Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon

Feminist Meanings and the (De)Politicization of the LexiconAuthor(s): Susan Ehrlich and Ruth KingReviewed work(s):Source: Language in Society, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 59-76Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168494 .Accessed: 20/06/2012 12:25

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Language in Society 23, 59-76. Printed in the United States of America

Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon

SUSAN EHRLICH AND RUTH KING

Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics York University

North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

ABSTRACT

In arguing for the necessity of gender-based language reform, feminist theorists have generally assumed that language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing reality. Rather, language is assumed to codify an androcentric worldview. While sexist language clearly reflects sexist social practices, the continuing existence of such practices throws into question the possibility of successful language reform. Because linguistic meanings are, to a large extent, socially constructed and constituted, terms initially introduced to be nonsexist and neutral may lose their neutrality in the mouths of a sexist speech community and/or culture. In this article we first examine the way in which nonsexist innovations have been appropriated by a sexist speech community. More specifically, we examine uses of neutral generics such as chairperson, spokesperson; singular they; he or she; and neutral titles such as Ms.; and we demonstrate that these terms are often not used nor interpreted in their intended (neutral) way. Rather, they are used in ways that maintain sexist stereotypes and distinctions. Then we examine the use of feminist linguistic innovations as they appear in the print media. We demonstrate the extent to which such terms get redefined and depoliticized by a speech community that is not predominantly feminist and is often sexist. (Language and gender, language and race, nonsexist language, gender-based language reform, neutral generics, discourse analysis)*

In arguing for the necessity of gender-based language reform, feminist theorists have generally assumed that language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing social realities. Rather, it is assumed that a particular vision of social reality gets inscribed in language - a vision of reality that does not serve all of its speakers equally. Like other social institutions and practices, language is seen as serving the interests of the dominant classes (Gal 1989, 1991); in the case of sexist language, language can be said to codify an androcentric worldview. The "names" that a language attaches to events and activities, for example, especially those related to sex and sexu-

? 1994 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/94 $5.00 + .00

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ality, often encode a male perspective. Cameron 1985 discusses terms such as penetration, fuck, screw, and lay, all of which turn heterosexual sex into something men do to women. (Penetration from a female perspective would be more appropriately encoded as enclosure, surrounding, or engulfing.) What becomes clear from such terms is the extent to which language serves as an ideological filter on the world: language shapes or constructs our notions of reality, rather than labeling that reality in any transparent and straightforward way. In addition, as shown by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1994, language's ideological perspective is often naturalized, "obscuring its status as one among many perspectives."

While androcentric language clearly reflects and reproduces sexist social structures and attitudes, the continuing existence of such structures and attitudes throws into question the possibility of successful language reform. Graddol & Swann (1989:110) comment:

Sexist language is not simply a linguistic problem. The existence of unmarked expressions 'in the language' does not mean that these will be used and interpreted in a neutral way. This may lead one to question the value of the linguistic reforms advocated in writers' and publishers' guidelines.

Cameron (1985:90) makes a similar point:

... in the interests of accuracy we should strive to include the female half of the human race by replacing male terms with neutral ones. But the 'reality' to which language relates is a sexist one, and in it there are no neutral terms.... In the mouths of sexists, language can always be sexist.

As McConnell-Ginet (1989:47) points out, in connection with women saying "No" to men's sexual advances, "meaning is a matter not only of individual will but of social relations embedded in political structures." A woman will say "No" with sincerity to a man's sexual advances, but the "No" gets filtered through a series of beliefs and attitudes that transform the woman's "direct negative" into an "indirect affirmative": "She is playing hard to get, but of course she really means yes." Linguistic meanings are, to a large extent, determined by the dominant culture's social values and attitudes - i.e. they are socially constructed and constituted; hence terms initially introduced to be nonsexist, nonracist, or even feminist may (like a woman's response of "No" to a man's sexual advances) lose their intended meanings in the mouths and ears of a sexist, racist speech community and culture.1

NONSEXIST AND FEMINIST LINGUISTIC

INNOVATIONS AS RESISTANCE

Dominant modes of discourse may serve the interests of some groups more successfully than others, but they are rarely without resistance. Gal

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(DE)POLITICIZATION OF THE LEXICON

(1989:349) describes two ways in which "resistance to dominant representa- tions" occurs: "when devalued linguistic strategies and genres are practiced despite denigration, and when these devalued practices propose or embody alternate models of the social world." Linguistic innovations can resist or challenge androcentric linguistic norms in at least two ways: (a) they can replace forms (sexist) that already exist in a language, or (b) they can encode phenomena that have previously gone unnamed. Both types of innovations can be said to "embody alternate models of the social world." For example, by replacing masculine generics (e.g. he, man) with neutral generics (e.g. they, with singular reference, he/she) advocates of gender-based language reform are challenging the claim implicit in the use of masculine generics that men are the typical case of humanity and that women are a deviation from this norm.2 In a similar way, innovative terms such as sexism and sexual harassment (what we are calling feminist linguistic innovations) function to reinterpret and give a name to the experiences of women. As Steinem (1983:149) says of these terms: "A few years ago, they were just called life." Together, these types of linguistic innovations - or, to use Cameron's (1990b) term, "the feminist critique of language" - have challenged the absolute hegemony of male-defined meanings and grammar. At the least, this critique has exposed the nontransparency of language, bringing to light and "denaturaliz- ing" its androcentric perspective.

When it is claimed (a) that linguistic meanings are to a large extent socially constructed and constituted, and (b) that they serve the social and political interests of the dominant classes, a question arises concerning the extent to which language can represent a minority ideological perspective, i.e. a nonsexist and feminist one, within the context of a dominant culture that is sexist. This article examines the way in which nonsexist and feminist linguistic innovations travel and get circulated within the society at large, and more particularly in the public media. In the first section, we look at the way that nonsexist alternatives to masculine generics get used and interpreted, dem- onstrating that these terms are often not used or interpreted in their intended way. In the second section, we extend our analysis to what we call feminist linguistic innovations - terms like sexism, feminism, sexual harassment, and date rape - as they are used in the print media. We demonstrate the extent to which these kinds of terms get redefined and often depoliticized as they become integrated into the larger, often sexist, speech community.

NEUTRAL TITLES AND GENERICS

Gender-based language reform has enjoyed a certain degree of success over the last decade: thus McConnell-Ginet 1989 points out that it is becoming ever harder to make he function generically, given the debates and disputes surrounding the pronoun's so-called generic usage. But there are indications

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that such reform does not always have its intended effect. In a survey of studies investigating the use of generic man, Sunderland 1991 concludes that its use is in decline. However, her final comments (p. 520) do not convey unqualified optimism:

Although man seems to be in a state of decline, might it not refuse to actually die, but rather play a role in limited linguistic contexts? . . . Or might man-words die but with an accompanying increase in the use of sex-specific man-words in, say, examples and verbal illustrations - perhaps very stereo- typed ones? (emphasis supplied).

For instance in the linguistics literature one might find a decrease in the use of masculine generic forms, but an increase in example sentences that refer to males in stereotypical ways. In speculating about a further decline in the use of generic man, Sunderland elucidates the lack of necessary connection between a reduction in the use of sexist linguistic forms, on the one hand, and nonsexist language, on the other. Specifically, if masculine generic forms are simply replaced by sex-specific male forms, then nonsexist language reform can hardly be said to have been successful.

The title Ms. was originally popularized by feminists in the 1970s to replace Miss and Mrs. and to provide a parallel term to Mr., in that both Ms. and Mr. designate gender without indicating marital status. Miller & Swift 1976 see the elimination of Mrs. and Miss in favor of Ms. as a way of allowing women to be seen as people in their own right, rather than in relation to someone else. Unfortunately, while Ms. was intended to parallel Mr., con- siderable evidence suggests that it is not used nor interpreted in this intended way. Graddol & Swann (1989:97) explain that Ms. is not a neutral title for women in Britain, in that it sometimes replaces Miss as an indicator of single marital status: "in some contexts it seems to have coalesced with Miss (official forms sometimes distinguish only Mrs. and Ms.)." Similarly, Pene- lope 1990 claims that speakers in the United States use and interpret Ms. as referring to single women who are trying to hide the fact that they are single. From these two examples, we see that the married/single distinction continues to be marked linguistically; it is only the title signifying single status that has changed. The importance of women's marital status is also demonstrated by the following Ms. -related examples. Frank & Treichler (1989:218) cite this directive, sent to public information officers in the state of Penn- sylvania: "If you use Ms. for a female, please indicate in parentheses after the Ms. whether it's Miss or Mrs." Atkinson 1987, in a Canadian study of attitudes toward the use of Ms. and birthname retention among women, found that many of her respondents had a three-way distinction: they used Mrs. for married women, Miss for women who had never been married, and Ms. for divorced women. What all these examples demonstrate is the high

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premium placed on identifying women by their relationship (current or otherwise) to men. In spite of the intended neutrality associated with Ms., it seems to be used and interpreted in ways that maintain the linguistic distinction the title was intended to erase.

In a similar way, true generics such as chairperson and spokesperson, introduced to replace masculine generics like chairman and spokesman, seem to have lost their neutrality in that they are often only used for women. The following example containing announcements of academics changing jobs, cited by Dubois & Crouch 1987 (from the Chronicle of Higher Education), demonstrates that a woman is a chairperson, but a man is a chairman.

Margarette P. Eby, Chairperson of Humanities at U. of Michigan at Dear- born, to Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and Professor of Music at U. of Northern Iowa.

David W. Hamilton, Associate Professor of Anatomy at Harvard, to Chairman of Anatomy at U. of Minnesota.

From such examples we see that the attempt to replace a masculine generic with a neutral one has been somewhat unsuccessful. This same kind of distinction is made consistently in publications such as The New York Times and in Toronto's two newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The Star), and was made by George Bush in his 1992 State of the Union Address when he distinguished between the chairman and the chair of certain committees, to refer to a male and female, respectively.3 Rather than ridding the language of a masculine generic, then, the introduction of neutral generic forms such as chairperson or chair has led to a gender-based distinction between forms such as chairperson or chair (used to designate females) vs. chairman (used to designate males).4 Thus both the title Ms. and these true generics are used in ways that maintain distinctions the terms were intended to eliminate - distinctions that are clearly important to the speech community.

Concerned with interpretation rather than use, Khosroshahi 1989 investi- gates the mental imagery evoked by neutral generics such as he or she, she or he, singular they, as opposed to masculine generics (he), in an experimen- tal setting. Earlier studies had shown that he/man generics (even though intended generically) readily evoked images of males rather than females. One of the aims of nonsexist language reform has been to eliminate the so- called generic terms that have been shown to consistently produce images of a specific sex, i.e. males. Khosroshahi's study included both male and female respondents with both reformed and traditional language usage (i.e. four groups). She summarizes her results (p. 517):

All groups were androcentric except the women who had reformed their language; androcentric in the sense that when they read a paragraph that

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was ambiguous with respect to gender, they were more likely to interpret it as referring to a male than to a female character. Even if the paragraph used he or she or they, feminine referents did not become more salient than masculine ones.

These results demonstrate that, for most of the speakers in this experiment, the use of masculine vs. neutral generics had no significant effect on the image evoked: male referents were always more salient than female ones, even if he or she or singular they were used. Khosroshahi (518) explains her results in the following way: "In a literature dominated by male characters, initially sex-indefinite words must quickly develop masculine connotations." This study, then, shows that terms intended by their inventors to be neutral and generic are not always interpreted that way. Again, we see that prevail- ing attitudes and values of a culture determine how these innovative, nonsexist terms get interpreted, in spite of their intended neutrality. It is interesting to note that the exceptional group in this study, the reformed language women, not only interpreted neutral generics in terms of female referents, but also interpreted the masculine generic mostly in terms of female referents. In other words, they displayed the opposite pattern to the other three groups: female (as opposed to male) referents were evoked regardless of the type of generic pronoun used. Again, we see that the interpretation of the pronoun is heavily influenced by the ideologies of an individual or speech community, rather than by the particular pronoun used in a given context. In terms of both use and interpretation, then, we see that the neutral title Ms. and neutral generics do not always function in their intended (neutral) way.

A similar point regarding the (mis)use of neutral generics is made by Sil- verstein 1985. Considering the relationship between language structure and ideology, he notes (252) that ideologically charged lexical reform "has both a certain potential for misfire and abuse, and a certain generative force reas- serting categorical homeostasis." He cites, as we did earlier, the use of neutral generics like chairperson to designate female referents. Silverstein also considers cases of language reform where neutral terms such as actor and waiter are advocated as replacements for words with feminine suffixes such as actress and waitress. In Silverstein's terms, the category of gender often gets reconstituted in these cases: a supposedly neutral term like server takes on the feminine suffix that the neutral term was intended to eliminate, as in serveress. Again, while the terms involved in these opposition may change (e.g. Mrs. /Miss -* Mrs. /Ms., chairman/chairwoman -+ chairman /chairperson, waiter/waitress -* server/serveress), what persists is the linguistic encoding of social distinctions that are clearly of ideological importance to the speech community (the married/single distinction among women, or the male/female distinction).

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FEMINIST LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS

Another instance of feminist linguistic resistance is the coining of new terms to express women's perceptions and experiences - phenomena previously unexpressed in a language encoding a male worldview. About the importance of feminist linguistic innovations, Cameron (1990b: 13) says: "Since feelings and ideas without words to express them may remain fleeting, inchoate, and unrecognized by the culture at large, our languages are less than perfect vehi- cles for expressing women's most pressing concerns." While feminist linguistic innovations (such as feminism, sexism, sexual harassment, and date rape) pervade our culture, it is not clear that their use is consistent with their intended, feminist-influenced, meanings. In what follows, we identify some of the discursive strategies used systematically by the print media to redefine and depoliticize feminist linguistic innovations. In the process of redefinition, phenomena like sexual harassment and date rape are rendered nonexistent at best, and at worst trivialized and delegitimized. We demonstrate the extent to which these feminist innovations, like the nonsexist innovations described earlier, get appropriated by a sexist speech community, in this case nonpro- gressive elements of the print media.5

Following Fowler 1991, Fairclough 1989, and Kress & Hodge 1979, we assume that language is a highly constructive mediator; and that, like any kind of representational discourse, the print media use language to construct a particular ideological perspective on the world. Furthermore, following Herman & Chomsky 1988, we assume that the ideological perspective from which the mainstream media in North America present events in the world is one that serves the interests of the dominant elite. It is perhaps not surprising, then, given the current backlash against feminism documented so well by Faludi 1991, that feminist linguistic innovations would be redefined in ways that trivialize and minimize many important issues arising from the contemporary women's movement. Faludi (p. xviii) comments on the role of language in the feminist backlash:

The backlash has succeeded in framing virtually the whole issue of women's rights in its own language. Just as Reaganism shifted political discourse far to the right and demonized liberalism, so the backlash convinced the public that women's "liberation" was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and eco- nomic problems.

Redefinition as omission or obscuring

The first kind of discursive strategy to be exemplified involves the elimination or obscuring of crucial aspects of a term's definition. The following examples illustrate how the phenomenon of sexual harassment virtually dis- appears when its distinguishing characteristics are omitted from its descrip-

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tion. In an article in the National Review, author Morgenson (1991:37) reports a Times/CBS sexual harassment poll in which 38%7o of the respondents said that they had been "the object of sexual advances, propositions, or unwanted sexual discussions" from men who supervised them or could affect their position at work. However, only 4'7o actually reported the inci- dents at the time that they occurred.

In attempting to explain the small percentage of formal complaints, Mor- genson asks (37): "Did the Times offer any explanation for why so few actually reported the incident? Could it be that these women did not report their "harassment" because they themselves did not regard a sexual advance as harassment?" Note the implication here that, without a report of sexual harassment, the harassing behavior becomes a "sexual advance." (Note in this regard the quotation marks around harassment.) Reporting, then, becomes crucial to Morgenson's definition of sexual harassment. Of course, this kind of definition ignores the political dimension intrinsic to sexual harassment - specifically that, in most cases, women are harassed by male supervisors who have the power to affect the womens' position at work. The question of whether to lodge a formal complaint is a complicated one, involving eco- nomic and career considerations among others. To imply that sexual harassment only occurs when it is reported, and otherwise is merely a sexual advance, is to deny the political aspect of the phenomenon and renders the majority of sexual harassment cases nonexistent. This, of course, was one of the tactics used by Republican senators in attempting to destroy Anita Hill's credibility during the Thomas/Hill hearings. How could Anita Hill say she had been sexually harassed when she didn't file a formal complaint, and even followed Thomas to a new job?

A somewhat different property of sexual harassment is obscured in the following account of comments made by Brent Baker of the conservative Media Research Center, reported by Boot (1992:26) in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Baker argues that Phelps and Totenberg [the two reporters responsible for Anita Hill's allegations first appearing in the press] reported their leaks too hastily, recklessly jeopardizing Thomas's reputation before they had done enough reporting to justify their stories. He noted in an interview that Hill's allegation was far different from a claim that nominee X was guilty of something that definitely could be proven, such as stock fraud. Hill's allegation was an instance of her-word-against-his (as is generally the case in sexual harassment cases); there were no witnesses and real corrobora- tion was impossible. Baker contends that, given those limitations and the inevitable damage to Thomas's reputation that disclosure would cause, Phelps and Totenberg should have held their stories until they had estab- lished, among other things, that there had been some pattern of misbehav-

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ior, with other women claiming he had been guilty of sexual misconduct with them. [italics in original]

Like Morgenson, Baker disregards a crucial element of sexual harassment - that it normally occurs in private, without witnesses to corroborate allegations of harassing behavior. Because sexual harassment cannot be "proven" in the same way that stock fraud can be proven, Baker insists that sexual harassment must be subject to different criteria in the determination of guilt. This leads Baker to the conclusion that sexual harassment can only be deemed to have occurred if there is a pattern of harassing behavior. (With other kinds of offenses, such as stock fraud, a pattern of behavior is not necessary to the determination of guilt.)

While these two examples obscure critical aspects of the phenomenon of sexual harassment, the following example from Time magazine (Castro 1992:37) redefines the prototypical case. It comes from a review of the book Step forward: Sexual harassment in the workplace, by Susan Webb (1992). The book is described an "an accessible sort of Cliffs Notes guide to the topic," and as "refreshingly free of ideology and reproach." The following examples of case studies from the book are given:

(1) You and your boss are single and like each other a lot. You invite him to dinner, and one thing leads to another. Was someone sexually harassed? (No - though it wasn't very smart.)

(2) Your boss invites you to a restaurant for dinner and - much to your surprise - spends the evening flirting with you. Just before inviting you to her house for a nightcap, she mentions that promotion you are hoping to get. (You are being sexually harassed. Whether or not you welcome her interest in you, she has implied a connection between the promotion and your response.)

Clearly, these types of examples are meant to help readers differentiate between behavior that is sexual harassment and behavior that is not. Of interest to us is the fact that case no. 2, which does constitute sexual harassment, involves a female supervisor and presumably a male employee. (It's difficult to imagine Time reporting on lesbian relations.) Thus what is presented as the prototypical case of sexual harassment is a situation where a female boss is harassing her male employee - a scenario that flies in the face of the over- whelming majority of sexual harassment cases, where male supervisors or colleagues harass their female employees or peers. This is not to say that women never harass their male employees, but only that this is not the typical case of sexual harassment. Here, however, the typical case of sexual harassment comes to be reconfigured as females harassing males.

Redefinition as expansion

The second kind of discursive strategy to be discussed is employed fairly consistently with terms such as sexual harassment, rape, and sexual abuse. It involves expanding the definition of such phenomena beyond reason -

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exploiting feminists' attempts to expand the definitions of these phenomena - and then imputing this expanded (unreasonable) definition to feminists. The effect of this kind of expansion strategy is that of ridiculing and trivializing the phenomenon in question.

John Taylor (1991:39) quotes the journalist Stephanie Gutmann of Rea- son magazine, who states, about date rape: "The real story about campus date rape is not that there's been any significant increase of rape on college campuses, at least of the acquaintance type, but that the word rape is being stretched to encompass any type of sexual interaction." [emphasis added]. Here Gutmann presumably refers to feminists' attempts to expand the notion of sexual assault or rape so that it includes more than just sexual intercourse, and so that mutual consent becomes a crucial criteria in distinguishing rape from nonrape. Gutmann overstates the case significantly by saying that rape now encompasses "any kind of sexual interaction." Later on in this same article, Taylor (39) "paraphrases" a feminist revision of the notion of rape. Andrea Parrot, a feminist, is quoted as saying that "any sexual intercourse without mutual desire is a form of rape." Taylor continues: "by the definition of the radical feminists, all sexual encounters that involve any confu- sion or ambivalence constitute rape." He then quotes Stephanie Gutmann again: "Ordinary bungled sex - the kind you regret in the morning or even during - is being classified as rape. . . . Bad or confused feelings after sex becomes someone else's fault."

This same strategy is evident in an article on feminism published in the National Review (Minogue 1991:48), but this time it is sexual abuse that is redefined. Again the author plays on feminist attempts to broaden notions like sexual abuse, rape, or sexual harassment.

A raised consciousness in this area [feminism] plays with propositions of the form "X per cent of women have experienced sexual interference before the age of Y," where X is a very large number, and Y as low as you care to make it, and "sexual interference" defined so broadly that it can include hearing an older sibling discuss his/her adolescent sexual experimentation. [emphasis added]

Clearly, women's concern with issues such as date rape and sexual abuse is rendered ludicrous and misguided when date rape refers to "any kind of sexual interaction" or "ordinary bungled sex," and when sexual abuse is defined as overhearing a sibling refer to sexual experimentation.

Redefinition as obliteration

Probably the most violent form of redefinition is the complete obliteration of a term's referent. Indeed, the following examples claim that phenomena such as date rape and sexual harassment are creations of the feminist imagination.

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For the moment, however, there is agreement on the crime invented by Professor MacKinnon - sexual harassment stemming from a hostile work environment. That invention is only one aspect of her campaign to pro- tect women from men. [Letwin 1991:36; emphasis added]

By campaigning against the thing called "date rape," the feminist creates immense hatred and suspicion between men and women, so that the feminist advice to any woman going out on a date is to establish a virtual con- tract governing what will happen in the course of an evening. [Minogue 1991:48; emphasis added]

As with the hysteria a few years ago over the sexual abuse of children, endless talk shows, television news stories, and magazine articles have been devoted to date rape, often describing it as "an epidemic".... Much of this discussion starts off with the claim that one in four female students is raped by a date. [Taylor 1991:39-9; emphasis added]

The emphasized forms in the examples all have a similar function: They express the degree to which the writer believes in the truth of the propositions uttered.6 More specifically, expressions such as invention, the thing called, and the claim that, as ways of referring to date rape and sexual harassment, denote the writers' lack of confidence in the existence of such occurrences. (The quotation marks also call into question "date rape" as an event in itself, and certainly as "an epidemic.") Once date rape and sexual harassment become nonexistent, the attention paid to the phenomena can be characterized as hysteria, with all of the stereotypically female connotations that this word conjures up. Invoking "female hysteria" serves to delegitimize even further womens' concern with "nonevents" such as date rape and sexual harassment.

DEPOLITICIZING CATEGORIES OF RACE AND ETHNICITY

Since we have identified a number of discursive strategies by which feminist linguistic innovations are redefined and depoliticized in the print media, it is perhaps not surprising that these and similar linguistic mechanisms are operative in other cases of political and ideological dispute, as is evident in the media's definitions of terms such as oppression, oppressed groups, minor- ities, racism, and antiracism.

Redefinition as omission or obscuring

What gets obscured or eliminated in the redefinitions that follow - from New York magazine (Taylor 1991:36-7) and the National Review (Taki 1991:60), respectively - is the fact that race, ethnicity, and gender are socially signifi-

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cant and salient categories and are commonly the basis for discrimination and oppression in our culture.

The multicultural and ethnic-studies programs now in place at most universities tend to divide humanity into five groups - whites, blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians ... These are somewhat arbitrary categories. . . . In fact, the politically correct have concluded that anyone with any sort of trait, anxiety, flaw, impediment, or unusual sexual pref- erence qualifies for membership in an oppressed group. [italics in original]

Since nearly everybody belongs to one minority or another, being either tall or short, fat or thin, young or old, bald or hairy, rich or poor, black or white, Christian or Jew, it is ludicrous even to pretend that it is politically incorrect to call a fat slob a fat slob.

From these examples, we learn that categories like race and ethnicity are on a par with categories such as height and hairiness. As Taylor states, "any sort of trait, anxiety, flaw, [or] impediment" can serve as entry into an oppressed group - as if being White with flawed skin, or being White and neurotic, is commensurate with being Black in North American culture. Indeed, some traits listed earlier, such as thinness and tallness, are viewed quite positively in the culture, and are not at all equivalent to categories that constitute the basis for discrimination and oppression.

A perhaps more subtle example of this kind of depoliticization comes from the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun (Berman 1992:56). In discussing the origins of the "political correctness" debate in North America, Berman claims:

The new variation drew from American identity politics. Its fundamental unit was the identity-politics idea that in cultural affairs, the most important way to classify people is by race, ethnicity and gender - the kind of thinking that leads us to define one person as a white male, someone else as an Asian female, a third person as a Latina lesbian and so forth.

The implication here is that these categories are the invention of identity politics, rather than the historical basis for quite damaging discrimination. It is as if identity politics, not the culture, has made these categories salient and significant; as if identity politics has led us to identify individuals in terms of their gender, race, and ethnicity, and presumably could have just as eas- ily led us to view individuals in terms of their eye color.

In effacing and obscuring the real criteria for oppression in our culture, these three examples trivialize and ridicule the effects of racism and sexism, given that any trait or flaw can be the basis for oppression, as in the New York and National Review examples - or given that categories like race, ethnicity, and gender are merely the invention of identity politics, as in the Tik- kun example.

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Redefinition as reversal

Seidel 1988 identifies a discursive strategy she calls "semantic reversal," whereby key concepts related to racism undergo a complete reversal of meaning. She cites examples from the Salisbury Review in Britain, "a quarterly journal of conservative thought" (131), in which antiracism is redefined as its opposite, racism.

Through a combination of facile agreement, political opportunism and moral intimidation, the Left, under the specious banner of "anti-racism," has succeeded in forcing "institutional racism" onto the legitimate political agenda of politics and, in the process, is fostering the very racial disharmony it purports to condemn. [Seidel 1988:135; emphasis added]

Similar examples of semantic reversal can be found in the print media's rep- resentation of the political correctness debates taking place on North Amer- ican university campuses. The discursive strategy works in two steps. First, attempts to fight racism and sexism on university campuses are characterized or relabeled as the political correctness movement. Second, the political correctness movement is held responsible for creating disharmony and social divisions. In an attack on "the notion of political correctness" during a May 8, 1991, speech at the University of Michigan, George Bush made the following remarks:

The notion of "political correctness" has ignited controversy across the land.... What began as a cause for civility has soured into a cause of conflict or even censorship.... Political extremists roam the land, abus- ing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race. [emphasis added]

Bush's remarks (perhaps more indirectly then Seidel's example) suggest that struggles against racism and sexism are indeed responsible for creating what they seek to eliminate: race and class divisions. The following example from New York magazine (Taylor 1991:40) also has the effect of equating antiracism with racism:

The enterprise [political correctness movement] is undertaken to combat racism, of course, and it is an article of faith among the politically correct that the current climate of racial hostility can be traced to the Rea- gan and Bush presidencies, to conservative Republican efforts to gut civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However true that may be, scholars like Shelby Steele, a black essayist and English professor, have also argued that the separatist movements at universities - black dorms, Native American student centers, gay-studies programs, the relentless harp- ing on "otherness" - have heightened tensions and contributed to the culture of victimization. [emphasis added]

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This passage begins with the proposition that the enterprise in question is that of combatting racism. Combatting racism then gets relabeled as "the separatist movements at universities," and these separatist movements are in turn held responsible for "heightened tensions" and "the culture of victimization." This type of discursive strategy, whereby antiracism undergoes a complete reversal of meaning, only succeeds in discrediting the struggle against racism. What is clear, however, is the extent to which this general linguistic mechanism of redefinition and depoliticization extends beyond the linguistic innovations of feminists to lexical items that involve other kinds of political and ideological disputes.

DEFINITION AS A SITE OF IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

In the previous sections, we have attempted to demonstrate the extent to which linguistic meanings are determined by the social values and practices of the larger speech community. More specifically, we show that simply introducing nonsexist terms or terms with feminist-influenced meanings into a language will not necessarily result in nonsexist or feminist usage of such terms. Just as words like No (in the context of a woman refusing a man's sexual advances) can undergo a kind of "semantic reversal" (Seidel's 1988 term) in the mouths of a sexist culture, so nonsexist and feminist linguistic innovations may lose their intended meanings as they get integrated into the larger (sexist) speech community. Similarly, we see that terms like oppressed group, racism, and antiracism also undergo redefinition as they circulate within the larger (racist) speech community. This is not to say, however, that we sub- scribe to a static view of the relation between language and society, such that language merely reflects social structures and categories. According to this view (often associated with the quantitative sociolinguistics paradigm), language is said to express social realities; thus Labovian sociolinguistics, especially as practiced in the 1970s, focuses on establishing correlations between linguistic variables and social factors such as race, ethnicity, and gender. Crit- ics of this view have pointed out that language use is a social practice in its own right, not just a reflection or expression of social categories. As Came- ron (1990a:86) claims, paraphrasing Harold Garfinkel, "social actors are not sociolinguistic 'dopes'," mindlessly making linguistic choices that are defin- itively determined by social class membership, ethnicity, gender, social situation etc. While an individual's language use is an expression of social norms and relations, it can also function to resist or subvert these norms. With respect to the sexist language debate, Cameron argues that instances of sexist language not only reflect sexist social practices, but also reproduce these practices. Conversely, nonsexist and feminist language reform is not merely a reflex of nonsexist social reform, but enacts reform in individual interactions.

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How do we reconcile this more dynamic view of the relation between language and society with the evidence presented earlier, which shows nonsexist and feminist innovations to have been co-opted by the sexist speech community? Treichler 1990 documents a similar meaning appropriation with the term natural childbirth. Originally coined by feminists in the women's health movement, the term originally referred to the "demedicalization" of childbirth - the idea that childbirth is a "normal, natural physiological process" that requires "little medical management" (121). But Treichler (132) cites a physician who redefines it as being "awake, alert, aware, and able to participate in and enjoy the birth of your baby. It does not mean that you can't use analgesics or anesthetics, but that the selection of such is done wisely to minimize the effects on you and your baby" [emphasis added]. Treichler says, of this kind of meaning appropriation: "An innovative structure - or a deviant definition - lives a double life, for it has grown out of struggle with a dominant structure which continues to shape it, even canni- balize it" (132). Thus, while feminist and nonsexist linguistic innovations (e.g. terms like sexual harassment and date rape) attempt to reshape the dominant social structures and attitudes, they are at the same time being shaped by these very structures.

That definitions do become a site of ideological struggle is illustrated clearly in the following example. Recently the sexual harassment policy at the University of Toronto was revised such that the definition of sexual harassment was expanded to include any conduct that created "an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment." The response of some faculty members was documented in The Toronto Star (Hurst 1991):

Ignoring the fact that the recommendation stipulated that the conduct must also exceed the bounds of free speech or academic freedom before it could be considered harassment, some faculty members pounced with the speed of lightning: Would they be hauled up on harassment charges if they discussed the works of a macho mandarin such as Norman Mailer? Gawd [sic], could they dare even mention Freud on the psychology of women?

Stretching the new definition of sexual harassment so that it included discussing Freud, these faculty members then ridiculed the policy on the basis of its overly general nature. Indeed, the sexual harassment officer at the Univer- sity of Toronto says of the response: "it makes sexism and sexual harassment synonymous." What we see in this example is the institutionalization of a feminist-influenced definition of the term sexual harassment. This innovative meaning subsequently becomes the site of struggle: in Treichler's terms, it gets "cannibalized" by the dominant structure it is attempting to subvert. Interestingly, in this case, the feminist-influenced meaning does have an official status of sorts, and thus cannot be completely eradicated by the sexist

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community's attempt to trivialize the sexual harassment policy. As McConnell- Ginet states in Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1993, "linguistic forms do not come permanently glued to meanings but are endowed with meanings in the course of social practice." Just as feminist meanings will be challenged by sexist speech communities (as we have seen throughout this article), so sexist-influenced meanings are not "permanently glued" to linguistic forms; they will themselves continue to encounter resistance, especially once feminist meanings get institutionalized.

While those in power have the authority and influence to make their meanings stick, nonsexist and feminist linguistic innovations challenge the absolute hegemony of these meanings. As Seidel (1985:44) puts it: "Discourse . .. is a site of struggle. It is a terrain, a dynamic linguistic and, above all, semantic space in which social meanings are produced and challenged."

NOTES

* An earlier version of this article was presented at the Women and Language Conference: Locating Power, held at the University of California, Berkeley, 1992. We thank Susan Gal and Jane H. Hill for helpful comments and suggestions regarding this version of the article. We thank Sue Levesque for help in collecting the print media reports from which our examples are drawn. Susan Ehrlich acknowledges the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, for Visiting Scholar status in the winter semester of 1992, during which time much of this work was completed.

'On the implications of this view of meaning for gender-based language reform, see Ehrlich & King 1992. We acknowledge Sage Publications for permission to reprint small portions of that work here.

2 Studies have demonstrated that he/man language also has adverse practical consequences. For example, Bem & Bem 1973 show the negative effects of job advertisements containing instances of generic he and man. The researchers composed three versions of a job advertisement. In all three cases, the duties listed were identical, but different terms were used to refer to the position. The first advertisement used linesman and the pronoun he; the second used linesperson and he or she; and the third used linesperson and the pronoun she. More women applied in response to the inclusive language of the second advertisement (person, he or she) than to the exclusive first one (man, he); and notably, still more applied to the language of the third advertisement (person, she).

3 A 1991 survey of one week's issues of The Toronto Star found that the great majority of individuals referred to that week were male; in more than 80Wo of cases, they were referred to as chairman, spokesman etc. When women were referred to, compounds with person or women were used.

4This result is consistent with the theory of markedness outlined by Waugh 1982. In her terms, non-sexist language reform opposes the unmarked status of the masculine term in gram- matical oppositions like man/woman or he/she. The masculine terms of these oppositions are unmarked to the extent that they can be interpreted as the representative of the category human (the so-called zero interpretation of unmarked terms) or as referring to the part of the species that is not woman (the so-called minus interpretation). Given Waugh's claim of a hierarchical relation between unmarked and marked terms, "with the marked term being lower on the hier- archy" (1982:309), it is perhaps not surprising that attempts to alter the unmarked status of the masculine terms in these oppositions would not always be successful. In this specific example, the chairman/chairwoman opposition is replaced by chairman/chairperson. It is not the case here that markedness relations have changed; rather, the marked term of the opposition has changed.

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5This part of our article comes from a larger research project on redefinition and depoliticization of feminist linguistic innovations. Our data are drawn from print media reports of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and of the "political correctness" debates. These reports appear in publications that reflect a wide range of political perspectives.

6Fowler (1985:72) includes linguistic devices such as these under the category of "modality," which "subsumes a range of devices that indicate speakers' attitudes to the propositions they utter." Of interest to Fowler (as to us) are the way in which such linguistic forms figure in "the linguistic practice of power."

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Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon

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