‘It wasn’t because a woman couldn’t do a man’s job’
uncovering gender ideologies in the context of interviews with American female and male war veterans
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.26348Keywords:
ideology, army, gender, membership categorization analysis, interviewAbstract
Women currently serve in 95 percent of all US Army occupations and make up 16.3 percent of the active Army forces. Numerous measures have been taken in the form of regulations and policies to advance the presence and position of women in the military (e.g., the recent lifting of the ban on women serving in combat roles). It is claimed, however, that the broader ideology of masculinity prevalent in the institution is much more effective in constraining women’s participation than either specific institutional or interpersonal limitations. This paper, drawing on membership categorization analysis and conversation analysis, exposes some of the gendered propositions and gender ideologies produced by war veterans in the context of interviews. To this end, selected interviews with American female and male war veterans taken from the Veterans History Project (run by the Library of Congress) are qualitatively scrutinized. The analysis demonstrates how gender is occasioned and accounted for when describing military experiences and dayto-day operation of the army. It furthermore reveals the categorization work performed by the veterans that allows us to access various commonsense assumptions concerning the positions of women and men in the contemporary US Army. All in all, the paper points to the continuous relevance of gender in the military.
References
Baker, C. (1997) Membership categorization and interview accounts. In D. Silverman (ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice 130–43. London: Sage.
Baker, C. (2000) Locating culture in action: membership categorization in texts and talk. In A. Lee and C. Poynton (eds) Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies 99–113. London: Routledge.
Baxter, J. (2008) Is it all tough talking at the top? A post-structuralist analysis of the construction of gendered speaker identities of British business leaders within interview narratives. Gender and Language 2(2): 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v2i2.197
Benedict, H. (2009) The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Bolden, G. B. (2006) Little words that matter: discourse markers ‘so’ and ‘oh’ and the doing of other-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56: 661–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00314.x
Bolden, G. B. (2009) Implementing incipient actions: the discourse marker ‘so’ in English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 974–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.10.004
Bolden, G. B. (2015) Discourse markers. In K. Tracy (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction 1–7. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell and the International Communication Association. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi031
Bushnell, C. (2014) On developing a systematic methodology for analyzing categories in talk-in-interaction: Sequential categorization analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 24(4): 735–56. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.4.03bus
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender Identity. New York: Routledge.
Cameron, D. (1997) Theoretical debates in feminist linguistics: questions of sex and gender. In R. Wodak (ed.) Gender and Discourse 21–36. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250204.n2
Cameron, D. (2006) Theorising the female voice in public contexts. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Context 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_1
Cameron, D. (2007) The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carreiras, H. (2006) Gender and the Military. New York: Routledge.
Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cromdal, J. (2012) Gender as a practical concern in children’s management of play participation. In S. A. Speer and E. Stokoe (eds) Conversation and Gender 294–309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Day, D. (2013) Conversation analysis and membership categories. In C. A. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics 1050–55. Oxford: Blackwell.
Drew, P. and Holt, E. (1988) Complainable matters: The use of idiomatic expressions in making complaints. Social Problems 35(4): 501–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/800594
Eagly, A. and Carli, L. (2003) The female leadership advantage: an evaluation of the evidence. Leadership Quarterly 14: 807–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.09.004
Eagly, A. and Johannesen-Schmidt, M. (2001) The leadership styles of women and men. Journal of Social Issues 57(4): 781–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00241
Eagly, A. and Karau, S. (2002) Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review 109: 573–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573
Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791147
Eglin, P. and Hester, S. (1999) ‘You’re all a bunch of feminists’: categorization and the politics of terror in the Montreal Massacre. Human Studies 22: 253–72. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005444602547
Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. New York: Routledge.
Fitzgerald, R., Housley, W. and Butler, C. (2009) Omnirelevance and interactional context. Australian Journal of Communication 36(3): 45–64.
Fitzsimons, A. (2002) Gender as a Verb: Gender Segregation at Work. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hall, M., Gough, B., Seymour-Smith, S. and Hansen, S. (2012) On-line constructions of meterosexuality and masculinities: A membership categorization analysis. Gender and Language 6(2): 379–403. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i2.379
Heller, M. (2001) Critique and sociolinguistic analysis of discourse. Critique of Anthropology 21(2): 117–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X0102100201
Herbert, M. (1998) Camouflage isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality and Women in the Military. New York: New York University Press.
Heritage, J. (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society 27: 291–334. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500019990
Hester, S. and Eglin, P. (1997) Membership categorization analysis: an introduction. In S. Hester and P. Eglin (eds) Culture in Action. Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis 1–23. Washington, DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and University of America Press.
Hester, S. and Francis, D. (1997) Reality analysis in a classroom storytelling. British Journal of Sociology 48(1): 95–112. https://doi.org/10.2307/591912
Holmes, J. (2014) Language and gender in the workplace. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2nd edn) 433–51. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch22
Holmes, J, and Marra, M. (2004) Relational practice in the workplace: women’s talk or gendered discourse? Language in Society 33: 377–98. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404504043039
Holmes, J. and Marra, M. (2005) Narrative and the construction of professional identity in the workplace. In J. Thornborrow and J. Coates (eds) The Sociolinguistics of Narrative 193–213. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.6.10hol
Hopper, R. and LeBaron, C. (1998) How gender creeps into talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction 31(1): 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3101_4
Jackson, C. (2012) The gendered ‘I’. In S. A. Speer and E. Stokoe (eds) Conversation and Gender 31–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. London: Routledge.
Jefferson, G. (1990) List construction as a task and resource. In G. Psathas (ed.) Interaction Competence 63?92. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Jefferson, G. (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols. In G. H. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation 13–23. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jones, P. H. (2008) Anniversary honors achievements of women warriors. 23 October. Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from www.army.mil/article/13559/anniversary-honors-achievements-of-women-warriors.
Jones, R. (2013) Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kitzinger, C. (2000) How to resist an idiom. Research on Language and Social Interaction 33: 121–54. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3302_1
Koenig, A. M., Eagly, A., Mitchell, A. A. and Ristikari, T. (2001) Are leader stereotypes masculine? A meta-analysis of three research paradigms. Psychological Bulletin 137(4): 616–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023557
Lakoff, R. (2003) Language, gender, and politics: putting ‘women’ and ‘power’ in the same sentence. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 161?78. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch7
Lakoff, R. (2006) The politics of nice. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 173–91. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2005.1.2.173
Lassen, I. (2011) Stereotyping gender. Discursive constructions of social identities in a Danish bank. In D. Majstorovi?, and I. Lassen (eds) Living with Patriarchy: Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects across Cultures 249–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.45.14las
Lazar, M. (2002) Consuming personal relationships: the achievement of feminine self-identity through other-centerdness. In L. Litosseliti and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis 111–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.2.07laz
Lazar, M. (2014) Critical feminist discourse analysis: relevance for current gender and language research. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2nd edn) 180?99. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch9
Litosseliti, L. (2006) Constructing gender in public arguments: the female voice as emotional voice. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in the Public Context 40–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522435_3
Mullany, L. (2007) Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Mullany, L. (2010) Gendered identities in the professional workplace: negotiating the glass ceiling. In C. Llamas and D. Watt (eds) Language and Identities 179–90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. tps://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592902
Pawelczyk, J. (2011) Talk as Therapy: Psychotherapy in a Linguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781934078679
Pawelczyk, J. (2014) Constructing American female war veterans’ military identity in the context of interviews. Women and Language 37(1): 87?111.
Pawelczyk, J. and Graf, E. M. (2011) Living in therapeutic culture. Feminine discourse as an agent of change. In D. Majstorovi?, and I. Lassen (eds) Living with Patriarchy: Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects across Cultures 273–302. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.45.15paw
Peräkylä, A. (1995) AIDS Counseling: Institutional Interaction and Clinical Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597879
Philips, S. U. (2014) The power of gender ideologies in discourse. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2nd edn) 297–315. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch15
Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446222119
Potter, J. (2012) How to study experience. Discourse and Society 23(5): 576–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926512455884
Potter, J. and Hepburn, A. (2005) Qualitative interviews in psychology: problems and possibilities. Qualitative Research in Psychology 2: 281–307. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp045oa
Prividera, L. and Howard, III, J. W. (2014) Repealing the direct combat exclusion rule: examining the ongoing ‘invisible war’ against women soldiers. Women and Language 37(1): 115–20.
Rapley, T. (2001) The artfulness of open-ended interviewing: some considerations on analysing interviews. Qualitative Research 1(3): 303–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/146879410100100303
Sacks, H. (1972) On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication 325–45. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. A. (1997) Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society 8(2): 165–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926597008002002
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a) Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b) A tutorial on Membership Categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 462–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Seale, C. (1998) Qualitative interviewing. In C. Seale (ed.) Researching Society and Culture 202–32. London: Sage.
Silverman, D. (1997) Discourses of Counseling: HIV Counseling as Social Interaction. London: Sage.
Stokoe, E. (2010) ‘I’m not gonna hit a lady’: conversation analysis, membership categorization and men’s denials of violence towards women. Discourse and Society 21(1): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509345072
Stokoe, E. (2012a) ‘You know how men are’: description, categorization and common knowledge in the anatomy of a categorical practice. Gender and Language 6(1): 233–55. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i1.233
Stokoe, E. (2012b) Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies 4(3): 277–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612441534
Turpin, J. (1998) Many faces: women confronting war. In L. A. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds) The Women and War Reader 3–18. New York: New York University Press.
US Army (undated) Ready and resilient strategic objectives. Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from www.army.mil/readyandresilient.
Vergun, D. (2013) Secretary of Defense rescinds ‘Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule’. 24 January. Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from www.army.mil/article/94932/Secretary_of_Defense_rescinds__Direct_Ground_Combat_Definition_and_Assignment_Rule_.
Veterans History Project (2015) About the project. Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from www.loc.gov/vets/about.html.
Walsh, C. (2001) Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organizations. Harlow: Longman.
Weatherall, A. (2002) Gender, Language and Discourse. London: Routledge.
Weatherall, A. (2007) Feminist psychology, conversation analysis and empirical research: an illustration using identity categories. Gender and Language 1(2): 279–90. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v1i2.279
Wines, W. A. and Hamilton, III, J. B. (2009) On changing organizational cultures by injecting new ideologies: the power of stories. Journal of Business Ethnics 89: 433–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-0009-5
Woodward, R. (2000) Warrior heroes and little green men: soldiers, military training, and the construction of rural masculinities. Rural Sociology 65: 640–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2000.tb00048.x