Gender and Belief Systems:
Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference

The Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference was held April 19-21st, 1996 at the Berkeley Conference Center, Berkeley, California
Proceedings were edited by Natasha Warner, Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes, Monica Oliver, Suzanne Wertheim, and Mel Chen.

The topic of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference was Gender and Belief Systems. This includes such issues as expression of spirituality; how language reflects beliefs about gender; beliefs about the language of particular groups; and the interaction of language and gender with religions, political, social, cultural or intellectual systems.

Beliefs of many types are often taken for granted both in studies of language structure and in those of gender. Belief commonly serves as a starting point, but is not investigated in its own right. This topic encourages works exploring the foundations of ideological/epistemological constructs.

Table of Contents

EILEEN P. ANDERSON

"You think...I think": Toward an understanding of girls' psychological conflicts using a voice-centered relational method of interview analysis

VICTORIA L. BERGVALL

Divided minds: Gender polarization in brain and language research

MONIQUE BIEMANS & RENÉE VAN BEZOOIJEN

The effect of masculinity and femininity on pitch

LEELA BILMES

Gender differences in Thai near-death narratives

JANET M. BING

Discovering hidden values: A frame analysis of teaching evaluations

RENÉE BLAKE & SIGRID MÜLLER

The coming of the third industrial revolution: Will women again be relegated to service positions?

LISA BLAND

The humorous side of butch and femme

DIANA BOXER & ANDREA TYLER

A cross-linguistic view of harassment

JILL BRODY

Competition as cooperation: Tojolab'al women's barter

ALYSA BROWN

Genderlects on the tennis courts: An analysis of female athletes' linguistic behaviors

MARY BUCHOLTZ

Geek the girl: Language, femininity, and female nerds

MARISA CASTELLANO

Building community across different belief systems: An ethnographically informed perspective on the role of narrative and dialogue

MELINDA YUEN-CHING CHEN

Conceptualization of homosexuality: A group-based view

JENNIFER CURTIS

"He sorta raped her": Hedging and re-education for batterers

JILL DOWDY & DEBORAH KELLER-COHEN

Signifying in African American women's confession magazines

PENELOPE ECKERT

Vowels and nail polish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace

SUSAN EHRLICH & SUSAN LEVESQUE

Discursive practices, point of view and the representation of sexual harassment

SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN

Writing a woman's profession: Women's relation to the scientific voice

GLENN FRANKENFIELD

Gender difference and phonological selection

ALICE F. FREED

The language of pregnancy: Women and medical experiences

HIROKO FURO

Linguistic conflict of Japanese women: Is that a request or an order?

RUDOLF P. GAUDIO

Funny Muslims: Humor, faith, and gender liminality in Hausa

DEBORAH GÜNZBURGER

Gender adaptation in the speech of transsexuals: From sex transition to gender transmission?

KIRA HALL

Lexical subversion in the hijra community

JENNIFER HAY

Problems and paradoxes of language and gender research

CAITLIN HINES

She-wolves, tigresses, and morphosemantics

JANET HOLMES

Women's role in language change: A place for quantification

LANITA JACOBS-HUEY

Negotiating social identity in an African American beauty salon

DEBORAH JAMES

Derogatory terms for women and men: A new look

CHERYL JOHNSON

Race, gender, and belief: The case of the O.J. Simpson defense

SCOTT FABIUS KIESLING

Cultural models and alignment roles in fraternity men's discourse

AMY KYRATZIS, DONNA TROUSDALE & MARDI KIDWELL

Gender and science: Epistemic stances in girls' and boys' scientific discourse

ROBIN TOLMACH LAKOFF

The (rise and fall and)n of Hillary Rodham Clinton

ELAINE J. LAWLESS

Images of God in Christian women's sermons: Finding God

WILLIAM LEAP

Fruit Loops and naughty places: How the language of gay city reflects the politics of urban gay experience

A.C. LIANG

The Dharma Talk as a therapeutic discourse

ANNA LIVIA

Fear of sewers: Who sees this? Who thinks this? Who says this?

JONATHAN D. LOFTIN

"Women's knowledge" and language choice at the Fourth Cultural Congress in Otavalo, Ecuador

YOSHIKO MATSUMOTO

Does less feminine speech in Japanese mean less femininity?

BONNIE MCELHINNY

Strategic essentialism in sociolinguistic studies of gender

JANET S. MCINTOSH

Professed disbelief and gender identity on the Kenya coast

DEIRDRE H. MCMAHON

"Her greatest wish fulfilled": Motherhood in medical texts

JOHN MCWHORTER

Bringing gender into creole studies

MIRIAM MEYERHOFF

My place or yours: Constructing intergroup boundaries in Bislama

ELAINE K. MILLER

Engendering Hillary: Editorial cartoon frame-ups

YOSHIMI MIYAKE

Women and the deferential particle o in Japanese

GABRIELLA MODAN

Roving hookers and homebody johns: Images of stability, movement, and otherness in the reporting of prostitution arrests

JENNIFER MONAHAN

The language of préciosité: Stereotypes of women's language writ large?

BIRCH MOONWOMON-BAIRD

Lesbian conversation as a site for ideological identity construction

SHIGEKO OKAMOTO

Representations of diverse female speech styles in Japanese popular culture

ESRA G. ÖZYÜREK

Feeling tells better than language: Emotional expression and gender hierarchy in the sermons of a Turkish Islamic leader

DON PETERKIN

Prostitutes and primitives: Blamed, framed and blended in "African AIDS" discourse

PIA PURRA

"None of the boys aroused anything special in me": Transitivity as a linguistic belief system

KATHLEEN C. RILEY

Engendering miscommunication in the Marquesas, French Polynesia

SUZANNE ROMAINE

Why women are supposed to talk like ladies: The glamour of grammar

FILOMENA SANDALO

Gender and social class in Kadiwéu phonology

UMA SHRESTHA

You have got to have a son!

MERYL SIEGAL & SHIGEKO OKAMOTO

Imagined worlds: Language, gender and socio-cultural "norms" in Japanese language textbooks

BETH LEE SIMON

Gender, language, and literacy in Banaras, India

DEIRDRE SNYDER

"The cause of all the mirages": The twisting of tropes in Delmira Agustini's "Visión"

ELIZABETH A. STRAND

Gender beliefs and expectations affect fricative perception

LISA M. STULBERG

Let's talk about sex: The negotiation of discourse and the critical potential of classroom talk in a sex education classroom

LIISA TAINIO

Gendered everyday myths in a Finnish conversation: Stories about a first visit to the home of prospective in-laws

SARA TRECHTER

The intersection of grammar, metalinguistic knowledge and ideology in Lakota gendered speech

RENÉE VAN BEZOOIJEN

The effect of pitch on the attribution of gender-related personality traits

KATHRYN A. WOOLARD

Language and gender in urban Catalonia

Papers from the Panel "A retrospective on progress in the field since the 1983 publication of Language, gender, and society"

NANCY M. HENLEY

Comments

CHERIS KRAMARAE

Strengths/successes and snags/nags

SALLY MCCONNELL-GINET

Language, gender, and society: Personal reflections on its ancestry and its offspring

BARRIE THORNE

How has feminism changed the study of language? Looking across the disciplines

Presented at the 1994 Berkeley Women and Language Conference

BONNIE MCELHINNY

"I teach talk only, not language": Writing the scholarship of Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi into histories of eighteenth century linguistics

Also presented at conference but not included in these proceedings:

NIKO BESNIER

Talking on the margin and negotiating identity in Tonga, South Pacific