Gender Identity

Gender Identity

1. There is biological sex AND THEN there is gender

   • Social facts are to do with gender performance
     • Sex categorizations have a social origin
   • Purely social convention that one should be mapped onto the other

2. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003) social process of creating distinctions between men and women by socially establishing what is to count as 'normal differences' between them. Children experience these differences as they develop socially, and understand which practises they are expected to engage in to be counted as male or female. Like passing on gender identities ie give boys swords and girls dresses.

3. Identities are subject to change, being a man or women mean different things to different people at different times.

4. DR- deploy discursive resources which are culturally available to them to rhetorically build up their talk and construct a gender identity within local discursive context

5. Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003), modern field of gender and language has moved beyond concerns with describing womens talk in terms of syntatic or prose differences from mens talk. Essentialist views of gender as grounded in biology are rejected, and also simplistic accounts of gender differences as an obvious causes of social effects such as language variation are also treated with uncertainty.

6. DR questions: How are gender identities constructed?, what social actions are enabled through talk of gender?

   • What are the rhetorical features of gender talk?: what sorts of assumptions or potenial inferences do speakers address as they create identities?