Men and emotion talk
Evidence from the experience of illness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v3i1.81Keywords:
gender, men, emotion, feelings, illness experienceAbstract
Evidence is presented supporting the view that serious illness is often interpreted by men as an opportunity for emotional expressivity, contrasting with language and gender ideologies that stress men’s deficiencies in this realm. Comparative analysis of a large matched corpus of male and female interviews concerning the experience of a wide range of illnesses is reported. Illness experience prompts a process of biographical disruption for men resulting in a highly varied verbal repertoire. The analysis focuses on the use of adjectives, showing that, when compared with women discussing similar experiences, some men express high levels of frustration, rely on conventional strategies for expressing emotion such as swearing and a problem-solving attitude towards health - while others use a more self-conscious ‘women’s language’ of feelings that enables them to construct new identities. Such men associate this with the capacity for new and, paradoxically, more powerful performances of masculine identity.
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Seale, Clive, Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Ziebland, Sue (2006) Gender, cancer experience and internet use: a comparative keyword analysis of interviews and online cancer support groups. Social Science & Medicine 62: 2577–2590.
Seidler, Victor (1989) Rediscovering masculinity: reason, language and sexuality. London: Routledge.
Silverman, David (2006) Interpreting qualitative data: methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. London: Sage.
Talbot, Mary M. (2003) Gender stereotypes: reproduction and challenge. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The handbook of language and gender 468–486. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tannen, Deborah (1992) You just don’t understand: women and men in conversation. London: Virago Press.
Voloshinov, Valentin (1973) Marxism and the philosophy of language. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Warren, Lynda W. (1983) Male intolerance of depression: a review with implications for psychotherapy. Clinical Psychology Review 147–156.
Whitehead, Stephen M. and Barrett, Frank J. (2001) The Masculinities reader. Cambridge: Polity.
Williams, Gareth (1984) Genesis of chronic illness: narrative reconstruction. Sociology of Health and Illness 6: 175–200.
Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords. London: Fontana.
Young, Paul T. (1943) Emotion in man and animal. New York: Wiley.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The dialogic imagination. (Edited by M. Hoquist.) Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bergvall, Victoria L. (1999) Toward a comprehensive theory of language and gender. Language in Society 28: 273–293.
Brod, Harry and Kaufman, Michael (1994) Theorizing masculinities. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. (1987) Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bryman, Alan (1988) Quantity and quality in social research. London: Unwin Hyman.
Bury, Michael (1982) Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness 4: 167–182.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender trouble feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah (1997) Performing gender identity: young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof (eds) Language and masculinity 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cameron, Deborah (2000) Styling the worker: gender and the commodification of language in the global service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 323–347.
Cameron, Deborah (2003) Gender and language ideologies. In Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds) The handbook of language and gender 447–467. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cameron, Deborah (2005) Language, gender and sexuality: current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics 26: 482–502.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2007) The communication of leadership: the design of leadership style. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Coates, Jennifer (2003) Men talk: stories in the making of masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Connell, Robert W. (1995) Masculinities. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
Connell, Robert W. and Messerschmidt, James W. (2005) Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept. Gender and Society 19: 829–859.
Damasio, Antonio (2003) Looking for Spinoza. London and New York: William Heinemann/Harcout.
Eckert, Penelope (1992) Communities of practice: where language, gender and power all live. In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz and B. Moonwomon (eds) Locating power: proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley women and language conference 89–99. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Reprinted in J. Coates (ed.) (In press) Readings in language and gender. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1992) Think practically and look locally: language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490.
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (2003) Language and gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ekman, Paul (1972) Emotions in the human face. New York: Pergamon Press.
Ekman, Paul (2000) Emotions revealed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Emslie, Carol, Ridge, Damien, Ziebland, Sue and Hunt, Kate (2006) Men’s accounts of depression: reconstructing or resisting hegemonic masculinity? Social Science & Medicine 62: 2246–2257.
Firth, John R. (1935) The techniques of semantics. Transactions of the Philological Society 36–72.
Fischer, Agneta H. and Manstead, Anthony S. R. (2000) Gender differences in emotion across cultures. In A. H. Fischer (ed.) Emotion and gender: social psychological perspectives 91–97. London: Cambridge University Press.
Galasi?ski, Dariusz (2004) Men and the language of emotions. London and New York: Palgrave.
Goatly, Andrew (2007) Washing the brain – metaphor and hidden ideology. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Goodwin, Marjorie H. and Goodwin, Charles (2001) ‘Emotion with situated activity’. In A. Duranti (ed.) Linguistic anthropology: a reader 239–257. Malden, MA: Oxford: Blackwell.
Griffiths, Paul E. (1997) What emotions really are: the problem of psychological categories. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Harré, Rom (ed.) (1986) The social construction of the emotions. London: Oxford University Press.
Hearn, Jeff and Morgan, David (1990) Men masculinities and social theory: critical studies on men and masculinities. London: Unwin-Hyman.
Hewitt Roger (1997) ‘Box-out’ and ‘Taxing’. In S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof (eds) Language and masculinity 27–46. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hine, Christine (2000) Virtual ethnography. London: Sage.
Kiesling, Scott F. (2005) Homosocial desire in men’s talk: balancing and re-creating cultural discourses of masculinity. Language in Society 34: 695–726.
de Klerk, Vivian (1997) The role of expletives in the construction of masculinity. In S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhof (eds) Language and masculinity 144–158. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kövecses, Zoltán (2000) Metaphor & emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán (2005) Metaphor in culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kulick, Don (2003) No. Language and Communication 23: 139–151.
Lakoff, George (1987) Language, fire and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, Robin (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 161–178. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lutz, Catherine and White, Geoffrey (1986) The anthropology of emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436.
O’Brien, Rosaleen, Hunt, Kate and Hart, Graham (2005) ‘It’s caveman stuff, but that is to a certain extent how guys still operate’: men’s accounts of masculinity and help seeking. Social Science & Medicine 61: 503–516.
Ochs, Elena and Schieffelin, Bambi (1989) Language has a heart. Text 9: 7–25.
Ochs, Elena (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking context: language as an interactive phenomenon 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plutchik, Robert (1980) Emotion: a psychoevolutionary synthesis. New York: Harper and Row.
Riessman, Catherine K. (1990) Strategic uses of narrative in the presentation of self and illness: a research note. Social Science & Medicine 30: 1195–1200.
Rose, David and Pevalin, David J. (2005) The national statistics socio-economic classification: origins, development and use. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Sabo, Donald and Gordon, David F. (1995) Men’s health and illness: gender, power, and the body. London: Sage.
Schacter, Stanley (1971) Emotion, obesity and crime. New York: Academic Press.
Scott, Michael (2005) Wordsmith tools 4.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available at http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version4/)
Seale, Clive (1999) The quality of qualitative research. London: Sage.
Seale, Clive and Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2008) The interaction of class and gender in illness narratives. Sociology 42: 453–469.
Seale, Clive and Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2008) The interaction of age and gender in illness narratives. Ageing and Society 28: 1025–1043.
Seale, Clive, Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Ziebland, Sue (2006) Gender, cancer experience and internet use: a comparative keyword analysis of interviews and online cancer support groups. Social Science & Medicine 62: 2577–2590.
Seidler, Victor (1989) Rediscovering masculinity: reason, language and sexuality. London: Routledge.
Silverman, David (2006) Interpreting qualitative data: methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. London: Sage.
Talbot, Mary M. (2003) Gender stereotypes: reproduction and challenge. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The handbook of language and gender 468–486. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tannen, Deborah (1992) You just don’t understand: women and men in conversation. London: Virago Press.
Voloshinov, Valentin (1973) Marxism and the philosophy of language. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Warren, Lynda W. (1983) Male intolerance of depression: a review with implications for psychotherapy. Clinical Psychology Review 147–156.
Whitehead, Stephen M. and Barrett, Frank J. (2001) The Masculinities reader. Cambridge: Polity.
Williams, Gareth (1984) Genesis of chronic illness: narrative reconstruction. Sociology of Health and Illness 6: 175–200.
Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords. London: Fontana.
Young, Paul T. (1943) Emotion in man and animal. New York: Wiley.
Published
2009-08-28
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Charteris-Black, J., & Seale, C. (2009). Men and emotion talk: Evidence from the experience of illness. Gender and Language, 3(1), 81-113. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v3i1.81
