Gender factor in society, culture and language: female and male language pictures of the world

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Gender factor in society, culture and language: female and male language pictures of the world

Arestova Anna Anatolyevna

Riabtseva Elena Viktorovna

Department of Foreign Languages

Tambov State Technical University

Abstract

This article is the first one in the series of the publications devoted to the problems of gender factor in society, culture and language and to the peculiarities of female and male language pictures of the world. In the given work we present the brief review of the initial period of gender studies in different sciences.

Key words and phrases: gender; sex; society; culture; language; man - woman; male - female; masculine - feminine; manliness - feminity.

Homo Sapiens appears in two hypostases - as a man and as a woman. The opposition “male-female” is fundamental for human culture.

Socially and culturally significant distinctions in the behaviour, customs and socialization of men and women as a whole were sporadically fixed in scientific descriptions, especially in anthropology and ethnography. However the idea about the differentiation between the concepts of biological sex and social one (gender) came into existence only during the period of postmodernism.

The concept gender was treated as“the set of agreements with the help of which a society transforms biological sexuality into the product of human activity” (here and hereinafter the translation of citations is ours) [Pushkaryova, p. 147].

As opposed to the category sexus gender status and, accordingly, gender hierarchy and behaviour models stipulated by gender are not set by nature but are "designed" by society (doing gender), they are ordered by the institutes of social control and cultural traditions [Voronina]. Gender relations are a prominent aspect of social organization. They specifically express its system characteristics and also structure the relations between speaking subjects. The basic theoretical-methodological positions of gender concept are based on four interconnected components: these are cultural symbols; normative statements which specify the directions for the possible interpretations of these symbols and are expressed in religious, scientific, legal and political doctrines; social institutes and organizations; and also the self-identification of a person. Gender relations are fixed in the language as culturally stipulated stereotypes, influencing a person's behaviour, including the speech one, and the processes of its language socialization [Ryabov]. gender society language culture

The category gender was introduced into apparatus criticus at the end of the 60s - the beginning of the 70s years of the previous century and was used at first in History, Historiography, Sociology and Psychology, then it was recognized in Linguistics, being useful for Pragmatists and anthropologically oriented descriptions as a whole. The gender factor taking into account a person's natural sex and its social "consequences", is one of the essential characteristics of a person and during all his or her life specifically influences the comprehension of his or her identity, and also the identification of a speaking subject by other members of society.

Thus, the term gender was used for the description of social, cultural and psychological aspects of "female" in comparison with "male", i.e. “while distinguishing everything that forms features, norms, stereotypes and roles typical and desirable for those whom the society defines as men and women” [Pushkaryova, p. 16]. During this period it was talked mainly of women's studies.

In the 80s years of the previous century more counterbalanced understanding of gender appeared. It was treated as the problem of not only the explication of female history, female psychology, etc., but also as the problem of the overall investigation of feminity and manliness and the social and cultural expectations. In the 90s years of the previous century there appeared trends investigating manliness only and it was understood that masculinity has different manifestations in any society. The most important of these trends was called hegemonic masculinity.

At the same time there is no uniform opinion concerning the nature of gender in modern science. It is attributed, on the one hand, to cogitative constructions or to the models developed with the purpose of more precise scientific description of the problems of sex and the differentiation of its biological and socio-cultural functions. On the other hand, gender is considered as a social construction, created by society, also by means of language.

“While sex is comprehended in the categories "man" and "woman", gender - in the terms "manliness" (male beginning) and "feminity" (female beginning)” [Ryabov, p. 6].

In the mythology of any nation and in plenty of philosophical works it comes to feminity and manliness as cosmogonic and metaphysical categories: “…for example, in international rivalry: some nations are mainly female, others - male. Let's turn to the well-known fragment “Beyond good and evil” in which Nietzsche estimates the role of nations in creative process with the help of the metaphors "female" and “male”…” [Ryabov, p. 28].

The complexity and ambiguity of these concepts is connected with their metaphoricalness, the roots of which can be traced in mythological thinking. These concepts are met in all cosmogonic ideas of different nations, being isomorphic to two hypostases of human being - men and women. Manliness and feminity unite the complex of opposite beginnings.

In any mythological picture of the world there is a number of binary oppositions: top - bottom; light - darkness; right - left, etc. In many philosophical systems there is also a number of polar categories: nature - culture; activity - passivity; rationality - irrationality; logic - emotions; spirit - substance; contents - form; authority - submission.

The left member of each opposition is attributed to manliness, the right one - to feminity. Each pair of attributes makes an independent opposition without cause-and-effect relation with peoples' belonging to this or that sex. However sexual dimorphism taking place in the reality of human existence is nevertheless considered through the prism of feminity/manliness. To each sex the set of corresponding qualities playing an important role in the creation of the prototype of male and female in public and individual consciousness is attributed.

Thus in ancient Chinese mythology and natural philosophy two opposite beginnings are found - dark yin and light yan, which are practically always in pair combination. Such symbolics underlining the dualism of male and female beginnings also existed during preliterate period getting iconographic expression. The myth about androgynes also reflects the dichotomy of sex exposing the principle of harmony which is established when male and female beginnings unite.

Even Aristotle identified male beginning with spiritual one, with form, and female - with physical, with matter. According to his point of view, male beginning adds form and movement to material (female) one and gives it soul [Aristotle]. Such view of these two beginnings was very popular and wide-spread and only the philosophy of postmodernism systematically approached to the reconsideration of the concepts of feminity and manliness, but, however, it had little reflection in the stereotypes of ordinary consciousness.

Thus the problem of feminity and manliness was in detail discussed in the works of the Russian philosophers of “Silver age” - Berdyaev, Ern, Ivanov, Bulgakov, Rozanov, Solovyov, Merezhkovsky and Florensky. On the one hand, the philosophers transferred the metaphorical features of manliness and feminity to the modus of obligation and prescription attributing to real men and women as obligatory the features of philosophical concepts "feminity" and "manliness".

On the other hand these concepts were applied by them also to the persons of one and the same sex. Thus P. Florenskyopposes the male names Alexander and Aleksey associating one of them with manliness and another - with feminity [Ryabov].

To some extent the dichotomic opposition of male and female and their hierarchy where manliness is on the predominating position is peculiar to practically all the trends of philosophical thought. It is proved that in a number of philosophical conceptions polar distinctions between these qualities are considered as “intrinsic, substantial”, existential. In other, more modern works, “accidental, casual” character which must be overcome is attributed to them [Ibidem].

As we can understand from everything told before, manliness and feminity are important attributes of public consciousness. Being universal, i.e. present in any culture, concepts, they at the same time comprise certain specificity peculiar to the given society.

According to Y. D. Apresian's idea, “specific connotations of nonspecific concepts are the source of knowledge about the naive picture of the world imprinted in language, helping to reveal the "stereotypes" of language and wider cultural consciousness” [Apresian, p. 350].

In the language gender stereotypification peculiar to collective, "naive" consciousness is fixed. During communication with the help of the set of gender stereotypes available in the given language the experience reflexed by an individual is actualized. Means of language are used as “the tool allowing an individual designing sign models more or less adequately objectifying the fragments of his or her conceptual system in external world” [Kamenskaya, p. 34].

Naive picture of the world reflected in language is not primitive. It has the deep logic dictated by the experience of many generations including the observation of the types of people called men and women, attributing certain qualities and simultaneously their estimation to them.

Thus research of feminity and manliness must include the description of the stereotypes connected with them and the means of the manifestation of these stereotypes in language.

Studies of the interrelation of language and the sex of its native speakers can be divided in two periods the boundary being the 60s years of the previous century [Kotthoff; Samel; Kirilina; Tafel]:

1) biological determinism - irregular (and not connected with adjacent sciences) researches based mainly on the observation of isolated facts;

2) gender researches themselves - large-scale researches which appeared in the 60s years of the previous century and were caused by the growth of the interest to the pragmatical aspect of linguistics, by the development of sociolinguistics and by essential changes in the traditional distribution of male and female roles that allowed to put a new face on linguistic facts and interpret them in a new way.

Today it seems more correct to name the three phases of the development of gender researches: between the first and the second stages there was a small transition period from the beginning till the middle of the 20th century which became the preparatory base of modern gender researches. At that time the accumulation of the facts, allowing doubting in exclusively biological character of sexual dimorphism began.

For the first time the factor of biological sex in language was noticed in ancient times while thinking about the category of grammatical gender. The most ancient and for a long time the only hypothesis concerning the reasons of appearing and functioning of gender category in language was the symbolic-semantic one, based on the correlation of natural biological category sexus with the grammatical category genus. The supporters of symbolic-semantic hypothesis thought that grammatical gender had appeared under the influence of natural reality - the presence of people of different sex [Royen; Jarnatowskaja; Shahmaykin].

Although the points of view concerning the determinancy of gender category by biological reality did not coincide in a number of aspects, the opinion concerning the doubtless connection of natural sex with grammatical gender was common. The hypothesis was based on two features of mythological thinking - animism and anthropomorphism. The symbolic-semantic hypothesis was represented by the scientists who had great influence on linguistics (Gerder, Grimm, Humboldt, etc.), and it predetermined its long domination in linguistic description. It must be mentioned that explaining the extra linguistic motivation of gender category the researchers used their non-linguistic experience. It led to the occurrence of estimation in the interpretation of gender category: masculine gender appeared to be paramount thanks to attributing the semantics of force, activity and energy to its names. Names of feminine gender, on the contrary, were characterized by passivity and subordination. Thus, the conditions of social reality were extrapolated over the laws of language development that is proved by E. Borneman's data, who created one of the most fundamental works considering the role of gender factor in the development of society where analysis is conducted from the positions of interdisciplinary approach [Borneman].

Discovering the languages without gender category stroke a blow on symbolic-semantic hypothesis. Nevertheless within the framework of the criticism of this hypothesis and the gradual replacement of it by the morphological and syntactic explanation of gender category the recognition of the fact that the gender category itself is capable of influencing the human perception of corresponding words and concepts was invariable. Thus the personification attributes to the objects designated by the words of feminine gender the properties of the persons of female sex, and to the objects of neuter and masculine gender - the properties of the persons of male sex.

According to R. Jacobson the Russians imagine the days of the week in accordance with the word gender. At the same time ordinary consciousness does not reflect upon what has caused the word gender - semantics, syntax or morphology [Shahmaykin]. All this allows assuming that the grammatical gender of a name influences the perception of reality and activates the consciousness frames connected with the concept of biological sex and, what is essential, participates in the formation of positive or negative connotations (to be continued).

References

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