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Article Excerpt
Audre Lorde (1981) in her classic 1979 speech, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," named language oppression tool that preserves embedded ideologies. In one way, issues of social justice and economics outweigh concerns with "mere semantics." In another, language structures social thought and constrains our ability to envision integrative metamorphoses from dialectic oppositions (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Merrill, 1996). The role of language in creating a "home" for women has occupied feminist scholars, as they have sought a secure place for their research, writing, and pedagogy within the master's house of the academy.
In this essay, we propose a taxonomy of gendered form and content in academic writing. We offer tools for identifying gendered uses of language, and for becoming reflexive of language biases and their effects, as an heuristic for research and pedagogy. Central to our project is the question, Is all language is patriarchal (Trinh, 1989)? We review the literature on academic style and content, then offer a taxonomy for thinking about the topic and present exemplars that illustrate the categories. We use this taxonomy to categorize articles from a representative list of top communication journals and evaluate its usefulness. Finally, we review how the taxonomy offers an heuristic for respecting research that challenges old ideas and style, for pedagogy, and for further research.
Style and Content
Masculine and feminine style have been identified as qualities of written and spoken language (Bizzell, 1999; Gray, 1999; Merrill, 1996; Spender, 1986). Our questions apply that concept to scholarly writing. It is never entirely possible to divorce form from content; thus, it is useful to distinguish traditional academic research with its masculine bias from feminist research.
Traditional research in communication studies derives from scientific methods and values and, for much rhetorical criticism and theorizing, from the agonistic qualities of argument long perpetuated. Communication researchers in the social science tradition often adopt scientistic language, which functions to distance scholars from the people and the human experiences they study. Traditional research is governed by the norms of institutional policy and the political practices of universities, learned societies, and academic journals. Expressed as argument, the academic tradition in most disciplines evolved in tandem with a masculine style of academic writing that is highly structured, uses linguistic conventions that purport to be objective while establishing hierarchical differences between researcher and human subjects and lay audiences.
Feminist research concerns women's topics or gender issues and challenges dominant ideologies that disadvantage women and other identity groups. It often examines how social knowledge is produced and seeks to contribute to social change. Its primary, but not only, method is qualitative. Data include narratives, stories, objects, or artifacts (such as quilts, recipe books, women's magazines) that traditionally may have been ignored. Feminist research emphasizes the personal dimension of communication and concern for human subjects as equal and engaged participants in the study. Such research is often reported in a feminine style that uses rhetorical strategies expressing subjective voice and qualities of (usually but not always) women's lived experiences. Its language invites the audience into the content by exposing the author's self in the essay. Non-traditional research perspectives, methods and style of feminist scholarship often encounter barriers: It "breaks the rules" that have long governed publication, promotion, and tenure.
Toward A Gendered Taxonomy
The literature on academic writing, particularly as it pertains to communication studies, allows us to postulate four categories in a taxonomy of gendered academic writing style and the formal content of the research. These are traditional research/masculine style; feminist research/feminist style; feminist research/masculine style; and traditional research/feminist style.
Traditional Research/Masculine Style
Western epistemology established both male and masculine hegemony in scholarship and academic style by idealizing the scientific paradigm and the language of argument and debate. Academic journals emphasize the scientific model and adherence to the strict rules of research protocols (Hawkins, 1989). Quantitative and experimental methods are believed to establish impersonal, neutral, value-free, and objective results. If the researcher has soundly constructed the methodology, it is assumed the research demonstrates objectivity. Looking more closely, we see objectivity is constructed by rhetoric: Stylistic conventions conceal the "I" who conducts the research and writes the report, resulting in an impersonal, authoritative, linguistically invisible persona for the researcher.
The methods of mainstream scholarship are most compatible with a style that has been described as masculine. In ancient times, scholarship and style were virtually identical. According to Brody (1993), "The metaphor of manly expression represented in the agon tradition of rhetoric was widespread in the ancient world" (p. 10). (1)
Aristotle and Cicero vaunted qualified, "manly" writing, and Quintilian "described effeminacy as the representation of weak writing" (Brody, p. 12). Male scholars have perpetuated the belief that the masculine voice produced effective writing and the feminine voice produced "weak" writing. Brody explained, "[T]o write well in western culture is to write like a man ... productive, coherent, virtuous and heroic; writing that is plain, forceful and true" (1993, p. 3). Other researchers have elaborated characterizations of masculine academic writing style. Caywood and Overing observed:
[T]he expository essay is valued over the exploratory; the argumentative essay is set above the autobiographical; the clear evocation of a thesis is preferred to a more organic exploration of a topic, the impersonal rational voice ranked more highly than the intimate subjective one. (1987, p. xii)
Bizzell (1999) characterized academic writing as a "grapholect" that uses precise, formal language, is highly structured, and enforces an objective, skeptical, and argumentative world view. The grapholect presumes that only reason, untouched by emotions, can produce knowledge. It normalizes debate and conflict as means to intellectual achievement. Bizzell concluded that the grapholect's "persona is male, and white, and economically privileged" (p. 11).
Thus, male scholars, who until recently have controlled power within the academy, installed the elaborations of Quintilian's bias for 2,000 years. The authoritative voice that emerged as the standard for academic writing privileges the "objective" observer, a master of specialized languages that buttress the credibility of a learned elite; this voice expresses the quest for knowledge as a contest (argument), not a dialogue.
Nodal points between content and style are the use of supposedly non-evaluative language that demonstrates the researcher's neutrality, and language that establishes the credibility of expert sources. These strategies are not value-free, however. Kirsh stated that '"cultural, social, and gender differences define, to a large extent, who will be recognized as an expert in our culture, whose writing style will be regarded as authoritative, and who determines the discourse conventions that characterize disciplinary writing'" (in Bach et al., 1996, p. 410). Merrill (1996) argued that language identified as "natural," "real," and "objective" actually is socially constructed using rhetorical strategies associated with a masculine perspective.
Just as a presumably value-neutral academic style disguises language strategies with a maculine valence, so also does scientific method masquerade as neutral while preserving a gendered hegemony. McDermott (1994) emphasized that "scholarship is the specialized knowledge, constructed in accordance with Western philosophical traditions, which is produced and sanctioned by the university and its publication system" (p. 4). Neuwirth observed that "'masculinist science ... has ... been used to rationalize and justify preservation of dominant, social and political ideologies ... [specifically] white male-dominated hierarchical social systems'" (in Hawkins, 1989, p. 51). This hierarchy organizes the academy. The "hard" sciences of biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, and mathematics typically receive more internal funding, as well as external grants and rewards. These disciplines remain male-dominated. To gain a place among the more prestigious disciplines, the field of communication has employed a "traditional scholarship approach to communication research; [however, it] often takes as valid the pursuit of a unified communication theory akin to a Kuhnian (1962) vision of normal science" (Carter & Spitzack, 1989, p. 13).
The scientific model of research enacts power...
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