Addressing Gender-based Ideologies, por Andrea Insaurralde

Lic. Andrea Insaurralde. Profesora en Inglés e Inglés Técnico – Instituto Nacional Superior del Profesorado Técnico. Licenciada en Lengua Inglesa – Universidad de Belgrano. She has specialized in the teaching of Language and teaches at Universidad CAECE and Instituto Superior CEM. She is also teaching Grammar I at Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She has been a teacher at several secondary schools and Teacher Training Colleges in Buenos Aires, Santa Cruz and Corrientes.

The study of language and gender has always been grounded in eliminating disadvantage. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the USA, women began to examine social practices that supported gender discrimination. This led to the study of language and gender with the aim of banishing societal inequities based upon gender. The aim of this class is to raise awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse, that is to say, how our language use shapes our understanding of the social world, our relationships to each other and our social identities, and how gender-differentiated language use can reflect and help perpetuate the subordinate status of women in society. By recognizing the constitutive nature of language discriminatory practices can be challenged and transformed through our language choices.

Since the components of our social identity – social class, ethnicity, gender, age and so on – have a crucial bearing on our experience of and relationship to social processes, one step towards redressing social inequities is the use of nonsexist language. In light of this fact, the notion of “sexist language” will be addressed, together with the question of possible gender differences in the area of language usage. The former will include the discussion of naming conventions, lexical choice and the use of generic “he”, and the latter, two different approaches to the study of language and gender: the dominance approach and the dual-culture approach.