They say fashion is cyclical; that the 90s are coming back; that every twenty years trends circle back. I'd argue the same thing about sexism. Tannen's thesis, written in 1993, had its revival in relevance in the 2010s, and is now about to decline.
A lot of things that Tannen said showed incredible foresight: asserting that "merely mentioning women and men marked [her] as a feminist" is true -- women can rarely discuss sexism without seeming disgruntled and angsty. For women, talking about sexism is only okay as long as we are mildly amused or entertained, as though the perpetrator is a child that will never understand.
But, at times, I felt as though parts of her argument were...trying quite hard to be original. She brought in Fasold's science "mark" theory to compare to the linguists' mark theory, yet I felt as though Fasold's argument was tangentially related at best. I was reminded of "The Biological Race" piece that we read -- if it is horribly racist to imply/assume that there are genetic differences between people of color and white people, why is it any more okay to turn to biology to explain gender differences? We learned in AP Biology that in birds, the chromosomal structure is the exact opposite of ours: the men are ZZ and the female are ZW. Does this mean that male birds are "unmarked", and female birds are "marked"? And sure, the Y chromosome doesn't "mean anything unless it is attached to a root form", but the second X chromosome is also rendered almost entirely useless in females post-embryonic development (becoming Barr Bodies), too. Biology seems to imply that both sexes primarily use only one X chromosome and are, in fact, equal.
I found this blog post very insightful. I never really thought twice about Tannen’s argument about biology, but I definitely agree now that it doesn’t make much sense. Also, I agree that she made her argument very black and white and didn’t mention the LGBTQ+ community at all. Overall I really enjoyed your post and I loved how you connected Tannen’s piece to even things your learned in your biology class!
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you connected everything we learned in AP Bio to Tannen's piece! I also love your usage of metaphors throughout your post, such as comparing sexism to fashion and the difference between sexes as a brick wall that is being broken apart brick-by-brick. It also only occurred to me after reading your post that Tannen completely left out the LGBTQ+ community in her piece. I feel like this kind of goes back to Nancy Mairs article, since back in the 90s, just like there was no proper representation of people with disabilities, there was also not a lot of representation of the LGBTQ+ people in the media/literature. Today, we're getting a lot better, but we still have a lot of work to be done as a society. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed how you added onto Tannen's thoughts and further developed your ideas by adding onto the passage we read in class! Along with adding on, you expressed your opinion on whether or not you agree with what she expressed. Your thoughts seem very organized and precise when speaking about how sexism seems to be an ongoing trend in this society. The parallel you drew with examples of current trends in fashion and the trends with sexism was introduced very smoothly and I totally agree with you. This blog is very well worded and expressed. Nice Job!
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