Making social moves

CHAPTER 4 Making social moves When people converse with one another, they are making various kinds of social moves. As we saw in the preceding chapter, this is why con- versational access is so important and also why it can be problematic. In this chapter we will look in more detail at different kinds of lin- guistically mediated social moves, what analysts call speech acts. Speech acts are firmly embedded in social practice. Each particular utterance enters into the discourse and into the plans being developed in that interaction and, in turn, into a larger landscape of social practice, in- cluding gender practice. The work each utterance does is not a matter simply of its form, its linguistic properties. Each utterance is part of the social situation in which it occurs, and its significance unfolds in the emergent history of the discourse and interaction that it enters. We have seen that gender structures people’s access to participation in situations, activities, and events, hence to their opportunity to perform particular speech acts legitimately. In this chapter, we will see how the acts themselves accomplish gender. Talk is often thought of as quite distinct from action. ‘‘He is a man of action, not words.’’ ‘‘She’s all talk, no action.’’ (The pronouns here reflect language and gender ideologies familiar to many English speakers.) A sharp dichotomy between talk and action is, however, problematic. It is true that simply to say ‘‘Let’s have lunch together sometime soon’’ need not result in any lunchtime meeting. Perhaps the utterance is in some way a figure of speech, the overt literal proposal to have lunch not really intended to lead to a lunch but just to indicate that the relationship between the interlocutors should be seen as continuing to be cordial. Even in such pro forma cases, however, the words do something. What precisely those words do on any particular occasion of their utterance depends on the social relations of the people who are talking and on what they are doing together, both during this interaction and more generally. Perhaps one reason that people are sometimes tempted to identify talk with inaction is that words alone really do not do anything. Their often considerable force derives from 129 130 Language and Gender their being embedded in social practice. Not surprisingly, that force is implicated in gender practice in complex ways. Aspeech act is a move in a continuing discourse among interactants. Like other acts, it moves their relationship along one more step, moves their mutual connection to ideas and ideologies, and it moves their accomplishment of things in the world as well. Amove can be a com- pliment, a complaint, an insult, a request, a command, a criticism, a question, a one-up, an exclamation, a promise -- these are some of the kinds of speech acts that linguists and philosophers have discussed. We will sometimes refer to them as social moves in order to emphasize their place in a larger discourse and as part of socially-oriented plans and strategies. But we also refer to them as moves because there are meaningful interactive moves, such as waving, raising one’s eyebrows or handing someone a pen, that do not use language and are thus not speech acts as ordinarily understood. As we saw in the last chapter, con- versational conventions can make silence a meaningful social move. It might insult or compliment. It might or might not be accompanied by meaningful facial expressions or other bits of ‘‘body language’’ (which also, of course, can accompany speech). Sometimes we will talk about speech acts when we really mean communicatively significant social moves more generally. That is, our interest is in meaningful interac- tive moves that often -- perhaps canonically -- involve speech but may also be made in other ways. The gendered division of labor can mean that certain kinds of speech acts are seen as more the province of one sex than the other or that particular ways of performing them enter into gender practice, or that their effect is different depending on who performs them. Repeated moves of a particular type can grow into an activity -- a series of one-ups can become a competitive conversation, a series of complaints can become a gripe session, a series of criticisms from one person to another can become a dressing down, a series of statements on some topic uttered by the same person can become a lecture. Speech act theory Philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) initiated the systematic study of speech acts in his well-known exploration of ‘‘how to do things with words.’’ To undermine the view that speech and action are opposed to one an- other, Austin drew attention to what he called performative utterances. Aperson with the proper institutional authority, he pointed out, can say ‘‘you’re hired!’’ and thereby give a job to the addressee. The utterance itself, given the proper institutional setting and a speaker authorized 131 Making social moves to produce it, brings it about that the addressee has indeed been hired. Those words start a chain of events that will, if the addressee accepts the offer, lead to the addressee’s showing up for work and getting a paycheck some time thereafter. Hiring and firing, naming boats and babies, pronouncing judgments in a courtroom, marrying two people or joining them in a domestic partnership: verbal performances are central to doing such things. And, of course, we have already observed in the last chapter that gender often affects which people will be in- stitutionally empowered to bring off particular kinds of verbal perfor- mances. Although Austin (like most analytic philosophers of his era) generally spoke of individual speakers as if their social identities and relations to one another were irrelevant to their status as speakers (or, more generally, as actors), he spoke of overt performatives like promise or christen as ‘‘trouser words,’’ 1 gendering the notion of performativity at its birth. As we noted in chapter one, gendering people can be thought of as accomplished through a series of acts, many of them linguistically me- diated. ‘‘It’s a girl,’’ pronounces the medical professional at the moment of birth, and indeed it is thereby made a girl and kept a girl by sub- sequent verbal and nonverbal performances of itself and others. In de- veloping the per formative theory of gender mentioned in chapter one, Judith Butler (1990) draws inspiration (and nomenclature) from Austin’s theory of perfor mative utterances. Butler develops Austin’s important insight that performativity is not just a matter of an individual’s want- ing to do something by saying something. Verbal as well as other per- formances come off, acquire their meaning, and do their work, because they draw on discourse histories of similar performances, reiterating elements that have worked similarly in the past. In that reiteration, however, there is the possibility of individuals going beyond the con- straints of the social or linguistic system they have inherited, perhaps ultimately thereby contributing to changing it. As Butler (1990, p. 145) puts it, ‘‘In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency’, then, is to be located within the possi- bility of a variation of that repetition.” (We will return to Butler’s ideas about performativity in chapter nine.) Austin focused on the speaker’s agency but later work has emphasized that what speakers can do with their words is constrained (though not fully determined) by linguistic and other social conventions. 1 Trousers were at that time very much masculine apparel and symbolized authoritative action. Compare ‘‘she wears the pants in that family,’’ a line often used in the same era to criticize a woman who wielded what the speaker saw as inappropriate authority in her household, usurping the place of the legitimate pants-wearer, the man of the house. 132 Language and Gender Not all utterances affect the world as dramatically as overt perfor- matives like ‘‘I hereby pronounce you husband and wife’’ (when uttered by a person licensed by the state to perform marriages). Nonetheless, Austin observed, all utterances are indeed actions. He distinguished three different kinds of acts involved whenever someone says some- thing. There is a locutionary act. The speaker produces an utterance -- a stream of sound or hand gestures or marks on a page or computer screen -- as a particular linguistic expression with a particular structure and (literal) meaning. The locutionary act sets the stage for the illocu- tionary act, what is done in saying whatever has been said. Have you claimed something or inquired? Have you promised or threatened or warned? Invited or implored or commanded? Expressed your anger or your pleasure? Praised or criticized? Apologized or empathized or com- plained or teased? In saying something and meaning something by it, a speaker always performs one or more such illocutionary acts. There will also be perlocutionary acts accomplished by saying something. You may persuade someone of your views, frighten or annoy them, cheer them up or comfort them, move them to some kind of action of their own (e.g. to follow your suggestion or respond to your request), impress them with your wisdom, fan their love of you. The literature on speech acts (e.g. Searle 1969) generally focuses on illocutionary acts (e.g. promising or requesting). If we just pay attention to illocutionary acts, however, the social character of speech acts may be underrated. To come off, to work, it looks as if an illocutionary act needs only to be comprehended (assuming that certain preparatory conditions are met). So, for example, if the speaker is giving a party at some future time and says ‘‘Please come to my party,” then the addressee who understands what is said is thereby invited to the party. The addressee does not have to welcome or to accept the invitation, but it has successfully been issued. Comprehension is not trivial, of course. The speaker cannot always guarantee that the interpreter will figure out the illocutionary point of what has been said: whether, for example there is just a report offered by ‘‘I’m thirsty” or a further request for a drink. But generally, if the illocutionary point is understood, then the illocutionary act has been performed. (This assumes that the speaker is indeed empowered to perform the illocutionary act in question, not always a safe assumption.) Perlocutionary acts, however, are inescapably social: their coming off as the speaker intends requires very active participation from the addressee -- for example the addressee’s coming to the party or getting a glass of water for the speaker. Perlocutionary acts have to do with effects that go far beyond simple understanding. It is obvious that gender and other aspects of social standing will affect 133 Making social moves success in performing intended perlocutionary acts. It is less obvious but also true that gender and other social attributes of speakers may enter into success in getting particular locutionary and illocutionary acts to come off as intended. 2 In our everyday taxonomies, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are not so sharply distinguished as this discussion might suggest. For example, a threat and a promise are two different kinds of illocution- ary act. But they both commit the speaker to some future course of action. They are distinguished only by whether or not the addressee is presumed to be negative or positive about the speaker’s commit- ment. The person who aims to threaten intends to scare the addressee in contrast to the promiser, who aims to please. Scaring and pleasing are distinct desired perlocutionary effects. The same words may be a threat addressed to one person and a promise addressed to another. You cannot tell if someone is threatening someone else by simply ob- serving what words are uttered. And indeed a speaker may be neutral as to whether the addressee will welcome the commitment made, simply expressing the commitment with no intention to scare or to please. En- glish words for speech acts often convey information about both the kind of illocutionary act and the perlocutionary effects the speaker hopes to produce. There is a large literature on apparently gendered speech acts or speech act types: for example compliments, apologies, insults, one-ups. As we observed earlier, research in this area has probably raised at least as many questions as it has answered. To try to sort out some of the issues involved and think about how research might usefully develop, we find it useful to see speech acts as kinds of social moves that are part of larger, socially accomplished plans of action. We will expand this idea below. First, however, we want to talk about interactional pur- poses and effects at a very general level. Functions of talk and motives of talkers: gender oppositions In chapter one, we saw that gender is overwhelmingly conceptualized in terms of oppositions and in the preceding chapter we looked at 2 Inequality of various kinds among speakers can affect interpretation so that even if comprehension is all that is needed it might not be forthcoming in some situations (e.g. from someone who thinks that the speaker is not fully competent linguistically or is ignorant of some fact relevant for interpretation). The importance of interpretation and its social character are central themes throughout this book. 134 Language and Gender gender-polarized characterizations of conversational style: cooperative or other-oriented versus competitive or individualistic. The same or closely related oppositions are also advanced to describe gender differ- entiation in linguistic politeness and, more generally, speech-act usage. Thus women are said to be more polite -- to use more polite language -- than men; and this is said to be because they are more other-oriented, more collaborative, more affective. Such oppositions are in many ways an advance over views of women as simply ineffective speakers who deviate from the (effective) norm set by men’s speech. But these polar- ized oppositions, however appealing we may find their more flattering view of women, are ultimately as problematic as the deficit views of women’s speech that they replaced. And from a linguistic perspective, notions such as politeness and affectiveness are completely undefined. How do we identify them in our linguistic data? Is the utterance thank you always a polite speech act? How about when it is uttered as a re- sponse to the refusal of a favor? Politeness Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) have developed a theory of politeness that builds on Erving Goffman’s (1967) ideas about face- work (discussed in chapter three), and that has been very influential in work on gender and politeness. What Brown and Levinson are trying to do is articulate a theory that will shed light on general principles of politeness while also showing how it can differ cross-culturally and offering a framework for doing comparative work on politeness. Each individual, they argue, has ongoing interests in promoting their pos- itive face: projecting a self that is affiliated with others, that is liked and identified with, part of a ‘‘we.” Each individual also cares about their negative face: projecting a self that is a separate individual, some- one deserving of respect and freedom from imposition, someone whose own interests have intrinsic value. 3 An individual’s positive face needs have to do with need for approval from others, for a sense of being liked by others, of being connected to them. Negative face needs have to do with a need to make a place for oneself, a need to pursue one’s own projects without interference from others, a need to have one’s own distinctive individuality recognized and respected. Positive and negative face needs are in tension with one another. The more closely 3 Brown and Levinson’s labels ‘‘positive face’’ and ‘‘negative face’’ are inspired in part by Durkheim’s (1915) positive and negative rites, along with insights derived from Goffman. 135 Making social moves connected we are and the more like one another we see ourselves as, the harder it may become to protect our own and others’ needs for separateness and independence of action. The more respect we receive, the more recognition of our autonomy, the more difficult it may be to forge intimate bonds linking us to similar others. Brown and Levinson suggest that people typically have a better chance promoting their own face interests if they also attend to others’ face interests. Although they don’t put it this way, it may be most important to seem to care about helping others preserve and enhance their face needs, whether or not one in fact does care. What Brown and Levinson call positive politeness involves addressing positive face needs: showing that you like or empathize with someone, that you include them in your ‘‘we,” your ‘‘in-group.” Commiserating with one another about common problems (interfering parents or a shared obnoxious boss), admiring the other’s taste in clothes by com- menting approvingly on their attire, friendly joking and playful banter marked by profanity and familiar terms of address (sweetie, you old sonofabitch): such speech moves can exemplify positive politeness. Much of the behavior that ordinary folk call polite, however, is a mat- ter of what Brown and Levinson categorize as negative politeness: showing respect or deference, avoiding imposing or offending, acknowledging ‘‘rights.” Apologies, for example, often try to correct a social wrong done to another, thanks typically acknowledge that another has been willing to extend themself for one’s own good, greetings and farewells offer formulas to ease the strain created for face by the beginning and ends of interactions. Such speech acts and other linguistic practices such as the use of relatively formal modes of address and reference (sir, madam, professor) often convey negative politeness. Although certain kinds of speech acts do tend to be used to promote positive face and others to protect negative face, the connections are not as straightforward as they might at first seem. Brown and Levinson emphasize that politeness does not lie simply in forms as such but in what speakers use those forms to do. Of course, forms are not ir- relevant to politeness. There are, for example, often verbal formulas that are used to mark speech as conventionally ‘‘polite’’: many a child acquiring English has learned the magic powers of ‘‘please” as an ac- companiment to a request. ‘‘Please” conventionally signals recognition that the request imposes on the addressee, that the speaker cares about this potential harm to the addressee’s negative face and wants to mit- igate the imposition. Politeness formulas are often aimed at least as much at promoting the speaker’s face as protecting the addressee’s. Following relatively rigid conventions for how one should speak in 136 Language and Gender particular kinds of situations can be an important part of establishing one’s own right to respect, showing that one is in the know on social norms. Similarly, flouting conventions can be a way to show that one is not socially controlled by those who promote those conventions. For example where certain politeness routines have been associated with mothers and women teachers, boys may avoid them as part of present- ing themselves as independent of that female authority. On the basis of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Tenejapa, Mexico, Brown (1980, 1990) argued that the women of Tenejapa did more to promote others’ face needs, both positive and negative, than did the men. Brown had not expected much negative politeness from women to other women because in Tenejapa women’s subordination to men in general and to the particular men in their own households was strongly institutionalized. But she describes women’s relations to one another as far more complex than she had predicted. She hypothesized that the women needed to show both negative and positive politeness to one another because of their extreme vulnerability to one another, their heavy reliance on the good will of other women in their house- hold and in the village. It is not always easy to classify speech acts as promoting positive or negative politeness or neither. Brown and Levinson’s distinction is not exactly the same as one between that which aims to make another feel good and that which aims to lessen the bad feelings someone might have, to repair actual or potential damage to someone’s face. There is also a further socially crucial distinction between saying and doing things to promote one’s own face needs and saying and doing things to promote someone else’s. Frequently, of course, the same action is in- tended to play both roles, perhaps even promoting one’s own face needs by means of promoting the other’s. But considerateness requires atten- tion to the other’s face needs, whereas politeness as often discussed in the literature may or may not. What looks like the same kind of act -- for example a compliment -- might be positively polite in one context but not in another. Sometimes it might be a considerate move to make, other times not. (Presumably, when a move is not considerate, it is not really positively polite.) Drawing on her own and others’ research on gendered distribution of a number of different kinds of speech acts, Janet Holmes (1995) argues that women tend to be more (linguistically) polite than men. She found, for example, women complimenting (and also being complimented) more than men. She also found women apologizing (and also being apologized to) more than men. Compliments she treats as positively polite, apologies as negatively polite. In other words, compliments are 137 Making social moves seen as aimed at making someone feel liked by others, connected to them. Apologies are seen as making someone feel that due attention has been given to their interests and rights, that others respect them. Holmes and her New Zealand colleagues had observers listen as they went about their affairs and write down the first twenty instances of utterances they heard as speech acts of the designated kind. This method represents a considerable advance on earlier studies in the US that relied on questionnaires rather than observation of naturally oc- curring speech acts. Although we can ask on what grounds observers decided that a compliment or an apology had been proffered (recall from chapter one how a baby’s cries can be heard differently, depending on whether one thinks it is a girl or a boy), Holmes’s results and those of a number of other investigators whose work she discusses strongly suggest that women predominate as both initiators and recipients of certain kinds of ‘‘polite’’ speech acts among the populations studied (mainly New Zealand and US middle-class people of European descent). Can we conclude that these women are more considerate than the men with whom they live and work? More interested in strengthening so- cial ties, in promoting solidarity? More concerned to be seen as ‘‘nice’’? Less ‘‘sincere’’? Even if we assume that the data represent communica- tive patterns among these groups fairly accurately, accounting for the observations is not so straightforward. What sort of self a person presents in a particular kind of situa- tion and how they ratify the other’s self-presentation will often be implicated in constructing gender. Holmes takes the fact that men ap- parently direct more instances of conventionally ‘‘polite’’ acts towards women to indicate their recognition that women value these acts more highly than do men. An alternative explanation might be that (at least some) men want to project a masculinity that takes a ‘‘protective’’ stance towards women, constructing women as especially vulnerable creatures in need of special handling. And, of course, both kinds of motives might be involved, sometimes even for the same man. Unlike the work by Holmes and her colleagues, much earlier studies of politeness in service interactions in The Netherlands (Brouwer et al. 1979 and Brouwer 1982) found no difference linked to the speaker’s sex (as judged by the data collector). Like Holmes’s work, however, the Dutch studies did find significant differences linked to the sex of the addressee. But the results go in the opposite direction from those found in the New Zealand studies. Brouwer and her colleagues looked at what people said to ticket-sellers in a large train station and in this public service context found significantly more polite speech to male ticket-sellers than to female from customers of both sexes. Notice that 138 Language and Gender differences which depend on the addressee’s sex, however they are to be explained in particular cases, do point dramatically to the very so- cial character of gendered facework, which is always framed in relation to the other participants in an interaction. To evaluate research on gendered patterns of politeness, it is critical to see how each researcher has operationalized the notion of polite- ness. Is it a matter of the incidence of particular forms? Are the forms in one study comparable to those in another? In what kinds of social contexts are observations being made? 4 If it is a matter not of forms as such (e.g. please, thank you) but of speech act types like compliments or apologies, then it is important to understand how those act types are identified and in what circumstances they are produced as well as th e form they take. Essentiall y the same kind of act can be performed very differently in different situations or by different people. And, like other features of conversational practice, politeness cannot be understood by looking just at isolated individual moves or speech acts. Compliments and apologies, for example, ask for responses from their addressees. Re- sponses offer important evidence of the kind of facework accomplished by the speech acts eliciting them, a point that Robert Herbert (1990) emphasizes in his treatment of complimenting in gender practice. Each community of practice develops its own expectations about the facework participants will do on their own behalf and for the other members of the community, often allocating differential responsibil- ity for facework to different members of the community. There may also be expectations about the kinds of means chosen to do that face- work and how to balance the demands of facework with the other kinds of things done in talking. What kinds of performance are pos- sible? The ‘‘separate cultures’’ vie w of gender discussed in chapter one proposes that many people spend significant and formative periods en- gaged in single-sex communities of practice. These separate contexts for developing expectations about what is expected in the way of facework are then thought to explain gender-differentiated patterns emerging in mixed-sex communities of practice. Certainly gender separation at crit- ical developmental stages is likely to be significant for various kinds of expectations people have of themselves and of others. In the case of 4 The Dutch study looks only at exchanges between strangers in service transactions, whereas many other studies have included exchanges between acquaintances and even intimates. Wolfson (1984) proposes that facework is done most between acquaintances and is far less consequential between intimates, whose relation is presumably settled, and between strangers who do not expect to encounter one another again. There is, she argues, a ‘‘bulge’’ in politeness at the middle distance. Holmes (1995) suggests that Wolfson’s bulge model fits better with her observations of women than of men. [...]... situating the movemaker and the other participants in a larger social landscape Evaluation as facework People’s evaluation of one another is central to social interaction and to the construction and enforcement of social norms Compliments and other evaluative moves create and sustain not only affiliative social ties but also hierarchical distinctions Our social personae and statuses feed on evaluation, both... ‘‘named’’ speech act type in English that is widely seen as gendered We use them to illustrate some very general points about the gendering of speech acts and social moves Like all kinds of social moves, compliments have a host of different social functions and possible motivations These functions and motivations may not always easily coexist and can often be interpreted quite differently by interactional... language in social life 145 Making social moves Once made, the parent’s promise becomes one of the child’s interactional assets ‘‘You promised!” can be an effective protest from the child if the sandwich is eaten and the cookie is not forthcoming Exactly what effects any particular move of promising might have will depend on many other features of the particular interaction and also on how such moves are... and regulating the gender order Adults early on compliment the bravery of boys and the beauty of girls, boys’ toughness and girls’ niceness 151 Making social moves And preadolescent girls’ use of compliments is clearly important in instructing and enforcing social norms A young woman Sally knows was working during the mid-1980s on the clean-up crew of one of the dining halls at her college Her boss,... ‘‘stuck-up.”) There was probably also concern to make her ascendancy in the heterosexual market look uncontrived, look as if it simply followed from her inborn merits Compliments are social moves that give rise to other social moves, and we cannot look at the (putative) compliments without also considering responses to them Both women and men find negotiating the evaluative terrain and more specifically compliments... discuss in the next section ‘‘Do they really mean it?’’ What’s the key? With any speech act or other meaningful social move, questions arise about what interactants are trying to do, whether they straightforwardly mean what their words say or whether something else is at 153 Making social moves stake Are they being serious, honest, playful, sarcastic, joking, offhand? In what ‘‘key’’ is this song being... to strengthen my social bonds to you, to convey that I like you The affective/instrumental split has long been associated in the US and many other English-speaking societies with a female/male division of labor not only in talk but also in many other kinds of social activities Interestingly, however, people often ignore negative affect (e.g anger) in endorsing this gendered view of social life They... Compliments are social moves that live in a landscape of evaluation They convey, explicitly or implicitly, positive appreciation of some thing or action for which the addressee may apparently be credited: appearance, achievements, possessions Criticism and insults inhabit the negative area of this same landscape In the positive neighborhood, we find not only compliments but also such moves as praise... that people want to (appear to) look out for one another Particular situations may throw that assumption in doubt and some communities of practice may be organized around antagonism, but, for 147 Making social moves example, the absence of a compliment is far more often interpretable as an insult than is the absence of an insult construable as a compliment This difference in defaults and the implications... expressions Holmes identifies are very similar to those found in empirical studies of compliments produced by American English speakers (in addition to Herbert, see Manes and Wolfson 1981, Manes 149 Making social moves 1983, Wolfson 1984) This similarity of form may have something to do with how data were collected In most cases, researchers had to identify and record compliments ‘‘on the fly” as they observed . CHAPTER 4 Making social moves When people converse with one another, they are making various kinds of social moves. As we saw in the preceding. compliments are 137 Making social moves seen as aimed at making someone feel liked by others, connected to them. Apologies are seen as making someone feel