Comments on Don Kulick's paper "Language and Gender/Sexuality"

Penelope Eckert Stanford University

This is a really important paper, and like everything else Don has written, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. It has given me many hours of enjoyment, thinking about things that I hadn't thought much about, and trying to figure out where my variationist's vulgar fascination with "identity categories" falls in the enterprise of the study of desire. But I do feel as if I've been led up to a precipice and then told to do something at it. (end of metaphor.) And not having the expertise to engage very usefully in deep discussions of language and the unconscious (although I look forward to those discussions), I'm going to move off in a slightly different direction. This commentary has two themes. The first is the relation between sexuality and desire. The second is about those identity categories. The two themes will not be discussed in any particular order, but will be hopelessly jumbled together.

Let me begin with the definitions of sexuality from my little Webster's College Dictionary - 1. The quality or state of being sexual; possession or exercise of sexual functions, appetites, etc. 2. Undue preoccupation with what is sexual. 3. The constitution and life of the individual as related to sex. I like the third defintion, except for the one thing that it shares with the others - a focus on the individual. This, I believe, is part of the mystifying, glorifying and essentializing discourse of sexuality as in our bodies - as basically biological and asocial, as involving sacred, pure desire. And I detect a certain amount of this discourse in Don's paper. Don talks about lying about desire (he is not the first person to point out that language can be used to lie about desire - Kira Hall's paper on phone sex workers (Hall 1992) is a nice example of this. [slap slap]) but he doesn't seem to problematize desire itself. A focus on real and feigned desire still works on an assumption first of all that sexuality is about desire, and second, that the object of desire itself is unproblematic.

At last summer's Linguistic Institute, in my class on the ethnographic study of variation, I asked the students to think of an age-related social construct that could be important for the study of variation. One group suggested the loss of virginity. It was not the sexual initiation itself that they were viewing as related to language, but the social salience of sexual activity at a certain life stage. Indeed, during the life stage when people are expected to be moving into sexual activity with others, orientation to this activity becomes an important focus in the structuring of identities and alliances. And as time goes by, the female categories of "slut" and "nice girl" become major sexually defined identity categories, which in fact correlate nicely with sociolinguistic variables.

My recent field research, in which I've followed an age cohort from late childhood (fifth grade) into adolescence, focuses on the emergence of a peer-dominated social order that centers around the construction of a heterosexual market, the co-construction of status and heterosexuality, the sexualization of peer society, and the socialization of sexuality. Whether a kid chooses to move ahead of the cohort or decides to lag behind, whether one becomes an "innocent" a "slut" or a "stud", - is more important during this passage than most other aspects of social practice. But what is at stake is not sexual desire so much as social desire as it plays out in the sexual arena.

An example. Angela had a long-standing struggle to get recognition from her Latina peers, who considered her white. One Saturday night towards the end of seventh grade, she lost her virginity, and the following Monday she told me the whole story. It was a long story, beginning with a boy she'd been flirting with and which girls were jealous that he was paying attention to her. It moved on to another day and another week, through space as she walked the neighborhoods with a succession of cuter and scarier boys, under the eyes of more jealous enemies and worried friends, and ended up in an empty lot behind the hall where her cousin's quinceanera was taking place. The actual loss of her virginity was encapsulated in the final event of the narrative: "and then we did it." No carnal pleasure, only some disappointment that it hadn't amounted to much. When I asked her what she liked about being with him, she told me she liked the feel of someone putting his hand on her waist. This story was not about sexual desire or sensation. And it wasn't really about boys. It was about outdoing those girls who called her white. And indeed, as she told me this story, I heard a remarkable transformation of her speech, as she constructed her stance through the authoritative use of Chicano English in a startlingly contrast to the way she'd sounded in our conversations in the previous weeks and years. (I hasten to add that sexual engagement and Chicana identity do not go together - this is one particular tough brand of Chicana identity that Angela is after, and this is a strategy that Angela has come up with to claim it.)

This is not a story about girls having sex to gain social status. It's about the fact that sexuality is not just about sex. And this leads me to my point - that if we focus on sexual desire, we're likely to make the same mistakes in the study of language and sexuality that have all too often been made in the study of language and gender. In this case, every act that indexes masculinity or femininity isn't necessarily about being male or female. And Angela's sexual activity is not about sex. It's about being Chicana. And if sexuality is about desire, the object of Angela's desire is not the boy or sexual pleasure, but the girls' recognition and legitimation in the Chicano community.

And lest it seem that this is unusual, let me step back to talk about the more general social setting that Angela is functioning in. In preadolescence, all of the fuss is about heterosex not because of raging hormones or emotional attachments to the other sex, but because this is the period at which the heterosexual social order becomes embedded in the peer social order. However, the emergence of heterosociability in the cohort has relatively little to do with sex, but is the vehicle for the transition to a peer-controlled social order. That is, during this period, the age cohort comes into its own by appropriating social control from adults as it constructs its own social order, and it does this through the development of a social market based on heterosexual value.

In late elementary school, kids begin a frantic and highly visible activity around forming boy-girl couples (this is discussed in some detail in Thorne 1993 and Eckert 1996). These couples form and break up up at a dizzying rate - most last a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. But an alliance that begins in morning recess can easily be over by lunch. And few people's feelings are hurt in the process. Most of the alliances are achieved through one or more intermediaries, and have more to do with relations among intermediaries than with relations between the two people who were being paired up. The relationships themselves are almost entirely instrumental, and most of the activity is ABOUT getting together or breaking up rather than actually being together. In fact, the activity is engaged in, not by the members of the couples, but as a collaborative endeavor that defines a newly-formed heterosocial community of practice - an emerging popular crowd. As the first major girl-boy joint endeavor, this crowd represents to all the new social order, and the co-construction of social status and heterosexual practice. Adults view this frantic activity as evidence that kids don't know what heterosexuality is about. But in fact, it is very much about heterosexuality, for heterosexuality and the institutions that support it in adult society are more about alliances and non-sexual matters than they are about sex.

Now about those identity categories again. I couldn't agree more with Don's impatience with the equation of sexuality with the categories of "gay" and "straight". This, to my mind, apes the fascination with difference that has dogged the study of language and gender. Focusing on the sex/gender of people's sex partners folds sexuality into gender, and effectively erases all those other things that matter every bit as much. And while indeed highlighted gay styles are prominent and interesting, neither their existence nor their interest lies in category membership. People have quite different orientations to their own sexuality and that of others, and to the relation between that sexuality and the other things and people in their lives. The life of "gay" language is in the complexity of the social landscape that ties gay people not just to gay people but to the rest of the social world. If sexual practice has anything to do with language use, it will be because it becomes part of people's personae. There may be linguistic effects that one finds only within communities of practice that are defined by sexuality. And these linguistic effects may spread beyond these communities of practice to the extent that people wish to project affiliation with the practice of these communities - whether they are actually participants in them or not, and the practices that they affiliate with may not be the sexual ones, but something else altogether.

In a recent NWAVE talk, Katherine Campbell-Kibler, Rob Podesva and Sarah Roberts (1999) approached the study of "gay" speech as a variety of ways of positioning oneself in a broader social landscape with the use of a variety of linguistic resources. As they say, "the idea of a singular 'gay way of speaking' homogenizes the diversity within the gay community and reifies as gay certain linguistic practices that are shared throughout society." Examining the speech style of a gay activist lawyer "doing gay activist lawyer", they focused on the hyperarticulation of stops. Hyperarticulation has been noted by several people as characteristic of "gay speech." It has also been noted as characteristic of "Jewish speech" and Mary Bucholtz has shown its use by teenage girls in constructing a "nerd" style. To say that hyperarticulation is "gay" is both incorrect and uninteresting. It is the very fact that this linguistic resource is available to everyone, and used by a variety of people in constructing styles that makes it interesting. And the wide range of its use is what makes it useful for the construction of particular kinds of styles that include "gay" as part of them.

Any categories that are worth anything to the study of language use exist in virtue of practice, and there are some potentially interesting categorizations one might make that are based on people's use of certain semiotic resources related to sexual practice.. Our interest in sexuality is in its social life - in how we use language to accomplish sexual ends, how we talk about sexuality, how we index sexuality when we talk about other things, how we use language in and around sexual activity, how we use language to organize ourselves socially around sexuality, and how we use language to organize ourselves sexually around sociability. For instance, sexy voice quality is something that many people adopt to "do" sexually aroused. Producing this voice quality is auto-erotic, it can arouse others, and it signals arousal. It is a voice quality that can be used independently of actual arousal to engage others in sexual activity, to harass others sexually, to present oneself as sexually aroused, to present oneself as a sexy person and so on. It can be used to express cathexis of all sorts - for things that feel good like food, perfumes, soft fabrics; and for more distantly desirable things such as articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, flowers, cars, buildings. It is a voice quality that can be used both to accomplish things and to combine with other linguistic resources to construct a variety of styles. It is a voice quality that one might adopt in making sexiness or promiscuity central to one's identity. So that what is a strategic resource may become common enough in some people's speech that it can be said to be part of their style, and it will signal to others that they belong to an identity category of sexy or promiscuous people (whether or not, in practice, they are sexy or promiscuous).

Variationists don't tend to pay attention to variables like voice quality or intonation - most of us are terminally stuck on apparent vowel changes in progress, and they don't tend to pay attention to categories that don't appear in the sociology textboooks. But the fact is that the social meaning of variation lies in the styles that we construct with the use of a much wider range of resources, and one future of variation lies in the analysis of those styles and of that wider range of resources.

References

Bucholtz, M. (1996). Geek the girl: Language, femininity, and female nerds. in: N. Warner, J. Ahlers, L. Bilmes, M. Oliver, S. Wertheim and M. Chen Ed., Gender and belief systems, Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group,

Campbell-Kibler, K., Podesva, R. J. and Roberts, S. J. (1999). Beyond lisping: A preliminary look at the linguistic correlates of gay styles. Paper presented at NWAVE 28. Toronto.

Eckert, P. (1996). Vowels and nailpolish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. in: J. Ahlers, L. Bilmes, M. Chen, M. Oliver, N. Warner and S. Werhteim Ed., Gender and belief systems, Berkeley: Berkeley women and language group,

Hall, K. (1992). Women's language for sale on the fantasy lines. in: K. Hall, M. Bucholtz and B. Moonwomon Ed., Locating power: Proceedings of the second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 1. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 207-22.

Thorne, B. (1993). Gender Play. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.