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Defining Term: Gender, Sex Category, and Sexuality
Sex categories are based on the biological distinction between ‘male’ and
‘female.’ There may also be additional culturally specific categories that define
people who do not fall easily into these first two categories. Gender is based on
gender categories but is culturally constructed. What is considered to be
masculine or feminine differs from one society to another. In performances of
gender, speakers draw on ideologies about what it means to be a man or a woman;
for instance, women may give each other compliments on their appearance while
men exchange ritual insults.
Sexuality has to do with an individual’s identity in terms of his or her
sexual activities. Of course, sexual identity isn't just about being gay, lesbian,
straight, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioner. They include depictions that
are available, promiscuous, asexual, or fetishize specific objects, behaviors, or
types of sexual partners. Such aspects of gender identity is intertwined with
gender identity.
Sexist Language
Most commonly sex category–marked names of people in specific
occupations, for example, fireman, stewardess, and waitress. If the unmarked
form is ‘fireman,’ it is possible to be a ‘firewoman’ but this is linguistically
marked and suggests that the norm is for a person in this occupation to be a man.
Today, at least in some circles, there is a growing recognition that subtle and
sometimes not-so-subtle differences arise in the choice of vocabulary used to
describe men and women. We can understand why there is a frequent insistence
that neutral words be used as much as possible, as in describing occupations, for
example, chair (person), letter carrier, salesclerk, and police officer.
Further, there is not necessarily a consensus on what constitutes sexism in
language. Others pointed out that the problem is that we had gendered pairs such
as waiter–waitress and that the English word president has no such gender pair.
In other occupations, words that were often assumed to imply the sex of the
person might be prefaced by a gender marker. It should also be noted that
language can also encode and perpetuate heterosexist attitudes.
Grammatical Gender Marking
It should also be noted that language can also encode and perpetuate
heterosexist attitudes language more gender neutral. As Mills (2008) notes, the
word for ‘minister’ in French is masculine (le minister), so it is difficult to refer to
a female minister.
One particular bit of sexism in languages that has aroused much comment
is the gender systems that so many of them have, the he–she–it ‘natural’ gender
system of English or the le–la or der–die–das ‘grammatical’ gender systems of
French and German.
To return to the cross-linguistic perspective, gender distinctions such as
he–she can often be avoided so it probably does not follow that languages with
gender distinctions must be sexist, which would also be a clear argument in
support of the Whorfian hypothesis.
Difference
Almost simultaneously with the focus on dominance in the study of

language and gender emerged another approach that came to be known as the
difference, or two-culture, approach. The basic idea was popularized by
psychologist Jonathan Gray in his bestselling book Men from Mars, Women from
Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex (1992) and by
linguist Deborah Tannen in her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and
Men in Conversation (1990). These works are based on the assumption that men
and women speak differently. Their claim is that men learn to talk like men and
women learn to talk like women because society makes them different life
experiences. However, the process of gender differentiation is not the focus of this
approach, it is an underlying assumption (and one that has been questioned).
The main claim is that men and women have different purposes of
conversation and thus although they may say the same thing, they actually have
different meanings. Maltz and Borker (1982) propose that, at least in North
America, men and women come from different sociolinguistic sub-cultures. They
concluded that women and men obey different rules in conversation and that in
cross-gender conversation the rules often conflict. The genders have different
views on questions, women treat questions as part of maintaining conversation
and men treat them primarily as requests for information; differing views on
whether or not linguistic behavior is 'aggressive', with women viewing signs of
aggression as personally directed, negative, and distracting, and men simply as a
way of organizing conversation; different views on topic flow and topic shift.
A further criticism of the differences approach is that the analogy of cross-
cultural communication and focus on misunderstanding is misplaced, because it
relies on the assumption that most human interaction and socialization is in same-
sex groups, something that is clearly not true for many. A related issue that has
been pointed out is that this approach emphasizes the differences between men
and women, and the way men and women speak; but in reality the similarities
between male and female speech patterns (as far as we can tell there is such a
thing) outweigh the differences.

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Defining Term: Gender, Sex Category, and Sexuality

Almost simultaneously with the focus on dominance in the study of

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