Abstract
Gendered conversation styles and their impacts are discussed by the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen in three books for non-specialized audiences.1 Her general approach is shown in the first book with respect to various cultural differences, while the other two books focus on gendered conversational styles, i.e., “genderlects” (YJ 297), specifically. The second book has been a Book of the Month Club and also a Macmillan Book Club selection and nearly four years on The New York Times Bestseller List. It thus now probably affects as well as reflects gendered interaction in the United States.
Male-Female conversation is always cross-cultural. (TN 132)
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References
That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986); You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990); and Gender and Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). These sources comprise the totality of Tannen’s work to date on gender and will be cited as TN, YJ,and GD respectively.
Tannen’s doctoral dissertation in linguistics analyzed a two-and-a-half hour Thanksgiving dinner conversation between two Christian Californians, three New York Jews, and a native of England. She found a contrast between a high considerateness and a high involvement style and considered the latter Jewish. Later she recognized that German Jewish Americans do not share the high involvement style and came to wonder if it “is not so much Jewish as East European” in origin and includes Hungarian (YJ 207). Then again, within the United States this might be as much a regional as an ethnic style: “Jews (or New Yorkers—the categories are often confused in people’s minds)…” (YJ 206).
If one begins with 270 million Americans, and successively reduces it by 10% to exclude homosexuals, 56% to exclude wealthy, poor, and working classes, 50% to exclude non-mainstream ethnicities, 67% to exclude non-“Baby Boomers,” 67% to exclude non-young adults, and 90% to exclude non-Middle Atlantic speakers, there would seem to be merely about 600,000 Americans to whom her claims apply! If this estimate is off by an order of magnitude, then still less than 1% are concerned. Is this form of speech standard for all others?
Given the great use of films, novels, poetry, plays, and short stories in her exposition, one might suspect that something in the way of free-phantasy variation nevertheless occurs in the actual practice of Tannen’s research.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Embree, L. (2000). Phenomenology in and of Deborah Tannen’s Genderlectics. In: Fisher, L., Embree, L. (eds) Feminist Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_9
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