Feminist Communication Theories

Language and Gender

Early feminist communication theories attempted to address the connections between gender, sex, and styles of communication. Such scholars as Dale Spender julia Penelope Wolf, Cheris Kramarae (formerly Kramer), Robin Lakoff, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, among others, began to theorize about the ways gender constrained and influenced women's and men's communication styles and practices. These theorists argued that language is man-made—that it has been controlled by men for centuries and reflects a bias toward masculine styles of communication as well as masculine ideologies. Feminist theorists suggested that societal expectations of how women and men should behave have a powerful impact on the ways a person communicates. According to these scholars, women are prone, for example, to use more tentative language and to ask more questions in a conversation while men are prone to use more forceful language and to interrupt more. Women, too, according to Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Irigaray, must rewrite and reclaim language so that it reflects a woman-centered ideology rather than one grounded in male perspectives and politics.

Marsha Houston and Kramarae followed these earlier theories with work that suggested that not only did a person's sex or gender influence their communication styles, but also did a person's ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Most recently, scholars such as Amy Richards and Jennifer Bumgardner suggest that feminist theorizing works to explore and explain the reasons that specific labels, such as feminist or bitch, are interpreted differently by different genders and age groups.

[Page 391]Feminist theorizing in this area also suggests that when individuals violate gendered expectations for communication, they exist in a double-bind state. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, for example, suggests that women in a variety of workplaces face opposing and contradictory expectations regarding communication: Women are supposed to communicate in a more masculine style, but when they do, they are deemed unfeminine and penalized. The result is a double bind for women, with penalties for choosing either option. Similarly, feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Bell and Kim Golombisky are currently exploring the gendered, raced, and classed nature of the classroom and theorizing the gendered and raced double binds in which students, as well as instructors, find themselves as they attempt to communicate with one another. Judith Butler moves theory regarding gendered expectations even further, suggesting that gender itself is a performance and that individuals both do and undo gender as they perform personhood. For Butler, theories of communication must explain the ways individuals negotiate, resist, and transcend their identities in a highly gendered society.

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