Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations 1138791962, 9781138791961

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Tables
List of Concordances
List of Figures
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Language and Masculinities . . . 20 Years Later
1 Theorizing Language and Masculinities
2 Two Hundred Years of the American Man
3 Fight Narratives, Covert Prestige, and Performances of ‘Tough’ Masculinity: Some Insights from an Urban Center
4 Emceeing Toughness, Toughing Up the Emcee: Language and Masculine Ideology in Freestyle Rap Performances
5 Construing the New Oppressed: Masculinity in Crisis and the Backlash against Feminism
6 Diminutives and Masculinity in Brazilian Portuguese
7 ‘The Ideal Gay Man’: Narrating Masculinity and National Identity in Israel
8 No Ordinary Boy: Language, Masculinities, and Queer Pornography
9 Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse: The Case of Butch and Femme
10 Transmasculinity and the Voice: Gender Assignment, Identity, and Presentation
11 Reclaiming Masculinity in an Account of Lived Intersex Experience: Language, Desire, and Embodied Knowledge
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

“An exciting and ground-breaking new collection in which Milani and his international group of contributors bring the study of language and masculinities bang up to date for the 21st century. A theoretical and empirical tour de force.” —Sally Johnson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Leeds, UK “Since the publication of Johnson and Meinhof’s book, Language and Masculinity, almost 20 years ago, this impressive collection is the first to focus exclusively on the interconnections of language and masculinities. The volume provides a state-of-the-art treatment of current developments in the field: informed by feminist politics and by queer theory, it both interrogates the production of hegemonic masculinities and the naturalized relationship between masculinities and male-bodied subjects. It is theoretically sophisticated, methodologically varied and spans a range of geographical locations—an essential read for scholars of language, gender and sexuality.” —Professor Susan Ehrlich, York University, Toronto, Canada

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Language and Masculinities

This volume showcases cutting-edge research in the linguistic and discursive study of masculinities, comprising the first significant edited collection on language and masculinities since Johnson and Meinhof’s 1997 volume. Overall, the chapters are linked together by a critical analytical perspective that seeks to understand the relationships between discourse, masculinities, and power. Whereas some of the chapters offer detailed, linguistically informed critiques of the ways in which old and new expressions of masculinities are complicit in the reproduction of men’s hegemonic positions of power, others provide a more complex picture, one in which collusion and subversion go hand in hand. Contributions argue for the need for research on language and masculinities to expand its remit so as to engage with “gay masculinities,” and unsettle gendered categories in order to consider the ways in which women, transgender, and intersex individuals also perform a variety of masculinities. Finally, unlike Johnson and Meinhof’s 1997 collection, this volume not only offers a wider—and perhaps “queerer” perspective—on the study of language and masculinities, but also covers a broader geographical and socio-cultural spectrum, including work on Brazil, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa. Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His main areas of research include language politics and ideology, language, gender and sexuality, and queer theory. He has published in several international journals including Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Discourse & Society. He is currently co-editor of the journals Gender and Language and African Studies.

Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse Edited by Michelle M. Lazar, National University of Singapore

1 Framing Discourse on the Environment A Critical Discourse Approach Richard J. Alexander

5 Analysing Fascist Discourse European Fascism in Talk and Text Edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson

2 Language and the Market Society Critical Reflections on Discourse and Dominance Gerlinde Mautner

6 Discourse and Democracy Critical Analysis of the Language of Government Michael Farrelly

3 Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust The Concept of the Body Politic Andreas Musolff

7 Language and Masculinities Performances, Intersections, Dislocations Edited by Tommaso M. Milani

4 Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change Contextualising Positive Discourse Analysis Tom Bartlett

Language and Masculinities Performances, Intersections, Dislocations Edited by Tommaso M. Milani

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language and masculinities : performances, intersections, dislocations / Edited by Tommaso M. Milani. pages cm. — (Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse ; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Men—Language. 2. Language and languages—Sex differences. 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Discourse analysis, Narrative. I. Milan, Tommaso M., 1973– P120.M45L35 2014 306.44081—dc23 2014033182 ISBN: 978-1-138-79196-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75935-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Scott

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Contents

List of Tables List of Concordances List of Figures List of Plates Acknowledgments Introduction: Language and Masculinities . . . 20 Years Later

xi xiii xv xvii xix

1

TOMMASO M. MILANI

1

Theorizing Language and Masculinities

8

TOMMASO M. MILANI

2

Two Hundred Years of the American Man

34

PAUL BAKER

3

Fight Narratives, Covert Prestige, and Performances of ‘Tough’ Masculinity: Some Insights from an Urban Center

53

ROBERT LAWSON

4

Emceeing Toughness, Toughing Up the Emcee: Language and Masculine Ideology in Freestyle Rap Performances

77

QUENTIN E. WILLIAMS

5

Construing the New Oppressed: Masculinity in Crisis and the Backlash against Feminism

100

MICHELLE M. LAZAR

6

Diminutives and Masculinity in Brazilian Portuguese RONALD BELINE MENDES

117

x Contents 7

‘The Ideal Gay Man’: Narrating Masculinity and National Identity in Israel

133

EREZ LEVON

8

No Ordinary Boy: Language, Masculinities, and Queer Pornography

156

VERONIKA KOLLER

9

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse: The Case of Butch and Femme

174

LUCY JONES

10 Transmasculinity and the Voice: Gender Assignment, Identity, and Presentation

197

LAL ZIMMAN

11 Reclaiming Masculinity in an Account of Lived Intersex Experience: Language, Desire, and Embodied Knowledge

220

BRIAN W. KING

Contributors Index

243 247

Tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 4.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

Top collocates of man Frequencies of preferred vs. dispreferred states in the COHA Frequencies of marked and unmarked concepts in the COHA Concepts which strongly modify man across the four time periods Top 20 collocates of woman Members of MobCoW Frequencies of diminutives (per thousand words) Frequencies of literal and metaphorical diminutives (per thousand words) Frequencies of pouquinho (per thousand words) Frequency of diminutives (per thousand words) in interviews with straight men and women Frequency of diminutives (per thousand words) in interviews with gay men and lesbians Participants’ self-described gender identities, presentations, and sexualities Center of gravity for [s] for all speakers Changes in center of gravity (COG) over time Changes in center of gravity over time for individual speakers

40 41 41 43 48 84 124 125 126 127 127 202 209 211 212

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Concordances

2.1 2.2 2.3

Sample of honest, kind-hearted, and sane as they co-occur with man in the period 1810–1859 Sample of well-built, burly, and brawny as they co-occur with man in the period 1960–2009 Sample of paunchy, portly, and pudgy as they co-occur with man in the period 1960–2009

45 46 47

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Figures

6.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 10.1

Frequencies of diminutives (per thousand words) in sex/gender subgroups Methodological framework Gendered references to narrator (percentages) Gendered references to other protagonist (percentages) Center of gravity for [s] for all speakers

128 163 164 165 210

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Plates

1.1 1.2 1.3 11.1

Gender arrangements—Men Gender arrangements—Women Portrait of Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb by Gabrielle LeRoux. Words by Silva. Mani Bruce Mitchell

12 13 24 222

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Acknowledgments

The authors of the chapters in this volume would like to take the opportunity to gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce various texts and images as follows: • SAGE for a section in Chapter 1 that was previously published in the article “Are ‘Queers’ Really ‘Queer’? Language, Identity and SameSex Desire in a South African Online Community,” published in Discourse & Society 24: 615–633. doi: 10.1177/0957926513486168 • Mouton de Gruyter for Plates 1.1 and 1.2 that appeared in International Journal of the Sociology of Language 228: 201–225 • Taylor & Francis for a section of Chapter 1 that was published in Agenda. doi:10.1080/10130950.2014.963940 • Gabrielle Le Roux and Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb for Plate 1.3 • Mani Bruce Mitchell and Grant Lahood for Plate 11.1 This book would not have happened without the contribution of a number of people. First of all, Sally Johnson whose work has both challenged and inspired me since I first read her chapter “Theorizing Language and Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective.” Second, I’d like to thank all the colleagues who reviewed the chapters in this collection for their insightful comments. A special thank also goes to the reviewer who read this volume in its entirety. Third, I’m grateful to Michelle M. Lazar (Series Editor) and to Margo Irvin and Katie Laurentiev at Routledge for believing in this book project and supporting it at all stages. The final thank goes to Scott to whom this collection is dedicated.

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Introduction Language and Masculinities . . . 20 Years Later Tommaso M. Milani

It is now nearly 20 years since the publication of the volume Language and Masculinity, edited by Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof (1997). There, Johnson encouraged researchers to “abandon the search for trivial structural reflections of whatever we believe to be typically ‘male’ or ‘female’ language” (1997: 25); she proposed instead to look at the semiotic processes via which gender differences are invoked in discourse in order to produce or uphold dominance. In her view, this is an enterprise that cannot be pursued “without looking at men” (1997: 25, original emphasis). Indeed, several scholars followed Johnson’s (1997) programmatic statement and offered fine-grained studies of the ways in which male-bodied, heterosexual individuals perform very diverse, often conflicting, masculine identities. Such identity work is realized by way of specific discursive moves through which the participants in the studies align with or dis-align from dominant cultural models of what counts as a ‘man’ in their specific sociocultural contexts (see in particular Bethan Benwell’s (2002, 2003, 2011) influential work on ‘lads’ in the United Kingdom and Scott F. Kiesling’s (1997, 2001, 2011) important research on ‘frats’ in the United States). As I explain in Chapter 1, “Theorizing Language and Masculinities,” the privileging of masculinities performed by heterosexual males has been underpinned by the belief that we need to understand the hegemonic processes that make some identities (but not others) unmarked and normal to the point that they become invisible, and are not perceived as identities any longer. In Connell’s (1995) original formulation, hegemonic masculinity typically involves the subordination of women and the vilification of gay men. This is indeed often the case, but to say that hegemonic masculinity is defined principally in terms of heterosexuality subordinating male homosexuality might be both theoretically simplistic and empirically limiting. For example, Paul Baker’s (2005, 2008) work and my own research (Milani 2013) show that men who desire and have sex with other men are not necessarily victims of masculine hegemony. Quite the contrary, they collude with dominant masculinist discourses that devalue women and femininity, whilst at the same time contest marginalizing discourses that reproduce gay men as inherently effeminate.

2 Tommaso M. Milani So hegemonic masculinity is at best partial, fluid, intertextualized, always shape-shifting, and open to contestation, formed at the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, age, ethnicity, professional background, and history. Looking carefully at these intersections might also reveal “the intimate connections between privilege and oppression” (Nash 2008: 12), demonstrating how power never operates in a fully straightforward manner. But, I would add, we need to go a step further and “de-emphasize the normative relationship between men and masculinity” (Wiegman 2002: 51). This means dislocating masculinities from maleness, thus considering the ways in which women and transgender and intersex individuals also perform a variety of different masculinities that serve a plethora of competing agendas. Against this theoretical backdrop, the first three chapters illustrate the different shapes that hegemonic masculinity takes in the United States, Scotland, and South Africa. In Chapter 2, “Two Hundred Years of the American Man,” Paul Baker draws upon the quantitative techniques offered by corpus linguistics in order to show how representations of masculinities have changed over time in the United States. ‘Internal qualities’ such as bravery, sanity, and honesty seem to have been key traits in defining the American man in the 19th century. In the 20th century, however, having a muscular body seems to have taken over as the sine qua non for a man to be considered as such in the United States. Whereas Baker’s contribution illustrates the discursive processes through which certain ‘models’ or ‘types’ of masculinity congeal over time, in Chapter 3, “Fight Narratives, Covert Prestige, and Performances of ‘Tough’ Masculinity: Some Insights from an Urban Center,” Robert Lawson offers an analysis of actual masculine performances among young men in Glasgow, Scotland. What emerges particularly strongly in this chapter is the power of both standard and non-standard linguistic features to produce an array of tough, violent, masculine personas inflected by social class. Admittedly, not all the young men in the study “orientate towards inter-personal violence in the same way, even though the ideology of the ‘hard man’ and its associated characteristics are so deeply embedded in the social fabric of the city” (Lawson, Chapter 3). Rejecting violence as some of the young men do, however, is not tantamount to a dismissal of “‘tough’ masculinity as a worthwhile component of . . . social identity” (Lawson, Chapter 3). A similar picture is painted in Chapter 4, “Emceeing Toughness, Toughing up the Emcee: Language and Masculine Ideology in Freestyle Rap Performances,” in which Quentin E. Williams unpacks how ‘toughness’ is discursively enacted in hip-hop performances in Cape Town, South Africa. As in the educational context of Glasgow, standard and non-standard linguistic features, together with different languages, registers, and styles, are resources through which hip-hop performers can bring into being specific identity nexuses in which masculinity is entangled with race and social class. By evoking these complex identity bundles with the help of different linguistic resources, the performers compete for authority on stage. Taking

Introduction 3 into consideration the aesthetic nature of a hip-hop battle, Williams calls for an analytical shift towards understanding how “tough masculinity is constructed through the staging of fantasy in the identification . . . with entextualised figures and personae” (Williams, Chapter 4). Read together, Chapters 3 and 4 show how linguistic discursive performances of masculinity can only be made sense of in light of an ethnographically grounded understanding of “the language ideologies circulating in specific communities of practice” (Hall 2014: 235). Whereas Baker, Lawson, and Williams are more concerned with the ways in which men compete for dominance with each other, Michelle M. Lazar’s Chapter 5, “Construing the New Oppressed: Masculinity in Crisis and the Backlash against Feminism,” debunks the arguments that men are undergoing some ‘gender trouble’ as a result of feminist advancements. Through careful critical discourse analysis of a corpus of blog posts in Singapore, Lazar illustrates the more or less subtle strategies through which hegemonic masculinity can refashion itself in order to uphold its hegemonic character, and thus “reoccupy centre stage and reclaim patriarchal privilege” (Walsh 2010: 7). This chapter not only demonstrates that hegemonic forms of masculinity have not stopped impacting upon women, and thus still cause oppression; it also presents a compelling case in point that feminist linguistic approaches are needed more than ever for a politically engaged scholarship that strives for gender equality (see also Mills and Mullany 2011). In Chapter 6, “Diminutives and Masculinity in Brazilian Portuguese,” Ronald Beline Mendes moves away, at least partly, from straight men, offering quantitative evidence of the correlation between the usage of diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese and gender and sexuality. In a context where diminutives are indexical of femininity/effeminacy, it is quite predictable that this linguistic feature is employed least by straight men, followed by masculine gay men and masculine lesbians, but features more prominently in the speech of feminine lesbians, straight women, and ‘effeminate’ gay men. However, once one examines the usage of diminutives by the group that employed them least—straight men—a more complex picture emerges. On the basis of an analysis of the specific interactional contexts in which diminutives feature, Beline Mendes argues that “heterosexual males may find themselves in situations in which the use of diminutives goes outside of their normative range as a way of temporarily indicating a particular stance,” one that has less to do with gender and sexuality than with tender memories of childhood. Chapter 7, “‘The Ideal Gay Man’: Narrating Masculinity and National Identity in Israel,” marks a clean break with heterosexual masculinities, looking instead into the complex entanglements of gay masculinities and national identity in Israel. Through discourse analysis of coming-out narratives, Levon teases out the impasse created by dominant nationalist discourses that view masculinity as inherently heterosexual, on the one hand, and the nexus of gender, sexual, and national identity, as experienced by a

4 Tommaso M. Milani group of gay Israeli men, on the other. The incompatibility between sexual identification and nationalist/gender identification “is resolved only when a more gender-normative gayness is discovered” (Levon, Chapter 7). In this way, the Israeli men’s embracing of masculinity makes them “succeed in resisting marginalizing discourses of sexuality in Israel while simultaneously reinforcing . . . dominant ideologies of gendered nationalism” (Levon, Chapter 7). The remainder of the book engages with the proposal made in Chapter 1 to move the field of language and masculinities beyond an exclusive focus on male-born, male-bodied individuals. Such a turn is inaugurated by Veronika Koller in Chapter 8, “No Ordinary Boy: Language, Masculinities, and Queer Pornography.” Here, the author analyzes a pornographic short story through the lenses of the notions of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1995) and “female masculinity,” the latter being “a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity” (Halberstam 1998: 9). Koller illustrates how the two protagonists in the story cannot be easily pigeonholed into fixed identity categories. Their performances of gender and sexuality are fluid, encompassing both hegemonic and female masculinities. By presenting such variability, the text analyzed by Koller is in many ways queer in that it unsettles the “coat-rack model” (Nicholson 1994) of gender according to which men perform masculinity and women femininity. A critical approach to female masculinity is embraced in Chapter 9, “Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse: The Case of Butch and Femme,” where Lucy Jones conducts painstakingly detailed linguistic analysis of interactions in a community of practice of self-identified lesbian women who are part of a hiking group in the United Kingdom. As Jones puts it, female masculinity might imply that “butch lesbians are ‘pretending to be’ men due to the connotations that ‘masculinity’ has with ‘manliness.’” Instead what the women who are part of this specific community of practice do is not a straightforward alignment with masculinity but “a rejection of heteronormative femininity” (Jones, Chapter 9, emphasis added). This is not politically irrelevant. To equate butchness with masculinity would suggest that butchness is just a form of ‘drag,’ an imitation of what men do. Instead, if it is interpreted “as a challenge to heteronormative femininity, and as a powerful construction of alternative womanhood,” butchness is a powerful resource through which the women in this community of practice “may proudly and confidently project their identity as lesbians” (Jones, Chapter 9). Chapters 10 and 11 close the volume by showcasing analyses of the constructions of masculinities among transgender speakers as well as intersex individuals. More specifically, in Chapter 10, “Transmasculinity and the Voice: Gender Assignment, Identity, and Presentation,” Lal Zimman takes a socio-phonetic approach to the usage of the sibilant [s] by 15 transmasculine people in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States, during their first year on testosterone therapy. All participants in this study were born

Introduction 5 as females. However, their pattern of gender identification is very different, ranging from man to trans man and genderqueer. Furthermore, their sexual identifications span from straight to queer. In a context where higher frequencies of [s] are indexical of femininity, and, vice versa, lower frequencies are pointers to masculinity, it might be expected that the participants that identify as ‘straight men’ would produce sibilants within lower frequency ranges. On the contrary, those who identify as ‘genderqueer’ display significantly higher frequencies of [s]. However, if one considers individual phonetic patterns, it is possible to discern more complex gendered entanglements. For example, one of the participants in the study, Dave, identifies as a ‘man’ but presents himself as ‘fem.’ The higher frequencies of [s] in Dave’s speech are according to Zimman “the clearest demonstration that gender identity and gender presentation are distinct for members of this community . . . His voice is among the most salient means by which Dave constitutes his flamboyantly non-normative take on masculinity” (Zimman, Chapter 10). All in all, this chapter shows how “fem masculinities become intelligible and a wider range of subjects can be included within our notions of the masculine” (Zimman, Chapter 10). In Chapter 11, “Reclaiming Masculinity in an Account of Lived Intersex Experience: Language, Desire, and Embodied Knowledge,” Brian W. King employs “small story” analysis in order to unpack the discursive positioning performed by an intersex individual, Mani Bruce Mitchell, in a series of storytelling practices. King illustrates how Mani relies on both biological innateness and social construction in narrating the “path to self-identification as intersex” (King, Chapter 11). Whilst discursive, social constructivist epistemologies have become nearly hegemonic within gender/language/sexuality research, this chapter reminds us not to become too complacent about, or bound by this regime of truth. More specifically, social constructionist research cannot be blind to the role played by biology in the accomplishment of masculine identities. As King cogently suggests in Chapter 11, To dismiss the possible intersections of masculinities with bodies and biological processes, or equally, to underestimate the dislocation of masculinities from sexual phenotype, is to place limits upon our ability to hear and see, and to risk perpetuating the unintelligibility of intersex experience. Obviously, these are only very partial snippets that cannot do justice to the arguments made by each author, but they will hopefully encourage readers to delve into each chapter, appreciating its nuances and complexities. Differences notwithstanding, all the contributions to this volume are linked together by a critical analytical perspective that seeks to understand the relationships between discourse, masculinities, and the ambiguities of power. Unlike its predecessor (Johnson and Meinhof 1997), this volume offers a wider, and perhaps ‘queerer,’ perspective on the study of language

6 Tommaso M. Milani and masculinities. This is not so much because of an overt reliance on queer theory, a framework that is employed only by some of the authors in the volume. Rather, what is ‘queer’ here lies in the very choice of including discourseanalytical work on masculinities performed by lesbians and transgender and intersex individuals. This marks a rupture in the power/knowledge structure (Foucault 1980) of a scholarship that has been traditionally dominated by analyses of male-bodied, male-born individuals. Moreover, this book offers a broader geographical and socio-cultural spectrum than usually features in language and masculinity studies, including work on Brazil, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa. We are aware that the choice of the content and the structure of this edited collection might not please every reader. There are many blatant gaps in the topics showcased here. To name just two, critical deconstructions of the intersections of masculinities and religion are much needed in a time when the ‘Muslim man’ seems to have become demonized in many allegedly liberal democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom. Detailed linguistic studies of masculine performances among ‘drag kings’ would also have been an obvious topic to be included here. Alas, there is only space for a limited number of contributions to an edited volume. Future work on language and masculinities might start precisely from what we have left out. As for structure, the progression of the chapters—straight men > gay men > lesbians > trans men > intersex—might be read by some as reproducing the marginalization the volume is trying to challenge. This is however not our intention. Quite the contrary, the point is precisely to move away from the hegemonic centre of masculinities performed by heterosexual men towards more complex ‘queer’ arrangements. After all, who said that the last chapter is the least important? The ‘last word’ about masculinity—at least in this book—is left to those who have historically been most marginalized and made invisible, intersex individuals. These choices are of course up for discussion . . . so the floor is open!

REFERENCES Baker, Paul. 2005. Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge. Baker, Paul. 2008. Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Equinox. Benwell, Bethan. 2002. “Is There Anything ‘New’ about These Lads? The Construction of Masculinity in Men’s Magazines.” In Discourse Analysis and Gender Identity, ed. by Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland, 149–174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Benwell, Bethan (ed.). 2003. Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines. Oxford: Blackwell. Benwell, Bethan. 2011. “Masculine Identity and Identification as Ethnomethodological Phenomena: Revisiting Cameron and Kulick.” Gender & Language 5: 187–211. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. London: Polity. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.

Introduction 7 Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Kira. 2014. “Exceptional Speakers: Contested and Problematized Gender Identities.” In The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, ed. by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 2nd ed., 220–239. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Johnson, Sally. 1997. “Theorizing Language and Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective.” In Language and Masculinity, ed. by Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof, 8–26. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike H. Meinhof (eds.). 1997. Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kiesling, Scott F. 1997. “Power and the Language of Men.” In Language and Masculinity, ed. by Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof, 65–85. Oxford: Blackwell. Kiesling, Scott F. 2001. “Stances of Whiteness and Hegemony in Fraternity Men’s Discourse.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 101–115. Kiesling, Scott F. 2011. “The Interactional Construction of Desire as Gender.” Gender & Language 5: 213–239. Milani, Tommaso M. 2013. “Are ‘Queers’ Really ‘Queer’? Language, Identity and Same-Sex Desire in a South African Online Community.” Discourse & Society 24: 615–633. Mills, Sara, and Louise Mullany. 2011. Language, Gender and Feminism: Theory, Methodology and Practice. London: Routledge. Nash, Jennifer. 2008. “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89: 1–15. Nicholson, Linda. 1994. “Interpreting Gender.” Signs 20: 79–105. Walsh, Fintan. 2010. Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiegman, Robyn. 2002. “Unmaking: Men and Masculinity in Feminist Theory.” In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. by Judith Kegan Gardiner, 31–59. New York: Columbia University Press.

1

Theorizing Language and Masculinities Tommaso M. Milani

INTRODUCTION In August 2009, South African athletics fans exulted when Caster Semenya won the women’s category 800m race at the World Athletics Championship in Berlin. But as TV cameras zoomed in on her hair beaded tightly to her head and her bulging biceps flexed in a sign of victory, viewers and officials of the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) started wondering whether the sprinter was actually biologically female. This signalled the beginning of a long inquiry in which the IAAF would attempt to determine the runner’s sex. It also sparked a series of global debates in which discordant views about the configuration of Semenya’s genitals became proxies for tensions surrounding the intersections of gender, race, and Western epistemologies. After the Australian daily The Sydney Morning Herald announced that Caster Semenya “is technically a hermaphrodite” (Magnay, 11 September 2009), the (then) leader of the ANC Youth League Julius Malema reacted strongly, asking: Hermaphrodite? What is that? Someone must tell me what is hermaphrodite in Pedi? That woman is Pedi. What is hermaphrodite in Pedi? There is no such a thing [as] hermaphrodite in Pedi, so don’t impose your hermaphrodite concepts on us. You are either a woman or a man . . . And why should we—you know—accept the concepts that are imposed on us by the Imperialists? (Cited in howzit MSN news, September 12, 2012) These statements generated a flurry of reactions from a variety of social actors who accused Malema of reproducing the ideology of the gender binary, a set of beliefs that denies anything that does not fit in neatly with the male/female dyad. Critics also pointed out that Malema ignored the existence of a sePedi1 word, setabane, which encapsulates the co-existence of male and female biological characteristics and is mainly used derogatorily. Leaving aside for a moment Malema’s linguistic ignorance or strategic

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 9 forgetfulness, it is important that his statement not be dismissed too quickly, for it contains an element of ‘Southern’ resistance against Northern institutions trying to label, define, and ultimately control African experiences. Three years later, another South African athlete—Oscar Pistorius— gained considerable media attention when he was accused of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. The Pistorius trial received extensive coverage by South African and international media, including a dedicated TV channel on the private broadcaster DSTV. Pistorius did acknowledge shooting at his partner, but claims that he did so unintentionally, as an act of defence against a perceived intruder. At the time of writing (October 2014), Pistorius has been found guilty of manslaughter and is awaiting sentencing. Interestingly, we are told by his defence team that Pistorius, fearing for his life, “screamed like a woman.” This claim is used to counter neighbours’ testimony that they had heard Reeva’s cry for help in an altercation with her boyfriend that night. His pitch of voice notwithstanding, Pistorius said that “it filled me with horror and fear of an intruder or intruders being inside the toilet. I thought he or they must have entered through the unprotected window.” Granted, intruders can be of any gender; they can also be of any race, or age for that matter. In South Africa, however, the cultural image of the ‘burglar’ carries specific gendered and racial overtones that have roots in the apartheid past. In his testimony, Pistorius did employ the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to the alleged intruder, but he shied away from the overt usage of racial categories. That being said, it is notable how some key South African analysts have interpreted his testimony. The title of an article by Sandile Memela in the British Guardian is a case in point: “If Oscar Pistorius Had Shot a Black Man, Would Anyone Care?” (Emphasis added.) Memela puts words to the nexus of masculinity and blackness, an intersection that in South Africa is often invisible because it is taken for granted. According to Memela, The black man is always a suspect, a target. And for the rest of the world, it is understandable and acceptable if a white man shoots to kill to defend his land, property and family . . . As a white male you do not kill a white woman, especially the one you profess to love. Your role and responsibility is to protect and defend her against black men. (Memela, April 30, 2014) Also in The Guardian, South African writer Margie Orford wrote that “Pistorius has insisted that he thought it was an intruder, an armed and dangerous man intent on robbery, rape and murder.” Orford goes on to explain that the panic invoked by Pistorius is nothing other than “the old white fear of the swart gevaar (black peril),” a form of perceived threat which “[u]nder apartheid . . . was used to excuse any and all kinds of violence” on the part of white South Africans (Orford, March 4, 2014, emphasis in original).

10 Tommaso M. Milani The controversies surrounding Semenya and Pistorius are in my view the most vivid materializations of the three facets of masculinity that are highlighted in this book. To start with, they illustrate that masculinity is a relational concept, because it only makes sense vis-à-vis its binary counterpart: femininity. They also show that masculinity is never in the singular, but is instead a set of performances that one carries out by employing linguistic and other meaning-making resources within normative constraints about how a man should sound, appear, and behave. This multiplicity of masculine positions is due to the complex ways in which gender intersects with a variety of other categories such as race, social class, age, and national identity, to name just a few. Finally, Caster Semenya in particular reminds us that masculinities are not necessarily synonymous with biological maleness, but can be dislocated from it. PERFORMANCES It is relatively uncontested in contemporary scholarship in the social sciences and humanities that one is not born but rather becomes a man (see de Beauvoir 1952). But how does one turn into a man? By developing into a man once and for all? Or is manhood a never-ending process of becoming? These questions can be answered with the help of Judith Butler (1998a), a queer/feminist thinker who in my view has explained most lucidly how sex, gender, and sexuality have become “entangled in knots that must be undone” (225–226).

Gender Is Performative Butler argued famously that gender is performative. Following Austin’s (1962) canonical definition, a performative is an utterance that is less a description of pre-existing arrangements than a linguistic formula through which social reality is produced. A good example of “performativity’s social magic” (Butler 1998b) can be found in marriage ceremonies, in which the linguistic act of pronouncing “I do” turns the speaker from an unmarried person into a legally wedded husband or wife. What does it mean then that gender is performative? What kind of social magic is produced by gender? When a doctor or midwife exclaims in an English-speaking context “It’s a boy,” Butler (1993) would argue, they are not simply describing the corporeality in front of their eyes: a crying and wriggling body with a small protuberance between the legs. That exclamation is an “interpellation” (Althusser 1971) that boxes that small body into the linguistic pigeonhole of the pronoun “he” and brings into being a set of rules and expectations about how that body should look, think, and behave. These norms will be consistently enforced by a variety of authorities and institutions such as school, church, family, and the military.

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 11 For Butler, gender is also performative because “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990: 25). Density of writing style aside, this quotation captures in theoretical terms a point that was made in the introductory section above, namely that masculinity is not a uniform, essential trait—in the singular—that certain individuals (and not others) have by virtue of specific biological endowments. Instead, masculinities are nothing but a series of performances—in the plural—that can be done with the help of a variety of meaning-making resources. Does this mean that masculinities are like a wardrobe of clothes that can be chosen and changed on a whim? Butler would dispute such an interpretation, highlighting that “[g]ender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1999 [1990]: 43–44, emphasis added). The “highly rigid regulatory frame” consists of those normative, context-specific beliefs about what counts as masculine (or not) that were evoked in the exclamation “It’s a boy!” These norms are not ingrained in people’s minds randomly or idiosyncratically, but are the results of particular social, cultural, and historical developments (see also Cameron 2014). They are like the calcified residue of long-standing percolations through which certain bodily shapes, poses, facial expressions, haircuts, clothing, activities, linguistic features, and styles of speech are repeatedly and consistently associated with men but not with women. A rather mundane materialization of these indexical processes that link men with particular traits can be found in Plate 1.1, which represents a newsstand at Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC (see Milani 2014b for a more detailed analysis of gender and sexuality in “banal” (Billig 1995) public spaces). Like their female counterparts in Plate 1.2, the men on the cover pages of the lifestyle magazines in the picture are young and attractive, but they are larger, rugged, and muscular. These representations portray men and women as having opposite and complementary bodily configurations: men are muscled, strong, and display the need to protect, whereas women are beautiful, petite, and show the need for security (see Goffman (1977) for a ground-breaking analysis of the visual enactments of these gender stereotypes and Baker (Chapter 2, this volume) for quantitative evidence of this phenomenon in the United States). It is also worth noting in this context that Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Scientific American are placed directly under Men’s Journals, whereas Bon Appetit, Fine Gardening, and Furniture are situated near Women’s Health. The front-page images and the spatial arrangements of the magazines are neither arbitrary nor ideologically innocuous. They “exaggerate gender difference and create the impression that gender distinction is integral to the functions, importance, and uses of human beings in social and familial systems” (Kitch 2009: 62). The problem here lies in the normative connections between men, ‘hard’ science, and technical abilities, on the one hand,

12 Tommaso M. Milani

Plate 1.1

Gender arrangements—Men

and women and ‘soft’ skills such as everyday cooking, sewing, gardening, and interior design, on the other. These associations testify to more or less subtle sexist trends that, after decades of feminism, still seek to create power differentials between the two genders. Whereas women should be relegated to the world of creativity and the domain of the private, the public sphere and the practical ‘stuff’ should be left to men.

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 13

Plate 1.2

Gender arrangements—Women

What is on display—quite literally—at the Dulles Airport newsstand are visual manifestations of the indexical processes that lead to the creation of particular cultural models or types of masculinity (and femininity) (see also Kiesling, 2011). These are recognizable cultural formations—scripts—that one needs to “cite”—as Butler (1993) would say—in order to fit in and qualify as a ‘normal’ man (or woman).

14 Tommaso M. Milani

Hegemonic Masculinity: Representations and Practices The masculine representations on the front covers of men’s lifestyle magazines are ideals, instances of what R. W. Connell (1995) calls “hegemonic masculinity”—the dominant and “currently most honored way of being a man [in a particular context]” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832). Hegemonic status is less the result of violence and raw force than of “discursive persuasion” (Messerschmidt 2012: 58), that is, the complex manufacturing of consent in which the media and other institutions play a key role (see Herman and Chomsky 1988). In its original definition, hegemonic masculinity entails the subjugation of women and the vilification of gay men (Connell 1995: 77–78). It is “not normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832). Yet it has become the norm, requiring “all other men to position themselves in relation to it” because of the highly valued “ideals, fantasies, and desires” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832) it imbues. Put more simply, very few men (if any) perform the kinds of hegemonic masculinity embodied on the front pages of men’s lifestyle magazines; some try to live up to, or at least not oppose it, whereas others choose to resist it covertly or overtly. These different performances, however, are not equally valued; those who contest hegemonic masculinity are punished for deviating from the norm; on the contrary, those who seek to approximate the ideal or at least tacitly accept it are rewarded with the harvests of the “patriarchal dividend,” the benefit “gain[ed] from the overall subordination of women” (Connell 1995: 79) and femininity. In this sense, hegemonic masculinity occupies a relational and hierarchical position vis-à-vis women and femininity, on the one hand, and other non-hegemonic or subordinate masculinities, on the other (Connell 1995: 37). Of course, what is required of a man to be at the top of the masculine pecking order is not universal or stable. The performance of hegemonic masculinity in a hip-hop context in Cape Town (Williams, Chapter 4, this volume) or a school in Scotland (Lawson, Chapter 3, this volume) is very different from what one would find in the United States (Baker, Chapter 2, this volume). Whereas having a muscular body makes one a man’s man in contemporary American texts, the deployment of linguistic features from different non-standard dialects, languages, and styles seems to be more relevant for activating hegemonic masculine personas in South African hip-hop performances and Scottish educational settings. Although the concept of hegemonic masculinity is prominent in a variety of disciplines, it has recently come under attack by those who lament among other things that “the relationship between hegemonic masculinity at the macro level and men’s practice and constructions of sense-making masculinities at the micro level needs to be clarified” (Christensen and Qvotrup Jensen 2014: 61). Whilst this remark may be true of much of the academic work that draws upon Connell’s (1995) concept, it is at least partly due to

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 15 the fact that many social scientists neglect the linguistic/discourse analytical study of masculinities, which has aimed precisely at charting ‘macro’/‘micro’ relationships. Scott F. Kiesling (2011), for example, has offered a nuanced analysis of the different and often contradictory ways in which discourses of hegemonic masculinity are drawn upon, enacted, and/or resisted in daily interactions in a US fraternity. By the same token, Ann Wetherell and Nigel Edley (1999) have given a very convincing illustration of the ambiguous discursive moves through which the young men in their study perform or distance themselves from macro hegemonic models. The complex interplay between masculinities as congealed ‘macro’ representations and masculinities as discursive performances at a ‘micro’ level can also be illustrated in recent work that looks at media discourses and school practices in Sweden (see Jonsson 2007; Milani 2010; Milani and Jonsson 2011; Milani and Jonsson 2012). For the last 20 years or so, mainstream Swedish media have been circulating the image of the immigrant young man (invandrarkille): a male born in Sweden to a family of migrants, a troublesome youngster who is chauvinist, homophobic, and can only speak a ‘multi-ethnic slang’ that prevents him from entering the job market. In the media portrayals, the immigrant young man plays the bad alter-ego of the normative, gender-equal, homo-friendly teen who speaks standard Swedish. Unlike media representations, however, long-standing ethnographic work in several Swedish schools has demonstrated that these immigrant young men actually employ a rich linguistic repertoire that spans the continuum from standard Swedish to non-standard linguistic varieties. The mixing and matching of different linguistic resources is neither random nor insignificant, but constitutes a sophisticated discursive toolkit for the production of different masculinities. And this can only be understood in the context of the language ideologies at work in the schools in question. In those schools, standard Swedish is associated with being a ‘good boy’ and a good student; in contrast, non-standard linguistic practices are “icons” (Irvine and Gal 2000) of the street-wise tough thug. These young men strategically capitalize on the ideological affordances provided by linguistic styles in order to voice and bring into being an array of different masculine personas. These personas, in turn, are key to achieving or contesting different positions of power in and out of the classroom (see also Kiesling 1997; Pujolar 1997). To conclude, media texts allow us to understand which masculinities are hegemonic or not in a specific setting at a particular moment in time. However, what individuals—whether male-born and male-bodied or not—actually do with these diverse masculine scripts—how they cite and reproduce them or alternatively misquote and contest them—can only be understood by taking into account “the language ideologies circulating in specific communities of practice” (Hall 2014: 235). Research on Sweden’s immigrant young man, for example, has pointed to a disjuncture between ‘macro’ media representations of a cultural masculine type and the actual ‘micro’ performances of masculinity by those who are supposed to embody

16 Tommaso M. Milani that type. Moreover, the nature of the data raises an important analytical issue. Analogous to the ‘burglar’ in South Africa mentioned in the introductory section above, the hip-hop performer in Cape Town studied by Williams (Chapter 4, this volume), or the Scottish school kids investigated by Lawson (Chapter 3, this volume), the immigrant young man brings to light the intricate ways in which gender is entangled with other forms of social categorization. It is to such intersections that I will now turn. INTERSECTIONS That masculinities are not traits that we have, but rather performances that we do, emerges out of a broader social constructivist epistemology which holds that “identities are constructed at the interstices of multiple axes, such as age, race, class, ethnicity, gender, generation, sexual orientation, geopolitical locale, institutional affiliation and social status, whereby each aspect of identity redefines and modifies all others” (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004: 15). The methodological implication of this perspective is that one must look at the synergies between various interlocking domains of social differentiation. This, I would argue, is something that has characterized the study of language and masculinities from its very inception. At a time when language and gender scholarship was largely preoccupied with understanding the differences between a rather undifferentiated category of ‘men’ and a no less homogenous group of ‘women’ as manifested through language (see also Cameron 2005), the contributions to Johnson and Meinhof’s (1997) ground-breaking edited collection illustrated the differences in gendered performances within men. This “pluralizing of masculinities” advocated by Johnson (1997) ensued inter alia from the acknowledgement that gender is influenced by a plethora of other social categories. Arguably, social-constructivist work on language and masculinities has privileged the intersection of masculinity and sexuality, understood in terms of both homosexual and heterosexual identities and practices (see in particular Cameron 1997; Kiesling 1997, 2011; Benwell 2002 for ground-breaking work on heterosexual masculinities, and Baker 2005, 2008 for important research on gay masculinities). The quality and importance of this scholarship notwithstanding, this restricted focus has been at the expense of the interplay between masculinity and other social constructs (see however Milani and Jonsson 2011 for studies of masculinity and ethnicity; Kiesling 2001 for an examination of masculinity and whiteness; and Ehrlich and Levesque 2011 for work on masculinity and social class). With hindsight, one can speculate that the predilection for studying the intersections between masculinities and various sexualities (while overlooking other social categories) can be attributed to the impact of queer theory on language and gender research since the 1990s (see Livia and Hall 1997; Cameron 2005; Motschenbacher 2011). Not a uniform or coherent

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 17 apparatus, queer theory is instead a conglomerate of disparate analytical lenses (see Milani 2014a for overviews of queer theory in relation to masculinities). Differences aside, studies informed by queer approaches generally seek to understand how gender and sexuality are entwined in the production and valorization of the ‘normal,’ and the concomitant construction and devaluation of the ‘deviant.’ With its analytical gaze firmly cast on the knots between gender and sexuality (Butler 1998a), queer theory may well have overshadowed another important theoretical approach which also came to fruition at more or less the same time: intersectionality (see however Levon 2010 for a recent attempt to re-think intersectionality in sociolinguistic research). With this in mind, the remainder of this section will begin by unpacking the intersections between masculinities and sexual identities, before exploring other identity nexuses through the notion of intersectionality.

‘Privileged’ Entanglements? Language, Masculinities, and Homo/Heterosexualities The emphasis on heterosexual masculinities in language and gender research (see in particular the contributions to Milani 2011) is underpinned by the belief that critical engagement with the social (re)production of hegemony is needed in order to unveil and contest the ways in which power operates through gender and sexuality. This is not with a view to “re-centring” men, as Jack Halberstam (1998: 3) would suggest. Quite the contrary, it is because a deeper transformation of the social world can only be initiated by unraveling those processes through which certain bodies, identities, and desires (and not others) become unmarked, normal, and normative. In the case of gender and sexuality, only by questioning the conditions that enable some heterosexual masculinities to be considered default and normal can we start to shake the solid foundations on which the gender and sexual orders are built. In this regard, Ann-Dorte Christensen and Sune Qvotrup Jensen remind us that “[e]xactly because it does not rely on raw force or overt oppression, hegemonic forms of dominance successively change as they absorb, integrate and assimilate counter-currents” (2014: 62). Johnson (1997) noted similarly that [h]egemonic masculinity, and the linguistic resources drawn upon in its construction, are highly contextualized, inconsistent and unpredictable. However, this is not because men are necessarily in the business of relinquishing power, but because of their struggle to consolidate it. (24) The ‘crises of masculinity’ currently burgeoning in different parts of the world might actually be manifestations of this chameleon-like ability of hegemonic masculinity to refashion itself under new guises in order to retain

18 Tommaso M. Milani its dominant and taken-for-granted character. Therefore, Lazar (Chapter 5, this volume) warns us to not too easily dismiss pronouncements of a crisis of masculinity as naïve, unfounded, or laughable. Such arguments are not just examples of a backlash against feminism; they could also be strategic discursive means by which men seek to “reoccupy centre stage and reclaim patriarchal privilege” (Walsh 2010: 7). In the specific case of the anti-feminist blog posts in Singapore analysed by Lazar, heterosexual men are portrayed as the ‘new oppressed,’ not only by male bloggers, but by female writers as well. That some women also subscribe to the discourse of men as the new oppressed might not be particularly surprising considering that hegemony cannot take place without the complicity of those who least benefit from it (Gramsci 1971; Connell 1995). Another, albeit less straightforward, example of collusion in the workings of hegemonic masculinity is illustrated in my own work on a South African online community for men who are looking for other men (see Milani 2013 for a more detailed analysis). Linguistic tokens of such complicity can be found in the highly recurrent usage of the adjective straight/str8, often together with the present participle acting, as positively-laden attributes which the members of this online community use to present themselves and describe their object of desire. As in the case of heterosexual hegemonic masculinity, the valorization of a straight-acting identity goes hand in hand with an overt disavowal of femininity. This is manifest in the negative connotations surrounding the words feminine, fem/fems. The overt promotion of ‘straight-actingness’ might suggest that this online community is characterized by what Baker calls “hegemonic homosexuality” in that “the most highly-valued identity is traditional heterosexual hegemonic masculinity or an approximation to it” (Baker 2008: 176). One could even go so far as to suggest that we are witnessing the manifestation of internalized homophobia or “sissyphobia” (Bergling 2001; see also Eguchi 2011). But, as Voon Chin Phua (2002) has highlighted, “[s]traight acting means more than being masculine: it also means to be undetectable as a gay person” (186). Hence, those who desire or identify as straight-acting men are drawing upon a heteronormative discourse that implicitly promotes heterosexuality as the acceptable norm in the public sphere whilst devaluing homosexuality as an inappropriate identity not to be displayed (see also Eguchi 2009). In the South African context where equality on the basis of “sexual orientation” is enshrined in the constitution, the valorization of a straight-acting identity could be interpreted as a sign of assimilationist trends. Men who are looking for other men do not take full advantage of their constitutional rights by radically subverting gender norms, but prefer instead to gain acceptance by conforming to the masculine script that heterosexual men also follow (see also Clarkson 2005: 205). The appreciation of masculine attributes within the context of homosexual relations, and the concomitant stigmatization of male femininity, however, should not lead us to draw hasty conclusions about the complicity

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 19 of male same-sex desire in the production of hegemonic masculinity. Analogous to other contexts examined in the literature (see Baker 2008; Chesebro 2001; Thorne and Coupland 1998), the emphasis on ‘straight-acting’ homomasculinity2 could be read as a way in which South African men desiring other men contest widespread societal discourses that stereotype them as effeminate. The fetishization of ‘straight-acting’ qualities could also be interpreted as a form of objectification that reduces hegemonic masculinity to a commodity to be consumed either virtually (by reading an advert or profile) or in reality (by having sex) (see also Baker 2008: 177). In this respect, it is important to remember that those masculine personas so cherished online might simply be a longed-for chimera that does not necessarily coincide with the gender performances of the actual people with whom the men in the online community have sex or engage in a long-lasting relationship (see also Baker 2005: 190; Eguchi 2011: 52). Finally, ‘straight-actingness’ is not always unambiguously championed in this online community, but is at times subtly derided though irony and parody. In sum, even conceding that the subjugation and devaluation of real, perceived, or presumed male same-sex desire might be a key component of hegemonic masculinity as Connell (1995) originally theorized (see Cameron 1997 for a famous empirical example), I would argue that men who desire other men should not be viewed a priori as victims or passive spectators of hegemonic masculinity. On the contrary, they may well be ambiguous agents who simultaneously sustain and contest masculine hegemony. Understanding this ambivalent form of agency is in my view key in order to fully unveil and contest the ways in which power operates through gender and sexuality. What is needed for such a critical enterprise is perhaps the notion of intersectionality, which will be presented below.

Looking at Other Identity Nexuses: Intersectionality Developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is a lens that helps to capture “the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s . . . experiences” (Crenshaw 1991: 1244). The focus on the “Black woman” in its original formulation has led to disagreements about who counts as a legitimate object of intersectional analysis. Some scholars are adamant that intersectionality can be used in order to understand any nexus of identities; others take instead a more restrictive approach by reserving the concept for investigations of positions of multiple marginalization (see Nash 2008 for an overview). Acknowledging these disagreements, Jennifer Nash emphasizes that certain strands of intersectional scholarship have offered important analyses of the ways in which “patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism buttress each other” (2008: 12). In her view, however, the careful attention paid to the “interconnections of forms of subordination” has tended to ignore “the intimate connections between privilege and oppression” (2008: 12), leading

20 Tommaso M. Milani her to suggest that “[i]n conceiving of privilege and oppression as complex, multi-valent, and simultaneous, intersectionality could offer a more robust conception of both identity and oppression” (2008: 12). Re-read in such a vein, the men in the South African online community presented above make male same-sex desire visible and heard. In so doing, they are countering oppressive homophobic forces that seek to silence homosexuality in South Africa; they are also resisting marginalizing discourses that attempt to exclude any non-heterosexual man from the domain of the masculine. At the same time, though, their nearly misogynist attitudes ultimately reinforce dominant societal discourses that valorize masculinity at the expense of femininity. This complicity in the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity allows these men to tap into the privilege that comes with ‘passing’ as a man’s man. A similar picture emerges in Levon’s (Chapter 7, this volume) discourse analysis of ‘coming out’ stories of gay men in Israel; this well-argued empirical study examines the ways in which privilege and oppression can operate in tandem. Historically, the image of the healthy, muscular, virile man has been at the center of the Zionist nationalist project as an ideal which the ‘degenerate,’ ‘weak’ Jewish man should emulate in order to liberate himself from centuries of oppression in the diaspora and help establish the nascent state of Israel. This new virile Jewish man was inherently heterosexual, and his overpowering sexual energy could only be kept under control through marriage and reproduction. Considering this historical context, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Israeli gay men in Levon’s study “narrate their experience of homosexuality as one of long-lasting conflict,” a struggle that is “grounded in the incommensurability of gay male sexuality as they understand it and normative conceptualizations of Israeli identity” (Levon, this volume). Put simply, gay men do not fit the nationalist cultural stereotype of the Israeli man. This apparent incompatibility between sexual identification and nationalist/gender identification “is resolved only when a more gendernormative gayness is discovered” (Levon, this volume). Like the South African men described above, the Israeli men’s embrace of homo-masculinity helps them to “succeed in resisting marginalizing discourses of sexuality in Israel while simultaneously reinforcing . . . dominant ideologies of gendered nationalism” (Levon, this volume). More than 10 years ago, Bonnie McElhinny (2003) criticized the theoretical preoccupation with the links between gender and sexuality, arguing that to “suggest or assume that there is a closer relationship between sexuality and gender than between either of these and any other aspect of social identity . . . [is] a question which itself deserves empirical investigation” (26). Though not overtly drawing upon intersectionality theory, Lawson (Chapter 3, this volume), Williams (Chapter 4, this volume), and Levon (Chapter 7, this volume) all seek to expand the linguistic study of masculinities by encompassing the domains of nationalism, age, race, and social class rather than focusing solely on sexuality.

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 21 Most importantly, these authors show the ambivalent connections between marginalization and empowerment in the linguistic construction of the complex entanglements between masculine personas and other axes of social differentiation. Accordingly, it is in my view imperative to re-cast McElhinny’s programmatic suggestion that [t]he ways in which gender is imbricated in other axes of identity, the ways in which certain notions of gender can reinforce or challenge other notions about class and ethnicity, is part of what we must begin to investigate more closely. (2003: 26) As I argue in the next section, such an intersectional project in the study of language and masculinities is certainly not incompatible with calls to “de-emphasize the normative relationship between men and masculinity” (Wiegman 2002: 51). DISLOCATIONS Although the idea that “gender is a verb” (Johnson 1997: 21) has been underlying the study of language and masculinities since its very beginnings, this field of inquiry seems to have remained unresponsive to the methodological implications of Butler’s theorization of “gender as an effect of discourse, creating an illusion of a seamless integrity between the sexed body and cultural gender” (Benwell 2014: 243, emphasis in original). In a typically anti-normative way, Butler would encourage the disruption of any “coat-rack” arrangement (Nicholson 1994) in which sex overlaps too neatly with gender. However, the largest portion of the scholarship on language and masculinities has taken male-bodied individuals who happily identify as men as their participants par excellence. Heeding Butler’s call, Koller (Chapter 8, this volume), Jones (Chapter 9, this volume), Zimman (Chapter 10, this volume), and King (Chapter 11, this volume) all offer rich empirical evidence that “sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with . . . men” (Kosofsky-Sedgwick 1995: 12). Looking at the ways in which lesbian women as well as transgender and intersex individuals perform different masculinities, these authors agree that the time is nigh to “dislocate masculinities” (see Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994) from male-born, male-bodied people (see also Hall 2009). It is precisely the dislocation of masculinities from maleness that I will discuss in the remainder of this chapter by analysing a portrait drawn by the artist Gabrielle Le Roux in collaboration with Silva, a Namibian trans activist. This drawing was part of a broader project of art-activism titled “Proudly African and Trans” that was shown at the exhibition Queer and Trans Articulations, held at Johannesburg’s Wits Art Museum in February 2014.

22 Tommaso M. Milani

Going Beyond ‘Language’: Multimodality Choosing to analyze a work of visual art might seem unusual for a discipline like language and masculinities, which has not only tended to prefer naturally occurring interactions and non-fictional texts, but has also taken a rather narrow view of language as verbal and written code (see however Benwell 2002 and Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen 2002 for multimodal analyses of gender; Koller 2008 and Chapter 8, this volume, for the use of literary texts as linguistic data). Within this scholarship, language is not a passive mirror that reflects a pre-existing gendered identity, but is itself an active resource through which gender is discursively produced. And it is such a view of language that also underpins the contributions to this volume, which offer highly nuanced descriptions of how certain features, varieties and styles of language are mobilized for performing masculine personas. Yet as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1998) remarked long ago, “[l]anguage always has to be realized through, and comes in the company of, other semiotic modes,” and “any form of text analysis which ignores this will not be able to account for all the meanings expressed in texts” (186). Commenting on visual art, Adam Jaworski similarly observes that “[t]ext and image have been inextricably linked throughout art history as works of art have often combined visual imagery and writing (in itself a visual medium, of course . . .)” (2014: 135). Against this backdrop, the investigation of a portrait not only aims to counter the narrow linguistic bias of language and masculinities research; it also seeks to expand the analytical horizons of what are commonly considered to be legitimate texts of (socio) linguistic inquiry. At first glance, Gabrielle Le Roux’s artistic production is distinctive due to its multimodal character. Multimodality (see in particular Kress and van Leeuwen 2005) is a concept that aims to grasp the complex interplay between the visual and other semiotic modes—in this case, written language—in the creation of meaning. Of course, the mixing and matching of pictorial and linguistic elements is not a prerogative of this visual artist (see Jaworski 2014 for an overview of multimodal art). What is exceptional here is the process that was used to produce the multimodal arrangement of the portraits. All of the language-based sections, and a few of the visual ones, were created by the people drawn by Le Roux. Each of these people also wrote a longer narrative that accompanies the drawing. As Le Roux explains in an interview, The inclusion of the first person stories is what grounds the work in people’s lived realities and puts the microphone in their hands where it belongs. It gets away from the focus on the image, which inevitably is just my interpretation. (Sanger and Le Roux 2012: 65)

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 23 By giving voice to the people she portrays, Le Roux intentionally breaks down the established power imbalance between the creative artist, on the one hand, and passive models, on the other, enabling the models to become agents or co-creators. The co-production process leads to a multivocal and multimodal palimpsest on which Le Roux’s visual voice is interwoven with the linguistic vernaculars of the trans and intersex activists that have been portrayed. This linguistic and visual multivocality produces powerful gender dissonances, as the following discussion reveals.

Gender Trouble? When looking at the portrait reproduced in the picture above (Plate 1.3), most striking in terms of gender is how Le Roux portrays Silva in a masculine pose. Of course, one might wonder what the “warrants” (Swann 2002) are for such a gendered conclusion. As I pointed out earlier, what counts as masculine in a particular context is the result of indexical processes through which certain behaviours, linguistic features, and bodily shapes are historically related to men (but not women). I would argue that masculinity is performatively brought into being in this portrait through the position of the almost disproportionally large and ruggedly shaped hand on the crotch. Not only are rough and strong hands typically associated with men, but it is generally acceptable for men (but not for women) to clutch their groins publicly. This is an act that often serves as a signal of aggressiveness and/or braggadocio. Masculinity is also evoked through the rather impassive facial expression; not displaying emotions is another trait commonly believed to be male (see e.g., some of the life narratives in an African context collected in Morgan and Wieringa 2005). Most importantly, masculinity is not only depicted in Le Roux’s visual interpretation of Silva; it is also an important resource for Silva’s own selfidentification, as can be seen in the narrative accompanying the portrait: Extract 1 I am an open-minded Transgender person living in Namibia. I have been living here all my life. I see myself as a trans man. I live as a man everyday, the man that I am. I am slightly different because I am special, two in one. I am daddy, brother, boyfriend, lover and much more. Silva mobilizes different categories in order to enact various masculine identities. Man, daddy, brother, and boyfriend are all nouns that clearly index masculinity, whereas person, special, lover, and much more are gender-neutral labels. It is possible to conclude then that through the visual representation of Silva’s hand on the crotch and the linguistic acts of selfpositioning in the narrative above, this work of art simultaneously relies on, and performatively enacts masculinity. These masculine discursive

Plate 1.3 Portrait of Silva Skinny Dux Eiseb by Gabrielle LeRoux. Words by Silva.

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 25 constructions are further enhanced by the intertextual links that connect this portrait with other visual representations. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including our creative works), is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness’ . . . These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate. (79) By the same token, visual representations are not produced in a vacuum, but are “filled with” elements from previous images. These visual scripts (see van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999) have been repeated over and over again, and are therefore easily recognisable. In Silva’s portrait, an obvious intertextual connection is with the many images of military men photographed in self-confident poses, their bodies slightly tilted, displaying a metal name tag on their bare chests. Yet, citationality—the recurrence of earlier words or visual tropes—is never a verbatim repetition, but entails “a dynamic process of change whereby new meanings are produced,” for “iteration implies the break with an original context and the inauguration of new contexts” (Milani 2007: 103). Indeed, the intertextual link between Silva’s portrait and previous images of men at war, together with the hand on the crotch and the linguistic elements in the narrative above, conjure up a masculine persona. However, the discursive performance of masculinity is not so straightforward here; the breasts that dominate the central part of the portrait trouble the visual script of bare-chested, male warriors.

Female Masculinity? The co-existence of biologically female traits with culturally masculine ones is not a new phenomenon, as has been studied by Jack Halberstam (1998) in the context of US visual culture and Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa (2005) in several African contexts. Halberstam (1998) employs the expression “female masculinity” to refer to the production of “a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity” (1997: 9). Unsurprisingly so, this concept has not remained unchallenged. In an ethnographic study of a UK hiking group made up of self-identified lesbian women, Lucy Jones (Chapter 9, this volume) shies away from applying the notion of female masculinity to some of the gendered performances of the participants. This is because female masculinity “may imply that butch lesbians are ‘pretending to be’ men due to the connotations that ‘masculinity’ has with ‘manliness.’” Jones proposes “that we should instead re-interpret what butch women do as a rejection of heteronormative femininity.” Likewise,

26 Tommaso M. Milani based on the visual elements in Le Roux’s portrait, Silva does not ‘pretend to be’ a heterosexual man or a heterosexual woman, but instead comfortably embodies the gender liminality—the in-between-ness—that is linguistically afforded by the category ‘trans.’ Like the category setabane (lit. ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘intersex’) mentioned in the introductory section, which blends the gender dyad into one non-normative unity, the proud display of visually dissonant gendered elements in the portrait blurs the dichotomies between man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine, depicting a more complex humanity that cannot be easily pigeonholed into neat gender categories. This human complexity is also expressed linguistically in the statement “I am special, two in one” (Extract 1), which is reiterated in the portrait’s green and red text. Extract 2 I’m special cos I’m two in 1. I don’t want or need to be boxed cos Silva is precious in his own way. It has been a battle for me to accept who I am but I’m past that space and have accepted who I am. Silva. Special. I love who I am cos I’m unique. This extract contains a discursive move whereby identity boxes are rejected in order to express a unique human experience. This anti-identitarian attempt notwithstanding, Silva falls back onto gendered identification with the linguistic shift from first-person (I) to third-person (Silva). This narrative strategy not only enables Silva to talk about the Self as if seen from a distance; it also allows the usage of the possessive pronoun “his,” thereby producing once again a masculine identification through language. Silva acknowledges that this was done intentionally to avoid having the “2 in 1” statements be interpreted as a decision to opt out of gender completely (Gabrielle Le Roux, personal communication). In other words, a specifically masculine identity does matter to Silva. Further testimony of this is the exposed brand name of what appears to be a typical piece of men’s underwear.

Dislocating Masculinities for a Decolonizing Project The multimodal and multivocal arrangement of this portrait embodies a tension between, on the one hand, attempts to overcome identity categories altogether, and, on the other hand, the co-existence of gender identities that are simultaneously conventional and radical. Specifically, the fairly straightforward alignments with male-masculinity (the pose and the linguistic elements in the narratives) are jarred by a bodily presence that can be interpreted as typically female. Thus, the portrait troubles what Butler calls the “matrix of intelligibility”— “the grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 27 desires are naturalized” (Butler 1999 [1990]: 194). By going against the gender grain, the portrait “dislocates” masculinity (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994) from the biologically male body, reminding us how masculinity, femininity, corporeality, and gender performances can be interwoven in multiple and complex ways that ultimately “disrupt the binarity upon which normative assumptions of sexual difference are based” (Morgan and Wieringa 2005: 309). Dislocating masculinity from maleness in an African context is a powerful political statement. There is no doubt that the enshrining of equality on grounds of sexual orientation in the new South African dispensation was ground-breaking on the African continent; those who identify as nonheterosexual are now emancipated—politically at least. Despite the country’s liberal constitution, however, black individuals who do not conform to gender and sexual normativities suffer from a double marginalization. First, there are still macro-discourses that view anything that is not straightforwardly gender-conforming or heteronormative as un-African; black individuals who do not fit in with normative views of gender or sexuality are rendered invisible and unintelligible (see Livermon 2013), and often become the target of homophobic violence. Second, the “grammar of legitimization” (Reddy 2000: 174) has not yet translated into the achievement of true equality for everyone. Proof of this came during the 2012 Johannesburg pride event, when the activist group One in Nine interrupted the annual gay and lesbian parade, reminding us that the gender and sexual equality recognized and promoted in the constitution has not benefited everyone in the same way, but varies based on race and social class. White, middle-class suburbanites came to the Pride event to happily celebrate the political enfranchisement gained since 1994. Seen from the black, working-class perspective of the townships, however, there was “no cause for celebration,” as one of the One in Nine slogans read, for many gender non-normative black women were being murdered (see Milani, 2015). In light of this contextual backdrop, it is the racial character of the portraits that is perhaps the most powerful element of the exhibition. Not only are all of the featured trans activists black, but they also position themselves as “proudly African.” Thus, the exhibition makes visible through art those who are elsewhere erased in discourse or obliterated through violence. By highlighting the activists’ Africanness, the artwork also counters the prevailing belief among many African leaders that gender and sexual non-normativities are relics of the colonial past. Indeed, although the labels gay, lesbian, butch, and femme might be Western imports, there is historical and anthropological evidence that same-sex practices and gender nonnormativities existed in pre-colonial African contexts (see Epprecht 2004). For instance, the English explorer Sir Richard Burton wrote that the women in Dahomey (today’s Benin) were anything but feminine; because of their “muscular development of . . . frame,” “femininity could be detected only

28 Tommaso M. Milani by the bosom” (quoted in Blair 2010: 98). This is not an isolated or random commentary on an ‘exotic’ Other written by a white observer, but rather a textual manifestation of the ways in which colonial, western gender binary thinking worked in order to make sense of existing African realities. Rather than African politicians reinforcing colonial laws about gender and sexuality and claiming that this will help liberate their countries from the legacy of the colonial past, a truly decolonizing project would consist of freeing society from the yoke of sexual dimorphism and the concomitant gender binary (see also Zimman, Chapter 10, and King, Chapter 11, this volume). The dislocation of masculinity from maleness resulting from Le Roux’s collaboration with trans activists in Africa is in my view but one small step in that direction. CONCLUSIONS Johnson has argued that “a focus on the highly variable ways in which masculine identities are formed, and in particular the role of language in the construction of those identities, is a worthwhile feminist project” (1997: 25, emphasis added). She goes on to write 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, original emphasis) At the time, this was a radical statement in a discipline like language and gender, which was not only split between dominance and difference approaches, but also focused heavily on the study of women and femininities. Nearly 20 years later, however, the study of language and masculinities has come a long way. According to Bethan Benwell, “the pendulum has swung so far” (2014: 242) that there is “more theoretical discussion of masculinity” (Cameron 2009: 13) than of femininity. As a feminist, I concur with Johnson that it is practically impossible to understand how power operates without casting a queer eye at straight, gay, and other guys, and how they use language to construct their identities. But I would add that we should expand our remit of inquiry beyond male-bodied, male-born individuals, and at the same time transcend narrow definitions of language as verbal and written code. Adopting this broader perspective will enable us to sustain a critical attitude, one that will allow us to act like “perpetual party-pooper[s]” whose “impulse is to point to ambiguities, complexities and contradictions, to complicate matters rather than

Theorizing Language and Masculinities 29 provide merely for solutions” (Ang 2001: 2). In such a vein, my attempt with this chapter was to demonstrate that masculinity is a set of indexical resources that are mobilized by a variety of people—regardless of what genitalia they possess—to serve ambiguous, competing, and contradictory agendas. Whether focusing on white, heterosexual men like Oscar Pistorius or Black, gender non-normative individuals like Semenya, and whether adopting feminist, queer, or post-colonial approaches—or any other framework for that matter—the field of language and masculinities should avoid becoming complacent in its own hegemonic currents. The social constructivist epistemology that undergirds the contributions to this volume has become something of an orthodoxy in the study of language, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps, as Mary Bucholtz (2014) suggests, it “may be time for a new linguistic turn in feminist theory” (39), one that engages seriously with the ways in which discursive constructions of identity intersect with the materiality/corporeality of a person’s sex/gender (see Milani 2014a for a similar point). Regardless of what direction the scholarship takes, I believe that what we really need in the field of language and masculinities is to maintain a radical, self-critical, and ‘party-pooping’ edge. NOTES 1. SePedi is an African language of the Sotho group. 2. I strategically employ homo-masculinity instead of gay masculinity (Nardi, 2000) in order to refer to the performances of gender by all men who are attracted to other men, irrespective of how they identify themselves in sexual identity terms. In doing so, I draw upon the Greek origin of the prefix homo, meaning ‘the same.’ Such a terminological choice is also political insofar as it aims to re-appropriate and re-cast homo-sexuality in a new, less pathologizing manner. Having said that, I want to highlight that I distance myself from those who imbue homo-masculinity with either overly positive or very negative connotations.

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2

Two Hundred Years of the American Man Paul Baker

INTRODUCTION Connell (1995) conceptualises hegemonic masculinity as a way of moving beyond the idea that all men dominate all women, but that instead there are multiple masculinities (and femininities) which interact in a gendered hierarchy. Hegemonic masculinity is a “correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power” (Connell 1995: 77), and it embodies a particular society’s “ideal” notion of what a man should be. Men who meet (or approach) the hegemonic ideal are able to subordinate or marginalise other types of men (such as gay men, disabled men, working-class men, etc.) and women. Whereas few men actually embody or rigorously practice hegemonic masculinity, Connell argues that the majority of men benefit from the “patriarchal dividend” (1995: 79); for example, men are more likely to be viewed as ‘natural leaders,’ or be considered for important jobs. Therefore another important feature of hegemonic masculinity is complicity—those who are not towards the top of the hierarchy still accept and support the system, due to the fact that they may receive smaller amounts of power for doing so. If you were asked to visualise a man who embodied hegemonic masculinity, what would he look like? Would he be a muscular action hero, the smartly dressed CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a famous sportsman or pop star worth millions of dollars, a hard-working ‘family man,’ a charismatic religious leader, or something else? Perhaps we may disagree with the details of what a ‘hegemonic man’ looks like or does, but it is likely that many people would associate him with strength, independence, dominance, and confidence. He might also be heterosexual, white, wealthy, and healthy, thus embodying other qualities, along with being male, that are regularly (although often unfairly) associated with normalcy, goodness, and power. How do people come to recognise the system of hegemonic masculinity? One way that it is created and maintained is through the circulation of particular representations of masculinity as either good or bad. Butler (1990) famously argued that “[g]ender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance of a natural sort of being” (33).

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 35 This appearance of a natural sort of being thus becomes a model to which individuals need to relate—whether aligning or disaligning from them—in their daily performances. The repetition of certain representations of gender cumulatively contributes to the performativity of gender, namely “the underlying conditions that make performance possible, or by virtue of which a given performance does or does not succeed” (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 150). Equally then, representations of gender must also be repeatedly evoked, often through written or spoken language (although other methods of communication such as music and visuals can also be involved). Following Fairclough (1989: 37) I argue that the relationship between discourse and social structures is dialectical. Discourse (articulated through language) thus reflects society but also impacts on and changes society. An important aspect of the relationship between language and society is based on repetition. As Fairclough (1989: 54) points out, “A single text on its own is quite insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative, working through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency, particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth,” while Stubbs (2001: 215) argues that “[r]epeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a discourse community. A word, phrase, or construction may trigger a cultural stereotype.” Repetition of the same representation will help to strengthen it, although such representations can be challenged and altered if salient and frequent alternatives are also encountered. The aim of this chapter is to explore how such representations of masculinity have changed or remained stable over the 200-year period from 1810 to 2009, using a large American reference corpus which could be viewed as being representative of (American) language in general. As a large, wealthy, industrialised, powerful, and influential country, over the last 200 years American representations around gender have had an enormous global reach, making images such as The Marlboro Man and action heroes in films like Rambo widely recognisable.1 This chapter focuses on linguistic representations, however, and the method used to examine such representations is thus corpus linguistics (McEnery and Wilson 1996), which is ideally suited for conducting research on repeated linguistic patterns in society over time. One aspect of corpus research is that it often does not begin with a set of theories which are then tested out on the corpus. Instead, the corpus analysis is relatively ‘naïve’—analysts attempt to identify frequent or statistically salient patterns or relationships in corpora and then need to account for their findings. After reporting and interpreting findings, it is often useful to relate them to existing research or try to find explanations by drawing on social context, or to indicate the critical implications for the findings. This is the approach taken in this chapter, which begins with a brief discussion of corpus linguistics and how it has been used in the past to examine gender representation. I then describe the Corpus of Historical American English, the dataset used in this piece of

36 Paul Baker research. After outlining the method of analysis which will be based on an examination of collocates of the word man, I present the results. The chapter ends with a discussion of the results, relating them to social context, as well as implications arising from them. CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND GENDER REPRESENTATION Corpora are large bodies of naturally occurring texts which have been sampled in order to be representative of a particular language (or more often a variety or genre of language). Whereas in some cases it may be possible to collect a fully representative sample (e.g., the complete works of Jane Austen), in other cases, the texts are only a small proportion of what could have been collected, and need to be carefully balanced so as to be maximally representative. Corpora are normally comprised of electronic versions of texts and are sometimes annotated with additional linguistic information (for example, each word may be assigned a part-of-speech ‘tag’ which labels it according to whether it is a noun, verb, or adjective). Analysis is conducted via specialist software which derives frequency information about the linguistic features and patterns in the corpus, as well as sorting and presenting data in ways that make it easier for humans to identify more complex patterns. Common corpus analysis procedures involve the creation of frequency lists (which allow analysts to focus on the most frequent words, fixed sequences of words, or combinations of words and tags), keyword lists (which compare two corpora together and identify statistically frequent words in each), and collocations (which identify which words are likely to co-occur next to or near to each other). In referring to collocation, John R. Firth (1957) famously said that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (11). Other tools can be used to analyse dispersion of a particular feature across a text, whereas a concordance search presents a sortable table containing every occurrence of a word or phrase within a few words of its immediate context. Research which combines corpus linguistics and gender representation is a relatively new field, although several papers have demonstrated the utility of this method. An early example is Kjellmer (1986), who used two corpora called Brown and LOB, which each consisted of a million words of written published English from 1961, taken from American and British English respectively. Kjellmer looked at the frequencies of different male and female pronouns as well as the terms man, woman, and their plurals, finding that the male terms were all more frequent than the female terms, which suggested an overall bias towards males in the corpora. Sigley and Holmes (2002) also compared the Brown-LOB 1961 corpora with equivalent corpora from the early 1990s, finding that over time there had been reductions in the use of sexist suffixes such as -ess and -ette, the ‘pseudo-polite’ lady/ ladies, and the pseudo-generic man.

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 37 Baker (2010) updated and expanded this research by including British English versions of corpora from 1931 and 2006 and examining other phenomena like terms of address. I found that while Ms continued to be very rare, the male equivalent Mr was steadily declining, which may eventually result in the unequal gender title system disappearing. I also found that representations of males and females had changed over time, with males more likely to be represented as physically attractive or fashion-conscious in the 2006 corpus. Also in the later corpus, women were more likely to have positive traits assigned to them such as assertive and carefree, rather than negative terms like obedient, docile, and mad. However, in some cases, patterns remained fairly stable over time—women continued to be viewed in terms of their physical attractiveness, whereas men (but not women) were labelled with adjectives which described them as powerful in some way (e.g., celebrated, distinguished, noted, rich, wealthy, grand, famous, top, self-made). One criticism of the research carried out by Kjellmer (1986), Sigley and Holmes (2002), and Baker (2010) is that the corpora involved were relatively small (at 1 million words each). Whereas 1 million words is probably adequate in showing change in frequency of high-frequency words like his and her, it may not be so useful in deriving collocational information about nouns. The benefit of using a large corpus is demonstrated by Pearce (2008) who employed the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC; mainly containing texts from the early 1990s) to examine grammatical relationships involving the terms man and woman, using an online tool called Sketch Engine. He looked at verb collocates of these terms but also took into account Sketch Engine’s ability to indicate whether the verbs positioned men/women as the subject or object. Among other things, he found that men tended to be both the subject and object of violence verbs like raid and strangle, but women were mainly in the object position when collocating with similar verbs like suffocate and violate. Women were the subject of verbs which showed capacity to annoy such as fuss and nag. Two related studies which have used larger amounts of corpus data, also with Sketch Engine, have both examined the terms boy and girl and their plurals. Taylor (2013) used three corpora of British broadsheet newspapers, focusing on collocates which consistently occurred across all three corpora. She found that there were some shared sets of collocates relating to age, violence, and education, although stereotyping differences were also found, and tellingly, the collocational profile of girl was more similar to woman than boy was to man. My own study of collocates of boy and girl (Baker 2014) used the ukWaC corpus (consisting of 2 billion tokens of web pages in British English), finding a wider set of representations of girls than boys, and in particular a focus on evaluations of girls’ appearance (via collocates like wear, blonde, and overweight) and boys’ behaviour (via collocates like naughty, wonder, and credit). Finally, Caldas-Coulthard and Moon (2010) examined adjectival modification of man, woman, boy, and girl in British tabloid and broadsheet

38 Paul Baker corpora, finding stereotypes in terms of gender, sexualisation, age, and behaviour. Female bodies, for example, were described as curvy whereas male ones were hunky. Men were more likely to be categorised in terms of age, status, and personality, whereas there was more focus on physical appearance and sexuality for women. This study aims to combine the focus on a large corpus as exemplified by Pearce (2008), Taylor (2013), and Baker (2014) with the diachronic investigations of gender representation carried out by Sigley and Holmes (2002) and Baker (2010). Whereas the texts in the BNC were sampled from 1960 to 1993, this is a relatively short time period, and over 90% is from 1985 to 1993, which does not make the BNC a good candidate for diachronic research. Instead, this study uses a different corpus, which has recently been made available, the Corpus of Historical American English. Although the focus of this chapter is on the word man, following Caldas-Coulthard and Moon (2010), I have also considered to a lesser extent the words woman, boy, and girl in order to make contrasts with man, and these findings are reported in a separate section towards the end of the analysis. DATA AND METHOD The Corpus of Historical American English was created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities. It consists of approximately 400 million words, taken from over 100,000 individual texts, covering the period 1810–2009. It is divided into four sections: fiction, magazines, newspapers, and non-fiction, from sources which include Project Gutenberg, as well as scanned books and movie and play scripts. The texts are also part-of-speech-tagged and categorised according to decade, allowing the evolution of a word or phrase in terms of its frequency or meaning to be examined over time. The corpus is accessible through a website2 which also contains a search facility, allowing frequencies, concordances, and collocates to be derived. Due to copyright restrictions, the individual texts are not made available in their full form, although concordances can be repeatedly expanded, allowing analysts access to longer stretches of text if needed. In order to examine changing representations relating to man over time, I decided to focus on adjectival collocates which directly modified man. Initially, I aimed to examine each decade of the corpus separately, which would have elicited 20 sets of collocates of man. However, this resulted in a very large number of collocates which would have been difficult to incorporate into a chapter-length analysis, and also highlighted a potential issue with the sampling of the corpus. The earlier decades were represented by much less data than the later decades. For example, the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) contains 1,181,205 words from the 1810s but 29,567,390 words from the 2000s decade. As a result, collocational

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 39 information for the earlier decades can be quite sparse, producing many collocates which occur fewer than 10 times. For example, the 1810s decade only shows 7 adjectival collocates of man occurring 10 or more times. For these two reasons, it was decided to combine the decades together into four periods: 1810–1859, 1860–1909, 1910–1959, 1960–2009. This resulted in a more manageable set of time periods, each containing enough data to give a wider set of collocates. There are numerous ways to calculate collocates, and the online interface associated with the COHA allows two. The first is based simply on frequency of association. Using this method, a word’s collocational strength is based on the number of times that it appears next or near to another word (depending on how the span has been set). Such a method tends to prioritise high-frequency words, including grammatical words like the and at, which is not always helpful when considering representations of identity (although some grammatical words can reveal interesting cases; e.g., but can reveal instances of exception-negating). When frequent adjectival collocates of man were considered, words such as old, young, poor, good, little, white were found. However, these words were also found to be the most frequent collocates of related words like woman, boy, and girl, so they tell us less about ways that men are specifically described and more about how people in general are frequently referred to. For this reason, it was decided to use the interface’s other method of calculating collocation: Mutual Information (MI). This method takes into account cases where two words appear apart from each other as well as together, and gives a score which is higher when the words share an exclusive relationship. Generally an MI score of 3 or above is considered to suggest that two words have an important relationship with each other (Hunston 2002: 71). Once collocates of man for each period were obtained, they were grouped together in order to identify similar semantic preferences (Louw 1993) or discourse prosodies (Stubbs 2001). These two related concepts indicate cases where a word shows a preference for a semantically related set of words (e.g., glass collocates with words relating to cold drinks) or longer stretches of text which indicate attitudes (e.g., cause often co-occurs with words or phrases relating to unpleasant events), respectively. Collocational relationships were investigated using concordance analyses in order to interpret the patterns found, and the latter section of the chapter attempts to explain the patterns further by relating the findings to changing social context in America. ANALYSIS OF MAN Table 2.1 shows the 20 most frequent adjective collocates for man which have an MI score of 3 or more, occurring five places to the left or right of the word. I experimented with different spans but found that five places have a good balance between including relevant descriptive collocates and

40 Paul Baker Table 2.1

Top collocates of man

1810–1859 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

old young honest middle-aged elderly kind-hearted sane fine-looking well-dressed infatuated white-haired well-informed braver gray-headed tallest deaf-and-dumb thick-set good-hearted half-naked red-faced

1860–1909

1910–1959

1960–2009

young elderly middle-aged sane drowning self-made gray-haired white-haired fine-looking well-dressed red-faced thick-set broad-shouldered braver portly able-bodied well-informed bald-headed red-headed red-haired

young tall elderly middle-aged bearded stocky red-faced gray-haired heavy-set white-haired wiry trusty well-dressed broad-shouldered red-headed self-made able-bodied dapper red-haired bald-headed

old young tall handsome middle-aged bearded elderly limping bald stocky burly balding gray-haired good-looking white-haired richest dark-haired wiry heavy-set portly

excluding collocates which did not modify man. Cases where a collocate only occurred in one or two files were excluded because these were only representative of a very small part of the corpus. These four lists of collocates offer a preliminary picture of the different and similar salient ways in which men are described in American English over time. A range of different semantic prosodies are present across the table. For example, age is a popular semantic concept across all four time periods: old, young, middle-aged, elderly. Another category involves descriptions of men’s bodies or physiques: tall, stocky, thick-set, broad-shouldered, wiry, burly, heavy-set, portly. Hair colour or presence/lack of hair is also common: gray-haired, bald-headed, bearded. Other categories refer to attractiveness: handsome, fine-looking, well-dressed, dapper; health or disability: deaf-and-dumb, able-bodied, limping; financial power: richest, self-made; moral status: good-hearted, trusty, honest, emotional status/personality: sane; and intellect/education: well-informed. Some of the words in the table appear to be merely descriptive, and taken out of context, do not seem to suggest a particular evaluation, contributing towards a discourse prosody (e.g., we do not know if it is good to be dark-haired). However, many of the words suggest positive or negative

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 41 evaluations. So being seen as good-hearted, braver, able-bodied, self-made, well-dressed, trusty, or broad-shouldered is better than being deaf-anddumb, portly, balding, or limping. In general there appear to be more positive words in the table than negative ones, which may help in determining what counts as hegemonic masculinity. One way that we make sense of something is by comparing it to other things, so for example, we understand the concept of Sunday by differentiating it from other days of the week (Douglas 1966: 64). Therefore, meaning is created by considering what something is not, which often results in binary distinctions. Derrida (1981) argues that there is a power imbalance in such distinctions, with one being seen as preferable to the other. Where it is possible to make binary distinctions such as good/bad the preferable term (in terms of corpus frequencies) is often more frequent in general language use (see Table 2.2). Cixous (1975) gives a slightly different perspective on binaries, arguing that one state is usually considered to be the ‘norm,’ whereas the other is viewed as deviant or outside. Examining cases of such binaries in the COHA reveals the opposite pattern to Table 2.2. The unusual case seems to be more frequent, perhaps because the typical case does not need to be referred to because it is assumed to be true. The words in Table 2.3 help to demonstrate this point. Of course, not all words function as halves of a single binary pair. Instead they may operate within multiple binaries. So boy could have a relationship with girl (making a gender distinction), but also with man (making an age distinction). Some words may exist in taxonomies (such as the words for hair colour), and others may be (near) synonyms (such as burly, stocky, broad-shouldered). However, what Tables 2.2 and 2.3 indicate is that we tend to refer more to preferable concepts in natural language use, although in cases where we refer more to non-preferred concepts, it is usually because 3

Table 2.2

Frequencies of preferred vs. dispreferred states in the COHA

Preferred term good happy man white strong Table 2.3

Frequency

Dispreferred term

Frequency

391,593 62,682 588,572 166,713 78,790

bad sad woman black weak

76,945 23,439 172,338 119,830 21,294

Frequencies of marked and unmarked concepts in the COHA

Normal term

Frequency

Unusual term

Frequency

right-handed heterosexual blind monosexual

190 358 17,734 1

left-handed homosexual sighted bisexual

522 1,032 1,516 178

42 Paul Baker they are rare or unusual in some way—the preferred concept is (assumed to be) so prevalent in real life that it is taken for granted and not referred to. Relating this back to the collocates in Table 2.1, this may explain why so many of the collocates appear to have positive associations, whereas the negative ones like deaf-and-dumb or limping refer to states that are considered to be problematic yet are relatively rare. I would therefore argue that the positive traits in Table 2.1 tell us something about the different ways in which we construct preferable states of masculinity, or rather hegemonic masculinity, whereas the negative traits also have something to tell us about hegemonic masculinity in that they point out the marked, problematic cases which would be considered to not be hegemonic masculinity. It is notable then, that these marked cases often involve disability. Hegemonic masculinity requires a fully functioning body (which is also suggested by the presence of the collocate able-bodied). Table 2.1 also gives some indications of how ideas about hegemonic masculinity may be changing over time. For example, in the first column of numbers, which refers to the 1810–1859 data, there are collocates which reference emotional or moral states such as honest, kind-hearted, sane, braver, and good-natured. None of these sorts of collocates occur in the 1960–2009 column. Instead, this column contains more references to physical descriptors such as wiry, burly, balding, and stocky. Perhaps then, notions of what counts as a man have moved away from internal to external features. However, care should be taken here before making this conclusion. We are only considering the top 20 collocates in each time period, and there may be many other collocates outside the top 20 which, taken collectively, offer an alternative picture. For this reason, it is necessary to expand the analysis to consider more collocates, and to take into account the frequencies of the collocational relationships. Therefore, for each of the four time periods, all of the collocates of man were considered which occur five times or more and have an MI score of 3 or more. Again, collocates which only appeared in one or two files were excluded. Once derived, these collocates were grouped together, based on the initial 10 semantic categories which were identified from Table 2.1. The frequencies of the individual collocates in each semantic category were added together and the results are presented in Table 2.4, making it possible to identify which concepts are most likely to be strongly associated with the word man across the four different time periods. Because the sizes of the sub-corpora are different, it is not meaningful to compare the raw frequencies of each category across the different time periods. So for example, collocates that relate to attire collectively modify the word man 40 times in 1810–1859 and 105 times in 1960–2009. We cannot conclude that people talk about men in terms of how they are dressed more in the later period though, because the sizes of the corpora are different, and also the collocates are only those which have strong MI scores and are thus strongly associated with the word man to the exclusion of other words. So there may be some

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 43 Table 2.4

Concepts which strongly modify man across the four time periods

1810–1859 age 12033 (14.18%) morality 730 (0.86%) personality 98 (0.11%) hair 65 (0.07%) attractiveness 52 (0.06%) attire 40 (0.04%) body 36 (0.04%)

1860–1900

1910–1959

1960–2009

age 11859 (7.33%) age 11658 (6.23%) age 18488 (12.15%) hair 235 (0.14%) body 1804 (0.96%) body 2175 (1.43%) personality 223 hair 617 (0.33%) (0.13%) body 203 (0.12%) personality 203 (0.1%) morality 109 health/disability (0.06%) 121 (0.06%) attractiveness 95 attractiveness 115 (0.05%) (0.06%) wealth 94 (0.05%) morality 114 (0.06%) attire 55 (0.03%) attire 107 (0.05%)

hair 1138 (0.74%) attractiveness 754 (0.49%) health/disability 467 (0.30%) personality 289 (0.19%) wealth 162 (0.10%)

health/disability 30 attire 105 (0.06%) (0.03%) intellect 29 (0.03%) health/disability 52 wealth 61 (0.03%) morality 87 (0.57%) (0.03%) wealth 18 (0.01%) intellect 43 (0.02%) intellect 27 (0.01%) intellect 10 (0.006%)

clothing words which do not appear as collocates of man, because they also collocate with other words (such as woman or boy). What Table 2.4 reveals are the collocates which have especially strong associations with man. In order to obtain a measure of proportional change, the numbers for each category were divided by the total number of occurrences of man in each of the four time periods and expressed as a percentage (in brackets). For example, collocates of man relating to age occurred 12,033 times in 1810–1859. The word man occurred 84,806 times in this period though, so (12033/84806)*100 = 14.18. This measure does allow for comparisons to be made across time periods with slightly more confidence, although even here we need to bear in mind that we are still only considering the words which were strong collocates of man to begin with, so we are looking at salience rather than frequency per se. It is notable how the percentages and rank ordering of the different categories changes across all four periods. References to age are extremely high across all four time periods (though proportion-wise are highest in the 1st and 4th sub-corpora). Noting whether a man is old, young, or middle-aged is thus a very salient way of referring to men over the whole 200-year period. Age appears to have a complex relationship with concepts of what counts as an ‘ideal man.’ For example, collocates (using the same criteria listed above) of young man across the whole corpus often positively reflect physical attractiveness or ability: good-looking, broad-shouldered, presentable. But other

44 Paul Baker collocates of young man suggest negative qualities relating to personality: hot-headed, foppish. Collocates of middle-aged man suggest physical decay (balding, plump, craggy, seedy) but can also suggest good attire, which may be an indicator of success (well-dressed, dapper). Finally, collocates of old man are broadly negative and suggest further physical decay (wizened, toothless, infirm, decrepit). Broadly then, the set of negative words for old man indicate that advanced age is not considered to be synonymous with hegemonic masculinity (at least in the American context). Another relatively stable category (in terms of its ranking in Table 2.4) is the category for intellect which also tends to appear near the bottom of the table in all four time periods. However, in terms of proportions, this category goes down over time. Again, we should not assume that this means that people rarely write about intelligent or stupid men. That could be the case, or it could be that intelligence or stupidity is not especially the province of men alone, but can be applied to other types of people such as women, boys, or girls. What Table 2.4 shows is that intellect (compared to other qualities) is not strongly associated with men alone. Other categories, however, seem to show more dramatic changes over time. For example, words which refer to morality (or ethics) appear to be strongly associated with man in the 1810–1859 period. After age, morality is the second most frequently cited set of collocates. However, in the late 19th century this category falls to 5th place, then 7th place in the early 20th century, and 9th place in the late 20th century. The percentages also fall over time. This suggests a change: people used to strongly associate the word man with terms like honest, good-hearted, and kind-hearted. More recently, however, this association does not appear to be so salient. Similarly, the categories of personality/emotional state and attire have ceased to be so strongly associated with man over time, although not to the same extent as the morality category. On the other hand, categories which are now much more exclusively associated with men are the body and health/disability. So in the 20th and early 21st centuries, particular physical features associated with men’s bodies are one of the most salient ways in which we describe men. Such words may reference a solid, physically strong body such as stocky, burly, heavyset, broad-shouldered, well-built, brawny, and barrel-chested. They may reference height: tall, lanky, and gangling, or excessive weight: portly, pudgy, rotund, paunchy, and pot-bellied. The concept of attractiveness also occupies a larger proportion of salient collocates of man in the later 20th century. Put simply, there seems to have been a move away from associating man with moral qualities and instead associating him with physical qualities. What do these changing patterns reveal about changing notions of masculinity (especially hegemonic masculinity), and how can they be explained? If we focus on the more positive sets of words in the popular semantic groups in each time period, we can get an idea about how hegemonic masculinity was conceived at that point. So it seems that in the 19th century, a

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 45 hegemonic man was one who embodied particular internal qualities. He was honest, kind-hearted, and sane, as shown in Concordance 2.1. The concordance table shows how these words contribute towards positive representations of particular men, as well as collocating with themselves (honest and kind-hearted co-occur in lines 5 and 7). In line 1, an honest man is also good and industrious. In line 2, he is frank, fair, upright, candid, and ingenuous. Other positive adjectives in the table include sensible, unprejudiced, eloquent, and gentle. However, by the late 20th century, a different set of qualities, based more on external features, appear to be more strongly associated with hegemonic man. Here, man is tall, burly, or stocky, handsome, or bearded. In particular, words which emphasise a large, strong, and fit body like burly, brawny, and well-built now seem to be the way in which people single out men who they approve of. Concordance 2.2 below shows the approving tone with which these words are used. Readers may have noticed how these terms also co-occur with other positive representations of men. So the word handsome appears in three of the concordance lines, whereas in other lines, these men are described as wealthy (line 1), polite and helpful to ladies (line 3), intelligent (line 4), Concordance 2.1 Sample of honest, kind-hearted, and sane as they co-occur with man in the period 1810–1859 The father of Lucy Marsh is a good,

honest

He is a plain, undisguised, frank, fair, upright, thoroughly ; though, from what I know of Abdalla, as a courageous and got an everlastin new country to clear up yet, and if an Mr. Titus Dodds was a plain, honest, You are the wife of a good man—a gentle and An industrious, honest,

honest

perhaps we should say that the truly eloquent man is a familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he were a no

honest honest kind-hearted kind-hearted kind-hearted sane sane sane

, and industrious man; but he has met with crosses and losses in the world man, always the same, always candid and ingenuous man, I am fain to think, industrious man can git a few hundred dollars lent to him, , sensible-enough sort of man. man. He will make you a good husband may hold up his head beside the wisest man man with power to communicate his sanity and sensible man, after all.” unprejudiced man, who has a glimmering of Christian feeling or knowledge, can believe.

46 Paul Baker Concordance 2.2 Sample of well-built, burly, and brawny as they co-occur with man in the period 1960–2009 A slim,

well-built

The face of the handsome,

well-built

Fox was a

well-built

Celechair looked at the

well-built

Her former chief lover Stanford White had been a fashionably

burly

THE GENERAL was a big,

burly

The host of the inn himself appeared, a big,

burly

I’m married to a sweet and

burly

The

brawny

He was a laughing,

brawny

The general was a big

brawny

I guess he is nearly as handsome as the

brawny

man with windswept hair and piercing blue eyes, he was the picture of casual wealth young man flashed through her mind. , tan-colored man, exquisitely polite and well-trained in helping ladies in and out , handsome young man, admiring his high color and intelligent brow man, and her husband Harry K. Thaw though not as large was nevertheless soft man, with nine rows of ribbons on his chest; man who demanded to know whether there was not sufficient cause to raise the watch, man who teaches social studies and coaches wrestling at the local high school man was angry some, but not too worried.” man with meat on his breath, it was said that he loved machines excessively, man—the biggest man here, in fact. He looked strong enough to uproot century-old oaks. Paper Towel Man.

fashionable (line 5), in the military (lines 6 and 11), sweet (line 7), not worried (line 8), and laughing (line 9). Looking at some of these concordance lines in more context, it appears that these types of men often have roles as heroes or central characters in fiction. Compare the above constructions of well-built men, to those who are described with other body words which tend to indicate an overweight or out-of-shape body. The characters described here do not seem to be so central, but they tend to either be represented as incidental or less important in a text, or they are non-heroic. These concordance lines indicate other associations with being overweight: being reptilian-faced (line 1), having hard eyes (line 2), being

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 47 Concordance 2.3 Sample of paunchy, portly, and pudgy as they co-occur with man in the period 1960–2009 burst capillaries in his face to prove it); Jerry, a reptilian-faced, Jared Bakravan had been shocked. He was a small, Quel luxe,” murmured Georges dreamily. He was a Lillian finally called the landlord, a The man next to her was

paunchy paunchy paunchy

paunchy portly

Burghley was a

portly

and been replaced by a

portly

he was a

pudgy

It was a delicate problem, and the poor A soft,

pudgy

Benson was a meek,

pudgy

pudgy

man in his forties, dentist by trade, oenophile by avocation man with white hair and beard and hard eyes. man with a round face. Tom mistrusted his mild and unfailing good humor. , sweating man whom she rarely saw, and though and gray-haired with tired eyes. Automatically, man who seemed a little pompous , oldish young man noted for his glossy exterior and his profound ability to mask his true thoughts. ; middle-aged man with harassed eyes. man was not equal to solving it. I grew ashamed man with no hair and wearing steel-rimmed glasses , thirty-four-year-old man, with a sort of permanently bewildered air about him.

mistrustful (line 3), sweating (line 4), tired (line 5), pompous (line 6), masking his true thoughts (line 7), harassed (line 8), bald and short-sighted (line 9), and permanently bewildered (line 10).4 If the men in Concordance 2.2 could be seen as hegemonic, then those in Concordance 2.3 are definitely nonhegemonic. Their personalities are questionable, they seem unable to cope with the demands made on them, and they have other physical problems. Physical qualities therefore often seem to be strongly matched to internal qualities in this latter section of the corpus. COMPARING MAN TO SIMILAR TERMS It is worth considering whether this shift away from strongly associating men with moral qualities and towards physical ones is unique to the male sex or whether the same pattern can be seen for the word woman. Table 2.5 shows the top 20 collocates for woman, using the same criteria as those used for man in Table 2.1.

48 Paul Baker Table 2.5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Top 20 collocates of woman

1810–1859

1860–1900

1910–1959

1960–2009

old poor lovely sick married weak lone virtuous wronged silly decent kind-hearted elderly middle-aged fascinating defenceless masculine comely true-hearted broken-hearted

sensible elderly middle-aged unmarried motherly pregnant kind-hearted strong-minded good-looking grey-haired scorned loveliest handsomest blonde well-bred comely sweet-faced ould queenly erring

young married older handsome middle-aged attractive elderly gaunt stout blonde plump pleasant gray-haired pregnant hysterical unmarried good-looking white-haired well-dressed motherly

young beautiful older attractive middle-aged pregnant elderly blond slender dark-haired plump good-looking blonde gray-haired mature unmarried stout red-haired petite well-dressed

Looking at the early 19th century collocates of woman, there are a number of words which also reference moral qualities: virtuous, decent, kindhearted, true-hearted. Some of these words are different from those used to refer to man. Man but not woman collocates with honest, braver, and goodhearted, however, both man and woman collocate with kind-hearted. We cannot say though that morality was the province of men in the early 19th century, but not women. Instead, this seems to have been a general way of talking about adults (male or female) which does not seem to be as popular in later periods (these morality words are largely absent from the later time periods in both Tables 2.2 and 2.5 for man and woman respectively). What about boy and girl? Morality collocates are also found to refer to boy in the early 19th century, although, they are mainly negatively described as naughty, wayward, thoughtless, and truant.5 The collocates for girl in this period tend to be more positive overall, although only 2 in the top 20 can be (loosely) put in the morality category (amiable and nice). Compared to the late 20th/early 21st century, only one word, naughty is a collocate in the top 20 list for boy, and the same word also occurs in the top 20 for girl. As with woman, these patterns suggest that descriptions relating to morality are becoming less salient over time.

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 49 A further examination of Table 2.5 indicates that the 19th century corpus data contain several negative collocates which represent woman as at risk: weak, poor, sick, lone, wronged, scorned, defenceless. These words are not present in the 20th century data, suggesting a potential change in salient representation over time. However, some themes such as marriage and parenthood are present across all four periods, suggesting a way in which woman are conceptualised (in terms of their relationships to their children or spouses) but not men. It is also worth noting from the last three columns in Table 2.5 that there are numerous words which refer to women’s bodies: good-looking, comely, sweet-faced, beautiful, attractive, slender, plump, stout, petite, gaunt, handsome. Generally, these words seem to focus more on physical attractiveness than the body words for men, which are more concerned with strong bodies like broad-shouldered, able-bodied, heavy-set, burly, and stocky. However, these are different to the body words which occur with man, suggesting a move over time towards differentiating men and women via physical qualities. The final section of this chapter attempts to explain this changing pattern. DISCUSSION The findings in this study are only directly relevant for American society, although as indicated at the start of this chapter, the United States has considerable global influence. This study has also only focused on the representation of one word: man and its collocates which are exclusive rather than frequent. Further research could examine plural forms like men, whereas a focus on verb collocates which focus on actions that men do, or have done to them, or noun collocates (which might suggest comparisons to other concepts or man as part of compound noun phrases) is also likely to be revealing. One finding which this research has foregrounded is a move from referring to people in terms of moral qualities towards more focus on their bodies. This seems to be equally the case for man and woman, although the ways in which we talk about such bodies is clearly different. A ‘good’ male body is based on musculature, whereas a ‘good’ woman’s body is based on being beautiful. A distinction seems to be made in the late 20th/early 21st century data between men who have ‘good’ muscular bodies and those who are overweight, and how these external features also seem to match a range of other qualities (such as being wealthy, kind, intelligent, or being tired, incompetent, or needing to wear glasses). Such connections help to further strengthen the idea of hegemonic masculinity as centred on a fit body as the body itself can come to imply these other qualities through association. Considering this point from a critical perspective, there are implications for how societies and individuals relate to masculinity and femininity. Despite moves towards equality, clearly, gender differences continue to be highly valued, and people who have the resources or natural propensity to

50 Paul Baker obtain bodies that are associated with ideal expressions of their gender are likely to find themselves even more advantaged, beyond the advantage of having a physically fit body in itself, while others will not. Western society’s increasing attention to men’s bodies has been observed by Jeffords (1994) and Simpson (1994). The trend in referring more to male bodies could be linked to several developments in American society. It may be due to increased liberalisation, so in earlier times, people might have felt that it was unbecoming to write about men’s physiques or bodies in general. Bronski (1998: 81–108) provides an overview of changing attitudes towards men’s bodies, noting that Early Christian teaching had emphasised the body as a vessel of sin, whereas medieval art represented the naked body as a warning of damnation. Increased focus on male bodies has been linked to male objectification and sexualisation, in line with the way that women’s bodies have been the subject of comment and evaluation in the past (Bordo 1999; Faludi 1999). As Berger (1972) has pointed out, men are traditionally subjects and women are objects: “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome—men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (45, 47). The corpus data suggest that the distinction has become less rigid over time though, which is likely to be due to the wide range of social changes which took place over the 20th century, including advances in feminism and women’s rights, at least in American society. As women become more independent and empowered, then they may look for qualities in their partners which are linked towards providing sexual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure rather than being providers in the more traditional sense. Alongside women’s rights movements, advances in gay liberation (see Bronski 1998: 99–108) have brought men’s bodies even more into discussion, with gay imagery also representing the male body as a source of (often explicit) sexual desire. For example, my corpus analysis of recent online gay male erotic fiction found frequent hyper-masculine representations which involved picturing men as confident but emotionless machines, sex as work or violence, and the penis as a weapon (Baker 2005). Yet despite the men in these stories having gay sex, they were often constructed as normally heterosexual, indicating how writers were strongly oriented towards traditional hegemonic masculinity. Another perspective emphasises changes in relations of production in societies rather than gender and sexuality relations. In the industrial West, strong male bodies were associated with manual labour and stigmatised accordingly (Benson 1997: 144), but the move towards a more automated, technology-based, service-providing society provides increased leisure time and more opportunity for individuals to conceptualise the body as a project where bodies “provide individuals with a means of expression, and a way of feeling good and increasing control over their flesh” (Shilling 1997: 71). Trends like body-building (Pope et al. 2000), along with diet control and the

Two Hundred Years of the American Man 51 use of supplements reflect the focus on the male body which is much more sculpted than those produced as a result of manual labour. Finally, Luciano (2000) points out that men’s bodies are used more in advertising, which suggests a capitalist imperative for the change rather than an impulse towards gender equality based on humanist principles per se. These trends then suggest a current conceptualisation of hegemonic masculinity, which is not strongly associated with internal qualities such as bravery, sanity, and honesty, but is now more firmly entrenched in the notion of a muscular physique. One question which might be raised then, is whether such representations will continue to change. It is difficult to predict the future, although my analysis has shown that gendered representations are not set in stone: over the 200-year period examined they have changed, and it is possible that they will change again. One way that this could happen would be if standards of female attractiveness alter to place more emphasis on muscularity. If muscularity is no longer the preserve of men, then it could cease to be such a strong feature of hegemonic masculinity. Instead, other qualities may become more important in the coming decades. Or it may be the case that as awareness (and criticism) of hegemonic masculinity grows, and there are further movements which seek to redistribute power to hitherto subordinated groups such as women and gay men, then the current hierarchy will break down. Time and the diachronic corpora of the future will tell. NOTES 1. It is telling that former actors who have played heroic roles in films have gone on to have successful careers as politicians, including Ronald Regan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clint Eastwood. 2. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/. 3. The classification of a collocate as positive or negative is admittedly subjective and for this study was based on reading expanded concordance lines in context in order to get a ‘feel’ for the representation that authors were trying to convey. 4. Of the three words examined in Concordance 2.3, whereas paunchy and pudgy are normally used in negative constructions, portly is sometimes linked to positive qualities such as dignity, kindness, being gentle, or being well-dressed. These are still less frequent constructions though. 5. My analysis of collocates of boy and girl in the ukWaC Corpus found collocational evidence that boys tended to be discussed in terms of their behaviour (either good or bad) more than girls (Baker 2014).

REFERENCES Baker, Paul. 2005. Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge. Baker, Paul. 2010. “Will Ms Ever Be as Frequent as Mr? A Corpus-Based Comparison of Gendered Terms across Four Diachronic Corpora of British English.” Gender & Language 4: 125–129. Baker, Paul. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyse Gender. London: Bloomsbury.

52 Paul Baker Benson, Susan. 1997. “The Body, Health and Eating Disorders.” In Identity and Difference, ed. by Kathryn Woodward, 121–182. Milton Keynes: Open University/ Sage. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC Books/Pelican. Bordo, Susan. 1999. The Male Body: A Look at Men in Public and Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bronski, Michael. 1998. The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. New York: St Martin’s Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen, and Rosamund Moon. 2010. “‘Curvy, Hunky, Kinky’: Using Corpora as Tools for Critical Analysis.” Discourse & Society 21: 99–133. Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1975. “Sorties.” In La Jeune Née, ed. by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, 63–129. Paris: Union Générale D’Editions. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Oxford: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman. Faludi, Susan. 1999. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: HarperCollins. Firth, John Rupert. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. London: Oxford University Press. Hunston, Susan. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeffords, Susan. 1994. Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kjellmer, Goran. 1986. “‘The Lesser Man’: Observations on the Role of Women in Modern English Writings.” In Corpus Linguistics II, ed. by Jan Aarts and Willem Meijs, 163–176. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Louw, Bill. 1993. “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies.” In Text and Technology, ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Luciano, Lynne. 2000. Looking Good: Male Body Image in North America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Wilson. 1996. Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pearce, Michael. 2008. “Investigating the Collocational Behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the British National Corpus Using Sketch Engine.” Corpora 3: 1–29. Pope, Harrison, Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia. 2000. The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession. Sydney: The Free Press. Shilling, Chris. 1997. “The Body and Difference.” In Identity and Difference, ed. by Kathryn Woodward, 63–120. Milton Keynes: Open University/Sage. Sigley, Robert, and Janet Holmes. 2002. “Girl-Watching in Corpora of English.” Journal of English Linguistics 30: 138–157. Simpson, Mark. 1994. Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. London: Routledge. Stubbs, M. (2001), Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. London: Blackwell. Taylor, Charlotte. 2013. “Searching for Similarity Using CorpusAssisted Discourse Studies.” Corpora 8: 81–113.

3

Fight Narratives, Covert Prestige, and Performances of ‘Tough’ Masculinity Some Insights from an Urban Center Robert Lawson

INTRODUCTION1 Over the past 50 years, a large body of research has argued that masculinity and violence are closely related, especially in Western society, with particular attention being paid to the position of inter-personal violence, aggression, and delinquency in the lives of working-class urban adolescent males (Hall and Jefferson 1975; Prothrow-Stith and Weissman 1991; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1994; Morenoff, Samson, and Raudenbush 2001; Heitmeyer 2002; Rasmussen, Aber and Bhana 2004; Regoli, Hewitt, and Delisa 2009). This research has shown, for example, that urban adolescent males are more likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violent crime, including assault and muggings (Flatley, Kershaw, Smith, Chaplain, and Moon 2010), whereas others such as Guerra (1997), Anderson (1999), and Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman (2002: 82), discuss how urban adolescent males use inter-personal violence to establish, consolidate, or compete for a position at the top of their peer hierarchy or as a means of obtaining ‘respect’ from one’s peers. Indeed, in criminological and sociological accounts of adolescent male violence, the concentration has typically been on the instrumental role of violence, that is, violence used to achieve a particular social aim, including the acquisition of status, power, prestige, or material goods. Other accounts have focused on the use of violence as a way through which males (both adolescent and adult) pre-emptively counter potential threats to their physical safety and well-being (Anderson 1997, 1999), dissuading future attacks through establishing themselves as ‘tough’ in the eyes of their peers and friends. Although such research has provided valuable insights on the role of inter-personal violence within urban adolescent male communities (especially working-class inner-city communities; Miller, Wasserman, Neugebauer, Gorman-Smith, and Kamboukos 1999; Beyers, Loeber, Wikstrom, and Stouthamer-Loeber 2001), they present a relatively one-dimensional and occasionally problematic picture of a homogenous group of ‘workingclass male youth’ who are assumed to primarily engage in anti-social, violent, and criminal practices, the result of deeply entrenched “moral panics” (Cohen 2002) about the prevalence of adolescent male criminality.

54 Robert Lawson Moreover, such research has neglected, or only tangentially considered, the role language might play in the performances of such forms of ‘tough’ masculine identity. The use of the term ‘performance’ here draws on Coupland’s (2009: 588) argument that “identity work can often be appropriately modeled as ‘performance’ by virtue of speakers’ agentive control of a repertoire of meaningful features and styles.” Thus, being a ‘tough urban adolescent male’ presupposes that a speaker will mark this out through specific patterns of language use (in using the term ‘tough,’ I am primarily drawing on ideas related to physical strength, aggression, courage, fearlessness, competitiveness, and a disregard for one’s personal safety; Young 2007; Lawson 2013). For example, Howard Parker (1974, reprinted 1992), in his classic ethnography of a group of working-class adolescent males in Liverpool, points out that Toughness does not just become operational in fighting . . . A whole ethos of being ‘hard’, being able to look after yourself like a man, is displayed by The Boys and other local working-class adolescents. Language is an important carrier of this identity. (Parker 1992: 146) For the participants in Parker’s study, specific patterns of linguistic variation index toughness and physical prowess, characteristics intrinsically linked with ‘urban masculinity.’ Very little is said, however, about the specific linguistic strategies The Boys deploy in order to construct their identities as tough, nor is there any comment on how language carries these indexical meaning of ‘toughness.’ Similarly, in Quinn’s (2004) ethnographic study of men’s use and refusal of violence in Easterhouse, Glasgow, Quinn’s informants comment that it is not only what is said that is important but also how it is said (Quinn 2004: 86). So although a link between language and ‘toughness’ (predicated on the use of physical violence) is assumed to exist, it is an implicit association which is not fully explored in these studies. Indeed, very few researchers have focused on the intersection of language, masculinities, and violence, limiting our understanding of the dynamic construction of urban adolescent masculine identities, and more specifically, the role that language plays in discursively constructing ‘tough’ masculine identities. Moreover, there is a lack of contemporary research on working-class masculinities, especially within a sociolinguistic framework, with the field of language and masculinity studies typically focusing primarily on speakers from middle-class backgrounds (although see Labov 1972; Cheshire 1982; Milroy 1987; Hewitt 1997 for some important exceptions). This chapter addresses these gaps in the literature by presenting a critical evaluation of the tripartite of language, masculinity, and violence in urban settings and suggests some of the ways in which we might be able to productively link contemporary criminological and sociological research on male violence with sociolinguistic approaches to language use.

Some Insights from an Urban Center 55 In the first part of the chapter, I outline some of the sociolinguistic research on urban male adolescent language, examining the concept of sounding (Labov 1972) and verbal insults and the way in which these kinds of speech activities can tell us more about urban masculine identities. In the second part, I discuss how the concept of ‘covert prestige’ (Trudgill 1972) is linked to an ideology of working-class male speech as ‘tough’ and ‘aggressive’ and attempt to trace how the indexical links between these meanings and linguistic practice emerge. In the third part, I examine a number of ‘fight narratives’ collected from a group of adolescent males during a three-year ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, named Banister Academy (Lawson 2009) and discuss how urban adolescent males reject and contest social practices which might be considered ‘violent’ or ‘tough,’ including fighting. In doing so, my aim is to show how the adolescent males of Banister Academy narrate their orientation towards violence (Brookman, Bennett, Hochstetler, and Copes 2011) and through an analysis of conversational excerpts, trace how ideologies of violence are discursively reified, challenged, and reformulated. STUDIES OF URBAN MASCULINITIES AND LANGUAGE In recent years, interest in urban male language use has grown, with a range of work focusing on a number of diverse issues, including the usefulness of the competitive/co-operative divide (Hewitt 1997), the discursive construction of urban masculinities (Bucholtz 1999; Lawson 2013), the intersection of class and gender (Eckert 2000), the nexus of masculinity, ethnicity, and sexuality in urban locales (Milani and Jonsson 2011), the role of verbal insult and gossip among urban males (Evaldsson 2002; Eliasson 2007), and the importance of language crossing in urban communities (Rampton 2006). But before the publication of the seminal volume Language and Masculinity (Johnson and Meinhof 1997), very little was known about the language of men or the relationship between language and masculinity. Men in sociolinguistic research were typically presented in rather uncritical terms, with most analyses offering only a superficial picture of what ‘being male’ entailed (Johnson and Meinhof 1997: 11). Part of the reason such a situation existed was that the notion of ‘gender’ was treated as a static category which speakers occupied, with language taken to be a reflection of these social categories. For example, Trudgill’s (1972) analysis of (ing) reduction in Norwich showed that male speakers used higher rates of the alveolar nasal variant [n], whereas female speakers used higher rates of the velar nasal variant [ŋ], irrespective of social class. Ultimately, the use of [n] or [ŋ] was taken to reflect particular social categories and speakers, with speakers using certain patterns of variation because they were male or female. Such a conceptualization of gender, however, has only limited explanatory power and alternative perspectives from the field of linguistic anthropology

56 Robert Lawson argued that speakers actively perform gender through the deployment of linguistic and other semiotic practices (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Johnson and Meinhof 1997; Cameron 2007; Levon 2010). Rather than taking language as a reflection of social categories, a social constructionist approach argues that language is a constituent part of social identity. If we view Trudgill’s data from this perspective, male speakers do not use [n] because they are men, but instead, use [n] to perform a particular form of masculine identity which draws on the association of non-standard variants with working-class speakers and by extension, stereotypical working-class characteristics such as toughness, physical strength, courage, and so on. It is no surprise that in Trudgill’s analysis of speakers’ self-reported usage, both working-class and middle-class male speakers over-reported their use of non-standard variants compared to female speakers. This is a point to which I return later in the chapter. In tandem with developing a more sensitive theory of gender, sociolinguistics has recently made moves towards integrating a more nuanced understanding of masculinity, drawing on developments within the fields of anthropology, criminology, psychology, and sociology. Indeed, these fields have been instrumental in advancing our theoretical and applied knowledge of men and masculinities (for a review of some of these issues, see Connell 2005), with particular attention being paid to masculinities in an urban setting. The first major wave of studies of working-class urban male communities in the United Kingdom was during the 1970s, with many aimed at better understanding the lived reality of urban males, particularly in relation to crime and deviancy. Perhaps the most famous studies from this period were the urban ethnographies of Patrick (1973), Parker (1974), and Willis (1977). One of the main arguments to emerge from this body of work was that urban adolescent males primarily engaged in illegal activities due to being denied access to secure and well-paid employment (Parker 1992: 107–108). It was also the case, however, that some participants viewed paid employment as almost wholly exploitative and a poor return on the level of physical, emotional, and mental investment made (Parker 1992: 71). Consequently, the lack of acceptable opportunities for The Boys in Parker’s study to fund their chosen lifestyle meant that alternative means were pursued, such as the theft and sale of car radios. Similarly, for the participants in Patrick (1973), theft and robbery were seen as means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Willis (1977: 39–40) argues that the motivation for financial gain is a significant component to criminal acts such as theft and that material gain is a way through which status can be displayed to peers. Indeed, Patrick (1973), Parker (1974), and Willis (1977) highlight the fact that competition for status is an important component in the social context of urban adolescent males. Not only can this competition manifest itself through a show of material gain, but it also manifests via more explicit means such as fighting and physical aggression, as well as more

Some Insights from an Urban Center 57 subtly through specific forms of language use, including “piss-taking,” “ribbing,” and other forms of “insult talk” (Willis 1977: 32). Such strategies are often intended to highlight specific weaknesses, including lack of sexual experience, physical ineptitude, or intellectual limitations and serve to undermine many of the characteristics of claimed hegemonic masculinity, defined as the “configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men” (Connell 2005: 77). Since such studies were primarily sociological in orientation, however, there was a lack of detailed attention paid to the way in which language was used to display, promote, advertise, and construct specific forms of masculinity. In one of the earliest sociolinguistic studies of urban language use among African American speakers in New York, Labov (1972) offered a fuller treatment of such ‘insult talk.’ In particular, his discussion of playing the dozens or sounding in African American Vernacular English sheds considerable light on the structural characteristics of this form of verbal art and how it relates to peer competition. Although Labov does not explicitly relate sounding to a substantiation of competition for masculine status, it is undoubtedly one of the first examples within sociolinguistics which attempts to show how young urban males vie for social standing through the public denigration of one another. Labov’s analysis is also evidence of how young men use conversational strategies which can be viewed as competitive, including explicit “oneupmanship” (Coates 2003: 56). More recently, Eliasson (2007) examined the use of verbal abuse in high schools in Sweden, arguing that the deployment of verbal insults and abuse has a higher incidence rate among boys than among girls (25). She also argues that the use of verbal abuse among boys is due to their desire to demonstrate hegemonic masculinity. In the course of doing so, verbal abuse provides the boys with a more developed sense of “linguistic power” over others (Eliasson 2007: 48; see also Milani and Jonsson 2011). So the activity of sounding (and insult talk more generally) offers some support to Seidler’s (1989) comment that “language comes to be used as a weapon for the defence of masculine identity, rather than as a mode of expressing connectedness with others.” Although the research discussed above does suggest that young urban males use language as a ‘weapon,’ I suggest that this is not the whole story. For example, in his study of rap battles (a more codified and publically consumed form of sounding), Lee (2009) outlines how these performances are governed by a specific set of community rules and norms which attempt to prevent battles escalating into serious inter-personal violence. Indeed, of the 91 battles observed by Lee, 84 were concluded peacefully, while only 7 resulted in “blustering,” that is, behavior which includes pushing, shoving, invading an opponent’s personal space, and using aggressive and provocative gestures (Lee 2009: 593). The participants in Lee’s study primarily reify

58 Robert Lawson their urban masculine identities not through violence or ‘being good with their fists’ but rather through creativity and inventiveness in the face of emotional stress. Among rap battle participants and battle onlookers, Lee found that verbal competition was valued more highly than physical competition; yet there were several cases where participants sometimes chose to use physical violence in order to ‘win’ the respect of their peers and/ or opponent (Lee 2009: 594). Indeed, whereas verbal competition has the benefit of a lower social cost than physical violence (Anderson 1997: 18–23; Guerra 1997; Lawson 2014a: 87), it is certainly the case that urban males will deploy other means in order to defend or express a particular form of ‘tough’ masculine identity (Kimmel 2001: 278). In his analysis of the predictors, causes, and correlates of male youth violence, Farrington (1998: 450) points out that “fights often occurred when minor incidents escalated because both sides wanted to demonstrate their toughness and masculinity and were unwilling to react in a conciliatory way.” Although speech phenomena such as sounding, arguments, and insult talk might seem on the surface to be simply an overt manifestation of masculine competition, a case can be made that these forms of ‘competitive’ talk play an important inter-personal function. Even less ritualized encounters, such as stories of “one-upsmanship” (Coates 2003: 56–58) demonstrate how men can use ‘competitive’ language as a vehicle through which they establish commonality and connection. In the aftermath of many of the battles observed by Lee (2009: 595), for example, the participants often congratulated one another on a battle well fought, while in their analysis of conversations among a high school basketball team, Eveslage and Delaney (1998: 246) found that “trash talk” was an integral part of the team’s process of bonding as friends and teammates (see also Bird 1996 and Kiesling 2005). Indeed, Coates (2003: 104) points out that men express solidarity with one another by using linguistic strategies such as ritual insults and competitive banter. Such inter-personal work challenge Seidler’s claim that men do not use language as a way of “expressing connectedness with others” (1989: 7). Yet despite the focus on arguments, insult talk, and other similar forms of urban adolescent language practice in the research outlined above, there are very few examples in the sociolinguistic literature of engagement with ‘fight narratives’ where the locus of ‘tough’ masculinity is perhaps most on display (Bucholtz 1999: 446). Before moving on to examine such narratives, however, I want to problematize some of the key issues surrounding the notion of ‘covert prestige’ as it relates to performances of urban, workingclass masculine identities. COVERT PRESTIGE AND URBAN MASCULINITY Trudgill’s (1972) study of linguistic variation and change in Norwich English was one of the earliest studies in the United Kingdom to investigate

Some Insights from an Urban Center 59 informants’ own perception of how they spoke. In an examination of three vocalic variables (the vowels in ear/here/idea, road/nose/moan, and gate/face/name), Trudgill’s analysis showed that, in self-evaluation tests, male speakers reported that they used a higher rate of the less prestigious variants than they actually did, irrespective of their social class. Since less prestigious variants are generally associated with the non-standard market and, by extension, the working-class market, Trudgill argued that the patterns observed in the self-evaluation tests could be explained through reference to the notion of covert prestige. This covert prestige exists because WC speech, like other aspects of WC culture, appears, at least in some Western societies, to have connotations of masculinity, probably because it is associated with the roughness and toughness supposedly characteristic of WC life which are, to a certain extent, considered to be desirable masculine attributes. (Trudgill 1972: 183) Thus, working-class culture is associated with particular ‘masculine’ social practices, including “roughness and toughness,” associations which become marked in non-standard variants. Trudgill argues that these nonstandard variants are used more by male speakers because “WC speech in [Western] culture has desirable connotations for male speakers” (Trudgill 1972: 183).2 In their analysis of (aw) monophthongization among male speakers in Pittsburgh English, however, Kiesling and Wisnosky (2003: 3) point out that the term covert prestige does not explain why men in Pittsburgh use the more traditional monophthongal variant [a] in words like downtown. They argue that covert prestige is less of an explanation and more “a reidentification of the correlation: men use [a] because it is identified with things masculine” (Kiesling and Wisnosky 2003: 3). In particular, they are critical of how far covert prestige can help explain why [a] indexes ‘tough’ and ‘masculine’ and what it means to be ‘tough’ in Pittsburgh. In order to explain the patterns observed in their data, Kiesling and Wisnosky use the concept of heritage prestige. This idea draws from the fact that local pride about Pittsburgh is not covert but rather is very much front and center in the social consciousness of its inhabitants, especially men, and this local pride is often built up around the traditional working-class industries such as steel work. (aw) monophthongization is a working-class heritage variant and as such connects Pittsburgh men to a previous way of life for the Pittsburgh working class (Kiesling and Winosky 2003: 16). Ultimately, the explanation for why men in Pittsburgh use a higher rate of (aw) monophthongization than women is embedded in the sociohistorical trajectory of the city and relies a great deal on understanding the role local pride plays in speakers’ orientations towards Pittsburgh.

60 Robert Lawson It is also debatable how far Trudgill’s argument about covert prestige is supported by the evidence, since his data from informants focus on their sense of linguistic insecurity and their perception of their language as ‘bad speech’ or ‘horrible.’ Whereas linguistic insecurity can sometimes manifest itself as a desire by a speaker to change their language, sometimes too far in the direction of the standard language model, the so-called hypercorrection explained by Labov (1972), Trudgill points out that his informants actually have little motivation to change their speech due to the potential for peer and community censure (see also Milroy 1987). Following this line of reasoning, we can suggest that Trudgill’s informants who adopt non-standard speech features are doing so out a sense of group affiliation and solidarity (cf. Wodak and Benke 1997: 135), not that they are explicitly orientating themselves towards more generalized ideologies of working-class culture, particularly those ideologies of “toughness and roughness.” Indeed, although Trudgill (1972: 183) makes the point that his claims are intuitively correct, no evidence is given to suggest that his speakers are explicitly aware of the kinds of ideologies which surround non-standard speech, especially as they relate to working-class male culture, or if speakers are aware, that they orientate themselves towards such ideologies. For example, although [n] was used more by both working-class and middleclass male speakers, there are no examples of speakers explicitly making the point that they use this variant because it has “positive connotations for male speakers,” nor does he show how the male speakers in his sample (either working-or middle-class) positively orientate towards ideologies of “toughness and roughness.” In order to be able to substantiate these points, we have to find (implicit or explicit) evidence from speakers that the use of certain speech features have particular social connotations, that the speakers are aware of these connotations, and that they either deliberately avoid or use such features. The first step of this process is to identify the kinds of ideologies surrounding working-class and middle-class culture. Of course, it is important to note that the identification of such ideologies can only be partial; nevertheless, this process will at least offer us a point of departure from which we can attempt to add substance to Trudgill’s claims outlined above. Willis (1977) offers some excellent insights into class ideologies among “the lads” (working class) and the “ear’oles” (middle class), perhaps the main of which is the anti-school and pro-school orientation of each group. For example, “the lads” are ostensibly opposed to the claimed authority of the school and reject most attempts by teachers to engage them in their education, whereas the “ear’oles” (which Willis also calls “the conformists”) are invested in the idea of education and the career possibilities a good education opens up. But the opposition between “the lads” and the “ear’oles” also provides evidence that each is negatively evaluated by the other, since “the lads” view the “ear’oles” as being boring, unanimated, and

Some Insights from an Urban Center 61 passive (Willis 1977: 14), whereas the “ear’oles” view “the lads” as disruptive troublemakers. Willis (1977: 33) highlights the role language plays as a marker of group affiliation and particularly the differences between the language used by “the lads” and “the ear’oles”: The language used [by “the lads”], especially in the context of derision and the ‘pisstake’, is much rougher than that used by the “ear’oles,” full of spat out swearwords, vigorous use of local dialect and special argot. Talking, at least on their own patch and in their own way, comes very naturally to “the lads.” Here, the significance of “local dialect” is important, and we can see how the use of working-class speech features might trigger indexical associations with working-class culture such as toughness and physicality (see also Parker 1992: 146). Willis (1977: 199) also highlights how “the lads” believe that other male pupils have a desire to be viewed as ‘tough’ or ‘hard,’ particularly since such a status confers peer respect. Taking this view, language is an important way of performing ‘toughness’ to earn ‘respect.’ Similarly, Bucholtz (1999) examines how Brand One, a white, middle-class male, strategically crosses into African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a way of constructing his identity as a tough, urban male. Brand One’s strategy works because black masculinity (and thus AAVE) is associated with hyperphysicality, hyper(hetero)sexuality and physical violence (Bucholtz 1999: 444). On the other side of the coin, we might expect that features more associated with the middle class would also be associated with a lack of ‘toughness.’ For example, Stuart-Smith, Timmins, and Tweedie (2007: 252) point out in their analysis of Glaswegian how traditional Scottish features used by middle-class speakers (such as the velar fricative /x/ in words like loch) engender negative reactions among working-class respondents (see also Reay 2006 for a discussion of negative evaluations of middle-class speech by working-class pupils in England): second girl: CT: both girls: first girl:

Posh people are pure poofs [slang = gay] Do you like a posh Glasgow accent? No They talk like that ‘my name is (pause) Samantha’

[high pitched voice, stands to full height, pats chest with a flourish] (laughter) all: first girl: CT: both girls: CT:

(laughter; comments) They think we’re junkies, heavy junkies [slang = drug addicts] You don’t like the posh accent? No But you like your accent?

62 Robert Lawson both girls: CT: second girl: CT: second girl: first girl: second girl:

Aye yeah, so why do you like your accent? Cos everybody talks like us so Who’s ‘everybody’? Like everybody round here, an’ everybody at school I know an’ then if you don’t talk like that you get a doing, an’ you get bullied for the rest of your wee, your life (Stuart-Smith et al. 2007: 252)

In this excerpt, negative identifiers such as poof index effeminacy and lack of a ‘tough’ masculine identity, highlighting the negative evaluations of middle-class Glaswegians who speak Standard Scottish English. Similarly, in my own fieldwork of a Glasgow high school (Lawson 2009, see also analysis below), there were comments from working-class respondents that using the standard dental fricative variant [θ] in a word like think (rather than the traditional Scottish variant [h] or the innovative non-standard variant [f]) was something that only ‘posh’ people used, again reifying the social distancing carried out by working-class people from middle-class speech. Thus, we have a clear continuum in Scotland of non-standard Broad Scots on the one hand,3 indexing covert prestige and thus ‘tough’ masculinity, and Standard Scottish English on the other, which does not have these associations (see Aitken 1979 for a discussion of this linguistic continuum). But so far, this does not give us any information on the extent to which middle-class speakers acknowledge that working-class speech (or workingclass culture) is somehow indicative of ‘toughness’ and this orientation is a key component of how covert prestige is presumed to operate. In a recent research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Hollingworth and Williams (2009) interviewed a number of urban, white, middle-class youths in three cities in England as part of an investigation into attitudes towards and beliefs about working-class youth. While social practices such as dress were often commented on in relation to behaviors expected of working-class youth (particularly ‘chavs’ or ‘charvers,’ terms of derogation used to refer to inner-city and working-class young people (Jones 2011)), there were also many comments about the use of violent social practices such as fighting and bullying (Hollingworth and Williams 2009: 474), practices which were consistently looked down upon or marginalized by their male and female middle-class peers. Given this context, we have to ask the extent to which young middle-class male speakers would view non-standard language as a way of positively orientating towards a working-class ideology of “toughness and roughness” as Trudgill (1972) argues. Why would middle-class male speakers use nonstandard variants when the group with which such variants are most associated (working-class speakers) is negatively evaluated?

Some Insights from an Urban Center 63 In order to solve this paradox, it is useful to consider Connell’s idea of ‘complicity.’ Since physical violence often underpins hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005: 77), and since violence is stereotypically seen as a hallmark of being a “real man” (Kimmel 2001: 278), working-class males are usually taken as exemplars of a physically based masculinity, in contrast with a more technically based masculinity which appears to be more associated with the middle-classes (Barrett 2001). But even though middle-class men may reject or otherwise negatively orientate towards physical violence, the fact that violence is more strongly associated with men than it is with women means that middle-class men gain a ‘masculine dividend’ from this association (cf. Connell 2005: 79 on the “patriarchal dividend”). Thus, middle-class men in general gain an advantage from the overall association of violence with masculinity, even though they may reject violence themselves. Taking these elements together then, we can posit an indirect chain of indexicality whereby non-standard forms come not to simply mean ‘workingclass-ness’ but rather some form of ‘toughness’ and other related characteristics. For example, Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2014: 190) point out that non-standard forms in Glasgow can even come to mean ‘gregariousness’ and a general sense of ‘mateyness.’ Additionally, some speakers may use non-standard variants as a way of distancing themselves from the negative associations of ‘effeminacy’ evoked by standard variants, rather than positively orientating towards a ‘tough’ masculinity. It is important to note, however, that although I have attempted to map out more explicitly how particular variants (or working-class speech more generally) might come to index ‘toughness,’ the way in which this manifests itself on the ground is certainly less predictable. As Eckert points out, Variables come to be associated with fairly abstract meanings, derived from large-scale patterns in layered and overlapping communities (imagined or otherwise). They then take on more local and precise meanings as they are vivified in locally-recognized styles which are, in turn, built on recognizable combinations of shared resources. (Eckert 2002: 4) Consequently, we have to recognize that a variant will not always and forever have a particular social meaning and that a variant will have different social meanings in different communities and at different times (Kiesling and Winosky 2003: 5). Moreover, as Kiesling and Winosky’s study highlights, understanding how variants mean relies on detailed local knowledge. In the case of (aw) monophthongization, the social meaning of monophthongal variants as ‘tough’ or ‘masculine’ relied on knowing about the sense of local pride which exists in the minds of Pittsburghers. Without this local knowledge, it would have been more difficult to develop a grounded theory of (aw) monophthongization in Pittsburgh (see also Lawson 2014b for a discussion of the importance of ethnographic knowledge in the study of language and social meaning).

64 Robert Lawson DISCOURSES OF URBAN MASCULINITY AND VIOLENCE In the final part of the chapter, I would like to bring together the different threads explored here to consider the discursive construction of urban masculinities in Glasgow, Scotland, by reporting on a longitudinal ethnographic study conducted in a high school in the south side of Glasgow (Banister Academy) between 2005 and 2007. The aims of the study were twofold. The first was to determine the extent to which phonetic variation mapped onto community of practice membership (these results were reported in Lawson 2009, 2011, 2014a), and the second was to determine how working-class, urban, adolescent males in Glasgow discursively constructed their identities as ‘tough’ (also explored in Lawson 2013). The first of these aims was principally motivated by the fact that phonetic/phonological studies of Glaswegian speech had not focused on locally grounded identity categories but rather on large macro-based social categories such as age and class (Macaulay 1977; Stuart-Smith, Timmins, and Tweedie 2007). The second aim was motivated by the fact that although recent research has shown that urban adolescent males construct their masculinity through narrative and discourse (Wetherell and Edley 1999; Bamberg 2004), little attention has been paid to ‘narratives of violence,’ how ‘toughness’ might be constructed in these narratives and how ‘tough’ masculinity might be rejected and/or reformulated within urban adolescent male communities. This issue was important because Glasgow is strongly associated with a subculture of criminality, aggression, and inter-personal violence, yet there had been very little sociolinguistic research into how urban adolescent males discursively embed such an ideology in their dayto-day lives. The fieldwork commenced in February 2005 after I had secured a standard background check, approval from the head teacher (principal) of Banister Academy, clearance from Glasgow City Council, and ethical approval from the University of Glasgow. Participants were also required to submit a signed and dated permission form from their parent or guardian before any recordings were conducted. The data4 were collected through recording semi-structured conversational triads (with myself present), supplemented by ethnographic fieldwork in the high school and surrounding areas (for example, the shopping center the pupils visited during lunch). The participants I met during the fieldwork were all from the local area (which I named Altonhead) and were exclusively white, working-class, and male. I positioned myself within the school environment as a researcher interested in Glaswegian Vernacular and this was generally enough to convince participants to talk to me (see Lawson 2009 for more detail about the ethnographic component of the research). Over the course of the fieldwork, four communities of practice (CofP hereafter) became salient which I named the Alternative, Sports, Schoolies, and ‘Neds,’ each of which were differentiated by their engagement in a range

Some Insights from an Urban Center 65 of social practices (see Lawson 2009: 11–12 for a discussion of the etymology of the term ‘ned’). For example, the Schoolies were actively pro-school and positively orientated themselves towards establishment values (in many ways similar to the “ear’oles” reported by Willis 1977), the Alternative and the Sports were more likely to view school as an opportunity to socialize, enjoy the company of their friends, and ‘have a laugh,’ while the ‘Neds’ were actively anti-school and engaged in the local subculture of Altonhead, participating in a range of age-restricted activities such as smoking (none of the members in other CofPs smoked). What became apparent during the fieldwork was that (a) violence was considered to be a key part of the lives of urban adolescent males in Glasgow (agreeing with work reported by Fraser, Burman, and Batchelor 2010) and (b) that violence was differentially orientated towards in each of the four CofPs in Banister Academy. In particular, I was especially interested in how urban adolescent males rejected, contested, or accepted violence and the extent to which this manifested itself in discourse. Given that violence is a central component of some forms of working-class hegemonic masculinity, the rejection of violence (or an unwillingness to engage in it) can be problematic since it potentially places the individual in the position of being viewed as an easy target by other young men (see also Anderson 1999: 16), yet my data showed that some young men in Banister Academy readily rejected such dominant discourses of this form of hegemonic masculinity. For example, in one conversation with members of the Schoolie CofP, I asked how they would react to being involved in a fight with another pupil. Excerpt 1 So if you got in a fight now, (0.6) like, how do you think you’d react? (0.7) 5 Josh: Probably run away. (Josh, Schoolie CofP, Year 3) 1

RL:

Although Josh hedges his answer here with the adverb probably, it is nevertheless a statement of his apparent willingness to retreat from a physically violent encounter, with no attempt at excusing this behavior. Conversations I had with other members of the Schoolie CofP suggested that such a reaction to the possibility of a fight was due to both a lack of fighting skill or ability and fear of being involved in a fight (indeed, in a later comment, Josh admitted that if he was involved in a fight that he probably would not know what to do). This very much goes against the notion of urban masculine toughness which can be found in many post-industrial cities and is antithetical to the stereotype of the Glasgow ‘hard man.’

66 Robert Lawson Similarly, Victor (Schoolie CofP) related a story about him being involved in a fight with several boys from the local area which ended with him badly beaten up. Excerpt 2 Victor: I didn’t fight back cause em, (0.7) I don’t really, (0.5) 5 wantI didn’t want to fight back and maybe get myself in trouble. (0.5) So I just take it, kicked in the head, nutted and punched, 10 (0.9) and eventually they just ran away. (Victor, Schoolie CofP, Year 3) 1

Immediately, Victor states that he “didn’t fight back,” primarily because his main concern is with not getting in trouble with either the school or his parents for fighting. Consequently, he puts himself in harm’s way by orientating himself to the values of non-aggression and non-violence. Indeed, it was commented on by others that the Schoolie CofP members could not be considered ‘tough’ or ‘hard,’ essentially removing them from the category of ‘real men.’ At the same time, however, he also mentions that he “takes it” (extract 2, line 8), suggesting that he resignifies elements of ‘tough’ masculinity to position himself as a different kind of ‘tough’ (in this case, being able to withstand pain rather than doling it out). Such reformulations of apparent ‘weakness’ can also be seen in Zeeland (1997) and Edley and Wetherell (1997), where men who might not explicitly orientate towards hegemonic norms are able to strategically reconfigure their practices within the framework of hegemonic masculinity. Interestingly, however, both Josh and Victor operate at the more standard end of the Glaswegian Vernacular/Standard Scottish English (SSE) continuum, suggesting that how they construct their identities as ‘urban male’ does not rely on an orientation towards ‘covert prestige.’ Victor, for example, uses only SSE forms in his narrative, including don’t and didn’t (with the negative contraction n’t rather than the negative particle nae as would be expected in Glaswegian Vernacular), the [ɔ] vowel in want rather than the Glaswegian Vernacular form [a], and [ʉ] in to rather than [e] (usually orthographically transcribed as tae). So although Victor is strategically redeploying certain discourses of ‘tough’ masculinity in his narrative, this orientation is not coupled with a concomitant change in his fine-grained phonetic practice. Although his use of standard variants here suggest an orientation away

Some Insights from an Urban Center 67 from aspects of ‘roughness’ and ‘toughness,’ a closer examination of his discourse shows that Victor does orientate towards some aspects of ‘tough’ masculinity. If we contrast Victor’s narrative with a similar situation faced by Peter (a member of the Sports CofP who later became a core member of the Alternative CofP), however, we find a very different self-presentation of urban masculine identity. In this excerpt, Peter relates an event where he was attacked by several assailants in his local area yet emerged victorious from the fight. Excerpt 3 1

Peter:

5

10 RL: Peter: 15

It’s happened to me once, right? Once I got jumped off (attacked by) a big group of boys. I- I turned around and smacked one of them with a pole, 5 and then put it down then just walked away, right? And all these boys were sittingstanding around him. He was like that holding his face. I think he had a big massive bruise there, 10 a big massive thing there. RL: Uh-huh. Peter: It was cut at the top and all that. Know how the circle bit? There was a big massive cut there where 15 I smacked him with it. I hit him there and it was a big massive red thing down there. (Peter, Sports CofP, Year 1) 1

Peter:

It’s happened tae me wance, right? Wance I goat jumped aff a big group of boays I- I turnt aroon and smacked wan of them wi’ a pole, and then put it doon then just walked away, right? And aw these boays were sittinstaunin aroon him. He was like that haudin his face. I hink he had a big massive bruise there, a big massive hing there. Uh-huh. It was cut at the toap and aw that. Know how the circle bit? There was a big massive cut there where I smacked him wi it. I hit him there and it was a big massive red hing doon there.

68 Robert Lawson Unlike Victor’s narrative, Peter appears to be relatively unconcerned both by the ramifications of his behavior or the actions of his attackers. Although his use of inter-personal violence here is reactive, Peter presents a complex combination of active participation coupled with a sense of downplaying the seriousness of the event. For example, his use of just in just walked away (line 5) suggests that he is retelling the story from a position of detached nonchalance, a stance not uncommon in the fight narratives I encountered at Banister Academy. Indeed, Kiesling (2012: 6) discusses what he terms “trivializing just” and argues that it functions to downgrade the level of investment of an utterance. Applying this analysis to Peter’s narrative, we can see how he frames his involvement in the story as an event relatively unworthy of discussion and thus unworthy of any emotional or personal investment. This also has the effect of making it seem as though events of inter-personal violence have little impact on him, almost to the point of indifference. This ties in with a lack of concern about one’s personal safety among urban adolescents males discussed in Anderson (1999: 24–25). Peter’s lack of concern is one way through which he can display toughness to his interlocutors; the message here, to some extent, is that tough people do not worry about being involved in fights and take such events in their stride. In addition, Peter’s phonological system shows a number of Glaswegian Vernacular features, including consistent use of [ʉ] rather than [ʌʉ] in roon (lines 3 and 7) and doon (line 5), [o] rather than [ɔ] in got (line 2) and top (line 12), [ɔ] rather than [a] in stauning (line 7), and the traditional [h] variant rather than the standard [θ] in hink (line 9) and hing (line 10). Moreover, he uses traditional Scots lexical features such as wan (“one”) and wance (“once”). Given that Peter appears to be more invested in the presentation of a form of ‘tough’ masculinity, it would makes sense that his use of these features is pointing towards some notion of ‘covert prestige’ (and thus indexing characteristics like physical toughness and so on) in a way that the linguistic practices of Josh and Victor do not. Moving on to examine an excerpt of a narrative from Danny, a member of the ‘Ned’ CofP, we are presented with something slightly different from the type of non-involvement in violence found in the Schoolie CofP. Excerpt 4 1

RL: Danny:

5 RL: Danny:

Do you get in quite a lot of fights? Aye, usuallyI- in school I dae- I don’t run, but ootside of school I fucking just run cause I don’t like gettin in fights, cause if I fight then I’m mair liable tae kill some cunt. Right. Cause that’s how nasty I am. I’m mair nasty ootside of school than I am in.

Some Insights from an Urban Center 69 10

RL: Danny:

Aw are you, aye? A lot mair nasty.

Do you get in quite a lot of fights? Aye, usuallyI- in school I do- I don’t run, but outside of school I fucking just run 5 cause I don’t like getting in fights, cause if I fight then I’m more liable to kill some cunt. RL: Right. Danny: Cause that’s how nasty I am. I’m more nasty outside of school than I am in. 10 RL: Aw are you, aye? Danny: A lot more nasty. (Danny, ‘Ned’ CofP, Year 2) 1

RL: Danny:

Danny’s presentation of ‘tough’ masculinity here is complex and multifaceted. First, he comments that although he does get involved in fights, outside of school he would rather run away from such events. Unlike the members of the Schoolie CofP, though, this is not due to his lack of ability or a fear of repercussion, but rather from a concern that he would seriously hurt or injure his opponent. In his own words, he admits that if he were to get in a fight outside of school that he would be “more liable to kill some cunt” (line 6). His statement here suggests that he does not trust himself to moderate his behavior during a fight. While Danny distances himself from a stereotypically ‘tough’ masculine identity in parts of this conversation, he simultaneously reframes his unwillingness to fight outside the school within a ‘tough’ urban identity, particularly through his repetition of “nasty” which has connotations of a highly unpleasant and physically harmful persona. This performance is emphasized later in the conversation. Excerpt 5 1

Danny:

5

RL: Danny: RL:

10

Danny:

So if I’m hyper when some cunt says something wrang tae me I fuckingJust cannae he-help masel. I just turn aroon and just go like that, smack. Uh-huh. And I’m fuckingI’m liable tae fucking knoack them straight oot wi wan hit. Uh-huh. Even though if they didnae mean it? Even if though they didnae mean it.

70 Robert Lawson So if I’m hyper when some cunt says something wrong to me I fuckingJust can’t he-help myself. I just turn around and just go like that, smack. 5 RL: Uh-huh. Danny: And I’m fuckingI’m liable to fucking knock them straight out with one hit. RL: Uh-huh. Even though if they didn’t mean it? 10 Danny: Even if though they didn’t mean it. (Danny, Ned CofP, Year 2) 1

Danny:

In this excerpt, Danny brings up how he feels his medical condition (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is a predictor of his willingness to respond to a perceived slight or insult with aggression and violence. But this is also something of an ‘advertisement’ of toughness, albeit in a slightly different way from Peter’s presentation discussed above. Here, it is an explicit advertisement of his ability in a fight and the suggestion is that he is not one to take lightly. In terms of Danny’s patterns of phonetic variation, he presents a complex mixture of both Glaswegian and SSE features. For example, in excerpt 4, he switches smoothly between SSE and Glaswegian Vernacular. More specifically, he uses the SSE negative contraction don’t (lines 3 and 5) rather than the Glaswegian Vernacular negative particle nae and the SSE vowel [ɔ] in lot (line 11) rather than the Glaswegian Vernacular variant [o], while at other points in his narrative he uses the Glaswegian Vernacular form [ʉ] rather than [ʌʉ] in ootside (line 4) and [e] rather than [o] in mair (lines 6, 9, and 11). In this excerpt, I suggest that Danny is simultaneously managing a stereotypical presentation of ‘tough’ masculinity and a non-violent presentation of self. His switching between non-standard Glaswegian Vernacular forms (that is, forms which index ideologies of ‘covert prestige’) and the more standard SSE forms is part of the way Danny uses fine-grained linguistic resources to negotiate the dichotomy between ‘tough’ and ‘non-tough’ forms of urban masculinity. But when we examine excerpt 5, we see that Danny reverts to Glaswegian Vernacular forms exclusively, including [a] rather than [ɔ] in wrong (line 1), the reduced form masel (line 3), [ʉ] in roon (line 4) and oot (line 7), the contracted form wi’ (“with,” line 7), and the negative particle nae in dinnae (line 10). Importantly, it is at this point Danny presents an extreme form of ‘tough’ masculinity, one where he points out that he is “liable to knock [someone] straight out with one hit” (line 7). There is no mitigation or negotiation of his behavior, while his presentation of ‘tough’ masculinity is made more socially meaningful by virtue of the fact he uses all non-standard variants at this point in his narrative. Indeed, one of the implications of

Some Insights from an Urban Center 71 using SSE here would be that his performance of masculinity is not ‘tough’ enough, hence the avoidance of SSE features when the issue of ‘tough’ masculinity is under particular scrutiny. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS What emerges from the analysis of the linguistic practices of Josh, Victor, Peter, and Danny is that there exist within Banister Academy a number of different ways the speakers perform their masculinities (‘tough’ or otherwise). Both Danny and Peter embody two culturally accepted ways of performing tough male identities; one is more implicit (Peter) whereas the other is more explicit (Danny). We can argue, then, that the discursive construction of ‘tough’ masculinity in Banister Academy is multifaceted and can be operationalized in different ways. Even though both Danny and Peter are invested in the idea of constructing their identities as ‘tough,’ ‘aggressive,’ and ‘hard,’ both do it in very different ways, yet each of them align with the dominant expectations of manhood in Glasgow. For Danny and Peter (and members of the ‘Ned’ and Sport CofPs more generally), violence and fighting is a core part of being a man and failure to live up to these standards is tantamount to failing as a man (this issue was raised many times during the ethnographic fieldwork). But when the data from Danny and Peter is set in counterpoint against the data from Schoolie CofP, in which practices indicative of ‘tough’ masculinity are ostensibly opposed, there is clear evidence that not all urban adolescent males orientate towards inter-personal violence in the same way, even though the ideology of the ‘hard man’ and its associated characteristics are so deeply embedded in the social fabric of the city. Interestingly, however, the analysis highlighted how Victor orientates towards certain aspects of ‘tough’ masculinity, albeit in a different way from that found for Peter and Danny. Victor may reject violence as an expression of ‘tough’ masculinity, but that does not mean he rejects ‘tough’ masculinity as a worthwhile component of his social identity. Importantly, not only do these orientations outlined above become apparent through an analysis of the speakers’ narrative content and topic but also through an analysis of their phonetic variation. Indeed, by focusing on fine-grained phonetic variation and integrating Trudgill’s theory of covert prestige, it has been possible to develop a fuller account of how standard and non-standard language use plays a part in the construction of ‘tough’ masculinity in Glasgow. Taking Trudgill’s point that workingclass variants (or non-standard variants more generally) “have connotations of masculinity, probably because [they are] associated with the roughness and toughness supposedly characteristic of WC life which are, to a certain extent, considered to be desirable masculine attributes” (1972: 183) as a point of departure, the chapter has attempted to flesh out how

72 Robert Lawson non-standard variants might come to be associated with these kinds of ideologies and to show how we can productively examine urban male language use by considering language use at both the discourse level and the phonetic level. In terms of future work, further research is needed to investigate the ways in which young men in Banister Academy oppose dominant expressions of masculinity and how masculinities are constructed outwith the ‘tough’ masculinities discussed in this chapter. The members of the Schoolie CofP, for example, are particularly interesting in how they subvert, challenge, and resist hegemonic masculinity in the high school, yet they do so against a backdrop where young urban men are expected to behave and act in a certain way. How successful are they in constructing oppositional masculinities and what is the social status of these masculinities? And moving beyond Glasgow, we might also ask to what extent are the kinds of masculine performances identified in this chapter found in other urban communities, both within the United Kingdom and further afield? Nevertheless, what this chapter has shown is that how young men in urban contexts construct and perform their identities as ‘young urban men’ is complex, sophisticated, and subtle, and that a speaker’s orientation towards ‘tough’ masculinity is a particularly delicate sociolinguistic project which deserves further attention. TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS [[ [ = [info] (gloss) (( )) (number) (.) : . , ?

Simultaneous utterances Overlapping speech which does not start simultaneously Contiguous utterance Contextual information added (e.g., names) Gloss of lexical item Paralinguistic item Silences timed to tenth of a second Pause less than 0.2 seconds Speech stops abruptly Sound is prolonged Terminal pitch intonation Continuing pitch intonation High rising pitch intonation

NOTES 1. I’d like to thank Scott Kiesling, Erez Levon, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughts and comments on draft versions of this chapter. Particular thanks also go to Tommaso Milani for putting this collection of chapters together and for his helpful comments in clarifying the ideas presented here.

Some Insights from an Urban Center 73 2. Although as Eckert (2000) shows in her seminal work on the jocks and burnouts, it is not always the case that male speakers lead in the use of non-standard variants. Indeed, the results from Eckert’s study demonstrate how it is the female speakers (and in particular, the female burnouts) who generally have higher rates of non-standard variants compared to the male burnouts. Part of the reason for this is due to the limited access of female members to the prototypical social practices which characterized membership of the burnout Community of Practice (urban cruising, toughness, fighting, etc.). Consequently, the female burnouts express their category membership through the symbolic use of non-standard variants. 3. In Glasgow, the form of Broad Scots used by many working-class speakers is Glaswegian Vernacular. 4. The varieties used by speakers in Banister Academy ranged from non-standard Glaswegian Vernacular through to a Glasgow-based variety of Scottish Standard English. In some instances, I have used an orthographic transcription (rather than a phonetic transcription) for some of the data examined, but I have also provided a Standard English gloss for those readers unfamiliar with Glaswegian Vernacular.

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4

Emceeing Toughness, Toughing up the Emcee Language and Masculine Ideology in Freestyle Rap Performances Quentin E. Williams

INTRODUCTION1 It has been more than a decade since the publication of Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof’s (1997) landmark collection of essays on Language and Masculinity, a work which shaped some of the arguments in feminist linguistics (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003), language and gender studies (Bucholtz et al. 1999), and studies in language and sexuality (Cameron and Kulick 2003). The collection of chapters in that volume was an attempt to think through the various linguistic and discursive practices and implications of men’s talk, and how men articulate their masculinities, and what views they have as men, based on class, social status, and other factors such as race and ethnicity (see in particular Coates 1997). In the introductory chapter, Johnson laid bare the agenda for casting language and masculinities, among other aspects, through a more critical ambit, from deconstructing hegemonic or ‘dominance’ framings of heterosexual masculinity to addressing the idea of ‘difference.’ Particularly, she argued that “[w]hat we really need is to know more about the complex role played by ‘difference’ in the construction of ‘dominance,’” going on to say that “[t]he study of language and masculinities is not simply one way of exploring such a role” but that “it [is] difficult to envisage how this can be done without looking at men” (Johnson 1997: 25; italics in original). Today we live in globalised societies where heterosexual men, their ideas of being men, and their practices are placed under the spotlight and studied with intense scrutiny (see studies by Shire 1994; Bourdieu 2001; McConnellGinet 2011; Atanga et al. 2013; Milani and Shaikjee 2013). As Milani (2011) argues in his introduction to a special issue of Gender & Language on Re-casting Language and Masculinities, it is imperative to have a critical focus on heterosexual men not only in order to grasp the plurality of masculinities, but also to constantly question how, why, and with what linguistic and semiotic means men produce their heterosexual masculinities in various contexts (183–184). This chapter contributes to Milani’s call to question the conditions that enable the production of heterosexual masculinities, by focusing on how

78 Quentin E. Williams young men articulate language ideologies of various non-standard languages (Woolard 1998) and how a particular form of masculine ideology, toughness, emerges in freestyle rap performances. Freestyle rap performing is a decades-old genre of rap deeply entrenched in global hip-hop culture since its inception in the late 1970s (Alim et al. 2010). In the performance of freestyle rap, emcees (artists with wide ranges of linguistic, identity, and genre repertoires) produce clever lyrics and rhymes, and whatever metaphors, puns, and tropes they can create in order to outwit, outthink, and outperform each other. Typically, emcees would duel with each other lyrically in a freestyle battle circle made up of a small audience and a mediator (Lee 2009). This circle is an interactional site where language and local rap identities and masculinity are challenged and tested (Alim et al. 2011); it is also a space semiotically anchored in which the activity of freestyling rap lyrics is staged as a form of play, and where power struggles for toughness are negotiated, contested, and aligned. In the analyses of freestyle rap put forth in this chapter, I demonstrate how three ‘coloured’2 male emcees draw on the language ideological associations of Kaaps3 (a working-class variety of Afrikaans), African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and the register Sabela (the speech register of the Number Gangs4) to perform masculinity. I draw on a yearlong multisited ethnographic research completed for my PhD study, focusing in particular on the analysis of video data of freestyle rap performances. The data reveal how hip-hop spaces in Cape Town are male dominated, and how emcees limit or restrict the staged performances of masculinity and jostle for power (Foucault 1982) to control the genre of freestyle rap. Specifically, I demonstrate how emcees draw on language and semiotic resources to entextualise (Bauman and Briggs 1990) figures, characters, and personae (Agha 2007) in the performance of toughness. Before we move into the analysis of relevant excerpts, I first argue that language ideologies cannot be viewed in isolation of the exploration of tough masculinity, and as such, I briefly review the way toughness and tough masculinity have been addressed in language and gender studies and in the hip-hop literature more generally. By drawing on the notion of entextualisation suggested by Richard Bauman as part of the theoretical toolkit of the sociolinguistics of performance (Bauman 2011), the analytical sections demonstrate how tough masculine performances emerge as a result of localised rap identities and taking a tough stance on stage; that tough masculinity is constructed through fantasy captured in figures, personae, and characters; and that such discursive features feed into performances of tough masculinity. I illustrate my argument by analysing two interlinked instances of freestyle rap performing to show how emcees contest and coproduce language and tough masculine ideologies on stage and in front of an audience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that hip-hop linguistics expand its remit and focus more intently on local forms of toughness as indexical of local orders of hegemonic masculinity (cf. Connell 1995).

Emceeing Toughness 79 LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY, GENDER, AND MASCULINITY To study language ideologies or language ideological associations and how they are tied to the performance of gender and masculinity, especially in the context of local hip-hop practices, is to acknowledge the way in which speakers valorise ideas about and of language use and structure. Language ideologies tell us what links are forged between the use of forms of talk, speaker perceptions about the value of language, and the power of their language(s). Silverstein (1979) writes that language ideologies are “sets of beliefs about language circulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (193), whereas Woolard (1998) reminds us that language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use but also the very notion of the person and the social group, as well as such fundamental social institutions as religious ritual, child socialization, gender relations, the nation-state, schooling, and law. (3) According to Cameron (2003), language ideologies became “a salient issue for feminists because the salience of gender itself in many (pre-and non-feminist) representations of language” (448), and for decades now, feminist and gender researchers have argued against ‘established ideologies of language’ that suggest the differences between men and women should be taken as ‘natural’ (Cameron 2003). Feminist linguists, in particular, have challenged the representation of differentiated language use among men and women, leading to further questions about how gender identities are represented, and where and what ideologies are involved. Cameron (2003) notes that antiquated ideological representations of gender relations had the purpose of instructing men and women on “gender appropriate behaviour” (449) and sold the message “that there are clear-cut, stable differences in the way language is used by women and by men” (450). These ideologies ignored the fact that the contexts of situation and speech situations where men and women interact today are much more complex, linguistically, than what was previously found. In actual fact, as Cameron argues further, there has always been “intra-as well as intercultural variation in the representation of language and gender” (451). In spite of this, our globalised world as we know it today is still defined by gender inequality and in some contexts the language ideology “women are linguistically inferior to men” remains, especially where heterosexual men overwhelmingly dominate gender talk, discourses, and interactions (Cameron 2003: 453; italics in original) (cf. Cameron 1995). Those discourses are often defined by categories such as class, ethnicity, place, and nationality and, when looked at closely, reveal the complex nature of heterosexual interactions across various local contexts. For example, Milani and Jonsson (2011)

80 Quentin E. Williams demonstrate convincingly how language ideological pronouncements in the Swedia media filter into its society and are appropriated and used in heterosexual interactions. In the authors’ study, they illustrate how “immigrant young men” negotiate “positions of power, authority and solidarity” in the school and classroom context (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 241), and slip in and out of “ethnic, sexist and homophobic insults and jokes” (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 241) as they interact with each other. The authors also illustrate how those ethnically Other young men bring into doubt a dominant ideology in Sweden—an ideology of equality—prescribed by the teacher. They argue, however, that this ideology of equality is “an essentialist view of ethnic and national belonging” (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 250), and as a result they conclude that the young men in the classroom resort to “ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynistic talk” because such talk not only constitutes the interactional resources from which they draw to make meaningful classroom interaction but also helps them to negotiate “the local masculine order” (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 265; citing Evaldsson 2005: 764). Recent studies on language and gender in Sub-Saharan Africa also attest not only to the relevance of studying language ideologies and heterosexual masculinities but its importance for understanding gender relations of power and dominance in post-colonial settings (cf. Morrel 2001; Atanga et al. 2013). Atanga et al.’s (2013) volume for instance demonstrates how gender traditions, struggles, and the fight for change are complicated by hegemonic gender relations, discourses of power, and language use among men and women. In particular, the study of language and masculinity ideology in South Africa cannot be understood outside the context of its history of colonialism and apartheid (Hearn and Morrell 2012). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to rehearse how the gender hierarchy and relations were structured during colonialism and apartheid, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that since the beginning of post-apartheid South Africa, gender relations and inequality have been addressed in the context of civil rights, government, and institutions such as the media. Reid and Walker (2005) point out, for instance, that with the dawn of a new democracy, the gender order in South Africa shifted from a patriarchal system to one that “has given way to new ideals of equality between men and women, which are enshrined in the Constitution” (1). But given the constitutionally enshrined rights of gender equality, we may want to ask why hegemonic masculinity is still so relevant in multilingual interactions? Does it have to do with ‘perceptions’ of being a man in a context of South Africa? Or is it the way men dominate gender interactions because of cultural, religious, and indigenous prejudices against other men? These are some of the questions which relate to the study of masculinities that have occupied feminists and gender activists for a long time. Not too long ago David Morrell (2001) concluded that when we study men in a post-colonial country like South Africa, “there is no one, typical South African man” (33), which many further studies in language and masculinity support (see for instance Milani and Shaikjee’s 2013 study on the New Man).

Emceeing Toughness 81 To study language ideologies and their framing of gender and masculinity therefore can be useful when we want to sharpen our focus on men’s language use and performances, especially on how constructions of masculinity emerge in space and time; because as Cameron (2003) puts it, “ideologies of language and gender . . . are specific to their time and place: they vary across cultures and historical periods, and they are inflected by representations of other social characteristics such as class and ethnicity” (452). Language ideologies are thus important resources to understand gender power struggles in interactions (cf. Milani and Jonsson 2011) and performances, particularly in the staged performance of tough masculine identities (the focus of this chapter). Generally, tough masculine identities are associated with physical prowess and the attainment of respect, or participation in contact sports, and are among the checklist of prime indicators for measuring toughness. They are sometimes a driving factor for how men anchor their dominant roles in gendered interactions and performances. For example, to be a tough man means to act in accordance with subjective power-driven expectations and experiences and to exert power over others when and where it is required by your peers (see Walker 2005). More specifically related to language use, Lawson (Chapter 3, this volume) states that articulations of tough masculinity can be studied by looking at the language of toughness, and how it is often associated with “interpersonal violence, aggression and delinquency” as men try to obtain respect from their peers (Lawson 2013: 369). As he points out, men performing toughness typically articulate characteristics of the ‘hard man,’ those men who perform “a particular form of masculine identity which draws on . . . stereotypical working-class characteristics such as toughness, physical strength, courage, and so on” (Lawson, this volume; see also Lawson 2013: 370). For Lawson, articulations of toughness emerge in conversational turns and performances that are viewed by men as competitive and where they engage in “one-upmanship” (Coates 2003: 56). What characterises articulations of toughness are verbal insults and abuse and the goal is always to assert “linguistic power” (Eliasson 2007: 48); because, according to Seidler, “language comes to be used as a weapon for the defense of masculine identity, rather than as a mode of expressing connectedness with others” (Seidler 1989: 7; compare Evaldsson 2002). HIP-HOP BURDENED BY TOUGH MASCULINITY In no other local cultural context in South Africa is tough masculinity more clearly represented than in the popular practice of hip-hop. Toughness, from the perspective of global hip-hop, is prevalent, unquestioned, and almost an everyday index of hegemonic masculinity throughout the hip-hop culture (Rose 1994).

82 Quentin E. Williams As a historically urban culture born out of poverty and urban spaces, hip-hop can be understood as a way of life for many young men and women that define their lives by the performance of its elements: rap (or emceeing), graffiti-writing, turntabling (deejaying), and b-boying (or breakdancing) (Chang 2007). Since its birth in New York, hip-hop has always been a male-dominated culture, so it is not surprising then that scholarly concerns have lamented over the dominance of toughness, the lack of emphasis on the plural differences of masculine identities, and the subjugation of women and their bodies (Rose 1994). It was Rose’s (1994) comprehensive study on rap music that shed light not only on how rap artists’ use of misogynistic and homophobic lyrics denigrate women, but also how the under-representation of female emcees in localised hip-hop cultures and gender marginalisation in global hip-hop persist (Morgan 1999; Perry 2004). In most hip-hop studies, toughness is consistently and predominantly associated with the apprenticing of boys, young men, and older men into the culture and its practices (Sharpley-Whiting 2007). Since Rose’s seminal study on rap, a stronger focus on men in hip-hop and their masculinities has been one of the main concerns among hip-hop feminists and cultural theorists (Forman and Neal 2004; Pough et al. 2007). In her fascinating comparative study on graffiti writers in London and New York, for instance, Macdonald (2001) corroborates many early studies of gender marginalisation in hip-hop, although focusing on how young male graffiti artists position themselves as tough men in search of respect, and how they draw on a wealth of social, semiotic, political, and linguistic resources to make tough masculine ideology relevant. Macdonald’s excellent ethnographic study on graffiti offers up evidence to understand how young men contest and coproduce toughness (Macdonald 2001: 96). In other words, Macdonald not only demonstrates how toughness is associated with practices of respect among graffiti artists, but also shows how the young men in her study discursively performed toughness as their preferred masculine ideology, which was also often associated with the dangers of physical confrontations. Furthermore, tough masculinity is not only a dominant feature in the practices of b-boying and b-girling (Schloss 2009), or turntabling; it is also a prominent feature in rap music and freestyle rap performances (Morgan 2009). Morgan (2009), for instance, demonstrates how in the performance of freestyle rap music young black men perform tough masculine personae in response to the large macro-social issues impacting their daily lives, and often comment through clever lyrics and rhymes how those issues pervade the immediate spaces where they performed rap and hip-hop (see also studies that draw similar conclusions: Pardue 2008; Roth-Gordon 2009). Global hip-hop studies have underscored how the flow of language and masculine ideologies ties into the local lifestyles and lived realities of black men who actively participate in the hip-hop culture, and how those men idolise and very often act out the ‘real-life’ figures, characters, and personae they see of artists in rap music videos. Most prevalent among these have been,

Emceeing Toughness 83 on the one hand, the popularisation of the late rapper Tupac Shakur and his motto, “Thug Life” (“The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucked Everybody”), and on the other hand, the gun-toting, saggy-pants-wearing, Alizé-drinking Gangsta Rap popularised by groups NWA (Niggas with Attitudes), G-Unit, and emcees 50 Cent and The Game. These images reach various localities across the globe and become recontextualised by young men apprenticed into local hip-hop cultures. This has also been the case for hip-hop in South Africa even though traditionally rap music in the country has focused much more on socioeconomic inequality and counter-hegemonic agency in apartheid South Africa (Haupt 1995), and less on language, gender, and masculine ideologies in the present democratic situation. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case. First, rap music in South Africa has focused on the lyrical narration of state resistance, race, and place in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid South Africa, and few scholarly texts have highlighted the nature of masculinity in the local culture. Second, research on the plurality of masculine ideologies has always been mentioned in passing and even though it remains an imperative (see Ariefdien 2005 for a move forward), there is still a need to emphasise more clearly the local instantiations of masculinity and masculine ideologies (Haupt 2008, 2012). TOUGH PERFORMANCES AS ENTEXTUALISATIONS Given the previous discussion, in this section of the chapter, I will demonstrate how the language ideological associations of (1) working-classness and the non-standard stereotyping and marginalisation that have come to define the language variety Kaaps; (2) the violence, gangsterism, and aggressiveness ideologies typically associated with the use of Sabela; and (3) the use of AAVE as a racialised variety are taken up and performed by emcees in the performance of freestyle rap (cf. Williams and Stroud, 2010). I will explore two instances of toughness in freestyle rap performances during a hip-hop show held in a popular night-club. Performances are “critical sites for the play of linguistic ideologies about types of people, the varieties they are supposed to speak and the indexical varieties associated with these varieties,” and they also serve as important “frameworks of interpretation which people orient to in their everyday lives” (Lo and Kim 2012: 258). In the context of this chapter, I explore freestyle rap performances as instantiations and processes of entextualisation (Bauman and Briggs 1990) central to the enactment and articulation of toughness by emcees. Entextualisation here refers to how context-specific interactions become decontextualised and recontextualised in the extraction of a piece of linguistic interaction, a text, or discourse, from one particular space, and its incorporation into another in such a way “that the resultant text carries elements of its history of use within it” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73; Bakhtin 1981). As such, I aim to demonstrate in the

84 Quentin E. Williams analyses how emcees prioritise toughness as a masculine ideology mediated and remediated in the performance of freestyle rap (Reeser 2010). In the analysis below, I demonstrate how male-centred hip-hop cultural practices of tough masculinity entextualised in freestyle performances may repress the staging of other forms of masculine identities. I also demonstrate how forms of transnational toughness circulating in global hip-hop are relocalised in the local freestyle battle space. I point out how toughness indexes the historical framing of black and coloured bodies as emcees lyrically insult and threaten each other on stage. I also illustrate how emcees articulate toughness through Kaaps and AAVE to showcase ideologically their form of toughness, but also to assert registers of toughness of communities associated with extreme violence (as in the case of Sabela). Below, then, I first analyse how the emceeing of toughness involves the entextualisation of tough popular culture figures and personae in the local freestyle rap space under consideration. Second, I demonstrate how everyday discourses of chauvinism, homophobia, and sexuality are associated with the toughing up activity of emcees in freestyle rap performances.

Emceeing Toughness with Personae: Chuck versus Bio.has.it The freestyle rap performances analysed below owe their existence to trouble started between emcees representing opposing style communities in Cape Town’s hip-hop culture in the Northern Suburbs. In the first setting, I analyse two instances of freestyle rap performing based on video data I collected on multilingualism and hip-hop in a popular nightclub in the Northern Suburbs, Club Stones, whose management agreed with a young rap group, Suburban Menace, to host a weekly hip-hop show called “Stepping Stones to Hip-Hop.” Club Stones, like most of the clubs in Cape Town, has historically been a convivial space for the local hip-hop culture. Suburban Menace’s main purpose was to gain experience by performing their rap music in front of an audience in a club. One of the main features of their rapping was the performance of freestyle rap. Suburban Menace formed part of a much bigger male rap production company named MobCoW (see Table 4.1). All the members of the Table 4.1

Members of MobCoW

Suburban Menace Members:

Other Members of MobCoW:

MoB Lil Holmes M.D.K Mseeq (also music producer) Narc Chuck Baza Lo Jack Denovan

Emceeing Toughness 85 company grew up in township areas across the Cape Flats, the apartheidsegregated land outside the city of Cape Town where most coloured and black speakers live. They are multilingual and speak either English or Kaaps in most speech situations. Each of them has at one point or another been exposed to the activities of the Number gangs4 who pride themselves on a form of tough masculinity defined by extreme violence and physical abuse (Salo 2004). The Number gangs use the register Sabela to articulate and exalt their form of toughness in the Cape Flats, and most young men who live in the Flats are exposed to the register. As emcees in the making, MobCoW lyricists perform their on-stage tough personae that often combine the mannerisms, physical posturing, and, to some extent, the registers of the Number gangs with the transnational toughness of black masculinities and AAVE prevalent in global hip-hop. They often engage in street corner freestyle battles, where aggressive, face-threatening lyrics and language use are tested. And although they recognise other types of masculinity—as fathers to their children and breadwinners in households—they are more often than not tough men for the sake of rap authenticity, identity construction, and apprenticing in local hip-hop spaces across Cape Town. As part of their effort to bring the best hip-hop performances in the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town, MobCoW not only gave a platform to emcees across Cape Town but also recruited some of the best rap lyricists in Kuilsriver. Two emcees, Chuck and Jack Denovan, earned very rapidly the reputation as the best emcees in the hip-hop community and for performing the most aggressive style of freestyle rap in Club Stones. As a rap duo, named by MoBCoW music producer Mseeq as You Two, Chuck and Jack Denovan captured the hearts and minds of the hip-hop show audiences and took a chance, one night, to unseat the Stepping Stones to Hip-Hop’s thenfreestyle rap champion Bio.has.it (an emcee representing the Bellville South hip-hop style community). What follows is a transcript of a recording of the freestyle rap bout between Chuck and Bio.has.it. The freestyle opened with the freestyle mediator (the facilitator of the battle), Mseeq, calling both emcees to the stage. After each had shaken the other’s hand, the mediator asked the emcee who initiated the battle (Chuck) to choose heads or tails at the toss of the coin and to decide which one should start the performance. Chuck won the toss and elected himself to start, opening his freestyle with four lines of verbal cues (lines 52 to 54), before he went on to emcee his toughness against Bio. has.it, performing5: Chuck: 52 Uh 53 Uh 54 Uh

(Chucks moves closer to Bio.has.it)

86 Quentin E. Williams 55 (inaudible) 56 Djy sal jou weg moet stiek You need to hide 57 Van vir my lyk djy ’Cause to me you look 58 soes Liewe Heksie (Bio.has.it lifts his hands in the air, dancing) Like Little Witch 59 Met jou fokking kak takkies (Bio.has.it touches sneakers/shows With your fucking shit sneakers thumbs up) Chuck opens his lyrical attack on his opponent’s masculinity by entextualising the persona of a fictional character depicted in a local children’s television show, aired in the early 1980s to early 1990s of apartheid South Africa: the Little Witch, Levinia. This show was an adaptation of a popular books series by Verna Vels published in 1961 and depicts the world and travails of Levinia, a little witch who has a garden, a kitten named Matewis (Afrikaans for Matthew), elf friends in “Flower Land,” and a grown cat who drives a car and owns a helicopter. As the story goes, the Little Witch would sometimes summon a magic horse named Griet, and in her world, she is beholden to King Rose Wreath, whose frustration is often caused by Levinia’s lack of magical skill. She occasionally fights with a yellow witch and her underlings, the “Little Poison Apples.” And when she finds herself outnumbered, and sometimes literally between a rock and hard place, the Fairy Queen comes to her rescue. From its debut on television, the show’s target audience was toddlers, and the language in which the puppets spoke was standard Afrikaans. Levinia is the first television figure on whom Chuck draws in order to mediate the opening lyrics of his performances. Rather interestingly, his point of departure is to tell his opponent to hide away like Levinia (lines 56 to 58) because he acts like her. Stereotypically, Levinia, being a witch, used to hide away, was shy, and always wore worn-out black clothes and shoes which reflected her as unkempt and ugly. It is these features of Levinia that Chuck brings to light and associate with the clothes on Bio.has.it’s back, and his ‘shit sneakers’ (line 59). Almost immediately, we see that Chuck link the flaws of Levinia with Bio.has.it’s masculinity so as to bring into doubt his toughness. He goes a step further and decides to make use of expletives to perform an aggressive rap style. 61 Chuck verstaan as djy wil verloor Chuck understands if you want to lose 62 Want dai’s die skill Cause that’s the skill 63 wat ek jou met kan betoor With which I can put you under a spell

Emceeing Toughness 87 64 Afrikaans, kan djy praat van dai Afrikaans, you can speak of that 65 Djy’s ’n Boesman van Afrikaans (Bio.has.it waves Chuck away) You’re Bushman speaker of Afrikaans 66 Probeer jou naai (Audience response: “Whoa!”) Try you cunt First, what is interesting about the continuing lines of emceeing toughness above is that the emcee opposes Bio.has.it by reflecting on his skill (line 62). He suggests cleverly, in Kaaps, that he would understand if Bio.has.it wants to lose (“Chuck verstaan as djy wil verloor,” line 61) because his lyrical skill will put him “under a spell” (line 63). In other words, whereas Chuck’s lyrical skill does not assume the full magical competence of Levinia, it’s magical enough to subdue his opponent (line 63). Second, from lines 64, we see the emcee entextualise a second persona—a Bushman—that is defined by local sociolinguistic characteristics. Chuck offers this second persona to the audience as a way to read his opponent’s use of standard Afrikaans as questionable (line 64 to 66). To draw on Agha (2007), the “activity of reading persons” is almost always “mediated by stereotypes of indexicality, namely stereotypic social images associated with discrete signs that specify default ways of reading persons who display them” (239). Thus, what unfolds in Chuck’s performance of toughness is the entextualisation not only of ethnic Bushman linguistic stereotyping but also the racing of his opponent as a coloured speaker who fails to speak ‘proper’ and/or ‘Standard Afrikaans.’ Chuck highlights apartheid’s monoglot ideology (Silverstein 1996) of Afrikaans and its varieties. In other words, Chuck offers meta-commentary and “moral indignation” (Woolard 1998) on the way Bio.has.it is and has been performing Afrikaans lyrics, as not ‘Suiwer Afrikaans’ (‘Pure Afrikaans’ as spoken by white Afrikaners) but as a working-class variety of Afrikaans, Kaaps, which is typically associated with coloured speakers. This is followed by more aggressive lyrics and tone as another social persona is entextualised by Chuck when he brandishes Bio.has.it as trash: 70 Hy se ek loep rond (Bio.has.it shows Chuck the middle finger) He says I go around 71 Ek naai vir twak (Chuck faces the audience) I’m fucking for cigarettes 72 Hah-hah (Laughs) 73 Hy fokken naai met Chuck He’s fucking with Chuck 74 Die ouens (inaudible) met dai brak The street-smart (guys) with the dogs Apart from lines 70 to 71, the hysterical laugh in line 72, Chuck argues that Bio.has.it is “fucking with” him and as a consequence is looking for

88 Quentin E. Williams trouble with his ouens. As he completes his round of performing, we see it is the street-smart figure that is mediated in Chuck’s performance, specifically the aggressiveness of the ouens (line 74) (compare Ratele 2001). On the one hand, Chuck implicitly links to the transnational figure of Dark Man X (DMX) whose rap music has an aggressive style and who embodies a (hyper) masculine ideology in his music videos where young black men, wearing tough Timberland boots, hold back salivating bull terriers tied to tight collars. In the global linguistic flow of hip-hop, this figure of tough masculinity has become part of the local masculine orders in various local hip-hop contexts, not least in Cape Town. On the other hand, by using the male Kaaps honorific ouens, Chuck highlights that outside the freestyle rap performance space his opponent is likely to encounter members of his crew, some of whom form part of a Number gang (see Steinberg 2004; Salo 2004: 204). The use of that honorific cuts right to the heart of the aggressive ideology Chuck wishes to associate with the artistic use of Kaaps. He exploits the perceptions of his audience and opponent about how “honorifics are embedded in an ideology in which a low-affect style can be other-elevating” (Irvine 1998: 62) but also how the use of honorific ouens seems to manage or prioritise tough masculinity in terms of “affectivity and conventionality” and “rank and power” (Irvine 1998: 62). Bio.has.it’s response remediated the persona of ouens, its link to Kaaps, and the toughness of Number gangsters, as he performs: 75 Kykie (Bio.has.it moves closer to Chuck) Look 76 Djy’s van Bruinstormers You’re from Brainstormers 77 (inaudible) 78 Huil as die komkommers (Chuck looks to the stage floor, listening) Cry when the cucumber’s 79 in jou hol in is in your ass 80 Want hoekom lyk jou gesig soe vol bommels? Why does your face have pimples? 81 Djy lyk amper vir my soes You look almost like 82 dai bra sonder ’n face that brother without a face 83 Djy’s ’n volstruis wat gebasterd is met ’n muis (Chuck laughs ridiculously) You’re a crossbreed between an ostrich and a mouse 84 Hoekom praat (inaudible) Why do you speak? 85 Kyk hoe lyk djy Look at you 86 Djy lyk soes ET You look like ET

Emceeing Toughness 89 87 Djy moet jou naam change van Chuck You need to change your name from Chuck 88 na Auntie Beatie (Audience Response: “Oh!”) To Auntie Beatie From the start of his performance, line 75, Bio.has.it points out that the affiliation to Brainstormers, a rap group not affiliated to MobCoW or the Kuilsriver hip-hop community, compromised Chuck’s toughness: the reason for this is that Chuck was always seen as a marginal member of the group and it became general knowledge throughout the larger hip-hop community. But because this is freestyle rap where creativity is taken seriously, the lyrical combinations are done in several ways. Bio.has.it accuses Chuck of being the female of his group, crying when a cucumber is in his ass. This explicit reference brings Chuck’s masculine body into question, with Bio.has.it asking why his face is full of pimples; suggesting something has gone wrong; and further pointing out that Chuck looks like an interbred species that looks like an ostrich and a mouse. These comments on Chuck’s body lead Bio.has.it to further associate his opponent with two popular television personae (lines 86 to 88): ET, the extra-terrestrial alien who stars in Steven Spielberg’s popular movie by the same name, and a local and very stereotypical persona captured in the name Auntie Beattie, modelled after a television character named Auntie Stienie who stars in the popular 1980s Afrikaans series, Agter Elke Man (‘Behind Every Man’). Auntie Stienie is a mature gossipy neighbour with rollers in her hair, who looks for rumours in order to spread them widely. Thus, in the same way that Chuck entextualised figures and personae before, so does Bio.has.it. The point I want to highlight here is that the dialogical construction of toughness staged by the emcees demonstrates how femininity is not only entextualised as figures of fantasy (the Little Witch), but that it also tells us how femininity is tied into the staging of an aggressive articulation of tough masculinity in the use of linguistic features of Kaaps. This is specifically clear in the use of Kaaps expletives (such as “fokking,” line 59; “naai” in lines 66 and 71; “fokken,” line 73); as well as the use of sexual image-invoking words (such as “komkommers,” line 78; “hol,” line 79). We can add to that Cameron and Kulick’s (2003) argument that the “linguistic features that index femininity linguistically also index heterosexual identity, because of the crucial role played by compulsory heterosexuality in the construction of gender identity and gender relations” (50–51). Thus it is clear that both emcees make widely relevant the use of Kaaps for emceeing toughness, and this is particularly the case for emcee Chuck who suggests explicitly that his toughness is tied to his ouens’ tough masculinity. They draw on historical discourses to construct each other’s masculinity and throughout the whole performance Kaaps is made the linguistic resource on which they draw to maintain their rhythm and cadence of freestyle rap

90 Quentin E. Williams performing. Further, they put on display the value of Kaaps as a local hiphop language variety that should and could be used in freestyle rap battling and the performance of other genres (I have written elsewhere on how well Kaaps works in the performance of other localised rap genres; cf. Williams and Stroud 2013). We can summarise the above analysis of tough masculine entextualisation as significant in the way toughness is dialogically constituted through fantasy, a strategy for enforcing and maintaining the linguistic power and ideology of toughness as compulsory for local hip-hop performances. The use of Kaaps by both emcees reveals the various ways in which they attempt to exert the power of toughness through the entextualisation of sexuality. No attempt by the emcees is made to distance themselves from such articulations, but rather they embrace artistic expressions through Kaaps to index the relevance of performing toughness in the freestyle battle space. They enact but are also caught up and embroiled in relations of masculine power that subjugate their rap identities and make them subject to injurious discourses of sexuality, artistic humiliation, and face-threatening speech (Foucault 1982: 781). In other words, this first struggle of toughness, or “agonism” of toughness, between Chuck and Bio.has.it stages linguistic and symbolic power as acts and actions of domination, “of men upon other men” (Foucault 1982: 787), typical of the local freestyle battle space. In the end, the above lyrical bout was won by Bio.has.it. Chuck lost the performance against his opponent because of the fierceness of the latter’s lyrical attacks, the entextualisation of the discourse of homophobia well known to be a feature of heterosexual masculinity (expressed in the lyrics 78 and 79), the referencing of feminine imagery captured in the suggestion of a name change (as in Chuck has to change from Chuck to Auntie Beatie), and the cheers touted by the audience members. This did not sit well with Chuck’s emceeing partner, Jack Denovan. They lost ‘face’ (cf. Lee 2009) and momentum when Chuck lost, and for an entire week, clandestine plans were hatched by You Two to regain their credibility as the best emceeing duo. Together with other MobCoW emcees, Jack Denovan rose to the occasion to suggest that the best way to deal with Bio.has.it, and to reclaim their pride, was to face the latter on stage in a freestyle rap battle. The week following Chuck’s humiliating loss to Bio.has.it, Jack Denovan challenged the latter emcee in the freestyle rap space and Bio.has.it obliged favourably. The analysis of that lyrical battle follows below.

Toughing Up the Emcee with Sexuality: Jack Denovan versus Bio.has.it Out of loyalty to You Two, the organisers of the Suburban Menace HipHop Show were coaxed to prepare a lyrical battle between Jack Denovan, Chuck’s stage partner, and Bio.has.it. In a dramatic and strange turn of events that night, Bio.has.it declared that he would enter the bout only if

Emceeing Toughness 91 it would be his last. Taking this as news, the freestyle mediator, Mseeq, announced his retirement on the same night before the start of the battle. In the days leading up to the battle, Chuck and Jack made intimidating threats against Bio.has.it, mainly on-stage, but many believed that Bio.has. it’s announcement of retirement was influenced by the frequent threats of violence by You Two, both on-stage and behind the scenes. Thus, as a way to avoid unnecessary physical violence, he submitted his retirement much to the irritation of many in the audience. The performance started much like the one in the previous section. After a coin toss, Jack Denovan began the lyrical bout by attacking Bio.has.it’s masculine identity. His performance opened with four lines of local verbal cueing in Kaaps (lines 1 to 4) followed immediately by references to Bio. has.it’s sexuality. Jack Denovan: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Is ja Yeah Kykie Look Is ja Yeah Kykie Look Bio, ek is an actual Bio, I am an actual Die ding is ’n bunny This thing is a bunny Hy’s ’n fokken Biosexual He’s a fucking Biosexual Kyk hoe staan hy Look how he stands Hande in die sak With his hands in pocket Ek het hom nog nie gebattle nie I haven’t even started this battle Toe sak hy al my plak But I’m already unsettled

From the start of his performance, from lines 5 to 11, Jack articulates his own toughness as real, “actual,” compared to Bio.has.it being a “biosexual,” for several reasons. First, if we take lines 6 and 7 together, we see that Jack attempts to denigrate the toughness of Bio.has.it by explicitly referring to him as a “bunny.”6 The word bunny is widely used among gay men and women who speak Gayle (Cage 2003), although the word is used here to

92 Quentin E. Williams insult the masculinity of his opponent. Second, Jack questions his opponent’s aggressiveness: he does this by pointing towards the fact that he has his hands tucked away in his pockets and means to say that Bio.has.it has already displayed his submissiveness before the battle has even begun (see from lines 8 to 11). Further, Jack resemiotises in the local freestyle battle space the transnational hip-hop gangster image by lyrically arguing against Bio.has.it as a tough Black Thug with no toughness, that is to say, an emcee with no gangster credibility, a fake gangsta rapper. As he performs: 12 Hy’s ’n nigga He’s a nigga 13 gangsta rapper 14 but this fucka never pulled a trigger 15 Madonna se figure (gesturing over Bio.has.it’s body) Madonna’s figure 16 Ek is in Stones I’m in Stones 17 Ek is bigger I’m bigger 18 Wat gat jou aan? What’s going on? 19 Djy one, one two (Jack moving closer to Bio.has.it as he You’re one and two-ing moves away) 20 Ek maak vir jou ’n poes I make you out to be a pussy 21 Vir jou my broe’ It’s you my brother 22 Maak jou hand soe (Bio.has.it gesturing Jack is just talking) Make hand signs 23 Ek rap freestyle I rap freestyle 24 Betieken die kom van boe (Jack touching his head) That means it comes from my head 25 Bring jou rhymes Bring your rhymes 26 Is djy gecurse You’re cursed 27 Ek guarantee vir julle (Facing the audience) I guarantee you guys 28 Rap vir my ’n verse Rap me a verse The lyrics above are entextualised with a number of references to sexuality that follow from the opening of the emcee’s performance. First, Jack

Emceeing Toughness 93 compares Bio.has.it’s bodily stature to Madonna’s figure (the global icon of pop sexuality) by rhyming his opponent has a meek bodily figure in relation to his own (lines 16 to 17). This comparison of Bio.has.it’s body to that of Madonna is interesting because “the materiality of the body” is often considered “a site of desire” (Milani, 2014: 27). Second, the use of the expletive poes (‘pussy’) is not only seen here as an indicator of “power and masculinity,” but also a display of “connotations of strength . . . [and] confidence in defying linguistic or social convention” (de Klerk 1997: 146–147). Thus, by comparing Bio.has.it to Madonna and saying he is a pussy, Jack produces a temporary symbolic reworking of his opponent’s masculinity: he is not tough; he can be sexualised; and is rather an effeminate male emcee. Jack Denovan’s performance was followed by a short interlude by the freestyle rap mediator Mseeq who told the audience that Jack’s first-round performance was just a warm-up (line 32: “Dai’s opwarming”) for what is to follow. Whether that comment concerned the lyrical response of Bio.has. it is unlikely, because Mseeq was the producer of Suburban Menace’s music and a member of the MobCoW. But this mattered little in the freestyle rap space and Bio.has.it had to respond to Jack’s denigration of his masculinity. And instead of responding in an aggressive way as he did in the battle against Chuck, he avoided the use of expletives or any reference to toughness. Whereas Jack toughened himself up with chauvinistic lyrical content (as we saw above), Bio.has.it’s response was subdued, rhyming: Bio.has.it: 34 Kykie Look 35 Djy hoor jou naam is Jack Denovan You hear your name is Jack Denovan 36 Vir jou sit ek liewendig I take you alive 37 Binne in ’n Stove in And put you inside a Stove 38 Agterna is djy soes ’n houbou Afterwards you’ll be like a vagrant 39 Wat kryp binne in jou eie skel Who crawls within your shell 40 Want hoeko’ djy’s dai bra Because you that brother 41 vir wie ek gou enigetyd sal bel Whom I’ll call anytime 42 om te se djy vervel To tell you, you are shedding skin 43 Die mense wat jou kan sit binne hel I’ve got people to put you in hell

94 Quentin E. Williams 44 Kykie Look 45 My broe’ My brother 46 Nog altyd wie ek is I’m still me 47 Bio.has.it sal jou Bio.has.it will 48 Tot binne in die existence diss Diss you into existence 49 As djy vir my kom tsais het If you came to step to me 50 is djy dai bra wat gepick is deur ’n lices Then you’ll be that brother that was picked by lice 51 Sien djy my broe’ jou hele styl is uit You see my brother, your whole style is whack 52 dai’s hoekom ek gebruik jou nog vir visse buit That’s why I use you for fish bait 53 Djy’s dai bra wat nog gaan stink soos viskuit You are that brother that will stink like fish eggs It is clear that in the lyrical content of Bio.has.it’s 20 lines of performance not one reference is made to sexuality, no homophobic slur is used or any other form of emasculation. Although it may appear to the general hip-hop fan or the uninitiated to emceeing that Bio.has.it deliberately throws the freestyle rap battle, this is not necessarily the case. He brings into doubt whether the sustained toughening up entextualised by Jack in the previous spit is worth the effort. Although he chose to avoid entextualising toughness, Bio.has.it offers, for example, to focus on alternative aspects of Jack’s character: that he is a coward who hides like a vagrant in his shell (lines 35 to 39); that wherever he his Bio.has.it will still be able to disrespect him, even in hell (lines 40 to 48); and that his style is whack (line 51) which makes him easy prey like fish food placed on a hook (lines 52 to 53). What is perhaps also interesting to point out is the following: in the use of Kaaps, both Jack Denovan and Bio.has.it code-switch between forms used in that variety typical of local rap performances and AAVE (“diss” in line 48 and “tsais” in line 49; cf. Williams and Stroud 2010 for a similar example). Overall, we see how Bio.has.it performs a distancing strategy from toughness by avoiding aggressive lyrics in Kaaps and the use of expletives this time around. As such, he relinquishes the power to challenge Jack out of fear of violence and physical harm, subjecting himself on-stage and “dividing” (Foucault 1982: 778) his rap identity in light of the power of toughness that holds sway in the freestyle battle space. It is clear that Bio.has.it’s dialogical construction of nontoughness is a tradeoff, a “continuous oscillation between multiple identities” which ensures “that no clear and unambiguous

Emceeing Toughness 95 gender ideology can be permanently affixed to it, thus enabling it to achieve a kind of ideological inscrutability” (Benwell 2011: 197). But be that as it may, the performance of much more subdued and non-aggressive lyrics worked against Bio.has.it because in the end, it was Jack who won the freestyle rap bout between the two. It was not only a victory for You Two, but also a victory for the remediation of tough masculinity. CONCLUSION So, how do the data analysed before inform us about discussions about masculinity in sociolinguistics and hip-hop linguistic studies? What do they tell us about hip-hop in Cape Town? And what have we learned about the local use of language and language ideological associations among the emcees active in the hip-hop culture of Cape Town? In this chapter, I have tried to contribute to the study of masculinities by demonstrating how language ideologies are associated with the use of Kaaps, Sabela, and AAVE, and I have tried to demonstrate how tough masculine identities are performed in freestyle rap battles. At the beginning of the chapter, I asked in what ways emcees draw on language and semiotic resources to entextualise figures, characters, and personae. I also asked what sorts of sexuality discourses are usually entextualised by emcees to stage their toughness (drawing inspiration from Kiesling 1997, 2007). The analyses in this chapter illustrate how discourses and practices of femininity that circulate in the practice of hip-hop in Cape Town feed into performances of tough masculinity and that a language variety such as Kaaps is used as a linguistic resource to enforce toughness as a dominant form of masculinity in local hip-hop spaces. Interestingly, the data also reveal that the emceeing of toughness and the toughing up of an emcee through Kaaps, AAVE, and Sabela and the activity of entextualisation of figures, characters, and personae is a matter of position-taking by emcees, with the larger goal to win. For instance, in the first freestyle rap performance between emcees Chuck and Bio.has.it, we learn that the mutual display of toughness is mainly entextualised via figures and personae. The lyrical battle between Jack Denovan and Bio.has.it gives us an entirely different picture. The data illustrate how Jack entextualises homophobic sexuality discourses through chauvinistic lyrics that are meant to ritually insult and emasculate his opponent. Taken together, these performances of toughness and toughing up of each other in the freestyle rap space are interesting because they allow us to show how the display of toughness is not only mediated through local languages but also demonstrates how emcees use those languages to reinforce the local masculine order (Milani and Jonsson 2011), be it through popular figures, characters, or racialised social personae. The analyses also demonstrate that Kaaps, the language variety for rap authenticity, is strongly linked to the everyday dynamics of masculine

96 Quentin E. Williams ideologies in multilingual spaces such as the one in this chapter. It is my suggestion that hip-hop linguists should strongly consider not only the dialogic construction of tough masculine selves, but that we also need to unpack how tough masculinity is constructed through the staging of fantasy in the identification (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 114) with entextualised figures and personae. This will help us understand and unpack the intended and unintended associations of language ideologies and tough masculinity by men as they navigate local masculinities (Pujolar i Cos 1997: 90). NOTES 1. I would like to thank Christopher Stroud, Tommaso Milani, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that strengthened the final draft of this chapter. This work was fully supported by the Flemish Interuniversity Council (VLIR-DBBS, UWC), and partly supported by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, the Research Council of Norway’s (RCN) Yggdrasil funding scheme, project number 227492/F11, and its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265. 2. Coloured is a racial category created by the apartheid government in South Africa for citizens not easily defined as white or black. 3. Kaaps is a variety of Afrikaans. 4. There are three Number Gangs in South Africa: the 26s, 27s, and 28s. 5. A note on the transcription: the performances I have transcribed are mainly in Kaaps, with a few words in AAVE and Sabela. I have used different fonts to indicate the difference between Kaaps, AAVE, and Sabela. The Kaaps lyrics are translated into English, and the English translation given in italics. I have transcribed the on-stage movements of the two emcees to accentuate the performance as well as given the audience reactions where it occurs. This is indicated in round brackets. 6. According to Cage (2003, 59), there are two ways to use the referent ‘bunny.’ First, gay men and women talk about ‘bunny bashers’, that is, “homophobic heterosexual males who go about beating up gay men.” But gay men and women also talk about bunny boys, teenage male prostitutes, used in Johannesburg round about the 1930s.

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Emceeing Toughness 99 Roth-Gordon, Jennifer. 2009. “Conversational Sampling, Race Trafficking, and the Invocation of the Gueto in Brazilian Hip Hop.” In Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, ed. by H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook, 63–79. London: Routledge. Salo, Elaine. 2004. Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters Producing Persons in Manenberg Township South Africa. PhD thesis, Emory University. Schloss, Joseph G. 2009. Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seidler, Victor. 1989. Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 2007. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip-Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York University Press. Shire, Chenjerai. 1994. “Men Don’t Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe.” In Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. by Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, 146–157. London: Routledge. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. “Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony.” In The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology, ed. by Donald Lawren Brenneis and Ronald K. S. Macauly, 284–306. Boulder: Westview Press. Steinberg, Jonny. 2004. The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Walker, Liz. 2005. “Negotiating the Boundaries of Masculinity in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” In Men Behaving Differently: South African Men Since 1994, ed. by Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, 161–182. Cape Town: Double Storey Books. Williams, Quentin, and Christopher Stroud. 2010. “Performing Rap Ciphas in LateModern Cape Town: Extreme Locality and Multilingual Citizenship.” Afrika Focus 23: 39–59. Williams, Quentin, and Christopher Stroud. 2013. “Multilingual Remixed: Sampling Texts, Braggadocio and the Politics of Voice in Cape Town Hip-Hop.” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 42: 17–39. Woolard, Kathryn. 1998. “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5

Construing the New Oppressed Masculinity in Crisis and the Backlash against Feminism Michelle M. Lazar

INTRODUCTION The impact of feminism and women’s movements worldwide has brought about changes in expectations about gender relations and, to some extent, has destabilized normative gender identities in many societies. More women are entering the paid workforce, and the possibility for leading diverse and fulfilling lives as a result of greater choices and economic independence is opening up for some women. At the same time, men are expected to treat women as equal, participate more fully in domestic responsibilities, including childcare, and develop greater emotional literacy skills. Although patriarchal assumptions and dominant forms of masculinity are constantly subjected to feminist challenge, patriarchy as an entrenched ideological system based on male dominance and privilege, is far from ended. As Segal (2006) notes, men still enjoy overwhelmingly greater access to cultural prestige, political authority, corporate power, individual wealth, and material comforts, compared to women in all parts of the world. The patriarchal system securing ‘men’ in social power, therefore, may have been dented, but hardly substantially dismantled. Offering a nuanced argument, Segal (2006: 273) usefully writes: Of course, it is only particular groups of men in any society who will occupy positions of public power and influence. But this is precisely what secures rather than undermines the hierarchical structuring of gender through relations of dominance: the symbolic equation of “masculinity” with power and “femininity” with powerlessness. (Original emphases) Although only ripples in a sea, the changing patterns of gender arising from feminism have been met with a variety of responses. Undoubtedly, individually, some men have strived to adjust to these changes, although as Connell (1995: 136) notes, they may at times also risk experiencing “gender vertigo” or a sense of existential confusion. Some institutions adopt co-optative measures to “re-make” hegemonic gender relations in present times, by selectively aligning with a rhetoric of progressivism without fundamentally challenging

Construing the New Oppressed 101 dominant masculinity in discourse as well as in policy (Lazar 2005). Yet another response, which is the focus of this chapter, is the well-documented growing reactionary “backlash,” by individuals and institutions, against feminism and women (Faludi 1991). Advocates of the backlash react negatively to feminism as they see the hetero-patriarchal privilege of masculinity undermined by the push for greater gender equality and the threat of women living more meaningful and successful lives with or without men. These men feel threatened that the world is “changing too fast;” that on the one hand, they are being “left behind,” and on the other hand, there’s a sense of the “future being female” (Beynon 2002: 85, 78). Yet, Faludi (1991: 14) describes the antifeminist backlash as a “preemptive strike” against the achievement of comprehensive gender equality. She cites feminist psychologist Jean Baker Miller as saying: [B]acklashes occur when advances have been small, before changes are sufficient to help many people . . . It is almost as if the leaders of backlashes use the fear of change as a threat before major change has occurred. Anxieties about feminism and rising expectations of women have mobilized within the backlash movement a ‘crisis-in-masculinity’ sensibility. Widely discussed in populist and academic circles alike, the masculinity-incrisis thesis is based on the perception that men as a group are somehow in deep crisis due to an undermining of their social position. The argument follows that this has led generally to men’s sense of powerlessness, confusion, and uncertainty, which has manifested itself across a whole spectrum of social life—in crime, family breakdown, domestic violence, ill health, suicide, education, and work (Beynon 2002; Edwards 2006). Where the crisis tendencies are aligned with an antifeminist backlash position, feminism is squarely blamed for the symptomatic ills experienced by men, who feel gravely wronged by feminism and women. Yet, scholars researching masculinity agree that although some men in some situations may experience some kind of crisis, this does not equate with an overall crisis in masculinity, as a set of characteristics, values, and dispositions (Brittan 1989; Edwards 2006: 4). Beynon (2002: 76) observes that even though men, either individually or in groups, may express crisis tendencies, their general sense of masculinity can, nevertheless, remain relatively secure. In this chapter, my focus is on the antifeminist backlash discourse in the Singapore context. Specifically, I examine the masculinity-in-crisis sensibility evident in the construal of heterosexual men as the new socially oppressed in Singapore in a series of blog posts on Yahoo in 2010. The posts were written in reaction to Yahoo News’ re-posting of a letter that Singapore’s sole feminist group, AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research),1 had published in the nation’s main daily The Straits Times, on May 20, 2010. In the letter, AWARE posited that the reason why Singapore has not

102 Michelle M. Lazar been successful in reversing declining total fertility rate trends in the country is because of a lack of comprehensive gender equality. AWARE argued that although in the last 30 years, significant numbers of Singaporean women have entered the workplace and that proportionately more women than men have attained tertiary level education, “fathers here are not rising to the task of child-rearing [at the same rate], and state support for equal parenting roles is not adequate,” which makes child-rearing an unattractive option for women. The letter concluded with several suggestions put forth to the government by AWARE, which included increasing paternity leave and flexiwork arrangements, extending family-friendly benefits to men, and supporting active fathering practices. In response to Yahoo’s posting of AWARE’s letter, more than a thousand blog posts were received on the online Yahoo news site over the next few days. These posts I categorized according to their ideological stances in relation to AWARE’s feminist position, amongst which was the category of an antifeminist position, that is, oppositional to AWARE and its position. In this chapter, I discuss a slice of a much larger antifeminist discourse that emerged from the blog posts. In particular, I selected the segment of data that dealt with construals of men as the oppressed gender in Singapore, exhibiting a backlash masculinity-in-crisis’ tendency.2 The analysis is guided by a feminist critical discourse perspective (Lazar 2005), which in this case is interested in the contradiction of an antifeminist backlash discourse, which presents men as victims in a system that otherwise continues to privilege them as a social group. As Segal (2006) put it, “men appear to be emerging as the threatened sex; even as they remain, everywhere, the threatening sex, as well” (272). The analysis shows how the bloggers represent personal discontent as a wider crisis affecting men in Singapore generally, and how that is used strategically as a backlash targeted at feminism and women in Singapore. In analyzing the backlash, the construal of men as the new oppressed is necessarily viewed vis-à-vis how women and feminism are also represented. CONSTRUING MEN AS THE NEW OPPRESSED In the antifeminist backlash discourse, there are several interrelated arguments by which the case of men’s oppression is made in the blog posts. These are discussed below in terms of claims of reverse sexism and gender inequality; a discourse of rights, in which men are seen to lack and, therefore, demand them; and the representation of patriarchy as disadvantaging men, while benefitting women.

Reverse Sexism and Gender Inequality The basic feminist premise about women’s social gender inequality is appropriated to describe the present situation of Singaporean men.

Construing the New Oppressed 103 (1) Yes! I totally agree it’s gender inequality and much more! Singaporean men are extremely unfairly treated indeed!!! (62:30 Tired Nuts) (2) I for one believe there is gender inequity in SG [Singapore], that is, men are the discriminated sex. (161: 1 skipper) These statements begin by seemingly aligning with AWARE’s feminist position that gender inequality remains a pertinent concern in Singapore. However, the bloggers use the strategy of apparent agreement for ironic effect, by substituting men as the unexpected subject of the continuing assertive clauses. Highly explicit subjective modalization from the first person point of view (“I totally agree”; “I . . . believe”), together with the emphatic “yes” and multiple exclamation points in (1), signal strong personal conviction for these views. In appropriating and reversing the claims of gender inequality for men, feminist claims of women’s societal subordination get abrogated. A sense of injustice underlies bloggers’ complaints in having to adjust to new and multiple gender roles. (3) i a father to be soon..take cares of everything in the house/cook/clean/ arrange . . . den what? we male no rights is it? (13:42 Desmond) (4) we men have to shoulder all the burdens like taking care of the baby when she goes outing, nightout and stuff? And most of them are spending more than what they earn. And it’s not possible for us men to shoulder all financial burdens. This can be very stressful to us men. Tell me, how to make more babies? [. . .] So please don’t question us “MEN”. (123: 42 Cao Eng Huat) (5) Yeah.. greater gender equality.. for guys u mean? If you talk about gender equality, what is so unequal about guy and girl’s role in singapore? Do you see: How many guys are carrying girls bag on the street? How many girls expect guys to pay for their meal? How many father pushing around baby cart while women shop? Well these are just a few of what our women expect from us nowadays. So although guys are born to be physically stronger, we are not living in iceage, muscle don’t count, so stop talking about gender equality AWARE! (183: 10 VC) On the one hand, men have to fulfill traditional expectations as financial providers (“shoulder all financial burdens” (4); “pay for their [dates’] meals”) as well as behave chivalrously (“carrying girls bag [their girlfriends’ bags] on the street”). Yet, on the other hand, men are expected to assume domestic responsibilities as well (“takes care[s] of everything in the house/ cook/clean/arrange” (3); “taking care of the baby” (4); and “father pushing around baby cart” (5)). VC in example 5 provides an instance of the multiple expectations placed upon men in the mixed list of questions raised: “How

104 Michelle M. Lazar many guys are carrying girls bag on the street? How many girls expect guys to pay for their meal? How many father pushing around baby cart while women shop?” The expectations are construed as arduous, as implied in VC’s grudging comment that “these are just a few” of what Singaporean women expect of men today. VC readily acknowledges that expectations have changed with the times in his reflexive comment that “although guys are born to be physically stronger, we are not living in [an] iceage, muscle don’t count.” In pointing out that the leverage men traditionally had over women based on physical strength is eroded, VC is claiming a changed reality in which men already are fully participative in ‘modern’ roles. For this reason, VC objects to AWARE’s harping on the equality issue as unwarranted. In this changed reality, men not only assume multiple roles, but they are required to perform the roles wholly. Note the inclusive noun phrase “everything” and the quantifier of totality “all” in “takes care of everything” (3); “have to shoulder all the burdens like taking care of the baby . . . all financial burdens.” The unfairness is compounded by a contrastive situation whereby women are represented as indulging themselves in leisure pursuits instead (“she goes outing, nightout and stuff . . . spending more than what she earns” (4); “while women shop” (5)). The generalization of social actors, largely, through the collective pronouns “we male”/”us men”/”our women”/”them,” suggests that the situation described in the posts are not merely the adjustment concerns of individual men, but involves wider shifts in Singapore’s gender order itself. In this new gender order, however, the multiple role expectations on men are emphasized, whereas the multiple responsibilities shouldered by women get erased. In the new gender order, Singaporean men have become the new oppressed. (6) Women have AWARE and the law behind them but what about the men who enter workforce later and are expected to pick up traditional paternal roles as well as modern roles? They are under represented and often at a disadvantage when it comes to fulfilling societal and women’s increasing high demands and expectations. Men are humans and suffer post natal depression too, esp if he becomes the sole breadwinner as a result after a child’s birth!! (171: 30 UnderRepresentedMen) (7) This smacks of sexism. If a prominent men’s organisation said something perceived as sexist, the next thing we know, AWARE will be up in arms. But when they themselves say something disparaging to men, what recourse do men have? Where can we complain about sexist remarks against men? (149: 15 skipper) (8) In modern times, we talked about gender equality but in reality it should be gender equality imbalance. [. . .] so much law are now in place to protect “women’s rights” we men are left vulnerable. Who looked into our interest? our needs? our well being? our psychological well being? (216: 8 DC80)

Construing the New Oppressed 105 The language of oppression is indexed in such phrases as “at a disadvantage” (6), “sexism/sexist” (7), and “left vulnerable” (8). (See also “extremely unfairly treated” (1) and “discriminated sex” (2)). The language commonly associated with women’s social inequality, therefore, is now claimed by Singaporean men to describe their own situations. So, too, the experience of being “under represented” (6) and silenced in public discourse (7). The term ‘sexism,’ for instance, was coined by (Western) feminists to name a social practice experienced systematically by women in patriarchal societies (Spender 1978), which has given some women in some societies, including Singapore, recourse to take legal action. In example (7) AWARE’s comment about men not assuming equal responsibility in the home is construed by this blogger as a sexist statement against men. By using the terms “sexism”/”sexist” to refer to the disadvantaging of men in this case, AWARE, a women’s organization, is thus represented as a bully. The latter is especially pronounced because, unlike Singaporean women nowadays, men lack institutional avenues to seek redress against sexism, and it is particularly challenging when the defendant in this case is a feminist organization itself. The duplication of questions “what recourse do men have? Where can we complain about sexist remarks against men?” expresses the helplessness of being silenced, no less by AWARE. Psychological effects that beset men in a crisis of masculinity have been well documented (Horrocks 1994; Clare 2000). In these blog posts, the psychological strain of oppression on men is described in terms commonly used by and for women in having to meet patriarchal demands: “suffer postnatal depression” (6), “our psychological well-being” (6), and “very stressful” (4). Interestingly, in (6), post-natal depression, a condition commonly associated with new mothers, is universalized as a gender-inclusive human experience, and claimed by men as well: “Men are humans and suffer from post-natal depression too.” The psychological suffering of men is allegedly brought about by the unreasonable expectations and behavior of women, and the men’s exasperation at this is signaled (as in 7) through the multiplication of questions: “Who looked into our interest? our needs? our well being? our psychological well being?” (8)

The Lack of Rights and Demand for Representation The reversal in gender inequality where Singaporean men, in general, are the new oppressed also draws expressly on a rights discourse, which is the focus of this section. The following examples comment on men’s lack of rights in Singapore. (9) What the hell is wrong with women nowadays???? The law is too sided with women already. Men has completely no RIGHTS! even my lawyers agree with that statement right in my face. (55:11 Alex)

106 Michelle M. Lazar (10) No rights for men i guess. AWARE shld know better. (148: 12 Ang. shirt): (11) Modern women just want their way, and men just have to give in?? Is there place for men to fight for their rights?? (149: 18 Trevor) (12) Pls lah,Open your eyes BIG & see how men are being treated in Singapore. Men’s rights in SINGAPORE are the worst. (183: 9 jasmine) Whereas in (9) and (10) rather strong claims are made, through negation, of men’s deprivation of rights, in (11) and (12) the nominal phrases “their rights”/”Men’s rights” presuppose that men have rights; however, their rights have been suppressed or subsumed by women’s rights. The rationality underlying these claims, generally, is a zero-sum game concerning gender relations. References to women of today (“women nowadays” (9) and “modern women” (11)) which seem to index some sort of privilege—the availability of legal support for women (9), and having a feminist lobby (10)—are construed in terms of an erosion of rights for men. This is a view not only of male bloggers, but also held by some women. Post (12) by “jasmine” is ostensibly posted by a woman, voicing displeasure on behalf of her male partner who is legally bound to pay alimony to his former wife. Using a colloquial expression, “open your eyes big” (meaning ‘to take notice’), jasmine’s post implies that the dire situation concerning Singaporean men is something not commonly known and in need of attention. She makes the plea using a local expression of exasperation—“Pls lah” (“please lah”)—and then categorically assesses the state of men’s rights in Singapore to be the worst. The repeated reference to location “in Singapore” focuses attention on the particularly abysmal state of affairs of local men. At the same time, by referencing Singapore, it becomes possible to frame personal discontent in terms of a wider national concern. The lack of men’s rights in Singapore is tied to the lack of a lobby group to represent men as a constituency. (13) Just like man, we do not have any organization to protect our interest. We just endure and bite our teeth together to bring food home on the table. (135: 26 John) (14) Men don’t have an organisation to specifically address discrimination against their sex, whilst women do. Isn’t that already inequality in action? (161: 1 skipper) The lack is expressed through negative polarity contained in the relational process of possession—“we do not have any organisation” and “men don’t have an organisation.” The purpose for which such an organization is needed is explained in the postmodifying embedded non-finite clauses of purpose: “to protect our interest” and “to specifically address discrimination against their sex.” The lack of a men’s lobby is construed cynically in

Construing the New Oppressed 107 (13), where the expression “Just like man” suggests a lack of surprise, and whose lack of representation renders them as voiceless and powerless. The absence of a men’s group is also construed accusatorily, in the form of a rhetorical question, as evidence for men’s inequality status in (14). Several bloggers, therefore, called for the setting up of a men’s lobby group: (15) Since men’s rights in SINGAPORE are the worst in the world as far as civilised countries are concerned, it’s time for MEN’S RIGHT’S group. (3:7 HL Tan) (16) Seriously, it is time to have a MEN’s right group as well in Singapore. Men in Singapore are treated unequally instead. (175: 40 Didi) (17) There should be a man’s association whereby men’s equality in society is look after. (78: 24 Steven) (18) Men are already at a disadvantage in Singapore because of the Women’s Charter that favours women. There should be a group fighting for mens’ rights too. (215: 5 Christina Chia) In (15) and (16), necessity is expressed as timeliness and urgency for action to be taken (“it’s time”) to right the injustice against men in Singapore. In (17) and (18), the modality of obligation (“should”) in existential clauses (“There should be. . .”) represents as an objective recommendation the moral obligation to set up a constituency for men. Like (12) above, (18) is by another woman blogger, named Christina Chia, who views the Women’s Charter, instituted in 1961 to protect the rights of women in marriage, divorce, and property ownership, as directly causing disadvantage to men in Singapore (note the adverbial clause of reason “because”). In proposing a men’s lobby, under the guise of egalitarianism (see the inclusive use of “too”), Christina, in effect, seems to be arguing for a redress of men’s disadvantage vis-à-vis women’s protection. A few proposals for naming the men’s rights organization were offered, namely AMARE, BEWARE or BE-AWARE, and AH BENG. Contrary to the vociferous expressions of men’s oppression and discrimination, however, the naming exercise proved not to offer a serious and constructive platform for men. (19) Do you guys think we need a body like AWARE We call it Association for Men’s Action Research and Engagement (AMARE) We’ll have fun talking to “Curry-Na” level to level. (301: 28 Richard Yap) (20) for the sake of self preservation, we need to set up an alternative council call BEWARE! (35:1 hestoppedthesun) (21) SO FOR ALL MEN OUT THERE, WE SHOULD ALSO HAVE AN ORGANIZATION CALLED “BE-AWARE” which can educate us

108 Michelle M. Lazar men from the pitfalls of failed marriages, so called gender equality, AHEM . . . and of cos the Women’s Charter (Holy Bible) . . . (216:8 DC80) (22) I setting up AHBENG. Any guys want to join me? Got doctorate even better!! I only got Degree . . . (207: Frankman) The proposed names for the men’s groups are all in reaction to AWARE in some way. “AMARE” is meant to parallel the acronym AWARE as well as roughly what the acronym stands for (“Association for Men’s Action Research and Engagement” compared with the Association of Women for Action and Research). The names BEWARE and BE-AWARE are negative wordplays on AWARE which is looked upon with suspicion. AH BENG (which in colloquial Singapore English is a generic name for flashy men of a lower class) taunts AWARE for being (mis-)perceived as an elitist, middle-class organization run by highly educated women, to which the AH BENG supposedly offers a corrective. The function of the proposed men’s rights group, unsurprisingly, is to counter rather than to engage AWARE in constructive dialogue. Thus, a mocking and oppositional stance is adopted in relation to AWARE. In (19), the blogger’s idea of “engagement” (a word that is included in the “AMARE” acronym) is to mock AWARE by disrespectfully mispronouncing the first name of AWARE’s Executive Director, Corinna Lim, as “Curry-Na” in a tonguein-cheek manner. In (21), BE-AWARE’s purpose to ostensibly “educate” men is not motivated by an interest of genuine social justice for all, but rather in defense against AWARE and women’s rights. Note the qualifying expression of skepticism “so called” that premodifies “gender equality” and the sarcastic gloss offered in parenthesis “(Holy Bible)” after the mention of the Women’s Charter. The notion of a defense is echoed also in (20), where AWARE is implicitly construed as a threat, necessitating a council for men’s “self-preservation.”

Patriarchy as Disadvantaging Men In the final section of the analysis, the focus is on how patriarchy itself is construed, rather ironically, as privileging women and disadvantaging men in Singapore. (23) singapore is a patriachical society as defined by the constitution and laws which is designed to protect women and children (woman’s charter). as such there are many practices in which the men are at a disadvantage. i could only take max 5 days of child care leave when my wife gave birth. there is a huge gap between me not wanting to spend time and me NOT ABLE to spend time with my family. (6: 17 Joseph Lee) (24) 1) Singapore is a patriachical society

Construing the New Oppressed 109 2) Men have to serve 2 years NS [National Service] (whether we view it proactively or not, we still have to give 2 years. means we cannot pursue our studies or career or monetary interests) 3) Men don’t have paternity leave white maternity leave was recently increased to 4 months AND NOW 4) AWARE is blaming men for poor birthrates .. think twice about who you fight for when you lift your rifle guys . . . sigh (247: 3 georgejk) (25) Would it be good if the govt give better handouts for FATHERs like us? And not just targetted at our wives? Isn’t that gender inequality? The woman gets all the credits, just look at the hype about women, AWARE, mother’s day, maternal leave, incentives . . . anybody remember when is Father’s day. (229: 44 fisherman) In (23) and (24) an identical statement is made explicitly and matter-offactly about Singapore’s status as a patriarchal society. Underlying the use of the term ‘patriarchy’ here is its traditional sense, which Ehrenreich (2006: 223, 226) describes as “the intimate power of men over women, a power which is historically exercised within the family by the male as breadwinner, property owner, or armed defender of women and children. . .[an] intimate domination and protection.” Joseph Lee’s post (23) highlights the protection aspect of the patriarchal assumptions that underlie the laws constitutive of the Women’s Charter, and (through the logical connector “as such”) links women’s protection to men’s disadvantage. (See 18 above for a similar argument.) What is overlooked here is the connection between protection and domination, which has led Ehrenreich (2006) to remark on the “hypocritical pretense of male protection” (227) within patriarchy. In the three examples (23–25), the relative lack of childcare leave and benefits as well as recognition given to fathers (compared to mothers) is cited as disadvantaging men. Joseph Lee (23) pertinently distinguishes between “not wanting to spend time and [. . .] NOT ABLE to spend time with my family,” emphasizing (through capital letters) the constraints placed upon men due to inadequate paternity leave provisions. In contrast, posts (24) and (25) remark that women have stood to gain disproportionately: note the lexical verb “increased” (39) and the quantitative premodifier in “all the credits” (25). Yet, to be sure, the gendered policies and practices underlying childcare, as noted in these posts, have been points also of feminist contention, arguing that a patriarchal ideological system disadvantages both women and men. In fact, in AWARE’s letter to the newspaper in the present case, AWARE had argued precisely for a change in childcare policies in order to enable greater paternal involvement. In other words, the position of feminists and antifeminists alike, in this case, is more similar than dissimilar. Yet what distinguishes the latter from the former is the construal that patriarchy disadvantages men only. Nowhere in these posts are the

110 Michelle M. Lazar patriarchal assumptions questioned as to why childcare leave and benefits accrue primarily to women and not to men, and the constraints and pressures women face as a result of these entrenched assumptions. AWARE, in fact, in its letter to the press had raised the questions “What is the message and effect when the State mandates four months paid maternity leave but not a day of paternity leave? Are we sending the message that fertility is solely a woman’s responsibility?” Besides the issue of childcare, in other posts, complaints were made about the Women’s Charter for discriminating against men in laws pertaining to divorce; specifically, the related laws of maintenance and custody. The laws in question are also steeped in patriarchal assumptions about familial gender roles and obligations. In the case of maintenance and child support, the assumption is that men are the heads of households and would be the main financial providers, whereas women are more likely to be economically dependent on men, as housewives or as secondary wage earners only. Men’s role as the head of the family has been underscored by the government, both in statement and by policy. In determining child custody, the Women’s Charter states that “the welfare of the child” is of paramount concern. However, in a society where mothers are expected to be the primary caregiver of children and, in the majority of cases, are the ones that fulfill that expectation, the Court will often take the view that the child’s welfare is best served by the mother (Lim 2010). That said, the award of child custody to the mother is not automatically a ‘given.’ The following examples illustrate men’s stories of discrimination and victimization under these laws: (26) Wife pretend to work OT [overtime] but end up in having an affair with a boy younger then herself. Somemore, she brought her small white face home for sex. I paid for more then 85% of the house and 95% of the furniture. When filing for a divorce, she wanted the entire house, the child and 1k monthly maintance out of my 2k salary (before cpf). What the hell is wrong with women nowadays???? The law is too sided with women already. Men has completely no RIGHTS! even my lawyers agree with that statement right in my face. PISS OFF (55:11 Alex) (27) stop pointing the fingers where the other 3 is pointing to you.I had a friend got a divorse over unreasonal behaviour and there was no prof of evidence to back up her case but yet won the case,won the one daughter he loved . . . . brain wash the daughter not to see the dad and already more than 1 years past plus the house . . . . . . left the husband out in the street. So Aware do u stress on woman who behave like that??? . . . . . . . . . which someone says . . . . its all about the money . . . . . . so how can you say fathers are not stuping up? (153: 30 Percussion)

Construing the New Oppressed 111 (28) Since when is the equality equal in Singapore. My experience is this . . . I was divorced from my ex-wife whom was having an affair with another guy. My son was given custody to my wife and yet I have to give maintainance fees to both of them. Ironic isn’t it? I don’t frequent night spots and strongly against booze. I have been serving my responsibilty as a husband dutifully and yet I got all the blame for the marriage. Where is the men’s right? Who wants to get into a marriage with all the rights is with the women? What’s more having babies? (173: 43 JFK) (29) I believe situations where the woman strays but the man has to pay for the consequences is very prevalent nowadays, thanks to the Woman’s Charter. The only time my husband’s ex-wife gives him any consideration as the father of her children is when she needs more money for the kids. I am not sure that all the money goes to the kids as she has expensive taste and leads a swinging lifestyle. However, she does not get any maintenance as she was a serial adulterer but my husband chose to provide child maintenance for the children’s sake, which takes up a bulk of his salary. How can my husband and I have kids of our own when we need to finance his children and, indirectly, support another woman’s selfish lifestyle? Can he opt out of his chldren’s lives? NO! And I wouldn’t love him as much if he actually did. But because of his sense of responsibility, we are rather tight financially and don’t think it’s right to bring another child into this world if we can’t afford to give him/her a reasonably comfortable life. (246: 2 LN Tan) These life stories embedded in the posts of three men and one woman take the form either of personal recounts or third-person narrations (of a friend in (27) or the current wife in (29)), told from the perspective of the husbands. The husband victimization stories are constituted by two elements. First, the ex-wives are completely at fault and the husbands are blameless. In all cases, the ex-wives are responsible for the dissolution of the marriage; in most cases due to infidelity. The ex-wives are characterized as particularly reprehensible: they are (i) untrustworthy (“pretend to work OT [overtime] but end up in having affair” (26), “not sure that all the money goes to the kids” (29)); (ii) dishonorable in flouting cultural norms of acceptability (“a serial adulterer” (29)); “Somemore, she brought her small white face home for sex” (26); “having an affair with a boy younger than herself” (26)—the latter is based on the assumption that a woman’s sexual liaison with a younger man is culturally inappropriate); (iii) devious (“brain wash the daughter not to see the dad” (27)); and (iv) irresponsible (“she has expensive taste and leads a swinging lifestyle,” “selfish lifestyle”(29)). The ex-wives’ blameworthiness is contrasted against the husband’s virtuosity (“I don’t frequent night spots and strongly against booze. I have been serving my responsibility as a husband dutifully” (28), and “my husband chose to provide child maintenance,” “his sense of responsibility” (29)). Even where

112 Michelle M. Lazar the husband could have been blameworthy, this is dismissed as fabrication of the ex-wife: “a friend got a divorce over unreasonable behaviour and there was no pro[o]f of evidence to back up her case” (27). The second constitutive element of the victimization stories is the represented injustice of the outcome of the divorce. This is manifested both in terms of perceived discrimination of men by the law, and in terms of personal costs to the men. All four examples make reference to the law as unfair and unequivocally favoring women: • The law is too sided with women already (26) • there was no pro[o]f of evidence to back up her case but yet won the case (27) • My son was given custody to my wife and yet I have to give maintainance fees to both of them. Ironic isn’t it? (44) • the woman strays but the man has to pay for the consequences is very prevalent nowadays, thanks to the Woman’s Charter (29) The adversative conjunctions “but yet”/“and yet”/“but” juxtapose and present as incongruent two sets of actions, which underscore the gender bias of the law. Moreover, the men experience the penalty in terms of grave personal costs to themselves. The extent of loss is quantified in a number of ways: numerically (“I paid for more than 85% of the house and 95% of the furniture”; “1k monthly maint[e]ance out of my 2k salary” (26); “won the one daughter he loved” (27)); lexically (“she wanted the entire house” (26); “takes up a bulk of his salary” (29)), and through the use of the definite article (“the child” (26); “the house” (27)). The two elements of the narratives work to construct a position of utter helplessness and bewilderment of these men. The use of multiple questions and question marks, as noted earlier, indexes exasperation. In two instances, the frustration is also articulated as a lack of rights for men (also as discussed earlier): “Men has completely no RIGHTS!” (26); “Where is the men’s right?” (28). In citing patriarchal drawbacks for men, post (24) had earlier cited mandatory National Service for men also as a patriarchal burden upon them: “men have to serve 2 years NS . . . have to give 2 years.” In Singapore, all young, able-bodied male citizens are required to undergo military training at about the age of 18 for 2 years. As compensation, men who have undergone National Service receive higher wages in the workforce compared to those who have not, which includes all women and some men who are granted NS exemption. In the posts, men express resentment at having to do National Service, which again gets construed vis-à-vis the Women’s Charter and perceived women’s advantage. (46) How unfair are males already treated in Singapore? 2 years of National Service when we should be in Uni. Laws that favour

Construing the New Oppressed 113 women. Grants, bonuses and leaves given exclusively to women. Greater equality for women? Sure. Let’s give them 2 years of “NS” while we’re at it. (11:34 Lukestriker) (47) Singaporean women need not serve national service, while the males are set back by 2yrs–2.5yrs during my time). the women have a head start in society. by the time the women is in her 30’s she’s probably gained a good footing for her career. the male on the other hand is probably into his 3rd–5th year in the workforce (not withstanding possibilities of change of jobs during this period). . . . hence, where financial stability is concerned, there is significant delays in the progress of starting a family, especially for the males. it takes 2 to tango, and the fault doesn’t fall on the males solely. (if the women want gender equality, then please by all means motion for the removal of the woman’s charter). (53: 5 Alvin) (48) Equal rights will only pervail if both man and woman are to contribute to their share of 2 and half years of NS or none at all for both genders. once this foundation is established across the board, chances of any women becoming high flyer in the corporate world in tiny singapore will become history. only then, will their male citizens counterpart be respected for who they are, followed by the procreation part. todays, women, especially those high flyer one tends to look down on their male counterpart because they are very well protected by the stupid women charter law here, while their male counterparts have to be enslaved for 2 and half years in NS, learning nothing that is of any relevant to the corporate world.worst still, they might find themselves having to work for the women who was their ex-classmates, upon their ROD after that lost of 2 and half years for nothing. (60: 25 Dr.simon) (49) The overall mindset of majority of our males singaporeans are being totally weekened by the unfair practice of the NS practice in singapore, while those females counterpart enjoy being a singaporeans due to the protective women charter law here. This is the root cause of the falling fertility rates here. The remedy to this problem is to remove NS practise that is very harmful to our male citizen here. (192: 36 Dr.simon) The posts refer to National Service as unfair (46) and enslaving men (48), while at the same time referring to the Women’s Charter as advantaging women. The co-positioning of the issues on National Service and the Women’s Charter in the co-text may be immediate, with one clause following the other as in (46) and (49), or as consecutive points in an argument appearing in separate paragraphs as in (47) and (48). Either way, the two

114 Michelle M. Lazar quite separate issues are brought together as related, and as existing on an unbalanced scale, on which men are placed at the losing end and the women at the gaining end. Three solutions are recommended to eliminate the gender disparity; namely, abolish National Service for men, mandate National Service for women as well, or eradicate the Women’s Charter. Of the ‘solutions,’ the latter two that specifically target women are laced with rancor: “Greater equality for women? Sure. Let’s give them 2 years of ‘NS’ while we’re at it” (46); and “if the women want gender equality, then please by all means motion for the removal of the woman’s charter” (47). Set up as responses to feminists’ call for gender equality, the solutions express sarcasm (46) and irony (47) through a pseudo-politeness strategy of faux agreement and inclusiveness (“Sure. Let’s give them . . .”), and an exaggerated polite request form (“please by all means motion . . .”), respectively. The request to rescind the Women’s Charter is particularly punitive as that would strip women of any legal rights under a patriarchal system. The bloggers’ resentment of women through the lens of having to do National Service is rooted in the metaphorical conceptualization MEN AND WOMEN ARE COMPETITORS/RIVALS.3 ‘Alvin’ in (47) presents this as a race in which men are “set back,” whereas women “have a head start,” resulting in “significant delays” in men’s progress to establish themselves financially and to start a family. Rivalry is expressed by “Dr.simon” (48), who uses the negative superlative (“worst still”) to signal a dreaded situation of men having to work under their female peers due to the men’s delayed entry into the workforce. For “Dr.simon,” the eradication of menonly National Service would eliminate female competition in the workforce. Such an elimination, moreover, would be total, as indicated by the nonspecific deictic “any woman,” coupled with the modality of certainty “will become history”: “once this foundation is established across the board, chances of any women becoming high flyer in the corporate world in tiny singapore will become history.” The deep-seated misogyny expressed by this blogger overlooks the social reality that women’s career advancement in Singapore (as in most other patriarchal societies) hits the metaphorical glass ceiling, beyond which very few actually progress. CONCLUSIONS In this chapter, I offered an analysis of an antifeminist backlash discourse in Singapore, in which bloggers reacted vociferously against the feminist organization, AWARE, for attributing the country’s low total fertility rate to persisting gender inequalities. As a backlash to AWARE’s argument perceived as an indictment against (heterosexual) men, bloggers presented the case of Singaporean men, rather than women, as the oppressed gender. The majority of the antifeminist responses could be said to have come from men, although some women were similarly aligned with that position. In other

Construing the New Oppressed 115 words, the backlash is not simply a ‘men’s’ discourse, nor simply a polarized gender war in which ‘women’ are aligned with a feminist position and ‘men’ against. Rather, what is at stake is a masculinist discourse, founded upon what Brittan (1989: 4) referred to as an ideology that justifies and naturalizes male dominance. The claim of men as oppressed victims has been met with profound skepticism by pro-feminist researchers. Robertson (2000 quoted in Beynon 2002: 94) is of the view that “establishing a litany of ‘wrongs’ in order to then claim ‘rights’” is a “strategy” to regain patriarchal status and power for men. Similarly, Brittan (1989: 181) describes it as some sort of a “legitimation crisis.” Still, undeniably as evident in the posts, some men do experience crisis tendencies at some level, even if that is not constitutive of an overall crisis. The fact that men do suffer fundamentally raises the question of how well men are able to renegotiate relationships with themselves and with women in the face of changing patterns of gender. The problem arises, as psychologists have attested, when men are slower to change, thereby causing dysfunctional behavior in them (Segal 2006). Changing gender expectations, moreover, need not necessarily be construed as disadvantageous to heterosexual men. Instead, as scholars of masculinity have argued, it can be a very good thing (MacInnes 1998; Beynon 2002; Edwards 2006). Adapting to changing circumstances can work to the advantage of men and women alike, giving them both the opportunity for more loving relationships with their children and a sense of equality and commonality with their partners than hitherto. Therefore, even though for some men the changes are crisis-inducing, according to Beynon (2002: 94), “for very many men there has probably never been a better time to explore a widened range of ‘masculine scripts.’” In fact, it is optimistically fitting to end with Segal’s comment (2006: 277) that “it is not hard to find evidence for men’s capacity to be as caring, flexible and creative as women (if they so choose), when called upon to be so—with or without paternal authority.” (Original emphasis.) NOTES 1. For the history and notable achievements of AWARE, see Arora (2007). 2. Most of the bloggers in this slice of the data, perhaps not surprisingly, appear to be men. Although one cannot tell for sure what the gender identification is of each of the bloggers due to pseudonyms adopted, based on the information given in the posts, it is not impossible to surmise their gender identification. It is found, therefore, that some women are also aligned with an antifeminist backlash position. The language in the posts has been left unedited, so the typographical and grammatical errors, misspellings, and short forms are those that appeared in the original, and reflect the informal register of the bloggers. 3. Here I am representing the metaphorical statement in the tradition of conceptual metaphor studies (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Charteris-Black 2005).

116 Michelle M. Lazar REFERENCES Arora, Mandakini. 2007. Small Steps, Giant Leaps: A History of AWARE and the Women’s Movement in Singapore. Singapore: AWARE. AWARE. (2010). “Improve gender equality and you will raise fertility.” Letter to the Straits Times’ Forum Page, reported on Yahoo News on May 20, 2012. http:// www.aware.org.sg/2010/05/improve-gender-equality-and-you-will-raise-fertility/ Beynon, John. 2002. Masculinities and Culture. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Brittan, Arthur. 1989. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Blackwell. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005 Politics and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clare, Anthony. 2000. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. London: Chatto & Windus. Connell, Robert W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Edwards, Tim. 2006. Cultures of Masculinity. Abingdon: Routledge. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2006. “The Decline of Patriarchy.” In Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, ed. by Stephen M. Whitehead. London: Routledge. Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Vintage. Horrocks, Roger. 1994 Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, Realities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lazar, Michelle M. 2005. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lim, Corinna. 2010. ‘“Is the Women’s Charter Unfair to Men?” AWARE. http:// www.aware.org.sg/2010/11/womens-charter-unfair-to-men/ MacInnes, John. 1998. The End of Masculinity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Segal, Lynne. 2006. “Men at Bay: The Contemporary “Crisis’ of Masculinity.” In Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, ed. by Stephen M. Whitehead. London: Routledge. Spender, Dale. 1978. Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

6

Diminutives and Masculinity in Brazilian Portuguese Ronald Beline Mendes

INTRODUCTION I was once strolling in São Paulo, Brazil, when I was surprised by something a mother told her son. The mother, a woman in her mid-30s, was walking hand in hand with two children—a boy who looked to be about 5 years old and a somewhat younger girl. It was a calm, sunny Sunday morning on Avenida Paulista, a business center which was not nearly as crowded as it usually is on weekdays. I was about five feet behind them, when I heard the mother say: “As far as I know, I only have one daughter.” The mother’s tone towards the boy was of mild admonition. I had not been paying attention to them at all before, but after that comment, I could not help but wonder what the boy could have said that would have prompted his mother to remind him of something so obvious. He could not have done anything other than speak, since they were simply ‘happily’ walking hand in hand. Maybe it was not about what he said as much as how he said it . . . And then came the questions. Considering the boy’s age, why would he have sounded ‘less masculine’ (or ‘more feminine’) than expected? Did he do it ‘on purpose’? If not, what ‘led’ him to talk in a way that the mother took as gender inappropriate? Of course, we will never know how that boy said whatever he said, nor will we ever know what that mother evaluated as inadequate in her boy’s speech. However, there is still the general question of what makes people think of a man/boy as less masculine, or what might make a woman/girl appear less feminine/more masculine in her linguistic performance. This chapter presents qualitative and quantitative analyses of the use of diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese, in order to discuss the fluid relation between masculinity and femininity in linguistic performance (even when sharp distinctions are made or expected). According to work started by Mendes (2007) with data from São Paulo, there is a correlation between the employment of diminutives and the perception of a man as gay-sounding. In a sample of 84 sociolinguistic interviews, this chapter examines usage rates of different types of diminutives, based on the linguistic meanings they can convey, and analyzes whether men and women employ them differently.

118 Ronald Beline Mendes Additionally, with another sample (24 interviews with gay and straight women and men), it discusses whether and how diminutives may either function as an effeminizing feature, or be avoided to facilitate the performance of masculinity. Although this chapter uses the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ unceremoniously (as if they were being taken merely as sex differences), it actually assumes that they are instead gender differences and, as such, that they are socially constructed and not necessarily biologically determined (West and Zimmerman 1987). In that case, masculinity and femininity cannot be simply taken as an either/or, discrete binomial; they are more like compositional concepts whose integrating features can vary greatly. BACKGROUND The interest in how diminutives may be linked to gender and sexual identities started with sociolinguistic perception research where the main goal was to address the following question: What makes people think somebody might be gay when they hear him or her speak? Regarding Brazilian Portuguese, Mendes (2007) interviewed 107 people living in the city of São Paulo (men and women of different age groups, various sexual orientations, levels of education, and social classes). In spite of the very informal circumstances of these recorded conversations, the great majority of the interviewees found it difficult to give a definitive answer to that question. Following mainly Gaudio (1994), and prepared for difficulties on the part of the interviewees in answering the proposed question, Mendes (2007) had previously recorded five different men reading a short text. After the initial part of the conversation, the interviewees were invited to listen to these five readings and then to grade them—from 1 (least gaysounding) to 5 (gayest-sounding). Each of the five readings was given a different grade. Among the 107 interviewees, only 6 of them disagreed with the majority about which readings sounded gayest. A large majority attributed grades 4 and 5 to the same two of the readings,1 indicating that even if linguistic production is greatly variable, the perception that the individuals of a speech community have of their production can be fairly homogeneous (Labov 1966; Campbell-Kibler 2008, 2009). When asked to justify their grades 4 and 5, some linguistic cues were mentioned by a number of the interviewees: (i) “Certain vowels seem longer.” (ii) “The intonation goes up and down too much.” (iii) “Words are carefully pronounced . . . gay people talk very correctly . . . they don’t seem to make so many mistakes.” (iv) “Gay men, like women, exaggerate in their use of diminutives.”2

Diminutives and Masculinity 119 Variation in vowel duration and pitch dynamism—(i) and (ii) above— have not yet been addressed vis-à-vis their correlation to sex/gender identities in Brazilian Portuguese, as they have in a number of works in English (Gaudio 1994; Avery and Liss 1996; Smyth and Rogers 2001; Levon 2006 inter alia). There is, however, work in progress on variation in noun-phrase plural agreement as a case of (iii). This chapter focuses on the case of diminutives, which seem particularly interesting in the list above, because in fact diminutives do not actually appear in the text read by the five men and used in Mendes (2007). This means that the perception, revealed in the survey, of a link between sounding more or less masculine and the use of diminutives was not a perception based on the readings, but was rather triggered by them and remembered from quotidian life as an explanation for their evaluation. The claim that there is a link between femininity/effeminacy3 and the ‘exaggerated’ use of diminutives lead to both quantitative and qualitative questions. Do men tend to use diminutives less often than women? If diminutives index femininity (Ochs 1992), is that a case of direct or indirect indexicality (Silverstein 2003; Podesva 2006; Eckert 2008)? The categorization of diminutives in the next section—based on how they are used (in sociolinguistic interviews collected in São Paulo)—shows that their meaning is not necessarily directly ‘feminine’ or ‘effeminate.’ When they do not literally mean ‘diminished size,’ they can convey ideas like ‘delicateness,’ ‘carefulness,’ ‘coziness’—which in turn seem to be generally more often associated with the ‘role of women.’ Therefore, one would initially expect a ‘masculine man’ (and perhaps a ‘masculine woman’) to avoid diminutives, especially if they would express such ideas. DIMINUTIVES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE In order to tackle the problem of the purported relationship between diminutives and femininity/effeminacy, two samples of spoken Brazilian Portuguese were analyzed. Sample 1 is constituted of 84 sociolinguistic interviews recorded in 2009–2010 with 42 women and 42 men born and raised in the city of São Paulo. They are stratified according to their sex, age group (20–34 years old; 35–59; 60 or older), and level of education (up to high school; college). The interviews were recorded and transcribed by members of the Sociolinguistics Study Group of the University of São Paulo, for various research purposes (diminutives were not part of the group’s agenda at the time the corpus was being built). The conversational topics in these interviews were the neighborhood in which the participant/informant lived, his or her childhood, his or her occupation, leisure activities, and the city of São Paulo itself. The transcribed conversations add up to 870,724 words (excluding the speech of the interviewer). Sample 2 is a smaller sample of interviews (205,165 words), characterized by sexuality rather than just sex: five self-identified lesbians, five

120 Ronald Beline Mendes self-identified gay men, and five women and five men self-identified as heterosexual. All these informants were also born and raised in São Paulo. These were recorded in 2011 by a single interviewer. The topics included homophobia in São Paulo, coming-out stories, legislation against discrimination, and gay marriage. All participants in both samples have consented to the use of their recorded conversations for sociolinguistic research purposes. Their names as mentioned in this chapter are fictitious.

Literal, Metaphorical, and Lexicalized Diminutives The diminutive in Portuguese is formed by a derivational process that consists of adding the suffix {-inho} or {-inha} to the word, according to its grammatical gender. The derivation is most often made from nouns and adjectives, but it can also occur with verb gerunds.4 Instead of the suffix {-inho/a}, sometimes {-ico/a} occurs, but no such token was found in the samples analyzed here. A total of 2,546 occurrences of diminutives were found in Samples 1 and 2 combined (104 interviews; 1,075,889 words). Many of them convey a notion of diminished size, either in relation to something mentioned previously in discourse (sometimes in the same conversational turn, as in example 1), or in relation to some pragmatically shared notion of size (as in 2). In these examples, quarto ‘bedroom’ is a masculine word, whereas pequena ‘small’ agrees in gender with casa ‘house,’ which is feminine. (1) [S1f]5

(2) [S1m]

aí então ele reformou lá o . . . o quarto a cozinha . . . lá outro quartinho then he renovated there the . . . the bedroom the kitchen . . . there the other little bedroom há mais de quarenta anos que a gente convive ali . . . numa casa bem pequenininha it’s been over forty years that we live there . . . in a very small house

Size is of course relative, and even subjective, but the examples above can be seen as pertaining to a category of diminutives that are concrete, to the extent that actual size is being referenced. However, this is not the only way diminutives are used in Brazilian Portuguese. The following examples show instances in which size is not the issue: (3) [S1f]

(4) [S1m]

Tá grande lá tem bastante casa . . . um condominiozinho fechado . . . bem gostosinho lá It’s big there there’s a lot of houses . . . a closed little condo . . . very nice there O que aconteceu comigo foi um desses roubinhos bobinhos What happened to me was one of these silly little muggings

Diminutives and Masculinity 121 In (3), condomínio refers to a type of closed housing complex, common in São Paulo. The term usually entails notions of the upper-middle class and, in the example, the diminutive condominiozinho certainly does not mean a ‘small condomínio,’ since the speaker herself states that it is big (grande) there. Gostoso—generally ‘good,’ ‘tasty,’ or ‘delicious’—in this context means ‘nice.’ The diminutive gostosinho does not mean ‘less than nice’; instead, it emphasizes the good qualities of the condomínio. It is interesting to note that here the diminutive conveys an idea of pleasure, of coziness, which is not inherent to the semantics of the lexical items to which -inho is affixed. In (4), the speaker is relativizing violence in the city and indicating that nothing really serious ever happened to him. He mentions he has been mugged, but he diminishes the importance of the event, by using the diminutive—both in the noun (roubinho ‘little mugging’) and in the adjective (bobinho ‘very silly’). In the former, even though we can think in terms of size (perhaps, the amount of money that was stolen from him), it seems more plausible to interpret it as a less concrete usage of the diminutive— rather than size, it is a notion of significance (or lack thereof); in the latter, the diminutive further emphasizes the fact that it was nothing serious. In other words, as a counterargument to the supposition that São Paulo is a violent city, the informant is saying that, in his personal experience, nothing significant ever happened. Another example of a nonliteral, metaphorical use of diminutive is given in (5): (5) [S1m]

Parei de fumar faz anos, mas às vezes me dá uma vontade de fumar um cigarrinho . . . I quit smoking years ago, but sometimes I really feel like smoking a little ciggie

‘Ciggie’ in English is a shortening of the word ‘cigarette,’ but not an actual short cigarette. However, cigarrinho, in that context, aside from not referring to size at all, expresses an idea of endearment—not in relation to the cigarette itself, but in relation to “those days, 10 years ago,” when the person used to smoke. Fumar ‘to smoke’ does not really need a verbal complement (see the first sentence in the example), but saying fumar um cigarrinho implies that the speaker misses his smoking days. Thus the examples from (3) to (5) can be categorized as cases of metaphorical transfers—from concrete ideas of size to more abstract or less concrete ideas of importance, feelings of well-being, and the like. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), these metaphorical kinds of analogies could be summarized by the maxim “rational is up, emotional is down.” The diminutive (‘less,’ ‘down’) is employed to convey more abstract meanings than ‘diminished physical proportions.’ Besides literal and metaphorical uses of diminutives, there are some that can be considered lexicalized forms:

122 Ronald Beline Mendes (6) [S1m] (7) [S1m] (8) [S1f]

desde os meus onze anos já andava muito sozinho since I was 11 I’ve walked around a lot by myself Na Vila Madalena, tudo começou por causa dos barzinho In Vila Madalena, everything started because of the bars todas as escolas desde . . . do prezinho . . . sempre escola pública all schools since . . . pre-school . . . always public schools

Sozinho/a ‘by oneself’ and barzinho ‘little bar (literally)’ are probably the most prototypical examples of lexicalized diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese. Their non-diminutive pairs—só and bar—are respectively very infrequent (if not nonexistent in use) and different in meaning. In fact, só, meaning sozinho/a, does not even occur in the samples analyzed here. Its employment would possibly sound literary, if not a bit foreign. Barzinho means something different from bar. The latter usually refers to a more serious, ‘adult’ sort of bar, where the drinks and the food are the main attraction, whereas barzinho is more youthful and more about the gathering of people. The term bar might not be employed in the context of (7), and in fact, despite being technically a diminutive, barzinho would likely stand on its own as an entry in any dictionary of urban Brazilian Portuguese. Finally, the non-diminutive pré-escola ‘preschool’ is a term used to refer to the school years preceding first grade; however, prezinho is so ubiquitously recurrent in everyday, colloquial language that it has attained at least a quasi-lexicalized status despite technically being a diminutive. Aside from these, pouquinho ‘a little bit’ (as in 9 and 10) also seems to be on the way to lexicalization, but should be looked at separately. In relation to other cases of diminutives, pouquinho is so recurrent in Sample 1 that it could obscure the distribution of the other diminutive types (including the lexicalized ones) if counted together with them. (9) [S1f]

Adoro São Paulo porque você tem absolutamente tudo um pouquinho I love São Paulo because you have absolutely everything a little bit (10) [S1m] morei sempre no Ipiranga . . . agora que eu fui um pouquinho mais para cá I’ve always lived in Ipiranga . . . only now I moved a little bit closer to here This categorization of diminutives into three types—literal, metaphorical, and lexicalized—serves as the starting place for a quantitative analysis that attempts to go further in investigating the relationship between this linguistic feature and the expression of masculinity and femininity in Brazilian Portuguese. If certain diminutives are lexicalized to the extent that the non-diminutive analogue means something else, one could expect little or no social differentiation in their employment, since their use would not be optional and, hence, would not necessarily be threatening to notions

Diminutives and Masculinity 123 of masculinity. In other words, their use would be unmarked with relation to gender. However, as the next section will illustrate, there is genderand sexuality-based differentiation in the employment of almost all types of diminutives.

Exaggeration As seen above, some of the speakers interviewed by Mendes (2007) claim that gay men and women exaggerate in their use of diminutives. One male interviewee states: isso . . . caras gays mais delicados . . . mas mulher também . . . usa diminutivo muito exagerado . . . muito -inho isso -isso aquilo . . . uma coisa meio ‘Patrícia’” yeah . . . delicate gay guys . . . but women too . . . exaggerate in their use of diminutives . . . too much -inho this -inho that . . . something a bit sissy. Unfortunately, the English translation does not fully render the nuance encoded in the Portuguese original. Although semantically equivalent to meio Patrícia, the word ‘sissy’ does not capture the sort of pun intended by the speaker. Instead of Patrícia (a female’s name), what’s actually common to say in Brazilian Portuguese in that context is Patricinha (in the diminutive)—to make reference to ‘girlie’ girls, who behave and talk in a certain way. The prototypical Patricinha would be very urban, upper class (at least in appearance), very into shopping (preferably together with a few of her peers), and very concerned with always making sure that her hair is perfectly done and that her nails are perfectly polished. It is sociolinguistically amusing that the male participant ‘recoined’ the slang expression (by de-deriving the diminutive into a non-diminutive) in the very part of his comment in which he elaborates on his stereotypical views. This seems to support the idea that a man who intends to express or highlight his masculinity would probably employ diminutives with care (if not avoid them), even when discussing their use. In order to verify the distribution of diminutives in the speech of men and women, their occurrences were counted in Sample 1, according to the categories discussed above. A multivariate analysis using, for example, Goldvarb (Sankoff, Tagliamonte, and Smith 2005), is inadvisable in this case, because the diminutive/non-diminutive pair does not constitute a ‘variable’ in the Labovian sense—since they are not alternative ways of ‘saying the same thing.’ Not only lexicalized instances (bar and barzinho, for example), but also metaphorical ones (condomínio and condominiozinho) carry different meanings, as described in the section above. Table 6.1 displays the relative frequencies of the different types of diminutives per thousand words. In the whole of Sample 1 (approximately 871,000

124 Ronald Beline Mendes Table 6.1

Frequencies of diminutives (per thousand words)

Sex/Gender female (F) male (M) Total

Words 455,847 414,877 870,724

All Types

Freq

1422 3.12 754 1.82 2176 2.50 F/M = 1.71

Lexical Excluded

Freq

821 1.80 439 1.06 1260 1.45 F/M = 1.70

Only Lexical

Freq

601 1.31 315 0.76 916 1.05 F/M = 1.72

words), there are a total of 2,176 diminutives, which account for 2.5 tokens per thousand words. Considering all types of diminutives, women employ them 1.71 times more often than men. That ratio remains virtually the same if the lexicalized instances (such as barzinho, sozinho) are excluded (χ2 = 0.05(2), p > 0.95). Differently from what was hypothesized, women also use diminutives more often than men when only lexicalized cases are considered (F/M = 1.72, χ2 = 64.1(1), p < 0.001). The distributional patterns in Table 6.1 indicate that, in general, diminutives are more frequent in women’s speech, even when it comes to lexicalized instances (which, purportedly, would be semantically unmarked for sex/gender). Of course, this does not mean that a man would necessarily and immediately be perceived as gay, or effeminate, or ‘less masculine than expected’ if he used lexicalized diminutives as often as or more often than women. Nonetheless, as seen in a fairly large sample, men even use lexicalized diminutives less often than women. Table 6.2 focuses on the 1,260 tokens of non-lexicalized diminutives and separates literal and metaphorical instances. It shows that when it comes to literal diminutives (such as quartinho ‘small bedroom,’ in example 1 above), women employ them 1.36 times more often than men, whereas metaphorical uses of diminutives are more than twice as frequent in the interviews with women than in those with men. Along with the results in Table 6.1, these numbers confirm that diminutives are less frequent in men’s speech, relative to women’s, across the board. Chi-square tests show that the difference between the frequencies of diminutives for males and females is significant in both literal (χ2 = 12.82(1), p < 0.001) and metaphorical cases (χ2 = 83.35(1), p < 2.2 x 10–16), and that the chances that this difference is random are even lower when it comes to the metaphorical uses of diminutives. Considering that the sample is fairly big (42 men, 42 women), the evidence can be considered robust. As shown above in the discussion of examples (3–5), the abstraction that is characteristic of metaphorical instances of diminutives can include an ‘emotional’ tone. Example (11) below also illustrates this: amiguinhas ‘little girl friends (literally)’ means that those childhood girl friends were either especially nice or nice but not ‘real’ friends (in a superficial, childlike way).

Diminutives and Masculinity 125 Table 6.2 Sex/ Gender female (F) male (M) Total

Frequencies of literal and metaphorical diminutives (per thousand words) Words 455,847 414,877 870,724

All but lexical

Freq

821 1.80 439 1.06 1260 1.45 F/M = 1.70

Literal

Freq

364 0.80 246 0.59 610 0.70 F/M = 1.36

Metaphorical

Freq

457 1.00 193 0.46 650 0.75 F/M = 2.17

(11) [S1f] a gente brincava muito assim sabe? . . . eu minhas irmãs (. . .) e algumas amiguinhas que moravam perto we used to play together a lot you know . . . me my sisters and some little girl friends that used to live nearby Metaphorical diminutives can be ambiguous, being possibly positive or negative. In this case, since there is no additional contextual information that points towards either one, both interpretations are possible. Whatever the actual meaning that the female speaker intended to convey (“dear childhood friends whom I miss” or “unimportant childhood friends whose names I don’t even remember anymore”), the diminutive functions as an adjective to amiga ‘girl friend,’ and makes the narrative more subjective, in the sense of “emotive function” of language, through which an addresser signals his or her attitude towards what is being said (Jakobson,1963). In the sample, the fact that men use diminutives less often than women in all cases, but especially in abstract, metaphorical ways, can be a linguistic indication that men, in general, refrain from coming across as emotive (in the Jakobsonian sense). Instead, they tend to pick a more neutral option, that is, the non-diminutive—as in examples (12) and (13) below, in which they are also talking about their childhood friends: (12) [S1m] os meus amigos não tinham a minha idade eles tinham a idade do meu irmão mais novo (. . .) eu brincava sempre com os menores my friends were not my age, they were my younger brother’s age (. . .) I always used to play together with the younger (13) [S1m] sempre que eu saía da escola vinha pra cá . . . mas assim de brincar na rua mais quando eu (es)tava com a família mesmo . . . amigos na rua eu tinha pouco assim . . . as soon as I left school I would come here . . . but, like, playing in the street, only when I was with my family, really . . . I had, like, only a few friends in our street Stereotypes are, of course, oversimplified images—in this case, images of masculinity and femininity—but the data on diminutives reveal a linguistic

126 Ronald Beline Mendes Table 6.3

Frequencies of pouquinho (per thousand words)

Sex/Gender female (F) male (M) Total

Words 455,847 414,877 870,724

All but lexical

Freq

821 1.80 439 1.06 1260 1.45 F/M = 1.70

pouquinho

Freq

99 0.21 75 0.18 203 0.20 F/M = 1.16

habit in Brazilian Portuguese that permits or reflects the construction of such stereotyping. According to one of the male participants in the survey conducted by Mendes (2007), “delicate (gay) men, and women, exaggerate in their use of diminutives.” The speakers’ social profiles in Sample 1 do not indicate whether they are gay or straight, but if the data distribution supports that evaluation, it can also be interpreted in another direction: it could be men who exaggerate in attempting to come across as more (emotively) neutral in their linguistic performance. A final distribution of data in Sample 1 separates the occurrences of pouquinho ‘a little bit,’ which could also be on the way to lexicalization in Brazilian Portuguese. Table 6.3 shows that men and women employ pouquinho at approximately the same rate (χ2 = 1.26(1), p = 0.26). The fact that the difference between the frequencies for pouquinho in men’s and women’s speech is not statistically significant is an indication that there are diminutive/non-diminutive pairs in Brazilian Portuguese that are neutral in terms of sex/gender differentiation. In these cases, it sounds more tenable to say that “men employ them (almost) as often as women,” instead of “women use them as infrequently as men” or “women don’t use them as often as in the other cases.”

Sexuality The analysis of the data in Sample 2, which includes men and women selfidentified as gay or straight, allows this discussion to advance a few more steps. Because it is a smaller sample, all diminutives but pouquinho were counted for every participant individually. The first noteworthy aspect of Table 6.4 is the very low average frequency of diminutives in the interviews with straight men—approximately 0.3 per thousand words (or 3 for every 10,000 words). As was pointed out earlier, the conversations in Sample 2 addressed homophobia, coming-out stories, and other related topics. As informal as these interviews were (very much like those in Sample 1), it is possible that the straight men in Sample 2 were relatively more uncomfortable due to the subject matter. As a consequence, they may have monitored their speech more, particularly avoiding diminutives. Analogously, the average frequency of diminutives for the lesbians (1.20) in Table 6.5 is the second lowest. It is not as low as the average for the straight

Diminutives and Masculinity 127 Table 6.4 Frequency of diminutives (per thousand words) in interviews with straight men and women Pseudonym words -inho/a freq avg Pseudonym words -inho/a freq avg Pedro Alan Marco Paulo Marlon

11,193 12,415 8,812 10,262 9,518

6 4 2 2 1

0.54 0.32 0.23 0.28 0.19 0.11

Camila Lara Julia Sonia Paula

9,928 10,149 10,541 9,161 9,289

40 39 36 19 14

4.03 3.84 3.42 2.97 2.07 1.51

men, but it is considerably lower than that of gay men and straight women (2.53 and 2.97 respectively). In other words, in terms of the use of diminutives, lesbians resemble straight men more, whereas gay men are more similar to straight women. Again, the pattern seems to mirror well-known stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in which gay men are considered more feminine than straight men, and lesbians as more masculine than straight women. Of course, there is still variation within each group. Among the gay men, three of them (highlighted in Table 6.5) explicitly talked about how they like to be perceived as gay and do not ever try to “hide it”; they said that they like to “sound gay” and that they do not care if they are perceived as effeminate. Marcio even claimed he likes to “show off” his gayness (as a personality trait, he sees himself as the ‘flamboyant’ type). On the other hand, João and Cris both admitted that although they have “no problem” with being gay, they do not like to be “out there” in terms of their social projection. In Cris’s words: (14) [Cris]

antes de ser gay, eu sou um homem . . . antes de ser um homem, eu sou uma pessoa . . . eu não gosto dessa coisa de ser percebido através de um rótulo que na verdade não me define . . . eu nunca tive relações sexuais com nenhuma mulher, nem quis ter . . . mas eu faço questão de não me enquadrar num estereótipo . . . todo mundo que é próximo de mim sabe que eu sou gay, mas porque eu conto pra eles em algum momento e não porque eu carregue uma bandeirinha e fico agitando ela na frente das pessoas

Table 6.5 Frequency of diminutives (per thousand words) in interviews with gay men and lesbians Pseudonym words -inho/a freq avg Pseudonym Total -inho/a freq Marcio Nelson Caio João Cris

13,298 10,149 11,130 12,486 9,043

60 39 27 19 3

4.51 Ana 3.84 Silvia 2.43 2.53 Selma 1.52 Lia 0.33 Laura

10,394 10,009 9,397 9,581 8,410

20 17 11 6 5

avg

1.92 1.70 1.17 1.20 0.63 0.59

128 Ronald Beline Mendes before being gay, I’m a man . . . before being a man, I’m a person . . . I don’t like to be perceived through a label that actually doesn’t define me . . . I’ve never had sexual relations with a woman, nor have I wanted to . . . but I really don’t allow myself to conform to a stereotype . . . everybody close to me knows I’m gay, but because I tell them at some point and not because I carry a little flag and keep waving it at people’s faces It is strikingly ironic that Cris sounds so adamant when he mentions how he strives not to fall into a stereotype: in his linguistic performance, according to the previous discussion here, he does so in a way. Among the gay men in Sample 2, he is the one who employs diminutives least frequently. In fact, there is even a straight man in the sample that uses them more frequently than Cris. By attempting not to fall into one stereotype (“gay men sound effeminate”), he ends up conforming to another one (“if a man doesn’t want to sound gay, he should avoid certain linguistic features”). On the other hand, it is also interesting that one of the three diminutives (bandeirinha ‘little flag’) employed by Cris in the whole one-hour conversation occurs right when he is talking about his social projection as a ‘masculine gay man.’ The following section returns to this token from the perspective of stance. Among the lesbian participants, two of them (Lia and Laura, highlighted in Table 6.5) clearly stated that they “wouldn’t know how not to appear butch,” whereas the other three talked about how they prefer to present themselves as more feminine. In her interview, Ana says that “as a woman, liking other women doesn’t make it an obligation to behave like a man.” There were many instances in Ana’s interview in which she expressed a desire to rebel against the stereotype/prejudice that equates lesbians to masculinized women. By regrouping these individuals according to their expressed sexual and gender identities, it is apparent that masculine straight and gay men, as well as masculine lesbians seem to restrict their usage of diminutives. The recalculated average frequencies according to these groupings are represented in Figure 6.1.

3.59 2.97

1.8 0.79

0.9

0.28 straight men

masculine gay men

butchy lesbians

feminine lesbians

straight women

effeminate gay men

Figure 6.1 Frequencies of diminutives (per thousand words) in sex/gender subgroups

Diminutives and Masculinity 129 STANCE Sociolinguistics has long established that we tend to speak/sound like individuals or groups of people to whom we relate (see e.g., Labov 1966, 1972). It is also well known that we may accommodate the way we talk to our interlocutor or to a hypothetical hearer (Giles and Powesland 1975; Bell 1984, 2001). Furthermore, we may index our affiliation to people and/or concepts/ideologies through language use (Ochs 1992). This chapter has shown some robust evidence that, in Brazilian Portuguese, there is a strong relationship between femininity and the use of diminutives, in such a way that performances of masculinity entail lowering their frequency. However, the indexical field—a constellation of potential, ideologically related meanings (Eckert 2008)—of diminutives is likely to be very complex and dynamic. In addition to the fact that diminutives do not necessarily directly mean ‘effeminacy/femininity,’ the differences between literal, metaphorical, lexical, and some specific cases (like pouquinho) complicate matters, since the indexical link may be more direct in certain cases and more indirect in others. In order to refine the analyses here presented, this section explores one of Eckert’s (2008) central claims, namely that “[w]hile the larger patterns of variation can profitably be seen in terms of static social landscape, this is only a distant reflection of what is happening moment to moment on the ground” (472). Such exploration is pursued here by briefly reexamining the meaning of the diminutives in certain cases through the concept of stance-taking (see in particular Jaffe 2009). For example, it is unremarkable that in a conversation with a man selfidentified as a masculine straight man like Marlon (Table 6.4), there is only one occurrence of a diminutive, and that it is of the lexicalized type: (15) [Marlon] acho uma bobagem essa coisa de dar estrelinha pra alguém só porque cumpriu com a obrigação . . . não era obrigação? I think it’s really idiotic to give a little star to someone just because they fulfilled an obligation . . . wasn’t it an obligation? In this passage, Marlon is talking about gay rights—of which he is in favor—and expresses his dislike for praising people who are law-abiding. For him, it is the law-breakers that should be punished, whereas those who follow the law are doing nothing but their obligation and should not be commended for it. He uses estrelinha ‘little star’ to reference those golden awards that a teacher gives good students. Despite the lexicalized status of estrelinha, the respective non-diminutive estrela is still an option and would be understandable, but it would also be pragmatically weak and generic, in terms of making reference to those stars awarded by teachers. Differently, in (14) above (partially retranscribed below as (16)), Cris (a masculine gay man) twists the expression dar bandeira ‘give flag (literally).’ This expression is very common especially among gay men and means

130 Ronald Beline Mendes ‘to act out,’ both in the sense of ‘behaving as an out gay man’ and ‘revealing (unnecessarily or unwillingly) one’s gayness.’ (16) [Cris]

não porque eu carregue uma bandeirinha e fico agitando ela na frente das pessoas not because I carry a little flag and keep waving it at people’s faces

As seen above, Cris is clearly taking the stance of a gay man who does not like to be seen as feminine. In purely quantitative terms, one could expect that he would stick to the usual expression dar bandeira, but he creates an interesting effect of meaning when he talks about carregar e agitar uma bandeirinha, ‘carry and wave a little flag.’ Here the diminutive appears in the section in which Cris wants to downplay his sexual identity whilst foregrounding his gender identity as man. Here the diminutive performatively brings into being the persona of the stereotypical “conspicuous, in-your-face gay man.” The “little flag” encapsulates both in form and content the fact that more feminine behavior displayed by a man would cause him to be immediately perceived as gay, something from which Cris wants to distinguish himself. All in all, the diminutive is not employed to reveal Cris’s gayness, but is deployed in order to create the stance of a masculine man, irrespective of his sexual identity. Another remarkable, useful example appears in the conversation with Pedro, one of the heterosexual men in Sample 2. Five of the six tokens of diminutives in his interview are concentrated in a rather short excerpt. He is commenting about the fact that he is the first born and has only female siblings (one of whom is a lesbian) and about how they were raised: (17) [Pedro] eu já sabia ler né quando (es)tava na primeira série . . . já tinha meus livrinho . . . meus pais sempre gostaram de ensinar a gente lá em casa eu e as minha irmãzinha . . . os dois lia historinha assim pra gente desde pequenininho . . . minha mãe até fazia umas vozinha diferente . . . de mocinha . . . de herói I could read already when I was in first grade . . . I already had my little books . . . my parents always liked to teach me and my little sisters at home . . . both of them used to read us stories since we were little kids . . . my mom even did different little voices . . . the little lady voice . . . the hero voice If listening only to that excerpt of the interview, Pedro might be perceived as gay—the sequence of diminutives does come across as a bit girly, according to the constructed stereotype. However, Pedro—a self-identified straight man—is in a part of the interview in which he is connected to memories of his childhood and his “little sisters.” He is not taking a particularly gendered stance (Holmes 2008), nor is his sexual identity threatened, since he reached that topic on his own (that is, it was not initiated by the interviewer).

Diminutives and Masculinity 131 As these final examples clearly illustrate, heterosexual males may find themselves in situations in which the use of diminutives goes outside of their normative range as a way of temporarily indicating a particular stance. While perhaps not consciously performative, these examples suggest a complex and nuanced use of diminutives even by members of the group least likely to employ them according to the general distributional pattern. CONCLUSION Aside from literal, concrete diminished size, diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese can convey ideas that are more abstract and indirectly linked to notions of femininity or effeminacy. The quantitative analysis of the data shows that, except for the possibly lexicalized pouquinho ‘little bit,’ men employ diminutives less frequently than women in all cases—literal, lexicalized, and metaphorical—but especially in the last of these. As can be seen from the data, straight men, butch lesbians, and masculine gay men clearly and consistently limit the use of diminutives in order to perform masculinity/non-femininity. Conversely, straight women, feminine gay men, and non-butch lesbians are just as clearly invested in projections of femininity/non-masculinity in the enhanced use of diminutives. Despite the statistical significance of these findings, the diminutive usage is still very fluid as can be seen in (1) the intra-group variation in degree of adherence to these tendencies, (2) the multiple uses to which diminutives can be put, and (3) the importance of considering how stance may cause a speaker to utilize diminutives ‘going against the grain.’ To go back to the anecdote with which I began this chapter, it is likely that the mother on Avenida Paulista was instructing her son on the ‘proper’ use of language, but in turn the son—if he did in fact speak ‘like a girl’—was reflecting the complex possibilities of conformity and independence embedded in the choices that language permits. NOTES 1. Cf. Mendes (2007) for a grid of grades attributed to the readings as well as a transcript of the text. 2. The quotation marks here indicate that comments were translated directly from the conversations originally transcribed in Portuguese. 3. Both ‘femininity’ and ‘effeminacy’ are employed here because the first is more generally related to women and womanliness, whereas the second is intended to refer to men who have or show characteristics regarded as typical of a woman (unmanliness). 4. As in: Eu já estava acabandinho quando ele chegou ‘I was almost finishing it when he arrived.’ The gerund form of acabar ‘to finish’ is acabando. 5. Before every example, S1 and S2 indicate the sample it was extracted from. The codes ‘m’ and ‘f’ indicate the speaker’s sex—male or female.

132 Ronald Beline Mendes REFERENCES Avery, Jack, and Julie Liss. 1996. “Acoustic Characteristics of Less-MasculineSounding Male Speech.” Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 99: 3738–3748. Bell, Allan. 1984. “Language Style as Audience Design.” Language in Society 13: 145–204. Bell, Allan. 2001. “Back in Style: Reworking Audience Design.” In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. by Penelope Eckert and John Rickford, 139–169. New York: Cambridge University Press. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2008. “I’ll Be the Judge of That: Diversity in Social Perceptions of (ING).” Language in Society 37: 637–659. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2009. “The Nature of Sociolinguistic Perception.” Language Variation and Change 21: 135–156. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Variation and the Indexical Field.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453–476. Gaudio, Rudolf. 1994. “Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men.” American Speech 69: 303–318. Giles, Howard, and Peter Powesland. 1975. Speech Style and Social Evaluation. London: Academic Press. Holmes, Janet. 2008. “Gendered Discourse at Work.” Language and Linguistics Compass 2: 478–495. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1963. Essais de Linguistique Générale. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System.” Cognitive Science 4: 195–208. Levon, Erez. 2006. “Hearing ‘gay’: Prosody, Interpretation and the Affective Judgments of Men’s Speech.” American Speech 81: 56–78. Mendes, Ronald Beline. 2007. “What is ‘Gay Speech’ in São Paulo, Brazil.” In International Perspectives on Gender and Language, ed. by José Santaemilia, Patricia Bou, Sergio Maruenda, and Gora Zaragoza. València: Universitat de València. Ochs, Elinor. 1992. “Indexing Gender.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 335–358. Podesva, Robert. 2006. “Intonational Variation and Social Meaning: Categorical and Phonetic Aspects.” Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 12: 189–202. Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte, and Eric Smith. 2005. Goldvarb X: A Variable Rule Application for Macintosh and Windows. Toronto: Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication 23: 193–229. Smyth, Ron, and Henry Rogers. 2001. “Searching for Phonetic Correlates of Gayand Straight-Sounding Voices.” Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 8: 44–64. West, Candace, and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1: 125–151.

7

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ Narrating Masculinity and National Identity in Israel Erez Levon

INTRODUCTION It is by now widely accepted that gender and nationalism go hand-in-hand. Scholarship in a variety of disciplines has documented the ways in which normative renderings of masculinity and femininity have formed the building blocks of various nationalist (and imperialist) imaginings, and has described how they continue to animate dominant conceptualizations of nationhood to this day (e.g., Mosse 1985; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; McClintock 1995). At the same time, more recent work has also begun to consider the flip-side of the gender/nation equation and to explore how ideologies of nationalism can themselves be recruited in the construction and maintenance of a gendered order (e.g., Nagel 1998; Boellstorff 2005; Yuval-Davis 2011). In this chapter, I build upon these recent investigations into so-called nationed genders (Yuval-Davis 1997) to examine the ways in which certain gay men in Israel work to reconcile a perceived incompatibility between gay male sexuality, on one hand, and standard definitions of Israeli identity, on the other. Specifically, I consider how these men use ‘coming-out’ stories to negotiate the conflicting demands of their sexual and national identifications, and describe how they ultimately succeed in legitimating gay male sexuality through the strategic deployment of dominant national imagery. In doing so, I aim to highlight the politically and historically contingent nature of masculinity in Israel, and to demonstrate how language, in the form of personal narratives, allows gay men to resist societal marginalization and to construct gendered identities for themselves that accord with dominant Israeli discourses of the nation. The prevailing mode of contemporary Israeli nationalism traces its origins to the Zionist theorists of late 19th century Europe (Kimmerling 2001; Shafir and Peled 2002). As part of their aim to resolve the ‘Jewish problem’ (i.e., the discrimination and disenfranchisement suffered by Jews in Europe), these theorists were very concerned with what they described as European Jewry’s physical and moral degeneration (Nordau 1968 [1895]), which they viewed as at the heart of Jewish subjugation (Biale 1997; Boyarin 1997). The solution they proposed was the creation of a new ‘muscular Judaism’ that

134 Erez Levon would break with the chronic passivity and timorousness of Diaspora life. In step with the popular nationalist ethos of the time, these thinkers argued that the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine was the best way to achieve this goal. From its inception then, Israeli nationalism has been imagined as a tool with which to assert Jewish virility and power—in short, a tool for asserting normative masculinity (Almog 2000; Mayer 2000; Kimmerling 2001). My argument in the current chapter is that the gay men I consider make use of the same foundational Zionist logic in narrating their own journeys from sexual self-discovery to self-acceptance (i.e., their coming-out stories). Using recent developments in narrative theory (Ochs and Capps 2001; Georgakopoulou 2007), I detail how these men all tell their stories using a similar narrative template through which they construct a symbolic contrast between the gay man they once feared that they were (a sexual deviant who resides on the margins of Israeli society) and the gay man that they have since become (what one informant calls “the ideal gay man” who subscribes to normative Israeli socio-sexual values). In essence, I argue that the men’s adoption of this shared narrative template represents a form of emplotment (Ricoeur 1984)—a way for the men to reorient their life stories so as to render their identities culturally intelligible (see also Butler 1990 for a discussion on the “matrix of intelligibility” with regard to gender and sexuality). In this respect, my arguments resonate with other studies of masculinity and nation in Israel (e.g., Fink and Press 1999; Walzer 2000; Lemish 2004; Kaplan 2006), which all discuss Israeli gay men’s own experiences of their conflicting sexual and national identifications. What sets this chapter apart is my focus on the concrete symbolic practices through which this subjective negotiation is realized. In other words, my argument is primarily a linguistic one, in which I detail how certain Israeli gay men use language to performatively enact a coherent (and culturally authorized) presentation of self. I begin in the next section with a brief overview of Israeli ideologies of the nation, or the “collective identity narratives” (Yuval-Davis 2011) in which my informants situate their experiences. I then go on to introduce the framework of dimensional narrative analysis I employ, before turning to a detailed discussion of three coming-out stories. I close by remarking on the potential ramifications of my arguments, especially as they relate to studies of both performativity and intersectionality. THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN ISRAEL One of the most pervasive tenets of early Zionist thought was the belief that Jews in the Diaspora led a disembodied existence (Biale 1997). As such, Zionism was viewed as a way to ground the Jewish people, the quintessential luftmenschen (‘people of the air’), in the land of Palestine. This principle of grounding made more than metaphorical reference to the body; the physical

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 135 reconfiguration of Jewish corporeality, including sexuality, was seen as the ultimate goal of the Zionist national project. Zionism promised what Biale (1997) calls an erotic revolution for the Jewish people, which would entail the creation of the new ‘Hebrew’ man, the sabra—a strong, virile man who would be master of his own existence (see also Almog 2000). The idea of a connection between the body, sexuality, and Zionism is already evident in the writings of the earliest European founders of Zionism in the final decades of the 19th century (Biale 1997). For these theorists, the only way to revitalize the Jewish soul was to improve the health and physical power of the Jews. In his highly influential monograph, aptly titled Entartung (“Degeneration”), Zionist leader Max Nordau (1968 [1895]) argued that only by developing their bodies would Jews be able to surmount the perpetual nervousness (which he, interestingly, viewed as a genetic trait) that had kept them oppressed and subjugated for centuries. In this spirit, youth and physical prowess became symbols of Zionism, whereas degeneration and old age were taken to characterize Jewish life in the Diaspora. Sexuality, in the form of eroticism, was also present in Nordau’s formulation since he maintained that the physical and the erotic are intrinsically related. Yet, although Nordau, among others, wrote about the necessity of sexual health, he was also very critical of libertinism. In his eyes, an excessive sexuality was equally as indicative of degeneration as an insufficient sexuality was. Nordau therefore proposed a simple solution for this problem: marriage. Under the bonds of matrimony, a healthy, but not excessive, erotic sexuality would be ensured, thus enabling the physical betterment promised by the Zionist national project. These ideas about sexuality and matrimony were transplanted to Palestine by the Jewish settlers arriving from Central and Eastern Europe during the first two decades of the 20th century. Though they were neither very numerous nor representative of the majority of the (Jewish) population of Palestine, these settlers, known as the halutsim (‘pioneers’), quickly established themselves as the ruling elite. They built many of the structures of the pre-state society, known as the Yišuv (literally ‘settlement’), including the first kibbutsim (collective, normally agricultural, communities) as well as the labor federations, the health care, education, and welfare systems, and the armed militias that would become the official apparatuses of the state upon its establishment. Their thoughts, beliefs, and ways of life became the normative values of Yišuv society, and subsequently of the State of Israel. Though their overall influence has perhaps fluctuated over the past 65 years (cf. Kimmerling 2001; Shafir and Peled 2002), the halutsim remain the standard reference for the values of Israeli society. In the writings of the halutsim we find the same appeals to break with the Judaism of the Old World via a sexual and erotic revolution. For example, in a speech given in 1918 to other prominent Zionist leaders in Palestine, Meir Yaari, one of the founders of the highly influential Ha-Šomer Ha-Tsa’ir (‘youth guard’), claimed:

136 Erez Levon We want to educate this generation to be tough and strong, and not soft and wallowing in their imaginations. Only the [strong] arms of heroes will accomplish this work and not poets . . . I view with great trepidation the groups of Ha-Šomer that are dominated not by men, but by angels of beauty and love. (Cited in Biale 1997: 186) Zionism for the halutsim was thus identified with masculinity and virility, and was set in opposition to the perceived feminine weakness of the Diaspora. Yet, exactly like their European predecessors, the halutsim were equally critical of libertinism and too much sexual freedom. While calling for a new kind of sexuality, they insisted that this sexuality be what they described as ‘ripe,’ a rather winsome euphemism for ‘procreative.’ In other words, the halutsim believed that only sexuality that has procreation as its ultimate goal is appropriate. Eliahu Rapoport, a prominent Zionist philosopher, affirmed that the principal goal of sexuality is reproduction. He claimed that traditional morality considered sexuality to be far from God because of the physical pleasure that it entails. Yet, he argued that in ignoring the reproductive function of sexuality, traditional morality had defiled the sexual act and “robbed it of its divinity” (Biale 1997: 189). For Rapoport, only by restoring reproduction at the heart of sexuality was it possible to unite the body and the soul, and achieve the ultimate Zionist goal of selfrealization in the new nation. For the halutsim, as for the European Zionists before them, the new Jewish nation was therefore characterized by a return to seemingly traditional values. It is interesting, moreover, that for the self-proclaimed secular halutsim discussions of these values were frequently framed in religious terminology where the Jewish Bible itself was deployed to justify their ideas. The halutsim made frequent and selective reference to a variety of biblical tales, such as the Book of Joshua and its story of how the ancient Israelites defeated the Canaanites who had previously occupied the ‘Promised Land’ or the (apocryphal) Book of Maccabees and its story of the Jewish revolt against Greek occupation in the 2nd century BCE. These stories epitomized the muscular and militaristic understanding of Judaism that the halutsim advocated. Part and parcel with a return to tradition, the bi-millennial history of Jews in the Diaspora was symbolically minimized. Instead, emphasis was placed on biblical heroes, who through strength, courage, and military cunning conquered their foes. The image of the erudite and sensitive European Jew in a long, black coat was replaced by the young, strong, and suntanned Hebrew man, willing to die in the service of the land (Almog 2000). Even from this brief historical outline, it is possible to see how the halutsim used the Jewish national project in Palestine as a way to achieve (gendered) normality. By erasing the history of European subjugation, they were able to construct a narrative of Jewish national continuity that spanned two millennia. Viewed in this perspective, the halutsim were no longer

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 137 the descendants of the ‘degenerate’ Jews of Europe but of the conquering heroes of the Bible. In effect, the establishment of the nation is what gave the halutsim their power and their self-sufficiency—in short, their masculinity.1 This point is succinctly made by Boyarin (1997: 302), who writes that “if, in other national movements, ‘manliness’ is made to serve nationalism, for [the halutsim] nationalism was an instrument in the search for manliness.” As the Yišuv society gave way to the establishment of Israel, this national ideology—with its focus on militaristic virility and the centrality of the heterosexual family—came to be inextricably bound to what it means to be Israeli (Gross 2002; Shafir and Peled 2002; Kuntsman 2008). And it is this same ideology that gives rise to the perceived tension between gay male sexuality and Israeli national identity today. NARRATING SEXUALITY As I have argued elsewhere (Levon 2009, 2010, 2012), gay men in Israel make use of numerous strategies to negotiate a position for themselves within the Israeli ideological landscape described above. These strategies include a variety of both social and linguistic practices that range from more microlevel interactional work (such as variation of specific prosodic, morphological, and lexical features; Levon 2010) to broader discursive activities. In this chapter, I focus on a particular textual practice in which the men engage: the act of narrating a coming-out story. I mentioned in the introduction above that coming-out stories are narratives of sexual self-discovery and self-acceptance. As such, they are a specific type of life story (Linde 1993), or those narratives through which individuals provide their own perspective on prior significant events in their lives as a way of constructing a culturally coherent sense of self in the present day. What this means is that coming-out stories are much more than just an anodyne re-telling of past events. They are also an opportunity for speakers to convey a particular moral stance, and to evaluate their own actions (and those of others) in light of a system of culturally shared beliefs (Ochs and Capps 2001). In other words, comingout stories, like all life stories, are a tool for representing yourself as you want to be seen, and in a way that accords with the values to which you subscribe (see also, e.g., Liang 1997). From a structural perspective, there are a number of ways in which life stories can encode moral stance. Below, I focus on one of these ways—what Ochs and Capps (2001) call explanatory sequencing, or the particular logic of cause and effect that narrators draw upon to organize their stories. In essence, all narratives can be understood as a more or less elaborate description of a chain of causality, where the primary goal of narration is to recount the occurrence of some (normally unexpected) event, and then to lay out the situation that brought that event about and/or the reaction that event gave rise to (Labov and Waletzky 1967, though cf. Georgakopoulou 2007). As

138 Erez Levon Ochs and Capps describe it, events within a story are narrated as a series of affordances, or probable outcomes based on some prior action or state. For example, a narrative about a glass falling on the floor and breaking because it was placed too close to the edge of a table makes use of an explanatory logic in which being close to the edge of the table affords the glass falling on the floor and breaking. The key point, however, is that narrators have a fair amount of freedom in devising explanatory sequences. They can describe an event as affording (or having been afforded by) another; or they can choose to minimize any causal links and present the two events as unrelated. Varying an explanatory sequence therefore allows a narrator to reconfigure the relationship between the past and the present so as to present a chain of causality that suits her current narrative purpose. Nevertheless, there are limits to a narrator’s freedom, and it is because of these limits that explanatory sequences encode moral stance. All narratives are constrained by certain requirements for coherence. Prominent among these is the establishment of what Linde (1993) calls adequate causality, or a chain of causality among events that is deemed acceptable according to some set of standards in the world. Consider the example of the narrative about the broken glass. The causal link between a glass being close to the edge of a table and its falling and breaking can be considered adequate given what is known about spatial relations and physical forces like gravity. If instead the glass had been in the center of a large table immediately prior to its falling on the floor and breaking, we could argue that there was inadequate causality between the two narrated events. Importantly, however, adequate causality is not a fixed property. Rather, it is determined in relation to a particular and culturally contingent set of beliefs, what Linde (1993) terms a coherence system. These systems—be they based in science, religion, common sense, or some other way of structuring human experience—essentially impose a logical and moral order that dictates what events can legitimately result from prior events, and which, crucially, cannot. Examining the ways in which speakers narrate explanatory sequences can thus provide insight into how they achieve adequate causality in their stories, and, ultimately, the morality-tinged coherence systems that they use to do so. COMING OUT IN ISRAEL The data for my analysis are drawn from a larger examination of gender, sexuality, and nationalism in Israel (Levon 2010). For that project, I spent 12 months observing and recording 57 members of various Israeli gay and lesbian activist associations ranging across the political spectrum, including everything from a centrist political lobby to a queer anarchist group. My goal in this chapter, however, is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of the various social and linguistic practices I observed throughout my

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 139 fieldwork. Nor do I aim to offer a survey of coming-out narratives across my participant population or to identify a singular or characteristic Israeli gay male coherence system (which I do not think exists). Rather, I focus on the construction of coming-out stories among a sub-group of men in my sample, whom I have elsewhere called the Mainstream men, as a sort of case study of one way in which the intersection of gay male sexuality and Israeli national identity is articulated. My interpretations are therefore restricted to the Mainstream men’s practice, though from a comparative perspective I believe that my findings could be relevant to a discussion of sexuality in Israel more broadly. The Mainstream men are each members of one of the six ‘mainstream’ activist associations I interacted with during my time in Israel. I group these six associations together under the Mainstream label (a label group members also use themselves) based on what I understand to be a set of common institutional goals and a shared conceptualization of sexual politics in Israel. Put simply, this conceptualization can be summarized as an ‘accommodationist’ stance with respect to sexuality in Israel. Members of these groups argue that lesbian/gay sexuality can be fully compatible with the standard Israeli models of gender and the nation described above, and their activism is geared toward the integration of lesbians and gays within existing Israeli social structures (for further details, see Levon 2010; see also Vaid 1995; Seidman 2002 for a discussion of similar movements in other countries). For our current purposes, I discuss the coming-out stories of three of the Mainstream men: Yoav, Daniel, and Avi.2 These three men’s stories were chosen because together they illustrate various components of the coherence system I identified as implicated in all of the Mainstream men’s coming-out narratives. At the time of recording, Yoav was 36 years old, living in Jerusalem, and held a leadership position in one of the Mainstream organizations. He had grown up in Haifa and had lived in Tel Aviv for a number of years before moving to Jerusalem with his longtime partner five years prior to my meeting him. Daniel, who is originally from Jerusalem, was 30 years old when recorded, and living in Tel Aviv. Though he did not hold an official leadership position, Daniel was an active member of another Mainstream organization. Finally, Avi was 23 years old at the time of recording and had lived his entire life in Jerusalem (except when he was stationed elsewhere during his military service). He was a regular participant at the social events organized by a third Mainstream association, though he did not express a more serious commitment to the group’s political activities.3 I recorded these men’s stories in the course of individual sociolinguistic interviews that I conducted with each of them. The interviews were conducted entirely in Hebrew and took place between four and six months into my field research, so the three men were all wellacquainted with me at the time of recording.

140 Erez Levon

Yoav I begin with Yoav’s story. In response to my initial question about his childhood, Yoav provides a chronological outline of his upbringing, beginning with his schooling and moving on to his military service.4 He at first describes his time in the army as good, but then immediately goes on to state:5 (1) Y:

but I was really stressed that (.) like because of the whole thing that I’m gay and all that and= EL: =yeah, did you already know yourself? Y: I knew from the age of 13 but I didn’t do anything with it but it really bothered me. It was before ’93 (.) in ’93 Rabin changed the standing orders6 and yeah but that’s it I became a soldier in August of ’87. EL: Yeah Y: um so it still hadn’t been changed. I was really scared that they would ask or they would guess but even if they had asked then it wouldn’t have (.) I wouldn’t have had to lie because nothing had happened yet, everything was in my head but nothing had happened yet. um so that’s it. and then when I was 20 which was like towards the end towards the end of my service then that was the period when I started trying to stop trying not to be gay which is what I had been trying to do before then and it was so unsuccessful for me, as you can see. so that’s it. The extract in (1) is the first time that Yoav mentions his sexuality in our conversation. When he does so, he identifies it as a source of “stress.” The stress for him arose because of the impossibility, at least at the time, of being an openly gay man while simultaneously fulfilling an obligation to serve in the military. Even though for Yoav his sexuality was “all in my head,” he nevertheless depicts it as being in sharp conflict with his duty to the nation. For this reason, it is only when he begins to reach the end of his military service that Yoav “start[s] trying to stop trying not to be gay.” Immediately after he introduces the topic of sexuality, I ask Yoav whether he already “knew about himself” at the time of his story. My doing so can be seen as a way of encouraging Yoav to establish adequate causality—to describe the events that led to his feelings of “stress” in the army. Yoav accommodates my request simply by stating that he had “known since he was 13.” This type of response is what Linde (1993) describes as adequation via temporal depth, or the act of justifying a given state of affairs on the basis that it has been that way for a long time. According to Linde, the use of temporal depth in an explanatory sequence is a kind of distancing strategy, a way for the narrator to abdicate personal responsibility for the events described. In extract (2), Yoav makes use of an additional distancing strategy in his response to my question seeking further information about his sexuality:

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 141 (2) EL: so what happened with the whole coming out thing, like when did that start? Y: oh, okay. so I when I was 13 I knew that there was some sort of problem. it just became really clear to me in my mind. um and that’s it (.) and that I need to try with all of my strength so that (0.5) I won’t be (.) like that (.) and that I’ll beat the problem because if I don’t it would be a disaster and I will destroy my life. that’s what I knew. I didn’t ask anybody about it and I didn’t read it anywhere but from the age of 13 that’s what I knew. that’s just how it is. um (.) and it was interesting because I had this idea that (.) this belief about the world that people need to live as they are and be who they are and all sorts of things like that (.) childish ideas but nice ones (.) and I knew that ((in English)) it doesn’t apply in this case. like that all that is true on a theoretical level and all but that this is something different and, and that it wouldn’t work and that if I don’t want to ruin my life then it’s better to overcome the problem. EL: yeah Y: um (.) that’s it (.) and that’s what I tried to do. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t do anything. um that’s it (.) and that’s how (.) seven years passed. um (1) I was a good student, you know I did those things that people do in order to entertain themselves. um (1) and there was a girlfriend at one point which was really nice but (.) ((in English)) whatever. um (.) and at some point when I was in the army I just had this feeling that I broke that I couldn’t do it anymore (.) I mean I felt (0.5) a very strong sense of failure (.) because I had invested seven years and I didn’t succeed. And it was a sense of failure but I just wasn’t able to do it anymore (.) that’s it. In (2), Yoav describes his sexuality as a sort of innate characteristic, something about him that just “became clear in my mind” without any link to a prior causal event. Describing it in this way allows Yoav to refrain from taking personal responsibility for his sexuality (Linde 1993), and instead portray it as a psychological state that simply arose and over which he had no control. Yoav similarly describes how he “just knew” that his homosexuality was an impediment to leading a normal life. He is careful to highlight that he was never told this explicitly by anyone but was nevertheless certain of this fact. Narrating his story in this way, Yoav depicts his knowledge both about his sexuality and its incompatibility with dominant social values as absolute truths that are exempt from requirements for adequate causality (“that’s just how it is”).7 Yoav then goes on to provide a summary of different coping strategies that he attempted over the years (e.g., exceling in his studies, having a girlfriend) before stating that at some point in the army “something just broke,” and he realized that he “couldn’t do it anymore.” It is interesting to note that his summary of the various coping strategies

142 Erez Levon is the first time that Yoav places himself as an active agent in the story. Up until this point, Yoav’s sexuality and the stress it engendered were events that he just became aware of through no explicit action of his own. After summarizing the coping strategies he attempted at the end of extract (2), Yoav goes on to narrate his experience with two of these strategies in more detail. The first is reproduced below: (3) Y:

EL: Y:

EL: Y:

EL: Y:

EL: Y:

once during those years (.) I said to myself stop being so stupid, like you don’t live in Tajikistan in the 16th century, you live in Israel in the 20th century (.) like you’re an intelligent person (.) like check it out (.) like do something yeah so like (.) what I did was that I went to the library at Haifa University, so I said to myself read up a bit on (.) homosexuality like educate yourself. that’s it, so I did that in a state of total hysteria. I was scared that everyone was looking at me and all that (.) and also going to a part of the library that you’ve never been in before and the right shelf without asking anyone yeah because if you ask then (.) you’re in for it. so anyway (.) I managed (1) um I got to the right shelf and all (.) the problem is that on the right shelf there weren’t the right books because they had a really bad collection yeah um (1) all of it in English and it it didn’t have many books and those that it had at least those that I found were books that (.) um (.) described homosexuality as something (.) horrifying that was linked to alcoholism and wrecked families= =yeah= =sexual abuse and all sorts of other really pleasant things (.) um (1) that’s it. so um I like read that. I knew that what I was reading was ((in English)) bullshit. I knew it was bullshit but it also didn’t help me. I mean somehow I defended myself from those stupid books but I didn’t (.) I didn’t find anything there that helped me to move forward. um so that’s it.

In (3), Yoav describes one of the ways in which he attempted to seek help. Drawing on a belief in Israel as a progressive democracy (and not “Tajikistan in the 16th century”), he decides to go to the library in an effort to find external validation and support. This attempt is, however, unsuccessful. Although Yoav recognizes the inaccuracy of the texts that he finds, he is nevertheless unable to reconcile his homosexual identification with normative conceptualizations of appropriate behavior (“I didn’t find anything there that helped me to move forward”). This leads to Yoav’s going “back into the closet.” His return to the closet notwithstanding, this portion of the story

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 143 is important because it is the first time that Yoav narrates the possibility of one day resolving the “problem” of his sexuality. This resolution finally arrives for Yoav at the end of his military service: (4) Y:

EL: Y: EL: Y: EL: Y: EL: Y:

EL: Y: EL: Y:

at the end of the army I was supposed to be released, three years. and I wanted to travel abroad, I wanted to save money for that, but I didn’t have a profession. so where am I going to work, and what am I going to do, and all that? in the end what happened was that an officer that I had been in close contact with at my base in the north um moved to the bureau to my unit in Tel Aviv. and he asked me three weeks before I was supposed to be released um to move with him actually (.) in Tel Aviv. and I made a really good decision and agreed. and for me it was a wonderful solution. because for the army I was a career soldier (.) they paid me a salary and paid the rent on my apartment. I didn’t (.) live at my parents’ anymore, I lived in Tel Aviv. I already knew then that there were a lot of gays in Tel Aviv. yeah um (.) so it was great. so actually because I’m gay I signed a contract to be a career soldier for an extra year. interesting Yeah. so that’s it. and that’s the year in which (.) like things changed in a really meaningful way. yeah? like I made friends, I went out to places, I met my boyfriend Dror at some point (.) things like that (.) so um (.) so it was really different everything. and like did you go out a lot in Tel Aviv? so there were there were some places but really the parts that I remember that were the best it wasn’t really going out to bars and things like that but really just that you make this circle of friends (.) some of them in a couple some not in a couple. just like a normal gay life. yeah that it just happens there. and that’s like amazing. a blessing that that kind of thing exists (.) it was really um (.) like it was just like “wow.” yeah like OK. so there were also places to have a drink and all that but ((in English)) whatever. but that there really were (1) like that it was ok, that it was a nice part of the (.) that it was like ok.

Yoav relates in (4) how at the end of his compulsory military service, he was given an opportunity to remain in the army as a career soldier based in Tel Aviv. Making a “really good decision,” Yoav agrees to the proposal and moves to Tel Aviv—a place that he already knew had “lots of gays.” It is

144 Erez Levon then in Tel Aviv that Yoav finds the resolution that he has been seeking and is able to “come out.” Interestingly, this resolution is not necessarily brought about by the possibility in Tel Aviv of going out and being part of the gay “scene,” but rather by Yoav’s discovery of what he calls a “normal gay life.” Yoav characterizes this life in terms of a circle of friends, some of whom are in romantic relationships, who socialize with one another rather than go out to the various bars in the city. Implicit in this characterization is the establishment of a symbolic contrast between the kind of gay men who goes out on the town (presumably single men who engage in casual sex) and the “normal” gay men who are instead committed to monogamous relationships. It is with this latter type of gay men that Yoav ultimately identifies, and he closes his story with the happy realization that living this type of gay life “is OK.” Taking Yoav’s story as a whole, we see that he begins by describing his sexuality as a source of conflict that he had lived with throughout his adolescence. He does not elaborate on the cause of that conflict, either in terms of the origins of his sexual desire or in terms of the social values that impede its expression. He nevertheless details a variety of unsuccessful strategies he used in an attempt to overcome this conflict (including the trip to the library reproduced above and another occasion in which he tried meeting other gay men through the personals section of a local newspaper). It is only when he is given the opportunity to move to Tel Aviv that Yoav encounters the kind of gay life that allows for the conflict to be resolved—the kind of gay life that he still lives today.

Daniel Like Yoav, Daniel first brings up the topic of his sexuality in our interview in response to my question about his military service: (5) EL: D: EL: D:

so what did you do in the army, where were you? I was in the armored ((brigade)). (1) it was a really difficult place. yeah? yeah. it was a mistake (.) in hindsight. fine every place (.) every difficult experience also gives you something, but um (.) it was too hard. it’s not it’s also not clear to me like where this need this desire to go to such a hard place came from EL: yeah D: like to force myself (.) um there (.) yeah yeah there (.) is a place that (1) you can push yourself. And I pushed myself. I wasn’t like, it didn’t suit me (.) because it drove me as far into the closet as you can possibly go. um (.) the people there were hard in in wa- in a way that I wasn’t at all familiar with. EL: yeah

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 145 D:

I didn’t have any tools any ability to deal with it, it was just (0.5) it was um a catastrophe (.) and and and hard work, not hard work was less um (1) it was less of a problem. if there was hard work with normal people then I I (2) that that’s all right. it was (.) not easy like it was really um (3) really um (2) depressing.

In (5), Daniel describes his time in the army as a “catastrophe.” He ascribes this difficulty to his interactions with the other members of his unit, whom Daniel characterizes simply as “hard.” While he never elaborates on what precisely this means, we can infer that it is related to a particular display of hegemonic masculinity since he states that he was driven “as far into the closet as you can possibly go.” Daniel moreover alludes to the possibility that he had in fact volunteered for this particular unit as a way of attempting to “push himself,” though he does not specify the intended goal of that pushing. After its brief mention in (5), Daniel does not return to the topic of sexuality until seven minutes later in the conversation. Before then, he recounts his life after leaving the army when he moved to Tel Aviv and enrolled in the university. Daniel describes this time as a very happy one, and he relates the many friends he made and the academic successes he enjoyed. He then goes on: (6) D:

good grades and things like that came easily. but what didn’t come easily was coming out of the closet and and starting a relationship. that was hard. (3) um (1) bip bip bip ((nonsense syllables)) (1) that was that hardest part of dealing with it. EL: yeah D: actually EL: and when did all of this happen, like when did the whole story of sexuality start? D: um about is that right? it took another year and a half or so before I started (1) the start to-until I until I bought a computer and understood that (.) because I’m not (1) I told myself that never in my life would I go to the parks and I wouldn’t go to (1) even though I had friends that said to me sure but sure in the park you don’t just go to fuck you also go to meet people. it’s not like you fuck right away, you sit on a chair, people sitting with other people, you meet them, there’s like a culture (.) or and (.) they started to tell me that it’s not so bad. in my mind and my own self-impression it seemed to me like the lowest of the low. and later when people told me that there’s ICQ ((a web portal)) and there’s the Internet, that you can meet people that way I said well that’s perfect, that’s what’s right for me. so I bought myself a computer and I started talking to people and all that (.) and also to go out (.) and also to have sex (.) um

146 Erez Levon Daniel contrasts the relative ease with which he made friends and did well in his studies with the difficulties he had in coming out. He explains this difficulty as being grounded in his unwillingness to participate in the only gay “culture” he was aware of at the time, that of men meeting for casual sexual encounters in public parks. Only after he is told about the possibility of meeting men over the Internet (via web portals such as ICQ) does Daniel feel able to begin engaging with a gay lifestyle, and he admits (rather shyly) to his initial forays into dating and sex. Immediately after (6), Daniel continues his story about his initial coming out while at the university in Tel Aviv: (7) D:

and then they opened a student group at Tel Aviv University. I knew the group in Jerusalem from before the army when I used to go a bit, the first times that I actually I met gays. EL: in Jerusalem? D: other than myself, gay men (.) yes. and there they were always like these older guys and it totally drove me crazy EL: oh yeah? D: yeah, each time that I went then there were like two or three young guys and like 20 guys who were like 40 or 50. I went there when I was 17, maybe they looked older to me then, maybe they were only 30, I don’t know. But um when I went I expected to find people aged, I don’t know, students 25, 24. and there were a few. but the majority was actually people who weren’t even students. actually I became friendly with some guy who wa-what was he? he was, his mother worked at the university, that was his connection, and he invited me to go to Tel Aviv. and I went (.) ((laughter)) (.) I let myself be convinced. and then he introduced me to his friends who worked in peep shows, like friends from the central bus station ((located in an impoverished area of downtown Tel Aviv that is associated with crime and prostitution)). ((laughter)) like from the university I got to the place the most-like I most didn’t want to get to. that I was the most terrified of and that seemed to me like the things the most like (1) stigmatizing that could be connected to being gay. (1) the thing that I most of all like no no no no this. this isn’t me. Though he had originally stated that he came out when he was 23 and living in Tel Aviv, in (7), Daniel describes how he used to occasionally attend meetings of a gay youth group in Jerusalem when he was 17. In this part of the story, Daniel embeds a narrative about having traveled to Tel Aviv with a man that he had befriended at the youth group. Daniel seems to be using this embedded narrative to further delineate the types of gay men he had been exposed to (personified by the sex workers in the story) from the kind of gay life that he was seeking. In doing so, Daniel provides further background,

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 147 and hence justification, for the difficulties he had in coming out that were described in extract (6). Following his telling me about having gone to meetings when he was 17, I was curious to know when Daniel first realized that he was attracted to men. His response to this question was, “I don’t know. Age 11?” and he was relatively unwilling at first to elaborate. Eventually, however, he began to describe how it was difficult for him when he was a child because in his family, being gay was not seen as a “legitimate” option. He then went on to state: (8) D:

like the thing that most touched me it was like ’92 when Uzi Even ((a former military officer and future member of the Israeli parliament)) came out of the closet. that was like wow. for me that was like I don’t know what. it was a release. it was this feeling that was, simply astounding. it wasn’t some singer like Ofer Naxšon. do you know who that is, some like radio personality. you know one of those D-list celebrities that’s, that someone would come out of the closet, and even today it’s still touching and everything, but once, fine (.) it’s a DJ that came out of the closet. it’s not (.) a professor, a man who was in the army (.) a colonel and he’s a physicist and I don’t know something like that. the most bourgeois and elitist possible. and it’s this model that is so like (1) um (1) desirable, such a perfect role model that I like in my background, in my (1) heart it’s much more suited to that kind of model. that that, the ability to be a person who is both respected and gay. EL: yeah D: and (2) that’s it. that was like a feeling I really (.) remember. but when I was a kid, it was when I was 17. ’92. ’93 maybe. I don’t remember how old I was. ’95? yes. 18. 17. ’92. 17. so um (1) um but as an 11- or 12-year-old kid it’s something that’s really really hard to deal with. (2) that’s it and whe- you add to this the lonliness and the (2) the whole situation that I was in it was just completely (2) like hopeless. and I really thought a lot I’ll kill myself I’ll kill myself I’ll kill myself as soon as I no longer have the strength to deal with this I’ll kill myself, e- a- in the end ((chuckle)) I survived. but it was I don’t know, I think that for others it could be that (.) in a slightly different situation I could have been able to decide (.) that I can’t do it anymore (4) In this final episode of his story, Daniel relates his experience of watching Uzi Even, a prominent scientist and former military officer, testify before an Israeli parliamentary committee, where Even reported that he had been discharged from the army following a revelation that he was gay. There is palpable emotion in Daniel’s telling of his feeling of “release” when he realized that someone like Even (a professor and a soldier) can be gay. In Daniel’s

148 Erez Levon telling, Even was precisely the kind of “role model” that Daniel needed. Daniel then goes on to juxtapose this narrated memory with his prior feelings of hopelessness and despair when he was a child. Using side-shadowing (Ochs and Capps 2001), Daniel states that in a different situation he might have decided to end his own life, thus underscoring the fortuitous but by no means pre-determined nature of his having succeeded in making peace with his sexuality. Given the sequential placement of this claim immediately following his discussion of Even, we are led to understand that Daniel’s discovery of the kind of gay life that Even represents is likely a primary factor in his ability to have “survived.” Though Daniel’s story is temporally structured somewhat differently than Yoav’s, both Daniel and Yoav use a similar explanatory sequence in the narration of their coming-out stories. Both begin by relating how their military service was a period of significant personal tension due to a perceived conflict between their inner psychological states and the roles that were expected of them. In addition, both establish adequate causality for this inner state through recourse to claims of temporal depth and innateness. The two then narrate how they attempted on numerous occasions to resolve this tension, though each of these attempts ultimately led them back to the kind of gay life that they repudiated. Finally, it was a sort of chance occurrence (being asked to move to Tel Aviv in the case of Yoav, seeing Even on television for Daniel) that eventually led both men to discover an acceptable articulation of gay male identity and so resolve the conflict with which they began their stories.

Avi The final story I consider comes from Avi, the 23-year-old Mainstream man from Jerusalem. Avi’s story is an interesting one because, whereas it is structured almost identically to both Yoav’s and Daniel’s stories, Avi describes how he has not yet completed the process of coming out. As such, Avi’s narrative projects a hypothetical and idealized future (Ochs and Capps 2001; Georgakopoulou 2007) whose structure provides further support for my argument that there exists a common coherence system in use among the Mainstream men. In the interest of space, I do not reproduce large portions of Avi’s story. Instead, I provide a schematic outline of the main points of his narrative up until he begins to speak about this possible future. Like Yoav and Daniel, Avi also begins his story by describing the difficulty he experienced in the army. Claiming that at the time he was in denial about his sexuality, Avi relates how he “forced” himself to volunteer for a combat unit as a way of trying to repress or overcome his sexual desires. Avi quickly found the combat unit unbearable, however, and obtained a transfer to a different unit by telling his commanding officer that he was gay. Following his military service, Avi traveled in South America for a year, first with friends and then on his own. It was while he was traveling alone that Avi had his first homosexual

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 149 experience, a moment he describes as both “amazing” and “scary.” Avi then goes on to state that the first thing he did when he returned to Israel was to “get tested” (for HIV). Once back, Avi began to study at the university and “to become more involved in things and have more sexual experiences.” I then asked Avi how he met other gay men, and whether he went out to gay bars or other venues in Jerusalem: (9) A:

EL: A:

EL: A: EL: A: EL: A:

more or less like. I know a lot of people but it’s hard to say that I’m part of the scene (1) only now did I put up a face picture on Atraf ((a gay dating website)). you must have heard of Atraf. only now did I put a face picture up there. not like (.) like slowly, I’m not, I’m not like running with it (1) I’m just not completely c- with respect to l- (.) like I do go out and I don’t like hide it but (1) I mean I just now put a picture up (.) It’s not I’m out, I mean it seems to me, maybe it’s just my own problem but I’m not completely out 100 per cent. again, my image for completely out is something that comes from television and that could be wrong or distorted. of um that I need to go out all the time and to shout about it. it could be that objectively I’m out (1) it’s like a questions of definitions. yeah if I’m out or not out. I’m out because everybody who knows me knows (1) but I also like tell myself that if I don’t have a boyfriend, if I don’t have a relationship then I’m not completely out. like having a quickie once a month is (.) I don’t think that’s what being the ideal gay man is. and what is the ideal gay man? it’s someone who has a relationship. he lives in Tel Aviv= =yeah= =both he and his boyfriend’s names are written on their front door. but it’s (.) like that’s the ideal gay man. are you looking for a boyfriend? is that like something that you want right now? I’m always looking for someone to fall for. but um (.) it seems to me that it’s hard in Jerusalem. I don’t know in Tel Aviv there’s this feeling that you’re more um more like safe there. more surrounded by a community and you’re much more accepted. in Jerusalem you still need to play it straight. in a lot of thi- even (.) at work even. even though at work they know about me (.) but my boss doesn’t know about me. what he (.) maybe he also doesn’t need to know but. it seems to me that in Tel Aviv it would be different. let’s say that I was a waiter there (.) it’s automatic that you don’t have a problem if your boss knows because you’re in a situation where everyone is (.) most of them are. in a situation like that.

150 Erez Levon Avi responds to my question about whether he goes out in Jerusalem by beginning a discussion of how he feels he is not fully “out” about his sexuality, as evidenced by the fact that he had only recently posted a photograph of himself on a popular Israeli gay dating website. Avi claims to realize that his definition of what it means to be “completely out” may be distorted, though he insists that his behavior does not accord with the image of the “ideal gay man.” When asked to define what constitutes the ideal gay man, Avi describes someone who lives in Tel Aviv with his (presumably monogamous) partner and who is unafraid to state his sexuality publicly. Avi then goes on to compare the reality of his life in Jerusalem with an imagined and somewhat utopian life he could have in Tel Aviv, where there would be no “problems” and he would be surrounded by other people in “a situation like that.” Though brief, this final portion of Avi’s story succeeds in establishing a contrast between two distinct types of Israeli gay identity: a liberated gay man seemingly at ease with himself and his sexuality, and a somewhat more repressed gay man who lives in constant fear of various societal dangers. In this respect, Avi’s story ends just like Yoav’s and Daniel’s, with the only difference being that unlike the other men, Avi has not (yet) managed to liberate himself. Nevertheless, the same cultural logic is deployed in which liberation and the resolution of social conflict is only possible by inhabiting a particular articulation of Israeli gay male identity.

Discussion I argue that this common endpoint of the three men’s narratives is the defining feature of their shared coherence system, which itself undergirds the similar explanatory sequence used across the three stories. In each instance, the men narrate their experience of homosexuality as one of long-lasting conflict. Though they do not explicitly formulate it as such, the men all identify that conflict as grounded in the incommensurability of gay male sexuality as they understand it and normative conceptualizations of Israeli identity. In doing so, I suggest that the men are adopting the gendered moral logic of Zionism, as described above. Israeli national identity is represented in the stories by the twin figures of the soldier and the husband/father—both images of strong, dedicated, and quintessentially ‘masculine’ men. Gay male sexuality, on the other hand, is characterized as being both gender- and morally deficient. For gender, we see this in the narrators’ professed inability to cope with the physical and emotional demands of military service, where the protagonists of the stories (i.e., the narrators themselves) come to symbolize the lack of strength and power associated with gay men. Moral deficiency, in contrast, is embodied by a variety of stereotypically deviant figures— including sex workers and men seeking sex in public parks—who are also all explicitly labeled as “gay.” By narrating Israeli identity and gay male sexuality as diametrically opposed in this way, the three men provide a causal chain that allows them to successfully account for the psychological tension they

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 151 describe. Finally, as described previously, this tension is ultimately alleviated by the men’s discovery that another type of gay life is possible, one in which Zionist tropes of masculinity and morality remain intact. It is this discovery that then causes the men to eventually embrace their sexuality, and, I would argue, subsequently justify their claim to being both gay and Israeli. Narrative structure thus provides the men with a tool for the performative enactment of a ‘legitimate’ Israeli gay male identity (Yuval-Davis 2011). As a coda to my argument here, it is, I think, instructive to briefly consider the very different kind of explanatory sequence found in the coming-out story of another man in my sample who is not a member of the Mainstream group. Hanan is a 21-year-old member of what I have called the Radical group. Unlike their Mainstream counterparts, the members of the Radical associations reject an accommodationist stance with respect to Israeli normative values. Whereas they certainly recognize the perceived incompatibility between homosexuality and Israeli identity, Radical group members advocate a total reconceptualization of the Israeli gendered order. In other words, rather than working towards the integration of lesbians and gays within existing Israeli ideologies, they argue for the need to reconfigure the Zionist basis of Israeli society itself (see Levon 2010 for further details). This alternative understanding of the relationship between homosexuality and Israeli identity is evident in Hanan’s (very brief) coming-out story: (10) EL: so when did you start to deal with the whole issue of sexuality? H: around 14, 13, something like that. at some point I understood and then I started, pretty quickly, a process of coming out of the closet. I told my dad right away, when I was like 14, and he didn’t really accept it (.) he just said to me that I was young and it was a phase and that at some point it would pass. I told my mom when I was 16, and she said pretty much the same thing. and also when I was 16, I started to tell my friends. when I was 14, I had only told one good friend, but then I started telling all my friends. (1) and by 18, all my friends knew, and everybody at school knew, and then, again, I came out again to my parents at 18 and was like (.) this is how it is, and they realized that it wasn’t a phase. my own acceptance with myself was really fast. as soon as I figured it out, it was already clear to me that there wasn’t any problem with it. (.) though there were some times when I wasn’t really sure what to expect because of it. I mean (.) there was some kind of (.) process, but it wasn’t really obvious. I had enough other things to deal with, so I didn’t really devote a lot of time or energy to that. In Hanan’s story we find none of the psychological tension or distress described by the Mainstream men. Whereas it is certainly possible that Hanan is drawing a rosier picture than the reality that existed at the time,

152 Erez Levon what is important for our purposes is that Hanan’s narration of his coming out does not rely upon the resolution of any kind of tension. Rather, his sexuality is simply something that Hanan understood, accepted, and consequently made public (though he interestingly neglects to provide any form of adequate causality for these actions). Hanan’s description in (10) of the relative ease with which he came out is consonant with his remarks elsewhere in the interview regarding his disdain for dominant conceptualizations of Israeli identity and the various actions he has undertaken to combat them (for example, Hanan describes himself as “gender-queer” and a “pacifist” and was briefly incarcerated for refusing to serve in the military). In short, I propose that the structural differences between Hanan’s story and those of the Mainstream men are due, at least in part, to a difference in the coherence system used to establish a causal order across events. Whereas Hanan’s system of beliefs allows for the unproblematic intersection of gay and Israeli identity, I argue that the Mainstream men’s system does not. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that foundational beliefs about the relationship between gender and the nation in Israel continue to animate certain gay men’s conceptualizations of self. In particular, I suggest that a dominant discourse of hegemonic masculinity as the only acceptable articulation of Israeli national identity encourages these men to imagine their sexualities in such a way that they accord with Israeli norms of gender and morality. I do so by analyzing how these men narrate their journeys of sexual self-discovery and selfacceptance, that is, their coming-out stories. I illustrate how these stories are structured around a central logic of incompatibility between a gender-deviant gayness and Israeli national identity, an incompatibility that is resolved only when a more gender-normative gayness is discovered. My goal in making this argument is to underscore the highly contingent nature of beliefs about masculinity in Israel and to document the ways in which the historical investment of gender with a broader political meaning serves to stratify Israeli society along gendered lines to this day (see, e.g., Connell 1995). In light of these historico-political conditions, I would argue that the Mainstream men’s practice should be viewed as a form of resistance to societal marginalization—one way to overcome a dominant conceptualization of nationalism that otherwise excludes them (the Radical men’s rejection of Israeli norms is another). At the same time, I believe it is important to recall Abu-Lughod’s (1990) assertion that resistance is also a diagnostic of power, and that we must investigate the overlapping fields of subjection in which our informants are located. In arguing that the Mainstream men draw on the shared resource of a normative Israeli coherence system in structuring their coming-out stories, I am essentially proposing that they recycle the Zionist strategy of deploying nationalism as a way of constructing ‘adequate’ gender—that by demonstrating their ability to

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 153 be morally competent members of the nation the men work to performatively legitimate their gendered positioning. Doing so, the Mainstream men succeed in resisting marginalizing discourses of sexuality in Israel while simultaneously reinforcing (and subjecting themselves to) dominant ideologies of gendered nationalism (cf. Butler 1993). By recognizing this, I hope through this chapter to have provided insight into the complex interactions between gender, sexuality, and the nation in Israel, and to have demonstrated the crucial role that narrative plays in the performative enactment of their intersection. NOTES 1. There was also an analogous ideology of femininity and ‘appropriate’ behavior for women. In the interest of space, I do not describe it here. Suffice it to say that women were imagined in a complementary and necessarily subordinate role to men, and were viewed primarily as the ‘reproducers’ of the nation, both biologically and culturally (see, e.g., Berkovitch 1997; Sered 2000). 2. All names are pseudonyms. 3. I unfortunately do not have the space to discuss any additional details of the three men’s backgrounds. There are, for example, interesting differences in upbringing among the men, especially those related to issues of ethnicity and social class. These differences do not, however, appear to impact the men’s coming-out stories, and so I do not consider them here. 4. Military service is mandatory for all Jewish citizens of Israel (with certain exceptions). Men serve for three years, normally immediately after high school. 5. Though the interviews (and all my interactions with informants) were conducted entirely in Hebrew, in the interest of space I only present the English translations. Transcriptions are broad and only reflect pauses, hesitations, and intonation contours. Transcription conventions are as follows: = (.) () ?!,. text (())

no pause between utterances short pause (less than 0.5 seconds) length of pause (in seconds) intonation contours hesitation mid-word speech in English author comments

6. In 1993, Yitshak Rabin, then Israeli Prime Minister, changed the military regulations to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the Israeli army. 7. It is interesting that Yoav occasionally switches to English in the course of our conversation (as he does in the discussion of “just knowing” that being gay was not an option, or later when he dismissively mentions his experience of having a girlfriend). While an analysis of the use of English among my informants is beyond the scope of this chapter, this has been a common theme is language and sexuality research (e.g., Besnier 2003; Bucholtz and Hall 2008) and one that could be a fruitful avenue for subsequent research in Israel.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17: 41–55.

154 Erez Levon Almog, Oz. 2000. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berkovitch, Nitza. 1997. “Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse of Israel.” Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 605–619. Besnier, Niko. 2003. “Crossing Genders, Mixing Languages: The Linguistic Construction of Transgenderism in Tonga.” In Handbook of Language and Gender, ed. by Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, 279–301. Oxford: Blackwell. Biale, David. 1997. Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boellstorff, Tom. 2005. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and the Nation in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1997. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2008. “All of the Above: New Coalitions in Sociocultural Linguistics.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 401–431. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. London: Polity Press. Fink, Amir, and Jacob Press. 1999. Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2007. Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gross, Aeyal. 2002. “Sexuality, Masculinity, Army and Citizenship: Gays and Lesbian Service in the Israel Defense Forces from a Comparative Perspective,” ed. by Dafna Barak-Erez. Special Issue of Plilim [Criminal Proceedings] 9: 183–195 [in Hebrew]. Kaplan, Danny. 2006. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture. New York: Berghahn Books. Kimmerling, Baruch. 2001. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuntsman, Adi. 2008. “The Soldier and the Terrorist: Sexy Nationalism, Queer Violence.” Sexualities 11: 142–170. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. by June Helm, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lemish, Dafna. 2004. “‘My Kind of Campfire’: The Eurovision Song Contest and Israeli Gay Men.” Popular Communication 2: 41–63. Levon, Erez. 2009. “Dimensions of Style: Context, Politics and Motivation in Gay Israeli Speech.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 13: 29–58. Levon, Erez. 2010. Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levon, Erez. 2012. “The Voice of Others: Identity, Alterity and Gender Normativity Among Gay Men in Israel.” Language in Society 41: 187–211. Liang, A. C. 1997. “The Creation of Coherence in Coming-Out Stories.” In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall, 287–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayer, Tamar. 2000. “From Zero to Hero: Masculinity in Jewish Nationalism.” In Sexing the Nation, ed. by Tamar Mayer, 283–307. London: Routledge.

‘The Ideal Gay Man’ 155 McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. Mosse, George. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nagel, Joane. 1998. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21: 242–269. Nordau, Max. 1968. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seidman, Steven. 2002. Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life. New York: Routledge. Sered, Susan. 2000. What Makes Women Sick?: Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society. Hanover: Brandeis University Press. Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaid, Urvashi. 1995. Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. New York: Anchor Doubleday. Walzer, Lee. 2000. Between Sodom and Eden: A Gay Journey through Today’s Changing Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender & Nation. London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Floya Anthias (ed.). 1989. Woman, Nation, State. London: Macmillan.

8

No Ordinary Boy Language, Masculinities, and Queer Pornography Veronika Koller

INTRODUCTION Despite its important theoretical contributions, empirical grounding, and political impact, contemporary gender and language research often focuses on how male speakers construct themselves as masculine and female speakers use language to come across as feminine. This emphasis can be found regardless of most researchers embracing deconstructivist notions of gender as an effect of repeated performances, and arguing that gender needs to be decoupled from biological sex. Gender may no longer be seen as deterministically arising from socialization, as the so-called difference approach would have it, and current theory stresses that speakers may deliberately and strategically use linguistic and conversational resources to appear as masculine or feminine (see Talbot 2010: 98–113 for an overview of the difference and deconstructivist approaches). However, although it is true that the premium carried by gender conformity leads to speakers—or, more generally, discourse producers—performing gender in accordance with their sex across a range of contexts, the more subversive phenomena of male femininity and female masculinity have tended to be sidelined in language and gender research. This means that scholarly work on gender and linguistic performance could ultimately end up reinforcing what it set out to deconstruct. My aim with this chapter is to broaden the scope of language, gender, and sexuality research by turning to an instance of queer discourse that shows how language can be used to decouple masculinity from maleness and link it to a variety of sexual roles. I will therefore address the issue of intersections, in this case female masculinity and desire, as well as the dislocation of masculinity from being something that only male-bodied individuals do. Although female masculinity is rarely addressed in language and gender research (but see Queen 2004; Hall 2009; Koller 2009; Jones 2012), it offers a rich array of subjectivities at the intersection between gender and sexuality, including the personae that can be performed during sexual encounters and that need not be of the same, actual age of those involved. This chapter seeks to overcome the focus on conventionally gendered

No Ordinary Boy 157 language use by engaging in a discourse analysis of a written text (Queen 1994), a short story that constructs forms of female and male masculinity which integrate discourses on and by gay men. While describing a sexual encounter between a male- and a female-bodied person, the short story creates a text world in which the protagonists enact gay male sexuality as well as queer heterosexuality, interspersed with flashbacks of sex between two female-bodied people. In analyzing the text, I rely on work on both female and hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Halberstam 1998, 2002) as well as drawing on the framework of queer discourse analysis, which has the aim “to destabilise naturalised notions of gender and sexual identity and to relativise their absoluteness” (Motschenbacher 2010: 180). Discourse is here understood as textually mediated social action that serves both an ideational function, by representing experience and fantasies in texts, and an interpersonal function, in that discourse producers attempt to gain influence and power in their identities and relationships, through reinforcing, questioning, or subverting the status quo. Such interrelations between the linguistic and the social aspects of discourse are accounted for in a threedimensional framework consisting of text, discourse practice, and sociopolitical context (Fairclough 2010). In this regard, female masculinity is both an alternative reality that can be constructed in discourse as well as a way of relating to others. Discourse producers who construct this particular identity write from the margins of heteronormative society, their texts unbalancing notions of gender appropriateness as well as models of sexual identity. To see how this is achieved, the analysis starts out from features observed at the textual level and then proceeds to the level of discursive practice and social institutions, accounting for setting, participants, and genre. Finally, the wider social formation influencing these factors is also taken into consideration. In this chapter, the analytical focus is on the forms of reference to the characters, metaphor, epistemic modality, and cohesion. More specifically, I will illustrate how the author of the short story uses social actor reference and metaphor to evoke an exaggerated masculinity that makes the text resemble gay male pornography while simultaneously employing modality and cohesion to destabilize gender binaries. The chapter is structured as follows: in the next section, I will provide working definitions of sex and gender, sexuality, and sexual identity, before elaborating on the theoretical notions of performance and performativity as well as relational identities. In section 3, I will introduce the text in its immediate and wider contexts, and then discuss the selected analytical parameters. Following that, I will present a summative analysis of the text and finally close by discussing the implications of this study for queer research into language and masculinities. First then, let us look at some definitions and engage in some theoretical considerations.

158 Veronika Koller DEFINITIONS AND THEORY Much ambiguity surrounds the concepts gender, sex (i.e., the biological aspects of female, male, and other, more ambiguous bodies), sexuality, and sexual identity. The hegemonic discourses that critical research seeks to destabilize are notorious for prioritizing sex over gender and conflating gender and sexuality. First, such discourses posit that a person’s biological sex, or the socialization to which it gives rise, determines their gender identity, in that males identify as masculine and females as feminine. Further, sexual identity, defined as object choice, is naturalized as following from gender, in that males will not only identify as masculine, but also experience and display desire for the so-called opposite sex. Doing so crucially comes to be seen as a defining aspect of masculinity. (Vice versa, the same holds true for female-bodied persons.) It follows that a non-normative gender performance is seen as indicative of a non-normative sexual identity, in that, for example, an insufficiently feminine gender performance on part of a femalebodied person is taken as evidence of homosexuality. By contrast, in the academic approach to language, gender, and sexuality that has dominated the field since the early 1990s, gender is seen as performed and negotiated in discourse and other semiotic modes (e.g., clothing, movement). To quote one of the most influential authors for that theoretical paradigm, “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1999: 33). It is important in this context to distinguish between performance as projecting identity on the one hand and performativity as the constitution of an identity through repeated performances on the other. Gender and sexual identity are seen as a series of reiterable acts, including discursive and sexual acts, which echo previous identity performances. This line of thinking is radically antiessentialist in that it denies the possibility of a fixed, inherent gender identity. To once more quote Butler (1999), “‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody” (176). As we shall see, one of the functions of pornography as a predominantly fictional genre (see Heywood 1997 for non-fictional pornography) is to reinforce the concept of ideal types, including hegemonic “originals,” with queer texts subverting them at the same time. Texts that both reinforce and subvert gender categories can be considered queer in line with queer theory’s main tenet that any identity category is problematic, a signifier without a signified that is brought into being through “particular performative practices and performative statements which, through repeated citation, have become associated with a particular category” (Barrett 2002: 29). I see the text analyzed below as containing exactly those kinds of performative statements but simultaneously reflecting on them at a meta-level; by performing gender through recontextualization and dislocation it changes the meaning of gendered signifiers.

No Ordinary Boy 159 Of particular interest for this chapter—and indeed the book of which it forms part—is the notion of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The term refers to the form of masculinity that is posited as ideal in a given society at a particular historical time. Like all identities, it is relational and as such positioned at the top of a hierarchy that also includes emphasized femininity and subordinated, for example, gay, masculinities. Any form of identity, understood as a performative effect of practices, is relational, meaning that it is mutually constitutive of other identities, authenticated by them and authenticating them. In discourse, such relational identities are constructed by “tactics of intersubjectivity” (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 493–494), which are linguistically realized through particular devices such as parallel syntactic constructions. (An example from the text analyzed below is, “He was giving himself to me just like I had given myself to him.”) Accordingly, instances of actual masculinity performance are approximations, that is, actual people cannot represent the social ideal, as that is after all only a copy of previous enactments of a certain form of masculinity. Nevertheless, men’s adherence to hegemonic ideals may be enforced by ridicule, abuse, and the threat of, or even actual, physical violence. This of course begs the question as to why, if hegemonic masculinity allegedly comes naturally to males, it is necessary to promote and patrol it. Mostly though, acceptance of hegemonic masculinity relies on consent rather than coercion, a notion that Connell borrowed from Gramsci’s (1971) analysis of hegemonic power structures. Hegemonic masculinity involves attitudes to sex and particular sexual behaviors, and these are thrown into relief in pornography directed at men. For gay male pornography, Glenn (1981: 110–112) has identified the ideal of “carnal virility,” which includes—although it is not limited to—an obsession with physical appearance, lack of romantic orientation, the metaphoric conceptualization of men as sexual machines, as well as independence and lack of commitment. All of those features are in fact also present in the short story analyzed in this chapter. The above sketch of hegemonic discourses on gender, particularly hegemonic masculinity, raises questions about the links between sexuality and sexual identity. Bucholtz and Hall (2004: 470) offer the following definition of sexuality: “the systems of mutually constituted ideologies, practices, and identities that give sociopolitical meaning to the body as an eroticized and/or reproductive site.” Cameron and Kulick (2003: 4), on the other hand, take a rather different view when they gloss sexuality as “the socially constructed expression of erotic desire.” I see the erotic dimension of sexuality as encompassing not only the passively eroticized body but also the actively desiring mind and would claim that sexuality minimally includes desire and fantasy, and may also include practice1 and/or provide the grounds for identity. In contemporary usage, sexual identity is often conflated with sexuality, but such a blurring rests on the assumption that sexual desire constitutes identity. As historical and anthropological research (Lancaster and di Leonardo 1997; Hastings and Magowan 2010) has shown, the notion that

160 Veronika Koller people construct their sense of self as based on their sexual preferences and practices, and are identified along those lines (Foucault 1977: 58), is very much a construct of Western modernity. What is more, at a particular point in recent history, a number of feminists referred to themselves as lesbian in a display of their anti-patriarchal political agenda rather than to indicate any same-sex desire (Koller 2008: 37–42). In view of this, I would posit that sexuality as a concept can, but need not, include sexual identity as a facet of the self that is based on erotic preference, fantasy, and potentially, practice (see also Cameron and Kulick 2003 for a similar position). The short story that is analyzed in this chapter constructs queer personae on the basis of sexuality as defined above. In the next section, I will introduce the text and elaborate on the parameters used to analyze it. TEXT AND ANALYTICAL PARAMETERS The text at hand is Carol Queen’s two-part short story “The Leather Daddy and the Femme,” which was published in Pat Califia’s anthology Doing It for Daddy, a collection of pornographic stories and poems centering on the sexual persona of the “daddy.” The short story was later expanded into a novel (Queen 1998). The figure of the daddy—often specified as a leather daddy—originates in gay male culture, where it denotes an older and/or sexually dominant man. Lesbian women whose sexuality centers on dominance and submission have borrowed the iconography and practices of gay men, resulting in the persona of the dyke daddy, who has been defined as a “kinky queer woman who does ageplay as the older, protective partner in her relationship with another adult woman . . . [a] dyke daddy is often butch (masculine in appearance/actions) but . . . need not be actually older than her [partner]” (Urban Dictionary 2006). In a lesbian context, the other woman may identify as a girl or boy, the latter epitomizing a different kind of female masculinity (hence sometimes spelled “boi” to indicate that she2 is not a biological male). The text analyzed in this chapter adds yet another twist to the daddy–girl/ boy dynamic in that its narrative involves a sexual encounter between the male-bodied leather daddy of the title and a female-bodied first-person narrator. In the first part of the story (titled “After the Lights Changed”), the narrator inhabits the persona of a young gay man who cruises the other man while both stop at a traffic light. The subsequent action features the narrator in a submissive role, performing oral sex and being brought to orgasm by his partner. The narrator here displays the persona of the twink, a figure from gay male pornography embodied in “a young, ephebic-like (gay) male character who is often used and abused by a fully masculine character” (Leap 2011: 937). This passage constitutes what I have labelled section 1.1 of the story (Queen 1994: 24–26). After her sex is discovered in a transitional passage (26–29), the narrator styles herself into a hyper-feminine woman and

No Ordinary Boy 161 is vaginally penetrated by the daddy (section 1.2, 29–32). In this first part of the story, gendered personae are projected through signifiers like voice pitch, dress, hairstyle, and makeup. The second part of the story (“The Next Morning,” section 2, 152–161) takes place on the day after, when the narrator wakes up and realizes that their partner of the previous night is in the shower. Strapping on a stylized dildo, they reverse their previous roles in that it is now the daddy who provides oral sex and is penetrated. This section is interspersed with two brief flashbacks to the narrator’s sexual encounters with female-bodied lovers (156, 157); these were excluded from the analysis. Although both characters switch roles and genders, the narrator does so to a greater extent, performing both a gay masculine and a heterosexual feminine identity in the first part. The narrator’s gender is less clearly defined in the story’s second part, although the act of penetrating is of course connoted as male. We can here see a parallel to queer visual pornography in that “[r]ather than the models being cast as novel characters for each shoot—their identities reduced to the sex role they play—we see the models forming dynamic sexual and gender identities” (Seise 2010: 23). Given this fluidity and complexity of gender, it may seem surprising that the protagonists’ personae are limited to “leather daddy” and “femme” in the title of the story. However, despite also being performed in a lesbian context, the figure of the daddy originates in gay male culture just as a femme is usually a feminine lesbian. Framing a sexual encounter between a male and a female, both of whom are multiply gendered to a greater or lesser extent, the title broadens the referential range of its signifiers and can therefore in itself be seen as a subversive act that calls sexual and gender identities into question. The choice of text was motivated not only by its depiction of fluid identities, but also by its genre and time of origin. As for the former, Queen’s short story represents what we might call “self-consciously literary pornography”3 and as such not only features the exaggerated and ideal type gender identities, such as hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, that are typical of pornography, but also shows a level of complexity that allows for appropriation and subversion (as well as reference to the protagonists’ emotions, experiences, and attitudes). Here then we have an example of a pornographic text that shows a “subversive encoding . . . which challenge[s] the patriarchal norm in [its] form and content” (McNair 1996: 93). While the contents were sketched above, the analysis in the next section will show how the text’s linguistic form contributes to its subversive nature. As for the historic character of the text, it dates back to the heyday of queer theory and activism in the 1990s. Like Morrish and Sauntson (2011) in their corpus study of lesbian pornographic texts from the early 1990s, I too have selected this particular text because it “seemed to draw on the identificatory and behavioral possibilities offered by emerging postmodern notions of the fluidity of gender” (137). Whereas queer theory is still influential for the study of language, gender, and sexuality (see Motschenbacher and Stegu 2013), queer activism either folded after the zenith of the AIDS

162 Veronika Koller crisis and with the increasing mainstreaming of gay and lesbian issues in the West, or shifted from the streets to social networks and blogs. (Queen’s text was published just before the Internet became a shaping and defining force in gaining knowledge and engaging in everyday communication.) The importance of queer activism in the early 1990s shows in the fact that although the encounter between the protagonists is typical of pornography in being almost completely decontextualized—no information is given about the characters’ jobs, families, or until the end of the text, even their names4—the opening paragraphs do include a reference to the narrator’s political affiliation when mentioning his “leather jacket . . . with all its ACT UP and Queer Nation stickers” (25).5 It should be noted that the author, Carol Queen, is a writer, sex educator, and activist who was herself most active in the 1990s. The short story is therefore a prime example of a queer text not only because of its fracturing of gender identities but also because of its historic context. Like all personae, those of the leather daddy and the femme, too, are products of a series of reiterable acts, including discursive and sexual acts. It should be noted that sexual acts can be partly or wholly discursive, as is the case in online chat rooms (Jones 2008; King 2012) or indeed in pornographic texts. In discourse analysis, we can distinguish between overarching discourse goals or communicative purposes, the discourse functions meeting those goals, the discourse features that realize the functions, and finally the linguistic devices which the author uses to encode a particular feature (Koller 2014). Whereas goals and functions operate at the level of context, features and devices are realized at the textual level. To illustrate, in the text at hand, the four levels can be concretized as follows: the discourse goals are to entertain and arouse the reader, but also to subvert hegemonic discourses on gender and sexual identity. These goals of the short story can be identified from the subtitle (“Short and Sexy Fiction about a Very Forbidden Fantasy”) of the collection it appeared in, as well as the volume’s introduction (“[this book] is a twisty, fast ride on the roller coaster of polymorphous perverse, gender-fucking, role-playing fantasex” (Califia 1994: 9)). The author’s goal to subvert gender binaries is met by the twin discourse functions of social actor representation and intersubjectivity, which are realized by reference and metaphor and by epistemic modality and cohesion, respectively. These functions were selected top-down, that is, by drawing on a previously developed model for the analysis of collective identity in discourse (Koller 2012) and applying it to individual and intersubjective identities. Analyzing these features helps answer what individuals are represented and how; how those individuals, and their actions, are conceptualized by the writer; what degree of factuality is ascribed to the performed identities; and how different identity positions are linked syntactically and semantically. At the most detailed level, the text’s discourse features are realized by a range of linguistic devices, including pronouns and noun phrases, metaphoric expressions, which reflect cognitive conceptualizations, as well as modal verbs and comparative reference.

No Ordinary Boy 163 arouse, entertain

discourse goals

discourse functions

subvert gender binaries

social actor representation

intersubjectivity

discourse features

reference

metaphor

epistemic modality

cohesion

linguistic devices (selection)

pronouns and noun phrases

metaphoric expressions

modal verbs

comparative reference

Figure 8.1

Methodological framework

Selecting these devices was a bottom-up process, that is, familiarity with Queen’s short story suggested that they are both prominent and salient there. The methodological framework is summarized in Figure 8.1. Working from the ground up, I will in the following section describe the linguistic devices observed in the text and classify them as realizing particular discourse features. I will then proceed to interpret the results from the text description by elaborating on how they help to meet the discourse functions and goals that the author has pursued. This will finally lead to a brief discussion of the discourse practice and socio-political contexts that concludes the analysis. ANALYSIS: DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION As its title indicates, the short story features only two characters. Although both of them change gender more or less radically within and between the two parts of the story, I will—in line with the focus of the present volume— focus on references to the masculine aspects of the characters, distinguishing between a ‘boy’ persona and a ‘man’ persona as they are enacted by the narrator or ascribed to the other protagonist. Other personae are ‘woman/ girl’—this has not been differentiated as the focus is on masculinity—and ‘hybrid,’ that is, reference to both a masculine and feminine persona in the same noun phrase.6 As pointed out in section 3 above, the first part of the short story can be divided into sections 1.1, transition, and 1.2, while the second part forms section 2. Throughout, the story is told from the point of view of the firstperson narrator. Referred to 38 times by themselves and the other protagonist, the narrator’s gendered persona changes notably as the story unfolds, as visualized in Figure 8.2.

164 Veronika Koller 80 70 60 50

woman/girl

40

boy man

30

hybrid 20 10 0 1.1

Figure 8.2

transition

1.2

2

Gendered references to narrator (percentages)

The narrator’s boy persona dominates in section 1.2 and is indicated with references to what he is (e.g., “an adventurous gay boy,” 26), what he looks like (e.g., “not classically Daddy’s boy”), and what the other character calls him, albeit hypothetically (“‘this hot little schoolboy . . . he cruised me like he knew what I had,’” 25). In the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity, boys and sexually submissive men are subordinate to men who represent a closer approximation to the hegemonic ideal, so it is not surprising to find that the submissive protagonist as a boy is referred to in hybrid terms (“an effete young Cambridge faggot,” 24) as indeed is the daddy character once he has abandoned his dominant sexual role (see below). In the transitional section, reference to a boy persona become ironic (“‘Well, little boy, I must say you had me tricked,’” 27) as the narrator’s sex is discovered, whereas references to a woman/girl persona become prevalent: she is now called a “‘[g]ood girl’” (27) while she herself claims to be “not feeling like a boy now . . . but all womanly” (26). References to the narrator’s woman/ girl and hybrid personae increase in section 1.2 (e.g., “‘pretty bitch,’” 30; “‘I’m no ordinary boy . . . and I’m no ordinary woman,’” 30), with the one reference to the boy persona being negated (“‘make you be Daddy’s boy again . . . No,’” 30). Hybrid references pick up further in section 2, where the narrator takes a sexually active role without explicitly taking on a man persona and states that they may at that moment be “‘in transition from one to the other’” (160). Relevant noun phrases indicating the narrator’s fluid gender include “a strange, gender-schitzed boy-girl from out of nowhere” (157), “‘a love goddess with a big dick’” (161) and the dual name “‘Randy-Miranda’” (161).

No Ordinary Boy 165 The absence of any reference to a man persona in the narrator is as notable as the predominance of such reference terms for the other protagonist, who is referred to exclusively as “he” throughout the story. In total, he is mentioned 44 times, mostly by the narrator and twice by himself, with 95.45 per cent of those references clearly indicating a male persona. The respective terms of reference are mostly variations of “daddy” (“my daddy,” “leather daddy”) as well as the general references “guy” and “man.” His name, the masculine sounding “Jack” (160), is mentioned four times at the end of the story. The other protagonist is not cast in a boy persona at any point, but the change in sexual roles in section 2 goes along with a change to ANIMAL metaphors7 for reference, once as part of an attributive process (“[m]y sleek daddy had metamorphosed into a horny weasel,” 156) and once as part of a pre-modifying attribution (“his alley-cat-getting-fucked noise,” 158). Interestingly, both weasels and cats are small furry animals and as such carry feminine cultural connotations (cf. Koller 2015), with “alley cat” also conveying notions of freedom and adventurousness. The metaphor PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS is also applied to the narrator in section 2 (“[my] teeth holding the back of his neck like a cat does,” 159) and, interestingly, also serve to transcend gender binaries; at the end of section 1.2, the two protagonists are referred to as “not man and woman, just animals, two sated animals” (31).8 Returning to references to the other protagonist, he is in section 2 also referred to as “a strong nasty man impaled on my cock” (158); this can be read as hybrid if we understand strength and ‘nastiness’ as attributes of hegemonic masculinity and being penetrated as falling outside that concept. Figure 8.3 shows the extreme pattern of reference to the other protagonist throughout the short story.

120

100

80 woman/girl boy

60

man 40

hybrid

20

0 1.1

Figure 8.3

transition

1.2

2

Gendered references to other protagonist (percentages)

166 Veronika Koller There are also a number of metaphors that draw on a hegemonic discourse of masculinity, such as PEOPLE ARE MACHINES, realized in the description of physical actions (“pounding,” “slamming,” “pumping,” “a kiss that seared and melted,” 30) and attributes (e.g., “Those steel blue eyes were lit,” 27). The last example shades over into the metaphor PEOPLE ARE HARD OBJECTS (“this stone-hot daddy,” 25).9 The related masculinizing PEOPLE ARE MACHINES metaphor is occasionally combined with ORGASM IS EXPLOSION/SHOOTING (“he could come without shooting,” 158; “my touch triggered him.” 159). Conspicuous by their absence are metaphors like DESIRE IS WATER, which is typically used in a gendered way in that it describes women’s passive reactions to men (Patthey-Chavez, Clare, and Youmans 1996: 89). Although not analyzed systematically, it is worth noting a few other features that are used to index (temporarily) male-identified social actors. These are actions and attribution centering on physical strength (“he collared me and hauled me,” 25; “the hard curves of his biceps,” 29) as well as emotional self-control and psychological assertiveness as evidenced by the physical control of one’s own and the other’s body (“I felt weak-kneed and wildly dishevelled; he was immaculate yet,” 27; “[t]he powerful feeling of having him in my hands,” 159). In meta-linguistic terms, masculinity is indexed by the characters using challenging tag questions (Holmes 1982) (e.g., “you know what comes next, don’t you?” 158) and commands as the prevalent speech acts (“‘bring him with you next time you visit,’” 27). In addressing the narrator, the other protagonist also uses belittling terms typically employed to talk to women (“dear,” “child,” “little hellion”). The particular linguistic devices that the author uses for actor reference and metaphor form an interdiscursive link with gay male pornography, as evidenced in a random sample of texts, both pulp and literary, published in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, that is, the two decades preceding Queen’s text and thus most likely to have influenced it (see also Bolton 1995).10 Patthey-Chavez and Youmans (1992, quoted in Baker 2008: 241) further note that erotic texts aimed at men “only develop the character of the narrator,” whereas Baker (2005) notes that gay male pornography focuses on the narrator, often involving first-person narration. This focus on a differentiated self is certainly borne out by Queen’s text as well, although it is intended for a more diverse audience. The text at hand differs, however, in that it also elaborates on the characters’ emotions and past experiences. In that regard, it is very similar to lesbian pornography from the same period (Morrish and Sauntson 2011), which shows a high frequency of verbs of sensation and cognition, such as ‘feel,’ ‘want,’ ‘know,’ ‘see,’ and ‘touch,’ so that “[s]ex seems to encompass a mental dimension, with verbs of sensation and cognition occurring almost as much as verbs of action” (131). The authors conclude that their 60,000-word corpus of short stories from lesbian sex magazines On Our Backs and Bad Attitude show “a soft sadomasochistic orientation, modified by lexical appeals to gentleness that collocate with terms of affection” (136), such as ‘gently,’ ‘slightly,’ ‘quietly,’ and

No Ordinary Boy 167 ‘softly.’ Queen’s story also features terms of endearment such as ‘baby,’ as does the corpus of lesbian pornography analyzed by Morrish and Sauntson; however, such terms are also used in a mildly chauvinistic way in the short story, whereas dominant forms of masculinity are enacted in both psychological power and physical aggression. Whereas the interdiscursive links to gay male pornography import notions of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, indeed echoing “hyper-gendered discourses” (Baker 2008: 242), the gender identities at stake in Queen’s short story are both masculinity and femininity—note the narrator’s observation that “I felt like a Vogue model who’d stumbled into a Tom of Finland painting” (29). The text thus queers both straight and gay pornography. Moving from the function of social actor representation to that of intersubjectivity, we can see the latter realized by epistemic modality and cohesion. The short story shows a remarkable use of modality, and lack thereof, to simultaneously re-inscribe and destabilize gender identities. Interestingly, the prototypical device to realize modality, that is, modal verbs, is used only once (“I could be . . . an adventurous gay boy,” 26), the predominant device to realize degrees of factuality being suffixes: “boyish,” “un-boyish,” “femmed out,” “femmy,” and “womanly.” These can be rephrased as “like a boy/femme/woman”—and indeed we find an instance of this in “not feeling like a boy now” (26)—thus lowering the degree of factuality of the proposition. This is contrasted with identifying processes such as “I love being the faggot for him . . . I love being the boy” (28), which exploit the essentialist logic that people can unproblematically be someone or something to present the protagonist’s alleged maleness as a fact. Said by a biological woman, however, the essentialist premises of the statement are invoked and refuted at the same time. A similar shifting between degrees of factuality can be seen in repeated references to the dildo that the narrator uses in the second part of the story. Before and after the act of penetration, it is referred to as “a/ my/the dildo,” changes significance in the liminal space between (“I stroked the dildo, my cock now,” 154) and while in use is mostly called “my cock/ dick,” occasionally modified as “latex/rubber dick.” Interspersed are references to the narrator’s female genitalia and epistemic modality markers that further deconstruct any maleness (“He sucked it like it was real,” “The latex gave me a dim reflection of the sensations a flesh-and-blood cock would,” both 154). To the extent that the narrator oscillates between describing their body as male or as-if-male, the sexual encounter takes on either gay male or heterosexual overtones, leading to a subversion of “the . . . categories of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ [which] is attractive from a queer theory standpoint” (Baker 2008: 246). The same subversion and destabilization can be observed in the use of cohesion, and intersubjectivity is perhaps most clearly realized through this linguistic device. The predominant device is comparative reference, resulting in syntactic parallelism: examples include “he wanted it as badly from 11

168 Veronika Koller me now as I’d wanted it from him the night before” (155), “He was giving himself to me just like I had given myself to him” (158). Sexual roles, and by extension gender, are thus constructed as both interchangeable and interdependent. The use of various textual features can be summarized by looking at the opening two paragraphs of the short story in connection (see appendix for the relevant passage). Here, we find references to the narrator’s boy, woman/girl and hybrid personae (“effete young . . . faggot,” “not classically Daddy’s boy,” “the femme in me”) as well as references to the other protagonist’s male persona (“guys like that,” “this daddy”). The latter’s masculinity is emphasized through the use of the MACHINE metaphor (“steely blue Daddy-eyes”), whereas markers of epistemic modality (“pretty boyish,” “I look like an effete . . . faggot”) serve to lower the factuality of the narrator’s masculinity. Cohesion, and through it intersubjectivity, is achieved in the description of the mutual gaze; in “his head . . . turned in response to my eyes fixed on him and found what he saw noticeable enough to make him look again,” the clause “what he saw” refers both anaphorically to the “I” and cataphorically to the subsequent description of the narrator’s appearance. The male pronouns refer back to “a real-done up daddy,” a noun phrase that is repeated shortly afterwards. The concentration of all these devices in the space of little more than 230 words shows the author’s skill at introducing her protagonists and establishing their intersubjective identities and reciprocal relationship. The point has been made that “[t]he rule of reciprocity observed by gay male”—and lesbian—“porn . . . expand[s] the economy of pleasure and desire beyond the rigid gender hierarchies of typical representations of heterosexuality” (Pendleton 1992: 161). The present text, however, goes one step further in that it broadens the scope and flexibility of gender and sexual roles in its fictional account of sex between a male- and a female-bodied person. Whereas the text certainly shows some “fetishisation of masculine hegemonic power” (Baker 2008: 247), not least through an unequivocal male persona being reserved for the male-bodied protagonist, Queen’s short story also includes a celebration of both emphasized and alternative femininities, which adds to its queer complexity. We could therefore identify Queen’s text as an example of queer pornography, which Ryberg (2012: 27) has defined as “affirming . . . sexuality through ‘authentic’ representations, interrogating and troubling gender and sexual categories and aiming at sexual arousal.” It follows that power operates in the text world, that is, between the protagonists, as well as between the author and the extratextual world: while sexual power shifts between the narrator and the other character, the author writes from a marginal position with the goal to destabilize gender binaries and not only entertain but also empower the reader in the face of limiting hegemonic discourses. In terms of discourse practice, the short story shows typical elements of the pornographic genre, specially its gay male variety, by including explicit

No Ordinary Boy 169 and graphic, but decontextualized descriptions of sexual acts and by constructing exaggerated gender identities. In doing so, its author meets the expectations of the readers of an anthology subtitled “Short and Sexy Fiction,” in which Queen’s story was published. Beyond that, however, it is also a queer text in that it not only seeks to arouse but also has a political agenda to destabilize hegemonic discourse on gender and sexuality. In that respect, the story is reflective, indeed a tool, of its author’s sexual and political activism: the novel that the short story grew into has the sub-title “An Erotic Classic for the Gender Revolution” and the short story itself prefaces a description of sexual ecstasy with the slogan-like “Fuck sex differences, fuck ‘men are . . . ’ and ‘women are . . . ’” (158). This explicit stance is furthermore a reflection of the text’s historical socio-political context, which was characterized by the confrontational, even militant activism of groups such as Queer Nation, which were formed in response to increased homophobia in the wake of the AIDS crisis (see note 5), as well as by queer theory as a then-new philosophical paradigm. In the final section, I will outline what the above analysis has to offer for the study of language and masculinities. CONCLUSION The text analyzed in this chapter demonstrates in three different ways how masculinity is a linguistic resource that can be drawn upon to construct particular identity positions. First, the characters are portrayed as using spoken language in a way that is culturally connoted as masculine, by showing a pronounced use of commands, taboo words, and challenging tag questions. Masculinity is here constructed for the first person. Second, the characters address each other in gendered ways as “daddy,” “little boy,” and “bitch,” so that masculinity (and femininity) is constructed for the second person. And finally, the author of the text employs linguistic devices such as actor reference and metaphoric expressions to endow the protagonists with different kinds of masculinity, from hegemonic to feminized. Despite the fact that the story is told as first-person narration, masculinity is in this case constructed for the third person. By its very nature, queer pornography both exaggerates and destabilizes notions of masculinity and thereby provides rich data for studies into language and masculinities that go beyond showing how men construct masculinity in their language use, or how it is constructed for them. More generally, the linguistic expression of desire is likely to show more explicit performances of not only sexual but also gender identity (see also Kiesling 2011). However, as authentic data on desire are largely restricted to the private sphere and therefore difficult or impossible to access, fiction that anecdotally reflects real-life narratives and experience is the next best choice for researchers interested in language, gender, and desire.

170 Veronika Koller NOTES 1. Conflating sexual practice with sexual identity is of course a homophobic discourse strategy, resulting in terms of abuse such as “muffdiver” and “cocksucker.” 2. To do justice to the queer character of the text, I will use gendered pronouns contextually, that is, “he” when the protagonist stylizes a masculine form of identity, “she” when that form is feminine, and singular “they” when it is ambiguous or hybrid. 3. I am thankful to John Heywood for this term. Further thanks are due to him for providing me with the selection of gay male pornography detailed in note 10 as well as for his constructive criticism of an earlier version of this chapter. I would also like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this chapter. 4. Pendleton (1992) interprets the absence of names as “one clue to the allegorical nature of the characters in . . . porn” (164). 5. ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was founded in 1987 in New York City, to take direct action against government and industry policies on AIDS. One spin-off was Queer Nation, a short-lived but influential activist group formed in New York City in 1990, with the aims of taking a stand against homophobic policies and politics, of no longer tolerating increased violence against lesbians and gay men in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, and of increasing queer visibility. Known for its in-your-face public actions and militant rhetoric, it quickly spread across the United States, although most local chapters folded within a few years. Loosely related groups with similar aims included the Lesbian Avengers in the United States and OutRage! in the United Kingdom. 6. Hybrid gendered identities can also be expressed by pronouns such as ‘hir,’ a blend of ‘his’ and ‘her,’ but these do not occur in the present text. 7. Following the conventions in conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors and source domains will be indicated by small capitals, while relevant metaphoric expressions in quotations will be underlined. 8. Reference to both actors together can be found at the end of sections 1.2 and 2, suggesting a ‘post-coital we’ that emerges in the aftermath of sexual encounters. 9. This metaphoric description may be influenced by lesbian language use, where ‘stone’ refers to a sexual partner not wishing to have her sexual organs touched. 10. The material consulted comprises the following novels and short stories: Alcock, Richard. 1978. Come Again. Santee, California: Surree, n.d. Benderson, Bruce. 1975. Kyle. n.p.: Crusier Classics, Reprinted in Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, ed. by Michael Bronski, 290–304. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Powell, Mason. 1984. The Brig. New York: Outbound Press. Travis, Aaron. 1993. Beast of Burden. New York: Masquerade. Travis, Aaron. 1993. Big Shots. New York: Masquerade. Travis, Aaron. 1993. Exposed. New York: Masquerade. 11. It is interesting to note that Russo and Torres’ (1994) study of 16 short stories from On Our Backs, while sketchy in its linguistic analysis, mostly mentions features such as short sentences or minor clauses, gendered terms of abuse (e.g., ‘bitch,’ ‘slut’), and lack of terms of endearment, concluding that the language of the texts seems mostly “harsh and hostile” and only occasionally “poetic and more complex” (1994: 612 and 608). It seems that the authors’ critical stance towards lesbian pornography, together with the lack of systematic analysis, may have influenced their focus.

No Ordinary Boy 171 REFERENCES Baker, Paul. 2005. Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge. Baker, Paul. 2008. Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Equinox. Barrett, Rusty. 2002. “Is Queer Theory Important for Sociolinguistic Theory?” In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah .J. Roberts, and Andrew Wong, 25–43. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Bolton, Ralph. 1995. “Sex Talk: Bodies and Behaviors in Gay Erotica.” In Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination, and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Languages, ed. by William L. Leap, 173–206. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2004. “Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research.” Language in Society 33: 469–515. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identitiy, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Califia, Pat. 1994. “Introduction.” In Doing It for Daddy: Short and Sexy Fiction About a Very Forbidden Fantasy, ed. by Pat Califia, 9–16. Boston: Alyson. Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19: 829–859. Fairclough, Norman. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 2nd ed. Harlow: Longman. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Der Wille zum Wissen: Sexualität und Wahrheit 1. Translated by Ulrich Raulff and Walter Seitter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Glenn, John D. 1981. “Gay Fantasies in Gay Publications.” In Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication, ed. by James W. Chesebro, 104–113. New York: The Pilgrim Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by John Matthews. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Halberstam, Judith J. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith J. 2002. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Men, Women and Masculinity.” In Feminist Studies and Masculinity, ed. by Judith K. Gardiner, 344–367. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Kira. 2009. “Boys’ Talk: Hindi, Moustaches, and Masculinity in New Delhi.” In Gender and Spoken Interaction, ed. by Pia Pichler and Eva M. Eppler, 139– 162. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hastings, Donnan, and Fiona Magowan. 2010. The Anthropology of Sex. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heywood, John. 1997. “‘The Object of Desire Is the Object of Contempt’: Representations of Masculinity in Straight to Hell Magazine.” In Language and Masculinity, ed. by Sally Johnson, and Ulrike H. Meinhof, 188–207. Oxford: Blackwell. Holmes, Janet. 1982. “The Functions of Tag Questions.” English Language Research Journal 3: 40–65. Jones, Lucy. 2012. Dyke/Girl: Language and Identities in a Lesbian Group. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Rodney H. 2008. “Technology, Democracy and Participation in Space.” In Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, ed. by Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller, 429–446. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kiesling, Scott F. 2011. “The Interactional Construction of Desire as Gender.” Gender & Language 5: 213–239. King, Brian W. 2012. “Location, Lore and Language: An Erotic Triangle.” Journal of Language and Sexuality 1: 106–125.

172 Veronika Koller Koller, Veronika 2008. Lesbian Discourses: Images of a Community. New York: Routledge. Koller, Veronika. 2009. “Butch Camp: On the Discursive Construction of a Queer Identity Position.” Gender & Language 3: 247–272. Koller, Veronika. 2012. “How to Analyse Collective Identity in Discourse: Textual and Contextual Parameters.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 5: 19–38. http://cadaad.net/2012_volume_5_issue_2/79–66 Koller, Veronika. 2014. “Applying Social Cognition Research to Critical Discourse Studies: The Case of Collective Identities.” In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap. London: Bloomsbury. Koller, Veronika. 2015. “Sexuality and Metaphor.” In The Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, ed. by Patricia Whelehan and Anne Bolin. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Lancaster, Roger N., and Micaela di Leonardo. 1997. The Gender and Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. London: Routledge. Leap, William L. 2011. “Language, Gay Pornography, and Audience Reception.” Journal of Homosexuality 58: 932–952. McNair, Brian. 1996. Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. London: Arnold. Morrish, Liz, and Helen Sauntson. 2011. “Discourse and Identity in a Corpus of Lesbian Erotica.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 15: 122–139. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010. Language, Gender and Sexuality: Poststructuralist Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Motschenbacher, Heiko, and Martin Stegu (ed.). 2013. Queer Linguistic Approaches to Discourse. Special issue of Discourse & Society 24. Patthey-Chavez, G. Genevieve, Lindsay Clare, and Madeleine Youmans. 1996. “Watery Passion: The Struggle between Hegemony and Sexual Liberation in Erotic Fiction for Women.” Discourse & Society 7: 77–106. Patthey-Chavez, G. Genevieve, and Madeleine Youmans. 1992. “The Social Construction of Sexual Realities in Heterosexual Women’s and Men’s Erotic Texts.” In Locating Power: Proceedings from the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. by Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz, and Birch Moonwomon, 501–514. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Pendleton, David. 1992. “Obscene Allegories: Narrative, Representation, Pornography.” Discourse 15: 154–168. Queen, Carol. 1994. “The Leather Daddy and the Femme, Parts 1 and 2.” In Doing It for Daddy: Short and Sexy Fiction about a Very Forbidden Fantasy, ed. by Pat Califia, 24–32, 152–161. San Francisco: Alyson. Queen, Carol. 1998. The Leather Daddy and the Femme: An Erotic Classic for the Gender Revolution. San Francisco: Cleis Press. Queen, Robin. 2004. “‘I Am a Woman, Hear Me Roar’: The Importance of Linguistic Stereotype for Lesbian Identity Performance.” In Language and Woman’s Place, ed. by Mary Bucholtz, 2nd revised and expanded ed., 289–295. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russo, Anne, and Lourdes Torres. 1994. “Lesbian Pornography: Discourse of Inequality and/or Resistance.” In Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. by Mary Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, Laurel A. Sutton, and Caitlin Hines, 605–614. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Ryberg, Ingrid. 2012. “Imagining Safe Space: The Politics of Queer, Feminist and Lesbian Pornography.” PhD thesis, Stockholm University. Accessed March 4, 2013. http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:477159. Seise, Cherie. 2010. “Fucking Utopia: Queer Porn and Queer Liberation.” Sprinkle: A Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies 3: 19–30.

No Ordinary Boy 173 Talbot, Mary. 2010. Language and Gender: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urban Dictionary. “Dyke daddy.” Last modified July 23, 2006. http://www.urban dictionary.com/define.php?term=dyke%20daddy.

APPENDIX I was looking pretty boyish that evening. Maybe that’s why he looked twice at the spotlight when my car pulled up next to his motorcycle. Usually guys like that are moving, you just see a gleaming blur of black and silver. But here at the lights was a real done-up daddy, sitting stock-still, except for his head, which turned in response to my eyes fixed on him and found what he saw noticeable enough to make him turn again. When boy-energy gets into me I look like an effete young Cambridge faggot looking to go bad: round spectacles framing inquisitive eyes and a shock of hair falling down over one. Not classically Daddy’s Boy, something a little different. Maybe tonight this daddy was looking for a new kind of ride. A real done-up daddy, yeah. His leathers were immaculate, carried that dull gleam that well-kept black leather picks up under streetlights. Black leather cap, high boots, everything on him black and silver except the wellworn blue denim at his crotch, bulging invitingly out of a pair of chaps. I eyed that denim expanse quite deliberately; he noticed. He had steely blue Daddy-eyes and a well-trimmed beard. I couldn’t see his hands under the riding gloves, but they looked big, and from the looks of him I bet they were manicured. I love these impeccable daddies. They appeal to the femme in me.

9

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse The Case of Butch and Femme Lucy Jones

INTRODUCTION1 Work in the area of language and masculinity has, unsurprisingly—and as argued already in this volume—typically concerned the language of men (see, for example, Johnson and Meinhof (1997) and more recently Milani (2011)). This research has served to provide a lens through which we may interpret masculinity and establish what it means. Studies have shown that masculinity is constructed through interaction via the rejection of, for example, homosexuality and intimacy (Cameron 1997; Pujolar 1997; Kiesling 2002; Milani and Jonsson 2011), the discussion of sport and women (Coates 2003), and the use of competitive language to assert hierarchical positions (Kiesling 1997). Such work reveals the ideological link between homosexuality and femininity/effeminacy; it emphasises the hegemonic ideal of ‘masculinity’ as meaning heterosexual, “red-blooded” maleness (Cameron 1997: 62) and illustrates that it exists in opposition to women and gay men. Despite this, scholars such as Halberstam (1998) have argued that masculinity can exist in isolation from men, and “female masculinity” is often presented as being synonymous with butch styles and behaviours in lesbian women. In this chapter, I problematise and challenge the use of the term ‘masculinity’ when discussing the identity construction of butch lesbian women. I argue that the phrase “female masculinity” (Halberstam 1998) may imply that butch lesbians are ‘pretending to be’ men due to the connotations that ‘masculinity’ has with ‘manliness,’ and that we should instead re-interpret what butch women do as a rejection of heteronormative femininity. In line with the themes of performance and intersectionality that resonate throughout this volume, I focus in this chapter on the projection of a specifically middle-class, middle-aged, white lesbian identity by members of a lesbian community of practice. Using a sociocultural linguistics framework (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), identity is viewed here as an interactional and momentary phenomenon which is intersubjectively constructed in discourse. Through a consideration of the sociocultural context of lesbian culture (specifically, the meaning of ‘butch’ versus ‘femme’ styles and identities), as well as the ethnographic site of a group of gay women’s interaction, this

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 175 chapter will unpick the indexical links between the rejection of ideological femininity that takes place in the community of practice, and the women’s stance-taking towards ideologically butch styles. I will argue that the women do not simply ‘do’ masculinity but, instead, challenge hegemonic ideologies of femaleness in the construction of a butch identity. Central to this argument is that non-femininity need not necessarily be defined as ‘masculinity’; both femininity and masculinity are reworked, queered, and negotiated in this group of women’s construction of a lesbian-specific identity, one which embraces the cultural stereotype of ‘butch’ and rejects that which is ‘femme.’ I will begin this chapter by outlining the historically salient identity label of ‘butch,’ before going on to problematise the notion of ‘female masculinity.’ I will then outline the theoretical context of sociocultural linguistics before presenting some data which show the construction of a butch—but certainly not masculine—group identity in a lesbian community of practice. ‘BUTCH’ AS A SYMBOL OF LESBIAN IDENTITY The link between masculinity and lesbian identity has emerged via a long sociohistorical process of increased visibility for queer women. The term ‘butch,’ however, which is broadly recognised as a particularly non-feminised style that lesbians might adopt, emerged only relatively recently in the history of lesbian culture. Previously, it was interpreted as ‘mannishness’ or as gender ‘inversion,’ as Doan’s (2001) account of the influential Radclyffe Hall testifies. Hall was author of The Well of Loneliness, a 1928 novel about female same-sex relationships. Hall’s protagonist was portrayed as being of the ‘wrong’ sex, an interpretation which Doan (2001) suggests is directly related to her acceptance of the ‘invert’ explanation for her sexuality, which she projected through the wearing of men’s clothing (xv). Doan argues that the banning of this book (due to its ‘immoral’ content) led to the promotion of lesbianism as a concept, one which many people would not have been aware of until then. The label ‘lesbian,’ Doan (2001) suggests, then became indexically linked with images and descriptions of Hall’s “mannish” attire (27). An issue with explaining modern-day ‘butch’ identities in line with historical ‘mannish’ concepts, however, is the unproblematic way in which it encourages us to think of certain gay women as somehow role-playing a male character. One question that we need to ask is whether being ‘mannish’ means being ‘masculine,’ and whether being ‘masculine’ is the same as being ‘butch.’ If it is, one might reasonably assume that being butch simply involves the taking on of styles and practices which are ideologically associated with men. This is certainly how it has been discussed in the past, with Rubin (1992), for example, defining butch as “a category of lesbian gender that is constituted through the deployment and manipulation of masculine gender codes and symbols” (467). Similarly, Inness (1997: 185) argues that butch identity is achieved through the use of “masculine

176 Lucy Jones identifiers.” Different strands of feminism, however, theorise butch identities very differently; some take ‘butch’ to involve “merely re-enacting, reinforcing, and hence [being] an active agent in, the oppression of women” whilst others view it as “disrupting and decentering heterosexual masculinity” (Wilton 1995: 104). The ideological relationship between butch styles and male ones, then, may be perceived as a problematic one. It is not clear from the categorisation of butchness as ‘masculinity’ whether it might concern self-definition or a position which is attributed by others. Similarly, it is debatable whether being butch is about sexual behaviour and desire, or simply about the clothes and haircut that a woman wears. Indeed, butchness is conceptual and ideological, borne out of a presumption that lesbian women are inherently different to straight women. As an ideology, it is reworked within given cultural contexts in a way which best fits the needs of given individuals. There are many ‘versions’ of butch identity, for instance, from the ‘diesel dyke’ to the ‘soft butch’ to the ‘stone butch’ (see Faderman 1992), yet the core concept remains the same; butchness is about not being feminine, or ‘femme’ (a lesbian-specific category which connotes engagement with traditional symbols of womanhood). Though the category of ‘lipstick lesbian’ has existed since the 1990s—a more commercially viable, palatable, or ‘consumable’ lesbian image, as Ciasullo (2001) argues—symbols of femininity are also often symbols of heterosexuality within lesbian culture. In an episode of The L Word (a mainstream American drama series broadcast in 2004, written by an out lesbian and popular with gay women), for example, a sequence occurs in which several of the main characters attempt to assess whether another character is straight or gay. As Beirne (2006: 4) puts it, the characters use “pseudo-scientific methods of placing [the character’s] various attributes in ‘lez’ and ‘straight’ columns,” with authentic ‘lez’ points being awarded for a masculine walk, and ‘straight’ points coming from the character wearing earrings and having long hair. The underlying message in such a sequence, though fictional, is that ‘real’ lesbians are somehow less feminine than straight women. In this sense, we can argue that being ‘butch’ is about not doing what women are supposed to do, as creatures whose bodies and behaviours are ideologically oppositional to (and therefore attractive to) the male. This is central to the argument in this chapter: those lesbians who identify as butch may do so in order to produce a specifically lesbian identity, not a masculine one. As Esterberg (1997) puts it, the creation of a “distinctly lesbian style” allows lesbians who are butch or androgynous to “define a positive lesbian presence in opposition to heterosexist notions of women as weak, passive, and small” (96). In other words, whilst not all lesbians might recognise themselves as being butch, the presence of the category—and its salience within lesbian culture—reinforces a discourse of difference from, and rejection of, the heteronormative mainstream. Butch styles function as cultural signifiers for many lesbians and, for some, can act as a vehicle for authenticity and acceptance within lesbian communities.

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 177 As Hallett (1999:112) suggests, lesbians continue to struggle for visibility, but can gain it by reproducing an identity of difference. As members of a minority group, many lesbian women may embrace cultural norms which position them as part of a collective and engage in discourses which are recognisable to other lesbians (though many others may strive for a more ‘homonormative’ identity—see Duggan (2002)). In this way, lesbian women may achieve some cultural legitimacy (see Morrish and Sauntson 2007: 87 for an example of this). Due to the historical construction of lesbianism via ideologies of gender inversion, achieving legitimacy for Western lesbians may have become mostly about avoiding femininity. Because women who are not heterosexual stand out as ‘other’ in mainstream society, they may be likely to embrace their otherness by constructing an identity which opposes that which they ‘should’ be—heterosexual and feminine. Whilst it may be empowering for those women who subvert the norm by rejecting femininity, and whilst it may be understood within lesbian communities that this differs to the adoption of male styles and practices, however, there remains a popular misconception that butch lesbians ‘want to be men.’ Lesbian blogger Lesbian Wink (2010), for example, asks why some lesbians choose to be with a woman who “acts and looks like a man, happiest in her male disguise, completely barren of the qualities most people associate as feminine.” To dispel such myths of butchness as desired maleness, I argue that it is necessary to problematise and denaturalise the seemingly straightforward connection between the two. In the following section, I consider the reasons for, and problems with, their apparent link. BUTCH AND MASCULINITY Irvine and Gal’s (2000) theory of how language practices come to be ideologically salient can help to explain the reason why butch practices are often interpreted as male performances in Western cultures. They argue that it is not only within a specific interactive context that meanings are created (38); ideologies from broader cultural contexts beyond a particular interactive moment will always influence the way that practices are interpreted. When a woman employs culturally recognisable butch styles, for example, broader ideologies of binary gender difference directly impact on how they are explained—as masculine, because they are not feminine. The cultural resources available to us are limited and dominated by hegemonic, heteronormative ideas of essentialised, dichotomous gender; our understanding of a woman who does not engage in feminine styles and practices is shaped by these cultural resources, and she is subsequently interpreted as being ‘mannish.’ Irvine and Gal’s theory of fractal recursivity helps to explain this further: they argue that broader oppositions and constraints from one group may be drawn upon in the conceptualisation of difference in another group (Irvine 2001: 33). Because there is perceived to be an essential difference

178 Lucy Jones between male (masculine) behaviour and female (feminine) behaviour, then, the ideological disruption between femaleness and femininity which takes place when a woman engages in butch behaviour becomes associated with maleness. This is because it cannot easily be explained as a form of femaleness within the constraints of our binary system of gender. For this reason, butchness may often be described as “female masculinity,” a term popularised by Halberstam (1998). Halberstam’s (1998) description of female masculinity, however, works towards a definition of non-normative gender behaviour in women that overtly positions it as an empowering act. Though some of the contexts that she outlines in her discussion of female masculinity do involve a performance of maleness, such as drag kings, overall she argues that female masculinity is far more than an imitation of manhood (122). Her work clearly places masculinity as a concept which may be removed from men themselves and embodied by women, and as a relational concept which exists because of its opposition to femininity (Halberstam 2002: 354). This point is shared by Connell (2001: 31), who argues that it is only in cultures which treat women and men as inherently different that polarised gender—and thus masculinity compared to femininity—exists. Whilst this perspective encourages a view of masculinity as an ideological construct which is the consequence of a cultural system of binary gender, however, I would argue that labelling nonfeminine behaviour in women ‘female masculinity’ may, in fact, inadvertently reproduce harmful ideologies which link non-normative sexualities to gender inversion. Within the ideological system of binary gender that shapes Western societies, masculinity is intrinsically tied to maleness, after all. When a woman engages in non-feminine behaviour, as explained above, she is therefore perceived as ‘acting like a man.’ To name this ‘masculinity’ does little to challenge or deconstruct the deeply entrenched concept of binary, essentialised gender; it reinforces it, in fact, and makes it difficult to view non-femininity in women as an identity or behaviour in its own right. The labelling of butch behaviour as ‘masculine’ may obscure the relevance of butchness as a subversive act which deconstructs and challenges heteronormative ideals of femininity, and may augment the ideology of butch as a form of gender deviance. It is important to state, here, that I do not dispute that masculinity itself is an ideological concept, or argue that only men can embody masculinity because it is somehow innate to them. On the contrary, I would argue that masculinity is a repertoire of styles and practices which we simply think of men being more likely to use, and which match our understanding of hegemonic masculinity because normative men are most frequently represented as using them. In this sense, masculinity may be said to be an imagined space or “configuration of practice” (Connell and Messershmidt 2005: 836) which can be occupied by men or women. However, because masculinity is so clearly resonant with hegemonic maleness, there is a case for revisiting the concept of ‘female masculinity’ when discussing lesbian-specific style,

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 179 practice, and identity, in order to provide a more nuanced, critical, and queer understanding of what ‘butch’ can mean. Through the consideration of interaction between members of a community of practice called the Sapphic Stompers, I will argue that ‘butch’ may be best understood not as a performance involving male signifiers, but an identity which eschews social scripts that state what bodies women should have and what lives they should lead. In order to do this, I will utilise the theoretical framework proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2005), detailed below in relation to lesbian discourse and identity. SOCIOCULTURAL LINGUISTICS I have argued so far in this chapter that broader ideologies of essential, dichotomous gender must be explicitly addressed when considering the identity construction that might take place between lesbian women, in order that projections of butchness are not unproblematically defined as a performance of masculinity. That is to say, the construction of a shared identity that draws on culturally salient identity categories (such as ‘butch’ and ‘femme’) should be viewed as facilitated by broader structures (such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’), but not wholly constrained by them. To take such a view, we must try to understand the way that hegemonic ideologies are reproduced and, crucially, reworked from the perspective of those engaged in the construction of identity. A theoretical approach which allows such a multi-layered perspective—a sociocultural linguistics approach—has been developed for interactionist sociolinguistics by Bucholtz and Hall (2004, 2005). Bucholtz and Hall (2005) bring together broad linguistic research which takes interaction as the site at which meaning is negotiated and identities are made, formulating a framework which positions identity as being constructed intersubjectively. Their framework posits, in other words, that identities are not produced on an individual basis, but in relation to other people’s identities and in response to local as well as global ideological structures and discourses (2005: 586). One of the principles that they put forward, the positionality principle, allows us to view identity construction on three levels; the broad, macro level which concerns stereotypes or ideologies being drawn upon by social actors, the ethnographic level which concerns speakers’ relationships to one another and the cultural context in which they are engaging, and the interactional level at which speakers engage in temporarily significant identity work in order to construct meaningful personae—or “identity images” (Coupland 2007: 237)—relevant to that interactional moment. Of particular resonance to the current issue of whether butch identities equate to masculine identities, and of central concern to Bucholtz and Hall’s framework, is the notion of indexicality. This concept concerns the processes by which certain linguistic features or discursive moves signal

180 Lucy Jones particular ideological identity categories or personae (Ochs 1991; Silverstein 2003). The meaning behind particular features, moves, or roles, however, will depend on the sociocultural context of an interaction; it is only through interaction with others that identities emerge and become seen as meaningful or real (Bucholtz 2011: 2). This means, for example, that the use of euphemism could point towards femininity or towards professionalism, or even towards a certain social class or ethnicity, depending on who uses it and how their interlocutors understand it in a particular socio-cultural context. Importantly, then, indexicality is not a simple process whereby a particular linguistic feature necessarily indexes a given identity. It is, Ochs (1991) argues, an indirect process, with the ideological link between language and the identity that it indexes being mediated by cultural stereotypes and expectations. For example, a gay man who wishes to perform an identity relevant to his sexuality might employ a falsetto voice quality which, as research such as Gaudio (1994) has shown, is stereotypically linked with Western gay men. By using falsetto, Podesva (2007) has shown, gay male speakers in the United States can index a gay identity in a complex and indirect way. Falsetto has gay connotations, Podesva argues, because its function as a discourse marker is to communicate expressiveness. Expressiveness is ideologically the reserve of women because men ‘should’ be strong, silent, and powerful. Falsetto or expressiveness is therefore seen as a feminine trait, given its links with hysteria, and a man using it would seemingly index effeminacy as a result. Given the continued ideology of gender inversion surrounding gay men and women, it is evident that the use of falsetto can thus be seen as indexing a gay male identity (Podesva 2007, 18). Importantly, Podesva shows that this occurs only in contexts in which it is relevant or beneficial for a gay identity to be constructed; it is not the case that all gay men make use of falsetto. For Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 594), indexicality occurs not only through specific language features, but through the use of social category labels, implicatures, stance-taking, and other means by which speakers can position themselves (and others) as certain ‘kinds’ of people. By stance-taking, I refer to the process of “taking up a position with respect to the form or content of one’s utterance” (Jaffe 2009: 3). Stances are made up of discursive moves and linguistic styles, and concern an ideological standpoint towards or against something (Coupland 2006). This concept may be relevant for the construction of a sexual identity as speakers orient themselves towards, or away from, particular stereotypes from within gay culture in order to project an identity as a particular kind of person at a given time. Through even fleeting interaction, we can use language to take stances relevant to that moment. In turn, these stances can index salient identity categories and personae. We know which styles and stances are salient for the identity we wish to construct due to our engagement with cultural resources relevant to that identity and our interaction with groups who are defined by it. For example, identities which are constructed within lesbian groups are likely

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 181 to draw on ideologies of gender inversion or butch/femme. Indeed, research into conversations between Western lesbians has found this to be the case; whilst the specifics of what it means to be a lesbian may depend on the cultural context of a given community, similar stereotypes about lesbians which are more global can be drawn upon in order to construct a recognisable identity (see Morgan and Wood 1995; Queen 2005; Morrish and Sauntson 2007; Jones 2012 for examples). Such research suggests that, when sexuality is a shared and relevant part of a group’s purpose, it is likely that discussions relevant to that sexuality will emerge as a way of constructing a group identity. This is not to argue that all lesbians will necessarily engage in ‘lesbian’ talk, any more than it is to suggest that all lesbian women will relate to the categories of butch and femme. But it is to suggest that certain ideological concepts—including identity categories—may be prevalent amongst a broad range of women who do identify as lesbian, and that these ideologies enable the construction of shared selves. For the women detailed in this chapter, such categories were of central importance; this group of women are outlined below. THE SAPPHIC STOMPERS The women involved in the interaction detailed below were all members of the Sapphic Stompers,2 a hiking group based in the United Kingdom which met two to four times per month and was managed and organised by the members themselves. There were over a hundred women registered on an online mailing list which a core group of members maintained, but there were usually only half a dozen women on each hike (see Jones 2012 for a detailed account of the group’s structure and practice). The core Stomper members, who make up the focus of this study, were women who were in their late 50s to early 60s at the time of recording in 2007. They were part of the baby-boomer generation, mostly identified with feminism, and typically rejected symbols of femininity in favour of androgynous or butch styles. The women were middle-class, university-educated professionals, who came from an era in which their sexuality was political; they could be classed as part of a vision of a ‘lesbian nation,’ a place which “stood apart from the dominant culture as a sort of haven in a heartless (male/heterosexual) world” (Stein 1997: 378). The women can be classed as a community of practice (CofP), a model which has been borrowed from a theory of learning (Lave and Wenger 1991) to explain how group identities are constructed through shared linguistic resources and styles (see Eckert 2000; Moore and Podesva 2007; Mendoza-Denton 2008 for examples of its application in sociolinguistics). Members of CofPs engage in shared practices (ways of doing things) which can index broader social categories in ways that are specific to the group. For the Stompers, a group of lesbian women who engaged regularly in shared activities which were, in part, defined by their sexuality, shared

182 Lucy Jones practices certainly emerged and were employed when they were together. These practices included joking about what ‘counts’ as authentically lesbian by drawing on cultural stereotypes of butch and femme, as described below. Through their interaction together, and amongst other things, it was typical for the Stomper women to use discursive strategies which enabled them to position themselves and others in line with ‘authentic’ or ‘illegitimate’ personae that they constructed. They did this through the framing of one another (and themselves) as either a Dyke or a Girl, depending on the point of reference. For example, practices such as having short, cropped hair or riding motorcycles would index a more dykey style, whilst wearing pastel shades or makeup indexed girliness (Jones 2011, 2012). The practices which made up the Dyke persona were typically taken as indexical of what they perceived to be a ‘proper’ lesbian and were closest to an ideologically salient butch identity, whilst those which made up the Girl persona were indexical of femme identities and were classed as practices which were less authentically lesbian in their nature. For these women, then, being butch was a more legitimate way of ‘doing’ lesbian identity, and lesbian identity itself was gradable. If we return to the positionality principle put forward by Bucholtz and Hall (2005), it is apparent that the women engaged in practices (on the interactive level) which allowed them to construct salient personae such as a Dyke (on the ethnographic level) which, in turn, indexed a butch identity (on an ideological level). Broader concepts of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are clearly salient here, then, but they are not directly reproduced. By scrutinising the levels of identity and ideology that are involved in the production of salient personae in the group, it is possible to provide a more nuanced understanding of the role that ideological notions of femininity and masculinity play in the construction of a Stomper identity. This avoids the problematic and uncritical reproduction of hegemonic ideologies of binary gender and inversion in the analysis of their interaction, as shown in the following analysis. ANALYSIS The interaction detailed below involved three members of the core Stomper group—Claire, Marianne, and Sam—in conversation. I was also present, and feature in both the transcript and the analysis. I had been engaged in ethnography with the Stomper CofP for over a year by the time that this interaction occurred, and had begun to gain credibility as an honorary member of the group, but—as will become evident—I stood out as different to the women due to my relative youth (I was in my early 20s at the time), my researcher status, and my lack of adherence to butch norms or practices. The interaction occurred at Claire’s home, with the four of us eating takeaway fish and chips following a mid-week evening walk. We had attempted to eat at a pub near the walk’s finish point, as would be our usual practice, but

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 183 a fully booked venue took us back to Claire’s house instead. Whilst eating our food, sitting in her living room, we began to talk about the hike that we had just completed. We talked about another group of women that we had seen on the hills and joked about whether we thought that they were lesbians or not. This led to a discussion of whether other hikers recognised us as lesbians when they saw us out on our walks. The women all agreed that not everybody would interpret us in this way, but Marianne suggested that “sometimes they think some of us are men.” Sam agreed with this, telling an anecdote of a time she had been mistaken for a man and questioning what it was about her (and other lesbians) that led people to make this mistake. Ultimately, she concluded that it must be “body language a bit . . . the way we stand or the way we walk or something.” Her use of inclusive language such as the pronoun “we” was noticeable here, as she positioned herself as typical of other lesbians and cemented the notion that this is what lesbians looked like and experienced. At this moment, Sam effectively constructed the norm that lesbians can be mistaken for men and, in turn, that butch styles and practices are normative for gay women. This is very significant in shaping the interactional moment that occurred next. Following Sam’s anecdote, Marianne went on to tell her own story, one which concerned an ex-girlfriend who was frequently mistaken for a man. Marianne felt certain that it was body language that led people to mistake lesbians for men, but said that it was not something which happened to her. It is important to note at this point that Marianne did not perceive herself as being butch. She was less stereotypically ‘recognisable’ as a lesbian than Sam and Claire—both of whom had very short cropped hair, wore no makeup or jewellery, and had a very androgynous, neutral style of dressing which often involved wearing clothes designed for men. This rather explains Marianne’s input in the transcript that follows, as she shows less concern to distance herself from ‘femme’ styles than the other women. Nonetheless, by telling her own anecdote and sharing in the lesbian-specific experience of Sam, Marianne was able to work collaboratively in the construction of a shared stance towards the negative experience of lesbians being mistaken for men. In the run-up to the interaction which follows, then, both Sam and Marianne authenticated (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 601) their own status as lesbians by drawing on a real-life, personal experience. The telling of personal stories such as this, according to Holmes (2006: 182), enables speakers to focus on the aspect of themselves that are most prevalent at a given moment and thus strengthen social ties. In this moment, the Stomper members were able to come to a shared conclusion: the reason that people mistake lesbians for men is that they simply do not look closely enough, taking cues such as short hair for granted without looking past them. In this sense, Marianne and Sam blamed the heterosexual mainstream for their inability to see past what they expect to see, successfully ‘othering’ those that did not fit into their lesbian group and reinforcing a sense of homogeneity between them as a result.

184 Lucy Jones At this point, my attempt to authenticate myself as a lesbian within the given parameters of the interactional moment occurred. I began to tell my own story about being mistaken for a boy several years earlier, when I had my (usually long) hair tied back underneath a baseball cap and had been wearing a baggy sweater and tracksuit. I ended my turn by suggesting that I would not usually be mistaken for a man, partly because I wore makeup. Sam (S), Claire (C), and Marianne (M) would not have been surprised by this admission—I wore a little makeup on each of my hikes with them, and they undoubtedly recognised me as being not as butch—or perhaps more femme—than them. Nonetheless, as shown in the opening lines of the extract below, the women playfully admonished me for wearing makeup before moving on to critique makeup generally, and then lipstick specifically. The extract begins, below, with the conclusion of my story about being mistaken for a boy, as I (L) state that “it must be the body language thing ’cause there’s no way that looking at my face (. . .) people could’ve thought I was a boy I don’t think . . . not with mascara on, and foundation!” Part One3 1 L

so it must be the body language thing ’cause there’s no way that

2 L

looking at my face and like people could’ve thought I was a boy I

3 S M C L

[No]

[@(2)] [@(1)] [@(1)] [don’t] think (.) Not with foundation [@(1)]

4 S C L

[Wearing makeup] Makeup? [When I in] my:: youth I kno::w (.) I’m not [proper one]

5 S C

I don’t know

Wasn’t allowed in our day @(2) didn’t wear ma::ke-up ah::

6 C L

[We’ll] have- we’ll have none of Ah well bucking trends (5) I don’t [know]

7 S M C

@(.) that.

8 S M C L

[@(2)] [Ruth always wore lipstick on] occasion I hated [@(2)] don’t let her. [@(2)] [I wouldn’t go as far as lipstick]

9 S C L

it [I didn’t] want to kiss her [when she’d got lipstick on] [I know] [it’s horrible urgh lipstick]

Bev used to wear lipsticks before me

Doesn’t she anymore? No I

Mm I

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 185

Stances against Makeup As explained above, it was common practice for me to wear a little makeup around the Stompers, and indeed I was wearing some during this recording. It is reasonable to argue, therefore, that Claire’s horrified turn of “makeup?!” is intended to be ironic. Her exclamation in line 4, following the other participants’ laughter at my admission of wearing mascara and foundation, suggests that the women understood the dominant indexical links between makeup and femaleness. Indeed, given that the laughter comes once I myself have laughed, it seems that the women are expressing agreement that it would be unlikely for me to be mistaken for a male given the fact that makeup was worn at the time. I interpret Claire’s exclamation in a specifically lesbian frame, positioning myself as “not a proper one” (line 4), using the pronoun “one” in place of “lesbian.” This indicates a presupposition that the women would interpret my statement in light of our shared sexuality, and allows me to articulate my understanding of the implicature behind Claire’s expression. This exchange begins the construction of the notion that real lesbians should not wear makeup. It is relevant to note that I am not ostracised or demonised for wearing makeup in this moment. Instead, it seems, my apparent transgression is explained by the women positioning themselves as older than me, seemingly excusing me because I am of a different generation to them. From line 4 onwards, Claire and Sam jointly argue that they themselves would not have been able to wear makeup when they were my age. Claire’s turn of “in my youth,” and Sam’s turn of “wasn’t allowed in our day” (line 5) position me as younger and therefore peripheral to their shared, agerelated selves. That Claire accentuates “my” draws a clear divide between the two of us, and Sam’s use of “our day” positions the rest of the group in opposition to me. In doing so, the women “adequate” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 599) their shared experiences in order to construct a mutual persona. At this moment, Sam’s and Claire’s identity work positions them (or “us”) as older. It is particularly interesting that this move is made by Sam, because—unlike the other core Stompers—she had only come out as a lesbian a few years prior to joining the group; “in our day” seems to refer to when she was a young “out” lesbian as well as a young woman, but this was not, in fact, part of her experience. This, perhaps, illustrates an important argument of the sociocultural linguistics approach; personae can be fleeting or changing, and need not reflect the identities held by interlocutors in other contexts. In this sense, identities are only ever partial (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 606). The fact that the critique from Sam and Claire is light-hearted in nature is indicated by Sam’s laughter in lines 5 and 6, but also by Claire’s parodic use of Northern English vowels, exaggerated from her usual vernacular, in “didn’t wear makeup (/meːkʊp/), ah.” She employs extended vowel sounds which mimic older, traditional speakers in a “performance speech”

186 Lucy Jones (Schilling-Estes 1998) and, in doing so, seems to index an old-fashioned— or at least old—persona. This serves to inject a little humour into her speech, showing that she is not being entirely serious in her critique of me, as well as referring to differences between lesbian culture now and in the past (see Koller 2008 for an account of such differences). In this moment, then, my wearing of makeup is aligned with my youth. This means that, whilst I am de-authenticated due to my age, my status as a lesbian remains intact. The very fact that my wearing makeup led to this identity work, of course, indicates how clearly the practice is ideologically oppositional to ‘authentic lesbian style’ for these women. The topic becomes more focused at this point, as lipstick itself becomes the iconic form of makeup under scrutiny. From line 7, Claire introduces the topic of romantic partners wearing it. She actively constructs the claim that her girlfriend wore lipstick before her by setting up the temporality of the situation in line 7 with “used to” and “before me,” clearly stressing that this was something which occurred in the past and removing herself from any current association with lipstick. In distancing themselves from lesbians who do wear makeup, Claire and Sam seem to emphasise the ideological incongruence of this practice, here, and position themselves as more authentic by comparison; this is defined by Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 599) as a tactic of distinction. Claire’s alignment with Sam’s stance against lipstick is enabled, at this moment, through her supportive statement in lines 6–7 (“I know”), and the two women continue to cooperatively construct this by positioning lipstick as sexually unattractive. In lines 6–7, Sam claims that “I didn’t want to kiss [my girlfriend] when she’d got lipstick on,” supported by Claire’s declarative “it’s horrible” in line 9 and her subsequent expression of disgust (“urgh”). To position lipstick as unattractive allows the interactants to subvert the heteronormative status of makeup as a tool for women to enhance their femininity and thus be more alluring and appealing to the opposite sex. By expressing that lipstick functions as a turn-off rather than a turn-on, therefore, these women position their perception of attractive womanhood as fundamentally different to that of the ideological heterosexual woman, and their desire as lesbians as fundamentally different to that of heterosexual men. In this moment, then, they mark a very clear distinction between lesbian women (and what is attractive about them), straight women (and what is attractive about them), and straight men (and what they find attractive). Though it is done in a light-hearted way, the constructed stance against makeup and lipstick does suggest an awareness of particular styles and norms within lesbian culture; these clearly correlate with the time that these women came of age, and enable Sam and Claire to position themselves in line with butch lesbian stereotypes. That the women construct not wearing makeup as a valued norm also demonstrates their concern to be marked out as different to heterosexual women. What follows, detailed below, illustrates this further.

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 187 Part Two 10 L

I don’t wear lipstick I wear f- I wear foundation purely to cover my

11 M L

[I do I always my spots and I wear mascara just I don’t know why I [wear mascara(.)

12 M C L

wear not foundation not like [[that]] but but you know concealer or [[@(.)]] makes my eyes look better]

13 M

whatever I always have (.) but not much other makeup I always found

14 M

it really diff- is that there was one of those things I’m twenty-one

15 M

I should own a lipstick and I’d go and stand for hours looking at the

16 M

things trying to see if there was one that I could possibly I I think

17 S M L

[Mm] there are some of those sort of funny conflicty things I [think] more [Mm]

18 M

recently I did get a little bit into it and I actually B- Betty when

19 M

I met her she had lipstick and that but she hardly wears any now but

20 M

I thought God I’ve never had a girlfriend that wears lipstick before

21 M C

I thought it was quite nice actually I thought. (.) Well you put your

22 S C L

@(1) [I don’t like-] foot down Ah I can’t believe you banned her [from wearing] lipstick

23 M C L

[@(2)] she still sneaks it on when she’s going to meetings and things [@(2)] [@(2)]

24 S C L

but but not in my presence

25 S

think it it’s horrible to wear (.) and it’s a completely unnecessary

26 S M

thing. Mm I do think lipstick’s a bit horrible actually I don’t mind

27 M

other makeup.

@ (1)

/I really

Ah that’s funny/

Shifting Stance-Work Marianne’s role in this interaction is of particular interest because she attempts to shift the dominant stance that has been established by this point. Largely, it seems, this is in an effort to defend her wearing of makeup. In response to my own attempt at face-saving by justifying my

188 Lucy Jones use of foundation (as functional and allowing me to cover blemishes, line 11), Marianne begins to construct a new norm that some makeup is an exception to the rule. Her supportive statement in line 11 (“I do”) highlights our shared use of this type of makeup. In aligning herself with me (already established as a makeup wearer), however, Marianne places herself in an inauthentic position in line with the co-constructed authentic stance of Sam and Claire. As established early in the interaction, however, my use of makeup was excused due to my age, whereas Marianne was a long-standing member of the Stompers who matched the typical demographic of the group. By aligning her stance-taking with me, a peripheral member of the group, she engages in identity work which disrupts the apparent homogeneity between the Stomper members. She mitigates this somewhat by distinguishing between my use of foundation (typically a full base coverage applied to the entire face) and her use of concealer (typically applied solely to blemishes on the skin), claiming that she wears “not foundation, not like that” (line 10), using the pronoun “that” to both refer to, and to other, the type of makeup that I claimed I wore. She also hedges her admission of makeup use in this interaction through “you know” and “or whatever” on either side of her confession, mitigating the position that she has already taken. This may be perceived as an attempt to mediate between the two norms under construction in this interaction: that no lesbian would wear lipstick and that some types of makeup might be permissible. The dialogic and intersubjective nature of meaningful stance construction is evident here, as “the value of any stance utterance tends to be shaped by its framing through the collaborative acts of co-participants” (Du Bois 2007: 141). Without the prior construction of lipstick specifically as negative, after all, Marianne would have been unable to meaningfully present other makeup as potentially legitimate. She presents lipstick as something that, as a younger woman, she felt she ought to wear, but also as something that she was uncomfortable wearing due to her sexuality. By describing this as a “funny conflicty thing” in line 15, Marianne illustrates a conflict between being female and lesbian, highlighting her awareness of ‘appropriate’ styles for non-heterosexual women, and ultimately rejects this symbolically feminine product. Her consciousness of how her identity as a lesbian should conflict with hegemonic femininity is particularly apparent, here, and it seems that Marianne attempts to play down her own wearing of makeup as a result. Despite her rejection of lipstick for herself, however, Marianne then again flouts the Stomper norms by claiming that she thought that her partner wearing it was “quite nice actually” (line 19). Though she uses the adverbs “quite” and “actually” to weaken the strength of “nice,” seemingly acknowledging her deviation from the dominant norm presented by her interlocutors, Marianne fails to alter the dominant stance against lipstick in this moment. This is apparent not only from Claire’s response which ignores this contribution, suggesting that she should “put [her] foot down” (discussed below), but

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 189 from the fact that this begins a new sub-topic in which an additional stance against lipstick can be taken. This involves the stance object (lipstick) being altered from being unpleasant to kiss (line 9) to being horrible to wear, with Sam presenting wearing lipstick as a forced act of heteronormativity (“It’s a completely unnecessary thing” lines 25–26). Though Marianne presents lipstick as potentially desirable on a partner, then, this is fundamentally rejected by the other women. In apparent acknowledgement that her stance will not be taken up by any of her interlocutors, Marianne shifts her stance and concurs with the majority in line 26 by saying: “I do think lipstick’s a bit horrible actually.” By specifying lipstick, Marianne distinguishes it from the makeup that she has already admitted to wearing, and uses the resonant form “horrible” to mirror and align herself with what Claire and Sam have already said. Marianne again uses “actually” in this statement, but this time with its evaluative function implying that she might have now reconsidered her stance. Using “a bit” again functions to mitigate the strength of her assertion, and might also signal some reluctance to shift her stance entirely. What is evident, of course, is that Marianne has moved from a somewhat positive evaluation of lipstick to a somewhat negative evaluation of it; this seems to reveal her awareness of its salience, her concern to maintain cohesion and an in-group identity, and the symbolic power that lipstick holds for the group. It is clear from Marianne’s failed stance-taking, here, that the ideological link between makeup and femininity is extremely strong for this group of lesbian women. For the women to place the wearing of makeup as antithetical to their concept of authentic lesbianism is logical, given the heteronormative discourses in which messages advocating the wearing of makeup are transmitted; women are told to wear makeup to be more attractive to the opposite sex, and that this is how to be a ‘real’ woman. Furthermore, as indicated above, Stomper identity was frequently associated with feminism, a concept of great importance to many (gay) women of this generation. In the 1970s (a decade which most of the core Stompers experienced), feminist discourse typically positioned “all fashion and cosmetics [as] simply tools of sexual objectification and therefore instruments of male oppression to be discarded” (Craig 2003: 20). By rejecting heteronormative ideals of femininity, then, Claire and Sam arguably also reject a patriarchal model of womanhood in this moment. In this sense, their positioning of feminine symbols as inauthentic allows them to articulate their own authenticity as lesbians because they are not feminine, again using the tactic of distinction, and because they are feminists. As Rothblum et al. (1995: 65–66) argue, lesbians of this generation grew up in a period when it was almost mandatory for them to embody butchness, and when androgyny was culturally acceptable for straight women and lesbians alike. Marianne’s eventual acceptance of Stomper values and her acknowledgement of the symbolic relevance of lipstick to the Stompers’ mutual identity thus illustrates the powerful role of cultural norms when constructing identity for women of this generation. It

190 Lucy Jones also demonstrates the salience of rejecting symbols of heteronormative femininity in the construction of a normative lesbian—butch, for these women— identity. What is perhaps more interesting still, however, is the response to it and the type of identity that this turn enables Claire to momentarily construct. This is considered, below.

Power and Control Claire’s turn from line 21, when she suggests that Marianne “put her foot down” over her girlfriend wearing makeup, reveals the extent to which Marianne’s attempt to positively evaluate lipstick has failed. Rather than respond in an expected manner, by simply agreeing or disagreeing with her, Claire takes the interesting step of ultimately ignoring the very clear message in Marianne’s statement—that she liked her girlfriend wearing lipstick. Instead, she takes a domineering approach for the second time in this interaction (the first being in lines 7–8, when she claims to have prevented her girlfriend from wearing makeup). She re-frames Marianne’s turn as a problem to which she has the solution, an intention which is evident from her beginning her turn with the evaluative “well” (line 21). It is clear from Claire’s response that she perceives Marianne to have failed to construct an authentic Stomper persona in this moment, as she has not aligned herself with the prevalent stances taken within the interaction and has flouted one of the core expectations of normativity within the group (that lesbians eschew heteronormative femininity). However, Claire and Marianne were close, and it is therefore possible that this is a supportive move to save her friend’s positive face. This seems feasible because Claire reiterates the contextually established norm that one would not like it if one’s girlfriend wore makeup, providing Marianne with the opportunity to comply with it. This also allows Claire to construct and align herself with a participant role which is powerful, as she states that Marianne ought to prevent her partner from wearing makeup. Claire’s apparently facilitative role here, then, also allows her to position herself as somebody who plays a dominant or controlling role in a relationship. It is important to unpick the indexical relationship between Claire’s move, here, and the persona which she appears to be constructing for herself through it. Claire’s stance—albeit a humorous and, presumably, ironic one—draws upon what we might think of as a stereotypically ‘male’ practice: being domineering and controlling within a relationship. At this moment, she goes beyond simply rejecting lipstick as a symbol of femininity in her construction of a lesbian persona; her suggestion that Marianne should enforce some rules with her partner implies that Claire behaves in this way herself. This indexes a stance of assertiveness, power, and dominance. What this indirectly indexes (see Ochs 1991) is relevant to the ethnographic context in which it occurs, as well as to the interactive moment. One could suggest that she is alluding to stereotypical masculinity because of the common ideological association between power, dominance, and men. However, given that this is a

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 191 discussion of lesbian relationships and that the people concerned are women, this is not a straightforward conclusion to draw. Given the fundamentally female context, there is little reason for Claire to index a male identity at this moment. Instead, I would argue that she is performing an identity which disrupts the supposedly natural temperament of females, by being the opposite of what women are expected, ideologically, to be: facilitative, submissive, and supportive (Holmes 1995; Coates 1996). This enhances and supports the collaborative stance that she and Sam take against traditional femininity. It would be problematic and naïve, however, to suggest that Claire is therefore indexing masculinity in this moment. Instead, one might suggest that she is drawing on the binary system of butch and femme (rather than male and female); the lesbian-specific nature of this interaction makes the positioning of herself as butch (in contrast to femme) far more likely than the positioning of herself as male (in contrast to female). As argued above, it is important to make this distinction clear if we are to avoid perpetuating stereotypical notions of lesbians as ‘doing’ masculinity, or projecting a male persona. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION What has been highlighted in the analysis, above, is that—for these women, at least—’doing’ a butch identity is not synonymous with doing a masculine identity. Instead, butchness may be produced via the rejection of strong symbols of femininity and, to a lesser extent, taking stances of power and control. For the Stompers, the personae of Dyke and Girl indexed broader categories of butch and femme, hence the salience of makeup (and lipstick in particular) to the women’s construction and performance of authentic lesbianism in this moment. It has been suggested, above, that lesbian adherence to nonfeminised styles may often be interpreted simply as being ‘mannish,’ or as role-playing maleness. It has been argued that this is because of the relational system in which gender is ideologically structured, whereby one is female and feminine/male and masculine, and where femininity and masculinity are the only two options available. Yet the distinction between butch behaviour and male behaviour must be made clear, not least by an avoidance of referring to butch behaviour as ‘masculinity.’ The very fact that the women in this conversation are discussing lipstick and makeup in relation to their female partners and to their experience as women themselves demonstrates that this identity work does not concern the construction of a masculine, male identity. After all, if this conversation had occurred between a group of heterosexual men, we would not expect to see them asserting a strong stance against lipstick; it would not be expected that they should wear it, and they would therefore have less need to reject it. As argued above, masculinity as a concept is about all things associated with hegemonic manliness, whereas butch as a concept is about all things associated with stereotypical lesbianism. For this reason, the rejection of lipstick cannot be seen as an act of masculinity: most men would

192 Lucy Jones not need to renounce lipstick in order to assert their masculinity, but some lesbians would need to renounce lipstick in order to assert their butchness. If we choose to refer to what lesbians do in moments such as this as ‘masculinity,’ then, we need to deal with the fact that this is a very different masculinity to that which is produced by men. To avoid confusion, I suggest we avoid the term ‘masculinity’ all together. The way that gender ideologies work, it is clear from this discussion, is via a relational, oppositional system whereby identities are defined by what they are not as much as what they are (Baker 2008: 12). However, it would be unwise to presume that the rejection of a symbol of femininity means the claiming of a masculine identity. By rejecting heteronormative femininity, after all, these women do not deny their own womanhood. The rejection of symbols such as makeup is, in fact, a rejection of that which is expected of a heterosexual woman, not a lesbian woman. In refusing lipstick, therefore, it can be argued that the women in this interaction are positioning themselves as fundamentally lesbian in opposition to straight women, not as somehow male or masculine in opposition to womanhood itself. The Stomper women may also reject symbols of heteronormative womanhood in this moment in order to construct a specific type of lesbian persona—the Dyke. In casting aside and disparaging makeup, they may also index a lack of affiliation with ‘lipstick lesbians’ or femmes—those who engage in feminised styles which conflict with the women’s generationally specific understanding of lesbian style and practice. In this sense, the construction of butchness may be achieved by distinguishing the self from both heteronormative femininity and the lesbian-specific category of femme, but it is clearly not about the adherence to male or masculine norms. The sociocultural linguistics framework presented earlier in this chapter has been shown to be of use when attempting to understand identity work in interaction, as it allows a view of conversation as the point at which identity is constructed. This makes it possible to interpret individuals as working intersubjectively to create new positions which are meaningful within that moment and within that context, rather than attempting to understand how their behaviour reflects pre-existing categories or personae. As a result, the identities that are produced through interaction may be considered in a more nuanced way, with moves such as the rejection of makeup being considered in relation to the ethos of their community of practice (i.e., in light of their typical practice as a group) as well as to lesbian culture more broadly. In this way, the identity work of Sam, Claire, and Marianne can be seen to be both constrained by ideologies of dichotomous gender, but also enabled by specific cultural themes (namely butchness and feminism) which are prevalent to them due to the intersecting aspects of their experience and identity as middle-aged, middle-class, white British lesbians. By viewing identity as emergent in interaction, and as a product of indexicality and positioning, as well as identity work as involving relational concepts such as ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘illegitimate,’ it has been possible to interpret the women’s

Masculinity in Lesbian Discourse 193 drawing on apparently masculine resources as far more complex than it may, at first, appear. Butch identity, as long as it is thought of simply as a form of ‘female masculinity,’ will remain misunderstood. Butch identity is enabled because of the dichotomous, relational system of gender that exists for heteronormative women and men, and masculinity may therefore be a resource which is drawn on in the construction of a butch identity, but this does not make butchness and masculinity the same. It must be remembered that being butch is about being a queer woman, a concept which is defined by the experience of being nonheteronormatively female. To simply refer to butchness as masculinity, given the clear association of masculinity with men, will perpetuate an understanding of butch lesbianism as merely a form of drag. To interpret it, instead, as a challenge to heteronormative femininity, and as a powerful construction of alternative womanhood, is to value its role in giving non-heterosexual women a powerful resource to draw upon. Through this resource, these women may proudly and confidently project their identity as lesbians. NOTES 1. I am grateful to Mary Bucholtz, Emma Moore, and members of the UCSB Language, Interaction, and Social Organisation group (2008) for their feedback on the data analysed here. I also thank Deborah Chirrey, Kira Hall, and the audience at Lavender Languages and Linguistics 19 (2012) for their helpful comments on the arguments made in this chapter. 2. The name of the group, as with all other names provided in this chapter, is a pseudonym. 3. Transcription conventions: [ ] [[ ]] / (.) (2) . ?

:: @ (10)

line

beginning of first overlap end of first overlap beginning of second overlap end of second overlap self-interruption or false start latching (no pause between speaker turns) pause of less than one second timed pause end of intonation unit; falling intonation end of intonation unit; rising intonation transcriber comment lengthening of sound laughing, plus duration laughing quality emphatic stress or increased amplitude

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10 Transmasculinity and the Voice Gender Assignment, Identity, and Presentation Lal Zimman

INTRODUCTION In her groundbreaking book, Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam argues that masculinity studies must go beyond the limiting focus of masculinity among men. Though this chapter is not about female masculinity per se, I share Halberstam’s concern in teasing apart the numerous layers or facets of genders that make the notion of female masculinity possible. I approach this issue through a focus on the role of the voice in constituting the masculine gender positionalities of trans men and others on the transmasculine identity spectrum. Transmasculine is an umbrella term referring to individuals who were assigned to a female gender role at birth but at some point come to selfidentify as men, or with some other masculine identity, rather than seeing themselves as women.1 Transmasculinity is not a special—or single—type of masculinity. It is more aptly described as a context: masculinity as enacted by people with transgender identities. In truth, the masculinities of trans people overlap in many ways with those of non-trans men. But they also invite us to be more precise in our definitions, to consider the full range of genders that can be classified as masculine, and to examine the boundaries that delineate categories like ‘masculinity’ and ‘men.’ It is in this way that the analysis herein serves to dislocate elements of masculinity that are often collapsed: masculine embodiment, subjectivities, semiotic enactments, and interactional reception. Importantly, these layers of masculinity may or may not align according to the standards of hetero- and cis-normative2 cultural contexts. In the realm of transmasculine linguistic practices, the voice in particular calls for attention to the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality, and to the complexity of each of these social constructs. This chapter draws on a two-year sociophonetic ethnography carried out within several overlapping communities of transmasculine individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2010 to 2012. The project focuses on the changing voices of 15 English speakers in the early stages of testosterone therapy, which typically causes a salient drop in vocal pitch along with other forms of physical masculinization. As participants approach and cross over the border that divides female- and male-sounding voices, the goal of this project was to

198 Lal Zimman track changes in their vocal pitch along with shifts in vowel formants and the acoustic characteristics of [s], each of which carries gendered indexical weight. In this chapter, I focus on [s] as a window into the diverse range of masculinities with which my participants aligned, and the multi-faceted perspective on gender that is necessary to explain this variation. The chapter begins with an introduction to transmasculine subjectivity and the distinction many transmasculine people make (along with some gender theorists) between gender assignment, gender role, gender identity, and gender presentation. Along with a more fluid and context-sensitive understanding of physiological sex and of sexuality, this multi-layered approach to gender can take us beyond the now widely recognized division between social gender and biological sex. In section 3, I present variation in the acoustics of [s] to explore both inter-speaker and intra-speaker differences. These findings, I argue, demonstrate that sex, gender identity, gender assignment, gender presentation, and sexuality each have a role to play in accounting for phonetic expression of transmasculinities. Transmasculine speakers’ complex alignments and disalignment with various kinds of masculinities provides a concrete reminder of the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality as multi-faceted and flexible phenomena that resist binary coding schemas. In complicating our understanding of the relationship between these layers of gender, transmasculine speakers also challenge our understanding of how masculinity and power interact. Trans people have often been either held up as the ultimate gender transgressors or as traitors to the gender revolution for their purported gender normativity and acquiescence to dominant gender norms. Yet the implications of trans speakers’ appropriation of the semiotic resources associated with masculinity have a less certain valence given the variety of linguistic styles and social contexts in which they are situated. Rather than traveling as a package, power, too, may be dislocated from masculinity as speakers selectively draw on different facets of gender to align themselves with masculinity at one moment and criticize hegemonic gender norms at another (see also Zimman, forthcoming). GENDER AND SEX ARE NOT ENOUGH In gender studies and its allied fields, it has become commonplace to distinguish between sex, in reference to the gendered characteristics of the body, and gender, in reference to the social roles and norms ideologically linked to biological sex. One of the key contributions of poststructuralist feminism, however, is that sex and gender are both social constructs (Butler 1990, 1993; Delphy 1993; Nicholson 1994; for a linguistic perspective see Motschenbacher 2009; Zimman and Hall 2009; Zimman 2014). One of the clearest illustrations of these processes is the way dominant medico-scientific discourses about the body treat sex as a binary opposition between two, and only two, types of bodies. This system is naturalized, but in fact requires the

Transmasculinity and the Voice 199 erasure of many forms of embodiment that resist categorization as female or male (particularly intersex embodiment; see Fausto-Sterling 2000). Anthropologists have also documented some of the ways that sex differs across cultures. In a now classic study, Herdt (1993) discusses one intersex condition that occurs with greater frequency in certain communities and leads to a female-appearing body until masculinization occurs at puberty. Previous accounts of populations in the Dominican Republic argued that hormonal masculinization activates a biology-driven male gender identity. Yet Herdt paints a different picture for the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, who recognize intersex people as members of a locally recognized third gender category. Even in Western contexts, and even for normative bodies, the idea that men and women occupy fundamentally different biological categories is relatively new. Laqueur (1990) makes this argument as he traces the development of biological sex as a Western scientific concept. Through analysis of the historical record, Laqueur demonstrates that until the last few centuries male and female bodies were seen as occupying a single continuum, with female embodiment being conceptualized as an under-developed version of male embodiment, much as young boys and girls are seen as less developed versions of adult men and women (while still being members of the same sex). As a result, scientific texts and jargon did not distinguish terminologically between body parts like penis and vagina (or, at other times, penis and clitoris) or ovaries and testes. This perspective is obviously problematic on a number of grounds, but it illustrates that one need not look far to find that contemporary Western discourses about biological sex are not universal. Bodies are also malleable. The transmasculine speakers who are the focus of my research underscore this fact, as they are all making use of testosterone therapy to masculinize their bodies. This is one of the most common medical interventions used by transmasculine people and over time such a treatment regimen typically has dramatic effects on secondary sex characteristics such as body and facial hair, the distribution of muscle and fat, and vocal pitch. Yet it is not only trans people who modify their biological sex. The normatively gendered, too, shift their gendered embodiment through choices about food consumption, exercise, hair-style, clothing, body hair removal or growth, and so forth. As we consider the ways gendered embodiment interacts with the voice, it is important to keep in mind that sex is not static, not purely natural, and that it does not necessarily cause gender differences even where correlations exist. These terminological issues are academic in nature, but they are also important to the participants in my research. From here, I turn to the distinctions between gender assignment, role, identity, and expression as they are discussed by transmasculine people themselves. At the beginning of this chapter, I defined transmasculine people as being individuals who are “assigned to a female gender role at birth.” Though common usage might refer to transmasculine people as having been ‘born female,’ this language has fallen out of favor in many trans communities because of the way it naturalizes a person’s apparent sex at birth while

200 Lal Zimman treating trans identity as something other than inborn. Many trans people, like others in LGBT communities, describe themselves as being innately trans by birth, some invoking the so-called brain sex theory, which allows for the possibility that trans men have brain structures that resemble nontrans men’s, whereas the inverse is true for trans women (though see FaustoSterling 2000 for a critique of the brain sex theory). From this perspective, trans men’s bodies can be seen as at least partly biologically male, even if no medical interventions are made through hormones or surgery. In a more radical approach, some trans men contest the idea that their bodies are in any way female by referring to themselves with the body part terminology typically used for non-trans men, which I have discussed at greater length elsewhere (Zimman 2014). One trans man in my study, Dave, advocated for the then-new acronym (C)AFAB and (C)AMAB, found in activist circles as a way of referring to people as ‘(Coercively) Assigned Female/Male At Birth.’ This move unsettles the notion that trans people are agents in choosing to change gender categories and instead emphasizes the more powerful social forces that assign us to a gender without our consent. For the purposes of the analysis below, thinking about gender assignment gives us an opportunity to consider the effects of childhood socialization, for instance, and ask how transmasculine individuals’ gender assignment might shape their linguistic practices without conflating gender assignment and biological sex—a confusion that both naturalizes the gender assignment process and obscures the fact that assignment and sex may not align in normative ways. Gender assignment is designed to determine gender role, a somewhat nebulous concept meant to unify the social positionalities one occupies in everyday interactions, both personal and institutional. The transition from female to male, or vice versa, is frequently framed in terms of a change to biological sex, as references to ‘having a sex change operation’ suggest. Yet it is the social transition from one gender role to another that my participants, and many other trans people, emphasize as having the most profound effect on their day-to-day lives. Corporeal changes are important in large part because they facilitate a social transition in a society where biological sex and social gender are expected to “match.” Gender presentation or expression highlights the semiotic manifestations of gender and the various ways that an identity like “man” can be enacted. Gender expression consists in part of visual elements like clothing choices, hairstyle, and the presence of facial hair, makeup, and other forms of gendered body modification. Bodily hexis, including gesture, gait, posture, and so on, is also a semiotic resource for gender presentation. Even the body itself can be read as a part of gender expression—for instance, the display of muscle mass or fat, or their absence. And, of course, one of the crucial ways that masculinity and femininity are enacted semiotically is through the voice and linguistic practice more generally. Men and other masculine people have a huge rage of gender expressions, including both normative masculinities that align with dominant cultural

Transmasculinity and the Voice 201 expectations for men’s social practices as well as innumerable non-normative masculinities, and femininities, that in some way or another stray from, or blend, these norms. Norms for gender presentation vary considerably across communities, of course, and one man’s machismo is another man’s effeminacy. In older models of transsexuality, which continue to guide clinicians in many places, masculinity or femininity in gender expression are among the prime diagnostic cues of authentic trans identity (Benjamin 1966). Transsexuals are expected to have a lifetime of rejecting masculinity, if they were assigned to a male gender role at birth, or femininity, if they were assigned to a female role. Trans men should prefer playing with trucks and hate dolls, wear conventionally masculine clothing, be attracted to women and only women, and otherwise meet the demands of hegemonic masculinity. With the rise of transgender in the 1990s, as part of a challenge to the gender normativity built into definitions of transsexuality (see Stryker 2008; also Valentine 2007), services like hormone therapy became available to people with a wider range of gendered positionalities, with cities like San Francisco leading this trend. In the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010 to 2012, many transmasculine people on testosterone explicitly rejected the idea that they should conform to the demands of hetero- and cis-normative masculinity. Of course, self-identification as transmasculine suggests some affiliation with masculinity, but the nature of that affiliation varies wildly. In Table 10.1, I have roughly summarized my 15 participants’ gender identities, gender presentations, and sexual orientations, using their own words taken from interviews and conversations. As the table indicates, several of my participants saw themselves as having quite normative enactments of masculinity—an assessment with which I and members of their immediate communities would agree. Adam, for instance, has had a very masculine gender presentation his entire life. From the time he came out as a lesbian at age 19 until he started his transition at 38, he lived as a butch lesbian who also used the word “transgender” as an identity label beginning several years prior to the start of his medical and social transition from female to male. Adam is from the suburbs north of New York City, where he grew up in an Irish and Italian family with strong ties to their local Catholic community. After years of being visibly queer, Adam told me he was somewhat disappointed that his masculinity is “pretty conventional,” given his classic dress style and affective reservation (a disappointment that drives Adam to maintain a strong identity as a trans man, a point I will discuss shortly). On the other hand, my participants also included people on the other end of this spectrum, who had quite feminine gender presentations before their transitions, and who in some cases maintain their outward expressions of femininity through their transitions. The best example here is Dave, a white, middle-class trans man originally from the San Francisco Bay Area in his early 20s whose gender identity is strictly and simply ‘male’ but who describes his gender presentation as “fem.” He indexes his femininity with his preference for tight, form-fitting clothing, often in bright

202 Lal Zimman Table 10.1 Participants’ self-described gender identities, presentations, and sexualities Speaker

Gender identity

Ethan Joe Mack Carl Jeff

Man Man Man, trans man Trans man Trans man

Adam

Trans man

Tony

Trans man

Kyle

Trans man

Jordan Elvis

Trans man Genderqueer, transgender, but prefers not to use gender labels Genderqueer, trans boy Genderqueer, trans boy

Kam James

Pol Dave Devin

Genderqueer, trans boy Man, trans man Genderqueer, transgender, but prefers not to use gender labels

Gender presentation

Sexuality

Attracted to . . .

Typical guy Regular guy Regular guy Nerdy kid Sensitive, spiritual trans guy Conventionally masculine Typical guy

Straight Straight Straight Queer Queer

Women Women Women Women Primarily men

Queer

Women

Queer

Blend of queer, outdoorsy & feminist masculinities Masculine Masculine, sensitive guy

Queer

Queer Queer

Women & trans men Primarily women, but since transition men as well All genders Women & men

Fem

Queer

Masculine people

Mixture of masculine and feminine Dandy

Queer

All genders

Queer

Women

Fem Mixture of masculine and feminine, androgynous

Queer Queer

All genders Primarily men

colors or flamboyant prints. Dave is small in frame and stands just over five feet, but is usually perceived as male due in large part to his facial hair and low-pitched voice. Although it is low-pitched, Dave’s voice is also extremely “queeny,” as he puts it. He makes ample use of falsetto voice quality, wild excursions in pitch range that contribute to his engaging and expressive interactional style, and, as the analysis below reveals, he also has among the highest frequency productions of [s] among the speakers in my study. Among those that fall somewhere between Adam and Dave are participants like James, who blends masculine and feminine stylistic elements as part of his genderqueer identity and expression. James is a 26-year-old

Transmasculinity and the Voice 203 white, upper class, genderqueer trans boy from Massachusetts who embodies a scruffy, punk aesthetic with simple clothes adorned with hand-modifications like patches, pins, and other slogans of anti-authoritarianism. But he blends this rather masculine baseline style, which is enhanced by his unshaven facial hair, with much less normatively masculine accessories like the bright green bandana he had tied around his neck when we first met, the glittery jewelry he habitually wears in his facial and ear piercings, and toenail polish in always changing colors. Trans men like Dave who embrace femininity are often met with confusion or even aggressive challenges from people in their lives who cannot reconcile their self-identification as men with their feminine self-presentation. But it is precisely this distinction between identity and presentation that makes Dave’s self-understanding as a fem trans man possible. In transgender communities and the academic fields engaged with them, the phrase gender identity has been used to talk about an individual’s self-identified gender category—in other words, whether one thinks of oneself as a woman, as a man, or with one of the other gender categories available in a given community. We can expand on more traditional definitions of gender identity—as self-identification as female or male—to include identifications like cisgender versus transgender, genderqueer versus trans(gender); man versus trans man; and trans man versus trans boy. Yet identification as a man, a trans man, a boy, or genderqueer does not predict gender presentation. Some of the participants in my research identify strongly with conventional labels for masculine identities like man and male. Joe, for example, a 40-year-old working-class white man from Chicago who began his transition following a long entanglement with drug addiction and incarceration in a women’s prison, told me he felt more like “a regular guy” than a trans guy. Although he recognizes that his life has been quite different from most men’s, Joe doesn’t see his trans status as a strong component of his identity. His gender presentation, too, is normatively masculine: he wears his blond hair in a cropped cut that goes well with his athletic wardrobe including numerous sports jerseys and—as Joe is a true Chicagoan—a well-worn Cubs baseball cap. He would often meet me between trips to the gym when I would visit him in the quiet, affluent San Francisco suburb where he had been placed in a sober living house for women that left him feeling like an outsider much of the time. A larger number of my participants, in contrast with Joe, identify most strongly with the identity trans man. Trans men feel that their gendercrossing experiences are significant enough to constitute a distinct gender identity that is separate from the category of “man.” Trans men who have spent many years in lesbian communities may also invoke their sense of connection with queer or gender non-conforming women as a distinguishing quality that separates them from non-trans men. Yet it isn’t necessarily lived experience that distinguishes the trans men from the men—consider that Joe, too, identified as a lesbian for many years. In either aligning or

204 Lal Zimman disaligning with the unmarked identity man, the participants in my study are engaged in the processes Bucholtz and Hall (2004, 2005) have identified as adequation and distinction. Those who identify simply as men employ the tactic of adequation by emphasizing similarities between themselves and non-trans men, whereas the individuals who self-identify as trans men emphasize the differences they see as significant. An example of someone who variably aligns with both the unmarked identity man and the unique identity trans man is Mack. In one of our conversations in his home in San Francisco, Mack told me about his relationship to various shades of transmasculine identity, which I excerpt below. He is a 46-year-old straight white trans man who grew up in a working class family that moved around among the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area but has origins in the southern United States. After living as a lesbian for several decades, though always with an uneasy relationship with that label, Mack came to see a male identity as a more authentic expression of his inner self. He had been on testosterone for nearly a year and a half when we had this conversation, though he still occupied a somewhat androgynous social space due in part to his intentionally slow transition, which he preferred in part to make the process easier on his college-aged son. Just prior to the discourse in Excerpt 1, Mack had told me about the trouble he has relating to transmasculine people who identify as somewhere in between male and female, or who maintain strong ties with queer women-centered communities or identities. As a follow-up, I asked him whether he relates to the identity trans man as a category distinct from man. Although Mack tells me that he feels like he “should be a regular straight guy” (emphasis mine), he “wonder[s] if that’s really possible” for him (lines 10–12). Excerpt 1, Mack (70 weeks on testosterone) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14

LZ: What about, like, guys who specifically identify as, like, not men much as, like, trans men. As like, almost like a third category. Do you understand that perspective, or? MD: Yeah, I understand that. Yeah, I do, I do. And uh. Because I feel like, I wonder about myself, if, like once my transition is done, y’know? And, y’know, I’m physically male and being perceived as male, moving through the world as male, I have this sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that the end product isn’t gonna be a regular average male anyway. Y’know, just because uh, of my upbringing and all my years of female socialize-socialization? Y’know? So I feel-although I feel like I should just be like a regular straight guy, I- I kinda wonder if that’s really possible. Y’know, in me, anyway. Y’know, when I think about me. So, I- I- I- I think I understand guys like that, y’know. (.) I mean, never had a male boyho-, never had male adolescence, y’know?

Transmasculinity and the Voice 205 Here, Mack invokes the fact that he did not grow up in a male gender role, and the socialization experiences he missed out on as a result, as something that differentiates him from non-trans men. Transmasculine people who identify as simply men, by contrast, might interpret the same experience through a lens of adequation and thus highlight the fact that men have a wide range of socialization experiences and that many men grow up without the archetypal experiences of white, middle-class American boyhood but see themselves as men nonetheless. Importantly, when Mack wonders whether it’s possible to turn out as a “regular straight guy,” he quickly adds the twice-repeated caveat “y’know, in me, anyway” (line 12), reflecting a tension in the community and his awareness that some trans men do see themselves as “regular straight guy[s]” regardless of their socialization experiences. Other transmasculine people are uncomfortable with the word man in any context, and instead situate themselves somewhere else on the gender continuum. Three of the speakers in my study, James, Pol, and Kam, describe themselves as trans boys rather than trans men. These boys also use the word genderqueer to describe themselves, as do Elvis and Devin. The latter two, in addition to using the words genderqueer and transgender in certain contexts, also told me that they prefer not to put their identity to words if they don’t have to. Nearly all of the accounts I got when I asked about why my participants identified with the categories they do emphasized a subjective sense of authenticity. “It just feels right,” as Dave put it. These uncomplicated explanations depart radically from those elicited in studies of trans identity narratives like Gagné and Tewskbury’s (1997), which suggests gender stereotypes form the basis of transgender people’s sense of gendered authenticity (see also Zimman 2009). Authenticity is key, to be sure, but for the speakers I describe in this chapter, the authentic self is derived from an abstract, yet deeply felt, sense of self. My discussion of gender so far is separable from sexuality, in the sense that all of the identities I have described can be paired with any sexual orientation. But sexuality is also a lens through which transmasculinity is constituted. And it is clear that, for the participants in my study, identification as queer or straight (the two primary identity labels they used) is driven not only by erotic attraction but also by gender identities and gendered life histories. Here, as with gender, transmasculine people are by no means unique in this respect, but the ways in which they describe their identities challenge mainstream assumptions about the nature of sexuality-driven identities. As Table 10.1 shows, 12 out of the 15 the participants I analyze here describe themselves as queer; the remaining speakers, Mack, Joe, and Ethan, self-identify as straight, based on their identities as men who are attracted only to women. Yet this only tells us part of the story, because Carl, Pol, and Adam are also attracted only to women, yet they invoke their gender identities as trans men, as well as their relationships and histories with queer women, in explaining why they identify as queer rather than simply

206 Lal Zimman straight. Other transmasculine individuals identify as queer because of their attraction to men; if they are also attracted to women, they might think of these attractions as either straight or queer. Finally, many trans people are attracted to genders that are outside of a simple male-female binary, and identification as queer can signal that their desires go beyond binary-based labels like bisexual. There are a few important points to take away from this section before moving on to my analysis. First, people who describe themselves as transmasculine lay claim on an array of gender identities and gender expressions. Second, the layers of identity, presentation, assignment, and embodiment that transmasculine people invoke in talk about gender provide a vocabulary for understanding the linguistic variation I am about to describe. Importantly, none these factors necessarily aligns with the others in predictable ways. But this is not true only for transmasculine people. Even as transmasculinities bring the dislocations of gender into sharper focus, gender assignment, expression, and identity are elements of gender-normative non-trans women’s and men’s experience as well. Sex and gender are not enough. GENDER, THE VOICE, AND TRANSMASCULINITY The phonetic characteristics of the voice include some of the most salient sociolinguistic indexes of gender, and in the burgeoning field of sociophonetics the sibilant consonant [s] has recently received a great deal of attention as an index of gender and sexuality. Though biology continues to be prioritized as the most intuitive explanation for gender differences in the voice within the phonetically oriented literature (e.g., Fuchs and Toda 2010), evidence weighs strongly on the side of social explanations for gendered variation in [s]. Support for this conclusion comes from at least four sources. First, the acoustic properties of [s] do not vary between women and men consistently across languages and cultures. Among speakers of American English, a number of studies have found that women and girls produce [s] at higher frequencies than men and boys. A summary of studies in Flipsen et al. (1999) suggests that the mean frequency of [s] in read speech is within the range of 4,000–7,000 Hz for men and 6,500–8,100 Hz for women (see also Tjaden and Turner 1997). Yet studies such as Gordon, Barthmaier, and Sands (2002) compare seven unrelated languages (Aleut, Apache, Chickasaw, Scottish Gaelic, Hupa, Montana Salish, and Toda), only one of which showed gender differences in the mean frequency for [s] (Chickasaw). Similarly, Heffernan (2004) suggests that sibilants provide a more robust gender marker for Canadian English speakers than for speakers of Japanese. This is especially striking given reports that Japanese has more dramatic gender differentiation in pitch than does American English (e.g., Ohara 2001; Yuasa 2008), suggesting that it isn’t lack of attention to the gender binary that is keeping Japanese speakers from utilizing [s] to index gender.3 Second, there

Transmasculinity and the Voice 207 is also considerable intra-cultural variation in the gendered properties of [s] among speakers of the ‘same language.’ Stuart-Smith’s (2007) study of Glaswegian English reveals that although adult men in Glasgow tended to produce [s] at a lower frequency than their female counterparts, a different pattern appeared among adolescents. Middle-class teenage girls patterned with the adult women in terms of the most prominent frequencies in [s], but the [s] of working-class teen girls was closer to the adult men’s. On the other side of the Atlantic, several studies have identified [s] as one of the most consistent and most salient cues for the perception of sexual orientation among American and Canadian English-speaking men (e.g., Smyth and Rogers 2002; Munson 2007; Zimman 2013), demonstrating that adult men are entirely capable of producing a high frequency [s]. Third, studies of [s] in the speech of children and adolescents show that gender differences emerge as early as nine years old (Flipsen et al. 1999) despite the fact that gender differences in vocal anatomy do not emerge until puberty. Finally, data taken directly from anatomical measures supports a social, rather than biological, explanation. Fuchs and Toda’s (2010) recent investigation of [s] in German and English used electropalatography to consider whether articulatory behavior or anatomical differences between men’s and women’s palates best explain gender differences in [s]. The authors argue that gender-based differences in this sound, which were present in both languages, are partly the result of social factors and partly the result of biological factors. However, their data offer only weak evidence for this claim. Fuchs and Toda’s data showed no significant correlations between gender and palate size for the 12 German speakers in the study, and the correlation reported between gender and palate length among the 12 English speakers only approached, and did not reach, statistical significance. The importance of social factors in explaining gendered [s] is clear. What we know less about is the process whereby this gender difference emerges. Flipsen et al. (1999) point us to childhood language socialization, but how can that be the whole story, given the variability reported here? Stuart-Smith (2007) argues that it is critical to distinguish sex differences in the voice, which are biological in nature, from gender differences, which are socially learned. I have already discussed how both gender and sex can be complicated beyond a simplistic binary, and in the remainder of this chapter, I show the usefulness of this complex theoretical perspective in explaining one aspect of the gendered speaking styles of transmasculine people.

Background on the Study As I mentioned in the introduction, the analysis I focus on in this section is based on a two-year ethnographic study of transmasculine people in the San Francisco Bay Area during their first year on testosterone. From 2010 to 2012, I recorded 15 transmasculine individuals on a regular basis, forming

208 Lal Zimman a body of data that includes interviews, read speech, and everyday interactions. All of these speakers were undergoing masculinizing hormone therapy, which brings about a salient drop in vocal pitch as well as other forms of physical masculinization, but has no direct effect on socially learned articulatory habits. In the larger version of this study, I track my speakers’ changing voices through an analysis of pitch (fundamental frequency), vowel formants, and the acoustic characteristics of [s] in order to better understand how these speakers cross over the border that separates voices perceived as female from those perceived as male. In this analysis, I focus on my participants’ production of [s] in read speech. I recorded these speakers reading the Rainbow Passage (Fairbanks 1960) approximately once each month for the duration of their participation in my study, which lasted one year or longer for most participants.4 In the analysis below, I focus on inter-speaker variation in the realization of [s] by these transmasculine individuals. I also provide a brief summary of some of the intra-speaker changes that occurred over the course of this project, which is necessarily limited by space constraints. Importantly, I do not treat read speech as representative of how my speakers use their voices in other contexts. In some studies, this is a major limitation of read speech, but in this case it provides a special set of insights precisely because of the way it calls attention to the act of speaking. In this way, read speech is a kind of performance in the anthropological sense, which is to say it is a genre that opens a space for reflection on social and linguistic norms both for performers and audiences (see, e.g., Bauman and Briggs 1990). For transmasculine individuals in transition, who are already acutely tuned in to the ways their bodies and voices are changing, self-conscious speech creates an opportunity for a distinctly gendered performance. That is not to say that the voices my speakers use while reading are somehow more artificial than other speaking styles they (or others) might employ. Rather, I want to point out that the linguistic analysis of performance can bring its own set of insights on the ways cultural norms and practices are negotiated, resisted, valorized, or otherwise oriented to. Analysis of everyday, ‘vernacular’ speech may show unguarded moments in which unwanted styles or characteristics slip through, for instance, but analyzing read speech can shed light on the gendered personae my participants want to enact, revealing much about their linguistic goals and desires.

Methods My analysis is based on the same set of 14 word-initial tokens of [s] occurring in the Rainbow Passage, which each speaker recorded anywhere from 2 to 13 times over the course of their participation in this study; see Table 10.2 for the total number of recordings and tokens analyzed for each individual. Recordings were made on a Fostex FR-2LE Field Recorder with an Audio-Technica BP892 headset microphone, at a

Transmasculinity and the Voice 209 Table 10.2 Center of gravity for [s] for all speakers Speaker Ethan Joe Mack Carl Adam Tony Jeff Kyle Jordan Elvis James Pol Kam Dave Devin Total range

Total # of recordings

Total # of tokens

Mean COG for all tokens

4 5 11 9 12 10 3 13 2 9 8 8 4 11 13

56 70 154 126 168 140 42 182 28 126 112 112 56 154 182

5,226 Hz 5,788 Hz 5,921 Hz 6,579 Hz 6,705 Hz 6,727 Hz 6,728 Hz 6,819 Hz 7,338 Hz 8,128 Hz 8,196 Hz 8,264 Hz 8,267 Hz 8,905 Hz 9,188 Hz 5,226–9,188 Hz

sampling rate of 44,000 Hz. Prior to analysis, audio files were put through a Hann pass filter to remove sound below 1,000 Hz and above 13,000 Hz, which helped eliminate potential background noise. This preserves the range of approximately 4,000–10,000 Hz in which the bulk of acoustic energy for [s] occurs (e.g., Shadle 1990). For each token, a spectral slice was created at the midpoint, following Flipsen et al.’s (1999) finding that gender differences are most apparent at midpoint. There are a number of ways to measure the acoustic characteristics of [s] (see Stuart-Smith 2007 for a useful review). In this study, I make use of Praat’s moments analysis function, which calculates a weighted mean frequency for [s] referred to as center of gravity. As I mentioned above, American Englishspeaking women have been shown to produce [s] with a higher mean frequency than men, whereas among men, a higher frequency [s] may be interpreted as indexing a gay or otherwise non-normative masculine identity.5 In order to analyze how [s] changed over time for the 10 speakers I recorded for a full year or longer, I constructed a series of mixed effects linear regressions. First, data for each speaker were analyzed separately to see if their production of [s] changed over time. Center of gravity was treated as the dependent variable, whereas length of time on testosterone (measured in weeks) was the fixed effect explanatory variable under investigation. This choice was not made because time on testosterone would directly affect the pronunciation of [s], but rather because time on testosterone can serve as a benchmark for the time elapsed since these speakers began their embodied transition process.

210 Lal Zimman

Results First, I present the full set of frequencies for [s] represented in the read speech of my 15 transmasculine speakers. The most important point to note here is the huge range of mean frequencies in these individuals’ productions of [s]. In Figure 10.1, center of gravity is plotted for all 15 speakers, who are ordered from left to right according to mean COG frequency, starting with the lowest (Ethan) and ending with the highest (Devin). The notches in the boxplot, which narrow near the black mean bars in the center of each box, indicate significance tests performed by the plotting function in the R statistical computing package. In this case, the notches indicate which speakers have significantly different values for center of gravity from one another. Because the focus of my analysis is the degree of inter-speaker variation in the production of [s] among these individuals, speaker is treated as the main effect in this analysis. If the notches of two speakers overlap (as they do for Joe and Mack, for instance, but not for Mack and Ethan), the difference is not statistically significant. Table 10.2 contains the numerical means for center of gravity. Next, I discuss change in real time among 10 speakers whom I recorded over the course of a year or more. Table 10.3 presents the results of the linear mixed effects regression I described above. Five of the 10 speakers underwent a significant change in center of gravity over time: Carl, Adam, Tony, James, and Devin. For Carl, this change was toward a higher frequency [s], and for the other four, it was toward a lower frequency. I have

Center of gravity for [s] (Hz)

11000 10000 9000 8000 7000 6000

Speakers

Figure 10.1

Center of gravity for [s] for all speakers

in

e

ev D

m

av D

l

Ka

Po

l Jo e rd an El vi Ja s m es

ff

Ky

ny

Je

To

Jo

e M ac k C ar l Ad am

Et

ha n

5000

Transmasculinity and the Voice 211 Table 10.3 Changes in center of gravity (COG) over time. Speaker Mack Carl Adam Tony Kyle Elvis James Pol Dave Devin

Starting COG

Ending COG

Coefficient

p values

5788 Hz 6522 Hz 6867 Hz 6159 Hz 6777 Hz 7878 Hz 7907 Hz 7983 Hz 9014 Hz 9459 Hz

5933 Hz 6877 Hz 6481 Hz 5734 Hz 6616 Hz 8174 Hz 7717 Hz 8151 Hz 8960 Hz 8779 Hz

−0.0705 11.37 −4.953 −10.11 2.343 1.876 −8.862 −7.078 −0.8757 −11.94

n.s. (not significant) p < 0.001*** p < 0.01** p < 0.02* n.s. n.s. p < 0.01** p < 0.08 (n.s.) n.s. p < 0.001***

included each speaker’s mean center of gravity (or COG) for his first and last recording, though note that this does not always correspond with the overall trend through all of the recordings (e.g., Pol’s “starting COG” is slightly lower than his “ending COG,” but the overall trend in his recordings was downward, even though it did not quite reach statistical significance with a p-value of 0.08). Table 10.4 contains plots of the changes over time for the five speakers who underwent a significant shift in center of gravity, as well as Pol as a point of reference as a speaker whose changes in the production of [s] did not quite reach statistical significance. Carl is the only speaker to show a significant upward shift in center of gravity. Carl, along with Adam, shows that change in [s] center of gravity is not a consistent, progressive shift either downward or upward, even when statistically significant change does occur. In the case of Tony, the much greater variability across recordings is likely due to the fact that this speaker has a marked, lateralized [s] that might be identified as a “lisp” or “speech impediment.” His productions of [s] were in general far more variable than any other speaker, but in my estimation sounded retracted and in this way contributed to his masculine gender presentation (cf. Campbell-Kibler 2011); in fact, I was surprised that my acoustic analysis did not find lower frequency means for Tony but attribute this discrepancy to the unusual patterns of energy dispersal in the spectral slices created from Tony’s [s] tokens. I had the same impression of Ethan, who had the lowest frequency mean in Figure 10.1 and also had an audibly retracted [s] that might be categorized as pathological. James and Pol show a similar pattern in their change over time, with center of gravity rising before falling sharply and then rising again. The overall downward trend for James was significant, but in Pol’s case did not reach the threshold of statistical significance at the 0.05 level. Devin shows the most dramatic, and most clearly linear, downward shift in center of gravity, with the exception of one

Table 10.4 Changes in center of gravity over time for individual speakers Adam’s center of gravity for [s] over time

7500 7000 6500

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

4500

5500

6000

7000 6500 6000 5500 5000

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

7500

8000

8000

Carl’ scenterof gravity for [s] over time

10

15.71

19.71

25.71

30.71

38.71

45.86

51.71

60.71

0

2

4.86

7.86 10.86 15.71 22.57

Weeks on testosterone Tony’s center of gravity for [s] over time

32.86 40.86

47

54.57

9000 8500 8000

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

7000 6000

7000

7500

8000

9500

James’ center of gravity for [s] over time

5000

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

29

Weeks on testosterone

2.57

7.71

13.14

17.14

21.14

25.14

31.71

40.14

46.57

20.71

23

25.14

28.57

32.57

38.57

Weeks on testosterone

Weeks on testosterone

Pol’s center of gravity for [s] over time

Devin’s center of gravity for [s] over time

51.57

87

10000 9500 9000 8000

8500

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

8000 7000

7500

6000

Frequency (Hz) of center of gravity for [s]

9000

10500

11000

0.43

0

2.86

8

10.14

19.43

Weeks on testosterone

26.29

35.86

41.57

8.29

12 18.14 22.57 26.57 30.71 34.71 37.29 41.43 46.57 52.14 56.57 64.57 Weeks on testosterone

Transmasculinity and the Voice 213 recording made at 37 weeks on testosterone. Devin is also the speaker with the most acoustically dramatic and perceptually salient downward shift in vocal pitch among the participants in this study. Compared to the changes in pitch, however, shifts in the acoustics of [s] across these speakers were less dramatic, less salient, and less consistent on a week-to-week basis than were changes happening in these speakers’ pitch. DISCUSSION

Inter-Speaker Variation One story that could be told about the data I presented above is that some speakers have been more successful than others in masculinizing their voices. Yet this argument depends on the assumption that transmasculine people share the same stylistic target. When we consider the complicated relationships these speakers have with gender, a more compelling explanation brings together each of the facets of gender I identified above. First, based on what we know about the acquisition of gendered phonetic traits during childhood, it is important to consider gender assignment because of the time these speakers spent being seen and treated as girls and women. Assignment is a useful notion here because it isn’t these speakers’ biology that is responsible for their articulatory habits, nor is it necessarily the case that they self-identified as women prior to beginning their transitions—some certainly did, but others indicated that they never thought of themselves as female. The latter group describe themselves as actively resisting the femininity imposed on them in childhood, whereas others talked about accepting or welcoming their assigned gender. One interesting account of how my speakers see their gender assignment and socialization as impacting their voices came from Devin, a 24-year-old white middle-class queer person from the Bay Area who prefers not to use identity labels to describe his gender. During our first meeting, Devin and I were sharing a drink at a café in San Francisco where he stopped on his way home from work in the South Bay Area when he recalled thinking, as a child, that his voice was not feminine enough and that he should work harder to sound like other girls—an effort at which he apparently succeeded. Devin made reference to his socialization in explaining how, despite having the most dramatic drop in pitch of any of my speakers, he was still described by a friend as sounding “like a woman with a deep voice” (an evaluation that wasn’t a problem for Devin, but would have been received quite differently from this study’s male-identified participants). Childhood language socialization, then, can potentially explain why many of the speakers in this study have centers of gravity within the ranges typically reported for English-speaking women. However, socialization based on gender assignment cannot explain all of the variation represented in Figure 10.1. For speakers like Ethan, Joe, and Mack, who had the three lowest means for center of gravity, the fact that

214 Lal Zimman they are the only participants to identify as straight men is undoubtedly significant. These three men, who are all white, between the ages of 40 and 56, and come from working class families, enact conventional forms of masculinity within the context of their communities and are very comfortable being identified as men. With mean centers of gravity below 6,000 Hz, they are well within the norms for men’s center of gravity based on the range I quoted above (approximately 4,000–7,000 Hz). The next group of speakers, whose centers of gravity fall into the range where men’s and women’s reported productions overlap (6,500–7,000 Hz), can be distinguished in terms of gender identity as well. While Ethan, Joe, and Mack self-identify as straight men, the speakers in the middle group—Carl, Adam, Tony, Jeff, Kyle, and, separately, Jordan6—identify as queer trans men. For Jeff, this label refers to his primary attraction to men, but for the others it is a label that they apply to their relationships with women. Most of these queer trans men have relatively conventional gender presentations, as well, compared to some of the speakers I will discuss momentarily. Kyle, however, enjoys blending markers of queer masculinity (e.g., he says likes to “get cute” with his female partner before they go to a club, referencing makeup and dancing gear) with his outdoorsy and increasingly athletic lifestyle. In fact, trans men like Kyle who prize their affiliation with queer and distinctively transmasculine identities often expressed concern that they would be mistaken for straight non-trans men, and [s] can be understood as a potential resource for distinguishing these speakers from straight men like Mack, Joe, and Ethan. The speakers who do not identify as men and instead align with labels like boy and genderqueer (or avoid labels altogether), have significantly higher centers of gravity than the other two groups I have just discussed. This includes Elvis, James, Pol, Kam, and Devin. In fact, several of these speakers’ mean centers of gravity are beyond even the upper end of the range generally reported for women (8,100 Hz). All of these individuals distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity, linguistically and otherwise. This is evident in their non-normative gender expressions which they describe with words like dandy, queer, and androgynous and which involve more incorporation of markedly feminine signs like Elvis’ turquoise rings, James’ glittery earrings, or Kam’s lack of interest in binding (i.e., flattening) his chest. This leaves Dave, who again provides the clearest demonstration that gender identity and gender presentation are distinct for members of this community. Dave does not identify as genderqueer but instead describes himself as a man with a fem gender presentation. His voice is among the most salient means by which Dave constitutes his flamboyantly nonnormative take on masculinity, for which he mentions Oscar Wilde as a role-model. In Dave’s case, having the second highest mean center of gravity among these speakers reflects his gender presentation rather than his gender identity.

Transmasculinity and the Voice 215

Intra-Speaker Variation Explaining the changes that take place in transmasculine speakers’ productions of [s] also demands reference to gender role, gender identity, gender expression, and sexuality. Here again we might expect people who want to masculinize their voices to shift toward masculine norms for articulatory behavior as they lower their vocal pitch with testosterone, perhaps through self-conscious manipulation. But this expectation is complicated by the fact that transmasculine people begin their transitions with a wide range of gender identities and expressions, and by the fact that multiple patterns of change arise. Importantly, self-conscious masculinization clashes with discourses within many transmasculine communities that highly value authenticity (the focus of Zimman, forthcoming). In some quarters, there is even a stigma against self-conscious masculinization in behavior and speech both because it suggests insufficient ‘natural’ masculinity and because the goal of transition should be the desire to express one’s authentic self. Of course, such a stance is made possible by the dramatic effects of testosterone and other medical interventions that allow trans men to be read as male. So, although it is possible that some participants are choosing to use more masculine phonetic styles over time, there are other possibilities as well. Due to space constraints I will only briefly discuss them here. One important point is that socialization is an ongoing process that continues beyond childhood. As transmasculine people move through the world and begin to be perceived as men—that is, to occupy a male gender role—a new set of pressures is exerted that demands certain performances of masculinity. Despite the pride taken in being one’s authentic self among members of this community, it is hard to imagine transmasculine people universally resisting the pull of hegemonic masculinity—particularly given the vulnerable nature of their recognition as masculine and/or men. For those who are androgynous in appearance, taking on more normatively masculine characteristics can help ensure that they are perceived the way they wish. Or it may simply be a way to protect against the dangers that are visited upon insufficiently masculine men, of which my participants were clearly aware. Of course, a change in how a person presents themselves is not necessarily (or only) a response to compulsory gender normativity. Several of my participants underwent significant changes in gender identity or presentation over the course of their first year on testosterone, and some are still working to figure out just where they fit. Devin clearly shifted from a more mixed, visibly genderqueer gender presentation to a more conventionally masculine style (for instance, trading his longer, slightly punk hairstyle for a very short buzzed cut). Kyle, though he shifted between and blended normative and non-normative masculinities, had essentially abandoned his genderqueer identity in favor of the label trans man by the end of the project. Elvis described himself as “playing with gender” when we first met, and was unsure about whether he wanted to continue taking testosterone for the

216 Lal Zimman first several months he was on hormones. A year later, he had settled on a more consistently masculine presentation and was confident that testosterone was right for him. The fact that downward shifts in [s] were somewhat more chaotic and less linear than changes in pitch suggests that variation in [s] may be more sensitive to day-to-day fluctuations in affective state, embodied experience, or desired personae, or that it otherwise serves as a more flexible index of gender than does pitch. A question for future analysis, then, is what is happening during recordings like the one made of Devin at 37 weeks on testosterone that lead him to produce [s] with a higher center of gravity than on any other occasion. For most of these speakers, changes in [s] took the form of masculinization, but the most interesting case may be Carl’s upward shift in center of gravity. Even this unexpected finding can be explained in terms of a shift in gender presentation. Carl, a 21-year-old queer, middle-class Filipino trans man who finished his undergraduate studies at a Bay Area university during my fieldwork, was among many trans men who have described to me how being perceived as men made them more comfortable expressing femininity. Specifically, I was told on numerous occasions that once an individual is accepted as male by others, he need no longer worry that any hint of femininity might undermine that recognition. Toward the end of my fieldwork, Carl had started growing out his hair and was wearing a wider range of clothing styles—cut-off pants stopping just below the knee, for example—than the more conventional jeans and T-shirt look he preferred when we first met. His pitch, too, rose in our last few recordings from its lowest point to a mean that was not much lower than the first recording we made (160 Hz as compared to 167 Hz, respectively). Instead of looking like a gender-normative (if somewhat nerdy) teenage boy, Carl began looking more like a queer, rather bohemian young man who is unconcerned with hegemonic stylistic norms. CONCLUSIONS Are any of the masculinities I have discussed in this chapter new or unique? Perhaps so, perhaps not. But the path through which they are acquired is clearly unconventional: these are masculinities that carry the traces of a female gender assignment, of a varied history of gender presentations, and of self-defined identities that may or may not align with presentation. This chapter has provided linguistic evidence for the salience of this framework of gender as multifaceted among transmasculine speakers. As we move to consider a wider range of gendered subjectivities, however, we can see how gender assignment, role, presentation, and identity help us understand the fluid, interlocking, ever-moving parts that constitute gender as a social system. By focusing on transmasculinities and transmasculine voices, this chapter has also added to our understanding of the boundaries and diversity that

Transmasculinity and the Voice 217 characterize masculinity. We have seen through these speakers how masculinity can stake its claim in any one of several domains—gender assignment, role, presentation, or identity. When we recognize the ways that these elements of gender can be dislocated from each other and rearranged, fem masculinities become intelligible and a wider range of subjects can be included within our notions of the masculine. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my research participants and the many transmasculine individuals who spoke with me during my fieldwork. Thanks also to Kira Hall and my other colleagues and mentors including, alphabetically, Penny Eckert, Roey Gafter, Kate Geenberg, Rebecca Greene, John Rickford, Rebecca Scarborough, Tyler Schnoebelen, and Rebecca Starr; to two anonymous reviewers of this chapter; and to audience members at NWAV 40. Finally, thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for funding the research discussed in this chapter. NOTES 1. It is worth noting that, like virtually every other term used to refer to people included under the rubric of ‘transgender’ (Valentine 2007), transmasculine is a contested term. I employ it in this space because it is the only identity label that was acceptable to all of the participants in the research under discussion here, and because of its usefulness as an umbrella term. However, some trans community members raise objections: first, that the term suggests there is something inherently similar about trans masculinities that makes them separate from non-trans masculinities. Many conventionally masculine trans men, for instance, feel that they have more in common with non-trans men than with self-described genderqueer individuals who see themselves as neither female nor male. Second, transmasculine implies that all female-to-male trans people see themselves primarily as masculine, rather than feminine; this was a problem suggested by Dave, a fem trans man discussed at length in this chapter (though not enough of a problem to keep him from using the word transmasculine in at least some contexts). 2. Cis, the Latin antonym of trans, is used in many trans communities to refer to non-trans people. 3. Lest one suspect that such differences are driven by biological differences between speaker populations, Ohara (2001) demonstrates that English-Japanese bilinguals treat pitch as a resource for managing their gendered identities as they shift between the languages. 4. Five speakers moved away from the Bay Area during their participation. Jeff and Joe (see Table 10.1) moved to Portland for better economic situations, Kam moved to Washington for graduate school, and Jordan moved back home to New York state. Elvis also decided to pull up his roots and travel for the better part of a year, and James relocated to Massachusetts for a graduate school program, but I was able to record both of these participants following their return to the Bay Area.

218 Lal Zimman 5. However, it has usually been peak frequency or spectral skew, rather than center of gravity, that has been linked to gay-sounding male voices. 6. Interestingly, Jordan’s productions of [s] put him between the group of queer trans men and the group of non-binary-identified individuals that includes Elvis, James, Pol, Kam, and Devin. This neatly reflects the fact that I was only able to record Jordan twice, at the very start of his transition, during a time that he said he was gradually shifting away from a genderqueer identity and toward identification as a trans man.

REFERENCES Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Benjamin, Harry. 1966. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2004. “Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research.” Language in Society 33: 469–515. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 7: 585–614. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011. “Intersecting Variables and Perceived Sexual Orientation in Men.” American Speech 86: 52–68. Delphy, Christine. 1993. “Rethinking Sex and Gender.” Women’s Studies International Forum 16: 1–9. Fairbanks, Grant. 1960. Voice and Articulation Drillbook. New York: Harper & Row. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Flipsen, Peter, Jr., Lawrence Shrilberg, Gary Weismer, Heather Karlsson, and Jane McSweeny. 1999. “Acoustic Characteristics of /s/ in Adolescents.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42: 663–677. Fuchs, Susanne, and Martine Toda. 2010. “Do Differences in Male versus Female /s/ Reflect Biological or Sociophonetic Factors?” In An Interdisciplinary Guide to Turbulent Sounds, ed. by Susanne Fuchs, Martine Toda, and Marzena Zygis, 281–302. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gagné, Patricia, Richard Tewksbury, and Deanna McGaughey. 1997. “Coming Out and Crossing Over: Identity Formation and Proclamation in a Transgender Community.” Gender & Society 11: 478–508. Gordon, Matthew, Paul Barthmaier, and Kathy Sands. 2002. “A Cross-Linguistic Acoustic Study of Voiceless Fricatives. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32: 141–174. Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Herdt, Gilbert. 1993. “Mistaken Sex: Culture, Biology and the Third Sex in New Guinea.” In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. by Gilbert Herdt, 419–445. New York: Zone Books. Heffernan, Kevin. 2004. “Evidence from HNR that /s/ Is a Social Marker of Gender.” Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 23: 71–84. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Transmasculinity and the Voice 219 Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2009. “Speaking the Gendered Body: The Performative Construction of Commercial Femininities and Masculinities via Body-Part Vocabulary.” Language in Society 38: 1–22. Munson, Benjamin. 2007. “The Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Sexual Orientation, Perceived Masculinity, and Perceived Femininity.” Language and Speech 50: 125–142. Nicholson, Linda. 1994. “Interpreting Gender.” Signs 20: 79–105. Ohara, Yumiko. 2001. “Finding One’s Voice in Japanese: A Study of the Pitch Levels of L2 Users.” In Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender, ed. by Aneta Pavlenko, 231–254. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Shadle, Christine H. 1990. “Articulatory-Acoustic Relationships in Fricative Consonants.” In Speech Production and Speech Modelling, ed. by William J. Hardcastle and Alain Marchal, 187–209. Norwell: Kluwer Academic. Smyth, Ron, and Henry Rogers. 2002. “Phonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. In Proceedings of the 2002 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, ed. by Sophie Burelle and Stanca Somesfalean, 299–311. Montréal: University du Québec à Montréal. Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2007. “Empirical Evidence for Gendered Speech Production: /s/ in Glaswegian.” In Laboratory Phonology 9, ed. by Jennifer Cole and José Ignacio Hualde, 65–86. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tjaden, Kris, and Greg S. Turner. 1997. “Spectral Properties of Fricative in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 40: 1358–1372. Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke University Press. Yuasa, Ikuko Patricia. 2008. Culture and Gender of Voice Pitch: A Sociophonetic Comparison of the Japanese and Americans. London: Equinox. Zimman, Lal. 2009. “‘The Other Kind of Coming Out’: Transgender People and the Coming Out Narrative Genre.” Gender & Language 3: 53–80. Zimman, Lal. 2013. “Hegemonic Masculinity and the Variability of Gay-Sounding Speech: The Perceived Sexuality of Transgender Men.” Journal of Language and Sexuality 2: 1–39. Zimman, Lal. 2014.” The Discursive Construction of Sex: Remaking and Reclaiming the Gendered Body in Talk about Genitals among Trans Men.” In Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Lal Zimman, Joshua Raclaw, and Jenny Davis, 13–34. New York: Oxford University Press. Zimman, Lal. Forthcoming. “Agency and the Gendered Voice: Metalinguistic Rejections of Vocal Masculinization among Female-to-Male Transgender Speakers.” In Awareness and Control, ed. by Anna Babel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimman, Lal, and Kira Hall. 2009. “Language, Embodiment, and the ‘Third Sex.’” In Language and Identities, ed. by Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas, 166–178. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

11 Reclaiming Masculinity in an Account of Lived Intersex Experience Language, Desire, and Embodied Knowledge Brian W. King INTRODUCTION This chapter applies a queer lens to an account of an intersex lived experience, examining how strategic storytelling practices render intersex tellable and activate a reclaiming of masculinity by the teller. Nested within this approach are two aims. The first is to explore the participant’s lived experience as intersex through the analysis of stories, seeing how a space for intersex is narratively ‘carved’ out of the discursive field the speaker navigates, using creative and subversive everyday language to fully represent a lived experience (see Ho and Tsang 2007; 2012). Thus the study examines how that speaker manipulates ideologies of femininity and masculinity in the ongoing production of gender as well as bodies (Zimman and Hall 2010). The second aim is to explore how insights from queer linguistics, and indeed sociocultural linguistics more generally, might assert a transformative influence on a biopsychosocial model of sex, gender, and sexuality (e.g., FaustoSterling 2012a). More specifically, it asks how these insights can become part of a theoretical approach which hopes to explain how the social, the psyche, and the soma build one another (Corbett 1994), without fuelling the fire of what Cameron (2009) refers to as “the new biologism.” The ultimate contribution should be to query how “[o]ur seeing of two genders leads to the ‘discovery’ of biological, psychological, and social differences” (Kessler and McKenna 1978: 163). In this way, perhaps a synergy can develop between the ‘evidence’ produced in a variety of fields. In terms of masculinity, I align with the insight of Connell (1995) that there are different versions of it, and masculinities are treated here as fluid, variable, and highly contextualized in nature (Johnson 1997; Milani 2011), and as constructs potentially available to all. Sites for the formation of masculine subject positions are provided by linguistic practices, but these practices do not simply “index a gendered presence that enters the social moment already constructed” (Leap 2008: 283). In other words, language use constructs a subject position as part of the social moment, drawing on abstractions of masculinity in order to create a gendered presence which makes sense in context. In line with the goals of this volume, the queer approach

Reclaiming Masculinity 221 taken also aims to explore in greater detail to what extent, when, and by whom masculinities can in practice be “dislocated” from sexual phenotypes (i.e., corporeal realizations of genetic and hormonal processes, both in terms of appearance and experience) and to what extent masculinities “intersect” with phenotypes, and how this information helps us to explain power. The application of this queer lens does indeed help to reveal the limitations of the categories ‘man’ and ‘male’ as fixed locations for masculinities, yet it also emphasizes that masculinities cannot always be completely separated from a person’s subjective body experience. The use of language by the informant in this study manipulates the permeable boundaries of the categories of male, female, man, and woman in order to render an intersex experience intelligible. Within this maneuvering lie important insights into the workings of power in gender and sex binarism as well as in its disavowal. Professional discourses of the researcher are supplemented by the everyday language used by the participant, for professional discourses are unable to fully represent those lived experiences, reminding us that the language we use as social scientists has inherent inadequacies and a need for supplementation (Ho and Tsang 2007: 626). This interface of professional discourse and everyday language has important implications for the conclusions of this study. Addressing queer approaches to research, Motschenbacher (2010: 2) emphasizes a central focus on “critical heteronormativity research,” referring to a process of revealing how heterosexuality is naturalized (i.e., made to look like common sense) via normative gender binarism (i.e., man/woman) and sex binarism (i.e., male/female). Queer critiques directly address the exclusionary nature of these binary systems. Or as Cameron and Kulick (2003: 153) have put it, “Queer theory is essentially (or maybe that should be ‘anti-essentially’) a critique of heteronormativity.” Therefore, the queer approach taken here assumes a dual focus on the informant’s tacit compliance with binary categories and the simultaneous deconstruction of these same categories. Normative discourses of gender roles and biological determinism are strategically appropriated by this intersex-identified and intersex-embodied individual, who applies them to non-normative purposes, thus simultaneously countering them. In this way a story of intersex experience becomes “individual, and exceptional, and hence tellable” (Van De Mieroop 2012: 137). In Extract 1 below, the informant Mani Bruce Mitchell, speaking in a documentary film (Macdonald 2006), speaks of a long struggle to be visible as intersex, with physical appearance playing an important role in countering the binary thinking that is responsible for the erasure of intersex lived reality from people’s perception. Extract 1 we live in this binary world where people are socialized to put people into a masculine or feminine box

222 Brian W. King and i understand that but that is not my reality so while i function all the time as a hundred per cent authentic person there’s very little mirroring or recognizing that’s mmmm how would you describe it you function as an invisible person which is where this ((indicates facial hair)) comes from (smiling) one attempt not to be invisible ((laughing)) Mani’s facial hair (prominent in Plate 11.1) is therefore a purposeful embodiment of intersex, adding a visual element to the spoken performances of intersex which manifest in hir1 private and public discourse.

Introduction to Mani Bruce Mitchell Mani Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1953. Hospital records indicate “ambiguous genitalia” and a designation of “indeterminate sex,” while the birthing nurse declared to Mitchell’s mother in the birthing room, “Oh my God, it’s a hermaphrodite.” The parents of this child named it Bruce Mitchell Laird, and raised their new baby as a boy for the first year. Investigative surgery at age one revealed that this little boy had a uterus. Based on this information, Mr. and Mrs. Laird returned to their small, isolated, rural New Zealand

Plate 11.1 Mani Bruce Mitchell

Reclaiming Masculinity 223 community with a little girl, and by way of a collective community pact Bruce was never spoken of there again (although ‘feminizing genitoplasty’ surgery was not done until the age of eight). Thus it was that “Margaret” Laird (no longer Bruce) would grow up knowing that there was something unusual about ‘her’ body–a knowledge pieced together from the continual interest of doctors; this ‘something’ had to remain a secret, even from her; it was something “shameful.” Later Margaret ‘came out’ as lesbian and lived that way for many years before beginning to piece together the truth about her life history. Ultimately, while in her 40s, Margaret gradually made the momentous decision to live as openly intersex and changed her name to Mani Bruce Mitchell, thus reclaiming the original birth name and incorporating an Indian Sanskrit name (Mani) which means ‘both male and female.’2 An important aspect of Mani Mitchell’s intersex experience in general has been an ongoing exploration of the use of English to speak about (and from) an intersex body as well as an effort to outwardly embody intersex. Mani and I share the view that investigations of some ways in which this is done could potentially provide valuable material for interested selfidentified intersex people (including Mani) whilst further shedding light on the performance of masculinities through speech (cf. Kulick 1999 in reference to transgender people). I want to be clear that the latter goal does not take precedence here, for insights into social construction of gender from a language perspective must not ‘trump’ the exploration of intersex as a lived experience (Ho and Tsang 2012; Koyama and Weasel 2002). In communicating to others the path to self-identification as intersex, Mani brings biological innateness and social construction together. In a similar vein to the biopsychosocial model referred to in the opening paragraph, Bergvall (1999: 285) also writes of a drive to bring together biology and social construction during analysis of gender and language; “What is innate, what is socially constructed locally, and what is ideologically constructed: All three avenues of investigation must be used in the study of the body and its interaction with gender.” This call is echoed by Coupland and Gwyn (2003: 7) who call for a similar analytical move away from what they call a binary of “social construction and material positivism” and towards a synthesis. As Edelman and Zimman (2014: 3–4) point out, the relationship between discourse and the body is a “complicated, recursive, and co-constructed” one in which the two are inextricably linked in a continuous interplay. It is a relationship in which the body’s materiality is “both impacted by discourses and expressed and felt through them” (Edelman and Zimman 2014: 6). Such an approach to research is essential for the present investigation, for the examination of masculinity in Mani’s case cannot be separated from questions of the innate. This is because a subjective sense of innate difference forms an important part of hir experience with masculinity via embodied knowledge, or a sense of hir own ‘lived in’ body based on lived experience (Karkazis 2008).

224 Brian W. King METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES The data for this chapter have been drawn from a research project on sexuality education and language, conducted in a New Zealand secondary school.3 As part of that ethnographic study, Mani came to speak to the students twice. In early 2007, Mani and I were introduced at a public event, and s(he) confirmed language as a topic of great interest, stating that the English language poses many challenges related to the “putting into words” of intersex experiences and bodies. After many conversations about language, and later about my research efforts, we became friends. When I approached hir two years later and introduced this school-based research project, I asked if a session with the students would be possible, and Mani agreed. Hir conversational interaction with the students does not feature here (but see King, forthcoming); however it is important to realize that the data included in Extract 3 comprises Mani giving an interactive presentation to a class of 16-year-olds. S(he) was visiting in the role of guest speaker and educator subsequent to the students viewing a film about hir (i.e., Macdonald 2006) and spending a class period learning about intersex. Extract 2, on the other hand, was recorded at a Health teacher’s conference, and so the audience is a group of 12 Health teachers who were amongst those who chose to attend a presentation in which s(he) modeled the lessons conducted with the students. Both of these extracts were recorded during an interactive presentation in which Mani conveyed stories, or narratives, about past experiences while answering questions from the audience.4 Thus the analysis in this chapter will focus on how hir storytelling practices permit a reclaiming of masculinity as part of hir particular intersex experiences. NARRATIVES, SMALL STORIES, AND ACCOUNTS It is a well-established notion that interviews typically generate narratives (Van De Mieroop 2012), and as De Fina (2009) has convincingly argued, when the narrator interprets an interlocutor’s question as an evaluative one, or when the narrator feels a need to justify and explain a matter to an audience, narratives will take the form of “accounts.” Whilst interactively telling an audience about intersex experience Mani is essentially being interviewed and must presume that most of the audience members are representatives of mainstream opinion on the matter of the male/female binary. This orientation results in the production of narratives/stories which fit the “account genre” (De Fina 2009). That is, they are retellings of past experience which deploy explanations and facts in response to implicit (or explicit) evaluative inquiries about those experiences (De Fina 2009: 253). Mani’s accounts “show sensitivity to the generic expectations” of the coming out story genre in terms of function (Zimman 2009: 59), but in terms of form there are significant differences which would need further analysis. Thus, for the purpose

Reclaiming Masculinity 225 of this chapter, Mani’s stories will be treated more generally as accounts. Up to this point I have been using the terms narrative and story interchangeably, but it is important to address the difference between these two terms. ‘Small story’ analysis focuses on stretches of talk which clearly resonate as story-like tellings for both analysts and conversational participants, yet fail to neatly fit within the narrative canon with its rigid and robust structures for what counts as ‘a narrative’ (Bamberg 2004a, 2004b; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008). Bamberg and Georgakopoulou argue that small stories carry distinctive features that still make it fruitful to analyze them as stories. Narrative structures need to be viewed by analysts as resources “more or less strategically and agentively drawn upon, and negotiated and reconstructed anew in local contexts” (Georgakopoulou 2007: 8). Stories have a special role to play because stories, unlike other types of talk, construct a tale world (“a there-and-then”) while at the same time being told in the world of “the here and now” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008). These ‘worlds’ are brought together and separated by way of speaker roles. During Mani Mitchell’s telling of stories, s(he) uses various features of narrative to strategically reclaim masculinity and make intersex experience tellable. Therefore, analyzing them as stories becomes rewarding for analysis. Mani achieves these effects through manipulation of various story telling roles and positionings of self. It has been theorized that stories which include at least an element of autobiography contain more than one version of self. Or, as Koven (2012, 175) frames it, there are three speaker roles that “reveal patterns of voicing” in stories–the role of story narrator, the role of interlocutor (conversing with the listeners), and the role of story character. These roles alternate and also “fuse” at times, permitting the teller to look at the there-and-then from the here-and-now. For example, specific personas of self can be enacted in the character role so that they can be evaluated by interlocutors in the moment of telling. This means that the sequence of “I-positions” in a story world are “a means to bring off a claim with regard to ‘this is the way I want you to understand me’, here and now” (Bamberg 2004a: 223). This model does not presuppose that the audience necessarily needs to enter into a conversation with the teller or even utter a word; rather, as De Fina (2009) has reminded us, story tellers who give “accounts” are aware of the expectations of their audiences. For that reason, they tend to spend part of their time speaking as interlocutor in order to ‘converse’ with those expectations, or ‘justify’ and ‘explain’ the content of their stories. This tendency entails viewing stories, even monologues, as interactive and dynamic events in which teller and audience co-construct performances. In the analysis that follows, I apply a model of positioning analysis first developed by Bamberg (2004a) in which two levels of analysis are used to separate out elements of story interaction. Analysis of the first two levels of positioning (the content of what the story supposedly is about, and the coordination of the relationship between speaker and audience) allows the analyst to differentiate between how the speaker positions ‘hirself’ as both

226 Brian W. King complicit with dominant discourses and contradictory to them. At level 1, the analysis examines the character role (i.e., how the narrator talks about self in the tale world). At level 2 the analysis moves to the level of interactants in the here-and-now (or the telling world), asking what interactive work is being done between the teller and audience as a result of this story being told. This dual level analysis will focus on Mani Bruce Mitchell’s “maneuvers” as s(he) complies with socially shared, dominant heteronormative discourses in order to be “culture conforming,” and thus intelligible, while simultaneously countering those same discourses, explaining and constructing an intersex self (cf. Van De Mieroop 2012: 124). EMBODIMENT AND EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE This focus on spoken discourse is complemented by attention to Mani’s embodied knowledge, for within this social perspective the biological dimensions of bodies are not denied their existence (as indeed they rarely are in social constructionist approaches). As Edelman and Zimman (2014) have indicated, “we must consider how knowledge about one’s own body potentially guides and drives the discretionary logic of discursively navigating sexuality and desire” (7–8). In other words, it is seen as productive to examine how subjective body knowledge is put into words in Mani’s stories and how this knowledge interacts with discourse. For although our understanding of our bodies and biology is indeed a socially driven, discursive process, Mani Mitchell’s embodied intersex experiences are situated at the limits of this very process. Feminist post-structuralism has long emphasized the discursive aspects of the science of human biology, demonstrating that much of what is ‘known to be factual’ about differences between men and women’s bodies is very much “culturally primed” (Liao 2005: 427) and therefore largely conjectural in many cases (see Liao 2004). An instructive example is the highly questionable yet widely cited science around the gendered differences in childhood play choices (Liao 2005; Fausto-Sterling 2012b). The feminist querying of biological essentialism (indeed of scientific ‘fact’ about sex and gender more broadly) is a stance to which I align as a researcher, and it is compatible with a queer approach that seeks to reveal the heteronormative naturalization of sex binarism. However, as soon as one commits to the type of discursivebiological synthesis mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, it is important to keep an open mind concerning a possible role for differing biological processes because we are, in fact, embodied beings. We have differential bodily histories in terms of, for example, hormonal exposure, although it is scientifically unclear how much permanent effect hormones actually have on human brains (see Jordan-Young 2010: 290; Fausto-Sterling 2012b: 65). But it should not be the goal of discourse analysis “to disappear” possible differences in biological processes (a verb borrowed from Fletcher 1999);

Reclaiming Masculinity 227 rather it should be to query the ways in which such differences are identified, analyzed, put into words, and circulated. Thus it follows that the concerned analyst must take the embodied knowledge of research participants very seriously whilst still keeping one eye fixed on the influence of gendered discourses. For, as research has shown, notions of social construction can sometimes fail to reconcile with understandings of self and bodies which are based on gender-liminal experiences (e.g., “boys” in Hall 2009; and “transmasculine” individuals in Edelman and Zimman 2014). In terms of our experiences of ‘living in’ our bodies, corporeal feminist theorizing has posited the body as simultaneously social and personal (see Grosz 1994). As Motschenbacher (2009: 123) explains, in German terminology the body is seen as an experiential interface of both of these, with each facet not necessarily depending on the other. These facets are: (i) The social: the body as seen from the external perspective, as an object to be spoken about (German Körper). (ii) The personal: the body as felt from the internal perspective, that is, subjective body experience (German Leib). This heuristic separation of embodied experience into internal and external perspectives is particularly relevant in a study focusing on the experiences of a person whose body has never fit society’s norms of male and female. After all, as Goffman (1959) has pointed out, the body mediates between the self and the social in terms of identity characteristics such as masculinity. Chiefly the separation is relevant because a common theme in the experience of intersex individuals (regardless of whether or not they selfidentify as intersex5) is that their bodies are often viewed as medical curiosities and frequently ‘spoken about’ by others, even in that person’s presence and without their permission (see Karkazis 2008; Lahood 2012). Less often heard (even when voiced) are their own subjective experiences of ‘living in’ those bodies. It is this latter sense of the body (i.e., Leib) which comprises embodied knowledge in this chapter and will prove useful in understanding Mani’s experiences with masculinity and will serve to “stretch and challenge” understanding of masculinities by pushing beyond the language of the theories applied here (Ho and Tsang 2007). ANALYSIS: DESIRE FOR MASCULINITY As stated previously, the understanding of ‘queer’ applied in this study is in alignment with Cameron and Kulick (2003) and Motschenbacher (2010), who frame a queer approach to research in terms of a critique of heteronormativity. Cameron and Kulick also emphasize that a focus on desire is a way to operationalize such a critique. In other words, to focus on desire is one way for an analyst to see past heteronormative categories (like ‘man’ or

228 Brian W. King ‘woman’) and examine phenomena like sexuality, masculinity, and femininity from another, largely under-explored, point of view. In order to undertake such an analysis, one must first identify “the semiotic practices through which desire is verbalized–whether intentionally and sincerely or otherwise” (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 131). They have also argued that a focus on desire can be separated from a focus on identity, but Hall (2005: 127) has argued convincingly that the expression of desire is ultimately social and therefore cannot be analyzed independently of “ideologically rooted identity positions through which it is constituted” (see also Bucholtz and Hall 2004). In the context of the present study then, what kinds of practices function to verbalize desire in relation to masculinity, and (how) are they constituted through positions manipulated in Mani’s stories? The challenge has been taken up by Kiesling (2011), who distinguishes some concrete practices through which desire can be identified during analysis. While examining interactions between young (ostensibly) heterosexual men in a US fraternity, Kiesling (2011, 233) demonstrates that there is “desire in masculine ontology–a desire for a persona that aligns with the cultural discourses of masculinity.” In other words, an important part of ‘being’ or ‘being taken as’ masculine is the desire to “give off” (Goffman 1959) characteristics which match the ideas about masculinity which circulate in society, or to frame it in the terms of Hall (2005; see previous paragraph), characteristics which match the ideological roots of masculine identities. For example, one of Kiesling’s participants demonstrates through his talk that he desires to be seen as a physically ‘dominant’ person, a trait which indexes masculinity in the fraternity society under investigation.6 As the use of this additional lens has begun to take hold, it has become more obvious that desire is indeed made up of “powerful feelings” which “shape social action” (Lemke 2008: 23). Indeed power becomes centrally important in such an analysis. In the words of Cameron and Kulick (2003), we take from Foucault the insistence that any relationship (social relationships, sexual relationships, one’s relationship to oneself) is a vector of power. Thus, any analysis of desire will simultaneously and unavoidably be an analysis of the relations of power that animate or inhibit that desire. (113) Mani often expresses quite plainly a desire for an intersex persona, one which incorporates both masculinity and femininity, but it is masculinity which receives hir overt focus because it is that which needs to be reclaimed in this case. This need for reincorporation is a result of Mani’s lived experience of feminizing surgery as a child and being reared as female–a girl and a woman. Clearly, then, there is a power relationship animating hir desire to be taken as (at least partly) masculine, for heteronormative discourses of

Reclaiming Masculinity 229 male and female were “impinged” upon hir body in infancy (see Borba and Ostermann 2007). To reclaim masculinity is to reclaim some control. The following analysis of Mani’s accounts will aim to highlight evidence of a desire to be taken as masculine as well as feminine. In Extract 2, which was recorded at the teachers’ conference, following Mani’s self-introduction and life story summary one of the participants (Pam–a pseudonym) takes up hir suggestion to ask questions freely, and Mani responds. Extract 2: Teacher’s conference (September 2009) Pam 1 what’s your genetic makeup 2 do you have internal female sex organs or what Mani 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

um (exhalation) (1) th-i- i-i don’t know what my diagnosis↑ was and i certainly s-and i’ve never been able to work that out and these days i don’t care um (.) when I was doing MY journey trying to work out who i was my dad wonderfully had taken photographs (.) of ALL us kids and really that was my goldmine of trying to work myself OUT and i saw a child who was both comfortable doing (.)FE↑male things↑ dressing UP ↑ (1) umm (.) doing those sorts of things but i was also in SOME ↑ ways more masculine than some of my BRO↑thers um i would help my dad on the farm i was really interested in how engines worked and things like THAT so as a forty-year-old trying to put all this toGETher I made the decision that people had tried to put me into a box but that’s not who i AM so I made the decision to be ALL of who i am which is where THIS came from ((indicates facial hair)) so it’s an experimental thing one summer thinking cause i’d always CUT my facial hair in OUR culture women are not supposed to have facial hair so i thought well if i’m NOT a WOman i don’t have to fit to that (.) that um conVENtion and so i started to grow it n- (.) and it was SO exciting because this is one of the very few things that i had left that literally wasn’t removed by surgery i had GENital surgery at age 8 (.) to normalize and feminize my body so the difference was removed by a surgeon’s KNIFE

To begin with, Pam’s question requires analysis, for it influences Mani’s subsequent approach. In the question, the word genetic indexes science and

230 Brian W. King medicine, a move to which Mani then orients in the next turn by introducing the term ‘diagnosis,’ and Pam is asking whether s(he) has “female” sex organs “or what.” By adding “or what” as a tag, the question is framed not as a simple request for information but becomes a more ‘probing’ demand.7 Thus it can be argued that the question stimulates an “account” footing on Mani’s part because it is an implicit request for justification and explanation. At the same time, the use of the term “female” to refer to sex organs sets up a field of heteronormative binary sex, one in which intersex experience is marginalized; therefore, Mani must negotiate a position to speak from, one which both complies with this dominant discourse yet at the same time counters it (cf. Van De Mieroop 2012). Before engaging in storytelling, s(he) speaks as interlocutor and states outright that diagnosis is not something s(he) cares much about, perhaps implying that “social gender identity” determines sex rather than any diagnosis or gender assignment (cf. Zimman and Hall 2010). The use of a high rising tone on ‘diagnosis’ further frames that ‘medical’ process as a questionable one. At the same time, however, there is a limited compliance with the discourse of binary sex via the suggestion that s(he) has “never been able” to learn the answer. Thus Mani admits that this question has borne some relevance in the past and in this way complies with the discourse. However s(he) then states plainly that it is no longer of interest and begins to set up a more empowering counterdiscourse. The stories which then follow serve to explain (or account for) this apparent paradox as Mani begins to “reclaim authority over [hir] own body” (Zimman, 2014). Mani shifts to the tale world in line 6 (in the role of narrator) and begins the work of explaining how s(he) used early childhood photographs as an important source of information about hir past. In line 9, s(he) switches to the role of story character (i.e., the earlier adult Mani investigating the photos) and relates what this early investigation revealed. Mani deploys discourses of gender difference which tend to position men and women as categorically different in biology and behaviour (Sunderland 2004; Cameron 2008; Kiesling 2011). These discourses are circulated as cultural models (i.e., narrative-like versions of discourses) which are present in most cultures (Kiesling 2011: 217) and thus hold in the New Zealand context. These well-known versions represent ideals which are commonly resonant in society, in this case biological determinism and binary gender. In other words, boys behave certain ways and girls in certain other ways because their biology determines that they will do so. The goal here is not to discuss the veracity/reliability of these discourses. Rather, as part of analysis it is important to note that Mani finds these discourses useful in the process of reclaiming masculinity. Heteronormative discourses are thus drawn upon (e.g., helping dad on the farm, dressing up), and this compliance with a cultural model of binary sex and gender difference permits Mani to suggest, in a socially salient way, that both femininity and masculinity were

Reclaiming Masculinity 231 present in that childhood self. S(he) then switches in lines 14–17 back to the role of narrator in order to evaluate the character self’s realizations, and so compliance with discourses of binary sex then gives way to contradiction. The character self is evaluated (line 15) as a ‘boxed-in’ person who was incomplete and needed to “work [hir]self out” (from line 8). These entwined binaries of masculine/feminine, male/female, and boy/girl, are evaluated as inadequate ways to explain intersex experience. Mani then shifts to the role of interlocutor and draws the audience’s attention to hir facial hair by touching it. S(he) speaks of growing facial hair as a way to step out of this “box” in the tale world. In line 17, as narrator, s(he) mentions this strategy and concurrently embodies it as interlocutor (as seen in the photo in Plate 11.1). In this case, facial hair is a “lexically gendered body part term,” and such terms have come to directly index masculine gender (see Motschenbacher 2010: 125). It is important to be clear about what is meant here by indexicality. Silverstein (2003) describes indexicalities as “ordered,” where first order is a direct index and later orders are indirect. For example, a choice of words might index dominance which in turn might index masculinity in an indirect relationship rather than a direct pathway from the words to the social identity (see Ochs 1992 in reference to gender). But in this case, ‘beard’ and ‘facial hair’ (both as terms and images) point directly to masculinity rather than indirectly. More importantly for the current analysis, Mani says that a decision was made to become “ALL of who I am” and so this reveals hir desire for masculinity– the outward attributes of physical masculinity which were partly “removed by a surgeon’s knife” (line 28). Another way to phrase it is that beyond social masculinity, s(he) desires the perceived “essential technologies” of being male (cf. participants in Hall 2009: 155); this is very much an embodied masculinity. Mani begins to alternate between character and narrator roles from lines 19–28 (sometimes blending the two roles), speaking of a tale world self who was set on a ‘female’ life trajectory by surgeons and parental rearing and yet realized that s(he) was “NOT a WOman” (line 22). This realization leads hir to grow facial hair, and this is something that the character self found exciting at the time (line 24). Furthermore, as narrator (lines 24–25), s(he) evaluates the growing of facial hair as highly significant by reasoning that it was really the only embodied index of masculinity that the surgeon had not been able to “remove.” So although s(he) sets up an earlier ‘woman/ female’ self-positioning, we see that there was a strong desire not to remain there. In terms of power, Mani comes out of this story victorious against the “surgeon’s knife” (final line). Thus, similar to the aforementioned analysis in Kiesling (2011), s(he) displays a desire for a body which outwardly ‘gives’ masculinity to the viewer (Goffman 1959). More specifically, it is a desire to reclaim the masculinity that s(he) sees in a childhood self–the masculinity which was partly “removed by a surgeon’s knife.” This desire for a persona which reincorporates masculinity is also seen in Mani’s reference

232 Brian W. King to discourses of gender difference; the next section will begin to explore in more detail this lack of separation between biology and language-driven social construction in Mani’s account. THE BODY AS CATALYST FOR MASCULINITY In combination with discourse, bodies might have a role to play in language and masculinity. As Borba and Ostermann (2007) have expressed it, analysts need to pay attention to how speakers “embody local understandings of gender and sexuality onto their bodies and how this embodiment enables users to frame their language use according to surrounding ideologies about gendered and sexual beings” (144). In other words, certain understandings of gender can be physically ‘impinged’ on bodies and interact with language in the performance of gender. I find this idea useful and submit that it does not sit in opposition to the idea that the body is discursively constructed. As well as being “imbued with meaning through discourse” and thereby a product of linguistic practice (Zimman and Hall 2010: 166), the body can recursively serve as a ‘catalyst’ for discourses of masculinity and femininity, and this is a process that is part of Mani’s experiences with masculinity as an intersex person, both in terms of hir past and present. As seen in Extract 2, the decision to stop shaving is the most obvious example of hir body acting as a catalyst for discourses of masculinity, for when s(he) speaks with face visible the visual mode of hir facial hair ‘mediates’ between self-perception and audience perception. To use the terminology introduced earlier in this chapter, hir subjective (personal) body experience (Leib) can become part of hir social body, or the body others perceive (Körper). In Extract 1 (taken from a documentary film interview), s(he) expresses the growing of facial hair as an effort not to be ‘invisible,’ and I would like to suggest that hir prior feelings of invisibility trace back to the inability of others to see what s(he) ‘knows to be true’ as part of embodied knowledge–that s(he) is intersex. In Mani’s societal context, hir social body simultaneously gives off direct indexes of female bodies such as breasts and shoulder-pelvic width ratio, but by wearing facial hair Mani extends intersex onto that social body because wearing a beard does not fit the discourses of womanhood in Mani’s society (see line 21 in Extract 2 above). In doing so, s(he) regains control of hir body’s interpretation. In addition to this multimodal element of Mani’s embodied speech, s(he) also draws upon discourses of biological determinism to emphasize that intersex bodily difference runs more deeply than what is apparent on the surface. In Extract 3 (below), s(he) begins to speak about another aspect of personal body experience, suggesting that hir brain, as an organ, functions differently from a male or female brain. Even though the corpus of scientific research which compares the female vs. the male human brain is

Reclaiming Masculinity 233 (at best) inconclusive (see Jordan-Young 2010; Fausto-Sterling 2012b), the idea that there are innate differences in the brains of men and women has been enthusiastically taken up in folk discourse, contributing to an ideology which frames as fact the idea that men and women ‘really are different’ (see Cameron 2007, 2009 for a compelling critique). Perhaps for this reason it is a cultural script that Mani conforms to when trying to account for intersex embodied knowledge. Extract 3 was recorded with the students present but two months after the initial session, when Mani returned in order to answer more of their questions. In this particular section s(he) is responding to a question that had been inserted in the question box anonymously by a student. Extract 3: Second Session with Students (August) Mani 1 ((reading)) um what do you (1) consider (1) yourself as (.) more female or (.) male 2 uhh (.) that changes 3 and i don’t usually use the words male and female 4 but i realize in different situations it sorta moves around a little bit↑ 5 um (.) i was with my::: (2) nephew two nights ago 6 and he was talking about the exhibition that’s currently at Te Papa the Formula One 7 and he was saying and laughing most of the females there seemed bored 8 and completely (1) not interested↑ 9 i-i LOVE cars and i’m fascinated about racing cars so (.) i10 y’know what part of my brain is working y’know when i’m doing that 11 so it changes it alters it’s not a consistent thing 12 but i know for myself that i (.) i hold both of those realities 13 ((pitch up)) NOT only in my PHYSical body it-there’s something in my BRAIN 14 one of the things that i’ve noticed a LOT thinking over the last few years 15 that MY brain works quite differently from a standard male or a standard female brain↑ 16 it works a LOT like my intersex friends in america 17 so there’s obviously something there about the horMONAL EXPOSURE 18 or the way my brain is WIRED that is different As with Extract 2, the wording of the question positions Mani in relation to heteronormative binary sex discourses (i.e., are you more male or female), and this positioning once again brings forth an account, one which

234 Brian W. King explains and justifies that this binary is inadequate for describing hir lived experience. In lines 2–4 Mani responds first as interlocutor, gaining control of the interpretation of bodies by countering the heteronormative framing. S(he) states unequivocally that s(he) prefers not to use the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ and then suggests that “it” (intersex embodiment) is fluid (i.e., line 4–“it sorta moves around a little bit↑”). S(he) then tells a story in order to ‘explain’ or ‘account for’ this assessment. Shifting to the tale world and narrator’s role in lines 5–8, Mani tells of hir nephew’s assertion that the ‘females’ he had seen at a Formula One exhibit in Te Papa (National Museum of New Zealand) were all bored. Mani then switches back to speaking as interlocutor in line 9 and dissociates from the females in this tale world by asserting a fascination with racing cars. This move ostensibly complies with the heteronormative binary sex discourse first referenced by the nephew in the story, and this compliance permits an association with masculinity via its binaries. However in a second move in line 10, s(he) transfers this discourse onto the brain (“y’know what part of my brain is working y’know when i’m doing that”). And so we see that s(he) makes use of a cultural model (i.e., that men and women’s brains are different). It is significant that Mani deploys the word ‘brain’ as opposed to ‘mind’ because s(he) again makes uses of discourses of gender difference and biological determinism, inscribing these discourses upon hir own brain and using this gendered body part as a catalyst for reclaiming masculinity (as well as embracing femininity). Mani then goes on (lines 15–16) to differentiate between intersex brains and those of both males and females (i.e., “MY brain works quite differently from a standard male or a standard female brain↑”). Thus male and female brains are constructed as ‘others’ to Mani’s discursive construction of an intersexual brain, and in this way s(he) at the same time counters heteronormative binary sex discourse. S(he) uses these single-sexed ‘other’ brains as a tool for explaining hir own embodied knowledge that intersex people’s bodies are different. Mani also asserts at the end of line 16, that hir brain “works a LOT like [hir] intersex friends in america.” so there’s obviously something there about the horMONAL EXPOSURE or the way my brain is WIRED that is different Nested in hir story is the fact that s(he) grew up in New Zealand, isolated from other intersex people, and yet saw evidence of similar brain processes in other intersex people abroad (individuals who likewise grew up in isolation from other intersex people). Significantly this effect had not previously occurred for Mani with the brains or observable thought processes of males and females. Thus implicitly s(he) suggests that if reinforcement and social learning told the whole story, then hir ‘sex-of-rearing’ (i.e., female) would be imprinted upon hir mind. Or to put it in more scientific terms, parental and community efforts at “gender fortification”

Reclaiming Masculinity 235 (Fausto-Sterling 2012b: 10) would have given hir a female brain. But Mani’s subjective body experience (Leib) does not match this assessment. DISCUSSION It is clear that Mani desires to reincorporate masculinity into identity performance. The accounts analyzed in this study indeed show evidence of this desire, and the speaking of these accounts likely also (re)creates and continues this desire (see Kiesling 2011). Mani speaks of childhood as a time replete with masculinity and femininity performances which mingled with farm life and ‘girlhood’ in ways which were relatively unproblematic in that family context. While drawing on normative versions of masculinity and femininity, s(he) constructs a childhood self who performed both. This account of dual gender performances during childhood has parallels with the childhood accounts of girls ascribed the label ‘tomboy’ (e.g., Queen 2004) and boys ascribed the label ‘sissy’ (e.g., Barrett 2004). However, Mani’s intersex account begins to diverge from these other accounts when s(he) speaks of embodiment. Mani did not see intersex embodied by others until meeting other intersex people in middle age, and s(he) speaks of this as a profound experience in which the social bodies (Körper) of other intersex people reflected hir subjective body experience (Leib—Mani’s embodied knowledge). What Fausto-Sterling (2012b) and others call “the sex of the body image,” a foundational sense of Mani’s own subjective body in infancy and beyond, was not reinforced until middle age. Exploring the interface of the biological and the social, Anne Fausto-Sterling (2012b) reviews the layers of sex and gender development, emphasizing that they can sometimes develop independently of one another. Multiple layers develop during gestation whereas after birth (presumably), infants develop a very early sense of body image that is affected by sensory experiences of the external genitalia (e.g., parental wiping, contact with diapers and blankets). Subsequently, there is an elaboration of culturally coded masculine and feminine gender expression. Later still, social experiences begin to fortify a gender identity. Thus it is conceivable, although purely speculative, that Mani’s infant genitalia could have been a catalyst for an early ‘intersex’ body image and elaboration of a masculinity/ femininity hybrid, both of which persisted in spite of the efforts of surgeon and community. Although raised as female and carefully kept in ignorance of being intersex, the socially understood biological category of female did not fit in the end because the biology of Bruce/Margaret Laird was always non-binary. Perhaps this “body image” (Fausto-Sterling 2012b) was reinforced before surgeries and fortifications could intervene. However this, too, is speculative, and more to the point, the life experiences of people who later self-identify as intersex are diverse in terms of the age at which surgery was carried out (see Preves 2003), including immediately after birth, which disrupts

236 Brian W. King any notion that early surgical intervention will necessarily circumvent an intersex body image. I do not mean to suggest a simple, pre-discursive status for that biology; rather, it does highlight what Edelman and Zimman (2014) call the “complicated, recursive, and co-constructed” relationship between discourse and the body, bringing the complicated into sharp focus. The social constructions (i.e., manhood and womanhood) which culturally tend to ‘hang’ on maleness and femaleness (as part of normative ‘coat-rack’ models) (Nicholson 1994; see also McElhinney 2003) also failed to be accessible as a result of this non-binary physiology. Attempts to discursively saturate Mani’s body exclusively with womanhood through gender fortification ultimately failed in spite of the extreme ‘precaution’ taken by Mani’s childhood surgeon to surgically impinge discourses of binary sex onto that body and influence the later body image. This is a very different experience from Edelman and Zimman’s (2014) trans-men and transmasculine participants who manage to “decouple body parts from gender” (15). In other words, to them whatever they call a ‘dick’ is a dick; for Mani the attempt at decoupling foundered. Significantly, Mani felt that female simply did not describe hir embodied reality despite many years of living as a self-described ‘stone-butch’ lesbian (Mitchell, personal communication, 2010). ‘Female masculinity’ (Halberstam 1998) did not suffice in the end. Mani’s relationship with masculinity comes back to a sense that something innate had been taken away by the doctor’s scalpels. Sliced away were what Hall (2009: 155) calls “essential technologies” of maleness, or the physical attributes that are ideologically associated with manhood. But knives could only scratch at the surface. Although Mani strategically and agentively deploys stories about childhood performances of masculinity and femininity, these constructs interpenetrate with hir (inter)sex of birth. S(he) uses language and stories to subvert dominant (i.e., heteronormative) ideologies about masculinity and femininity as well as ideologies about intersex bodies and “reclaim a certain control over the meanings ascribed to them” (Zimman and Hall 2010: 167). By complying with heteronormativity in a nuanced way, I would like to suggest that Mani still manages to construct a self who does not “answer to the terms of the very binary which is erasing [intersex bodies] with a scalpel” (Riki Anne Wilchins, quoted in Valentine and Wilchins 1997: 220). Rather, power can be located in a reclaiming of authority over Mani’s own body (Zimman, 2014). This is achieved in spite of the limitations of language; that is, the lack of existing language to saliently describe an intersex body and self to 16-year-olds in New Zealand (and their teachers). These are people who are unlikely to have encountered gender-queer discourses and whose selfperception of their gender most likely matches the sex they were assigned at birth. In this sense, normative consolidations are seen to be manipulated for non-normative means (cf. Livia 1997), and Mani is able to make intersex experience tellable in these stories.

Reclaiming Masculinity 237 CONCLUSION In closing, it is clear from this study that there are numerous unanswered questions which remain. Foremost amongst these questions is how the same lens might be applied to bodies which fit within the social constructs male and female. The relationships between language, gender, discourse, and human biology remain under-researched from this perspective: Bodies which are suspect . . . are not what have to be explained. Rather, the requirement that they explain themselves should itself be investigated. For it is this requirement that naturalizes nontransgender and nonintersex bodies and obscures the processes whereby all bodies are understood through complex systems of meaning. (Valentine and Wilchins 1997: 221) By refusing to “obscure the processes” by which bodies are understood, queer linguistics scholars can contribute to the destabilization of heteronormativity. We must continually remind ourselves that “the belief in ‘only two’ is not an experiential given but a normative social construction” (Bing and Bergvall 1996: 2; see also Zimman, 2014). Another question arising is why the discourses so diligently applied to Mani’s body throughout the first 40 years of hir life failed to “bring [the truth of a female] body into social existence” (Edelman and Zimman 2014: 4). The ultimate failure of the female life trajectory engineered by Mani’s surgeon supports Bergvall’s assertion that biology, social construction, and ideology need to be considered together as part of gender-focused linguistic analysis. In the words of Fausto-Sterling (1999: 56) “The body is not merely born and then enlarged as a framework upon which culture hangs a few signifying baubles. Rather, the body is continuously being born and remodeled in an environment that starts before birth and continues until death.” Thus I hope this analysis has also demonstrated that queer linguistics has much to contribute to a biopsychosocial model of sex, gender, and sexuality. We must query how these constructs are brought into view and problematise the more fallacious claims of ‘science.’ As Cameron (2009: 174) has asserted, we need to scrutinize the status of scientific evidence and ask whether it in fact supports the contended conclusions. To a great extent, masculinities and femininities float free of body parts/characteristics which have been consolidated as indexes of maleness and femaleness (Hall 2009), yet Mani’s case supports the idea that the freedom to float might have limits. Thus hir narratives have the potential to “unglue” us as researchers from our preoccupations (see Ho and Tsang 2007), in this case from a preoccupation with gender’s undeniable socially constructed characteristics at the expense of embodied knowledge. To dismiss the possible intersections of masculinities with bodies and biological processes, or equally, to underestimate the dislocation

238 Brian W. King of masculinities from sexual phenotype, is to place limits upon our ability to hear and see, and to risk perpetuating the unintelligibility of intersex experience. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Mani Bruce Mitchell for hir patience and compassion. Thank you also to the trustees of ITANZ. Finally a sincere thank you to the reviewers of an earlier manuscript for their invaluable observations and suggestions. Any oversights or mistakes are of course my own, and I look forward to further discussion.

APPENDIX Transcription Conventions word(1)

A hyphen indicates abruptly cut-off speech. Numbers in parentheses indicate elapsed time of silence in seconds. (.) A dot in parentheses indicates a tiny gap, less than one second. :: Colons indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound. The length of the row of colons indicates the length of the prolongation. WORD Capitals indicate especially emphasized sounds compared to surrounding talk (including ‘I’). () Single parentheses contain prosodic contributions—e.g., (laughter). (()) Double parentheses contain author’s descriptions rather than transcriptions. ↑ Indicates rising intonation in the preceding syllable.  Indicates falling and then rising intonation in the preceding unit.  Indicates rising and then falling intonation in the preceding unit.

NOTES 1. Third person reference via pronouns is unavoidable in English, and this is one of the primary challenges to intelligibility faced by intersex-identified people on a daily basis. After consultation with Mani, the decision was made use “hir” (pronounced /hir/) for object pronouns and to follow Valentine and Wilchins (1997), using “s(he)” (pronounced /ʃəhi/) for subject pronouns. These words are still recognizable as personal pronouns to the English reader (rather than seeming fantastic or other-worldly), yet they avoid straightforward ascription of binary gender categories, a move which would erase Mani’s lived experience. ‘They’ is sometimes applied as a singular epicene pronoun, but it has

Reclaiming Masculinity 239

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

social distancing effects because of an us/them objectivising effect and can also be confusing in written text due to unclear anaphoric reference (see Wayne 2005 for a useful exploration) thus we have not chosen to apply it here. This life-story information has been gathered from my frequent personal conversations with Mani as well as recordings made during research. Human ethics approval for this research was granted by Victoria University of Wellington Human Ethics Committee. For examinations of Mani’s use of language in conversational interaction (as opposed to before an audience), please see King (forthcoming). It is important to acknowledge that some people with ‘intersex’ bodies embrace identities as either women or men and see their bodies as either intersex or as female/male but with a disorder of sexual development (DSD) that requires treatment (see Spurgas 2009). This is not to imply that there is always a conscious, agentive connection between a desire to align to a cultural discourse (such as dominance) and a desire to be taken as masculine. The tag phrase “or what” can be interpreted as carrying a negative overtone, for it often implies that the time has come to ‘make a decision’ or ‘cut to the heart of the matter’ (e.g., “So are you coming or what?” or “Is that sad or what?”).

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242 Brian W. King Wayne, Linda D. 2005. “Neutral Pronouns: A Modest Proposal Whose Time Has Come.” Canadian Woman Studies 24: 85–91. Zimman, Lal. 2009. “‘The Other Kind of Coming Out’: Transgender People and the Coming Out Narrative Genre.” Gender & Language 3: 53–80. Zimman, Lal. 2014. “The Discursive Construction of Sex: Remaking and Reclaiming the Gendered Body in Talk about Genitals among Trans Men.” In Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis, and Joshua Raclaw, 13–34. New York: Oxford University Press. Zimman, Lal, and Kira Hall. 2010. “Language, Embodiment and the ‘Third Sex.’” In Language and Identities, ed. by Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt, 166–179. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Contributors

Paul Baker is a professor of English in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His PhD thesis in 2002 was an examination of the secret language variety Polari which was mainly used by British gay men and has since fallen into disuse. Since then, his main research interests have been language, gender, sexuality, (critical) discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. He is particularly interested in how corpus-based approaches can be used to carry out Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). He has published 10 books including Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics (2010), Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality (2008), Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis (2006) and Public Discourses of Gay Men (2005). His book Hello Sailor: Seafaring life for gay men: 1945–1990 (co-authored with Jo Stanley) has been the subject of a travelling museum exhibition which has travelled around the United Kingdom and Canada. He has also published journal articles examining the representation of various groups including Muslims, refugees, and asylum seekers in large newspaper corpora. He is the commissioning editor of the journal Corpora and has also created reference corpora of British and American English in order to examine diachronic change in these two language varieties. Ronald Beline Mendes is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of São Paulo and currently chairs its Department of Linguistics. He was a graduate student at the University of Campinas and an exchange graduate student at New York University and York University (Toronto, Canada). He finished his PhD in Linguistics in 2005. His research focuses mainly on variation and change in Brazilian Portuguese and on the relations between language and sexuality and its intersections with social class and place. His ongoing research project on the Portuguese spoken in the city of São Paulo is funded by FAPESP (Higher Education Research Institute of the State of São Paulo) and includes undergraduate and graduate students. Lucy Jones received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, in 2010, and is currently Lecturer in English Language at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Her published research

244 Contributors concerns the development of the community of practice approach for discourse-oriented work in queer contexts, and her research interests lie more broadly in the area of language, gender, and sexuality. The research presented in this volume comes from a wider ethnographic study, which is detailed in the monograph Dyke/Girl: Language and Identities in a Lesbian Group (Palgrave, 2012). She is currently engaged in preliminary ethnographic fieldwork with queer youth groups. Brian W. King is an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the use of discourse analysis in sociolinguistic investigations of computer-mediated communication, sexuality education, gendered and sexual identities/desires, and space/place. Recent articles include “Language, Sexuality and Place: The View from Cyberspace,” Building and Analysing Corpora of Computer-Mediated Communication,” “Location, Lore and Language: An Erotic Triangle, and “‘Being Gay Guy, That Is the Advantage’: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction.” Veronika Koller is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, cognitive semantics, and social cognition, which she applies to questions of both corporate communication, and language, gender, and sexuality. In particular, she has studied the conceptual structure and discursive function of metaphor in business magazines, as well as the socio-cognitive representations in corporate branding discourse. In addition, she has done research on analyzing collective, especially sexual and queer, identity in discourse. Robert Lawson is a lecturer in Linguistics at Birmingham City University and was awarded his PhD in 2009 from the University of Glasgow. His ESRC-funded PhD research project focused on the inter-relationship between language and violence among working-class adolescent males in Glasgow, Scotland. His research interests include urban adolescent language use, ethnographic field methods, and acoustic analysis of speech data. He is currently working on an edited volume titled Sociolinguistics in Scotland (EUP) and a project investigating patterns of gendered language use on the British television comedy show Mock the Week. Michelle M. Lazar is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include feminist discourse analysis, multimodality, politics, and the media. She is the founding editor of the Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse monograph series and is on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Discourse and Society, Social Semiotics, and Visual Communication. Michelle is an advisory council

Contributors 245 member of IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) and is concurrently its Secretary on the Executive Board. Erez Levon is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. His work focuses on the interaction of language, gender, sexuality, and nationalism in Israel, Britain, and the United States, among other topics. His work has been published in such journals as Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language Variation and Change, and has been presented at a variety of international conferences, including New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) and the meetings of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), and the American Anthropological Association (AAA). His book Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His broader areas of research encompass language politics, media discourse, multimodality, and language gender and sexuality. His recent publications include the book Language Ideologies and Media Discourse (co-edited with Sally Johnson, Continuum 2010) as well as articles in Gender & Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Language and Politics, Language in Society, Language Problems & Language Planning, and Linguistics and Education. He is co-editor of the book series Advances in Sociolinguistics (Continuum) as well as of the journal Gender & Language. Quentin E. Williams is a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, where he completed a dissertation titled Multilingualism in Late-Modern Cape Town: A Focus on Popular Spaces of Hip-Hop and Tshisa-Nyama. His current research interests focus on multilingualism, popular culture, and identity, with specific reference to hip-hop and food markets. He also has an interest in the sociolinguistics of globalization, new multilingualisms, and informal language economies in Urban Cape Town. Lal Zimman has recently received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is currently Assistant Professor at Reed College. His research focuses on the intersections of language, gender, and sexuality among transgender and LGBQ communities in the United States. Taking a number of different analytic approaches, his previous work has been published in the journals Gender & Language, Colorado Research in Linguistics, and Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas’ book, Language and Identities. His current research takes an ethnographic and sociophonetic perspective on the changes that occur in the voices of trans men and others on the transmasculine identity spectrum who are making use of masculinizing hormones during gender role transition.

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Index

accounts 220, 224–6, 235 acoustics 198, 206, 209, 213 adequate causality 138, 140–1, 148 adequation 140, 204–5 adolescents 53–6, 64–5, 207 African American Vernacular English 57, 61, 78 Alternative 64–5 Altonhead 64–5 androgyny 176, 183, 204, 214–15 b-boying 82 b-girling 82 Banister Academy 55, 64–5, 71–2 biological determinism 220–221, 226, 230, 232–4 biologism see biological determinism biopsychosocial model 220, 223, 237 body 10, 26–9, 44–6, 49–51, 134–5, 167, 199–200, 221–2, 227, 232–5; image 235–6; impingement on 229, 232, 236; knowledge of 223, 226–7; materiality of 29, 93, 223; modification of 200 Brazilian Portuguese 117–23, 131 Broad Scots 62 Bucholtz, Mary 29, 61, 159, 179–80, 182, 185, 186, 204 ‘bunny’ 91 ‘butch’ 27, 128, 174, 175–9, 183, 191–2 Butler, Judith 10–11, 17, 21, 26–7, 34, 158 Cameron, Deborah 79, 81, 89, 159, 220, 221, 227–8, 237 characters 46, 78, 82, 95, 161, 163, 225, 230–1 chavs 62

cis-normativity 197, 201 cisgender 203 code-switching 94, 153 coherence systems 138–9, 148, 150, 152 cohesion 162–3, 167–8 collocation 36–40, 42–5, 48–9 collusion 1, 18 ‘coming-out’ stories 120, 133–4, 137, 152 communities of practice 64, 174, 181 competition 56–8 competitive/co-operative divide 55 complicity 18, 20, 34, 63, 225–6 corporeality see body corpus linguistics 35–6 Corpus of Historical American English 38–9 culture 59–62, 81–3, 146, 160, 199, 206, 230 ‘daddies’ 160–2 dialects 14, 61 diminutives 117–31; metaphorical uses of 121, 125 discourse 27, 35, 79, 157, 223; antifeminist 101–2, 115; counter- 230; features 162–3; feminist 189; functions 162–3; gendered 167, 227; goals 162–3; of masculinity see masculinity, dominant discourses of; medicoscientific 198; private 222; prosody 39–40; public 222; spoken 226 dislocation 21, 28, 156, 158, 206, 237–8 disorder of sexual development 236 distinction 186, 189, 204 distributional patterns 124

248 Index ‘ear’oles’ 60–1 effeminacy 1, 19, 62–3, 93, 119, 127–9, 180 embodiment see body emplotment 134 entextualization 78, 83–4, 89–90, 95 epistemic modality 162–3, 167–8 ethnography 55, 63–4, 78, 182, 207, 224 explanatory sequencing 137–8, 140, 150–1 expletives 86, 89, 93–4 facial hair 199–200, 222, 231–2 falsetto 180, 202 ‘fem’ 201, 203, 214 femininity 27–8, 119, 127–31, 203, 14, 89–90; hegemonic 189–90; ideologies of 175–82, 220, 233; male 18, 156 feminization 192, 222, 228 ‘femme’ 27, 161, 174, 176, 183, 191–3 figures 78, 82, 88–9, 95, 150, 160 gangsters 88, 92 gender 10, 197–206, 221; assignment of 199–200, 213, 216; binary 177–8, 182, 198, 221; boundaries of 197; and class 55, 207; expression of 200–2, 235; fortification of 234; identity 201–3; ideologies of 8, 220, 233; inversion of 175, 180, 182; -liminal 227; normativity 198, 201, 215, 235; practices of 14; presentation of 200–2, 216; representations of 14; roles 200–1, 221; third 199 genderqueer 152, 202–3, 205, 214–15, 236 genitoplasty 223 Glasgow 55, 62–65, 71 Glaswegian Vernacular 64, 66, 68, 70 gossip 55 graffiti 82 group affiliation 60–1, 89, 192 Halberstam, Judith 178, 197, 236 Hall, Kira 159, 179–80, 182, 186, 204 ‘hard man’ 65, 71, 81 hegemony see femininity, hegemonic and masculinity, hegemonic heteronormativity 18, 177–8, 189–90, 193, 226–30, 233–4, 236–7

hip-hop 78–96 homophobia 18, 20, 27, 90, 95, 169 homosexuality 16, 18, 20, 133, 150–1, 174 hormones 199, 200–1, 208, 221, 226 hypercorrection 60 indexical fields 129 indexicality 11, 13, 23, 29, 63, 119, 179–80, 192, 231 insults 55, 57–8, 81 inter- and intra-speaker differences 198, 213–16 inter-personal violence, aggression, and delinquency 53 intersectionality 2, 6, 8–10, 16–21, 134, 152–3, 174 intersex 21, 23, 26, 199, 220–38 intersubjectivity 159, 162–3, 167–8, 179, 189, 192 Kaaps 78, 83, 87–90, 95–6 Körper 227, 232, 235 Kulick, Don 89, 159, 221, 227–8 ‘lads’ 60–1 language: as a constituent part of social identity 56; emotive function of 125; ideologies of 15, 55, 60–4, 95–6, 78–84 language crossing 55 Leib 227, 232, 235 life stories 111, 134, 137 linguistic devices 162–3, 166 linguistic insecurity 60 linguistic power see power, linguistic linguistic styles 15, 180–1, 198, 208 lisp 211 lived experience 208, 220–1, 223, 228, 234 magazines: lesbian sex 166; lifestyle 11, 14 maleness: biological 10, 200, 236 material gain 56 masculinity: catalyst for 232–5; crises of 17, 105; desire for 227–32; dividend of 63; dominant discourses of 1, 20, 65, 90, 152, 159, 236; female 25–6, 156, 174, 178, 192, 197, 236; gay 159, 161; hegemonic 1–2, 14–16, 63, 78, 152, 159,

Index 249 214–15; heterosexual 17, 77, 80, 90; homo- 19, 29; ideologies of 71, 78, 88, 100, 220, 233; normative enactments of 201; physically based 63; queer 170, 214; reclaiming of 220, 224; remediation of 95; technically based 63; ‘tough’ 54, 64, 67; trans- 197–217; urban 54–72 masculinization 128, 166, 197, 199, 208, 215 metaphors 162–3, 165–6, 168; see also diminutives, metaphorical uses of monophthongization 59, 63 moral panic 53 multimodality 22–3, 26, 232 Mutual Information 39 narratives 22–3, 35–6, 133–4, 137–9, 224–6; fight 58, 64–71; roles in 225, 231 nationalism 133–4, 137, 152–3 Neds 64–5 New Zealand 222, 224 Norwich English 58–9 Number gangs 85, 88 pathology 29, 211 patriarchy 100, 108–14, 189; dividend of 14, 34, 63 performativity 10–13, 35, 118, 134, 158–9, 223 personae 78, 82, 89, 95, 179–80, 160–3, 185–6 personal pronouns 238 piss-taking 57 Pittsburgh 59, 63 Pittsburgh English 59 playing the dozens 57 pornography 157–62, 166–9 positionality principle 179, 182 positioning analysis 225 poststructuralist feminism 198, 226 power 12, 28, 80–1, 150, 190–3, 198, 221, 228; linguistic 57, 90 prestige: covert 55, 58–63, 68; heritage 59 psyche 220 ‘pussy’ 93 queer 4, 6, 157, 160, 168–70, 205–6, 214; activism 161–2

queer theory 16–17, 157–8, 161, 169, 220–1, 226–8, 237 rap 78–96; aggressive lyrics in 94; battles 57–8, 90, 94; nonaggressive lyrics in 95 resistance 9, 83, 152 ribbing 57 Sabela 78, 83–5, 95 San Francisco 197, 201, 207 school 15, 55, 57–8, 60, 62, 64–5, 224 Schoolies 64–6, 71–2 self-evaluation tests 56, 59 self-identification 201, 203, 216, 223, 235 semi-structured conversation 64 semiotics 22, 78, 158, 198, 200 sex 21, 156, 158, 197–206; binary 221, 224 sexualization 50, 93 sexuality 17, 90–5, 126–8, 135–6, 159–60, 181, 205 sibilance 206 social actors 104, 166, 179; representation of 162–3, 167 socialization 156, 200, 205, 207, 213, 215 sociocultural linguistics 174–5, 179–81, 185–6, 192, 220 sociolinguistic perception 118, 207 sociophonetics 197, 206 soma 220 sounding 55, 57–8 South Africa 8–9, 18–20, 27, 80–1, 83 Sports 64–5 stance-taking 102, 108, 129–131, 137–8, 180, 185–90 Standard Scottish English 62, 66 stereotypes 20, 65, 87, 125–8, 175, 180, 205 storytelling 220, 224–226 Sub-Saharan Africa 80 subjectivity 125, 134, 156, 197–8, 205, 227, 235; see also intersubjectivity tale world 225, 231, 234 temporal depth 140, 148 testosterone 199, 201, 204, 207, 209–211 third gender see gender, third trans boys 203, 205

250 Index trans men 23, 197, 200–1, 203–5, 215, 236 transgender 21, 23, 197, 201, 203, 205 transition 200, 208–9, 213, 215 trivializing just 68 turntabling 82

verbal cueing 85, 91 vocal pitch 9, 161, 197–9, 202, 206, 208–13; upward shift in 211, 216

urban locales 55

Zionism 133–6, 150–2

working-class industries 59