Reviews for Positioning Gender In Discourse

The average rating for Positioning Gender In Discourse based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-07 00:00:00 Gunawan Djoyo I finally finished this book. Praise God. I now feel like I must go read something that is actually edifying and concrete. I really want to move on to Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel', unfortunately, my summer goal requires me to finish one other gender book that I borrowed and need to return. I really hope the next one is not as bad as this one. In the first place, this book was disingenuous. Essentially the philosophical viewpoint from which this author approaches her research is that everything that someone says is due to and part of the 'discourse(s)' in which they find themselves. She defines 'discourse' as "a form of social/ideological practice". In another place she identified 'discourse' as the ideas by which people make sense of the world. Essentially: a worldview. But she is disingenuous because she quotes other people who do discourse analysis like Coates, Holmes and Tannen as backing her up. That's dishonest, why? Because I've read all three of those people and they do not define 'discourse' as a worldview, they define it as actual artifacts of speech. Discourse analysis to them is to take an entire conversation, record it, count the tokens it manifests and try to draw conclusions from the analysis of those findings. It is not to find the worldview that the words or speakers are expressing. Baxter, on the other hand, is doing exactly that, and it's dishonest for her to use the same word as the other researchers are, only giving it her own definition and applying it to their work in order to give her a semblance of legitimacy. This book is not a book on linguistics, and for that I felt cheated in the reading of it, it's a book on the worldview of the author and how she tries to find evidence that supports her view of the world in the speech of everyone else. The worse thing is that she calls it a 'methodology'. A methodology! Not in one place does she actually tell us how she comes to her conclusions. She doesn't have an elucidated system for deciding what speech constitutes one discourse and what speech constitutes another discourse. This is the opposite of science! A methodology is something that you clearly lay out and delineate so that other researchers can come along and copy what you did to see if you where right, to see if it holds up under other circumstances. There is literally no way to do this for this "methodology". (Okay, in the spirit of being clear, those are scare quotes. I'm being sarcastic). In fact one of the main points of this approach is that someone else examining it might come up with something different....again: That's the OPPOSITE of science. It is poorly written. On every page she puts 'something' in quotes. It is difficult to tell the difference between when she is actually referencing someone else's work and when she is simply putting something in scare quotes. It is particularly annoying because she puts so many different things in these scare quotes without explaining why she is choosing to do this. The same is true of italics. She italicizes everything and simply leaves it that way without explaining why she is choosing to put that word in italics. It's as though she thinks that simply putting something in italics is enough for her readers to interpret what she means by doing that. It's not enough. Is she being sarcastic? Is she emphasizing something? Is she drawing attention to particularly mellifluous sounding language? To particularly insidious problems? I have no idea. The thing that particularly annoys me about this book is that she went to the great effort to differentiate the terms 'gender' and 'sex'. (Note, I use quotes to indicate that I am talking about that particular linguistic token only, not to imply any sort of meaning to the word). Then in the rest of the book she constantly conflated the two! Oh, that burns me. She basically said at one point that: These two terms are different, but I don't always differentiate them and that's okay because I admit that I'm doing it. No. That doesn't make it okay. Words have meanings, use them clearly. The other main point of this book was that according to the Feminist Post Structuralist Discourse Analysis (FDPA) approach that she is espousing, you can't have overarching narratives and everything must be questioned. Nothing is absolute and everything is shifting and multiplicious. You can't judge things objectively. But she didn't apply this to her own work. I happen to disagree with her, I think that overarching narratives can be okay and that some things are absolutely true. But if she outright says that she thinks these things are bad and holds this up as the ideal and then doesn't practice it, it kind of destroys the underpinning of her work. For instance, she takes several things as given, which in itself implies an overarching narrative, but I digress. One of the first examples of cognitive dissonance is this. She states that: We must listen to disenfranchised, silenced, female voices. Okay. Why? ...crickets... I'm not saying that it is necessarily bad to listen to those kinds of voices, I'm saying that you need a reason for it. If there is no reason given for it, then it is in effect an axiomatic principle. Which is an absolute. Which goes against her stated principles. Another thing she takes as a given is that collaborative cooperative methods of talking are better than other types of speaking. She actually writes in one part that this viewpoint should be questioned but doesn't go on to question it and continues to frame it as a given. But...why? Why is this better than another way of talking? And if something is 'better' than something else, that implies that there is a hierarchy, which in turn implies that there is something absolute and objective by which to differentiate between two things. Which again, goes against her stated principles. Another thing is that she makes bald statements that have nothing to back them up. My personal favorite is this on page 185 where she wrote "I noted a slight tendency among certain male managers to derogate Sarah's speech style in sexist terms ('Sarah, under pressure...is not able to reason at this stage…)." That's it. That's the entirety. I didn't delete anything. She didn't mention anything about sexism before this, and this is the last sentence in the paragraph which in turn ends the section. Somehow that sentence is supposed to illustrate sexism so obviously that no explication is necessary. But, you know, I don't see it. Where is the sexism!!!?? The fact that they used her name?! What if you put 'Will, under pressure...is not able to reason at this stage...' Is it suddenly not sexist anymore? Is it the use of the word 'reason'? Is 'reason' somehow a masculine thing now? I mean seriously. This is not sexism, no matter how you stretch it. And yet she provides it as ultimate proof of sexism, without an ounce of explanation as to why. This book was idiotic, poorly written, and self-contradictory. I feel stupider having read it.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-12 00:00:00 Ryan Bland Joseph Wright's "Old English Grammar" is in some respects, such as terminology, somewhat dated, and has been updated and surpassed in breadth of information by Alistair Campbell's work. But on the other hand, for clarity, organization, and sheer well-composed writing that is a pleasure to read, Wright wins hands-down. His grammar is for this and other reasons still an important resource.