(1945-) Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistic at Georgetown University.Her best known book is " You Just Don't Understand:Women and Man in Conservation(1990).She mostly focuses on communication between men and women in her books.
I found this article very interesting but the author looks the situation from one direction and this way looks like so feminist. The author starts her article with comparing men and women's hair and dressing style at the conference. She taught that women are marked because she saw three women who have different styles. However, men look like each other with their clothes and hair styles. I think this example is not right enough to say women are marked because while people go conference or business meeting, they usually wear formal clothes which have definite colors and forms. However, this stereotyped clothing can be varying in different work fields. So that, I think we cannot say men are unmarked in this example. Also I don't think men's hair styles look like each other because nowadays, men are emerged with new hair styles and this hair styles are not limited.The author continues with giving examples why women are marked. She thinks women are marked because when women are married,they can protect their surname or they take their husband's surname.So this situation is unmarked for man because they haven't got any options like a that.The other example is titles.For instance,when women are married, we put "Mrs" front of their surname or if they are not married, we put "Miss". If we do not know anything about women, we can put "Ms". However,we called men with putting "Mr." up to their surnames.Deborah Tannen also benefits from the ideas of Ralph Fasold(He mentioned about reproduction in his book).For example, he said that X chromosomes make a female but Y chromosomes do nothing without X chromosomes.So this shows again women are marked.
Yes, Tannen is a feminist. She wrote this article before the advent of "metrosexuality" - as you say, we are seeing more variation in men's styles these days.
ReplyDeleteIt's important to see that the styles are not the basis of her argument; rather, she uses her initial observations as a device to reflect on the linguistic concept of being marked, and how it also manifests itself socially.