Helga Kotthoff Doing Gender, Indexing Gender, Performing Gender

Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg
GERMANY
kotthoff@ph-freiburg.de
http://home.ph-freiburg.de/kotthoff/

About Helga Kotthoff

Kotthoff has published widely in German and English on the intersection of discourse genre and gender within interactional sociolinguistics. In addition to two edited collections on language and gender and an edited special issue on interactional sociolinguistics, she has conducted research on gender and performance in a range of contexts, including German conversational joking and Georgian toasting ceremonies. Her sensitivity to culture calls attention to the important issue of the cross-cultural validity of perceived associations between gender and particular linguistic forms or practices.


Abstract

In my lecture I will address the debate on "doing gender," insofar as this is being carried on in conversation and discourse analysis. The ethnomethodological concept of "doing gender" has been and is fruitful for research on gender in communication. Anyone who deals with "doing gender" aims to describe how people make gender conversationally "accountable," how they display a certain cultural masculinity or femininity and the strategies by which gender is made relevant in everyday life. Yet up till now there is still no agreement on which dimensions of communicative performance should be understood as "doing." Various debates on this are presented in Discourse & Society, e.g., in number 6, 2002. They largely revolve around how and whether research should differentiate between identity categorization work at the center of the interlocutors' attention and identity work which remains in the background of the ongoing interaction (Kotthoff 2003).

I will discuss these questions drawing on my own research on lamentation rituals in Caucasian Georgia and on humor communication in Germany. Both activity types are gendered, but in very different ways. I hope that the big differences between these activity types, between the social settings and cultures in which they are performed will help us to grasp how different it might be to communicate gender.

Some short information on the activities I will discuss in the paper:

Lamenting in Georgia is performed nearly exclusively by women (Kotthoff 2002). The emotion of grief is thereby (indexically?) feminized. The social role contains tension for the lamenting women. On the one hand, wailing reconstructs the gender ascription of being vulnerable and over-emotional, on the other hand, it permits women to act as oral artists, and their talents are admired by the whole community. Pointing out good deeds of the deceased and his/her clan allows them to communicate their moral standards and their views on what good social relationships look like. They also take the chance to praise each other in their laments and to publicize what they find relevant in life. Another positive aspect of wailing for the women consists in allowing them to play an active part in practicing religion. Since within the official Orthodox church women have only low positions, they enjoy their important role as mediators between the living and the dead put on stage in the folk religious wailings.

Joking in Germany is performed by everybody. Since the relevance of gender seldom takes center stage in humorous interactions, and strategies of joking very often remain largely unconscious, it makes sense to view a person's humor as a component of his or her habitus and a way of indexing multifaceted gendered identities. I will discuss new findings from German sociolinguistics. Gender can be communicated both overtly and covertly. In specific humorous activities a particular type of femininity and/or masculinity can be stylized as an interactional by-product. Stereotypes in joke content can bring gender issues to the foreground of attention - in an affirmative or in a subversive way. Hegemonic, subordinated or inventive "masculinities" and "femininities" in the sense of Connell (1995) may become the center of a humorous activity. For example, by joking at his own expense in a particular context a man can create an identity for himself as "non-macho" or as a "new man," and a girl can use the same strategy to present herself as the girl next door (Branner 2003). Studies of humor in interaction can help us trace how "identities in interaction" are formed. For example, they can show how specific gender identities are implicitly negotiated and confirmed in the humor of a particular social milieu. Joking styles vary from situation to situation and index different masculinities and femininities even within a certain age group, culture or social milieu. But even today we can still find very direct forms of sexist humor, for example, in male jokes, male teasing as a form of sexual harassment or in sexually derogatory cartoon humor (http://home.ph-freiburg.de/kotthoff/gender_and_humor.rtf).

I will compare the two genres in regards to participant structure, identity management, emotion politics, and other dimensions of gender.

Branner, Rebecca (2003): Scherzkommunikation unter M”dchen. Frankfurt: Lang.
Connell, Robert W. (1995): Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Discourse & Society 6, vol. 13, (2002) Special issue ed. By Elizabeth H. Stokoe and Ann Weatherall.
Journal of Pragmatics (forthcoming). Thematical issue on gender and humor, ed. by Helga Kotthoff. Introduction. http://home.ph-freiburg.de/kotthoff/gender_and_humor.rtf
Kotthoff, Helga (2002): Gender, emotion, and poeticity in Georgian mourning rituals. In: Bettina Baron & Helga Kotthoff (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 283-327, 2002.
Kotthoff, Helga (2003): Was heiþt eigentlich "doing gender?" Differenzierungen im Feld von Interaktion und Geschlecht. Freiburger FrauenStudien 12, 125-163.
Ochs, Elinor (1992): Indexing gender. In: Alessandro Duranti&Charles Goodwin (eds.): Rethinking context. Cambridge University Press, 325-358.



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