Patty Sotirin Percpetions of Feminized Identities in Office Talk: A Case of Secretarial 'Bitching'

Michigan Technological University
Department of Humanities
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, MI 49931-1295
pjsotiri@mtu.edu

Abstract

Office secretaries, still nearly 90% female in the U.S. according to recent U.S. Census statistics, engage in a conversational practice called "bitching," which I distinguish from gossiping and other forms of complaint or troubles talk. Bitching is perceived as a gendered conversational practice, closely linked to secretaries' feminized occupational identities. In this paper, I offer a critical discourse analysis of secretarial bitching gathered during fieldwork at a corporate office. My analysis suggests that, through bitching, secretaries actively engage their own and more generalized perceptions of femininity and masculinity in the office. Their bitching takes up the implicit rules for who a secretary and a boss can or should be and what a secretary and a boss can or should do. I suggest that perceptions of these gendered office identities and relationships are manifested in bitching as both warrants for condemning deviations and opportunities for challenging the status quo. I argue that studying secretarial bitching can contribute to dismantling the pernicious associations of femaleness that disadvantage feminized identities in the workplace. It is not that women bitch because they are female. Rather, by bitching together, women in the office call attention to mundane gender injustices even as they reaffirm and reconcile themselves to perceptions of secretarial identities as feminized. My poster will include an auditory component that highlights these elements of my field data.

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