V. Gender Domains and Vernacular Milieu

V. Gender Domains and Vernacular Milieu

id="v-gender-domains-and-vernacular-milieu">V. Gender Domains and Vernacular Milieu#

Gender is vernacular. It is both as tough and adaptable, as precarious and vulnerable, as vernacular speech. As happens with the latter, gender is obliterated by education, and its existence is soon forgotten or even denied. Thus, many people today have lost the ability to remember or even imagine either gender or vernacular speech. For the high school graduate, his parents’ vernacular has become a substandard dialect of the mother tongue he has been taught. For the daughter who returns to rural Mexico, equipped with her university degree, the gender of her old mother can easily appear as a bondage that she has escaped.

The profound contrast between vernacular speech and taught mother tongue is often obvious for the parents and elusive for the son. The parents realize that the two modes of language belong to irreconcilable worlds, that the children have lost the vernacular. The children are taught that they speak it correctly. The differentiation between gender and sex is even more slippery than that between vernacular speech and taught mother tongue.

Space/Time and Gender#

The contours of spaces and schedules determine who does and who uses what and when. Gender demands that the Berber woman lean on the inside of the east wall of a house, while the outside of the wall is for man. The way the gender divide runs determines how closely the two genders mingle, and on which territories and occasions. In one valley of the Alps, they meet on the threshing floor, he with the flail and she with the sieve. Farther down the river, this place is men’s exclusive domain. As they are divided, so genders are also interwoven differently in each culture and time.78 They can rule separate territories and rarely intertwine, or they can be knotted like the lines in the Book of Kells. Sometimes no basket can be plaited, no fire kindled, without the collaboration of two sets of hands. Each culture brings the genders together in its unique way. There are places where young men and women come together to live communally for just a few years and then move out again into territories separated by a yearly widening gap.

Yvonne Verdier’s book79 on cooking, washing, and sewing in an isolated village is a masterwork, describing from women’s perspective the finely wrought tissue of such a web. It is delightful to read her report on the slaughtering of a pig. Only the woman can choose which animal will be slaughtered, addressing it as “Monsieur,” but the man must set the day for the slaughter. They go through dozens of appointed steps, as if dancing a minuet. Women prepare the sausage and men salt the lard. But while, in Minot, only women beyond their menopause can pick up salted pork from the larder, a few miles down the road not even they may trespass into this male space. Each village does its own dance to the tune of its own regional music.

Martine Segalen, in a recent book on husband and wife in French peasant societies, has broken new ground in describing their complementary rhythms. She carefully analyzes gender-specific tasks and their counterpoint timing, and explicitly distingulshes these from roles, status, and rank. She examines, also from a woman’s perspective, the “architecture” of farms and the farmers’ schedules; she collects proverbs and photographs, interprets old paintings and ethnologists’ reports in order to reconstruct from surviving patterns what things must have been like in the middle of the nineteenth century. What she finds is a relationship between men and women much less governed by family and kinship than by the demands of the household based on the matched interdependence of men’s and women’s hands. She describes how men and women did their daily work as members of their own gender rather than as individual constituents of a couple who are married to form a pair. The coupled pair carried little weight in the nineteenth-century French peasant household. Both the myth of rough male dominance and the idyll of a romantic peasant couple miss the mark completely. The body of gender still survived.80

According to Segalen, it is the household that mediates between the individual and the village community, not the twosome, the parents, the couple. If the household breaks down and its members do not act in accordance with the demands of their respective genders, then the village community will discipline the offending individual directly. For example, in northern France the kitchen garden ought to be hoed in April; and this is woman’s work. If by the first of May the ground is still unbroken, a straw man with a mattock in its arms will appear in front of her kitchen window. Another example: Should a man beat his wife, he too will get rough music. He will be covered with mud and pushed around the village in a wheelbarrow, accompanied by teasing doggerel and the clang of pots and pans. Should he let himself be beaten by his wife, he will be singled out again, tied backward on an ass with the animal’s tail in his hands.81

As long as the gender divide sets the pattern and the tone, this identifiable community will continue to survive. Various terms have been coined to designate such a commitment to a normative code that has been sanctioned by the proof of survival. Anthropologists studying the peasantry tend to speak of “subsistence ethics.” E.P. Thompson uses the concept “moral economy” for populations generally more urbanized. These are good strong terms because they permit us to compare the sense of decency under the rule of gender with a possible modern norm, one that corresponds to the assumption of scarcity. Both terms affirm the right of every villager, of every member of the crowd, to make survival the supreme rule of common behavior, not the isolated right of an individual. Both terms bespeak an attitude, an orientation, that protects the weakest from ruin. Both terms claim a right to a decorous, a customary existence, even if this right is articulated only in the struggle to defend it. But “subsistence ethics,” no less than “moral economy,” is a modern concept for the defense of an appropriate behavioral pattern that throughout history has been gendered. Therefore, I would like to leave the current, non-gendered sense of the terms “morality” and “ethics” intact, and find a different expression to speak about the imperative that guards local gender.

What one feels when going against the gender divide is a sentiment that is difficult for people today to reconstruct, partly because it seems to be as vernacular and, therefore, as “ungrammatical” as that divide itself, and partly because it is an experience that faded with gender. Neither “shame” nor “guilt” is quite the word, at least in their present-day meaning. Yves Castan has studied what the people in the Languedoc called “honnêteté” between 1715 and 1780.82 I shall translate the term as “probity.” His research was done on court records of disorderly behavior, one of the rare repositories for the actual speech of illiterate, lower-class people. Part of the study demonstrates how probity kept people acting according to their gender, down to the minutest details. For example, when guests came to the house, the woman had to fetch the glasses, prepare the salad, bring the wine, and listen to every word said without seeming curious and without getting involved in the conversation. This was expected of her; being one of the women, she was able to make known, in ways that are more powerful than the straight speech of men, what was in the interest of the household. She thus committed a fault against her own kind if she joined in men’s talk; she would lose the effective power of whispering and gossip.83 It was her task to shield the house from the tax collector, who was unable to enter if she claimed to be alone. She also had to take the part of her children in an argument, even if they were inexcusably wrong. Probity demanded that she go for the face of the enemy with nails and teeth, if that were necessary. From the man, probity required the opposite: In any incident in which the woman was expected to defend the offspring, he was supposed to correct or punish the child, sometimes rudely.84

Le Roy Ladurie has probed the relationship between house and gender in the same southern region of France, but his study’s focus was earlier times. He analyzed the records kept by the future Pope Benedict XII when, as a young bishop and inquisitor, he submitted several dozen inhabitants of the small mountain village of Montaillou to rigorous and skillful questioning on suspicion of heretical catharism. With great subtlety, he solicited innumerable details about their daily lives from these peasants and shepherds of the northern Pyrenees, and had verbatim records of their responses prepared. Le Roy Ladurie studied these responses, gathered for him 650 years ago. No other document I know gives such a comprehensive firsthand description of what a community of householders felt about the roofs and territory they shared, and about the behavior they expected from and tolerated in each other. Each of the victims of this inquisition comes to life as a person, not only when behaving as the bishop would approve but particularly when following the dictates of his or her own gender’s probity in ways that the inquisitor wants to check. And on every page the domus, the “house” in the strongest possible sense, means the roof under which and the place in which the two genders meet: the kitchen; the goods and land; the children and family as a whole, slaves and guests included.

The domus, not people, seems to be the subject of history, the basic social unit. The house, at once building and family, links men and women to their possessions, which relate them to each other. From these painstaking interviews between judge and Montaillou peasants of the late twelfth century, it appears that they – unlike the post-medieval, typically European peasant – are not yet obsessed by the land and its tenure; it is the domus that counts, even more than spouse or child. Not the naked family, but the domus is subsistent and autarchic; it reproduces itself in offspring. Here, in Montaillou, the women of the house are in charge of fire, cooking, gardening, greens for animals, and the fetching of water. The men look after the fields, the woods, and the sheep, getting occasional help from a woman belonging to the domus, or one hired from elsewhere. Material life is created by the home, the main acting subject, through its men and women.85

In the Etruscan lands of central Italy, a Latin word is used to designate both the central subject of history, the domus, and its tutelary gods, the lares. These are old gods, with prominent phallus or vulva. Together they protect the boundaries of their common milieu. Traditionally they are venerated at the crossroads, although their effigies are stored above the hearth. They are worshiped by day, keeping order in the house, even though they rise from the subsoil where the dead lie. And the dwelling itself, the home, the domestic establishment around the hearth, is also called the lar. Perhaps lar could serve as a technical term to designate that ultimate subject of history of which the domus is one specific example.

Gender and the Home#

Gender shapes bodies as they shape space and are in turn shaped by its arrangements. And the body in action, with its movements and rhythms, its gestures and cadences, shapes the home, the home as something more than a shelter, a tent, or a house. To live somewhere means to make a home, by bringing children into the world no less than by planting trees and building walls. Rare are the words that designate human actions – the verbs – that do not also refer to homemaking. In vernacular culture, dwelling and living coincide. With gender-bound tools, oriented by a gender-specific meaning, vernacular life weaves a gendered cocoon set in a biological niche. All living is dwelling, the shaping of a dwelling. To dwell means to live in the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people. Uninhabited space quickly becomes a desert.

To build a home means to encroach on the territories of other life, wildlife, to create fields, pastures, churns for domesticated forms of life – for grains, donkeys, and the bacteria that coagulates the butter. Among possible ecological niches, the home forms a distinct class, but its special character has been more obscured than illuminated by recent ecological talk. Although the ecological movement has fostered an important new common sense, it has also subtly encouraged sexism since it has enriched genderless – that is, sexist – language about space. The terms of ecology are the parvenues among key words of the late seventies and thus ought to be warily used.

A home is neither a nest nor a garage. The ecologist may call all three of these locations niches. For the philosopher, they are places in three kinds of space, each brought into existence by a distinct kind of action. Biological nesting, technical parking, and historical dwelling generate heterogeneous spaces. By instinct, the animal stakes out its territory. The nest is the spatial mode for the instinctive reproduction of its kind. A garage is the very opposite, designed for parking under the assumption of scarce space.

A modern apartment comes out of the same kind of space for which garages are designed. It is constructed out of economic – that is, genderless – modules of space-time, of “spime,” and is made to meet the tenants’ imputed needs. It is usually attached to transportation systems. Both the garage and the apartment are rationally and economically built for the overnight storage of a productive resource. Both are man-proof; the walls are insured against damage by bumpers or children, and both cars and children are insured against damage from accidents. The apartment is a repository that serves for the confinement of people, who are considered fragile and dangerous. It is impossible for the tenants to “make a home”; the place is structured and equipped for shadow work only. It is the address at which wires and traffic lanes, postmen and police can reach and service those who are healthy, sane, and civilian, those who survive outside institutions on Valium, TV, and supermarket deliveries. It is the specialized place for the practice of intimacy between genderless humans, the only place left where the two sexes can pee into the same pot.86

The home in Montaillou, Minot, or today’s rural Mexico is neither a territory staked out by animals breeding in the harness of their genes nor a specialized residence for sexual partners, carved into the shadowy slopes of economic space. A home made by people, not for them, is a space engendered by the bodies of its inhabitants, the environmental trace of vernacular living. The home is neither a breeding ground nor a well-equipped safe; it is the reflection in the milieu of men and women. Therefore, to be at home must mean something different for the two of them.

As the warp runs on and on lengthwise in the fabric, and the woof crisscrosses it at right angles to tie the threads together, so the actions that engender the home, the actions that engender life space, are necessarily different depending on whether they leave traces from men or traces from women. Both men and women make themselves at home through every move. But for women, who can engender the unbroken succession of life, phenomenologically the relationship to space takes on special significance. The culture may be matriarchal or patriarchal, the greater share of power in the hands of women or men, but only for women does to live and to dwell mean to engender bodies, to leave behind a trail of new life. In one culture men may build shelters, make fences, or terrace a hill; in another, these tasks are assigned to women. But only from women does bodily life come into the world. No matter how the local mythology depicts the creator of the world – as mother, father, or androgyne; no matter whose name the children carry – mother’s, father’s, or uncle’s; the special space (and the time that corresponds to it) that sets the home apart from nest and garage is engendered only by women, because it is they who bear living bodies.

This reflection might sound poetic, obscure, or romantic until one recalls that women are doubly out of place in the space of the modern apartment, and that they clearly say so. The encroachment and usurpation of normative space frustrates the flesh of women as it does not and could not affect men’s. Unisex architecture is necessarily male-sexist, as is the unisex ticking of watches. Such designs place women, in their flesh and rhythms, in double jeopardy: Their potential contribution to homemaking is frustrated, and they are yanked out of their proper gender context; in both respects, they suffer more than men.

By being turned into economic producers – paid or unpaid, on the job or at home – women, like men, are deprived of the environmental conditions that allow them to live by dwelling in a place and, by dwelling, to make a home. To the degree that they become more productive economically, both men and women become homeless. But the loss of a gendered home, and its replacement by specialized reproduction modules, deprives women of the kind of amplitude needed for new space-generating life. Each one alone, they deliver new individuals into genderless economic space, into a world made out of normalized spime blocks. Apartment space is just as hardened and genderless as hospital space in this respect; it, too, cannot be used for gendered lying in. Those who have tried home births in their apartments, and treasure them in comparison with hospital deliveries, know from their frustrating experiences that the topology of their bodies meshes neither with throwing a litter nor with reproducing the labor force; it fits neither a nest nor an assembly line: rather, it is shaped to bring forth vernacular space and time with a child.

Vernacular space not only shapes the landscape and the house, not only reaches into the past and beyond, it extends into the body itself, quite differently for women than for men. The result is that economic and genderless architecture forming well-governed international spime turns women inside out, transforming female gender into “the second sex.” What Michel Foucault has called the clinical perspective, which developed in the course of the nineteenth century, washes gender itself out of the body.

Recently, the steps by which gender has been rubbed out of the body, thereby reconstructing women anatomically as a special kind of human endowed with sex organs but lacking sufficient hair, have been well studied. But the crucial innovation in this polarizing humanization of women is the new place assigned childbirth in its study and public regulation. Up to about 1780, medical treatises and public ordinances viewed childbirth as women’s domain. The cessation of the menses, the suspicion of pregnancy, the swelling of the body, miscarriage, abortion, birth, lactation were no less women’s affair than infanticide or the rearing of the in-fant (in Latin, literally, the non-speaker). These matters were neither private nor secret, but gendered. Generally, snuffing out its life by sleeping on it, by putting it on the window ledge in winter, or by withholding her breast from the monster would not be a concern of the authorities. In public language and discourse, both medical and legal, it is clearly women who bring children into the world.

The perception that women, in the plural and collectively, are the source of new life changed only during the last generation of the ancien régime. During that period, the language of the law overstepped the threshold of the vulva, much as the inquisitor had earlier overstepped that of the domus. The fetus began to be talked about as a citizen, albeit unborn. Legislation was passed to police the womb in order to protect the life it contained. The principal aggressor threatening the future citizen and soldier was now the mother, especially if she was poor or single. In 1735, the Prussian police began to register unmarried women whose menses had ceased. The old herbal abortifacients were among the first drugs to be removed from the market by the authorities, or restricted by prescription to pharmacies; thuya trees were uprooted by the police in public gardens – as hemp is today.

The womb was declared public territory. The exercise of midwifery was made dependent on formal instruction and continual medical supervision. This transformation of the experienced neighbor into a licensed (and otherwise illegal), specialized accoucheuse was one of the key events in disabling professionalism. And this change was reflected in language. Childbirth ceased to be an event of and among women. The womb, in the language of the medical police, became the specialized organ that produces infants. Women were described as if they were wombs on two feet. Women no longer helped other women deliver; the doctor or midwife delivered the child.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, gynecologists had begun to penetrate into the new territory of the womb even before the onset of birth pangs. Toward the end of the century, they concentrated on disinfecting the birth canal in order to protect the newcomer against the diseases with which the possibly sullied mother menaced him. In the eighteenth century, the poorer the woman, the more she was suspected of a tendency to abort; in the nineteenth, she was believed especially prone to infect her child. Both earlier and later, her poverty served as the pretext for separating her from contact with other women and for institutionalizing her before she could give birth, a process conveniently serving to make her available as a training ground for future medicine men. Then at the turn of the twentieth century, in Massachusetts earlier than in Berlin or Milan, genderless hospital birth – hitherto viewed as a precaution against the wiles and diseases of women – began to be advertised as a benefit to the mother herself. Genderless medical care metamorphoses the womb into a kind of prenatal parking garage. Pregnancy under intensive professional care becomes, in my opinion, the ritual solemnizing the final victory of administered over vernacular spime.87

This essay deals with the contrast between gendered living and a sexist economy. But I have avoided any attempt to explain why a sexist regime ultimately and consistently works against women. The principal reason for this self-imposed limitation is the belief that a satisfactory answer depends on a fleshed-out philosophy of gender – and this remains to be written. But if I should ever try to explain why the loss of gender does and must degrade women even more than men, I would begin my search with an analysis of the distinct and different effects imperial and genderless environment has on the bodies of both men and women.

Gender and the Grasp of Reality#

Everywhere, girls and boys seem to grow into their respective genders early on. By the time they are weaned, they use unmistakably different gestures. In the Mashrik, the heartland of Islam from Egypt to Persia, where weaning takes place only after the second birthday (and later for boys than for girls), there are dozens of common sayings that instruct mothers on the different techniques for cuddling and handling the two genders. In some languages, where men and women use distinct kin-terms for the same uncle, the word fit for each gender’s lips is often among the first to be learned. The duties befitting each gender are inculcated at an early age. By the time she is nine, a Bemba girl knows how to distinguish forty mushrooms, while the boy knows the calls of many birds. The most fundamental cognitive division in the evolution of concepts is that based on gender. However, psychological epistemologists of the last two generations seem to pay least heed to it. Identification and opposition in gender is part of a child’s earliest empirical, but not yet verbal, growth. Piaget has coined a term for these primary distinctions; he calls them infra- and not just pre-logical. The most profound of these, gender, he seems to have overlooked.8889

The infant begins to form concepts only by physically grasping what is “there.” And unless it stretches out an arm, touches, holds, handles, and hugs other bodies, discernment can take no shape. These movements are not “spontaneous”; they are not mere biological reactions untouched by culture. The mother’s eyes, which look differently at a girl and boy, already impress a distinct pattern on the eyes of the infant. Thus, the earliest touching and embracing of the world is done by the infant with its own body, instructed by vernacular gender. Where gender predominates, growing up can never mean becoming a logical neuter, a genderless human, a nonspecific pupil.

When, from infancy, men and women grasp the world from complementary sides, they develop two distinct models with which they conceptualize the universe. A gender-bound style of perception corresponds to each gender’s domain of tools and tasks. Not only do they see the same things from different perspectives and in different hues, but early on they learn that there is always another side to a thing. And some things are always within reach for a boy but out of reach for girls – most of the time.

The genderless key words of contemporary discourse compel us to describe the ambiguous two-sidedness of vernacular reality as a sex war started by Adam and Eve. Invidious comparison now replaces awe as the reaction to otherness. The rituals that orchestrate the dance of life, marking bodies, intertwining genders, then pushing them apart again, are now dressed up as primitive sex education. The strange aberration, imagining mother when speaking about Clytemnestra, leads to a monstrous myth, no less an anomaly than attributing to Junior the passions of Oedipus.

Sex and gender are unfit to cohabit the same conceptual universe. The attempt to marry the two necessarily leads to the scientific sexism of anthropology, be it of a macho or a fem brand.

The most common sexist perspective by far is that of the male observer, a fact now well documented. Overwhelmingly, ethnographers are men. The rare women are either pupils or competitors of their male colleagues. It is tempting for the ethnographer to ask men what they think. Most researchers have linguistic difficulties and men, rather than women, are more likely to have learned some vehicular language – Hausa from market use, Arabic from Koranic school, or French from service in the army. This is the principal reason why, according to E. Ardener, ethnographers tend to report that women informants are a nuisance: “They giggle when young, snort when old, reject questions, laugh at topics proposed to them, and seem uninterested in speaking to a stranger.” In addition, they are inaccessible much of the time because their men declare them to be dangerous, impure, or in need of protection. So ethnographers feed their models (embedded in questions) to male interlocutors, and these – changing, embroidering, or misunderstanding these axioms – fashion their responses to suit the occasion. Since the questions are posed in gender-blind language, gender obviously does not appear in the answers.

Women investigators have recently produced a “complementary” sexist description, a “fem-sexist” speculum in which they view a kind of mirror image of the male fantasies to which gendered reality has been diminished by “science.” They have been primarily interested in the way women handle the symbols and levels of power. But since these newer studies, in large part, explore dominance and dependence in non-Western societies, they cannot but miss the complementary and ambiguous domains of gender. Ultimately, dominance and dependence are issues of a net transfer of power; they imply a competition for values or positions that are genderless. Once you view these values as scarce and equally desirable for men and women, you inevitably study the struggle for them in a sexist perspective.

Among the few anthropologists who have tried to unlink the study of male dominance from the analysis of conceptual universes that are asymmetric and only ambiguously complementary – and without denying the importance of the former – is Edwin Ardener. In his study of Bakweri women he found that they define the boundaries of their world in such a way that they live as women, but only up to a point, in what for men is “the wild” and for anthropologists is a seemingly impenetrable labyrinth. “Women do not readily see society bounded from nature; they will not necessarily provide a model for society as a unit that will contain both men and themselves. They may indeed provide a model in which women and nature are outside men and society.’

Unfortunately, Ardener used the terms “society,” “the wild,” and “nature” without insisting on the fact that for him these are metaphors. Therefore, his critics90 expended a lot of effort showing that these terms have a heavy ideological charge defined by the way they were used during the Enlightenment. They failed to grasp Ardener’s point: We have no good words to express the asymmetry of gender-specific perceptions in prose.

Ultimately, the sexist bias of most anthropological studies is due to something more fundamental than the use of male informants, the focus of female researchers, or misunderstandings. The bias against gender is built into anthropology because anthropology tries to be a science. Its scientific logic makes it an analytical tool that studies men and women as “anthropoi,” reduces gender to sex, and makes of a metaphorical complementarity, which only the culture’s own poets can describe, a system of two homogeneous opposites. This raises a more basic question: If anthropology cannot get at gender as a subject, how can it explore anything in the vernacular domain?91

Gender and Speech#

The gender-distinctive grasp of reality finds its expression in language.92 At the age of five, boys and girls typically sound different from one another, although no anatomical dissimilarity has been found in their speech organs. Passing from babble to talk, they adopt the form and style appropriate to their gender, even when playing among themselves.93

As with “women’s work,” so-called women’s language has also attracted scholarly interest in three successive waves.94 Such curiosity was first aroused toward the end of the nineteenth century, a time when every possible evidence of women’s constitutional otherness was highly prized. Women’s language was then one of those discoveries made by a clinical enterprise that had a priori defined a new, truly human anatomical, psychological, and behavioral reality and existence. This definition led women, as “the second sex,” into a society of neuters, by now standardized according to a common norm. Every evidence of women’s variance was grist for the professional mill: It could be turned to the profit of gynecologists, clergymen, home-economics teachers, and social workers who needed to define “needs” for which they alone could provide diagnostic language and normative therapy.

Nineteenth-century interest in women’s speech was, however, short-lived.95 While increasingly competent linguists have explored all sorts of language variations – by age, status, education, or IQ – linguistic distinctions between the speech of women and men were relatively neglected until the late 1960s. Most studies of this second wave that adequately recorded the peculiarities of women’s linguistic behavior tended to describe it as if it were a “dialect” peculiar to women, a thing subordinate to a superordinate entity that would be the “real” language. Then, during the 1970s, women’s studies moved into this field. In every dimension and area of modern speech where such research has been carried out, an interminable amount of evidence for male domination has been looked for and found.96

Irrespective of the language – French, German, or English – statistical measurements show that men speak more loudly and more often than women; are more apt to interrupt, impose their views, and take over the conversation; and are more inclined to shout others down. Women tend to smile obligingly, excuse themselves and stutter, or in fits of insecurity attempt to imitate and outdo men. They then adopt men’s vocabulary and syntax, men’s strategies and rhetoric. But the more the words and themes are unisex, the more clear it becomes that both shrill pronouncements and silent reveries mark women as the second linguistic sex. The coeducational classroom and the union shop, the conference table and the cocktail party, have made language sexist, as the labor market has done for work.97

Even today, however, in many parts of the world men and women not only speak about different things, but do so because the language itself requires this. For example, outside office, factory, or politics, Japanese women rarely, more rarely than European women, take up the topics characteristic of men. But, when they do so, they say different things. And the difference is so great that it would be pointless to look for equivalent phrases in men’s and women’s speech, since in most situations the content will differ as much as the formal expression. Where women are obliged to devote five minutes to a conversation about a garden or a celebration, men, discussing the same subject, would lose face if they did more than make a three-word statement answered by a sublinguistic grunt.98

The topical study of gender-specific language provides a partial view of the multidimensional domain of gender. Recently, this approach was used in a Spanish village and showed clearly that men talk about work in the fields, livestock, the shop, and the trade, while women’s talk converges on observations about people, their motives, lives, and the needs of the household. But the topics discussed do not, any more than the tools used, adequately reveal how the world is grasped. Differences in phonology, intonation, syntax, vocabulary, and pronominal and nominal references distinguish masculine from feminine speech.99 What these differences could reveal about symbolic complementarity, once they were accepted as constitutive of language rather than marginal features, we can now only guess. In one Madagascar vernacular, men’s language is considered prestigious precisely because it is indirect and avoids confrontation.100 For a man to be considered a skillful speaker in that culture, he must use an allusive, formal style. What to a white New Yorker would sound like vacillating and spineless fuzziness, to the Merina sounds like dignified male speech. In this society, women are the marketers. They haggle aggressively, shout at children, keep everyone in their place by broadcasting their disgraceful behavior. Women are respected when, impulsively and angrily, they blurt out what they have to say. Feminine and masculine language can reveal the intricacies of relative gender dominance even better than the study of tools.101

Feminine and masculine features of language are its most tender and vulnerable aspects, even while the language is still very much alive. In the past, these features seem particularly to have been abandoned when a language became the instrument of empire, when it became a trade language, a language of administration that had to fit areas with very different gender divides. The feminine and masculine traits are the first to be threatened when language is standardized, and what tends to remain is mere grammatical gender, out of touch with old dualities and now mainly useful for discriminatory speech. When vernacular speech is destroyed by absorption into a taught national mother tongue, its linguistic duality is reduced merely to different patterns, intonations, and topics, and to male dominance in grammatical gender. Such has been the case wherever this process has been studied and wherever vernacular gender has been extinguished by the cash nexus, and vernacular speech by alphabetization, schooling, and T.V. Formerly, Koasati was spoken (in southwestern Louisiana) with delicate and clear differences between feminine and masculine language.102 But after World War II, only the elderly made the distinction, insisting that women’s speech was attractive because it was easy, slow, and soft. Today, women use men’s forms. Women’s forms still survive as an oddity, only when women of the past are quoted in direct speech. The shift to male dominance – as in the new unisex “medium of communication,” so perfectly adapted to industrial life-styles – has thus been observed, no matter how many grammatical “genders” the language possesses.