"She Sired Six Children"

333

17

ANNA

lIVIA

......

....................... . .. . . . ....

"She Sired Six Children"

Feminist Experiments with Linguistic Gender
1utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for 'he/she'. "He" is the generic pronoun, damn it. -Ursula Le Guin, "Is Gender Necessary .
?"

(1979)

. "h /hirn/hi "which exclude women from 1 dislike the so-called genenc pronouns e 1 IS d d . "They/themltheir" should be restored ... and let the pe ants an d scourse .... pundits squeak and gibber in the streets. ? R d "(1989) -Ursula Le Guin, "Is Gender Necessary . e ux

ungrammatical by purists and contemporary linguistic watchdogs.' Writing in French, Monique Wittig makes the epicene on the hero/ine of L'Opoponax (1964), her first novel, where, in keeping with standard spoken French, the pronoun takes the place of all three persons, both singular and plural, at different times, depending on context. Although this strategy works admirably in French, in English one (on's nearest equivalent) sounds stuffy and scholastic. Writing of on and one, Wittig claims, ''There is in French, as there is in English, a munificent pronoun ... not marked by gender, a pronoun that you are taught in school to systematically avoid" (1986:68). She complains that the English translator Helen Weaver had absorbed the lesson on avoiding one so well that she "managed never to use it" in the translation of L' Opoponax. Wittig admits that English one "sounds and looks very heavy" but, she claims, "no less so in French." This is, however, simply not the case. French teachers tell their pupils not to use on in writing because it sounds colloquial, uneducated, marked for the spoken language. In contrast, in English one is often encouraged in formal writing as having a more impersonal, scholarIy, and therefore more authoritative voice. With regard to register, on and one are not equivalents but opposites. EIsewhere, Wittig (1992) employs one as an indefinite pronoun, sometimes inclusive of, at other times in contrast to, the subject pronoun 1:
(1)

(2)

(3) (4) curring theme for feminist novelists of the 1970s was the question of r~onouns. Ferninist theorist Elaine Morgan notes that if you use the pro~oun he in a book about the history of man .. "befor.e you are hal!wi~ through the first chapter a mental image of this evolvmg creaftuhre b /ry" .. . . al' e and he will be the hero o t e s o to form in your mind. lt will be a m e imag ts th t the use of he is "a simple matter (qu?ted ~n~pender 1?80:1:1)'h~~rgg~~~~e;onte;t, of linguistic convemence w ic ,
.

The only thing to do is to stand on one's own feet as an escapee ... One must accept that my point of view may appear crude ... First one must step out of the tracks ... One might have to do without ...

is clearly intended ironically, ark that

for the use of generic he is neithe~ si~,Pleh:~t~~n~;s~l::~~~!~ ~~~~~~~C::::race deshe long s to find a book that begins, W d th . hty brain that was to disscended from the trees, she had not yet ~ev:,l~i~he f::!ne pronoun in Morgan's tinguish her so sharply from other spefcl~s. k thi s reaction indicates that the reader imaginary textbook produces a sense o s oc , . 1 . ima ined aman. has, despite the lack of overt ~arker~ of mascuhm~, n~;~~~;~S~at li~guistic conThus the use of the generic he is no simple matter. or 1 hori an This choice h onoun he to anap onze m . h venience would cause one to e oose t. e pr . is the ronoun of preference is more a matter of gender concord, ~mce Sl~g~t~~~~id to !tweigh elegance) to in informal speech (where convemence m1 their mother Most theorists have anaphorize indefinite antecedents: Everyone o;es h 1 beli~ving that this wou1d rejected the substitution of the female pronou~ or.t lema e, b1 . oun d without solvmg t. mere1y turn the pro em a: rnon- ender) but impossib1y forma1-soundlng In some cases the epicene (c~mh or '~Singu1ar they" the latter still considered one is used in preference to genenc e '

Although the use of indefinite one in examples (1), (3), and (4) sounds merely oldfashioned and rather aristocratic (to my British ears), the use of indefinite one and the deictic my to indicate the same referent in example (2) is incongruous because instead of forming an integral part of that body of persons encapsulated in one, the first person has been explicitly excluded. In French, on the other hand, the same sentence (On doit accepter que mon point de vue paraisse grossier) is acceptable. French on resists the grammatical imperative to pro vide gender information about the referent, but English one, though equally epicene, is not nearIy so versatile, being restricted both by register (formal) and reference (inclusive of speaker).' Writing ofthe century-long search for an epicene third-person pronoun, ofwhich he gives more than eighty examples from more than 200 sources between 1850 and 1985, Dennis Baron (1986) dismisses the whole endeavor as "The Word that Failed," the heading for his tenth chapter. Indeed, he states explicitly, "the creation of a comrnon gender pronoun to replace the generic masculine 'he' ... stands out as the (linguistic reform) most often attempted and the one that has most often failed" (1986: 190). This condemnation of failure is interesting. If success is to be measured only by the entry of one of these pronouns into everyday language, then the attempt has indeed failed, although Baron's own impressive list of contenders is testimony to the depth and longevity of concem about the issue. Yet singular they has shown a dogged resistance to the attempts of conservative grammarians to eradicate it, whereas the various invented pronouns such as nelnis/ner, ho/homlhos, and shis/shimlshims/ shimself exist only in the artieles exhorting their use.

lDENTlTY AS IMPROVISA nON

"She Sired Six Children"

335

334

. . f icene pronouns but with their UpBaron is concerned not Wlt? 1.lterary use~ a e~rfectly reasonable distinction. The take in the language at large. This IS, of ~ou:a~esPof fiction bear little resemblance to carefully selected, gra~ef~lly ~o~ul~te Pand distinct syntactic structure. One cannot spontaneous speech with ItS vivid lexicon b sidering the literary texts produced make valid claims about the spoken language Yc~n.1 troducing promoting and popuby its speakers. Nevertheless, the role ofliterbatudr~ mlOi~:ed Wher~ would we 'be without . . speciifIC words and phrases cannot larizng M 1 e IS f The. Rivals whose every secon d the malapropism, so called after Mrs: t ~ ~~~~d .the phrase Bi~ Brother is watching word was mal propos (not to the point)? Il's 1984? As Laurel Sutton makes . . .th t George rwe . you ever have seemed sinister ~I ou (h t 8) the planned language of writers plain in her contributi?n to .thlS volume ~ ap er , ee also Inoue 1994). can provide useful insights lOt~ lang;a:e Ide~O~\~~inist novelists who took up the Let us turn to a c?nslderat~on o t ~ w~~ enious responses to the masculine prechallenge ofthe genenc mascuhne, creatmg g .. fi ~ (1971) Dorothy . 1 1 The Kin of Ata Are Waltzng or ou , rogative in their own nove s. n. d umber: in The Cook and the CarBryant proposes kin, unmar~ed for either gen er ordnnaself.' in Woman on the Edge of Arnold [ntroduces na, nan, an J, penter (1973) , J une . biect pronoun and per as object pronoun Time (1976), Marge Piercy us~s pers~n as sf~ J . novel The Left Hand of Darkness . Ursula Le Guin' s science- ICtIon d and possessive . Ii h for the ambisexual Gethenians, cause (1969), which features the genen~ mascu me d e(Her responses are discussed at length such a storm that she was oblig to respon.. 1 in rint for almost 20 years later.) Since three of these novels have.bee~h co~~~~~~~~ be~aid to have failed. Each and al! four have sold thousands of ~oples,. ey r er she or he is obliged to grapple time a reader encounters the ~eologl~ms kin, na, o p. Why have these pronouns been with the ideological motivatlOn behm.d. these terms. they replace? What purpose do . with the tradltlOna pronouns . . invented? Wh at ISwrong d h h ? Against a 1970s backdrop ofidentlty

ity" and felt a need to define for herself the meaning of gender and sexuality. This was a period in which women were questioning all their previous assumptions about the relationship between the sexes and the role of women. Consciousness-raising groups were mushrooming, and new solutions to old problems such as childbearing, child rearing, and family life were discussed with extraordinary vigor and energy. It was in this political climate that Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a novel set among the androgynous people of Gethen whose bodies, for two-thirds of . t h e 1ast t hiIrd o f t h e mont h theyenter "k emmer, " each month, are ungendered. Dunng the human equivalent of being in heat. Female or male genitalia develop when they come in contact with another Gethenian in kemmer, but they never know in advance which genital formation they will exhibit. A Gethenian who has borne three children may sire two more, for example. As the quotations that head this chapter show, Gethen brought with it the thorny problem of which pronouns to use to refer to such sexless/ duosexual beings. Le Guin's initial solution was to use the masculine generic. In the novel an Investigator from the Ekumen (an observer with both a political and an anthropological function) voices the author's views on pronouns. As in any work of fiction, author and narrator are separate entities, often with distinct or op. Id . d h . h I h s: 11 . h L G . , posmg wor views an t eir own et os. n t e 10 owing passage, owever, e um s 1976 view of the role of the generic masculine (seen in Le Guin 1979 as well) may be heard in the voice of the narrator/Investigator: "You cannot think of a Gethenian as 'it'. They are not neuters. They are potentials or integrals." Instead, the Investigator asserts, "1 must use 'he', for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is les s defined, les s specific, than the neuter or the feminine" (1976:70). The Investigator remarks further that the use of the masculine generic pronoun leads her to think of Gethenians as men rather than as me nwomen. However, her presumption of masculinity goes beyond the ambisexual Gethenians, for when she speaks ofthe as-yet-unappointed envoy from the Ekumen, she again uses the masculine pronoun. She assumes the envoy will be male, predisposing readers of her dispatch to appoint aman. This problem apparently does not exist in the language of the Gethenians. We are told that they rejoice in a "human pronoun" that encodes information regarding number and animacy but not gender. In another telling passage, Le Guin shows that she is at some leve! aware that masculine pronouns prompt a masculine reading. In the opening scene, the envoy from the Ekumen reports on a parade and introduces an unknown member of the crowd as "the person on my left." The character is subsequently referred to as this person, the d emonstrauve . thiIS provi idi s: . 11 . 1n t h e next senmg a rererenua m k to t h e fiirst mennon. tence the anaphoric his is used to refer to the person' s forehead: "Wiping sweat from his dark forehead the man-man 1 must say, having said he and his ... " (1976:11). If the pronoun he had truly been generic, there would have been a choice of feminine or masculine designation, but the envoy insists that he has no choice but to call the person aman; only men may be referred to as he. L e Guin was roundly criticized by ferninist readers and reviewers in the late 1960s and the 1970s for her use of the generic masculine. In response to this criticism she published "Is Gender Necessary?" (1979), the article from which the quotation that o pens thiIS Ch apter comes. Sh e argues th a t w hil . mascu line 1 e t h e genenc me i IS pro bl emate, it is less restricted than either the feminine she or the neutral ir and far preferable to the invention of clumsy neologisms. The story, however, did not end with

the neologisms serve? What effect .~t. ey dent what did it mean to withhold gender politics, in which gender was. a CruCI ~ngr~ ien , s to raise these questions, the neoloinformation? Insofar as the aim workin a~ac~\:e the books are read. gistic pronouns work an~ keep w gDal as an e igraph to his chapter on epicene Baron uses a quotatton from Mary y. P . ular " In the context of neologisms: :'lt is,~ mis~ke ~o :l~~e. ~~ t,~~:~I~~~;:~~~ ~~:ht m~an that it is a misa chapter entitled The or t a .al '. are other more important probtake to be obsessed with the genenc he, e.Ho there . the original text from which e o.wever In. , wutg's descrlptlon of lems to be solved Inthe feminist struggl . D 1 ontinues by refernng to M omque b the quotation comes, a y e . "'l' [le] as a generic feminine su how the first-person singular ~xcludes wom:n~hich is foreign to it, for all that is ject can only enter by for~e into .a lang~ag t being feminine grammaticallY hurnan (masculine) is forel~n it, .th~ umt:~~: Dal 1979:18-19). Daly's point, speaking but he (il] or they (lls] (Wittig quo . ~ nouns but that the third.. . take to point out the sexism o pro . b then, is not that it IS a mis . 1 d t for criticism.4lt is an important point, eperson singular should n.ot be s~ng ~ ou ter aim to highlight, each in different ways, p cause all the wnters considered m this Cdha redress the balance to so me extent by the t . .. d ation of women an o . 1" the [inguistrc erog N "fixate on the third person smgu ar. effect their fiction has o~ the r~ade~ ~ne to the 1976 edition of The Left Hand 01 As Le Guin recalls m the mtro UCtIO~tup in a "groundswell of feminist activDarkness, in the mid-1960s she was caug - ..... ----

:?

IDENTITY AS IMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children"

337

336

. . .. . .. m The groundswe11 offeminist activc1s this statement, and neither did ferninist cr: . 1970s the French Mouvement de ism launched itself on the language. By .t~ r::; ~mport~nce of semiotics and other Libration des Femmes was grap~lmg Wthl e t 'woman' Their American cous. . . t the constructlOn of e concep . slgmfymg systems o 1 h t k of reassessing the world, the history of ins, having taken upon t~e~s~ ves t e che from the new feminist perspective of a consciousness, and the mdlvldual ps.y th footsteps of the French and turned to an woman-centered ontology, followe~ m el Le Guin being part of this . d it li guistic base n reacnon, ' analysis of ldeol~g~ an 1 s m da iece of informed self-criticism in an essay writnew period of aCtlVlS~, produce h P d otation that heads this chapter). This ten in 1989 (from WhlC~ comes.t e secon qu ne-a sous-rature approach which essay would be .i~terestmg for its :~u:~~~ea a;~mmentary bracketed in italics. This preserves the ongmal 1979 essay d 1 t in Le Guin' s thinking a reminder procedure allows the reader to s:e th~h:v~ 9:n:,:~ce argues with its earlier self. The that one had to go there to get ere. 11 t the issue and that had she made the earlier voice states that pronouns were re~ y ~Othese androgynous beings would not female side of the Gethenians more rom~~enl~ter voice turns this statement around: have struck readers as purely mascu ised he d directed contro11ed my own think:'If 1 hadorealized how th~ prono~,n(~~~~: t5)~P;h~ 1989 v~ice has absorbed contem-

ing, 1 mlgd~tha vfeembel.nel.~tc a:~e:~~ial_constructionist

porary ra lca l .. . hypothesis and apphed it to her fictlOn
5

reworkings

of the Sapir- Whorf

Le ?uin' s comme~~~~~os~: she reahzes 20 years la ". .es of .o " (1989:7) by adverse critics? She can position ha~ been qu~ted with ~n. did J b~t it was too late to revise the novel itself. write a public recantatlOn, as Le . Ul~ , ver Le Guin found an ingenious twoIt was definitely too late to revise lt Howfe : one's past remain alive in one's . 1f t the prob lem o havmg pronged hterary so u Ion o . "Winter' s King" ([ 1969) 1975), a story that presento Her first response was to repnnt 11 dated The Left Hand of was set on the planet of Gethen and that ~a~ actua y P:~hrou hout although she Darkness. This time, however, she useddfe~llmn~ p~op~~~~uns T; refe; to indefinite .. (. 1975) still adamantly oppose to mven e . was m .. d h f the genenc masculme. antecedents, Le Guin retame t e use o . use of feminine pronouns The semantic clashes that res~lt from t~e UnV~ryl~g tosed with those caused in "Winter' s King" are highly amusmg, espeCI~llYT: ~};~:~d of Darkness: by the use of masculine nouns and prono un s m e

ti on: What can a novelist do when h ~~:a~r~~~Ywi~:~~rs~lf, especia11y when her former

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) My landlady, a voluble man (38) the king was pregnant a paranoid egomaniac it certainly as a young
6

"Winter's King" (1975) . the young king had her back agamst a will~~ a the ex-king of Karhide knew herself barbarian (110) .. her "Prince Emran is well. She is wlth attendants" (99) She sired six children (117)

(73)

pregnant king and an regent (82) . . . was dfficult to magme him mother (85)

In the novel men get pregnant; in the short story women sire children. It is hard to believe that these early exercises in gender-bending and blending, a sexual mix and match, provoked only righteous anger when their comic aspect is so apparent. The laughter produced by the elash between the generic femininity or masculinity of these examples and the biological facts and cultural identities usually restricted to the other sex points to the subversiveness ofLe Guin's pronoun choice (see also Barrett, chapter 16, this volume). The second solution Le Guin devised was to introduce invented pronouns in the 1985 screenplay of The Left Hand of Darkness, although she remarks that these were modeled on a British dialect and were therefore not entirely her creations (1989). The pronouns in question, aJunJa's, replacing shelherlhers or he/him/his, were accepted quite happily when read aloud, although some members of the audience to whom she presented this solution commented that the subject pronoun a sounded too like a Southem American l. Even here, however, Le Guin is still uneasy with the use of grammatical neologismo Although these pronouns may be acceptable in a screenplay, a guide for oral performance, they would, she hypothesizes, "drive the reader mad in print" (1989: 15). This distaste for written neologisms is interesting in an author famous for her contribution to science fiction, a genre that revels in neologismo Indeed, her 1985 novel Always Coming Home ineludes a twelve-page glossary of invented vocabulary of the Kesh, an imaginary native Northem Califomian culture. Le Guin's 20-year struggle to find appropriate pronominal anaphors for her anatomically unique Gethenians and her changes of heart and ideology attest to more than a comrnitment to feminist endeavor on the part of the novelist. The difficulty of the task itself demonstrates that, in contrast to the creation of lexical neologisms so frequent in science fiction, messing with a morphosyntactic staple such as the pronominal system brings with it problems that will affect the whole structure of the discourse. Although Le Guin was the earliest of the writers in this chapter to grapple with questions of language and gender, by the mid-1970s several American novelists participating actively in the women' s liberation movement were putting ferninist ideas to work in their fiction. For example, in the language of Dorothy Bryant's (1971) Kin of Ata, kin is the only pronoun. Although inanimate objects are carefully divided into feminine and masculine, heterosexually paired in all arrangements from building to planting to eating, there are no pronouns for 'she' and 'he'. There are words for the concepts 'woman' and 'man', but these are seldom used, and there is only one pronoun for all human beings, which makes no distinction of gender or number. So far this is not particularly unusual for a pronoun (after all, English you and, as we have seen, French on encode neither number nor gender). Speakers use the Atan pronoun both in the second person and the vocative, however, and in the third person "they referred to one or more people by it" (1971 :50). Jt was used "the way most people use brother" (50), except that brother is specifically masculine and singular. Bryant provides no examples of Atan, explaining that it has no written formo Bryant's description of this pronoun's properties provides an insight into feminist views of the pronominal ideal. In the language of the Kin of Ata, it is possible to distinguish women from men at the lexicallevel, but the pronominal system distingUishes only between the animate and the inanimate. Not only are gender and number elided, but so are second and third persons (first-person reference is not men-

338

IDENTITY AS lMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children" 339 covered Leslie's nose and mouth, pushing into nan face; one deputy easily dragged na to the car; another folIowed by the side, whacking Leslie's body wherever nan stick could land" (1973: 139). However, after the group has been thrown into holding celIs for the night, the traditional third-person pronouns assert themselves and the neologisms are discontinued: "The sergeant pushed Three to the floor and, with his foot on her back, told the policewoman to take off her shoes, PUIIdown her pants" (139). The questions of why the epicene pronouns are used and why traditional pronouns take over are thus planted implicitly in the text. The reader discovers that the group members are in fact alI women, since alI now have female pronouns assigned to them. It is by the telIing phrase witn his foot on her back that everything changes. The nongendered pronouns cannot hold out against such an onslaught; the men have won. Gender is indeed central if it means one sex has its foot on the other's back. The epicene pronouns are backed by a battery of epicene noun phrases: a person, for example, is resumed as the speaker and the white-haired one (7-8), the women's liberation movement is referred to as people who share the group's politics (45); men as those others (61). OccasionalIy this usage sounds a little stilted: "You let that one look, now let me" (35). Instead of that one a pronoun would seem more natural: "You let her/him/na look, now let me." But the traditional pronoun she or he would, of course, reveal the gender of the referent, and only members of the group occupying the school use the epicene pronouns in their own speech; it is a mark of in-group status, which the narrator shares but the townsfolk do not. To use the neologisms na and nan is to place oneself inside the women's group, to declare one's identification with the feminist ideology. Because readers, in order to understand the text, are obliged to make the conceptual link between separatist practice and gender-neutral pronouns, they too are required to identify with the women's group, or at least to read from the wornen's position. . We I.ater discover that the person who says, "You let that one look," insisting with prunent interest on seeing a diagram of female genital organs, is the male deputy sheriff, to whom epicene pronouns are unknown. The connection between the use of ~pi~ene pronouns and the possession of a feminist consciousness is underlined by an Incldent during which the status quo is overturned. It occurs early on in the novel, when the wornen' s group is stilI flourishing unhindered and the epicene pronouns prevail. One day, while the children are playing, their cries become highly charged and sex-specific. At this point, instead of the epicene term ehildren, they are referred to as girls and boys:
"1 am a tiger!" a boy cried. "I am a lion!" a second boy said .... "I'rn an eagle!" a girI's voice shouted. "Goose!" a boy's voice threw back. (55)

tioned). The second person is deictic-that is, the identity of the referent ma~ .be derived only from the context of utterance. The third per~on, in contrast, ~lasslfes the referent as a nonparticipant in the discourse (Benveniste 1966a, b). Km would thus collapse two of the categories that have been perceived as. fund.amental to the pronominal function. How such a system might work is ?ard to ~magllle. Its prornotion as an ideal of human cornmunication is, however, mstructive. A pronoun that did not change according to person, gender, or number would presuppose an extrem~ly homogeneous cornmunity where such distinctions ~er~ mere nuances that could easily be discerned from contexto The pronominal function itself would be reduced to that of a placeholder for the verb, a sign indicating :'verb corning." . Aspects of kin are to be seen in the pronominal ~ystems. devised by ot~er nove~ists. Although kin itself is unique to Bryant' s work, ideological homogeneity, egalitarianism, and the absence of sex-role segregation were ideal s dear to June Arnold and Marge Piercy. Whereas Bryant merely describe~ the pron~un of Ata, both ~rnold and Piercy employ their epicene neologisms in their respective novels, a~lowmg us the opportunity of a more extensive analysis. They do not, however, banish the traditional pronouns but pro vide a complex interplay betwe~n t?e two ~ystems. The moments when the systems combine, or collide, are of great significance m.each book. The epicene pronouns must be considered in terms of t~e .wh~le pronominal system of each novel because they cause a redrawing f the distinctions m~de by all ~ther pronominals. Whereas Le Guin opposed the introduction of grammatlc~l neologls~s because their unfamiliar forms render them so noticeable, Arnold and Piercy use this foregrounding effect to emphasize their points.. .. Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter (1973), unlike the novel s previously ~IScussed, is set not on a science-fictional world but in a large town in Texas. The ~hOlce of setting removes ideas of gender and language from the arena.of the fantastic and places them in the dust of everyday life. This move toward reahsm closes down, ~o a certain extent, the number of possible meanings of the texto Indeed, parts of ~mold s story are based closely on actual events that took place durin~ the occupation of a disused police building at 330 East Fifth Street in New York. C!t~ from Janua:y 1 to January 13, 1971, by a group of radical feminists. (The location IS now a parking lot for poi ice officers of the Ninth Precinct.) Arnold's story begins as a woman comes to warn a group of people who h~ve just moved to town that local residents plan to throw them out. From the opening line, Arnold introduces the pronouns na and nan without any preamble: "'~ ou know Texas. Do you think it's true?' the cook had asked an hour ago. The.carpent~r s answer was forgotten in nan pursuit of truth." Nan slips in without explan~tlOn, leaving readers to make of it what they mayo This strategy is intended to naturahze the pronouns, so that the lack of gender distinctions appears as an unproble~atized st~tus quo. As w~ will see further on, however, even Arnold found the neologisms unwieldy and turne to other tactics to avoid gender disclosure. . Three-quarters of the way through the novel, the group occupies a ~chool and plans its amp 1 to use 1 e rooms to provide health , education, and other .. services to the localf popu l a t lOn. I nev itably , the police come and arrest the . occupiers. Dunng the scene . . .o the arrests, epicene pronouns prevail. In the following passage: for exam~le, ,~t IS impossible to tell by grarnmatical means the gender of the deputies or Leshe: A hand

This garne quickly degenerates

"Bitch!" "Bitch!" ... "Pussy!"

into name-calling:

340

IDENTITY AS IMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children''

341

"Pussy!" "Cock!" The small female voice grew weaker and shriller; the small male voices boomed like those of ordained men. (56) Even in the women's group, sexual divisions come to the fore when the little boys begin to act like grown men. It is then not possible to refer to them as an undiffer~ntiated group of "children." This scene makes apparent on the li~guistic level conf1~cts that have also begun to emerge on the politicallevel, as seen m the fraug?t relatlO.ns between the women's group and the outside world. The women are trymg to bnng up nonsexist children in a nonsexist environment, of which the nongendered pronouns are an integral parto But the women cannot control all aspects of the chil~ren's .Ii~es any more than they can control the land they have occupied. The grouP. exists .w1thm, and only with the tolerance of, a wider sexist society whose valu~s ~nd ~lerarch1es also exert an inf1uence on the children and their speech pattems. Th1S 1Sevidenced by the ease with which the children divide themselves into a warring group of boys versus girls and their immediate appropriation of the sexed terms p~ssy a.nd cock '. But what is the metamessage of the book? Is Amold implying that m a group composed only of women, gender is meaningless, or that police aggression forces a gender split? Because the members of the group are called by nontraditional or epicene names like Nicky, Stubby, and Chris, and their roles are not stereotypical for wo~enin the opening scene, for example, the carpenter is sanding the porch, and later m the book the cook and the carpenter become lovers-some readers may be surprised when they leam that all are in fact women. Are gendered pronouns unnece~s~ if sex differences are apparent from subtle cultural c1ues? Different readers will nterpret the novel in different ways, although its frame of social realism, its ~etting i~ s~all-to~n Texas in the mid-1970s, and its feminist slogans do make a radical-feminist reading more compelling than others. The neologisms are so eye-catching and incongruous, given the realism of the rest of the text, that an obvious interpretation would be that they are intended to focus the reader's attention on what is missing, on the pronouns they replace and the reasons for grammaticalized gender distinctions. . . The author' s own stated purpose in using neologisms may be helpful m this regard. Amold prefaces her novel with the following statement: Since the differences between men and women are so obvious to all, so impossible to confuse whether we are speaking of learned behavior or inherent characteristics ... the author understands that it is no longer necessary to distinguish between men and women in this novel. 1 have therefore used one pronoun for both, trusting the reader to know which is which. This statement would seem to provide the necessary key to the texto If the. neol~gisms work, if readers can tell who is female and who is male witho~t having th1S information grammatically coded, then one must conclude th~t ~e dfferences between women and men are indeed obvious and that further coding lS unnecessary. If, on the other hand, readers are surprised by the return of the gendered pronouns and the sexual identities they reveal, then sexual difference may not be taken for granted.

Readers who discover only by the use of she and he two-thirds of the way through the novel that the group that occupies the school is composed of women, whereas the people who oppose them are men, demonstrate by this discovery that gender cannot be assumed. From this perspective, the preface is deliberately ironic. Even without the preface, however, this point is made in the novel itself. The epicene speech of the wornen's group is utopic; it cannot sustain the onslaught of mal e violence to which it is subjected. The language is defeated at the same moment as its speakers. Although the book itself may end with the defeat of the women's cause, its publication points to a triumph of a different kind. The Cook and the Carpenter was published by one of the earliest feminist presses in the United States, Daughters Inc., a company June Arnold founded in 1972 to publish books by and for women. Arnold has in fact argued for the exclusion of men from the whole printing and publishing process: "we should wear headbands which state: My words will not be sold to 'his master's voice'" (1976:24). While Daughters Inc. f1ourished, she maintained a separatist preserve. From this perspective, the great pronoun war turns out to be merely a battle fought on many fronts, a strategy among others for creating and maintaining women's autonomy. The epicene pronouns Marge Piercy created in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) operate rather differently from those of Arnold. The book is an ingenious ~ixtu~e of science fiction and social realismo Connie, a twentieth-century psychiatnc patient, moves back and forth between her own time zone and the twenty-second century. Changes in third-person pronoun use follow this movement: The narrator and characters in the present time use traditional pronouns, whereas characters in the future time use the epicene neologisms person andper. Unlike in Amold's novel, in which the characters' gender is not linguistically given untillate in the narrative, Piercy's futuristic characters are introduced by the narrator with the pronoun appropriate for their gender. The interchange between the time zones in Piercy's novel is much more f1uid than that between Arnold's woman-only and mixed communities, and it causes frequent shifts in the pronominal system. During the sequences set in the future society of Matapoisett, the traditional and epicene pronominal systems coexist: Events described by the future-time characters feature the epicene system; those described by the narrator feature the traditional system. When a character from the future time Erzulia, takes on the persona lity of another future-time character, Jackrabbit, ami dances like him, the narrator recounts: "She danced Jackrabbit. Yes, she became him .... Bolivar's head slowly lifted from his chest. Suddenly Erzulia-Jackrabbit danced over and drew him up .... Bolivar began to dance with himlher. The music ended .... Bolivar jumped back. 'But I feltper!' he cried out" (1976:316; emphasis added). The use of the traditional pronouns shows the scene from the point of view ofC . h . ~nme, t e time traveler. Thus the gender shock of she became him is very appar~nt smce the phrase itself defies the system and a new pronoun, her/him, must be l~vented. Bolvar' s use of the epicene per shows up the world of difference between ?IS community and Connie' S. The language of the more advanced time forces changes in that of the earlier century. Accompanying the neologistic pronouns are many epicene lexical items that refer to artifacts and concepts specific to the society of the future: mems (family mem-

342

IDENTITY AS IMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children"

343

bers, although there may be no biologicallink among them)! kidbinder (a person who looks after other people' s children); pillow friends (peopIe with whom one has a se~ual relationship). This gender-neutral vocabuIary causes Connie f~equ~nt difficulty smce she speaks a language that encodes sex differences. She notices peo~le who must be women because they carried their babies on their backs" (71), guessmg at gender from cultural information regarding her own time' s sex roles rather than ~hose of the future society. Because proper names are frequently epicene too, ~onme .manages as best she can: "The tall intense person was staring at her. Jackrabbit, LUCIente had said: therefore maleo He ... " (77). Connie cannot tell Jackrabbit's sex .simply fro~ looking at him, hence the neutral person; she rememb.ers that his name IS Jackrabbit and is relieved to settle her diIemma with the masculine pronoun that would be appropriate to refer to a male=-or "jack"-rabbit. ... Another possible future is glimpsed by the read~r w~en. C~nn~e tnes to fmd her way to Jackrabbit and Luciente's time but .gets .lo~t I~ ~Ild~na s hm~. ~hereas the society ofMatapoisett is an egalitarian utopia, GIldI~a s hf~ m a fUtU~IStlC ,~e~ York is a nightmare dystopia. Luciente explains to Connie that m MatapOls~tt we ve reformed pronouns" (42), but in Gildina's version ofthe future people still use the traditional gendered forms, which represent the extreme pole of a sexually segregated and sexist culture. Occasionally the characters in Matapoisett use gendered pronouns: "1 have a sweet friend ... and her tribe is Harlem-Black. But if you go over you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me" (103).1 There ~e~ms.to be no textual ~e~son for this; it answers no necessity of the plot. Thus one IS mclmed to conclud~ it IS simply a rnistake. Indeed, Piercy does seem at times unha~py with the use of ~~lcene pronouns and often avoids them, employing ot?er tec~mques such a.s rep~tItlon of proper names or ellipsis. This is particularly noticeable m Arthur?f Ribble s .memorial speech for his dead son, Jackrabbit (309-310). The ~assa~e IS charactenzed by a high number of ellipses and proper names and by relatively httle use of pronouns, although there are only two animate referents in the dis~ourse (~rthur and Jackrabbit) and only one, Jackrabbit, who might be referred to m the third persono Because the whole episode is a eulogy to the recently dead Jackrabbit: th~s referent s~ould remain active throughout the discourse, yet his proper name IS grven seven hme~, often where there is no intervening matter or where none of the intervening matter IS ofthe type to deactivate the referent (in other words, there are no referen~es to other characters). The continual use of Jackrabbit's name instead of a pron?un IS therefOr~ doubly marked. Connie, on the other hand, the focalizer of the story, ISoften referre e to by a subject pronoun even where her name does not a~pear in the passage. In on notable episode (194-195), Connie is referred to twelve times as she or her, although her proper name is not given at all. Because she is the vehicle of the plot, the narrator may safely assume she remains active in the reader' s mind throughout the nov~l, but Jackrabbit is just as salient in the scene ofhis memorial service. It seems that, like Le Guin, Piercy finds morphosyntactic neologisms cumbersome to use, even when they are her own invention. .. old's Although the strategy of creating epicene pronouns Is.the ~ame m b?th A~ s an d PIercy 'o s n v els , the intentions of the two authors are quite .. different. Piercy .mtend h _ her work to reflect the egalitarian future world of Matapoisett, a world m whic sex

role differentiation has been reduced to the point where fetuses are brought to term in giant "brooders," where three mothers, of either sex, volunteer to rear the baby, and where men are able to lactate just as women do. Indeed, Piercy affirms, "1 use the common gender pronouns to reinforce the egalitarian nature of that society" (personal communication, December 13, 1993). In marked contrast, gender distinctions are not an issue in Arnold's short-lived womeri's cornmunity because, as a separatist environment, it has only one gender present. Although the children of the women' s cornmunity comprise both girIs and boys, they playa minor role in the novel and are distinguished by sex only in the brief episode analyzed above. It is significant that the children's genders are revealed only in a moment of explicit hostility between the girls and the boys. With Suzette Haden Elgin we move from the I 970s to the 1980s, by which time feminist ideas about language were well established and there was already a substantial literature on the subject of language and gender. Whereas June Arnold and !'1arge Piercy .ar~ more interested in tackling grammatical gender and the hierarchy rt creates, Elgin IS con cerned with lexical semantics and the expression of women' s perceptions. In her science-fiction trilogy Native Tongue (1984), The Judas Rose (1987a), and Earthsong (1994), Ladan, the language of women' s perceptions, plays a crucial roleo Elgin (1987) relates her inspiration for the Ladan trilogy to the ideas she got from reviewing Cheris Kramarae's Women and Men Speaking for the linguistics journal Language. She combined the hypothesis that existing human languages are inadequate to express women's perceptions with the French feminist concept of criture fminine and Godel ' s theorem, as interpreted by Douglas Hofstadter (1979). In Native Tongue, Elgin cites two extensions of Godel's theorem into language and culture: "For any language there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction" and "For any culture, there are languages which it cannot use because they would result in its indirect self-destruction" (1984: 145). Elgin's trilogy presents a society in which women are treated like children and where the specialized class ofLinguist women surreptitiously creates its own language in order to cause unbearable strain on the dominant men's language. The Linguist women plan to spread their language to al! women on the pl~net because once women have linguistic Encodings with which to express their miserable situation, the situation itself will inevitably alter. An Encoding, the Ladan Manual explains, is "the making of a name for a chunk of the world that ... has been around for a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently impor~ant to deserve its own narne" (1984:22). EIgin would appear to be taking direct issue with J. L. Austin' s cozy assertion, "Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found wo~th ma.king in the lifetime of many generations" (1961:182). Or rather, EIgin's fictlOn pomts out that Austin must be using the term men in its masculine, nongeneric e sens ,. fo.r a muItitude of distinctions and connections that women might wish to make are mIssmg from the English lexicon. Elgin remarks that the trilogy revolves around the idea that "the Sapir-Whorf h~pothesis is true in its weak form, which means that language does become a mechanlsm for social change" (1987b: 178). It is important to note that she does not say that language limits perceptions-that we are unable to think beyond the confines of OUrnative tongue-but that the unique perceptions of women have no place in the

344

IDENTITY AS IMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children" 345 discussed in this chapter could not be written with a 199 . tations and contradictions of a politics based on id . Os under~t~ndmg ofthe limition of these earlier feminist texts d th . . entrty, The utIlIty of an examina. . an elr expenmentato ith . lies m the constant slippage that is discover d '. n WI pr?noml?al gender concept of identity. By eliminating gendere~ ;ven within the relatively rigid 1970s back on assumptions and presu iti h P onouns, these novels force the reader this way, they expose the fraug~f~~~I~:~:'tat m~y not be borne out by the text. In referenr and aIl the cultural baggage of she Ia~r ~~~kS between the pronoun and the
NOTES ~ am gra~eful to Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piere , and Dor . . mformatlOn, referenees and opinions about thei k othy Bryant for providing me with the sarne assistanee with her mother's work T~: wor and to Rob.erta Arnold for providing the use 1 have made of the matera th . y are,. of eourse, In no way responsible for ey gave me ThIS articl . ehapter of my dissertation (Livia 1995). . e IS an exeerpt from the sixth l. For an overview of these diseussions see f Croueh (1987), Fatemeh Khosroshahi (1989) 'do~:ample, Betty Lou Dubois and Isabel prefaee to Deborah Cameron (198'5' ")" h' an .Ieh~el Newrnan (1992). See al so the . .VII lor t e opposite view: "M '. . nene referents in this book will be sh dh If . ost sex-mdefmIte and gee an er there are any di about being excluded, or not addressed th . .men rea mg who feel uneasy ing within minutes of opening the vast' .ey.~aYf ~are to consider that women get this feelIt is interesting to note that wher::J~~1 y o I o~~s.' and to refleet on the effect it has." Spock's Child and Baby Care systematieall e y e itrons (1945-196.8) of Dr. Benjamin rnst criticism, pronominal referenee since 1~;: ~rre~ to the baby as he, m response to fernimaseuline. The baby is no longer a eneric b .a.s a ternated be~wee.n the feminine and the case: "Every time you piek your b b g oy, I~stead, eaeh situanon presents a specific , a y up ... every time you change hi b h hi ... he s getting a feeling that h b 1" tm, at e tm, feed him . e e ongs to you (1946'3' e h . dd trrne you pick your baby up let' ., . , mp aSIS a ed), versus "Every s assume u s a girl. her, feed her ... she's getting a feeling that h b 1 ... ever~, time you change her, bathe 2. Dennis Baron (1986'194) re ort th s ~ e ongs to you (1976:2; emphasis added). ists as early as the eighteenth'centur P s at SInhgUlarthey had begun to be attacked by pur. . y. H e quotes t e example ofg . L' w h o mSlsted on eorreeting "Can a h . rammanan mdley Murray nyone, on t eir en trance . t th I ' they shalI not be deceived?" to "C . m o e wor d, be fully secure that . an anyone, on his entrance t th h t at he shall not be deceived?" Baro I . m o e world, be fully secure Goold Brown, who declared the s~nte:~es~~Jtes the nineteenth-century Quaker grammarian their reputation" ineorrect because "th o persono S~ould be censured for being careful of e e pronoun their IS of the I I b .orrectly represent its antecedent noun per: hi h . ~ ura num er, and does not line." Brown gives no reason for inte ret;:n't:e IC IS ofthe third perso~, singular, mascuwanrs to justify the use of he to a hoi . .g noun person as masculme, except that he 3 . nap onze it. . The systematlc use of on as the princi al ronom . O~hertensions at the diseourse level. lvi P P nominal vehicle of L' Opoponax creates Vlew, and narrative voice as 1ar ' mivo vhmg su~h. textual features as focalization, point of F ' gue e sew ere (Livia 1995 1998) F . rench approaches to the problem f Iinoui . ,. or a dscusso of other Garrta), see Livia (1994, 1995). o ingursnc gender (for example, in the work of Anne

well-trodden grooves of a patriarchallanguage. Because the trilogy, like Le Guin's Left Hand o! Darkness, is a thought experiment, not scientific research, it might seem pedantic to ask which women's perceptions form the basis for Ladan: old, young, black, white, lesbian, heterosexual. Elgin's is a science-fictional world where, apparently, these differences are not as salient as in our own. The Linguist/nonLinguist distinction does have enormous importance in the novel, and Ladan is, in fact, the language of the Linguist women' s perceptions. (The creation of a world in which linguists are economically and politically the most important group provides a certain gratification for those of us who feel our discipline is more often slighted than celebrated.) The majority of the texts discussed here date from the late 1960s and the 1970s, the period when the women's liberation movement was at its height, and the goal of creating equality between women and men seemed attainable, if not overnight, then at least before the century was over. Literary experiments with gender have, in recent years, tended to take a different trajectory. With the rise of the gay liberation movement and the increased visibility of the gay community, sexual orientation has been added to the simple binary of feminine/masculine. The appearance of increasing numbers of transsexuals and their mobilization as a socially influential group have caused that binary to fragment into a multidimensional prism. Instead of creating epicene neologisms to force the reader to think in terms of persons rather than women and men, novelists such as Anne Garrta (1986), writing in French, and Jeanette Winterson (1993), writing in English, have adopted the strategy of removing all grammatical signs of gender in order to present androgynous characters who transcend sexual distinction. A tactic used in autobiographies by transsexual writers (NoelI994; Stephens 1983) is to alternate between portrayals ofthemselves in the feminine and in the masculine to demonstrate the fluidity of gender. As gender has come to be seen les s as a fact of individual identity and more as a homogenizing force, as a performative in the Austinian sense, the quest for gender-neutral pronouns has given way to a concept of gender as a social attribute separate from the speaker or the referent. *She sired su children is no longer semantically incongruous, and the disapproving asterisk may be removed, for many male-to-female transsexuals have sired children as men whom they now take care of as women. The sexual, racial, and c1ass identities that formed the basis of many of the most important political platforms of the 1970s and 1980s have given way in the more nuanced 1990s to an acceptance ofhybridity, fluidity, and performativity. The c1ass of women, an identification so fiercely fought for in the 1970s, has been undermined from within and without. Fragmentation from within began immediately, as the concept 'woman' was exposed as both an ideological construct and a cultural performance by theorists who themselves had been trained in feminist scholarship (see for example Butler 1990 and Fuss 1989). The "woman-identified woman" began to blur ever more rapidly as male-to-female transsexuals dec1ared that they too identified as women and challenged "women-born wornen" to justify the exc1usion of transsexuals from all-female events (as the annual confrontations at Michigan Womyn's Music Festival bear witness; see off our backs and Transsexuals News Telegraph's letters columns for July, August, and September 1993, 1994, and 1995). The novels

et

4. In languages in which gender is not coded . Hungarian, or American Sign Language th . morphosy~tactJealIy, such as Finnish, , e questlOn of creatmg gender-neutral pronouns

346

IDENTITY AS IMPROVISATION

"She Sired Six Children" 347

--(1985). Always coming home. New York: Harper & Row. --(1989). Is gender necessary? d 1 L G . . . of words, women, places, Ne~ r~o~~; ~ro:e, ~~;~ancing at the edge of the world: Thoughts Livia, Anna (1994). The riddle of the S hi . C . Bucholtz A C L L P mx: reatmg genderless characters in French. In Mary , . . rang, aurel Sutton, & Caitlin Hines (ed ) C ceedings ofthe Third BerkeLey Women and La s., ultural performances: Proand Language Group, 421-433. nguage Conference. Berkeley: Berkeley Women ----(1995). Pronoun envy: Literary uses of lin . . . fornia, Berkeley. (As Anna Livia Julian Bra::';StIC gender. Ph.D. dISS. University of Cali-

does not of course arise. This does not mean that these languages do not distinguish between the genders nor that the derogation of women does not occur at some other level, whether lexical, semantic, or pragmatic. 5. For feminist renderings of the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis see for example Dale Spender (1980) and Julia Penelope (1990). See also Caitlin Hines (chapter 7, this volume). 6. This quotation is so remarkable that it has made it into Bartlett's Book ofQuotations. 7. Matapoisett might be described as a racial utopia, for the people who inhabit it are from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Native American, Latino, Asian, and African, and there are no signs of interethnic or interracial hostility. However, a more fitting image than a utopia would be that of a melting pot, for the races are so blended together that little is left of their culture of origino

REFERENCES
Arnold, June (1973). The cook and the carpenter. Plainfield,VT: Daughters Inc. --(1976). Feminist presses and feminist politics. Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 3(1):18-26. Austin, J. L. (1961). A pie a for excuses. In Austin, Philosophical papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175-204. Baron, Dennis (1986). Grammar and gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Benveniste, Emile (1966a). La nature des pronoms. In Benveniste, Problmes de linguistique gnrale. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 251-257. --(1966b). Structure des relations de personne dan s le verbe. In Benveniste, Problmes de linguistique gnrale. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 225-237. Bryant, Dorothy (1971). The kin of Ata are waiting for you. New York: Random House. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah (1985). Feminism and linguistic theory. New York: SI. Martin's Press. Daly, Mary (1979). Gyn/ecology: The metaethics ofradicalfeminism. London: Women's Press. Dubois, Betty Lou, & Isabel Crouch (1987). Linguistic disruption: He/she, s/he, he or she, heshe. In Joyce Penfield (ed.), Women and language in transition. New York: SUNY Press, 23-36. Elgin, Suzette Haden (1984). Native tongue. London: Women's Press. --(1987a). The Judas rose. London: Women's Press. --(1987b). Women's language and near future science fiction: A reply. Women's Studies Interdisciplinary Journal 14(2): 175-181. --(1994). Earthsong. New York: Daw. Fuss, Diana (1989). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature and difference. London: Routledge. Garrta, Anne (1986). Sphinx. Paris: Grasset. Hofstadter, Douglas (1979). Godel, Escher, Bach. New York: Basic Books. Inoue, Miyako (1994). Gender and linguistic modemization: Historicizing Japanese women's language. In Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, Laurel Sutton, & Caitlin Hines (eds.), Cultural performances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 322-333. Khosroshahi, Fatemeh (1989). Penguins don't care, but women do: A social identity analysis of a Whorfian prob1em. Language in Society 18(4):505-525. Le Guin, Ursula (1969). The left hand of darkness. Sto Albans, England: Granada. --(1975). Winter's king. In Le Guin, The wind's twelve quarters. New York: Harper & Row. 93-117. (Original work pub1ished 1969) --(1976). lntroduction to The left hand of darkness. New York: Ace. --(1979). Is gender necessary? In Le Guin, The language of the night: Essays on fantasy and sciencefiction. New York: Putnam's, 161-171.

(1998). Fear of sewers: Who sees this? Who thinks this? W. . Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes Moni 01 S . ho s~ys this? In Natasha Wamer, , mea iver, uzanne Wertheim & M li d C Gender and belief systems: Proceedings ofthe Fourth BerkeLe ~' e In a hen (eds.), ference, Berkeley, CA: Berkelcy Women and L G Y omen and Language ConNewman M anguage roup, 439-446 , ichael (1992). Pronominal disagreements: The stubborn roble .. . .. antecedents. Language in Society 21(3):447-475. p m of singular epicene Noel, Georgine (1994). AppeLez-moi Gina. Paris: Lattes pene~:r~a~~in~ (1990). Speaking freely: UnLearning t~e Lies of the fathers' tongues. Oxford:

Piercy, Marge (1976). Woman on the edge of time. New York: Fawcett Crest Spender, D~le (1980). Man made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Pa~1 Spock, Benjamn (1946). Tlze common sense book of baby and child c N Y & Pearce. careo ew ork: Duell, Sloan --(1976). Baby and child careo Rev. ed. New York: Pocket B k St~phens, Inge (1983). ALain, transsexuelle, SI. Lambert: Quebec: ~~rt W~n~erson, Jeanette (1993). Wrilten on (he body. New York: Knopf. tage. Wittig, Momque (1964). L'Opoponax. Paris: Minuit. --(1986). The mark of gender. In Nancy Miller (ed) Th . Columbia University Press, 63-73. ., e poeucs of gender. New York: (1992). The straight mind and other essays. Boston: Beacon.

viii

SERIES FOREWORD

like in the new millennium. Reinventing ldentities is as wide-ranging as gender itself, which takes on new and surprising forms in new contexts. The volume emerges from what might be called the "third wave" oflanguage and gender scholarship. The goal of this new approach is to understand the diversity of gendered experiences as they play out in a variety of situations. Third-wave language and gender research makes explicit its connections to feminist theory; of particular significance are those constructionist perpectives that emphasize how gender identities and ideologies are achieved in discourse. But this approach does not examine language to the exclusion of other social practices, such as physical self-presentation, gesture and movement, and activities. Such details are crucial for arriving at specific, local forms of gender, in contrast to approaches that aim for a general description of "women' s use of language." Reinventing ldentities counters this well-intentioned but reductive strategy with a series of studies of gender on the ground, formed under conditions of community and contact, shaped moment by moment through the details of discourse. The fluidity of gender illustrated by the chapters of this volume suggests an alternative to more totalizing frameworks, an alternative that respects the variety of gendered selves that discourse makes possible. Reinventing ldentities attends to myriad cultural forms of gender: within the U.S. context, chapters focus variously on African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and European Americans; on a more global scale, contributors examine discursive gender relations in local contexts in Europe and Africa, as well as in North America. And via the influence of the emergent field of queer linguistics, Reinventing ldentities includes a sizable number of studies of sexuality as well as gender, the first volume of its kind to have substantial representation of both fields of inquiry. A contextualIy and theoreticalIy rich colIection of studies of the gendering, ungendering, and regendering of language, Reinventing ldentities is an important contribution to the field's current reinvention of itself. The volume invites scholars and students alike to rethink what it means to study the intersection of language and gender and where that intersection is located. The answers offered in its many chapters are as di verse, diffuse, and dispersed as the gendered selves who populate these pages. This undoing of a single unified tale of language and gender is the first step to envisioning new forms of feminist scholarship within linguistics. -Mary Bucholtz, Series Editor

CONTENTS

Contributors, xiii

Bad Examples: Transgression and Progress in Language and Gender Studies, 3 Mary Bucholt;

Part 1 Identity as Invention No Woman, No Cry: Claiming African American Women's Place, 27 Marcyliena Morgan 2 Coherent Identities amid Heterosexist Ideologies: Deaf and Hearing Lesbian Coming-Out Stories, 46 Kathleen M. Wood

3 Good Guys and "Bad" Girls: Identity Construction by Latina and Latino Student Writers, 64 Marjorie Faulstich Orellana 4 Constructing the Irrational Woman: Narrative Interaction and Agoraphobic Identity, 83 Lisa Capps 5 Contextualizing the Exotic Few: Gender Dichotomies in Lakhota, 10 1 Sara Trechter

The Reinventing ldentities Web site, featuring additional data, graphics, and audio and video clips from the studies in this book, can be found at http://www-english.tamu.edu/ pers/fac/bucholtz/oslg/re-id

x Part II Identity as Ideology

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

xi

6 Changing Femininities: The Talk of Teenage Girls, 123 Jennifer Coates 7 Rebaking the Pie: The Caitlin Hines
WOMAN AS DESSERT

18 Purchasing Power: The Gender and Class Imaginary on the Shopping Channel, 348 Mary Bucholtz 19 From Folklore to "News at 6": Maintaining Language and Reframing Identity through the Media, 369 Colleen Cotter 20 Constructing Opposition within Girls' Games, 388 Marjorie Harness Goodwin

Metaphor, 145

8 AIl Media Are Created Equal: Do-It- YourselfIdentity in Alternative Publishing, 163 Laurel A. Sutton 9 Strong Language, Strong Actions: Native American Women Writing against Federal Authority, 181 Rebecca J. Dobkins

Name Index, 411 Subject Index, 417

10 "Opening the Door of Paradise a Cubit": Educated Tunisian Women, Embodied Linguistic Practice, and Theories of Language and Gender, 200 Keith Walters

Part III

Identity as Ingenuity

11 The Display of (Gendered) Identities in Talk at Work, 221 Deborah Tannen 12 Gender, Context, and the Narrative Construction of Identity: Rethinking Models of"Women's Narrative," 241 Patricia E. Sawin 13 Language, Socialization, and Silence in Gay Adolescence, 259 William Leap 14 Turn-Initial No: Collaborative Opposition among Latina Ado1escents, 273 Norma Mendoza-Denton 15 Conversationally Implicating Lesbian and Gay Identity, 293 A. C. Liang

Part IV

Identity as Improvisation

16 Indexing Polyphonous Identity in the Speech of African American Drag Queens, 313 Rusty Barrett 17 "S he Sired Six Children": Feminist Experiments with Linguistic Gender, 332 AnnaLivia