LINGUISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSING GENDER IDENTITY IN WOMEN’S SPEECH

мақолада ўзбек детектив матнларини ўрганиш орқали асардаги аёл қаҳрамонлар нутқининг социопрагматик ва гендер хусусиятлари, ижтимоий ўзига хосликларини аниқлашнинг усул ва воситалари тадқиқ этилди. Хусусан, аёллар ўртасидаги мулоқотнинг ижтимоий хосланиши, шева ва ноадабий қатламга оид тил бирликларининг прагматик жиҳатдан ифода имкониятлари таҳлил қилинган. the article examines the sociopragmatic and gender characteristics of the speech of female heroines in the work, methods and means of determining social characteristics by studying the texts of the Uzbek detective. In particular, the possibilities of pragmatic expression of dialectical and non-linguistic units of social identity, dialectical and non-linguistic units of communication between women were analyzed. в статье исследованы социопрагматические и гендерные характеристики речи героинь женского пола в произведении, методы и средства определения социальных особенностей путем изучения текстов узбекского детектива. В частности, были проанализированы возможности прагматического выражения диалектических и неязыковых единиц социальной самобытности, диалектических и неязыковых единиц общения между женщинами.

Psychedelic psychodrama: Raising and expanding consciousness in Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1973)

Jane Arden’s debut feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1973) is an adaptation of the radical feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches (1971). In both the play and the later film, the all-female cast re-enact personal and archetypal situations using autobiographical material, which was collectively gathered from group therapy sessions led by the director. Psychedelic drugs were also consumed during the group therapy sessions. In this article, I will situate Arden’s distinct approach to performance in the film within the framework of psychodrama, focusing specifically on the role that psychedelic drugs play in unleashing performers’ repressed feelings of trauma, rage, and desire; these emotions are harnessed into a dynamic mode of performance that amplifies the cathartic possibilities of women’s speech. The film’s heady brew of radical feminist politics, group therapy, and countercultural self-actualisation is both challenging and contentious. I argue that Arden’s pursuit of consciousness liberation through psychodrama and psychedelics—in other words, through ‘raising’ and ‘expanding’ consciousness—is best understood as a concerted attempt to align countercultural and radical feminist tactics for unravelling repressive forms of social conditioning.

Silence, gender and metamorphosis in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’

This article explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.

Women and Fairness. Navigating an Unfair World

This collection brings together scholars from various disciplines to ask fundamental questions concerning how women handle the manifold impediments placed before them as they simply attempt to live full human lives. The collection explores narratives of women – real and fictional – who fight against these barriers, who succumb to them, who remain unaware of them, or choose to ignore them. It explores the ways we read women in cultural production, and how women are read in society. We assert the obstacles constructed into the very fabric of societies against fifty percent of the population are unfair, be they hindrances for women to attain their goals, encumbrances that limit women’s speech and societal participation – communal and artistic – or hindrances that prohibit specific behaviors and images of women.

Can the Women Speak?

Two prevalent interpretations of the women’s silence in the Markan ending—the silence as failure and as a religious response—share the assumption that the silence is the subjective action of the women. However, such interpretations fail to see the way in which the Markan women characters are constructed in the narrative, which is already colored by an androcentric and patriarchal lens. In this paper, I propose a symptomatic reading of the silence with a question “Can the women in Mark speak?” which is inspired by Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1999). An analysis of women’s speech in Mark shows how their voices are silenced in/by narrative. The women’s silence symptomatically appears from the Markan contradiction. On the one hand, Mark portrays the women positively on the surface; but soon after, Mark unconsciously dismisses the women from the narrative because of internalized androcentrism on the other.

GENDER AND COMMUNICATION: SOME FEATURES OF WOMEN’S SPEECH

This paper deals with gender and communication in terms of different features of women’s speech based on the previous studies done by many sociolinguists. Gender refers to categories that distinguish people based on their socio-cultural behavior, including speech. In their speech, gender-men and women- use different ways to say a similar thing in communication. This paper described women’s and men’s speeches from several studies in a frame of linguistics perspectives. Some different features were compared with the women’s speeches in Minangkabau community that indicates Minangkabau politeness maxims. This paper also describes how Minangkabau culture is different from other cultures in criticizing among native speakers of Minangkabau both direct and indirect. Then, some hedges are used by women as politeness markers to minimize face-threatening acts (FTA), a concept proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987).

METACOMMUNICATIVE PRAGMATIC MARKERS: GENDER ASPECT

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (slushay / u menya net deneg <look / I have no money>); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.

Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom and the Alleged Incontinence of Female Speech

In a passage from The Castle of Perseverance, the reprehensible Malus Angelus dismisses the speech of the personified virtues who are attempting to lead mankind to salvation: ‘Ther wymmen arn, are many wordys. (…) Ther ges syttyn are many tordys’ (2649-51). As the quotation illustrates, likening someone’s words to turds is both an effective brush-off and a colourful insult. This particular insult derives its force from the familiar anti-feminist trope of the voluble woman: like women, the wicked angel implies, the female personifications of virtue talk too much, and the incontinence of their speech is presented in terms that are both scatological and bestial. These lines transform the virtues’ words into logorrhea, an object of ridicule rather than reverence. But upon closer examination, this eminently quotable passage and the dramatic context in which it is situated also suggest new ways in which we might approach such examples of anti-feminist discourse concerning women’s speech. This essay examines how the terms of Malus Angelus’s insult both rely on and destabilize anti-feminist proverbial sayings concerning women’s bodies and women’s speech.