Communicating gender diversity: a critical approach

Citation

Elizabeth Gray, F. (2008), "Communicating gender diversity: a critical approach", Gender in Management, Vol. 23 No. 7, pp. 544-548. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542410810908901

From the opening words of the Preface, DeFrancisco and Palczewski declare their aim to provoke their reader into active engagement with theory and approach saying: “agreement is neither a necessary nor a preferred requirement for learning from this book” (xi). Such a non‐prescriptive approach may initially disconcert the undergraduate student reading Communicating Gender Diversity. However, through a genuine wealth of diverse voices incorporated into the book, the authors' style and approach are coherent as well as inviting and, ultimately, successful in their aims of engaging. As the authors themselves rightly suggest, the text might be particularly appropriate for upper‐level undergraduate students, or beginning graduate students. It is also a helpfully structured, comprehensive, and fresh guide for university educators.

A significant strength of the book is the way it draws upon a very broad range of theorists, linguists, and activists from throughout the twentieth and into the twenty‐first century, from Freud and Hofstede and Mead to Foucault to MacKinnon to Butler, to recent research from Leslie McCall and Eve Oishi. These diverse voices are blended into a unified and very accessible narrative. The authors have also endeavoured to give each of their multiple sources sufficient “speaking room” to convey to the reader more complexity than is common in undergraduate textbook “soundbites”. This generous inclusiveness is a consciously political choice on the part of the authors, as they explain at the conclusion of a section entitled “People, Places, and Topics of Silence”. In a discussion of how minority contributions to certain discourses have been restricted, overwritten, and sometimes ignored, they state:

This is one reason why we cite so many authors and use so many block quotations. We recognise we are not the first to discover the insights outlined in this text. We want to honor others who have figured things out, and so we use their words instead of erasing them with our own (p. 124).

As the above quote also illustrates, the authors have successfully met their stated goal of using an accessible writerly style (p. xiii). They describe the book, aptly, as inviting the reader to participate in an ongoing conversation with multiple thinker/partners. Their equally explicitly stated decision to forego graphical aids has perhaps had a less successful outcome. As one of the very few illustrations, the reproduction of a Guerilla Girls poster on page 103 (which protests the exclusion of women artists from the Met collections) adds force and concreteness to the argument. I wished for many more such supportive illustrations.

The book is organised into two parts: the first systematically lays out the major theories concerning the study of gender in communication, and summarises key thinkers and approaches. If a student survives this first theory‐heavy section, Part II examines a number of social institutions as focal points for the study of the intersection of gender and communication. Part II begins with Margaret Anderson's (2006) very helpful definition of institution as “established patterns of behaviour with a particular and recognised purpose; institutions include specific participants who share expectations and act in specific roles, with rights and duties attached to them” (pp. 30‐1, quoted p. 143); and systematically explains how gender can be approached and examined as a social institution. The chapters of Part II fulfil the authors' aim of combining examination of micro and macro practices of gender, grounding broader assertions in plenty of up‐to‐date specific examples, most (but not all) of which would be relevant to students outside North America. While these latter chapters are far from undemanding, they balance the almost encyclopaedic theoretical cataloguing of Part I with a welcome, greater reliance on example and application.

Among the key terms in Communicating Gender Diversity are intersectionality and interdisciplinarity. Intersectionality (first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw) refers to the way in which multiple social identities interact in complex ways, as do multiple forms of oppression and discrimination. The institution‐by‐institution discussion of Part II helps to systematically unfold the complex operation of intersectionality, as for example in the discussion of how race factors into the analysis of communication in and about work. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the two authors, which underpins their exposition of intersectionality, specifically notes their particular backgrounds in rhetoric (Palczewski) and social science (DeFrancisco). In fact it is the rhetorical analysis which provides some of the book's freshest insights: Chapter Five, on “Gendered/Sexed Language,” is one of the richest. “This chapter analyses how language uses people,” (p. 108) the authors state, going on to discuss the limiting and oppressive functions of language with a particularly useful expansion of the political implications of language explored in Muted Group Theory. While reasonably brief, this very provocative discussion really opens up the significance of this theoretical approach. While using Ebonics as an example is less pertinent to non‐US students, the question of how disempowered groups can speak when deprived of equitable language access is fascinating and relevant to all students. The chapter also does a good job of conveying the positive power and potential inherent in language use: “Language as Resistance” is possibly the most valuable section of a valuable chapter. The discussion of the truncated passive as an example of linguistic sexism was an unusual topic of discussion in this kind of text, but thoughtfully developed. (For example, the authors point out how the phrase “that woman was raped” avoids making agency – and thus responsibility – explicit.) In addition, the “de‐verbing” of women is addressed in the final pages of the chapter with an almost playful freshness and suggestiveness.

The authors claim that offering a review of the development of current thinking about gender in communication is not their aim, but rather that the book presents a “how‐to study”. However, the book provides both. Chapter One serves as a foundation chapter, laying out vocabulary and terms of discussion, explaining the ways in which sex and gender concepts are interrelated and thus why the authors use the term “gender/sex” to convey both their distinct and indivisible characteristics. Chapter Two reviews three approaches to explaining the complex operations of gender in communication, and encourages the reader to identify and interrogate underlying assumptions (this chapter in particular seems to have a relative neophyte rather than graduate student in mind). Chapter Three also is pitched at a recognisably undergraduate level, with expected content (review of non‐verbal communicative elements like proxemics, haptics etc) that may be found in most standard texts on cross‐cultural communication[1]. It is in Chapter Four, on Gendered/Sexed Bodies, that there is a noticeable lack of multi‐faceted discussion of masculinity. In the chapter's discussion of how culture dictates standards of attractiveness and fosters internalisation of these constraints, the brief mention of muscle dismorphia as a male affliction read as somewhat tokenistic. In the rest of the book, reasonably regular references to men's studies scholars punctuate the narrative, but neglect of the plurality of masculinities is particularly troublesome in the section in Chapter Six on sexual violence, which states that “even if a man never rapes, he is taught a type of masculinity that makes rape possible” (p. 147). I also welcomed the book's several mentions of intersex and trans‐gender people and would have enjoyed a more broadly developed discussion of the often oppressive operation of gendered communication practices upon this significant group.

In Part II, individual chapters address the construction of gender through communication in and about the family, education, work, religion, and media. All of these chapters are richly illustrated with references to contemporary scholarship. And while the bulk of the analysis deals with the pernicious and often subterranean effects of gendered assumptions and traditions, each chapter ends with a positive, forward‐looking section on “Emancipatory Education,” “Emancipatory Religion,”, etc. Chapter Seven is sharp on the subject of the privileging of heterosexual romantic relationships and its lingering effects on conceptions of “the family”. The essentialist aspects of Tannen and Dr John Gray (of Men are from Mars fame) are clearly but not mean‐spiritedly debunked. The chapter is prevailingly negative with a strong focus on violence: “gendered violence ought to be seen as an expected component of the heteronormative family form” (p. 170); the closing “Emancipatory Families” section mostly deals with “involved fathering”.

Of particular interest in the chapter on education is the presentation of the growing body of research on the way boys are discriminated against in the classroom. Only Christina Hoff Sommers' polemical The War against Boys (2000) is given any space and Sommers' ideas are given brief negative evaluation, after which the authors swiftly move the discussion to racism and classism. The authors do not take into account more complex and nuanced discussions of the research into boys in education[2]. The authors are also very critical of single‐sex schooling, only somewhat reluctantly admitting “there is value in same‐sex learning and interacting, but creating a community that includes gender/sex, race, class, and sexual‐orientation diversity enhances education” (p. 195).

The chapter on Work discusses child‐rearing at length, then includes a relatively brief section on communication at work ‐ Janet Holmes and Maria Stubbe's work on complexifying the role of gender in workplace communication would also be relevant in this context[3]. In the Religion chapter, the authors somewhat gingerly define religion as an institution that relies on the Old Testament – and thus concentrate their analysis on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Working hard to avoid the Christian bias they identify in North American culture, the authors discuss at length veiling in Islam, providing a nuanced reading of Western misinterpretations. The historical aspects of religious tradition and belief are interrogated with respect, with mention made of the wave of current scholarship concentrating on the writings and teachings of women religious[4] – and the review of the development of muscular Christianity in the nineteenth century, with the twentieth‐century Promise Keepers[5] as the latest instalment, is interesting and provocative.

Unsurprisingly, the chapter on gender in the media is both the broadest and shallowest of these chapters, as the authors make brief analytical comment on different media including movies, television, newspapers, magazines, and the internet. The authors skate lightly over accounts of the Male Gaze, chart the progression of media accounts of rape, debate the “crisis of masculinity”, and query whether the Net is (or should be) raceless and sexless (their answer: no).

Overall, Communicating Gender Diversity is a fresh, engaging, and accessible text. It makes a visible effort to avoid an unthinking US‐centric approach in terms of examples and references; the bulk still come from a North American context but this makes sense much of the time (e.g. in discussions of statistics concerning family violence) though not all of the time (pop culture references to the Drew Carey Show, for example, may lose even those non‐American students who are used to African Americans being used as the most frequently cited Other). Communicating Gender Diversity succeeds in its goal of inviting readers into a conversation on the topic of gender and communication. Amongst the broad range of areas opened up to ongoing critical engagement, upper‐level undergraduates may find a wealth of topics to pursue into further study.

Notes

See for example Martin and Nakayama (2004).

See for example the balanced review provided in Weaver‐Hightower (2003).

See for example Holmes and Stubbe (2003) and Stubbe et al. (2000).

Such rereadings have been particularly rich in the Christian tradition: see, for example, Oden (1994) and Selvidge (1996).

Founded in 1990, Promise Keepers is a non‐affiliated, not‐for‐profit, men‐only Christian organisation that teaches men to be the head of the home, and that wives should submit to masculine leadership. Begun in the United States, the organisation has spread globally.