Joan Pujolar Does Domination at the Social Level Involve Control at the Interactional Level?:
More Reflections on Theory and Method in Language and Gender Research
Click here to download Joan Pujolar's paper in pdf format.

University of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
C. Santander 6, 3er, 1a
Girona E-17005
SPAIN
jpujolar@uoc.edu

About Joan Pujolar

Pujolar has made important contributions to language and gender through his careful study of masculinity, a topic that until relatively recently received little attention in the field. His recent book, which explores in depth the ideological links between code choice and gender, reinvigorates a once-influential ethnographic approach to language and gender in multilingual societies by demonstrating that local perceptions of gendered language use may be contested by other groups.


Abstract

In this lecture, I will discuss some aspects of the relationship between our data and our object of study, that is, linguistic practices on the one hand, and the domination exerted by "men" over "women" on the other hand (here the labels "men" and "women" are used as a shorthand for the predominant forms of gender identity associated with the respective sexes). I assume that language and gender research is not simply about locating gender-specific traits of language or language use, but that most approaches are guided by a social and political agenda to uncover processes of subjection. Therefore, I will focus on the ways in which features of talk in gender-mixed interactions are interpreted in the literature as instantiations of struggles over gender relations. My point is that these interpretations are partial, that is, what is of interest is to find out how relations of power become legitimized in the contexts studied (not just how they "happen"). On the basis of this reasoning, I will argue that we need to focus on what I call "local fields of participation," rather than on relatively isolated instances of interaction. These fields are the relatively stable domains of social participation in everyday life: family, school, clique, workplace and so on. It is in these fields (inspired on Bourdieu's notion of "social field") that actors engage in middle/long-term relationships, out of a myriad of interactions (often ambivalent and constradictory), that end up constituting their gendered "habituses." In conclusion, we should not simply search for the "symptoms" of domination in isolated instances of social practice, but hypothesize how these help to reproduce or contest power relations in the contexts studied. In the lecture, I will provide an example of how such fields and processes can be conceptualized out of my data on youth groups in Barcelona.



Presentation Materials

Click here to download Joan Pujolar's paper in pdf format.
Click here to download Joan Pujolar's presentation handout in pdf format.
Click here to download Joan Pujolar's PowerPoint presentation.



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