Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

8.1 Male as the norm
Unit 8 Language and gender
Section 2 Language variation

Language plays a crucial role in signalling the way that we think about others and in displaying to others the way that we think about ourselves. Our relationships with others are largely managed through language, and we can thus signify to others how we see ourselves as gendered, classed and raced individuals through our choice of language items and styles of language. Since the 1970s, language has been of interest to feminist linguists because the use of certain types of language can signify particular attitudes towards women and men. Language seems to encode systematically a view of women as aberrant from a male norm. However, more recently feminist linguists have stressed the fact that, despite this embeddedness of certain stances towards women within the language, words do not ’contain’ meaning in any simple way. Instead, meanings are worked out contextually and can be contested. Thus, while it is clear that sexist attitudes are still expressed, they no longer have such a normative feel to them and they take their meanings within the context of contesting discourses, such as feminism, which have suggested alternative forms of expression. Those who wish to express sexist attitudes may also be driven to be more indirect, to use irony or presuppositions rather than to be direct. First, let us consider the way that the language encodes women as a marked case and males as the norm.

8.1 Male as the norm

In many languages, reference to human beings is often made as if all humans were male (Pauwels, 1998). This happens partly through the operation of the noun ’man’, when it is used generically to stand for the species, but also through the use of ’he’ as a generic pronoun (generic means general rather than specific - the generic ’he’ is therefore supposed to include females as well as males). However, as Rosalind Coward and Maria Black (1981) have pointed out, if generic ’man’ is genuinely inclusive then both of the following sentences should sound equally odd:

(1) Man’s vital interests are food, shelter, and access to females.

(2) Man, unlike other mammals, has difficulties in giving birth.

In practice, however, sentences like (1) are more likely to be produced and accepted unreflectingly than sentences like (2). Even when operating generically, therefore, words such as ’he’ and ’man’ carry their masculine connotations with them. This tendency also operates at more restricted levels of reference, when generic ’he’ is not intended to refer to the human species as a whole but to some non-gender specific group within it, as, for example, in the following:

(3) When the police officer has completed his investigation, he files a report.

(4) The modern reader may at first feel baffled by the overpunctuation, as it will feel to him that there are too many commas.

The conventions of usage of the generic pronoun say that we should understand the use of ’he’ and ’his’ in (3) as referring to all police officers (that is, including female officers). Similarly, in (4) the conventions of usage suggest that both male and female readers are being included in the reference. However, research has revealed that readers of sentences containing generic pronouns often do not read them as having general reference, but in fact read them as referring strictly to males. Kidd (1971), for instance, has demonstrated that, when students are asked to visualize the referent of a generic pronoun, they almost invariably draw a male referent, even when the intended referent seems at first sight to be general.

A similar process may be seen at work in the following caption from an advertisement for Lufthansa airlines: ’What does today’s business traveller expect of his airline?’ Most people would read ’his’ as having generic reference here, since it follows a generic noun ’business traveller’. But the picture that accompanies this advertisement makes it clear that the reference is only to males, since it shows a plane full of male business travellers relaxing on board an aeroplane, the only female on board being the steward who is serving them drinks. Thus, so-called generic nouns and pronouns are quite commonly not truly generic in practice: apparently non-gender specific, they often turn out to be referring actually to males. As a consequence of this, feminists such as Spender (1980) have argued that general categories of persons and indeed of the human species are often constructed through the language in male-oriented or androcentric terms. This process serves to make women less visible in social and cultural activity; the use, for instance, of the generic ’he’ in example (3), or in the advertisement, serves to erase the fact that there are women who work as police officers, or who travel on business.

In some ways generic nouns (such as ’business travellers’) that masquerade as non-gender specific terms are more insidious than the generic pronoun, ’he’. This is partly because there are so many of them, and partly because - unlike ’he’ - they do not give any explicit signals that they might be excluding women. Because of this they become powerful ways of carving up social reality in implicitly masculine ways without announcing that they are doing so. Cameron (1985), for instance, shows that even expressions such as ’astronaut’, ’firefighter’, ’lecturer’, ’shop assistant’, ’scientist’ and so on disguise a tendency to refer only to men - despite their apparently neutral generic potential. Cameron cites two newspaper reports:

(5) The lack of vitality is aggravated by the fact that there are so few able-bodied young adults about. They have all gone off to work or look for work, leaving behind the old, the disabled, the women and the children. (The Sunday Times)

(6) A coloured South African who was subjected to racial abuse by his neighbours went berserk with a machete and killed his next-door neighbour’s wife, Birmingham Crown Court heard yesterday. (The Guardian)

In example (5), the generic expression is ’able-bodied young adults’, yet it is clear from the rest of the sentence that what is really meant is ’able-bodied young men’, since women and children are subsequently excluded from its reference. In the second example (6), the generic expression is ’next-door neighbour’ since this word ostensibly means both male and female neighbours, and yet it is clear that, when it is used to refer to women, it needs to be modified to ’neighbour’s wife’. Thus, neighbour, rather than being a generic in this context, is in fact only referring to male neighbours.

It can clearly be seen that generic nouns often refer solely to men in the fact that women doing a job that is conventionally seen as stereotypically male are sometimes described as ’lady doctor’, ’female engineer’, ’woman pilot’, etc. However, as more and more women take up jobs that have been conventionally seen as male, the most salient feature of their work will not continue to be their gender and true generics such as ’fire-fighter’ will be used to refer to both females and males.

Apart from the discrimination entailed within generic nouns and pronouns, they can also be ambiguous in their reference, as, for example, in the following sentence:

(7) The more education an individual attains the better his occupation is likely to be.

It is unclear here whether the ’individual’ is supposed to be a man or whether this is indeed a generic use (this is not cleared up by ’his’ - which may also be generic). Because the reference of generic nouns and pronouns is ambiguous and because they serve to make women seem invisible, feminists such as Dale Spender (1980), Casey Miller and Kate Swift (1979) have objected to their use. As Pauwels (1998) has noted, feminists have been active in campaigning against their use in official documents so that in the public sphere, at least, their use is much less common, and feminists have developed alternative terms that are more acceptable to women. Because of the development of guidelines on language usage, it has also become more acceptable to object to sexist usage.

Feminists have suggested a number of ways around the problem of the generic pronoun and generic reference: some writers have begun to avoid using generic ’he’ entirely, by using the passivized form, as in the following:

(8) When a police officer has finished an investigation, a report should be filed.

Or the ’he’ can be avoided by using the plural ’they’:

(9) When police officers have finished their investigation, they should file a report.

In these sentences, it is clear that the reference is truly generic. But it is also possible to signal more positively that there may be female as well as male police officers:

(10) When the police officer has finished the investigation, he or she should file a report.

Some writers even use ’she’ throughout their work to draw attention to the problems with generic ’he’ usage, or they use a plural ’they’ after a singular subject:

(11) When the police officer has finished the investigation, they should file a report.

These forms are often contested, particularly examples (10) and (11), and even though usage has changed greatly in the last five years, since nearly all publishers, educational institutions and organizations have issued their staff with guidelines on language use to cover reference to gender and race, the subject of the use of generics is still contested and debated.