Krolokke begins her essay by recapping recent research in gender and language in cyberspace, including the role of "grrrls" who specifically resist male domination.  She then describes her study of 5 MSN channels of Internet Relay Chat (IRC): gay chat, lesbian chat, transgender/transsexual chat, politics2000 chat, and African-American chat for what she calls "playful chat".  She analyzes the transcribed speech for 4 types of language play: abbreviations, paralinguistic cues, hybrid language, and insulting speech. Krolokke uses performance theory to explain gender play online such that she considers "linguistic gender" to mean performing a speech pattern that follows social and cultural expectations or stereotypes associated with the speech of that gender. She explains that in some cases,  "IRC provides a space for participants to play out their most convincing performances of parodic linguistic identities."  As such, she provides an argument away from earlier linguists who argued about the inherent differences in male/female communication and towards later "third wave" linguists who see all communication and all contexts as marked for gender, not the speaker him or herself.

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In this article, Bromseth discusses his research into 2 Norwegian email lists: Radical Forum (a socialist/Marxist forum) and The Doctor's List (a forum for general practitioners) in which the membership was divided approximately 85% men and 15% women.  While the political group tended towards confrontational discussion and raw polemic, the medical forum was characterized by face-saving strategies and an emphasis on "brotherhood".  Bromseth argues that the latter behavior should not be seen as "feminization" of male speech, but rather as an example of positive and definitively male social practices in modern (2001) Norway.  To him, gender is constantly being constructed in relation to other social phenomena and contexts must always be examined independently to show such construction without stereotyping behavior.  This argument runs in counter to the generally accepted thoughts towards men's speech and should definitely be considered as a reminder to readers to not make generalized assumptions based upon previous theories, but instead, to take into account mitigating cultural and social factors when analyzing any speech community.

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Despite the fact that it was originally printed in 1987, Rice and Love's essay still provides interesting theoretical material about computer-mediated communication (CMC) in that it seeks to dispel myths that all computer-based communication is unemotional by nature and lack of bandwidth.  Among socioemotional content found, they discuss face-saving mechanisms, disinhibition, and "flaming".  They created 5 hypotheses about socioemotional content to be measured in the datasets of six weeks of transcripts from the Medsig/Compuserv public computer conference in order to attempt to prove their thesis that CMC over computer networks mirrors participation in real-world communities.  While this study does not differentiate variables according to gender, it was interesting to me to read their conclusions that the participants did particpate in socioemotional discourse, although there was no increase in the amount of such discourse over time.  I think that if the study were moved to a non-technical forum and increased in physical time length, that the results seen might be very different and more informative.

PDF/Text Available via Elsevier. 

I became interested in Matsuda's analysis because, even though it has nothing directly related to gender, it shows a clear picture of how linguistic markers used in verbal speech are carried over into an internet context to delineate identity and power relations.  Matsuda analysed the written communications in Japanese  of Japanese ESL teachers on the online community TESOL Link for verbal markers such as formal verb endings, address terms, and honorifics that are used to signify deference and vertical social relations.  Interestingly enough, he found that there was more horizontal than vertical social relationships on the list, and that when hierarchical distinctions were shown, they were created from a perception of knowledge as power more than seniority or social status.  To this, Matsuda cites the teacher vs. learner role as invoked frequently on the list.  While he notes that hierarchical relations were found to come into play in a theoretically hierarchy-free environment, Matsuda points out that the power relations were able to be re-negotiated by the members online in a way that might never have been possible in real face-to-face communication given social and linguistic norms in Japan.

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While I may never actually cite this reference in my work, I think it is a valid reference for email in 1998.  While Baron does not focus on gender in email communication, she seeks to provide a history of email and how it linguistically differs from both spoken language and other forms of writing.  She puts forth an interesting theory that email could be considered a "creole" language, citing linguistic evidence of "pidgins" that have a highly restricted set of communicative functions while they function as a lingua franca, which matures into a creole as a second and third generation of native speakers grow up in the linguistic community. Since email is less than 40 years old, time will tell if the language used in email will become its own standard with grammar and conventions, or whether it will continue to creolize and adapt to the technological changes of its electronic medium.

Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating.  In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality.  They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards.  As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies.  When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech.  The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.

Example of a citation where diacritical accents present in Franklin or VCAT don't translate well to Penntags.  They usually come back as other English charactes instead of accented vowels. 

Penntext/PDF available

In this article, Herring discusses her research into both asynchronous communication via discussion list and synchronous communication via IRC in which women were subject to harassment and demeaning characterizations by men.  In both instances, the result was that the affected women fell silent or complied with the male behavioral normatives.  I think it is important to note the forums chosen, as there may have been some issues inherent to the discussion which should be considered above and beyond the linguistic patterns. The discussion list was Paglia-L, a group dedicated to discuss the writings of the cultural theorist Camille Paglia, who is often referred to as an "anti-feminist feminist" and who often generates polemical discussions among women as often as in mixed company.  The IRC channel was #india which is primarily composed of expatriates from India living in English-speaking countries, and as such, specific Indian cultural patterns may have also influenced the speech found on that channel.  What is most useful to me from this essay is how Herring defines harassment online, shows examples of its resistance and escalation, and finally shows how the female participants accommodate or conform to the degrading situation.  If these examples can be extended across the internet, it would indicate that male-female communication suffers from similar breakdowns as those that can occur on the job or in any face-to-face situation where harassment may surface and as such, that we have a long way to go to address gender equality online.

 

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Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study.  The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively.  Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.

Penntext/PDF available

Soukup's study focuses upon two chatrooms - one sports-related and male-dominated, and the other female-based and female-dominated.  His results support the ideas cited by Tannen and others in linguistic studies of discourse, in that the male chatters were more aggressive, argumentative, and power-seeking than the female chatters.  It's unclear to me whether the results can be viewed as reliable or representative, since there may be an inherent social context to a sports-related chatroom/bulletin board that goes above and beyond being merely a male-dominant community.  For example, Soukup cites the fact that the sports-related chatroom essentially turned into a locker room replete with profane and sexist language, including sexual put-downs and challenges between male chatters.  He goes on to note that when male chatters entered the chatroom of the female-based community, that there was frequent inappropriate behavior such that groups of male chatters would take-over the room with sexist remarks or propositioning of the female members. 

 

Tannen's text on gender and conversational interaction seeks to present research into gender differences in conversation as evidenced by direct speech data. The first section is comprised of data about friendship rapport, focusing on "girl talk" (Eder and Eckert, respectively) and storytelling among men and women (Johnstone).  The second part focuses on "conflict talk" both among children at school (Sheldon and Goodwin, respectively) and adults (Brown).  The third section becomes more theoretical as it attempts to rethink the nature of discourse in terms of power vs. solidarity (Tannen) and turn taking (Edelsky).  Finally, James and Clarke review the literature and attempt to reframe the discussion of conversational interruptions among men and women.  While none of this research deals with online communications, I believe that  such analyses can be extrapolated to apply to online discussions both as "female talk" and "conflict talk".

Shade's research, although not linguistic in nature, is useful to provide a background into women's roles in constructing the Internet.  She begins by reviewing research on gendered uses of various communications technologies, including the telephone, radio, and television. She discusses cyberactivism and feminism, as well as public policy determining women's access to the internet.  She cites a case study of women in China and internet access implementation and concludes with a discussion of whether women are merely consumers targeted by merchants or active citizens in an online sisterhood (discussions that we have held in class as well).

In Gender and Politeness, Mills provides a new perspective on common assumptions of women's and men's speech with regard to etiquette and politeness.  In her introduction, she positions herself in the "third wave" of sociolinguists interested in women's speech - who are critical of the "second wave" of linguists such as Deborah Tannen, Dale Spender, and Robin Lakoff (cited elsewhere in my bibliography) for asserting the existance of "women's speech".  Mills prefers to discuss language in terms of "communities of practice" where people are drawn together to perform a common task.  She uses models developed by Judith Butler, Alice Freed, Bonnie McElhinny and others which position that gender is an act which can take place in contexts which are also considered gendered, such that she can attempt to describe gender at a discourse level instead of just at an utterance level or individual level.  As such, she can argue that men and women can alter their levels of politeness based upon interactional context with other speakers instead of following set gendered linguistic patterns.  While none of her research involves online or internet communication, I find her analysis to be an excellent counterpoint to the other linguists I have cited because of her challenge to previous assumptions.

Penntext/PDF available

In this essay, Frederick examines the question of whether computer-mediated communication is truly a democratic utopia where feminist values can flourish.  By studying data from 2 newsgroups, alt.feminism and soc.feminism, she demonstrates that discrimination and exclusion/hostility can continue to occur, even in a supposedly inclusive and politically feminist context.  She concentrates on the ethos of the newsgroups as the basis for constructing either a welcoming or distancing communication arena.  My interest in this article stems from this notion of ethos because I think that it a highly influencing factor which combines with inherent linguistic features of women's speech to produce a speech community.  I believe that any future discussions of the social structure of online communication must address ethos as well as linguistic differences in order to prevent factionalization or balkanization of men and women online, much as one might approach a dialog about multiculturalism and the internet.

In this second edition of her text, Cameron begins with an introduction to the study of language along feminist lines.  She continues with a basic framework of linguistic approaches to language variation and gender and separates the feminist "folklinguistics" from actual empirical studies of language use.  The second half of the book becomes more theoretical, investigating the links between gender and grammar and debating about the power of sexist language.  She overviews the radical feminist theories of silence, oppression, and alienation of women via language.  Later, she recaps the ideas of Spender, Lacan, and Irigaray among others to discuss the concept of a "gendered subject" as seen in a Postmodernist context.  Finally, Cameron wraps up her work by posing issues and concerns to gender studies as she meditates on methods of integrating feminist discourse and language study into real world policies and social change.  While this book does not deal in computer-mediated discourse, the issues addressed are valid in online contexts as well. 

In this text, Coates and Cameron attempt to address in a quantitative way how sociolinguistic differences are found between men's and women's speech.  While the research does not include online communication, it does show grounded empirical studies of women in their own speech communities such as among British Black women and women in mining communities in Wales.  They go on to address gender differences in communication "style" above and beyond format, and delve into examples of gossip, tag questions, and shop talk as female or male speech.  In all cases, the authors attempt to challenge prior academic research and offer new perspectives on the task of analyzing speech on gender lines, as in the example of Swann's "Talk Control: an Illustration From the Classroom of Problems in Analyzing Male Dominance of Conversation."

In this text, Herring brings together a variety of sociological and linguistic essays on computer-mediated communications.  In the first section, "Linguistics Perspectives", the authors seek to define the oral and written linguistics aspects of email, IRC chat, and computer conferencing while contrasting them with face-to-face interactions.  In the second section, "Social and Ethical Perspectives", the authors deal with social issues of interaction such as cooperation versus conflict and the role of radical feminism for internet discourse ("Cyberfeminism" by Kira Hall).  The third portion deals with "Cross Cultural Perspectives" in which CMC is analysed between North American, East Asian, and Mexican students and theories of classroom diversity are presented.  Finally, the last grouping "CMS and Group Interaction" explores how CMC can change people's lives - exploring the group dynamics of online forums (Korenman and Wyatt, "Group Dynamics in an Email Forum"), how e-mail has changed the work environment, and how groups conduct internet-based protests.

This journal (2004) is a very cool read for feminist scholars and anyone interested in body politic.  Although I am not sure that any of the essays will apply to my work, I was quite interested in Schleiner's essay "Female-Bobs Arrive at Dusk", which talks about the phenomenon of fan-created female heroine patches for video games in the late 1990's (part of our discussion with Nick Monfort).  I was hoping to be able to use the essay by Aristarkhova "Femininity, Community, Hospitality: Towards a Cyberethics" in order to discuss issues of hospitality and community for women online, but she spends the entire time theorizing on the ideas of Derrida and community without talking about language and speech.

This text contains 22 essays, any number of which would be relevant to our class.  For my purposes, Chapter 19 on "Charting the Codes of Cyberspace: the Rhetoric of Electronic Mail" by Judith Yaross Lee  is important because it seeks to codify email as a hybrid of oral speech and traditional writing. Philip Thompsen continues to discuss online communication strategies in Chapter 20: "What's Fueling the Flames in Cyberspace: A Social Influence Model".  Thompsen attempts to redefine flaming on the internet and propose a social-influence model which incorporates the flaming behavior and the negotiation of what that behavior means to the community. While he does not address gender per se, he does seek to define flaming behavior and explain its consequences to group members over long term online experience.

PDF/text available

Baron begins her analysis by situating instant messaging as a form of computer-mediated communication and attempting to create a profile for IM communications among undergraduate students.  She first reviews the linguistic differences in spoken speech: social vs. informative speech and standard vs. non or sub-standard usage by men and women.  In terms of written language, she reviews concepts related to personal letter writing and studies about gender identification of online texts. She analyzed the IM data for turn taking, sequences, conversation length, and lexical issues to determine possible effects of gender.  She found no differences in turn taking, but found that women had greater overall conversation length and length of ending sequences.  From the lexical analysis, Baron found that men used more contracted forms of words (e.g. "I'm" instead of "I am") than women.  Most interesting to me, and not at all surprising given my real-world online experiences, was the finding that women used more emoticons than men in the IM conversations.

In this study, Fahy analyzed written texts from on online conference of graduate students in a distance learning exercise.  He and his team hypothesized that the women's speech would be more "epistolary" in participation style as previously described by other researchers, and would most likely contain more hedges, qualifiers, first and second person pronouns, and parenthetical constructions with the intent of reducing any potential conflict and sustaining ongoing dialog.  He likewise hypothesized that the men's speech would be more "expository", using less of the aforementioned forms as well as being more declarative.  They also predicted that the men would use a greater number of linguistic intensifiers and would be more prone to flaming and/or rudeness.  While their results were not overwhelmingly strong, the numbers did support the base hypotheses of inherent differences in men's and women's discourse.  Fahy goes on to discuss what the potential effect upon distance learning may be if professors do not take into account the differences between epistolary and expository styles regardless of the participants' gender.

In this compilation of essays edited by Jones, the central theme is about how the internet is a virtual culture of its own and how that culture can be described in sociological terms.  Of particular interest to me for fan related discourse is Watson's study of the Phish.net fan community, which describes an online fan base of 50K+ members and their interactions.  Shaw discusses gender and sexual orientation and internet communities in his essay "Gay Men and Computer Communication: A Discourse of Sex and Identity in Cyberspace", which although does not related to women's speech, does deal with issues of communication and constructed identity.  Later in the volume, Dietrich takes on gender and internet journals in their construction of a body politic.  Finally, Zickmund addresses the problem of internet hate speech or "cyberhate" and how "the other" is defined online.

While I am not dealing with the subject of "cyberrape" as we read about LambdaMOO in the class assignment, if anyone is interested, Richard MacKinnon has a chapter in this volume titled "Punishing the Persona: Correctional Strategies for the Virtual Offender" which further discusses the rape and subsequent punishment of online offenders at LambdaMOO and elsewhere.

In this class textbook, Sunstein reveals her fears about the "Daily Me", the process by which individuals today can filter ever more increasing amounts of electronic information to fit a highly personal profile, such that they can see only that information they wish to see in the world.  In addition, she speaks about the convergence and polarization of ideas and the groups which espouse them, on the internet to the extent that she uses the term "balkanization" for some online communities such as race hate groups or political sites.  When people of a like mind do get together on a newsgroup, bulletin board, website, or chat room, it is found that members tend to further gravitate to those who have strong, defined opinions on topics of interest and concern for those individuals.  If that is the case, if one believes that women's speech is quantitatively different from men's speech and that women may find more community by remaining in the online company of women, then it may be the case that women and men may divide their online participation among more gendered lines.  Also, the way that strong opinions, criticism, and conflict are handled online may have a direct relationship to whether or not women will espouse new ideas or new online venues outside of their known social spheres.

This very recent compilation (2005) contains 11 scholarly articles on the subject of adolescent girls and their use of the web, from perspectives of age, gender, ethnicity, and sociology/media theory.  With regard to the subject of teenage girls and fandom, I am interested in Scodari's work on the negotiation of age and gender in TV fan newsgroups, since I am also discussing women's speech in such groups.  Mazzarella continues this topic with her discussion of the "cultural economy" of teenage girls fandom on the internet.  Finally, Thiel takes on the description of the construction of identity and gender identification for girls over instant messaging, which she describes as both a cultural and an experimentation space.  While this text does not discuss specific linguistic topics, it does serve as an interesting sociological reference for young women's behavior on the internet, which could influence or inform linguisitic decisions online.

This text consists of three sections regarding women's use of the internet.  Part One deals with the definition of gender as part of a user's identity on the net, in particular for internet gamers (Paasonen) and female professionals (Dorer)  The second part concerns how women are addresses as consumers of the internet and networks, with examples from online communities like Oprah.Com (Cooks/Paredes/Scharrer) and other women's websites (Gustafson).  Part Three gives examples of everyday uses of the internet for bringing girls and women together, and also discusses the problems and strategies inherent for lesbians online (Poster).  Finally, the fourth and last part talks about gender and new media in the contexts of the school, politics, and television viewing.  This looks to be a very interesting text from a sociological perspective which can supplement the other linguistic texts in the bibliography.

Robin Lakoff is one of the so-called "first generation" of linguists to look at women's speech as being quantitatively different from men's speech, and also one of the first generation of feminists to look towards linguistics as a scientific study to which to prove inherent sexism in language.  Although this text is dated (1975), it does serve as a key cited secondary reference for many of the articles published recently about gender and discourse.  Even other linguists who go on to refute Lakoff's dichotomies continue to cite her work regularly.  For my purposes, I may choose to quote from part 2 of her book "Why Women are Ladies" which deals with forms of politeness and how women specifically express politeness in speech, topics which I feel are still relevant today on the internet.

In this academic text, Tannen begins by examining the relationship between power and solidarity in various linguistic strategies - namely indirect speech, interruptions, silence, topic changes, and conflict.  She continues to expand upon the cultural, ethnic, stylistic, and gendered differences in conversational interruptions.  She compares the physical alignment of speakers to topical cohesion of the discourse and finds positive correlations. Finally, with Robin Lakoff, she explores the pragmatics of conversational strategies from a selection for Scenes From a Marriage.  Unlike her general books, this text goes into more scientific linguistic detail and analysis which could prove useful to apply to internet speech between genders.

Although this text of Deborah Tannen's is geared toward the general reading public more than an academic audience, and focuses upon verbal speech more than written, it proved useful on various fronts.  Tannen writes from the perspective that sociolinguistically, boys and men have been socialized differently from girls and women, and that their discourse reflects such societal influences and expectations.  Chapter 6: "Community and Contest" discusses the differences between the genders with regard to cooperation, community building and partnership versus fighting, conflict, and competition.  Chapter 8: "Dammed if You Do" focuses upon issues of politeness, apology, criticism, and boasting as key differences between male and female speech, which can be extended to internet media communication as well.

Tannen writes from the perspective that there are key, quantifiable differences in men's and women's speech from a sociolinguistic perspective which can be applied to workplace communication.  Although this book was written for a general non-academic audience, it can offer some interesting theories of spoken language and gender and power in an office environment, which arguably could be extended to email or electronic communications on the job.  Chapter 2 deals with conversational rituals that take place on the job: routines such as apologizing, giving criticism, ritual fighting, compliments, and complaints.  Chapter 2 discusses "Indirectness at Work" and how indirect speech can be viewed as both powerless and powerful depending upon the gender of the speakers and listeners.  In my experience, such rituals and directness/indirectness are key features in gendered speech found both in real-time verbal speech and in written internet venues.

Placeholder for the unclassified items.

This is my personal bibliography of research for the works of Manuel Puig and related topics.

This will be my bibliography for my final paper in the Spanish Film class, which will deal with Manuel Puig and Pedro Almodovar's works.

Doreva Belfiore

Linguists such as Deborah Tannen and Robin Lakoff have sought to examine the conversational styles and practices between men and women in order to formulate theories of gender-specific discourse.  In my final paper, I plan to take the theories of such linguists and apply them specifically to Internet venues (chatrooms, discussion boards, and Yahoo groups) to highlight differences in male and female user communication strategies.  It is my theory that while online, female members employ more verbal deference mechanisms and more consistently defend the use of “netiquette” than male members of similar age and regional background in order to preserve group unity and cohesiveness while discouraging group divisiveness.  From the theoretical readings assigned in class, I plan to cite from Republic.com by Cass Sunstein, and possibly also the 2 articles by Henry Jenkins, in addition to the other bibliographic citations.