I have just finished reading a really great article. Really great! This article problematizes many issues traditionally associated with gender and language research – many stemming from a dissociation of language from the society from which its meaning is constructed/negotiated. Gender, Eckert claims, is a dynamic noun. The categories that gender is comprised of are continually constructed and negotiated in discourse. Yes! I like this idea. Gender is not a static state of being, rather a construction that has different meanings dependent on the (now this part is important) LOCAL community. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet challenge us to think practically, and to look at gender in its local context.

To think practically and look locally is to abandon several assumptions common in gender and language studies: that gender can be isolated from other aspects of social identity and relations, that gender has the same meaning across communities, and that the linguistic manifestations of that meaning are also the same across communities (Eckert &McConnell-Ginet, 1992:462).

Finding practice-based explanations of sex correlations will require a significant leap beyond the correlational and class-based modes of explanation used so far. Explanations that do not recognize the contributions of practice to variation have typically tried to infer psychological dynamics from correlations rather than from observations of gender dynamics in the communities from which the correlations have been extracted (same as above link:469).

[tags] Eckert, Sociolinguistics, gender theory [/tags]