G&L (print) issn 1747–6321
G&L (online) issn 1747–633X
Gender
and
Language
Review
Jule, Allyson (ed.). 2005.
Gender and the language of religion.
Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 281.
Reviewed by Sarah Bunin Benor
Feminists debate the gender of God. Muslim Senagalese women code switch
in a hair braiding shop in Philadelphia. Female students remain silent in evangelical classes in Canada. Tourette Syndrome patients exhibit uncontrollable
cursing. And participants in an ex-gay ministry discuss God, parents, gender,
and sexuality. These topics would seem to be unrelated, but in Allyson Jule’s
edited volume they help to paint a picture of the intersection of language,
gender, and religion.
Some of the themes that emerge from these papers are crucial to our understanding of gender and language: the importance of power in the asymmetry
of gendered language, the constructivist nature of language use in individuals’
gender identities, the importance of examining language and gender locally
within individual communities of practice, gender differences in second language learning, and the intertwining of discourses about gender and sexuality.
This book adds to our understanding of these themes and contributes a new
lens through which to view them: religion.
Jule’s introduction explains why this is an appropriate moment in history to
bring the study of religion into sociolinguistic inquiry. Religion is ubiquitous
in current events, eastern and western religions have made their way to other
parts of the world, and the role of women in religious practice and leadership
Affiliation
Sarah Bunin Benor, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, 3077 University Avenue, Los Angeles,
CA 90007, USA
email: [email protected]
G&L vol 1.1 2007 149–154
©2007, equinox publishing
doi : 10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.149
LONDON
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is rapidly changing. She gives brief summaries of the papers, and she points to
the importance of local analysis:
Religions share the ideas of icons, symbols, sacrifice, behaviour, attitudes
and quest as part of a meaningful life. However how we each explore and
how we each relate to religion is infinitely individual, shifting from various
places and times, and most times significantly embedded in culture and in
communities. (p. 5)
What is missing from the introduction is theoretical grounding. It is clear from
the papers themselves how this volume fits into the field of language and gender.
What the reader is left to wonder is how this volume is influenced by and
contributes to research on the other sides of the triangle: religion and gender on
the one hand and language and religion on the other. The introduction would
have been more helpful if it had included discussion of some of the issues that
occupy researchers in those areas.
As in any volume, the papers vary in quality. Some seem to be included
merely to round out the diversity of the volume, especially Tekcan and Mooney.
However, most of the papers do make valuable descriptive and/or theoretical
contributions to the field of gender and language.
Münevver Tekcan’s overview of the gender of God in various religions incorporates data on parables, metaphors, art, and prayer. It touches on a vast array
of religious traditions, from ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology to Hindu
Brahmanic and Vedic gods. However, it does not come across as authoritative, as
it uses many internet sources (several without authors). Also, Tekcan discusses
each religion as if it is monolithic, not reporting on counter-discourses on the
interpretation of scripture. This chapter serves as only a weak introduction to
the articles that follow.
Francis Britto’s impressive literature review on debates among feminists
and traditionalists shows more of the picture of the gender of God. In most
languages God is depicted as male through gendered pronouns and metaphors.
Britto shows that there is a range of alternatives for feminists, from a complete
rejection of Christian religiosity to minor changes in theological language.
Despite the broad title, ‘The gender of God: Judeo-Christian feminist debates,’
this article deals almost solely with Catholicism.
Two other papers take the exploration of gender asymmetries in language
further by exploring lexical phenomena like generic masculine pronouns,
professional titles, the ordering of two gendered words, semantic derogation,
and honorifics. Samira Farwaneh’s ‘Asymmetries of male/female representation in Arabic’ and Kalyani Shabadi’s ‘Speaking our gendered selves:
Hinduism and the Indian woman’ follow in Lakoff ’s (1975) footsteps to show
how sexism is institutionalized in language within two religious societies.
s. b. benor 151
Farwaneh in particular provides a nice contribution with her morphological
analysis of personal names and terms of address.
Another topic dealt with by two papers in this volume is online discourse:
Sage Graham’s ‘A cyber-parish: Gendered identity construction in an online
Episcopal community’ and Fazila Bhimji’s ‘ ‘Assalam u Alaikum. Brother I
have a right to my opinion on this’: British Islamic women assert their positions in virtual space.’ Both of these articles complicate our understanding
of online discourse (e.g. Herring 1994, 1996), showing that women are not
always marginalized, silenced, or more polite than men. In Graham’s Anglican
online community, ChurchList, ‘women occupy a pivotal role in clarifying and
maintaining the group identity and community,’ even more than they do in
real-world church settings (p. 134). This is true in the amount of participation
and in how conflicts arise and are resolved. Women’s posts are just as adversarial
as men’s. Bhimji explores discourse among young Muslims in an online community based in Britain. She shows that women ‘argue and debate with other
online participants, contest mainstream notions and depictions of Islam, and
display their knowledge’ (p. 203). By initiating topics, arguing, and using Arabic
loanwords, these women present themselves online as religious, knowledgeable,
and assertive, bucking the stereotype of Islamic women as subservient. These
papers, which are among the most impressive studies in the volume, add to
our understanding of discourse in mixed-gender interactions, especially in
computer-mediated communication.
Jule’s own paper presents data on the opposite trend: women failing to participate in mixed-gender settings. In ‘Language use and silence as morality:
Teaching and lecturing at an Evangelical theology college,’ she shows how
female students rarely participate in the question-and-answer session of lectures in this Canadian college. Women’s quiet stance is indicative of ‘feminine
morality’ within Christian communities. Although it would benefit from supplementary data from seminars, the analysis is nicely connected to feminist
theory and research on Evangelicals.
Timothy Jay’s chapter, ‘American women: Their cursing habits and religiosity’
brings up another important issue. He cites his own previous research that
found that men curse more than women, using more varied and more offensive
curse words. His cross-cultural review of coprolalia (uncontrollable cursing)
among Tourette Syndrome patients is fascinating. He also cites laboratory studies about hesitation time with lexical stimuli and ethnographic observations
of working class women in a factory. Unfortunately, he assumes monolithic
cursing behavior among religious people and makes some disturbing assumptions (e.g. ‘male subjects become inhibited, because they want to make a good
impression on the female experimenter’, p. 75) and over-generalizations (e.g. ‘a
child reared in a home filled with profanities will learn less positive reactions
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to religious words and concepts’, p. 69, and ‘A religious woman who is offended
by profanity will not utter profanity’, p. 72).
Chao-Chih Liao’s ‘Women and men: Languages and religion in Taiwan’
provides a nice introduction to the relationships among Buddhism, Taoism,
and Christianity and several languages, including English, Taiwanese, and
Mandarin. Language choice of places of worship and individual religious people
are mediated by gender, age, and socioeconomic class. Christianity and English
are associated with higher education and class, and Taoism is more common
among older generations than Buddhism and Christianity. Women are more
likely than men to attend church or temple and participate in ritual, while men
are more likely to study scriptures.
The chapter on ‘Women’s letters to the Editor: Talking religion in a Saudi
Arabian English newspaper’ is an interesting contribution. Hannes Kniffka
gives a nice overview of Saudi Arabian society, including religious laws, media
consumption, hierarchies of religions and ethnicities, and the role of women.
The analysis of a very small corpus (nine letters to the Editor by women over
ten years) – in conjunction with Kniffka’s previously analyzed data – shows that
men’s and women’s letters have similar form and content but that women are
presented by the Editor as a marked group. The author makes the case for letters
to the Editor as a valuable source of data on Saudi Arabian women.
Annabelle Mooney’s analysis of written correspondence between leaders
and participants in the ‘Children of God’ Christian sect provides an interesting read but little theoretical contribution to the field. This sect, founded in
1968, has been described as a sex cult, involving practices like ‘flirty fishing’:
women attracting men to the movement through sex. The correspondence
examined here is about a sexual conflict between two women and the inflammatory response of the sect’s leader, David Berg. (The woman who refused
sex is called ‘selfish and independent and unsacrificial and disobedient and
rebellious and stubborn’, p. 178.) Based on her examination of discourse
styles, typographical conventions, and illustrations, Mooney concludes that
the correspondence represents women ‘as powerful and worthy only in their
giving up of self and power … when they sublimate agape into eros and love
into obedience’ (p. 168).
One of the strongest papers in the volume is Amy Peebles’ ‘‘Restoring the
broken image’: The language of gender and sexuality in an ex-gay ministry.’ The
author’s in-depth analysis of ethnographic interviews reveals an essentialized
discourse of heterosexuality. Participants in this religious residential therapy
center learn that God created humans for procreation. Homosexuality is linked
to childhood problems, including weak bonds with the same-sex parent. A
strengthened relationship with the Lord fixes the problem. The author shows
how sexuality is intertwined with gender, for example, when ‘gay’ is opposed to
s. b. benor 153
‘man’ and ‘woman.’ She concludes that, ‘Ex-gay men and women search for and
discover alternate constructions of heterosexual masculinity and femininity,
which in some ways approximate cultural norms and in other ways directly
resist or repudiate them’ (p. 201).
Shartriya Collier’s paper, ‘‘Inshallah, today there will be work’: Senegalese
women entrepreneurs constructing identities through language use and Islamic
practice’, examines a small group of immigrants as they blend English, Wolof,
French, and Arabic in their hair braiding shop in Philadelphia. English is
important for business, Wolof provides a connection to the past, and Arabic
is central to the maintenance of the Islamic religion. As might be expected,
younger immigrants use more English than their parents. Based on discourse
analysis that could be stronger, the author concludes that ‘cultural maintenance
occurs on a daily basis through language, religion, trade and customer relations’
(p. 236). The small business is shown to be a crucial site for the construction of
identity among immigrants.
Finally, Debra Cohen and Nancy Berkowitz’s ‘Gender, Hebrew language
acquisition and religious values in Jewish high schools in North America’
offers a different approach to the intersection of language, gender, and religion.
Based on a survey and Hebrew test administered to 735 teens studying the
same Hebrew curriculum in Jewish schools in North America, they show that
‘religious values and classroom setting mediate the effect of gender on achievement and motivation’ (p. 242). Non-Orthodox students and Orthodox students
who have co-ed classes showed only slight gender differences in motivation
and performance. But Orthodox students who have separate classes for boys
and girls showed major differences, favoring girls. This statistical analysis
contributes a new twist to the large body of research that has found girls to be
more motivated and successful in second language studies.
One of the strengths of this volume is its breadth. It deals with over a dozen
religious groups, including Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, and
several Christian sects. It demonstrates the diverse methods and theoretical
frameworks used by researchers of gender and language, including observation,
interviews, surveys, experimental methods, ethnography of communication,
analysis of texts (including online discourse), linguistic analysis of lexicon, and
literature review.
Some papers are more focused on religion, some more on gender, and some
more on language. But what they all have in common is the intersection of all
three. Miriam Meyerhoff ’s foreword sums it up nicely:
Gender and the Language of Religion represents a timely move to explore
exactly how ideologies of gender and religion intersect. It also considers how
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individuals negotiate and enact the daily practices of their lives when religion as well as gender is among the identities that they are orienting to. (p. x)
The book’s focus on these intersections leads to a problem of how to divide up
the papers. The editor chose to include the following sections:
1 gender, language patterns and religious thought;
2 gender and language use in religious communities;
3 gender and language use in religious identities.
While this seems like an appropriate format, it does not serve to enhance the
reader’s understanding of the subject, and some papers seem out of place (e.g.
Shabadi, which, like Farwaneh, is more about sexism in society than about
individual identities). The fact that several of the papers could have been in
a different section points to the intertwining of theology, community, and
identity in situations where language, religion, and gender intersect.
After reading this book, researchers will likely decide that this intersection is
worthy of further study. Instructors may decide to include a module on religion
in their graduate gender and language classes, including several themes: the
language of God among traditionalists and feminists, gender imbalances and
contestations in spoken and computer-mediated religious discourse, language
choice and code switching among men and women in multilingual religious
communities, the morality of cursing and silence among religious women, and
religious discourses of sexuality. This book provides a nice survey of the topic
and would make a fine text for such a course.
References
Herring, Susan. 1994. Politeness in computer culture: Why women thank and men flame.
In Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, Laurel Sutton and Caitlin Hines (eds). Cultural performances: Proceedings of the third Berkeley women and language conference. Berkeley, CA:
Berkeley Women and Language Group, pp. 278–294.
Herring, Susan (ed.). 1996. Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social, and
cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper.