureless’ (for a discussion see Charles 2009: 458) third globalisation wave where the global meets the individual and intersects with the local. The global-local nexus takes prevalence over earlier models where globalisation was characterised by countries or companies ‘going global’ and internationalisation strategies were put in place to both encourage and support those involved in the global market (for a discussion on the three waves of globalisation see Friedman 2006 and Christopherson, Garretsen and Martin 2008). In the MNC context where mobility is encouraged and in some cases is the norm, national borders seem to matter much less than in the past. The relationship of the ‘new economy’ and the ‘state’ has been addressed by other fields of study (see e.g. Ong 2000) but what this paper problematises is an interesting paradox regarding understandings of ‘culture’. Even though research has shown the abstract nature of the concept (see Sarangi 2009 for an overview), culture, often understood as nationality is still employed in discourses of difference, potentially threatening the ideal of harmony and conflict avoidance in MNCs (see Angouri and Glynos 2009). The deeply rooted assumption is often that workgroups operate differently in different countries but also that different nationalities do business in distinctive ways (compared to mononational workgroups often perceived as homogeneous in this respect). Against this backdrop there has been an explosion of interest in culture, cultural diversity and intercultural (IC) facilitation and training in the context of the multinational corporate workplace7 (as an example, leading training companies in the UK report a steady growth in demand for training per year for the past six years; see also Hall, Neitz and Battani 2003 and Werner 2002 for a discussion). Senior engineers self-identify as a mobile group (Gaggiotti 2006), indicating that they often work with their colleagues from different countries and/or different subsidiaries of the same company and new staff at different points of their projects’ cycles. It follows then that everyday life in this particular setting is typically multinational. This dynamic reality is often associated overtly with the concept of the cultural identity of the workforce which may ‘prevent’ employees from adapting quickly and efficiently in new environments. Accordingly there is a dearth of literature on the importance of ‘culture’ in project performance (Phua and Rowlinson 2004; Fisher and Ranasinghe 2001). Culture in this context often denotes nationality. However, a nation-state driven conceptualisation of culture and

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cultural identity often reduces ‘culture’ to a set of standardised commonalities8 and does not capture the dynamic realities in the MNC context or the complex role-relationships of the participants. Drawing a parallel with the discussion in the previous section, an analogy can be made between the two ‘discourses of difference’. In other words, as gender is often approached as a static category invoked to ‘explain’ differences, the same can be observed with ‘culture’ denoting nationality. Following earlier literature, which suggested that problems or clashes are to be expected when distinct ‘cultures’ come into contact with each other, there is the widespread belief that cultural differences can cause problems and hinder business success (see, for example, the dearth of ‘how to’ literature in that context: Buhayer 2005; Reed and Gray 1997). This literature tends to assume that the boundaries between cultures can be defined along national lines. And it is typical then for ‘culture’ to be invoked in an attempt to ‘explain’ potential problems in projects involving workforce from different countries (Dainty, Green and Bagilhole 2007). A detailed discussion of the complexities of the construction of nationality and national identity is beyond the scope of this paper (see Angouri forthcoming). Suffice it to say that such an approach does not take into account either the complexities of the concept (see Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart 2009) or the dynamics of social interaction. Furthermore, in the context of the MNC workplace, discourses of national ‘culture’ being ‘irrelevant to the everyday life [at the site]’, as an employee suggested, are worth discussing further in the light of the globalised nature of socioeconomic activities (I return to this point in the light of the data later in the paper). Before closing this section a point worth making is that nationality-driven understandings of culture are prevalent in everyday life and workplace discourses: my own research (Angouri 2007) has shown that employees often draw on concepts such as national culture and national identity9 and attribute explanatory power to them. Hence as ‘gender’ matters (Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003), ‘nationality’ matters too. Interactants often point to (dis)similarities between nationalities to account for perceived work-related problems (or solutions). In line with other research (e.g. Ailon-Souday and Kunda 2003) my understanding is that national culture is a resource participants draw upon; and the invocations of ‘cultural’ differences are accompanied by powerful visions regarding acceptable or expected norms and practices. Whether a particular dimension of similarity or difference becomes salient and which dimension it is focused on appears to depend on the specific practical problem being confronted, as well as the institutional context within which a solution is sought (Sarangi 1994: 413–4; Poncini 2004). Thus, emphasizing either the distinctiveness or the similarity of


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different cultures could be quite misleading if the context of the interaction is not taken into account. This does not mean that ethnicity and/or nationality are not large identity categories to be taken into consideration by the analyst. The point I make here is analogous to the one made earlier regarding gender. While participants may draw on stable identity categories, these are locally enacted in the context of interaction. As put by Bucholz and Hall (2005: 592), ‘Identities encompass a) macro-level demographic categories; b) local ethnographically specific cultural position; c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles.’ Hence in the multinational construction companies, the nationality of the workforce may (or not) be enacted in the discourse context, but an a priori categorisation of employees along the lines of difference risks perpetuating nationality (and other) stereotypes. Method and data collection procedures This paper draws on two datasets from a consortium of two multinational companies.10 The dataset I discuss here expands previous research on workplace talk in multinational companies in Europe (Angouri 2007). Naturally occurring data were recorded by the participants themselves in a hands-off approach (see for a detailed discussion Holmes and Stubbe 2003: ch 2). The process of data collection involves, when and where possible (Angouri 2010), ethnographic observations, shadowing and interviews pre- and post- the linguistic analyses. The participants who become coresearchers collect recordings of meetings but also often read transcripts and comment on the analysis in an iterative process.11 Even though the sample of meetings (and other events) is not as systematic as it would be if the sampling was determined by the researcher, this approach has the advantages of a) collecting a rich set of dat, and b) building a continuous relationship with the participants which feeds back into the analysis. This is considered an important stage of the process in order to decide what is relevant to the interpretation of the interactions and directly related to the participants’ tacit knowledge of their habitus that cannot easily be captured by the researcher. As stated by Cicourel (1992: 295) ‘exchanges […] carry considerable cultural and interpersonal “baggage” for participants because of long-term social relationships unknown to or unattended by the investigator’. I complement the recordings of workplace events with a dataset of interviews that are useful in analysing perceptions of the participants

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regarding interactions at work. This is not to suggest that the researcher can access the speakers’ perceptions and intentions. As Holmes (2006b: 685) notes, ‘we can only attempt to interpret what people wish to convey on the basis of their utterances; we can never know their “real” feelings’. I also share the concerns raised by other researchers (e.g. Mullany 2008; Edley and Litosseliti 2010) regarding the value of interview data. I do acknowledge that speakers do not always have the metalinguistic skills to account for their perceptions (and/or intentions) and very importantly in my view they may not wish to do so for the analyst, nor do they ‘wear their intentions on their sleeves’ (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003: 1532).12 I do, however, consider this extra dataset helpful in gathering in-depth descriptions/ re-constructions of the event, for and with the researcher, and a different snapshot of perceptions of macro-categories such as sex and nationality. As such it constitutes a valuable dataset which can shed further light on participants’ ‘first order’ concerns,13 foregrounds multiple perspectives and brings the participants’ views closer to the researchers’ analyses (e.g. Sarangi and Candlin, 2001; 2004; Sarangi and Roberts 1999). The naturally occurring data discussed here are drawn from business meetings. The meeting event constitutes the focus given its importance and frequency in the white collar workplace. Meetings are ‘the bread and butter of organisational life’ (Tracy and Dimock 2004: 8) and despite the topic occupying a substantial proportion of ‘advice manuals’ (see Angouri and Marra 2011) it has only relatively recently become the centre of linguistic research. Given that my project was not concerned with the gender order per se, I discuss here three excerpts, and the interview data that accompany them, where gender was brought up by the participants rather than being probed by the researcher. The interviews were ethnographic in nature and the key informants talked me through ‘what happened’ in the meetings they recorded. ‘Gender experiences’ became salient as I discuss in the next section. The discussion focuses here on data from one key informant ‘Chloe’. I also draw on the interview dataset to discuss briefly perceptions of ‘culture’ in this context. I consider the group of people who participate to these recordings as a distinct Community of Practice (CofP), evidenced by the analysis which shows distinct norms in handling their interactions and subsequently in constructing a collective ‘we’ identity. I use the term here according to Lave and Wenger (1991: 98) to designate ‘a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time’. In his more recent work, Wenger (1998) identifies three dimensions of a CofP, namely:


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a) What it is about — its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members. b) How it functions — mutual engagement that bind[s] members together into a social entity. c) What capability it has produced — the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time (Wenger 1998: 73).

A consortium as an overarching CofP offers a fertile ground for examining ‘gender norms’ and probing widely held views about engineering being a male domain. Further to this, taking a CofP stance is useful in showing the relationship between the local and the global and how ‘hegemonic masculinities’ discourses may be perpetuated/resisted in this context. Work in the field has repeatedly shown ‘barriers’ women are faced with (e.g. Margolis and Fisher 2001) in attempting to enter and climb up the ladder in that particular field. Hence the CofP construct constitutes a useful tool for discussing whether analyses of everyday practices support this widely held view. The multinational profile of this particular CofP also provides an understanding of the employees’ perceptions on the interplay between the local the wider global in their MNC context. As Haneda indicated (2006: 150), ‘Lave and Wenger’s social practice theory has much to offer because of its emphasis on the integral relationship among agent, activity, and the world, in which each is conceptualized as constitutive of the others.’ At the same time, issues of power and positioning become relevant in the CofP construct. Accordingly, the view taken is that ‘core members’ of workplace CofPs often act as gatekeepers who control trajectories and participation in established CofPs. The power relations between newcomers and the ‘gatekeepers’ are briefly discussed in the analysis of the data.14 Findings As Ochs’ suggested some time ago (1992), linguistic features do not directly encode social identities, something which is often done indirectly and subtly through associations of linguistic forms with particular roles and stances (Ochs 1992; 1996). The focus here is on the dynamic process of actively creating social meanings in workplace interaction and how gender is negotiated in, not always, an overt way. The second part of this section discusses the issue of ‘culture’ and by way of illustration draws on interview data by two employees, Chloe and Fil.

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Doing gender at work

This section follows up from the concept of backstage semantics as discussed by McConnell-Ginet (2000). It aims to show how social actors enact identities and in doing so bring to the fore for renegotiation shared knowledge (or what Sarangi and Roberts term habitual practices inherent in, and characteristic of, any workplace environment, which ‘can only be understood with reference to their own history and tradition’ (1999: 3)). Excerpt 1 This excerpt is taken from a routine meeting from an established team15 in the company that has been working together for over a year and a half at the time of the recording.16 Ron, though not member of the team, is a regular visitor working with the site team from one of the company’s central offices. 1 Peter: Fil told me that you were coming but after last 2 night I wasn’t expect[ing you] ((general laughter)) 3 Chloe: [sorry ] wh[y? ] 4 Fil: [Oh come] on Chloe, Pete 5 is referring to the match last ni[ght ] 6 Chloe: [ahh ]right won’t ask then 7 ((soft voice)) 8 Ron: uhhh yes really uh ba[d] 9 Peter: [so] I thought that you 10 will can[cel it ] 11 Fil: [(laughing)not po]ssible drinks on you tonight 12 (…) 13 Ron: [we are 14 wo]rking to forget ab[out it ] 15 Peter: [((laughing)) true] 16 Fil: [((laughing)) work] therapy for you 17 today right 18 Chloe: Shall we start in here then? ((irritated)) 19 Peter: Yes Chloe we shall ((laughter)) 20 Gabriel: well since we are here we might as well 21 ((laughter)) 22 Peter: told you to cancel it ((laughter)) sorry Chloe 23 Ron: woops just a moment needto bring my [notes ] 24 Fil: [of cou ]rse we will 25 be here

Holmes and Stubbe (2003: chapters 4 and 5) discussed the importance of pre-meeting talk for both fostering the social relationships and for progressing with the work at hand. Similarly, Mirivel and Tracy (2005) focus on the structure of pre-meeting talk sequences, noting that participants typically use this phase for necessary social bonding and the construction of group identity before switching to work talk. Excerpt 1 takes place immediately before the opening of a meeting chaired by Gabriel (senior manager). The pre-meeting talk is indicative of the atmosphere and the good working relationship of the team. Interestingly though there is some


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negotiation going on between the cheering and laughter and Chloe’s turn in line 19. The meeting follows a major sports event and the team supported by Ron did not perform up to his expectations. Football is a recurrent theme for small talk in that particular workplace and often the discussion revolves round the performance of teams (supported by the interactants) in major international competitions. Interestingly Chloe misinterprets Peter’s jovial comment and overlaps in trying to get more information as to the reasons why Ron would cancel the meeting. Previous research (Holmes and Schnurr 2006) has shown how misinterpretations of humour episodes can indicate new vs. established members of CofP and become subject to negotiation between the interactants. However, this does not seem to be the case here with Chloe being a core member of the team. It rather points to a recurrent theme in their interactions as shown by Fil’s response that could otherwise be perceived as attacking directly Chloe’s face. Chloe follows the interaction though without participating in the cheering and laughter and this could indicate she is not interested in the topic (which reaches a pick with her turn in line 19). As one would expect, Chloe draws on both normative feminine and masculine interactional styles in doing identity work in her workplace. However, her linguistic behaviour in this excerpt is clearly marked and could potentially be seen as attacking the face of the rest of the team. The metadiscourse is useful here in shedding light on the analysis of the transcript. Chloe notes: Interview quote 2 1 2 3 4 5

I find it dead boring to have to listen to their endless football stories. I am trying to make it clear they need to either find a different topic or choose a different sport so we can all have a laugh together

Even though the ‘football’ topic could be seen as stereotypically masculine, at one level no one seems to be excluded from the informal conversation. And arguably not being interested in football is not a pertinent characteristic of male or female gender identities. Chloe, for example, seems to consider ‘sports’ a suitable topic for small talk. At a different level, however, Chloe’s interview data turn football to a gender issue as discussed below. This echoes work by scholars on ‘hegemonic masculinities’ showing how sports and sport metaphors are frequently drawn upon and perpetuate gendered (masculine) discourses. Faulkner (2009) in a study on gender in engineering workplaces provides similar accounts with ‘football’ and ‘cars’

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being frequent topics for small talk that exclude women engineers (and arguably some men too). Chloe apparently often challenges the topic of the small talk and this is part of the shared knowledge of the team. Chloe interrupts fairly abruptly what was developing into a lengthy discussion of ‘last night’s match’ with a fairly formal but also firm prompt (‘shall we start in here then’). Given that Chloe has not called and is not chairing the meeting her utterance could be indicative of her intention to interrupt. The team responds to her call and both Peter and Gabriel consent. However, Peter’s turn could be seen as competitive since he provides a formal answer to Chloe’s prompt but also by his follow-up comment to Ron (line 22). Competitive teasing is typically associated with a masculine interactional style17 and it is the norm in this workplace context. Chloe confidently switches between and draws on a range of discourse strategies for enacting different roles and identities according to the context of the interaction. As Holmes and Schnurr suggest (2006: 42) senior female employees often draw on gender stereotypes and highlight their femininity. By refusing to passively participate in the small talk episode Chloe prefers to flag up her lack of interest which she later associates with gender. Chloe constructs a female (and also adult/mother) identity as she suggests: Interview quote 3 1 2 3 4

I often feel I am with 16 year olds (.) and of course it’s always about football and cars (sighs) they don’t seem to get it we are not all boys ((sarcasm)) around here

Chloe appears to be conscious of the gendered roles in the construction industry in general and the site in particular: In the interview Chloe brings up the following: Interview quote 4 1 Chloe: we are in a masculine profession and even 2 though at university level things have improved a 3 lot it is still difficult to get in and progress 4 to the higher positions in construction companies 5 Jo: mhm 6 Chloe: I mean there is still this macho identity 7 we have to put up 8 Jo: what do you mean by macho 9 Chloe: hmm that’s tricky to explain I mean there is 10 this myth right (.) the the idea that a woman is not 11 tough enough to work in a site yes it is this idea


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12 of being physically tough but you see this is not 13 rationale we are not workers we are chartered 14 engineers. 15 Jo: mhm 16 Chloe: And I mean the intentions are often good 17 especially if you have a good relationship with 18 people. They ((referring to male colleagues)) just 19 want to protect you. There is this idea that 20 you are ‘fragile’ and here for example nobody would 21 ask Mary to go out and climb up ((gives details)) 22 to ((gives details of the site)) apart from me 23 obviously ((laughter)). And when I was younger I 24 wanted my company to send me to a project in 25 ((names country)) but it was out of the question 26 ‘this is too risky for a young beautiful woman’ 27 I remember I was told. Bollocks I was fuming back 28 then and still get annoyed when I come to think 29 about it. I was to go and do site management 30 I would be perfectly safe. I wish I had the guts 31 back then to put my foot down (…)

I consider this interview extract (4) to be indicative of Chloe’s perceptions of the relevance of gender in her everyday life. I am not overlooking the affect my presence had in this narrative and I am not suggesting this data is not to be problematised in Chloe’s performance of professional and gender identities for the female researcher. Despite these inherent constraints, however, the discourse of gender difference is illuminating in how ‘gender matters’ in this context. As noted by Sunderland (2004) analysis of gendered discourse can shed light on how gender is ‘constructed, performed, represented and indexed’ (emphasis in original, 2004: 22). In the interview quote above Chloe aligns herself with chartered engineers – a distinct group from the workers (for whom Chloe seems to accept the ‘being tough’ condition) – and positions herself in challenging the ‘macho engineer’ identity. Even though ‘macho’ is understood as a construct here, it is interesting to note that a stereotypically male-norm is reported by a number of studies dealing with engineering education/socialisation and representations of engineers’ professional identities. As an illustration McIlwee and Robinson (1992) note, ‘competence as an engineer is a function of how well one presents an image of an aggressive, competitive, technically oriented person’ (1992: 20–21). Ingram and Parker (2002) in a recent study on engineers’ team performance claim that normatively male norms of interaction often dominate even in the university classroom (e.g. lack of rapport, product vs. process oriented interaction). Ingram and Parker’s (2002) work shows norms as being interactionally constructed rather than given and also shows

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how a ‘good engineer’ persona seems to include having the right answer to a problem at the expense of the team (this attitude of ‘lone wolf ’ has been reported by earlier studies on ‘engineering culture’ see, e.g., Frankel 1993). These studies are interesting in so far as they indicate a simplified ‘norm’ to which engineers either diverge or converge. The coding process of the interview data lends support to this work as ‘being tough’, ‘(biologically) male dominated work related networks’ and ‘masculinised small talk’ constitute three recurrent themes brought up by Chloe. It is also interesting to note the relationship between Chloe and Mary. Mary is a new employee, recent graduate and just joined that particular CofP. From their interactions Chloe seems to keep a firm eye on Mary’s development in the team. The excerpt below is a good example of this. Excerpt 218 This excerpt is taken from a routine meeting of the same team. The issue discussed here is a report that needs to be sent to an external company. The team decided that it would be useful to translate the document and given the time pressure they prefer their own employees to produce an unofficial translation to go with the original report. 1 Peter: We need to give him a copy of this but hmm we 2 need to translate it 3 Fil: so uhh we[uhh] 4 Gabriel: [who] is going to [translate]? 5 Peter: [either ] Mary or uh P[aul ] 6 Chloe: [But ] 7 they need((details)) and it’s not their job= 8 Fil: =yes you are very right here I’m afraid 9 Peter: Ok tomorrow I will discuss with Mary to ( . ) 10 and see if she can translate uhh […] 11 Chloe: hang on why Mary? Mary or Paul or both (.) 12 that’s a lot of extra work for [Mary ] 13 Peter: [it’s ok] it’s easy to 14 translate but it needs time (.) some days to translate 15 all these 16 Gabriel: Hmhh yes and what about ((he refers to a project 17 part of which has been assigned to Mary)) 18 Chloe: how long is this going to ta[ke because ] 19 Peter: [I don’t know xx]xx days (.) 20 lets give Mary xxx days and Paul can take on ((Mary’s 21 normal duties)) and we will take it from there. 22 Gabriel: Sounds ok [to me] 23 Chloe: [No ] that’s not good ((refers to 24 project)) this is Mary’s (.) I want her to learn keep 25 Paul out of this 26 Gabriel: Ok Chloe your wish is my command 27 ((general laughter)) 28 Chloe: Thanks Gab ((soft voice))

A number of issues are of interest here. There is no nominated chair in this meeting (see Angouri and Marra 2011) but Gabriel has actively constructed


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himself as the Chair here. Gabriel is generally responsible for assigning roles and responsibilities. Peter brings up the decision to translate a document for an external partner company. The important issue here is who is going to take on the task. Mary and Paul are both junior in the hierarchy and often seem to take on ‘peripheral’ tasks. There is, however, some negotiation between the team before they allocate the task to either Paul or Mary. Peter seems to clearly orient towards Mary (line 10) to take on the task. In a particularly interesting move, Chloe directly and explicitly challenges his decision by indicating that this is a task ideally for two people. Gabriel seems to share the concern (16) and refers explicitly to Mary’s other (role-related) tasks. Peter suggests that Paul should replace Mary in her normal workload for her to have time to work on the translation of the document. Gabriel seems ready to ratify the decision when Chloe reacts forcefully with a negative statement and interrupts Gabriel by explicitly disagreeing with this suggestion. Chloe does not attempt to mitigate the act here but provides an explanation for her overt disagreement by suggesting that Mary ‘needs to learn’ and by doing so Chloe fences Mary’s responsibilities. Throughout the interaction Chloe shifts confidently from an authoritarian and seemingly aggressive interactional style to a style that could index normative femininity. In line 7 Chloe introduces what could be seen as a ‘more “feminine” or otheroriented social identity’ (Holmes and Marra 2004: 391) by raising the issue of assigning extra tasks to either Mary or Paul which ‘is not their job’. Even though Chloe’s interactional style does not index normative femininity (e.g. she forcefully claims the floor and overlaps Peter) her turn could be read as an act of relational practice as discussed by Holmes and Marra (2004) which seems to be followed by Fil. Chloe later responds to Peter and again raises the issue ‘that’s a lot of extra work’ and this negotiation escalates when Chloe rejects Peter’s suggestion for Paul to take over part of Mary’s work (21). Gabriel resolves the potential conflict and seems to accept Chloe’s suggestion, expressed with a directive (line 26) which indicates negotiation on a fairly equal footing between the senior team. Chloe’s final turn lightens the atmosphere by using Gabriel’s nick name which could be an attempt to foster rapport. This is a tightly knit CofP and their unmarked style is fairly collaborative despite being overall normatively masculine. Competitive teasing is part of their unmarked repertoire and the whole team seems to engage and contribute (see also Faulkner (2009) on functions of humour in engineering workplaces). Interestingly Chloe seems to be consistently very conscious when the team assigns tasks to Mary (important to note here is that Chloe is not officially Mary’s line manager). From a CofP point-of-view, it is useful to note how Chloe (as a gatekeeper along with the senior members of the

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team) is actively supporting Mary’s transition from the periphery to the centre. The division of work is also of interest. The suggestion for Mary to take on this peripheral task matches the work on how hegemonic masculinities may be enacted in everyday practices as discussed in relevant work (e.g. Elias 2007). This is also clearly reflected in Chloe’s representations of ‘business masculinities’ (Elias and Beasley 2009: 291) in this workplace context. Chloe notes: Interview quote 5 1 the problem is they tend to confuse a female engineer 2 with a secretary and don’t get me wrong secretaries 3 are very important for any site but this is a 4 different role altogether. There is an issue here 5 with Mary because she is a woman right and there is 6 this tendency of not assigning ‘difficult’ tasks 7 to women (.) which is not good because then you see 8 it’s a circle if a new engineer is not asked to try 9 then they will think they can’t do it and then they 10 won’t be able to do it in the end (.) they have to 11 go and learn from their mistakes. Mary and Paul are not 12 here to ((translate)) (.) but but Mary needs space

In Excerpt two Chloe takes on a ‘mother’ role (Holmes 2006a) towards both Mary and Paul who need to develop their engineers’ personas. Chloe aligns herself with the senior team here but also constructs herself as a female engineer in a male-dominated domain (the use of they is of interest here). Note however how Chloe associates the sites’ administrators with a biologically female sex and in a rather essentialist way. By drawing on her own experiences Chloe considers Mary more vulnerable in finding herself in a position that would undermine her efforts of constructing her professional identity (‘they tend to confuse a female engineer with a secretary’). Mary as one would expect still sits at the periphery of that particular CofP and given her (in)experience she is fairly quiet in meetings with senior engineers. In the excerpt below, Mary is reporting back to Peter but confusion follows around a certain amount of money the consortium owes. As before this example illustrates the potential power struggle of ‘newcomers’ in interacting with senior members of the CofP. Excerpt 3


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This excerpt is taken from a meeting called by Gabriel preceding another formal meeting. The consortium needs to discuss financial arrangements with a subcontractor and Gabriel wants to be clear on the accounts before the meeting. 1 Mary: There is a charge of xxxxxxx thousand 2 xxxxx in to[tal ] 3 Gabriel: [no i]t cannot be ((shuffling 4 papers)) the charges cannot be that mu[ch ] 5 Mary: [it i]s 6 xxxxxxx thousand xx[xxx ] 7 Gabriel: [no th]ese cannot be their 8 claims show me are you sure [this is correct] 9 Mary: [it is xxxxxx ] 10 thousand xx[xxx ] 11 Gabriel: [no thi]s is the total [sum ] ((raises his 12 voice)) 13 Chloe: [Hang on] Gab 14 Mary explain please 15 Mary: I never said this is the xxx only ((high pitch)) 16 this is the total amount from ((details)) and 17 the cha[rges ] 18 Gabriel: Mhm [I see now] 19 Fil: [exact ]ly 20 Gabriel: I am sorry I thought these were only the 21 cha[rges ] 22 Fil: [no no ]it’s all then 23 Gabriel: be more careful Mary with the accounts ask 24 Fil to help you with the number crunching 25 ((irritated)) 26 Fil: Mary will be fine Gab she is young she needs to 27 learn 28 Chloe: exactly Gab 29 Gabriel: ((inaudible)) move on then

Gabriel asks for clarification regarding claims around work they have undertaken and the charges (other costs) the consortium needs to cover. Mary is in charge of co-supervising part of this project and hence her responsibility to co-administer this account. The confusion here stems from Mary’s utterance (line 1) where she refers to ‘a charge’ which Gabriel interprets as ‘the charges’ and confusion follows. Chloe intervenes (line 13), overlaps with Gabriel and asks Mary to explain (note the function of please here possibly in mitigating the directive). Chloe’s turn is an example of a reconciliatory utterance. She uses the short form of Gabriel’s name which she seems to use strategically to build rapport when needed (see also lines 13 and 28), and adopts again mother tone (with a clear directive) towards Mary (see Kendall 2003). Mary responds to Chloe’s claim but prefaces the explanation with a complaint (line 15) and the prosody is clearly marked. Gabriel apologises but his turn in 20 is clearly face threatening by referring Mary to another

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senior member of the team for help. Fil and Chloe, however, both take on the face saving work by referring to Mary’s experience and position. Again the short form of Gabriel’s name is used strategically in an attempt to mend bridges and end the potential confrontation. In line with other research, a point worth raising here is that interactants adapt their communicative styles according to the context. Masculine and feminine identities are therefore fluidly enacted in the discourse of the participants in work-related events. Compare for instance how Fil’s turn (line 26) could index conventional femininity as he seems to also be doing rapport work. Doing rapport, however, in Excerpt 1 included for Fil a rather masculine interactional style and ‘contestive humour’ (Holmes 2006a). Hence this study would lend support to previous work showing the limitations in labelling interactional style according to the biological sex of the interlocutors. I am now turning to the issue of ‘culture’ before closing the paper. What about culture?

An important aspect of the profile of this worksite is its multinational nature. Despite work in the field showing that ‘national culture’ is a construct, there is still a dominant paradigm operationalising culture as nationality (e.g. Greece-Culture Smart, Buhayer, 2005). From this point-of-view, ‘culture’ is often represented as a potential threat to the harmonious relationships of personnel. The four managers, whose interactions I discussed here, come from different countries (the official working language of the consortium is English). This does not seem to become relevant in their everyday encounters as the analysis of the transcripts would indicate. If however one accepts that a) a person’s country of origin plays the most important role in shaping their ‘values’19 and b) if this dimension is applied as an explanatory variable over the data, one could then perhaps relate and explain the issues raised in the previous section to these different values. However, this could be problematic in more than one way. As Sarangi (1994) suggests, societal and institutional roles of interactants are by and large ignored when ‘culture’ is ‘blamed’ as the reason for communication clashes. As argued elsewhere, We characterize ‘culture’ as a floating signifier here because its meaning and significance emerges only in and through the process of articulation, namely, the way it is partially fixed by connecting it to available discursive resources and the problems animating a particular context. By characterizing it as floating signifier – ie., a signifier whose overdetermined meaning shifts on account of its floating from one to another perspective and


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context – we aim to avoid reifying its content and significance. (Angouri and Glynos 2009: 11–12)

By way of illustration only, I am drawing on two representative interview quotes here. Following from the issue of female engineers travelling less than their male colleagues (see also interview quote above), I asked Chloe how it feels to be part of such an international team. Interview quote 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

well it’s kinda hmm normal for us you see we ((engineers)) we are a bit of chameleons (.) Take us for example Gabriel has worked in I dunno how many places and the same for Fil ((provides details of Fil’s last project)) Even those of us you have not travelled that much we always work with people from all over the world so it’s just normal I mean I have my own biases and prejudices but hey just biases and prejudices right (laughter)

Chloe’s interview data would lend support to work on the profile of the ‘modern workplace’ where national borders matter much less and diversity of the workforce is promoted as an ideal (Gee et al. 1996). At a different level, however, it also shows a representation of reality where different ‘nationalities’ in contact are the norm and hence unmarked in that setting (which does not mean however lack of ‘biases and prejudices’). Fil also comments on this: Interview quote 7 1 For me it doesn’t matter, I mean socially it doesn’t 2 make a difference. The issue is always to agree on 3 how to carry out the work. You see we need to 4 negotiate common procedures and of course for 5 what I do safety and security is the most important. 6 We have to work with the EU regulations, the 7 ((companies’)) regulations, the countries 8 regulations and so forth. It is to know how to 9 carry out the work and to have at least one 10 common language (laughter).

The coding process of Chloe’s and Fil’s interview suggests that recurrent themes associated with their multinational environment in the interview data are: ‘mobility of projects’, ‘procedures’, ‘(companies’, departments’) responsibilities’ and ‘profile (education/experience) of colleagues’. In this consortium where ideals of effectiveness and time efficiency have a hegemonic status, the corporate discourses create a ‘good engineer persona’

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which strives to go beyond localities of the past (see earlier discussion on MNCs). I am not claiming that nationality does not come with another set of ‘backstage semantics’ as do other abstract attributes of employees in that context. In the everyday life of this multinational company, however, national identities seem to be typically unmarked. And to take this further, in a recent study on meeting talk in European and New Zealand corporate white-collar workplaces, the analysis showed important similarities in how participants orient towards a common understanding of the various roles and practices in the communicative event we analysed – despite differences in local settings and participants (see Angouri and Marra 2011). One could make here a case for hegemonic corporate discourses that run deep in these multinational workplaces (Gee at al. 1996), clearly an issue that warrants further research. On the basis of the dataset from that particular workplace, this paper would agree with the observations by Louhiala-Salminen who suggested (2002) that in the everyday life of the workplace she observed, national cultures do not seem to always become relevant. Conclusions Overall, the discourses of difference reveal powerful ideologies. As Elias suggests (2007: 12) ‘workplaces act as locations for a merging of localized and globalized discourses’. Overall the analysis of the excerpts of these routine meetings shows that the interactants generally contest each others’ points, the floor tends to be competitive and overlapping talk occurs frequently in all three excerpts. This, however, does not constitute marked linguistic behaviour in this context. The four engineers do show concern about each other’s face needs (Holmes and Stubbe 2003) and do ‘relational work’ in ways that range from normative feminine to normative masculine interactional styles. At the same time the interviews with Chloe brought to the fore her perceptions of the construction industry as still being by and large a masculine domain where biological sex can affect the career progression of female engineers. No matter the subjectivity of Chloe’s views, the fact remains that the engineering industry is the most male-dominated major industry in a number of EU countries (and arguably beyond). In line with other research, however, I consider Chloe’s attitude in debunking stereotypical behaviours and in actively negotiating the ‘gender factor’ a positive turn for women in that profession. Being labelled as a woman seems to suggest something in that particular industry which is not accepted without at least some resistance (see also Faulkner 2009).


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What constitutes a recurrent theme is the perceived importance of ‘being a good engineer’. The members of the team seem to ‘buy in’ to the good engineer persona showing loyalty to their professional identity which comes across as still heavily gendered. I close this paper by an anecdote where Mary describes a part-time job she had during her studies. Interview quote 8 1 So my role there was very much to talk on the 2 phone with them ((describes her role)). I knew they 3 didn’t want to talk to me (.) they would always ask 4 to talk to the guys ((sarcasm)) (.) and I 5 would then typically tell them that 6 ‘the guys’ ((sarcasm)) are not available but I can 7 help and they would then typically say ‘no prob 8 I’ll call later’ and hang up I’d then be 9 like ((imitates strong swear language)) ((laughter)) 10 but I guess they are not used to women engineers.

About the author Jo Angouri is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, UK. Her areas of research specialisation are sociopragmatics and discourse analysis. Her current research focus is language in workplace and health care settings. She has published work on meeting talk, professional identity, workplace written discourse and (foreign) language use and language policy in the corporate workplace. Her research includes a comparative analysis of discourse in business meetings. She is a core network member on the ESRC funded Discourse Analysis Network. Appendix Transcription Conventions (simplified from Jefferson 1984) [ Left square brackets indicate a point of overlap onset. ] Right square brackets indicate a point at which two overlapping utterances both end, where one ends while the other continues, or simultaneous moments in overlaps which continue. = Equal signs indicate continuous utterance with no break or pause and/or latch. (.) A dot in parentheses indicates a short pause. ((NOTES )) Double parentheses are used to indicate transcriber’s comments. emphasis Underlining is used to indicate some form of stress or emphasis.

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Notes 1 I would like to express my appreciation to the senior engineers who participated in my projects, collected data, agreed to be interviewed and were very generous with their time. I especially wish to thank ‘Chloe’ for our discussions. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the helpful suggestions. 2 Usually the term refers to engineering projects such as bridges, tunnels, highways and so on. 3 All the names are pseudonyms. 4 I need to clarify here that accounts on culture do not constitute the primary aim of the paper. The paper is concerned solely with problematising a dominant paradigm in the field as discussed in the following section (for further discussions see Angouri and Glynos 2009). 5 The term multinational is defined here as a company that has subsidiaries or branches in at least three countries (see also Starke-Meyerring, 2005) or has a multinational workforce. 6 Work by discourse analysts have also shown the dominance of masculinised business practices. Koller (2004) shows how metaphors of violence and war are used in business magazines and perpetuate the equation of the business world with a masculine world. 7 Training sessions on ‘working with other cultures’ are very common in corporate workplaces. 8 See Angouri and Glynos (2009) for a discussion on how ‘cultural training’ can be symptomatic of issues than run deep in the MNC workplace. 9 I will not probe in this paper the use of terminology such nationality vs. ethnicity or national culture. For an interesting discussion see Adib and Guerrier, 2003; Hansen, 2005. 10 Background details on the consortium are not relevant and will not be discussed to also protect the anonymity of the participants and companies. 11 A brief summary of hands off procedures (see Holmes and Stubbe, 2003): Key informants are involved in all stages of the project. Complete and firm confidentiality is agreed and the participants are in control of the collection of real life data. It is agreed that any segments or full recordings would be immediately erased at any stage and recordings of meetings could also be deleted post transcription/anonymisation on request. The transcripts (post anonymisation) are made available to the participants (I consider this stage important not only to confirm anonymisation but also for the analysis). 12 And as very rightly put by one of the reviewers they do not need to either . 13 The term is used in an analogy to politeness research. 14 Even though a theoretical discussion on the CofP framework goes beyond the scope of this paper, I endorse the view that emphasis needs to be placed on the concept of ‘praxis’ and ‘legitimate participation’ in workplace CofP that are characterized by unequal power relations (Corder and Meyerhoff, 2007).


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15 ‘Team’ in this paper denotes the group of people who feature in the transcripts. I will not distinguish between this term and CofP here. I acknowledge that the two terms are not interchangeable (see Storck & Hill, 2000 for a discussion) but a discussion around these constructs goes beyond the scope of this paper. 16 Gabriel is the manager of the consortium and senior in hierarchy to Peter, Chloe and Fil. 17 The discussion here refers to normative masculine/feminine styles as defined in relevant work (see introduction). At the same time, one could contest whether a competitive style is ‘masculine’. The stance taken here does not attempt to relate specific styles to men or women but accepts that it is a useful starting point to discuss “choices which index gender identity by association with normatively gendered ways of talking” (Holmes, 2006:9) . 18 This excerpt has been edited because of space limitations. 19 The operationalisations of the term, often not defined, also warrants further research. For a good overview on work in the Intercultural Communication field see Piller, 2009.

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Stubbe, M., Holmes, J., Vine, B. and Marra, M. (2000) Forget Mars and Venus, let’s get back to Earth! Challenging gender stereotypes in the workplace. In J. Holmes (ed.) Gendered Speech in Social Context: Perspectives from Gown and Town 231–258. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses. London: Palgrave. Swann, J. and Maybin, J. (2008) Sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches to language and gender. In K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Saunston and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies 21–28. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Tannen, D. (1990) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow. Tannen, D. (1994) Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tracy, K. and Dimock, A. (2004) Meetings: Discursive sites for building and fragmenting community. In P. Kalbfleisch (ed.) Communication Yearbook 28 127–164. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. UNCTAD (1999) World Investment Report 1999: Foreign Direct Investment and the Challenge of Development. New York: United Nations Conference for Trade and Development. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werner, S. (2002) Recent developments in international management research: A review of 20 top management journals. Journal of Management 28(3): 277–306. Wetherell, M. and Edley, N. (1999) Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: Imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices. Feminism and Psychology 9(3): 335–356. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (2009) The Discursive Construction of National Identities. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zimmerman, D. and Wieder, L. (1970) Ethnomethodology and the problem of order: Comment on Denzin. In J. Douglas (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life 287–302. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Appendix Transcription Conventions (simplified from Jefferson 1984) [ Left square brackets indicate a point of overlap onset. ] Right square brackets indicate a point at which two overlapping utterances both end, where one ends while the other continues, or simultaneous moments in overlaps which continue. = Equal signs indicate continuous utterance with no break or pause and/or latch. (.) A dot in parentheses indicates a short pause. ((NOTES )) Double parentheses are used to indicate transcriber’s comments. emphasis Underlining is used to indicate some form of stress or emphasis.


Gender and Language

Article

How effective is ‘femininity’? Media portrayals of the effectiveness of the first Spanish Woman Defence Minister Mercedes Bengoechea Abstract This paper studies the linguistic performances of Carme Chacón, the first Spanish woman Minister of Defence, as interpreted by the media. The corpus analysed is composed of 63 press columns and reports spanning her first year in office in which Chacón’s traits or performances are valued or assessed. Chacón’s success as a politician seems to be proportionate to her closeness to the powerful social roles of minister and military officer, performed from hybridly gendered identities, whereas her attempt to be a ‘coming-out’ feminine military leader meant a serious reverse in her popularity. keywords: language and gender; female leadership; women’s linguistic performances; media gender construction

Affiliation Universidad de Alcalá, Spain email: [email protected]


doi: 10.1558/genl.v5i2.395

www.equinoxpub.com

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Introduction This paper is part of a more extensive feminist study on the production of gendered identities of women politicians in media discourse, with an aim of transformational action. I am particularly concerned with how women’s identities are enacted in institutional contexts (especially in powerful positions within the State), and how women in leading positions are managing to find their ways to influence, power and leadership. In a global interconnected world, the ways an individual woman manages to have her authority acknowledged are soon learned by many other men and women, who remember representations which challenge stale images. From a feminist perspective, I find it essential to identify these ways and to interrogate their practices. Here I focus on the first year in office of the first Spanish woman defence minister. In 2008, perhaps ‘as a direct result of his pro-feminist policies’, as The Independent asserted, Spain’s re-elected Socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, appointed a predominantly female cabinet for the first time in the country’s history. His nine female ministers (out of a total of 17 ministers) not only formed a majority in the cabinet, but also occupied heavyweight positions, including for the first time the appointment of a woman as defence minister. That woman was Carme Chacón, a 37-year-old mother-to-be (seven months pregnant) with no previous military experience. Formerly lecturer in law, later vice-chair of the Spanish Parliament and minister for housing, Carme Chacón was expecting her first child. Paradigmatic masculinist communities of practice, government and the military (together with the family and corporate business) are institutions through which current practices and ways of thinking authorise, make valid and legitimise the dominant position of men and the subordination of women (Cranny-Francis, Kirkby, Stavropoulos and Waring 2003: 16). This might have forced Chacón to want to become ‘one of the lads’ by resorting to ‘masculinist’ performances, but that proved not to be the case. This fact renders the interpretations and consequences of her performances especially interesting to study from a feminist perspective, as she was manoeuvring in an up-to-then masculinistic and all-male environment. Assumptions

Taking a feminist social constructionist approach, I assume that women may perform diverse and multiple identities, which are constructed, negotiated and interpreted through different (sometimes competing) discourses (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). Perform here refers to the

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way individuals in ordinary situations present themselves and their activity to others, especially when this acting has consequences. I also assume that even women in leading political positions are subjected to gender ideology and discursive gendered relations of power, which can be negotiated, contested or complied with. As Lazar put it: pervasive and insidious in modern societies ... is the operation of a subtle and seemingly innocuous form of power that is substantively discursive in nature. This form of power is embedded and dispersed throughout networks of relations, is self-regulating, and produces subjects in both senses of the word ... The effectiveness of modern power (and hegemony) is that it is mostly cognitive, based on an internalization of gendered norms and acted out routinely in the texts and talk of everyday life ... [H] owever, [it] can be discursively resisted as well as counter-resisted in a dynamic struggle... The mechanisms of power not only often work in subtle and complex ways, but the relations of asymmetry are also produced and experienced in complexly different ways for and by different groups of women… . (2005: 9–10)

One of the tasks of a feminist investigation is to reveal how women are exposed to different forms of power relations and how they resist or accept them. Another of my assumptions is that, as gender counter-discourses are expressed, received and reproduced in the media, hegemonic ones continue to be reinforced and transformed, should the necessity arise. As Walh-Jorgensen claimed in her study of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign: although there is a need for greater flexibility in the readings of genders, we cannot dismiss the conservative power of patriarchal institutions; the power to perpetuate domination by an amazing flexibility; a boundless ability to absorb changes (2000: 72).

My hypothesis is that any woman in power has to struggle against gendered discourses that will attempt to catch her in the gender trap, constructing her as incapable for the post, position or office, while inducing her to act according to dominant gender scripts (Butler 1990; Gal 1991). Although the question of individual agency and its limitations by cultural constraints remains controversial in studies of language and gender (Cameron 1997: 30–32; Bucholtz 2003; Lazar 2005: 8), I assume that, even constricted by rigid regulatory gender norms, a woman still has ‘agency’ (Austin 1962; Butler 1990: 145). Up to a certain point, she can (and will probably have to) find ways to escape from the trap and counter-construct a worthy and powerful persona as manifested in her performances.

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High-profile female politicians have their identities subjected to the media’s interpretation of their performances. This is what makes the study of those performances (and the discourses which interpret them) so vital (Walsh 2001; Lakoff 2003). In this paper I am particularly concerned with the role played by the media in mediating public perceptions of Chacón’s performances. Of all the types of performances a woman in politics can enact, I am especially interested in the linguistic ones. Women’s and men’s communicative styles have been thoroughly studied since the 1970s as separated entities, but for some time now analysts have been attempting to disengage from earlier binary constructs. Some of those studies (e.g. Holmes 2005a; 2006; 2007; Holmes and Stubbe 2003a; Holmes and Schnurr 2006; Marra, Schnurr and Holmes 2006) have demonstrated that women in leading positions choose from among a whole range of strategies available to them, selecting some which the earlier literature on language and gender (e.g. Tannen 1990; 1993; 1994) described as typically feminine, and some others which have been considered typically masculine. Aims

My interest is to study the active accomplishment (if there is such a thing) of a powerful woman within the institutional frameworks of a ministry and the military, whether in her performances she is appropriating some of the so-called ‘masculine’ traits and throwing overboard some of the ‘feminine’ ones. In this sense, one of the aims of this paper is – echoing Holmes – to ‘document change in progress and active resistance’ to hegemonic gender behaviour. A word of caution is called for here: I must emphasize that by ‘feminine’ behaviour I refer to what the (still) prevalent binary order has associated with women for a long time. Being especially concerned with gendered traits of leadership, my analysis will rely on the ways Chacón’s communicative identities as speaker permeate the press’s assessment of her performances. By using the term ‘communicative identities’, and not ‘communicative style’, I am aligning myself with Baxter (2008): ‘communicative style’ may entail immutable, fixed, essentialist attributes, whereas ‘communicative identities’ implies the poststructuralist understanding of identities as socially constructed (Baxter 2008: 200). On the other hand, ‘communicative identities’ is a term which puts the emphasis on the role of the subject as agent of her own performances. Although the communicative strategies displayed by women leaders are often the outcome of the demands of the specific social contexts that these women encounter, the strategies they choose to perform should also help them to assert their authority and become ‘effective’ leaders.


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I will finally discuss how ‘effective’ the roles she chooses to perform are. ‘Effectiveness’ is of course problematic and complex to measure. An effective performance is one that contributes to empowering the actor, and to convincing the audience of her reliability. I take for granted that a member of the government aims both to achieve proposed political changes and to be accepted by citizens as a reliable leader. Being a politician and a member of the government, I will identify Chacón’s effective leadership with positive reactions from the media, citizens’ approval (even if I know that long-term tendencies are difficult to estimate), and social changes brought about according to the political programme she was elected for.1 Corpus

In order to carry out my study, I collected 63 articles, lead articles, editorial notes, columns, reports or news in the Spanish press and one from the British press (from the Guardian) that mentioned Chacón. The texts’ web addresses are provided in Appendix I. The 63 Spanish texts had appeared in 33 paper or digital dailies ranging from the ones with more national readership (five were taken from El País, twelve from El Mundo, six from ABC) to local regional newspapers. The 63 samples also range from left-wing papers (Público) to right-wing ones (Confidencial Digital). My only guiding criterion for a text to be included in the corpus was that it somehow assessed, characterised, described or valued her or her performances. The dates span her first year in office, from April 2008, when she was appointed as defence minister, to April 2009, just after her unexpected announcement that Spanish troops were to be withdrawn from Kosovo.2 Two of Chacon’s salient moments which are projected in the press cuttings of my corpus will be discussed here: when she is seen as a hybridly gendered minister/military officer, and when she is considered as a soft-power ‘feminine’ leader. It will be shown how Chacón’s success as a politician seems to be proportionate to her closeness to the powerful social roles of minister and military officer, performed from hybridly gendered identities, whereas her attempt to be a ‘coming-out’ ‘feminine’ military leader meant a serious reverse in her popularity. In what follows, I will look into her performances clustering around the two moments, as captured and perceived in the press, and into the effectiveness of the roles performed. All quotes are taken from my corpus; the number in square brackets after a quotation indicates its source, and corresponds to its number on the list in Appendix I. The translation of the quotes is mine.

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Previous studies of women leaders’ performances The contradictions between leadership and feminine identity have been widely discussed in the literature on language and gender, or of gender and the professions (e.g. Acker 1992; Alvesson and Billing 1997; Baxter 2003; 2008; Davidson and Burke 2000; Kendall and Tannen 1997; Mullany 2007; Rosener 1990; Wodak 1997; 2003). Women’s performances in specific communities of practice at work have also been the focus of many studies (e.g. Fisher 1991; Gunnarsson 2001; Walsh 2001; West 1998b; Wodak 2003). Analyses have deduced that there is no single unified manner of ‘doing’ femininity in the public arena. And, although women have sometimes managed to conform to prevailing norms in the professions in different ways, and in some cases they have even succeeded in developing new standards for those professions – instances often mentioned are female police officers (McElhinny 1998) or female doctors (West 1998a) – there are not many versions of femininity available to women in power. For the purposes of the present paper, some of the most interesting previous investigations deal with the diverse ways women leaders attempt to reconcile the demands of conflicting identities in their interactions. Fairclough (1989), assuming that the subject has the apparently paradoxical properties of being socially determined and yet capable of individual creativity, summed up Margaret Thatcher’s ‘creative’ strategy for solving the double-bind any woman political leader was faced with the recipe: ‘be authoritative, decisive and tough, yet do not compromise your femininity’. This sounds contradictory, because the three adjectives in the first part are all associated with masculinity. What [Margaret Thatcher] has done [in a radio interview] is to combine authoritative expressive elements of a traditional male political discourse type ...; ‘tough’ expressive elements ... from other male discourse types; and ‘feminine’ expressive elements most obviously from a visual ‘discourse’ of fashion, but also the non-authoritative modality features ... stereotypically feminine (Fairclough 1989: 191–192).

Wodak (1997) and Holmes (2005a; 2006; 2007) analysed women’s construction of their leadership in daily interactions with the persons they relate to as leaders or bosses. Holmes describes how women directors or executives embrace powerful feminine social roles (e.g. queen or mother) which acceptably combine ‘doing power’ with enacting femininity. Her analysis of interactions in the workplace suggests that, depending on the task, some women leaders may draw on one of these two roles to enact power. Holmes also reveals how discursive features which enact authority are frequently followed by attenuation strategies (2005a; 2006; 2007). In more masculinist communities of practice, though, some women opt for what Holmes has called the role of ‘harridan’, ‘battle-axe’ or ‘rottweiler’ to


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construct their workplace identity. Holmes characterises some of these ‘direct, no-fuss, authoritative’ managerial styles as ‘direct and focussed’, ‘with no hedging, no mitigating devices’ (Holmes 2005a: 16). One of Holmes’s aims is to document ‘the challenges that these women offer to the masculinist discourse norms that dominate most workplaces’ (Holmes 2007: 455) – sometimes by integrating ‘feminine’ discourse styles into their talk, and attenuating assertive powerful performances; sometimes by appropriating authoritative, powerful strategies when required, and thus contributing to their de-gendering (not ‘only-male’ any longer). Consequently, for Marra, Schnurr and Holmes (2006), ‘effective leadership’ in the corporation is defined as being concerned with both the transactional and the relational, that is, one that mixes task-oriented and peopleoriented goals. For them, it ‘consisted [of ] communicative performance which results in acceptable outcomes for the organization ... and maintains harmony within the team or community of practice’ (2006: 242). Holmes does not always analyse how the team or the subordinates perceive the bosses’ behaviour, except for the context and outcome of the interactions, and rarely on opinions expressly uttered by their subordinates or peers. Martín Rojo and Gómez Esteban (2003; 2005) did, however, study how some women in leading positions in organisations were perceived by their peers and subordinates. The picture is disappointingly unfavourable for women managers, who were perceived as weak and powerless when they deployed ‘feminine’ communicative traits – despised by male colleagues, mistrusted by female subordinates. On the other hand, female bosses and managers were castigated and undervalued when performing very authoritative masculinist strategies (Wajcman 1998; Martín Rojo and Gómez Esteban 2005; Baxter 2008). In general, previous studies have concluded that ‘there is clearly a great deal still to be done to broaden the conception of an effective female leader to encompass a wider diversity of leadership styles’ (Holmes 2005a: 18). Further, as Philips (2003) demonstrated, while the leadership role continues to be gendered, many unexamined cultural assumptions also present barriers to women’s ambitions. Welcome to power: The old-order discourse With no attempt at self-concealment, sexist discourse found its voice in the writing of some male columnists and journalists when welcoming Chacón to power. She (and the rest of the women ministers in passing) was denigrated contemptuously in a rightist newspaper as ‘the immodest majoress of the President’s battalion of inexperienced seamstresses’ [5]. The chief-editor of another of the most important conservative dailies

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compared her to the character of a woman bartender in an opera by Donizetti, qualifying her also as a ‘star trapeze artist of Zapatero’s circus’ [3]. Some even dared to play with alliteration in Spanish, using constructions similar to the English ‘womb/bomb/bump’: bombo-bomba [1, 4]. Portrayed as a gendered being, she was downgraded as having been ‘appointed merely as a token’ [56], because of the obligations of the parity policy, and representing ‘minorities’: ‘Only a gay would have been more provocative than this nice little doll, in her thirties’ [4]; ‘it was a question of the quota’ [5]; ‘a toll’ [23]; ‘the quota announces that next time fat women or the handicapped will be also represented in the Cabinet’ [1]. She is also described as ‘intelligent and ambitious’ [4, 22], the latter an adjective frequently used for women politicians, but not for men (Lakoff 2003). Finally, some papers focused on her age. She was consistently referred to as ‘a girl’ [3, 4]. She was also termed ‘primipara minister’ [3]. Her alleged lack of experience (‘her previous appointment as a housing minister was just to provide her with the minimum service record required to become now a general’ [3]) was also cited [21] to denounce her as unsuitable for the post. It must be noted that young as she was, she had some experience in politics and had been MP for years. She had no previous experience in the armed forces though, as the compulsory military service was mandatory only for men. In any case, all those quotations show how in the media gender was linked to homosexuality, body size, disability, age and (probably) military service. Chacón’s appointment was thus challenged and overtly resisted in the discourse of the most conservative male journalists (and of some male journalists of the left), who attempted to construct her as inept and incompetent for the post, to which she had gained access only because of the parity policy. Interestingly, in this first stage, most women journalists and columnists of all political positions received her warmly or remained quiet (see, for instance, 7, 29), but did not join in with these men’s pronouncements. The hybridly gendered minister and military officer A woman in a leading position must forcefully seize power, and make room for herself in the masculinised space of public government. For that, she must construct a public identity as a government leader, which is always the product of her negotiation of different and competing discourses. In the paragraphs above I have summarised some of the discourses she had to deal with during her first days in office. How did she handle them, and what roles did she choose to perform?


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She had to shift between competing subject positions, under an obligation to demonstrate that ‘I am worth it’ and that she could make decisions, give orders, be respected, and have her authority acknowledged. She constructed herself as a powerful persona, compatible with her gender, age and ideological traits – ‘pacifist, Socialist and Catalan nationalist’ [23] – supposedly opposed to the main function of the military forces, which is preserving the ‘unity’ of Spain. Chacón’s communicative ways to make room in the patriarchal space of government and military space for herself are complex. According to the press, she relies on a firm voice and a low tone [55, 11] which transmit authority. ‘She speaks quietly, but clearly. She does not skip a line of the message she wants to transmit. Her thin bone structure and her short sight provide her with a certain delicacy that disappears as soon as she speaks’ [22], asserts one newspaper. ‘Trustworthy and authoritative, her voice was far from any male sexist authoritarianism’ [54], acknowledges another male journalist. ‘She is the boss, she knows firmly how to order’ [22], an admiral is quoted as saying. With concessions to a male style of being ‘professional’, she performs seriousness. Like the Pittsburgh police officers discussed by McElhinny, she seemed to have developed an ‘economy of affect’ (1998: 314), and the press does not depict her as smiling much. Rather, ‘her very serious countenance and circumspect attitude’ [53] are habitually noted in most favourable terms. On one particular occasion when she was accused of ‘a perennial severe gesture’, she replied it was a question ‘of responsibility’ [22], although it may be read as well as societal assumptions which impose restrictions on women’s behaviour. Studying effective communicative strategies that women executives and managers display in the workplace, Holmes (2006; 2007) found a recurrent strategy, which consists of making use of both authoritarian, powerful discourse as well as more relationally oriented, normatively feminine discourse as appropriate, reflecting the demands of specific social contexts these women encounter (Holmes 2007: 445). In a similar way, Chacón alternates between relational face-oriented utterances (as described by Tannen 1994; Holmes 1995; Coates 1996) and assertive coercive speech acts. One episode may illustrate this alternation. On the first day Chacón inspected the troops, most newspapers included her firm orders: ‘Captain, order standing to attention!’, ‘Now, utter with me “Long Live the King”’ [7, 46]. They also mentioned the clear points she made after that, in her first speech as a Minister, ‘firmly listing the targets of her term of office’ [7]. And then, at the end of this first speech, she added : ‘I feel proud and led by my love of this Spain, a love I have had ever since I was a little girl’ [7]. We may

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read this as a ‘mitigation strategy’, or a wish to sound open and honest, but it certainly expresses a trend to bring private experience into the public realm to express personal involvement. Chacón continued mixing strategies stereotypically ascribed to men in power with ‘feminine’ ones. On the one hand, her tough side is underlined by the media by means of nouns and adjectives traditionally associated with strict authoritative transactional leadership: ‘her firm expression shows that she is the boss’ [22]; ‘a real leader’, ‘a formidable redoubtable lady’ [49]; ‘when she sounds reveille, even the caretaker stands to attention’ [49]), ‘strict’ [26], ‘disciplined and firm’ [46]. But, on the other side, she was also depicted as using more relational leadership traits: ‘cordial, but with a firm hand’ [22], ‘not distant and respecting their subordinates’ [22], possessing ‘great powers of persuasion’ [26], somebody ‘who had earned the respect of the general staff, without ever looking overbearing’ [22]. She claimed in an interview that her relationship with military officers was based ‘on mutual respect’ [46]. Generals and admirals praised her style: ‘She looks closely, but does not interfere. She has character and authority. She will be a good boss’ [22]. The previous commander-in-chief of the general staff said of her: ‘She is the chief that any member of the general staff would like to have’ [46]. An admiral was quoted as saying that the military ‘like her. We do not demand a minister to be a great technician, but to be a person whose decisions are balanced and capable of marking out a clear strategic line’ [22]. Like many other women leaders, Chacón ‘does not improvise or leave things to chance’ [22]. Part of their success is based on training, preparation and work. In analysing the narratives of women managers in top position, Baxter notes how female leaders are using a range of different strategies with which to observe, regulate, police, review and repair the way they appear and sound to their colleagues, in order to avoid negative judgement. Among their strategies of defence, women make use of rigorous preparation (2008: 217).

In a similar way, the media document how Chacón ‘studied the videos of her predecessors [all male], and rehearsed gaze, rhythm and walking pace, cadence and tone of voice’ [22]. On the other hand, and probably for the same reasons, she did not summon a press briefing where journalists might drop unexpected questions in a year, something resented by some media: ‘she leads a communicative policy based on staging rather than on faceto-face interaction with the press’ [25, 58]. Chacón kept on expanding her range of traits. One of her first decisions was to replace the highest-ranking officers in the armed forces by others who suited her targeted policies better, a most authoritative decision


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which openly challenged the Establishment: e.g. the Chief of Defence Staff identifies himself as an atheist for the first time since Franco died.3 But at the farewell ceremony of the previous general staff, she looked ‘moved’, ‘almost crying’ [22]. She justified her emotion: ‘I have worked so, so, so well with the previous ones’ [22]. She used a construction documented as most feminine (García Mouton 2000; López García and Morant 1991), ‘a gustísimo’ [so, so, so well], a qualifier which both in Spanish and in English may ‘position a speaker as lacking in “real” authority, as drawing in [this resource] in an attempt to divert attention from lack of institutional status or socially conferred prestige that would enable “plainer” words’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003: 81). One may tend to ascribe Chacón’s emotion to a typical ‘feminine’ style of leadership, where women’s difficult decisions may cause them to cry. Holmes has observed how there is an underlying pressure to counter the effects of masculine strategies with more feminine behaviour. According to Holmes, this is evidence that ‘societal assumptions about women’s behaviour continue to operate and impose restrictions and constraints, even when women have apparently broken through the glass ceiling’ (Holmes 2005b: 52–53). Chacón’s display of emotion here can be read as a similar way to negotiate her identity. Chacón’s success in deploying different types of performances adds to the very many women who, in the public domain, have opted for mixing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits in the construction of powerful self-identities, from Margaret Thatcher (Fairclough 1989) to the managers studied by Holmes et al. For Marra, Schnurr and Holmes (2006: 256), ‘effective’ senior managership in a corporation is ‘able to skilfully integrate transactional and relational goals’. Their findings were later supplemented by Baxter, who showed how the managers and CEOs in her sample deployed ‘a wide repertoire of gendered linguistic strategies in order to achieve the diverse goals of their business’, and additionally were ‘able to shift their subject positions’ by means of competing allegiances ‘from one moment to the next’ (2008: 216). Chacón’s performances during her first months as a minister were interpreted as ‘effective’ [58] by some of the press. As a political leader elected to implement policies of equality, she ‘stuck to her feminist principles’ [6]. Not only did she ‘share maternity/paternity leaves with her husband’ [52, 58], but in her first months in office she promoted more women in the army [46]; changed military structure – now, time in the army is no longer a criterion for promotion, which will permit women to become generals [25]; and ‘adopted the picturesque [sic] decision to change women’s uniforms’ [58], as they were ‘universal male’ and did not fit women’s breasts or bodies. She was quoted as claiming that ‘the human

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dimension in this “house” should not be disregarded’ [22] – ‘house’ seems a very ‘feminine’ term for what, a century ago, was ‘the Ministry of War’. In addition to that, she managed to change the nature of the military, which according to surveys would soon ‘come closer to the civilian society than ever: under her office, the military forces are better valued than ever after Franco’s death’ [46]. In February 2009 her efforts to own the roles assigned to her seemed to have worked. It was then that she commanded ‘more respect’ [25, 53]. The media praised ‘her initiative, soundness and coherence’ [53], and acknowledged ‘her acceptance by the military’ [25]. Also, ‘according to surveys, citizens’ assessments of her were so high that they surpassed any other minister in the cabinet (including the President)’ [11, 25, 58]. Most newspapers hint that she might be President Zapatero’s future successor [28, 47, 49, 58, 59]. If one felt tempted to conclude that she had helped to crack the old gender order in a very successful way, it would be a hasty conclusion indeed, as we will see. Fall of her popularity: The values of fatherland. ‘Negotiating instead of ordering’, a most ‘feminine’ trait Feminists have pronounced that there is often a culturally prescribed way to do things which is invisibly gendered (e.g. Kendall and Tannen 1997). The mode of accomplishing certain posts, jobs and tasks draws upon certain assumptions which are never questioned. Masculine hegemony resists the dissolution of men’s historical privileges by making women occupy positions that can be described as precarious and thus have a higher risk of failure (the phenomenon described as ‘glass cliff ’ by Ryan et al. 2007) or making women feel like ‘interlopers’ – to use Eckert’s (1998: 67) felicitous term – in a masculine reign. It is especially when women fail that their status as ‘interlopers’ becomes more visible; they have proved that they do not belong. If there is an institution where discourse and representation have been dominated by androcentric norms and masculinist styles of interaction it is the military forces, so much so that they have become the paradigm of masculinity. Even now, when women are part of corporations, the government and the military forces, the androcentric notion of effective leadership is often masculine in its performance and accomplishment (Bass 1998; Heifertz 1998; Davidson and Burke 2000). This Chacón painfully discovered after a year in office. She could see for herself how the association of power, masculinity and androcentric procedures places a woman who holds power in a perilous and precarious position, both from


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those who support and from those who attack the government of which she is part. In March 2009, the Spanish government decided to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, where they had been for ten years. The conventional chain of command would have entailed that this issue should be discussed first within the cabinet, then taken to the Parliament to be approved and finally to NATO; the decision should then be communicated to the generals and commanders, who would in turn tell the soldiers. By exercising her authority and agency, instead of following the traditional chain of command, Chacón decided to tell the troops first. She travelled to Kosovo, summoned the press, and simultaneously told the soldiers deployed there and the world that Spain was to withdraw from Kosovo: ‘You have done very well. It’s time for you to come back home. A magnificent job. Congratulations for all your efforts’ [36, 45, 60]. Afterwards she explained the reasons why she had decided to act like this, by simply stating the following: ‘The right thing to do was to transmit – in person and straight to them – a decision which so directly involves them, the Spanish soldiers, our troops, after ten years protecting the lives of thousands of innocent people and being peacekeepers’ [32]. According to the rendering of the minister’s act by some pundits in political radio debates (e.g. Javier Nart in Punto Radio), she had tried to ‘negotiate with the troops’ an order which could not possibly be opposed. The literature on language, gender and the workplace has described this trait as most ‘feminine’ (e.g. Tannen 1994). It would be part of women’s person/process-oriented, affectively oriented interactional style (Holmes and Stubbe 2003b: 574). This orientation would try to minimise status differences, and would allegedly enact power in a covert way by paying attention to subordinates’ faces (Holmes 1995; Mills 2003). ‘They should be the first to know’ – she justified again her action in the press briefing ‘she had to urgently summon, as a result of the irate responses from the media (and from NATO) to her performance’ [25]. Martín Rojo and Gómez Esteban have claimed that, for women leaders, being acknowledged by subordinates is essential to being able to exercise authority. According to those authors, this explains the recurrent fact that female managers worry more about not offending their subordinates than about not offending their superiors (2005: 74–75). If we accept that, we might conclude that, on this particular occasion, Chacón was negotiating a soft form of power (power by seduction, not by coercion) by coming close to her subordinates. In fact, such is the interpretation of one of the most influential newspapers, the centre-left El País:

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With the appointment of Chacón, a Catalanist, pacifist, pregnant woman, Zapatero attempted an approach to the embodiment of soft power (Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, 2004), which deals with the political skill to achieve what one wishes through seduction, instead of through coercion. Apparently Zapatero might have been wrong. [45]

Transformational (more ‘feminised’) leadership may have proved more successful and productive even in the military organisations (Bass 1998), but, if Chacón’s performance was an attempt to exercise transformational power in the army, the media did not find it effective. The collaborative frame to decision-making described as more ‘feminine’ is often resented as unfocused and unproductive in very masculinistic contexts (Baxter 2003: 149). What seems clear is that Chacón had reframed the situation and, refusing to be forced into the hierarchic structure of the ‘chain-ofcommand’, leapfrogged several steps. But, by separating her behaviour from the structural frame of the institution, she would discover that she could not draw support from the system of norms of international politics, whose value system prioritises established communicative strategies. US’s and NATO’s alleged sense of unease caused by her behaviour were reported in the press [39]. From that very moment, and grounded solely in her communicative behaviour on that particular occasion, all the press denied Chacón the capacity to hold power. ‘The Government’s interlocutor is the Parliament, not the soldiers deployed in the zone, according to the law’, complained some MPs [35]. The initial view, tentatively expressed by some media a year earlier when she was appointed (that she was too young, inexperienced, novice or greenhorn), was reinforced by all commentators, and not only by those critical from the beginning: ‘A worrying symptom of lack of thought and political maturity’ [48]. ‘The President was frivolous’ [31] when he appointed her, as ‘she did not meet the requirements for the post’ [31, 56]. He had supposedly taken a great risk when he decided to appoint her – it was ‘an exercise of irresponsibility’ on his part [31]. Her capability is now fiercely questioned by both women and men columnists (she is ‘incompetent’ [56], ‘makes blunders’ [36]). The way she had communicated the Government’s decision (the media even suggested that it had been a decision of her own, not even shared with the rest of the Cabinet [25, 55]) demonstrated that ‘she did not possess the necessary abilities for the post’, and that ‘she does as she pleases’ [56]. Her performance allegedly revealed ‘her lack of ability for leadership’ [31]. Represented again as ‘a girl’ [37, 60, 61], she was accused of ‘immaturity’, ‘childishness’, being ‘novice and green’ [31, 37], and of acting ‘in a rush’ [56], with ‘improvisation’ [35, 61] and ‘frivolity’ [61]. She had done ‘a botched job’ [35, 50, 53]; a ‘crazy silly mistake’ [29, 59]; like in a ‘tambourine operetta’ [53] or like ‘a TV celebrity’ [60]. ‘Even the Secretary


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of the Presidency of the Government criticised her in public’ together with ‘all political parties in the Parliament’ [47]. She was particularly accused by the leader of the opposition of ‘all talk and no action’ [35]. A provincial daily put it blatantly: ‘Things must be done as appropriate. She should have done the right thing: with maturity and avoiding childish behaviour’ [42]. She had clearly become an immature interloper in the ministry and in the army. Although the majority of the press agreed with the decision of troops withdrawal [25, 53], absolutely all the press demanded that ‘she should have followed the established procedures’ [33, 44, 50, 56]. That was the main criticism of her performance: ‘In Europe and in democratic Western countries there are rules governing procedures’ [24]. Holmes has documented one of the ways in which power ‘is done’ in organisations – ‘by drawing on the taken-for-granted assumptions about the way things operate in [the] organization’ (2005b: 41). As Holmes states, ‘Appealing to precedent … is a very conservative response … one which assumes and emphasizes the inherent incontestability of the status quo’ (42), thus reinforcing the existing institutionalised procedures. As in the case of the woman analysed by Holmes, Chacón was placed in a subordinate position in discourse, and ‘told to follow the established rules if she wanted to make progress’ (Holmes 2005b: 42), again a ‘paradigmatic example of the way power relations are performed and systematically reconstructed’ (42). Chacón’s performance was also taken as manipulative and hypocritical. In their analysis of female style in interactions in labour organisations, Martín Rojo and Gómez Estaban (2005: 71) concluded that ‘maintaining a communication style considered typically female contributes to reinforcing an image of women in positions of responsibility that highlights their weakness or incapacity for holding such a post; it may also lead to their being seen as false and manipulative’, among other things, because ‘the supposed interest in seeking the approval of [subordinates] may be perceived as merely rhetorical, since the difference in position obliges [them] to follow the superior’s order anyway’ (69). Similarly, in the case of Chacón, a ‘feminine’ trait such as that of negotiating instead of imposing by orders (granted, a negotiation with the media as witnesses, and a negotiation which could not be refused) produced not only a weak and incompetent identity, but also a manipulative one. Her desire to communicate to the troops first was perceived as sheer manipulation via the media, seeking the approval of Spanish society and the soldiers first: ‘a theatrical gesture’ [31, 35], ‘a pathetic attempt to be on the news’ [33, 40, 41]. ‘Irrespective of international treaties and obligations towards our allies’ [56], she had behaved in a ‘selfish’ [61], ‘cheap demagogic way’ [38], ‘in accordance with her own agenda only’ [48].

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Not only had she allegedly behaved against procedures, but she had acted in an inmature and childish way. Gender is also made overtly relevant by the media. Her performance was ‘a first-time mother craving’, ‘a hunch’ [56]. It was in this moment that her powerful position in the previous months showed its precariousness and instability. ‘Chacón eclipses’, was one of the headlines [49]. So, we’re leaving Kosovo, this the mother-minister announced yesterday in an absolutely emotional appearance – her conjunctiva about to shed tears – admitting no error. [28]

Litosseliti (2006) has shown how constructing a female voice as emotional creates an asymmetrical position for a woman, effectively limiting her involvement in debates and decisions around the area of war and conflict. Similarly, Chacón is now despised not only as ‘emotional’, but also ‘impulsive, uncontrolled’ [55] – and thus irrational. I interpret this as marking her as unprofessional (and non-manly). According to one of the most influential dailies, El Mundo, Chacón’s behaviour in Kosovo was produced ‘with the aim of highlighting her femininity over her position’ [56]. This sentence reflects how difficult it is for a woman to be ‘feminine’ and occupy the position of a minister. The sentence can be read as meaning government positions should not be feminised, too ‘feminine’ traits do not fit, a ‘highlighted feminine’ being does not belong. Chacón was now identified with a devalued status. Placing soldiers (the concrete, the particular human beings and their subjectivity) first in the value scale (and not the national policies of defence or international alliances) when communicating to them the end of their mission was to no avail. What counted was the rigid chain of command, the separation between spheres (private/public), the rationality and objectivity of decisions. Her more democratic and cooperative view of leadership was regarded as a lack of leadership, her authority undermined, and her way to exercise leadership challenged. The press depicted the decision to leave Kosovo as hers and only hers. Some of the most rightist press link it to unmanly desertion, and blatantly associate power in the military forces as a men-only world, one where ‘one keeps to his word’. With poor honour and no glory … Spain deserts again … in a grotesque stampede … from a military campaign … Desertion is badly regarded both by the military and by gentlemen … it is one of the many short-skirted decisions taken by this government. [24]

The whole government and their set of policies are also gendered in this phrase, and as such dismissed as ineffective. It is a ‘short-skirted decision’


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(that is, characteristic of a woman and suggestive of short-sighted). The military world is a domain organised and managed by men. Neither a woman nor a pacifist government can cope with it. In other words, this would never have been done by a gentleman or the military; the minister is neither of them: A man of honour would have never fallen into such behaviour. Chacón is neither a man, nor has she honour. Her resignation would suffice. [43]

Her decision to communicate to the troops first is cast as a question not only of international commitments, but also of masculinity. The gendered system is again invoked to assure the maintenance of masculine dominance. Journalists disseminate the idea of the (necessary) male dominance in the male preserve of politics, where the woman minister did not know how to act correctly. Authority now appears associated with giving orders in a very strong sonorous voice: ‘Her orders to the troops were not such’, ‘but mere attempts to wee cries’ [56]. Virility, as marked by the voice, specifically a speech tone which is identified as cool, distant, strong, forceful, seems to be now required, and not her ‘wee cries’. Perhaps more critical is the corollary that she had even attempted deliberately to undermine the institution itself: Zapatero is a pacifist … His parliamentary group is a coryphaeus where socialist women seem to be about to say that if, in order to end up with war they have to refrain from cock [sic], like Lysistrata, they will. Lysistrata – a name which means ‘the woman who dissolves armies’ – is Chacón. [41]

This last position is most revealing, as the writer (the editor of a national daily) seems to make clear the very essence of the military institution as being male: a woman’s commanding of the army in a ‘feminine’ way is to break up it. Neither in the military nor in the government is femininity to be highlighted. And political positions are fully gendered. Was Chacón really an outsider in the community of practice of high politics, an interloper? Was her performance an outcome of her ignorance or a carefully devised strategy aimed at resisting masculinist procedures? One might wonder whether Chacón had expected such a reaction from the press. If she had, then, as a feminist I must congratulate her for attempting to break binary gender divisions, challenge the institutional procedures and institutionalise ‘feminine’ leadership. But if she had not anticipated the media’s negative reaction, then this performance does not seem very ‘effective’ in terms of getting her own way and having her authority acknowledged, at least in the short term. Chacón was rejected, both socially and in the media. The great popularity she had enjoyed experienced a dramatic

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downturn. Surveys did not assess her, as a minister, in a positive way any more. And ‘she had to apologize to NATO, her head bowed’ [59]. The limits and contradictions of her subject position did not permit her a ‘highlighted’ feminine leadership. As soon as she was understood to be claiming authority by adopting only a ‘most feminine’ identity, she was ascribed to the group of incapable women, unable to lead the defence policy of the State. Was she better equipped for effectiveness in enacting multiple gender positions than radically opting for a ‘feminine’ one? Surely she seemed to have had more chances to succeed when she had shifted between different forms of identity. Openly ‘feminine’ ways displayed by women in power are often still rejected. As Cohn put it, the power of gender codes’ policing function is to mark: what is out of bounds in the discourse and offer a handy set of epithets to use to enforce those rules. It also links that ‘subjugated knowledge’ to the deepest sense of self-identity … And in the [national] defence community, the only thing worse than a man acting like a woman is a woman acting like a woman (1993: 239).

Had not the press discourses demonstrated some months earlier that, with Chacón’s appointment and popularity, the gender categories had been subverted? It seems now that this was not the case; the gender system and its dichotomies are still stable. The idea that a woman in the military might transform the notion of politics and the armies into more ‘feminine’ terrains has proved to be naive. A woman in power has not transformed the discourses of gender or politics yet. The link between masculinity and politics/the military seems to have been left intact. In fact, as shown above, media discourses, when interpreting the latest Chacón performance, tended to reinforce masculine hegemony, and perpetuate masculine domination. Even pacifism and socialism are gendered and criticized as non-manly. Conclusions My study demonstrates that gender frames continue to be rigid, regulatory and coercive, which is why the range of identities available to women in power is not as wide as they desire. Although the media discourses show a (relative) fluidity of gendered subject positions and a relative success in Chacón’s mixed performances, institutional bodies such as ministerial offices do not permit entirely free gender-identity performances. Chacón’s choices and decisions have not been free or unlimited, and their performances have had material consequences – she has paid for her choices. She clearly won more approval and acceptance when she challenged existing gender constructs while simultaneously sustaining them, partially


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by complying with certain gender norms. After all, as Baxter (2008) and Holmes (2005b) have already concluded, there is always an underlying pressure on women leaders to uphold the ideals of womanhood. But my analysis also demonstrates that the pressure to follow masculinist norms and procedures seems to be even greater. To change the sex of the leader within an organisation is not enough to change its organisational system and the androcentric notions which support it: the ‘institutional coerciveness’ (Cameron 1997: 31), based on ideologies that structure enactments of gender. A woman in charge of the armies does not change the press’s attitudes towards men and women in the military or the government, nor evaluations of their performances, which often continue to be assessed on the basis of androcentric values. Any woman who enters into the masculinistic world of politics (and war) participates in a gendered discourse in which she may be forced to adopt a masculine position for legitimacy, and adjust her behaviour to a feminine pattern as well. Consequently, it is not that the feminine is absent from government/military discourses; it is present, but still undervalued and delegitimised. And the masculinist way to perform power is still overvalued and hegemonic. The problem that women leaders have to face is not the obligation to expand their communicative tactics – after all, women’s communicative range has already increased notably, making place/space/room for the most ‘masculine’ performances. Their problem, rather, is that any communicative tactic which is not part of the men’s repertoire is evaluated as invalid and/ or illegitimate. Thus women must necessarily resort to any performance or identity which men have already appropriated as theirs (mixed or not with some more ‘feminine’ ones). Meanwhile the literature on gendered leadership in the corporation has already demonstrated that strategies adopted by men become immediately validated (Wajcman 1998). Appendix I: Web addresses of the texts of my sample referred to 1) ‘Carme Chacón escuece a los medios de la derecha’. Público, 16/04/2008. http://www.publico.es/070961/carme/chacon/escuece/medios/derecha 3)’La fille du régiment’. P.J. Ramírez, 20/04/2008. http://www.elmundo.es/papel/2008/04/20/opinion/2373859.html 4) ‘Zerolo, ministro de defensa’. L.M. Ansón, ABC, 15/04/2008. http://www.elmundo.es/papel/2008/04/15/opinion/2368988.html 5) ‘El batallón de modistillas de ZP’. ABC, 13/04/2008. http://www.antonioburgos.com/abc/2008/04/re041308.html 6) ‘El ejército español, a la moda’. M. Massanet Bosch,Xornal Galicia.com, 4/09/2008. http://xornalgalicia.com/index.php?module=pnWebLogandfunc=viewanduid=385

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7) ‘Las tropas se ponen firmes por primera vez ante una ministra’. E. Mucientes. El Mundo, 14/04/2008. http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2008/04/14/espana/1208154193.html 11) ‘La ministra de Defensa destaca el papel de las mujeres 20 años después de su llegada a las Fuerzas Armadas’. J. Romero. Público, 7/01/2009. http://www.publico.es/espana/188721/carmechacon/pascuamilitar/reyes/principes/ esmoquin 22) ‘Madre y ministra’. L. Sánchez Mellado. El País, 7/09/2008. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/MADRE/MINISTRA/elpepusoceps/2008090 7elpepspor_5/Tes 23) ‘Mujeres, madres, ministras’. A. Camps. adn, 14/04/2008. http://www.adn.es/blog/urnanimidad/politica/20080414/POS-0015-Mujeresministras-madres.html 24) ‘La deserción como carácter’. H. Tertsch, ABC, 2/03/2009. http://www.abc.es/20090320/opinion-tercera/desercion-como-caracter-20090320.html 25) ‘Tiroteo sobre la superministra de defensa’. F. Jaúregui. El Faro de Vigo, 23/03/2009. http://www.farodevigo.es/secciones/noticia.jsp?pRef=2009032300_5_308913__ Opinion-Tiroteo-sobre-superministra-Defensa 26) ‘Mujeres y ministras’. Y. Veiga & I. Álvarez, Diario Vasco, 20/04/2008. http://www.diariovasco.com/20080420/politica/mujeres-ministras-20080420.html 28) ‘Chacón y ZP’. DiarioYa.es, 24/03/2009. http://www.diarioya.es/content/editorial-chac%C3%B3n-y-zp 29) ‘Kosovo’. J. J. Armas Marcelo, ABC, 24/03/2009. http://www.abc.es/20090324/opinion-firmas/kosovo-20090324.html 31) ‘La incompetencia de Chacón, la frivolidad de zapatero’. El Mundo, 22/03/2009. http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/03/22/opinion/2617124.html 32) ‘Chacón descarta errores y asegura que la retirada de Kosovo es consensuada’. Xornal de Galicia.com, 24/03/2009. http://www.xornal.com/artigo/2009/03/23/espana/chacon-descarta-errores-aseguraretirada-kosovo-consensuada/2009032313552355525.html 33) ‘Rajoy califica de “patéticos” los esfuerzos de Chacón “por salir en el telediario’. M. Cruz. El Mundo, 25/03/2009. http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/03/25/espana/1237967533.html 35) ‘Todos contra el anuncio de Kosovo’. J. Cavero. Faroceutamelillla.es, 26/03/2009. http://www.elfaroceutamelilla.es/content/view/30388/143/ 36) ‘La chapuza de Kosovo’. A. Martín del Pozo, La Voz de Salamanca, 25/03/2009. http://www.lavozdesalamanca.com/article5561.html 37) ‘Carmen Chacón, sostenella y no enmendalla’. L. M. Ansón. El Imparcial, 24/03/2009. http://www.elimparcial.es//carmen-chacon-sostenella-y-no-enmendalla-35982.html 38) ‘Chacón da explicaciones al secretario general de la OTAN tras la polémica retirada de Kosovo’. El Norte de Castilla, 26/03/2009. http://www.nortecastilla.es/20090326/mas-actualidad/espana/chacon-reune-nuevosecretario-200903260914.html


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39) ‘La estrella de Zapatero se eclipsa’. la Opinión de Zamora, 24/03/2009. http://www.laopiniondezamora.es/secciones/noticia.jsp?pRef=2009032400_7_ 343976__estrella-Zapatero-eclipsa 41) ‘Estatua de sal’. R. del Pozo. El Mundo, 26/03/2009. http://www.elmundo.es/opinion/columnas/raul-del-pozo/2009/03/2619289.html 42) ‘Madurez por favor’. J. A. Vera. La Razón, 24/03/2009. http://www.larazon.es/noticia/madurez-por-favor 43) ‘La obscenidad de Chacón’. C. Vidal. La Razón, 11/11/2008. http://www.larazon.es/noticia/la-obscenidad-de-chacon 44) ‘Grave error de procedimiento en Kosovo’. L. M. Ansón. El Mundo, 26/03/2009. http://www.elmundo.es/opinion/columnas/luis-maria-anson/2009/03/2617143.html 45) ‘Kosovo y la ministra Chacón’. J. A. Pérez González. El País, 24/03/2009. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Kosovo/ministra/Chacon/elpepuopi/ 20090324elpepiopi_6/Tes 46) ‘La gestión de Carme Chacón y la retirada de Kosovo’. P. Rego. El Plural.com, 28/03/2009. http://www.elplural.com/opinion/detail.php?id=32112 47) ‘Adiós a Kosovo. Todos los datos, declaraciones y polémicas’. El Confidencial Digital, 28/03/2009. http://www.elconfidencialdigital.com/Articulo.aspx?IdObjeto=20152 48) ‘Kosovo por dentro’. El País, 26/03/2009. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Kosovo/dentro/elpepiopi/ 20090326elpepiopi_1/Tes 49) ‘Tres hurras por Carme Chacón: ¡Hurra, hurra y hurra!’. F. Quevedo. El Confidencial, 24/03/2009. http://www.elconfidencial.com/cache/2009/03/24/dos_palabras_8_hurras_carme_ chacon_hurra_hurra_hurra.html 50) ‘La chapuza nacional y Afganistán’. C. Mendo. El País, 27/03/2009. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/chapuza/nacional/Afganistan/ elpepiopi/20090327elpepiint_12/Tes/ 52) ‘Carme Chacón: “No soy una superwoman”’. Mujer Hoy, 3/03/2009. http://www.hoymujer.com/trabajo/lideres/Carme,Chacon,superwoman,76745,03,200 9.html 53) ‘Password’. L. Campmany. ABC, 28/03/2009. http://www.abc.es/20090328/opinion-firmas/password-20090328.html 54) ‘Firmes’. J. J. Díaz Trillo. Odiel Información, 4/05/2008. http://www.odielinformacion.es/index.php?option=com_contentandtask=viewandid= 4167andItemid=843 55) ‘El error de Carme Chacón’. J.L. Gómez. Diario del Alto Aragón, 23/03/2009. http://www.diariodelaltoaragon.com/NoticiasDetalle.aspx?Id=561913 56) ‘La señora Chacón de Guatemala a Guatelpeor’. M. Massenet. Diario Siglo XXI. com,23/03/2009. http://www.diariosigloxxi.com/texto-diario/mostrar/42275 58) ‘El tropiezo de Chacón’. B. Torquemada. ABC, 29/03/2009. http://www.abc.es/20090329/nacional-politica/tropiezo-chacon-20090329.html

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59) ‘La Chacón se rinde en la OTAN’. Marcello. Estrella Digital.es, 27/03/2009. http://www.estrelladigital.es/ED/diario/110924.asp 60) ‘Última excursión con Asmoedo’. P. J. Ramírez. El Mundo, 29/03/2009. http://www.elmundo.es/opinion/columnas/pedro-j-ramirez/2009/03/2920862.html 61) ‘Kosovo: Una comedia de enredo’. J. Oneto. Tiempo de Hoy.com, 27/03/2009. http://www.tiempodehoy.com/default.asp?idpublicacio_PK=50andidnoticia_ PK=56034andidseccio_PK=630

Acknowledgements The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science provided financial support for this research (grant PR2008-0213), which was carried out at Lancaster University. I thank Janet Holmes and Jane Sunderland for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, Clare Walsh for suggestions when reviewing it, and Lucía Sánchez Usanos for help with the selection of the media texts of my corpus. About the author Mercedes Bengoechea is Professor of Sociolinguistics (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain). Her research on language and gender has focused on denouncing, on the one hand the sexist usage of the language in the Spanish media and, on the other hand, normative linguistic policies and dictionaries of Spanish. She has also led proposals for non-sexist use of Spanish and feminist translation strategies. Notes 1 What I understand as ‘effective’ here is different from what Marra, Schnurr and Holmes understood as ‘effective leadership’ (2006). My definition of ‘effectiveness’ given in the above paragraph is rather controversial, as hegemonic thought is likely to permeate a woman’s effectiveness. I am perfectly aware that a politician may wish to challenge hegemonic constructions even at the risk of losing her popularity – if that were the aim of her performance, we might consider it effective. But for the purposes of this paper the above indicators of effectiveness may be functional enough. 2 At the time of writing this paper (2011), Chacón is still in office. 3 Francisco Franco was the authoritarian dictator of Spain from October 1936 until his death in 1975. Supported by the military forces, he maintained his control through the implementation of repressive and authoritarian measures.


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