2 - Marking/Erasing: “Instead of Saying ‘Normal Americans,’ You Can Just Say ‘Americans’”

Summary

What "goes without saying," what’s expected (statistically or normatively), is often unmarked linguistically. What is special, distinctive, in some way seen as unusual, gets marked. For social kinds, this often involves adding modifiers or affixes to names of distinctive subkinds within an overarching social category – hyphenated Americans, for example. This can lead to the erasure of those distinctive subkinds in talk of the overarching category. So, for example, ‘hyphenated’ Americans can be ignored in some talk of Americans. It can also lead to erasure of distinctiveness among those not included in the marked subkinds so that, e.g., whiteness or maleness can be elided with being American or being human. Dominant social groups often have no distinctive labels since they become ‘normal’ exemplars of the larger social group. Subordinated groups can push back by labeling the larger default category and trying to get its members to label themselves, to acknowledge, e.g., that being cisgender brings with it a range of experiences and privileges not all share.