Warren Thomas Farrell is an American political scientist, activist, and author of seven books on men's and women's issues.
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, femininity and masculinity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures, or gender identity. Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders ; those who exist outside these groups fall under the umbrella term non-binary or genderqueer. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as third genders.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. It includes women's studies, men's studies and queer studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, has been noted as a success of deconstructionism. Sometimes, gender studies is offered together with study of sexuality. These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, linguistics, human geography, history, political science, archaeology, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cinema, musicology, media studies, human development, law, public health and medicine. It also analyzes how race, ethnicity, location, class, nationality, and disability intersect with the categories of gender and sexuality.
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Although femininity is socially constructed, research indicates that some behaviors considered feminine are biologically influenced. To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is distinct from the definition of the biological female sex, as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits.
Deborah Frances Tannen is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992) is a book written by American author and relationship counselor John Gray, after he had earned degrees in meditation and taken a correspondence course in psychology. The book states that most common relationship problems between men and women are a result of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes, which the author exemplifies by means of its eponymous metaphor: that men and women are from distinct planets—men from Mars and women from Venus—and that each sex is acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other. One example is men's complaint that if they offer solutions to problems that women bring up in conversation, the women are not necessarily interested in solving those problems, but mainly want to talk about them. The book asserts each sex can be understood in terms of distinct ways they respond to stress and stressful situations.
Gay male speech, particularly within North American English, has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. One feature of the speech is sometimes known as the "gay lisp", though researchers acknowledge that it is not technically a lisp. Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts feminine speech characteristics – rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features. Gay speech characteristics appear to be learned ways of speaking, although their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear.
John Gray is an American relationship counselor, lecturer and author. In 1969, he began a nine-year association with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi before beginning his career as an author and personal relationship counselor. In 1992 he published the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which became a long-term best seller and formed the central theme of all his subsequent books and career activities. His books have sold millions of copies.
Sex differences in psychology are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, sexuality, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be innate, learned, or both. Modern research attempts to distinguish between these causes and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture, researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences, although this is often not possible.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a huge debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
That's Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships is Deborah Tannen's first book presenting, for a general audience, her linguistic approach to explaining how ways of speaking affect relationships. Predating by four years her phenomenally bestselling book about gender differences in ways of speaking, You Just Don't Understand, this short book approaches communication and miscommunication from a linguistic point of view rather than a psychological one, emphasizing differences between the genders. This book lays out the linguistic devices and rituals that constitute "conversational style," such as indirectness, pacing and pausing, humor, overlap and interruption, and shows their effects when styles differ.
Difference theory, broadly, is the notion that in communication and other interactions, men are fundamentally different from women.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics and media studies.
Deborah Cameron is a feminist linguist who currently holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University.
LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of the LGBT community. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which more specifically refers to linguistics overtly concerned with exposing heteronormativity. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.
Feminism is one theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, even though many feminist movements and ideologies differ on exactly which claims and strategies are vital and justifiable to achieve equality.
The Japanese language has some words and some grammatical constructions associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Such differences are sometimes called "gendered language". In Japanese, speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba or joseigo, and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo.
A Feminist Dictionary, published in its second edition as Amazons, Bluestockings, and Crones: A Feminist Dictionary, is an alternative dictionary compiled by Cheris Kramarae, Ann Russo, and Paula A. Tredichler. The dictionary was first published by Pandora Press in 1985. It has over 2500 words and definitions from a feminist perspective, with the intent of “forcing us to consider who assembles the dictionaries usually consulted and to ask how the words have been chosen." The dictionary can be described as a "sort of a cross between the OED and the Whole Earth Catalog," which uses speeches, graffiti, and quotes from famous women, as its sources.
The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, in which "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables.
