When “difference” is “dominance”: A critique of the “anti-power-based” cultural approach to sex differences

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the dichotomization of two opposing approaches to studying sex differences in language use: the “difference/cultural” approach, which treats women and men as having “different but equally valid” rules of conversation, and the “dominance/power-based” approach, which focuses on male dominance and sexual division of labor in talk. I critique the stance taken by the difference approach. First, its notion of women and men as belonging to different “cultures” is too simplistic to account for everything that occurs in mixed-sex conversation. Second, the dichotomization of “power” and “culture” as two separate, independent concepts is inappropriate, because social interaction always occurs in the context of a patriarchal society. As a direction for further research, I propose that the relationship between gender and language should be approached from the viewpoint that we are doing gender in interaction. (Sociolinguistics, communication, conversational style, gender, sex differences)