Think practically and look locally Langu

Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual review of anthropology, 21(1), 461-488.

It used to be fashionable to draw a sharp distinction between sex (biology and what it supposedly “determines”-i.e. femaleness or maleness) and gen­ der (cultural beliefs and norms linked to sex, often more specifically a norma­ tive conception of individual attributes associated with sex-i.e. femininity or masculinity).  actice-theoretic approaches to gender make it clear, however, that this dichotomy cannot be maintained (e.g. 22). What looks like laudable terminological clarity in  e service of workable analytical distinctions tu s out to mask intellectual confusion. Bodies and biological processes are inextri­ cably part of cultural histories, affected by human inventions ranging from the purely symbolic to the technological.   isn’t that cultures simply “interpret” or assign “significance” as a cultural overlay to basically biologic  distinctions connected to sex; rather, social practices constitute in historically specific and changing ways not only gender (and sexual) relations but also such basic gender (and sexual) categories as “woman” and “man” and related categories such as “girl” or “lesbian” or “transsexual” or “lady” or “bitch.” “Female” and “male” label distinctions in potential sexual reproductive roles: All cultures known to us sort people at birth into two groups on the basis of anatomical distinctions potentially relevant to those roles. Crucially, however, what is made of those categories and how they link to other sex-related categories and relations emerges only in the historical play of social practices, including their link to such phenomena as medical and technological changes in reproductive possibilities. “De ning” these various terms is not preliminary to but an ongo­ ing component of developing a scholarly practice centered on questions of gender. (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 463-464)

Rather than try to abstract gender from social practice, we need to focus on gender in its full complexity: how gendcr is constructed in social practice, and how this construction intertwines with that of other components of identity and difference, and of language. This requires studying how people negotiate meanings in and among the specific communities of practice to which they belong. (472)

Dominance is sustained by privileging in community practice a particular perspective on language, obscuring its status as one among many perspectives, and naturalizing it as neutral or “unmarked.” The privileged can assume their own positions to be norms toward which everyone else orients; they can judge other positions while supposing their own to be invulnerable to less privileged assessment. This privileged relation to a symbolic system, which we shall call symbolic privilege, ca ies with it interpretive and evaluative authority that requires no explanation or justification. (483) 

    —> This is very nearly the hegemony /erasure we talked about in Rosa’s class