GSWS 1235 - LANGUAGE, GENDER AND SOCIETY

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
As a field of research, language and gender studies is interdisciplinary and relatively new. These studies seem to discover the nature of gender-related differences in language and their causes and effects. Gender here refers to social categories based on sex but encompassing behavior, roles and images that, although not biologically determined, are regarded by a society as appropriate to its male or female members. What is seen as appropriate to each gender thus differs in different societies and eras. Explanations for gender thus differ in different societies and eras. Explanations for almost all observed male/female language differences are to be found less in the biological constitution of the human body and more in the social and psychological formation of the human subject. These are the issues we will be concerned with in this course. Is women's language use in systematic ways different from that of men? If it is different, how is it different? Why is it different, what sorts of explanations are there? And maybe most important, does a difference of language use matter?
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis

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