Critical discourse analysis for fun and profit

[triskellian]

I've been thinking for a while about trying an experiment in the way I use language, and something that came up in my reading today made me decide to go ahead and do it.

The experiment is this: I will watch for times when I'm about to use "he" to refer to a person of unknown gender, and I will substitute "she" instead (I'm talking about speech; I take care to use non-gender-specific language in writing). I think I mostly do this with the drivers of nearby cars, when I'm predicting they're about to do something stupid ("He's going to pull out!"), so there's no value judgement involved, just an attempt to change the default setting on a switch, so to speak ;-)

I invite you to join me in this experiment if you wish, and to call me on it if you spot me using "him" as a generic (also if you wish!)


The reading that prompted this is for the Good Course (as opposed to the Bad one), which is on critical discourse analysis. The material we're currently covering is to do with the way ideology shapes language, and through it the world, and I've just finished reading a chapter on the way "common sense" encodes and enforces a particular way of understanding the world. (This same material is causing me to write and rewrite every sentence in this post as I notice the assumptions I'm building into the most innocent-looking phrases.)

Anyway. The words that solidified my intention to proceed with the experiment describe a way of foregrounding common sense, of making its working obvious and therefore open to question:

"the deliberate disturbance of common sense through some form of intervention in discourse"
(Normal Fairclough, Language and Power)

...And they're a reasonable description of my experiment, too. So that settled the matter ;-)

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

In French, all of the nouns have apparently arbitrary genders.

Even if they are arbitrary, and have no origin in any issues of sex, you could still investigate whether they influence attitudes, just as triskellian is doing for our "gender-non-specific" pronouns.

[triskellian]

I have an article around somewhere about an experiment where speakers of different languages with gendered nouns were asked to describe various objects that had different genders in their languages (eg, say in French car is feminine and in German it's masculine). The result was that the gender of the noun did influence people's perception of the object - in my made up example, the French speakers were more likely to say things like "curvy" to describe a car, whereas the German speakers were more likely to say things like "powerful".

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

in German it's masculine

Das Auto, surely (i.e. neuter)?