Production, circulation and deconstruction of gender

Transcription

452229
2012
DIS14510.1177/1461445612452229Discourse StudiesGreco
Article
Production, circulation
and deconstruction of
gender norms in LGBTQ
speech practices
Discourse Studies
14(5) 567–585
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461445612452229
dis.sagepub.com
Luca Greco
Paris III University, France
Abstract
This paper investigates interdiscursivity in talk about gender norms in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) community. Drawing from field work conducted among gay and lesbian
parents, transgender people, and the Drag King community, I show how accounts like les
hommes sont comme ça (‘Men are like that’) or les femmes sont comme ça (‘Women act that
way’) emerging in discourse about pregnancy reveal gender-based norms and their relationship to
social conditions. Adopting a linguistic anthropology perspective, while paying particular attention
to agency, categorization, circulation, and recontextualization processes, I show how gender
norms are constructed and deconstructed through interactional, semantic, and morphosyntactic
patterns found in a variety of multisemiotic mediums (e.g. texts, multiparty conversations and
forum exchanges, images) and in a diversity of contexts. In addition to its contribution to the study
of gender and language, this article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership
categorization analysis and queer linguistics.
Keywords
Categorization, drag kings, female to male transsexuals, gender, interaction, interdiscursivity, gay
and lesbian parenting, LGBTQ issues, linguistic anthropology, queer linguistics
Introduction
Based on several years of multi-sited ethnography on categorization practices in talk,
texts, and bodily conduct-in-interaction, I will address the issue of the relationship
between norms and speech practices by answering two questions that were the starting
point of my research in the field: a) What linguistic, interactional, and multisemiotic
Corresponding author:
Luca Greco, ILPGA Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, 19 rue des bernardins, 75005 Paris, France.
Email: [email protected]
Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 5, 2016
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Discourse Studies 14(5)
devices are employed by people to build a self-presentation that fits into the current context and is relevant to their own experiences and personal histories? b) How do gender
norms – demands for essentialization, difference, and binarity, that is, ‘what a woman
must be like’, ‘what a man must be like’ – emerge in the discourse of communities
located on the fringes of heteronormativity?
These issues focus on the agency of group members in relation to a history and a language that precedes and constrains them, but lays the groundwork for the expression and
formation of their identities (Butler, 1997). Rather than thinking of people as individuals
who are all-powerful and whose actions are determined, solely and definitively, by a
society or a context that is inexorably beyond them and precedes them, research on
agency has made it possible to account for a reflexive relationship within which people’s
ability to act is socioculturally mediated (Ahearn, 2001). Within this framework and a
theory of the subject largely inspired by Hegel, Levinas, Althusser, and Foucault, Butler
conceives of self-accountability as an irreducibly interactive and dialectic process:
An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing [. . .]. Moreover,
the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to
ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish
social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our ‘singular’ stories are
told. (Butler, 2005: 21)
Raising the issue of an individual’s leeway in a normative context helps us account for
the role played by gender norms in the construction of identity-related devices, and consequently, for the role of context (in its ‘extra-linguistic’ version; see Cicourel, 1992; Hymes,
1974; Malinoswki, 1935) in how social practices get carried out. Indeed, gender norms and
language use are related in a reflexive way, in that they are both the locus and the result of
the behavior of social actors. First, gender norms can fashion and make intelligible language
events and interaction dynamics. Second, they emerge in and through speech practices in
the form of accounts, which participants thematicize as they go about their everyday lives.
After presenting the basic issue from which these questions arise in sociolinguistics
and linguistic anthropology, I will analyze excerpts from several corpora in order to
illustrate the relationship between norms and practices. Starting from a detailed analysis
of the linguistic devices people use aimed at gaining insight into how gender norms are
created, spread, and challenged, I will explain how interdiscursivity helps account for the
circulation of norms in various situations. In fact, it is through their ability to move from
one discourse to another and to seep into an infinite network of sayings and quotations
that norms produce gender binarity and make it meaningful (Butler, 2005). From this
angle, I will propose a view of discourse that sees it as a device for producing, circulating, and challenging norms, in a framework that interrelates approaches taken in ethnography, interaction studies, and gender and queer studies (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005).
Language, norms, and gender
The interrelationships between language practices, norms, and identity have been
studied in variationist sociolinguistics since the 1970s, based on the postulation that
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linguistic forms and gender identities are related to each other. Starting from the
assumption that there is a co-relation between language variation and social variation
(Labov, 1972), Trudgill’s (1972) work on phonological variation in the spoken English
of Norwich showed that standard forms were used more by women than by men, the
latter of whom identified more with stigmatized, popular forms that go against the
linguistic norm. When asked to listen to two different pronunciations of the same word,
men tended to identify more with the nonstandard form, regardless of how they actually pronounced the words themselves. This allowed the authors to demonstrate and
argue for the existence of a sort of covert prestige in the appropriation by men of stigmatized forms. The use of such forms allows them to display affiliation with the male
group; at the same time it allows to finally postulate that deviant forms (interpreted as
innovative) are an index of masculinity. Mirroring this, women are thought to be
inclined to display a conservative or even normative attitude in saying that their
language behavior is more standard.
This body of research has been widely challenged by gender and language studies,
which have been instrumental in establishing a research domain that is both innovative
and diversified in terms of its approaches and theoretical underpinnings (Holmes and
Meyerhoff, 2004; Lakoff, 1975; Livia and Hall, 2000). In regards to Trudgill’s (1972)
work, these studies have brought out a number of issues revolving around four points:
a) the ethnocentric, even culturally situated dimension of the postulation ‘Women
are more conservative than men’ (Keenan-Ochs, 1974);
b) the irreducibly sexist and androcentric dimension of these studies, which see a
conservative stance in the linguistic behavior of women (Cameron, 1985);
c) the overly binary and differential nature of gender identities in linguistic descriptions (‘girls’, ‘boys’; see Goodwin, 2006); and
d) the failure to take into account factors such as social class (Eckert, 1989), dynamics of power (Gal, 1995), and ideologies of the interviewees, in explaining
language behaviors (Bucholtz, 2002).
Although studies on linguistic variation1 postulate a link between language and social
variables, it remains to be explained how this link is generated in social practices. In the
ethnomethodological research trend, Sacks’s (1972) seminal work on how activities
evoke stereotyped categories is worth mentioning here. Through the example ‘the baby
cried, the mommy picked it up’, he showed how members of a society can interpret this
utterance to mean that the person who takes the baby in her arms is the child’s mother,
thanks to a culturally anchored link between activities and categories. In this view, activities (here, ‘pick up a child’) acquire an indexical dimension and are perceived as referring to and being culturally linked to certain categories (here, the mother; see
‘activity-bound categories’ in Sacks, 1972). However, the relationship that is established
between linguistic forms and gender identities is not only indexical, it is also indirect. It
is mediated by ideologies postulating a culturally situated and historically anchored relation between identity and language (Capps and Ochs, 1995; Ochs, 1992). This relation
not only arises from an ethnographic approach – which allows the researcher to uncover
the norms and ideologies in the practices of members of a society and to postulate a link,
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for example between a prosodic contour and a gender identity – it can also be put to use
consciously by individuals as a resource for action. An example is passing, which lends
credibility to the ‘womanness’ of the social actors who practice it (Garfinkel, 1967; Hall,
1995; Kessler and McKenna, 1978), thanks to their knowledge and know-how about the
links between gender and language.
In the past few years, the American philosopher and feminist Judith Butler, along with
sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, has begun to focus more on how gender
norms are constructed (or deconstructed) in discourse (Cameron, 1997; Kitzinger, 2005;
Speer and Stokoe, 2011) than on gender-based language differences.2 That is the contribution of queer linguistics (Livia and Hall, 2000) – or more generally of a postmodern
perspective to gender and language studies (Cameron, 2005) – to a new critical approach
whose ambition is to rethink gender and sexual categories, to shed a new light on concepts as ‘performativity’ and ‘community’. Within this theoretical framework, scholars
are interested in ways through which sexuality is intertwined with gender and desire
(Cameron and Kulick, 2003), in intersectionality between gender, race, class (Hall,
2005), in communities breaking the binary heterosexist system (Borba and Ostermann,
2007; Hall, 2003) and finally in simultaneous ways in which gendered subjects position
themselves and are positioned by power (Baxter, 2003).3
In the analyses proposed here, I will first look at the procedures used by social actors
to make gender norms visible through their speech. In this perspective, norms are incarnated and rendered intelligible by way of recognizable linguistic forms (i.e. generic
utterances). I will then look at how norms are circulated, reproduced, and contested in
various situations. Lastly, I will focus on the irreducibly political nature of my research,
and on the dialectic (and interactive) dimension of the relationship between norms and
language practices.
The data
The data presented in this article are made of participation observation and audio and
video recordings of a variety of situations in a variety of fieldworks since 2002. The first
set of excerpts I will analyze is from my work on ‘gay and lesbian parenting’ between
2003 and 2006, in a French association of gay and lesbian parents and future parents. The
data came from a support group in which the members were asking each other questions
about their desire to be mothers and fathers. The second corpus was gathered during
fieldwork conducted in a French trans-FtM (female-to-male) community between 2003
and 2004, during which I met with several persons who said they were FtMs. These
individuals are persons who were labeled ‘female’ at birth and were in the process of
making an identity change via various techniques, including hormone therapy and mammectomy. The data presented here are mainly drawn from a forum where members
exchange points of view on several topics. The third corpus is from my more recent
fieldwork (2008–2010). It deals with the multimodal construction of male-gendered bodies in a Drag Kings’ workshop in Brussels, Belgium. Drag Kings (hereafter abbreviated
DK) are persons (generally ‘women’) who dress and present themselves in a recognizably ‘male’ way and then stage their masculinity (Bourcier, 2006; Bourcier and Molinier,
2008; Halberstam, 1998). These performances are situated in an irreducibly political
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Greco
framework aimed at questioning and breaking down gender categories. The data analyzed were taken from a workshop in which the participants collectively constructed one
or more male-gendered bodies while drawing from a complex semiotic repertoire.
Emergence of the norm ‘A pregnant woman {that} is a
woman’
In this section, I will analyze an excerpt from the gay and lesbian parenting corpus. It is
part of a discussion between several members of a support group and focuses on the life
path that brought Hilary (H) to decide to choose artificial insemination by an unknown
donor (AID) rather than adoption. In this sequence, H is talking to E (another group
member) about how she progressed toward this decision:
(1)
DP011004p15p2 Une femme enceinte c’est une femme/ a
G
pregnant woman {that} is a woman
1 H
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 E
12 H 13 14 15 on avait un projet d’adoption/ avant euh d’avoir
we were planning on adopting/ before uh our
euh un projet d’IAD / et j’étais pas prête à
uh AID plan/ and I wasn’t ready to
porter un enfant/ mais ça c’est c’e::st une
bear a child/ but that it’s it::is a
question de féminité:: (2) enfin . >moi pour moi<
question of femininity:: (2) I mean . >me for me<
c’était une question de : je me sentais pas
it was a question of: I felt I wasn’t
assez fe:mme/ >ou je voulais pas< j’arrivais pas
enough of a wo::man/ >or I didn’t want to< didn’t feel up to
à revendiquer/ ou assumer/ enceinte/ >j- ne
displaying/ handling/ pregnancy/ >Ipouvais pas en fait assumer le fait d’être
in fact I couldn’t handle the fact of being
enceinte face/ vis-à-vis des autres quoi
pregnant in the face/ in front of others I mean
[parce]que&
[be]cause&
[mhm]
[um]
&j’avais du mal à m’assumer moi-même< .. et
&I was having trouble accepting who I was< .. and
c’était de cet ordre-là\ donc le problème
it was something like that\ therefore the issue
d’adoption c’était en partie/ . . . parce que je me
of adoption was partly/ . . . because I
sentais pas êt-/ porter/ euh un bébé
didn’t feel I could be-/ bear/ uh a child
572
In this excerpt, Hilary situates the path she had followed to come up with this decision,
in a narrative whose preface is stated right away (in the first two lines), via a method of
temporal junction (‘before’, line 1) between two events (‘planning on adopting’ and ‘AID
plan’, lines 1–2). This change of plans is stated as an account (‘I wasn’t ready to bear a
child’, lines 2–3) which accomplished two tasks: it made the adoption plan relevant and
it moved her from a joint experience, the couple’s plan (‘we’, line 1), to a personal experience (‘I’, line 2) in which she explains how she felt about the possibility of being a biological mother (‘I wasn’t ready to bear a child’, lines 2–3). Then, Hilary supports her
initial refusal to bear a child by way of another account that situates (and frames) the
pregnancy around the question of gender (‘but that it’s it::is a question of femininity::’,
lines 3–4). The way her categorization devices succeed each other is quite interesting.
The decision not to get pregnant is justified by her self-positioning on the fringes of the
woman category, which she achieves by a hedge, ‘not enough’ in the description ‘I felt I
wasn’t enough of a wo::man’ (lines 5–6). Thus, she posits a sort of ontological impossibility between the fact of not feeling ‘enough of a woman’ and the possibility of being
pregnant (lines 6–9). This antinomy is again defended at the end of her turn (lines 12–15)
in a closing summary (‘therefore’, line 13) in which the woman category is never verbalized (‘I didn’t feel I could be-/ bear/ uh a child’, lines 14–15). It can nevertheless be
inferred from what precedes (lines 1–13) and what follows, thanks to the ability of certain
states (‘bear a child’) to refer, in a culturally stereotyped way (Sacks, 1972), to the female
identity. The way this state is made to stand out linguistically and morphologically during
the turn is also interesting. The state ‘bear a child’ (lines 14–15) is constructed gradually,
using units that succeed each other in a series of repairs (Schegloff et al., 1977):
(i) je me sentais pas êt-/ -- (ii) porter/ euh un bébé
(i) I didn’t feel I could be-/ --- (ii) bear/ uh a child
A few seconds later as she talks with I, E, and myself (L), Hilary comes back to this
point, noting that her choices have evolved (lines 80–81):
((several lines omitted))
80 H [mais] ça ça peut évoluer
[but] this this can change
81
aussi moi [ça xxx]
also I [that xxx]
82 I [ça peut] évoluer oui [j-suis pas j-&
[this can] change yes [I’m not I-&
83 E [finalement&
[actually&
84 I &j-suis pas
&I’m not
85 E c’estxxx [(ça depend&
&it’sxxx [(it all depends&
86 L
[c’est une&
[it’s a&
87 E &de ce que tu fais) xxxxx quoi xxx]
&on what you do) xxxxx I mean xxx]
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Greco
88 L &image du co:::rps ] qu’est ce
&bo:::dy image ] what’s
89
qu- bon c’est vrai que avec [euh avec]
what- well it’s true that with [uh with]
90 H [ouais mais]
[yeah but]
91 L avec euh [xxx]
with uh [xxx]
92 H [une] femme enceinte c’est une femme
[a] pregnant woman {that} is a woman
Following my intervention (lines 86, 88, 89) about what being pregnant might represent in terms of one’s body image, Hilary took the floor (line 90) to produce a generic
utterance: ‘A pregnant woman {that} is a woman’ (line 92). This turn, while echoing the
ontological impossibility announced earlier between pregnancy and being located on the
fringes of womanhood (lines 5–6), represents a genuine process of norm emphasis. It
takes shape in a morphosyntactic structure ‘NPadj {that} is NP’ (‘a pregnant woman
{that} is a woman’4) where the first and second NPs (noun phrases) are the same except
that the first has an attributive adjective and the second does not.5 This construction clarifies the stereotyped relationship between the category and the state. The presentative
‘{that} is’ posits an implication between the categories ‘woman’ and ‘pregnant woman’,
in the form of a generic utterance. First, the link between the category (woman) and the
state (bear a child) is presented as non-negotiable; second, the woman category is rendered, by the pregnant-woman stereotype, the prototype. In the next section, we shall see
how other communities can make use of a similar type of linguistic structure (‘NP is/are
X’) to reproduce a norm that postulates a link between identities and states.
Reproducing gender norms
In the course of my work in discussion forums of the FtM community, I was struck by a
topic that a user brought up: the possibility of a transgender man having children. Here
is how a member of the community reacted to this idea:
(2) ForumFtM: pregnant man
u risque de me faire insulter moi je n’arrive pas a comprendre
a
que vous
so what if I get insulted but me I can’t understand how you
puissiez ne serais ce qu’envisager d
e pouvoir imaginer de
porter un gamin. . .
could even so much as contemplate being able to imagine having
a child. . .
C’est kan meme le must de la feminité
after all it’s the epitome of womanliness
Being pregnant is perceived here as ‘the epitome’ of womanliness, as a trait that is
inescapably linked to the ‘woman’ category and has the power to index a person who
574
bears a child as irremediably ‘female’, once and for all. The topic was closed with a
photo that triggered many reactions, some of which were deep-seated attacks:
(3) ForumFtM: pregnant man
je suis desolé j’ai peut etre un esprit tro heteronormer
mais je
I’m sorry my standards may be too hetero-oriented but I
trouve cette foto chokante
find this picture shocking
The picture showed a side view of a pregnant transgender FtM who had undergone a
mammectomy and whose facial hair was trimmed into a goatee. As illustrated by the following statement, some members of the forum attacked the possibilities suggested by
this picture, while nonetheless postulating a link between norms, states, and categories:
4) ForumFtM: pregnant man
Un homme c’est comme ça ça porte pas d’enfant
Men6 are like that they don’t bear children
This statement, which looks like a generic utterance, by the same token as the one that
emerged from Hilary’s speaking turn (‘a pregnant woman {that} is a woman’), tells us
about the link between a category (‘man’) and a state (‘not bearing a child’), at the same
time as it makes a gender norm intelligible based on reproductive functions. This link is
stated as ontologically impossible by way of some rather interesting linguistic devices.
The statement is first prefaced by a general truth (‘men are like that’), which is then
stated and supported by the second part of the utterance (‘they don’t bear children’) in
which the pronoun ‘they’, while pointing anaphorically to the NP ‘men’, introduces the
impossibility of experiencing pregnancy. This impossibility is incarnated at the linguistic
level (see ‘are like that’ located after the NP ‘men’) and challenges one of the ideological
pillars of our societies: the sex difference in reproduction (Heritier, 1996; Mathieu,
1991). The following two excerpts taken from two French newspapers illustrate this:
(5) I
nterview with Nicolas Sarkozy (former President of
France) (Le Figaro Magazine, 1 September 2006)
[. . .] « le modèle qui est le nôtre doit rester celui d’une
famille hétérosexuelle :
"[. . .] the model that is ours must remain the model of a
heterosexual
les enfants ont besoin d’un père et d’une mère»
family: children need a father and a mother."
(6) I
nterview with Philippe de Villiers (former member of a
Conservative Party in France), Le Monde, 9 September 2006
our un enfant, un papa et une maman, c’est mieux que deux papas
P
ou deux mamans.
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"For a child, a dad and a mom is better than two dads or two moms.
C’est une question de sécurité pour la société. Dissocier le
mariage de la
It’s a question of security for society. Separating marriage from
filiation, c’est aller vers le chaos
descendence is moving toward chaos."
The way gender norms are constructed, conveyed, and reproduced is closely tied to
morphosyntactic forms of the type ‘NP is/are X’. These utterances can be used in a wide
range of contexts, precisely because of their idiomatic ‘frozen’ format that takes on general truth values, and also because of their high degree of abstraction and ‘single sentence packing’ (see Sacks, 1992, I: 110). In this respect, they have a generative power
that Sacks (1992, I: 107) noted in proverbs or even idiomatic expressions:
What we can come to see is that there can be a very limited set of paradigms or models, each of
which may have demarcated areas of order, which can operate generatively for an enormous
range of further areas.
From this angle, they provide an opportune place for inquiries into how norms are
crystallized in language and are circulated from one context to the next. A large amount
of knowledge (and many gender norms) can be transmitted accordingly.
In the section that follows, we shall see how morphosyntactic structure of the
utterances analyzed above can be reappropriated by participants for political
purposes.
Challenging gender norms
During a transgender rally I attended in Paris in 2008 (‘Existrans’), I was intrigued by a
slogan I had already heard during other queer political actions:
(7) Existrans08slogan1-field notes
<Un homme c’est comme ça>((voix grave et en mimant les
stéréotypes de l’homme))
<Men are like that>((deep voice imitating male stereotypes)),
<une femme c’est comme ça>((voix aigue et en mimant les stéréo
types de la femme)),
<Women are like that>((high-pitched voice imitating female
stereotypes)),
<ta gueule, le psy tu nous fatigues>((avec un ton enragé et
hurlé))
<shut up, you shrink you’re annoying us>((in a yelled and furi
ous tone of voice))
In writing this article, I realized that in the utterances ‘men are like that’ and ‘women
are like that’, the morphosyntactic form ‘NP is/are X’ has a reproduction and
576
reappropriation effect. I became aware of the generative capability of utterances, that
is, their ability to circulate from one context to another.7 In the case of the above slogan, we can hardly say that this is a simple reproduction of the utterances presented
earlier. On the one hand, we can see that this new utterance contains a recurring structure of the type ‘NP is/are X’ that reproduces a non-negotiable truth and a gender norm,
in that it represents the demand for, and transmission of, binarity. On the other hand,
the norms evoked are made intelligible not only by verbal devices, but also by other
semiotic resources. They are parodied by nonverbal behaviors (voice, gestures, and
postures that parody and mimic masculine and feminine stereotypes), and they are
contested and ascribed to the dominant discourse of psychiatrists, as we can see in the
final part of the utterance ‘<shut up, you shrink you’re annoying us>((in a yelled and
furious tone of voice))’, which attributes the authorship of what precedes to the psychiatric power structure.8 In this case, the protestors animate the voice of a power (‘Men
are like that’, ‘Women are like that’), all the while introducing elements of authorship
that show up in their tone of voice and parodic gestures. This seems to be a process of
stereotype reappropriation (high voice for women, deep voice for men) that serves to
denounce the gender norms conveyed by the psychiatric authority. The denunciation
will reach its culmination point at the end of the utterance (‘shut up, you shrink, you’re
annoying us’) in which the protestors will talk entirely on their own behalf, as the animators, authors, and principals of their discourse (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin, 1990), a
discourse which, by condemning the psychiatrization of transgender individuals and
calling for self-determination of the sexes and genders, is undeniably political.9 Here,
heteronormative binarism becomes the core of a political battle, as we can see in the
following slogan of the rally:
(8) Existrans08slogan2-field notes
Ni homme, ni femme : le binarisme nous rend malades
Neither man, neither woman: binarism makes us sick
In stigmatized communities situated in the fringes of economic, social, racial, or
gender power, discourse can become a weapon of struggle (Morgan, 2002) for resisting
exclusion and avoiding being ignored, by way of its ability to mobilize a whole series
of linguistic, pragmatic, and multimodal resources aimed at creating a space for speech,
opposition, and freedom. In this framework, questioning and contesting gender norms
can also be achieved through a creative appropriation of masculinity, or through the
creation of new linguistic forms that challenge M–F binarity. The Drag Kings (DK) and
the participants of the rally mentioned above share a political view that intends to overcome and destroy M–F binarism in the long run. In DK workshops, one learns to build
one (or more) male-gendered bodies by means of a multisemiotic repertoire ranging
from make-up (for mustaches and beards) to dress, including stance, walk, voice, and
choice of a character to be embodied later on. The following excerpt shows how the
embodiment of masculinity relies on devices for reappropriating, parodying, and challenging gender norms:
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Greco
(9) DKB08-viril
1 C
2
3
4
5
6
7 J
8 9
10
11 C
je suis encore
I’m even
plus viril MAIS mes
more virile BUT my
poils poussent sur
body hair is growing on
les o::ngles chez
my nai::ls on
moi
me
((rire))
((laughing))
SUR LA LANGUE SUR
ON MY TONGUE ON
LA LANGUE SUR L-C MY TONGUE ON M- ASUR LES OREILLES
ON MY EARS
((rire))
((laughing))
dans le nez
in my nose
Virility is contested and resemiotized here through irony, using devices for exacerbating, stereotyping (‘even more’, lines 1–2), and modifying the category (see the categorical
modifier ‘but’, line 2). Not only is virility pushed to an extreme, it is also ‘modified’, made
unreal by way of prepositional phrases post-posed to the predicate ‘my body hair is growing’ (lines 2–3): ‘on my nails’, lines 3–4, ‘on my tongue’, lines 7–8, ‘on my ears’, line 9,
‘in my nose’, line 11. The loudness of the speaker’s voice (see uppercase letters on lines 2
and 7–9) and repeated laughing (lines 6 and 10) index a parodic and ironic context (like
the one that framed the behaviors observed in the previous excerpt) typical of the queer
culture and its politics, where counter-discourse practices using norm, resignification,
recontextualization, and demystification devices are common (Halperin, 2000). The contextualization of these practices in an extra-interactional context is necessary for understanding their irreducibly political character. In this vein, the excerpt between K and
myself (L) below shows how the incarnation of masculinity experienced in DK workshops
makes plain the gendered and political dimension of the body space and body positions:
(10) DKBentr.espace
1 L
2 3 je voudrais savoir si pour vous / (2)
I’d like to know if for you / (2)
l’atelier drag king c’est ju::ste un mo::ment que
the drag king workshop is ju::st a mo::ment that
vous prenez euh tu vois une fois par mois / (…)
you take uh y’know once a month / (. . .)
578
4 et puis ça s’arrête là/ (1) ou si: eu::h . . . quelque
part/ vous
and then it stops here/ (1) or if: uh::m . . . somehow/you
5
avez l’impression de continuer les ateliers drag
have the impression that you continue the drag
6
king (1) même .hh les autres jou::rs (1) euh du mois\
king workshops (1) even .hh on the other da::ys (1)
uh of the month\
7(1)
8 K ah mois oui complètement c’est-à-dire ça m’a o
ah me yes absolutely I mean it m
9 m- (2) on continue un petit peu dans la rue on continue
m- (2) we continue a little bit on the street we continue
10
à penser à tout ce qui est conditionnement gestuel
thinking about all the gestural conditioning
11
m- m- on repère tout de suite comme des gestes
m- m- we notice right away like feminine gestures
12
féminins/ on fait attention à ce que les autres/
feminine/ we pay attention to what others/
13
>voient de nous</ ça se voit tout de suite quand ils
>see of us</ you can tell right away when they
14
sont quand ils sont troublés quand ils savent pas si
vous êtes°un
are when they are puzzled when they don’t know if you’re °a
15
mec une nana° et bon y a rien entre les deux/
guy a gal° and well there’s nothing in-between the two/
16 L mhm mhm
uh huh
17 K et c’est vraiment intéressant euh à la limite
and it’s really interesting uh actually
18
instamment on peut pas s’empêcher de ((rire)) de
immediately you can’t help ((laughs))
19
jouer au contraire le : le plus possible à la caricature
doing the opposite playing it up as: as much as possible
20 L mhm mhm
uh huh
21 K ouais c’est c’e ::st (2) et aussi moi je trouve ça m’a
yeah it’s it::s (2) and besides I think it
22
ça m’a aidé à me ressentir vraiment mieux parce que
(1) tout ce
it helped me feel really better about myself because
(1) all the
23
qui est gestes de drag king qu’on xxx associe à des
gestes dans
drag king body postures that are xxx associated with
postures
24
lesquels on aime bien se tenir mmh deux pieds bien
droits par
where well we like to put hmm two feets flat on
579
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25
terre les choses comme ça alors que en fille <on va
the ground things like that whereas if you’re in a
girl <you’re
26
plutôt l’habitude se tenir comme ça>((en déhanchant))et de : de
going to be accustomed to hold your body like this
instead>((sways hips))and to : to
27
deux pieds pointés sur terre sur tête/ (1) lever la
tête/ le
two feet squarely on the ground on the head / (1)
your head held
high/ and
28
regard droit devant et tout tous ces trucs là ça
effectivement ça
looking straight ahead and all that kind of stuff
there that actually
29
fait aussi se sentir mieux et se sentir (1) en
possession de
that also makes you feel better about yourself and
feel (1) like you have control over
30
l’espace se sentir le droit d’être là et tout c’est c’est
the space feel like you have the right to be there
and all that it’s it’s
31important
important
J’s replies take place in a sequential environment typical of interviews: the question/
answer pair. Accordingly, after my question (1–6), J starts to give an account of a personal experience outside the DK workshop. There are two significant elements in the
first part of zir10 reply. The first is the realization that movements and postures are subject
to social conditioning (line 10) and that one acquires the skill of detecting such gendered
movements and postures (‘feminine’, line 12); the second is the realization of a self that
transcends the traditional categories (‘a guy a gal’, lines 14–15). This awareness also
underlies the ability to notice how others look at oneself, and how they are puzzled by a
body that is ‘in-between’ (line 15).
The second part of J’s reply (lines 21–31) presents two rather interesting points worth
considering. One is the possibility of appropriating (and thus unavoidably transforming)
a stance socialized as ‘masculine’11 (‘two feet flat on the ground’, lines 24–25) categorized as a ‘drag king body posture’ (line 23). The other is becoming aware of one’s position on the fringes of society where the pedestrian space becomes a metaphor that
highlights this subordination fairly well. From this angle, masculinity (line 23) is
expressed by default in a syntactic construction in which feminine movements (swaying
your hips, line 26) are introduced by the linguistic device ‘whereas’ (line 25). Thus, via
the appropriation of a repertoire of drag king body postures (line 23), the urban space is
incarnated by ‘the right to be there’ (line 30) with ‘head held high’ (line 27) and ‘looking
straight ahead’ (line 28). Here, walking ‘like a man’ or ‘dressing like a man’ is less of an
exaggerated depiction of masculinity (even if it is the inevitable response to the looks of
580
Figure 1. Rally flyer.
others, lines 17–19) as it is a multisemiotic, fundamentally political practice, in the sense
that it fosters awareness of an inferior rank in society. Most people who go to these workshops participate in activities aimed at fighting against binarism and the sexing of persons. They are often militants in an association called ‘Genres pluriels’ (Plural Genders)12
whose name evokes both the existence of a plurality of genders and the necessity of moving away from the gender duality. While such workshops can be regarded as providing a
possible place for challenging gender norms (to the extent that reappropriating masculinity helps extend, fluidify, and contest gender boundaries and binarity), it is necessary – if
we want to grasp their political power – to connect them to the battles undertaken by
workshop members in other contexts. A flyer distributed by three workshop participants
at a gathering in support of transgender, transsexual, and intersex persons (see Figures
1–3) echoes the slogans found at the Existrans rally in Paris (see Excerpt 7), the political
objectives of DK workshops, and the performance of the rally organizers, who set up a
‘degendering booth’ to encourage participants to undo and (re)do their gender.
Concluding remarks
My presence at all three sites could only have been experienced as a political dynamic of
alliance. First of all, the participants saw me as a member of an action group for questioning and contesting the heteropatriarchal and androcentric character of our society.
Second, the ethnographic studies I was conducting were ones that worked on, for, and
with them (Cameron et al., 1993), and also for a ‘we’ of which I am a part. My position
as a gay, feminist, queer scholar at the three sites allowed me not only to come into direct
contact with, and thereby enrich the theoretical frameworks advocated, the ethnographic
581
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Figure 2. Degendering booth in Brussels (view 1).13
Figure 3. Degendering booth in Brussels (view 2).
inquiry methods used, and the topics chosen for analysis, but also to promote a socially
and politically anchored view of linguistics that takes a stand in the stakes and battlegrounds of our society.
582
In this article I explored how gender norms, that is, injunctions to masculinity and femininity (‘Un homme c’est comme ça’ – ‘Men are like that’ and ‘Les femmes sont comme ça’
– ‘Women act that way’) emerge and circulate in speech practices in a variety of contexts and
through a multitude of semiotic resources. In my data, gender categories and gender norms
are resources used by participants to strengthen, to challenge, and to deconstruct ideas and
stereotypes about masculinity and femininity. The ways through which participants handle
gender categories and norms reminds me of some ‘homemade semantics’ where social actors
meticulously construct and deconstruct gender meanings and linguistic forms.
Gender and norms identities are performed through iteration and (ironic) quotation.
Therein, identity (de)construction is not the sole fruit of the actions of individuals (performance), but arises also or (partly) revolves around norms and power (performativity).14 This being the case, at the same time as practices are based on past frameworks
and contexts, they can prefigure and configure future contexts aimed at changing society
by fighting against binarism. It is through circulation, repetition, and transformation that
gender norms and practices are constructed and deconstructed, between a past that has
made us and constrains us, and a future open to possibilities and creations.
Notes
1. Eckert (2005) contributed substantially to creating a dynamic (versus monolithic) view of
variationism by proposing in her paper three waves in this trend, which led to important
changes in how we conceive of the linguistic community and how we interrelate linguistic
forms and social variables. The work on variation I am referring to here belongs to the
‘first wave’.
2. For an excellent analysis of the linguistic procedures used by ethnologists to convey an
androcentric view of the world, see Mathieu (1991) and Michard (2000), who work in the
framework of French materialist feminism.
3. For a critical and historical analysis of the so-called ‘postmodern feminism’ or third wave
feminism, see Cameron (2005) and Mills (2003).
4. The French sentence was ‘Une femme enceinte, c’est une femme’. The French presentative
‘c’est’ is denoted here in our English translation as ‘{that} is’. The braces indicate that the
word ‘that’ would not generally be used in English (‘A pregnant woman is a woman’).
5. In this metalinguistic construction, a noun phrase containing an attributive adjective has its
predicate the same noun phrase without the attribute adjective. This structure emphasizes the
importance of the noun in the second NP.
6. The French sentence was ‘Un homme c’est comme ça . . .’. Here in the English translation,
the plural ‘men’ is used instead of the singular as in French (‘un homme’) to indicate the
generic category ‘man’. It could be interesting to compare this example to another included
in Provencher (2007), where he analyzes the statement ‘Parce que 2 hommes ne peuvent pas
avoir d’enfants’ (‘Because two men can’t have babies’). In Provencher’s analysis, the informant (a gay man) comes out to his father with this statement instead of saying ‘Je suis homo’
(‘I am gay’) because he knows his father will understand the social role of parenting.
7. This what Judith Butler (1993: 234) understands by the concept of performativity: ‘performativity [. . .] consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer
and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performers ‘‘will’’ or ‘‘choice’’ [. . .]’.
8. As shown in the french transcript ‘le psy’.
9. One can check the blog of the Existrans rally at http://www.existrans.org/. For the list of
demands and press releases, look under ‘Communication’ at http://www.existrans.org/index.
php?category/Communication.
583
Greco
10. ‘Zir’ is a quite common pronominal form used by transgender people in order to refer to
persons not identified in male–female binarity.
11. What makes someone ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ is less some essential quality of masculinity
– which determines, once and for all, the classification as ‘masculine’ of a person’s voice,
movements, and postures, etc. – as it is the outcome of a socialization process to which we
have all been subjected since childhood. This is very similar to how Goffman (1977) conceived of ‘sex classes’, that is, as socially instituted devices in effect when a child is born.
12.http://www.genrespluriels.be/.
13. Thanks to Max Nisol and Londé Ngosso for the photos taken during the rally.
14. Concerning the distinction between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’, see Butler (1993: 2,
234) and Kulick (2003: 140, 2005).
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Appendix: T
ranscription conventions (based on the ICAR Lab Lyon 2
transcription system)
[ ] : overlapping talk
= : no discernible interval between turns
& : used to show that the same person continues speaking across an intervening line displaying
overlapping talk
(2) : intervals within or between talk
(.) : discernible pause or gap, too short to measure
/ : rising intonation
\ : falling intonation
! : animated tone
- : abrupt cut off of sound
: extension of preceding sound – the more colons the greater the extension
HERE : louder relative to surrounding talk
°here° : softer relative to surrounding talk
>this< : Speeding up or compressed relative to surrounding talk
<this> : ((clapping))
xxx : transcriber unable to hear words
(bring) : transcriber uncertain of hearing
((coughs)) : word(s) in double transcriber’s comments on or description of parentheses sound;
other audible sounds are represented as closely as possible in standard orthography.
Author biography
Luca Greco is an Assistant Professor in sociolinguistics working on categorization
practices in talk, texts, and bodily conducts in interaction at ILPGA Paris III Sorbonne
Nouvelle, France. Current research includes audio and video recordings from various
settings and communities (gay and lesbian parenting community, drag king groups,
and FemaleToMale trans persons in France and Belgium) focusing on the ways
through which participants construct and deconstruct gender identity and norms in
social practices. Dr Greco’s theoretical framework is linguistic anthropology crossing
queer and gender studies, ethnographic methods, and membership categorization
analysis approaches.

Production, circulation and deconstruction of gender

Transcription

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