Feminist Linguistics Research Articles

Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Wind Tale’: A Feminist Linguistic Analysis through the Lens of the Robinson-Lakoff Theory

This research paper investigates the application of feminist linguistics to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wind Tale," also known as "The Wind and the Sun." By analyzing the language and character representation within the narrative, the study aims to reveal how linguistic practices reflect and perpetuate gender roles and identities. Grounded in the foundational works of feminist linguists such as Robin Lakoff, Dale Spender, and Judith Butler, the analysis focuses on two key areas: character representation and the agency of female voices. The first aspect examines the portrayal of female characters, questioning whether they are depicted primarily in relation to male figures or as autonomous individuals, while also analyzing the attributes and motivations ascribed to them against the backdrop of 19th-century societal expectations of femininity. The second aspect explores the agency and voices of female characters, assessing their role in a male-dominated narrative. This study ultimately aims to illuminate the complexities of gender dynamics in "The Wind Tale," demonstrating how language serves as a reflection and reinforcement of contemporary gender norms.

A Transitivity Analysis of Woman Representation in “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust”

One of the concerns of feminist linguists is to examine the language which is used to represent men and women of a society. The study in hand has considered this issue and tries to explore the language used by the female author dealing with issues of women of Pakistan. Shahla Abdullah's “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust” is analyzed from the lens of the transitivity model. The emphasis is laid upon the woman's portrayal and the ideological representation through the transitivity patterning. The three steps analysis as given by Burton (1982) has been followed for the analysis of the data. Material and mental processes have been used dominantly with the frequency of 42.4% and 17% respectively which depicts the struggle of Pakistani women against oppression and marginalization. The findings demonstrate that the narrative constructed by Abdullah is the reiteration of the stereotypical woman who suffers due to the patriarchal setup and the hegemony of the male counterpart. The study concludes that being a woman, Abdullah could not deviate from the set norms and hence, is unable to construct a new discourse to inspire and empower the woman belonging to the underprivileged sect of society.

Oppression, Subversive Humor, and Unstable Politics

Abstract This essay argues that humor can be used as an unstable weapon against oppressive language and concepts. Drawing from radical feminist Marilyn Frye, I discuss the difficulty of challenging systematic oppression from within and explore the capabilities of humor for this task. This requires expanding Cynthia Willett’s and Julie Willett’s approach to fumerism beyond affect to fully examine the work of humor in manipulating language, concepts, and imagery. For this expansion, I bring in research on feminist linguistics alongside other philosophers of political humor to consider the connection between humor and world-making. I then link this with feminist world-breaking through Monique Wittig’s analysis of war machines and Trojan horses against heteropatriarchal language. Finally, I draw out the instability of humor as a war machine by investigating a bit where comedian Patti Harrison disguised herself as an official corporate brand platform to challenge the compulsory commodification of LGBTQ rights.

TILSHUNOSLIKDA GENDEROLINGVISTIKANING SHAKLLANISH JARAYONI

This article will focus on the gradual progress of linguistics as a separate discipline, as well as the introduction of the concept of a new par-adigm “gender” in World linguistics by the 20th century, the observation of the content-finding factors of a separate direction of genderolinguistics in linguistics. An attempt is made to shed light on the issue of the role of fem-inism in the progress of gender studies. The article also perfectly reveals such issues as the main factors in the emergence of genderolinguistics, the role of feminist linguistics in its progress. At the same time, issues such as the study of genderolinguistics in the East and West, the attitude of many scientists towards it, its need have also been described somewhat. In gen-eral, the inclusion of the term gender in science by Stoller and its place in a number of social linguistics fields is superstitious

Women, Who Climb - A Corpus Linguistic Tour Description with Potential Danger Zones

This paper explores novel ways in which Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies (DHA – the discourse-historical approach), and Feminist Linguistics can be fruitfully combined and thus contribute to a new awareness and knowledge concerning language and gender in discourse. For the paper a large heritage corpus of texts on mountaineering (Alpenwort – Corpus of the Austrian Alpine Club Journal) is explored, which constitutes a type of discourse that has yet rarely been studied in the abovementioned fields. The corpus was used to analyse gendered nomination with the following questions in mind: What frequently occurring patterns and typical ways of producing gendered nomination can be observed? How are the binary categories ‘female’ and ‘male’ linguistically produced and reinforced in these texts? These questions are answered using standard corpus linguistic methods: for example, gendered key items are determined via historical keyness-analysis; the concept of c-collocates and the method UFA (Usage Fluctuation Analysis) are used to trace how the meaning of such key items develops over time. These procedures reveal salient patterns of gender referencing that are then interpreted with the background of the DHA framework and can thus contribute to the investigation of gender bias in sports/leisure discourse.

The Scope of Feminist Linguistics for Literary Texts: An Analysis of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions

Often literary analyses include a discussion of figures of speech, characters and thematic issues from a theoretical perspective but issues of language and gender have received little attention from literary commentators. Drawing on the writings of Robin Lakoff and Deborah Tannen, two celebrated feminist linguists, this paper seeks to highlight how concepts from the area of language and gender can provide deeper insights into literary texts and the interaction of characters. To this effect, the present study examines three aspects – conversational style, the polysemous meanings of linguistic strategies and the use of sexist language – explicating these in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender at the Micro and Macro Levels in The Moroccan Translation Classroom

This article focuses on the confluence of translation praxis and gender discourse in the teaching/ learning of This article focuses on the confluence of translation praxis and gender discourse in the teaching/ learning of translation in Moroccan higher education. Owing to a tremendous lack of literature on the subject of gender bias, particularly in what concerns training in the translation classroom, this study aims to practically disclose how gender discourse is part and parcel of the source and the target texts both at the macro and the micro levels. Yet, it is observed to be overlooked by translation students while making all the lexical, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic choices. They simply reiterate the same sexism found in language use, which is believed to be considerably powerful in constructing ideologies and shaping attitudes towards women and men. 
 To help translation students acquire the skills and knowledge needed to understand how gender roles and identities are encoded in texts and transferred through languages and cultures, the present study uses a corpus-based training project. It consists of illustrative individual words (job titles), sentences (proverbs) and text samples purposely selected to meet the intended goals the researcher set out to achieve. The classroom training was conducted with 26 BA undergraduate students in English Studies at the Polydisciplinary Faculty of Errachidia in Morocco. It targeted their background knowledge, reactions, responses, and awareness to concentrate more on the linguistic manifestation of the gendered discourse in language use and its sociocultural dimensions. 
 To reach this end, the designed tasks, discussions and in-class activities covered three main phases: translating gender (1) at the word level, (2) at the sentence level, and (3) at the text level. In a pedagogically collaborative learning environment, the study adopted critical discourse analysis (CDA) with its three-dimensional framework: the descriptive, the interpretive and the explanatory. This choice is ascribed mainly to its effectiveness in triggering the students’ dynamic participation in most of the classroom activities. More importantly, the focus of interest is to draw the trainees' attention to the androcentric discourse as an all-encompassing aspect of the source texts (ST) and the target texts (TT) by suggesting ways to challenge the pre-established norms that govern languages and dictate the linguistic choices. 
 Through all the training classroom phases covered, the gendered discourse both in Arabic and English is found to be impenetrable, as if frozen in form and meaning. The two languages in use unfold that they possess a great deal of fixed sexist expressions that denigrate women both at the linguistic and socio-cultural levels. This asymmetrical denigration continued to appear in some male and female students’ translations during and after the training. Although many attempts were suggested by most trainees to neutralize some of them, they were hindered by the power of a sexist discourse that seems significantly trenchant to resist such intervention. However, it is not a question of finding the right gender-bias-free equivalents or gender-inclusive terms as suggested in feminist linguistics. It is rather about inquiring into the mentalities of the translators behind the translated words / texts that have been ossified in patriarchal norms to distribute roles and maintain power relations

REPRESENTATION OF FEMINISM IN TAYLOR SWIFT’S SONGS

Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. The language in terms of words, phrases, and clauses to portray women as either the instigations or objects of domestic violence. The objectives of the study are to find out what kinds of feminism and how the feminism depicted in Taylor Swift’s song lyrics. The present study employs qualitative descriptive methods and use content analysis technique to interpret the data. The source of data is taken from seven Taylor Swift’s song entitled: Look What You Made Me Do, The Man, I Forgot That You Existed, You Need to Calm Down, I Did Something Bad, Mad Woman, and Long Story Short. the data are the phrases or sentences contains portrayal women as objects. The steps of the procedure of the data analysis are: 1) highlighting the phrases or sentences contains women’s roles, 2) classifying the phrases or sentences based on the types of feminism, 3)interpreting the data, and 4) drawing conclusion. Results show that most of Taylor Swifts’ songs depicts liberal feminism and Taylor Swift expresses the liberal feminism through lyrics showing women struggles to combat domination, pursuing her goals, and expressing women emancipation.

A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Anti-feminist Poetry in English and Arabic

Language plays a major role in all aspects of life. Communication is regarded as the most important of these aspects, as language is used on a daily basis by humanity either in written or spoken forms. Language is also regarded as the main factor of exchanging peoples’ cultures and traditions and in handing down these attributes from generation to generation. Thus, language is a fundamental element in identifying peoples’ ideologies and traditions in the past and the present. Despite these facts, the feminist linguists have objections to some of the language structures, demonstrating that language is gender biased to men. That is, language promotes patriarchal values. This pushed towards developing extensive studies to substantiate sexism in language. The main question is: is language really sexist? This study employs a feminist stylistic analysis to investigate these theories, and takes the anti-feminist poetry as a springboard for that, for it addresses multiple issues objected to by feminism. The model adopted in this study is Sara Mills’s (1995) Feminist Stylistics which analyzes different structures of language that oppose feminism; English and Arab modern anti-feminist poetry is the genre that is investigated in this study. Besides, this study aims at revealing the societies’ inherent views about women along with investigating the feminist essential claim; that language is sexist. This is done by conducting both qualitative and quantitative analyses on the data. The current study has concluded that language in its pure form is not sexist; rather sexism is a personal and well as a societal attitude. Furthermore, there are certain items, especially in English, that can be regarded since English does not have a feminine form on its own; still, such items can always be avoided and other neutral items can be used instead. Finally, this study recommends that a feminist practical approach is required to track and omit gender bias in language from school books as it has a major effect on the ideology of society. It also recommends to developing a feminist method to raise the awareness against the indirect forms of sexism that plague literature.

SPECIFICS OF THE USE OF FEMINITIVES IN ENGLISH, FRENCH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ACTUAL PRESS

The article has been conducted in the context of the sociolinguistic approach from the standpoint of the feminist linguistics. It breaks down the features of the usage of feminitives in English, French, and Russian languages based on the material of the actual press. The main purpose of this research is analyzing and comparing the strategies of these languages for gender specification and neutralization. The incomplete knowledge of that topic, as well as the active feminist movement, provide the relevance of the research. Analyzing the material aggregated with the continuous sampling method showed that all three languages still apply masculine lexemes for women’s representation and rarely use feminitives, which tend to be used in the pro-feminist or liberal magazines and the articles dedicated to successful or famous women. The conducted analysis also showed that in English language there are more language means for the gender-specified lexicon elimination than there are in French and Russian languages. Accordingly, the usage of the gender-neutral vocabulary in English language is more frequent. Within the frames of studying the Anglophone publicistic discource, the British and the American magazines and newspapers were analyzed individually, which, however, has not led to identifying any fundamental differences in the usage of feminitives or methods of the neutralization of gender.

Tegn på språklig kjønnsdiskriminering i norsk og polsk

The aim of this article is to discuss the phenomenon called linguistic sexism, i.e. a lack of symmetry between the sexes in a language. The focus lies on comparing Norwegian and Polish, which with regard to feminist language reform follow two different strategies for a more inclusive use of language. While Norwegian speakers aim at replacing gender-marked forms with gender-neutral ones, in Polish there is a clear tendency to differentiate between nouns referring to men and women in order to increase the visibility of the latter. The article outlines how the lack of symmetry between the sexes in both languages is manifested in various areas, such as generic use of masculine forms, word formation of gender-related nouns, lexical gaps in the case of women together with titles and address forms.

Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Gender Bias in Islamic Children’s Literature: Case Study in Indonesia

Children's books with Islamic content are popular in Indonesia. The motivation of parents to introduce this genre of books is to help them teach their children the faith and knowledge of Islam from an early age. The more complete the information about Islam available in the book, the more parents will consider buying the book. Meanwhile, consideration of books with content that introduces gender equity needs to be considered. This study analyzes the gender bias in stories of Islamic content. The books analyzed are several popular books published by various different publishers. The research method used was qualitative and the narrative and visual data were critically analyzed with a gender perspective. Feminist linguistics was used to more deeply reveal the signs that will be described based on the context that surrounds the female character. The depiction of women in the four books is generally represented by traditional gender patterns. The female figure is depicted as dependent on men, not involved in dominant narratives. The female characters are described as weak while the male characters are described as stronger without regard to the female character.

A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Anti-feminist Poetry in English and Arabic

Language is the fundamental element of communication and understanding in society. It relates immediately to human thoughts and is embodied in written or spoken signs or signals. The field that scientifically studies language (its forms and structures) is called Linguistics. Among the linguistic studies of language is Rhetoric which studies the importance of speech or texts for the audience. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; it comprises different arguments raised by the speaker/writer depending on social, religious, moral or even traditional evidence in order to prove that the raised arguments are real. In this way, the writer/speaker associates the language to similar or related realities in order to reach the purpose of her/his language. However, presenting arguments and evidence it not always accurate because there are arguments that rely on weak evidence. The purpose of argumentative techniques is still to persuade the audience about a personal view or a societal concept. From this perspective, the feminist linguists suggest that rhetoric is actually masculine; that is, rhetoric is anti-feminist. Therefore, linguists presented a great deal of evidence to prove this theory and bring the feminist ideology into rhetoric. This study aims at providing a feminist rhetorical analysis of the anti-feminist poetry to study the status of women in rhetoric and whether the arguments that demean women are true or not. For this purpose, the current study utilizes Fiorenza’s (1995) model of analysis; a feminist rhetorical tool to analyze anti-feminist poems written by male poets in English and Arabic in order to study the arguments as well as the evidence the poets present against women.

THE SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION OF LANGUAGE BY GENDER

Human beings are the creators and the users of the language. Therefore, people-oriented study on linguistics should be vital as the studies from the perspective of symbol. But the most significant difference between human beings is the gender difference, so people of different genders from either physiology or psychology in the use of language will have their own gender characteristics that leads to the gender differences in language. Language gender difference has always been complex. It becomes the popular subject of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Gender differences in language are regarded as a linguistic phenomenon as well as being a social phenomenon. It is known that the use of gender in a different way from language has become a new field of research for linguistics since the second half of the twentieth century. With the advent of feminist linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, gender studies became more widespread. In the development of certain features of the "language" of men and women J. Gremel-Plestini, L. Pushuni, E. Groshko, A. Nielseni, R. Lakoff, R. Vardaufu, and others can be shown as scientists in world linguistics. The linguists from different countries have made a lot of profound significant exploration to explain the cause of gender difference in sociolinguistics. The gender difference can differentiate for society, culture, customs and other considerations of language users. Gender differences widens our research horizon, deepens our cognition of the universal law of language; at the same time, it helps us to better explain the factors in the internal change of language development.

Neki metodološki problemi u savremenom istraživanju socijalnih femininativa u srpskom jeziku

This work critically examines some epistemological problems of the institutionalized public knowledge of Serbian lingustics and the knowledge of the opposed groups of social and feminist linguists. It also provides attention to some relevant studies of feminine derivational sufixes in the Serbo-Croatian and Croatian language. Under consideration are some crucial methodological issues such as supporting a claim, reliability of evidence, presenting disagreement among sources, and research ethos. The research contributes to the fuller understanding of the problem of social femininatives and to enlarging the types of reference sources. It suggests the need of thorough diachronic and interdisciplinary research which would look at different centuries and show the correlation between macsculine and feminine sufixes, the chronological activisation and geographical distribution of social femininatives, their productivity, archaization and extinction, as well as the newest proposals.

The Critique of Gender Linguistics from the Perspective of Feminist Linguistics

Introduction.The paper reviews features and main problems of feminist linguistics. The novelty of the study is an unparalleled take on feminist linguistics in contradistinction to gender linguistics; the identification of their fundamental differences as well as emphasizing arguments in favour of both scholarly importance and practical value of feminist linguistic studies. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the lack of academic papers concerning the subject; the growing interest in studying the language as an anthropocentric sociocultural phenomenon; and the increasing significance of the feminist movement world-wide.Methodology and data sources.The theoretical foundation of the study constitutes Russian and foreign gender studies (works of А. V. Kirilina, А. М. Kuznetsov), feminist sociological and sociolinguistic studies (L. N. Kaznin, R. Lakoff, M. Fuko) as well as feminist linguistic studies (N. A. Antropova, E. Gorshko, O. A. Voronina, E. Zdravomyslova, A. V. Tolstokorova). The methods of the study include both analysis and synthesis of theoretical material; polling research; the analysis of the collected data.Results and discussion.The latest results on feminist linguistics research are showing inadequacy of the attempts of proving the existence of either «women’s language», «men’s language», or genderlect. This is in fact entirely sociocultural phenomenon of the replicating women’s and men’s behavioral patterns in a particular culture, including the patterns of speech. Feminist linguistics uses a more in-depth approach in the studies and addresses the language system directly, identifying gender asymmetry that is evident in the androcentrism of a language; it also develops strategies against language sexism and suggests concrete ways of its elimination, such as the introduction of gender-neutral lexical units and feminine gender-specific job titles, the implementation of inclusive language. All of that is possible with feminist language reforms and appropriate feminist language planning.Conclusion.An overview of conventional gender linguistics findings draws to a conclusion that feminist linguistic studies introduce lots of new ideas of a special value to linguistics. Feminist language critique is a progressive course of modern linguistics that draws attention to the most vital language issues of the society and suggests effective means of addressing them.

Feminitives and gender linguistics from the position of feminist linguistics

Feminitives and gender linguistics from the position of feminist linguistics

ГІПОТЕЗА ҐЕНДЕРНИХ СУБКУЛЬТУР: ҐЕНДЕРЛЕКТ АМЕЛІ НОТОМБ

At the present stage in national linguistics, gender research is developing quite intensively in several areas. Since this area of linguistics is currently under development, its study is considered promising. The use of a gender approach in social and humanitarian knowledge presents ample opportunities to reconsider culture, history, and linguistics, because its formation is, in fact, much more than just the emergence of a new theory. This is a fundamentally new theory, the adoption of which sometimes means a change in value orientations, a revision of many common ideas and truths. This is a kind of registers switching, change of accents, new projections, another plane of research. The article considers the hypothesis of gender subcultures and studies the concept of "genderlect". The basic, theoretical methodological approach made it possible to determine the range of existing problems with their conceptual vision. The sociological method allowed to correlate the studied gender parameters of A. Nothomb's written language with the generally accepted characteristics of female and male language. The research of men’s and women’s language behavior is generalized, gender characteristics of male and female speech are given, features of written language of A. Nothomb are revealed and prospects of further scientific researches are outlined. The special contribution of the author to the development of the researched question is the generalization of theoretical achievements on the mentioned problem, the analysis of A. Nothomb's written language, the identification of gender markers in the studied novels. It is established that the written language of the Belgian author does not correspond to the canons of today's female language, and in many respects coincides with the generally accepted canons of the male style of writing. Thus, the existence of a special female language, which was assumed in early researches, is not confirmed. However, the works of recent years increasingly point to the fact that talking about genderlect is inappropriate and unscientific. The role of the subcultural factor in this case is greatly exaggerated. The differences between female and male language are not so significant, they are not manifested in every speech act and do not indicate gender being a determining factor in communication, as it was considered at the initial stage of feminist linguistics development.

ПРАГМАТИЧЕСКИЕ МАРКЕРЫ МЕТАКОММУНИКАЦИИ: ГЕНДЕРНЫЙ АСПЕКТ

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (slushay / u menya net deneg <look / I have no money>); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.