Episode 35 Language and the gendered body

In this week’s podcast I’m sharing a talk I gave as part of the English seminar series at the University of Liverpool. Here are the slides if you’d like to follow along. (Slides 17 and 18 were missing from the original presentation, so you’ll hear me stumbling a little as I try to sort that out.)

Here’s the abstract of the talk:

Many strands of research in linguistics – including critical discursive and feminist approaches – orient toward social critique and social change. Most of these approaches adopt the perspective offered by practice theory, whereby individuals are understood as negotiating social structures through their engagement in a range of various practices. A major weakness of practice theory, however, especially as it has been applied in sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), is that it takes for granted the integrity of the self, the presence of the body, and the coincidence of self and body. Such a premise forecloses the possibility of critically investigating those social structures that disallow subjectivity and that erase the body.

In this talk I illustrate a method of CDA designed to reveal the social structures that emerge in everyday conversation. It looks specifically at structures of heteronormativity in accounts by two participants – Mary and Beth – who recount two very different types of troubling experience in adolescence. Mary’s account reveals a social structure in which entering heteronormativity requires the erasure of both self and body. In Beth’s account, the body serves as mediator of a heteronormative structure: it serves as a protective boundary to maintain the integrity of the self. I aim to show that the methods of CDA can be used to identify different configurations of social structures in everyday conversation, and more importantly, to imagine new, less oppressive structures. Specifically, it makes possible an understanding of self and body as integral – and potentially transformative – components of social structure.