Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:09:54.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“This guy says I should talk like that all the time”: Challenging intersecting ideologies of language and gender in an American Stuttering English comedienne's stand-up routine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2016

Nathaniel W. Dumas
Nathaniel W. Dumas*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

American Stuttering English (ASE) speakers (or ‘persons who stutter’ in pathological perspectives) have historically had tense relationships with comedic representations of their speech. Mainstream representations pathologize and ridicule stuttering, rather than appreciate it as a legitimate language variety. These depictions also increase non-ASE speakers' ‘possessive investment’ (Lipsitz 1995) in Standard American Fluent English as the dominant language variety. Recently, some ASE speakers have reinterpreted ASE and comedic portrayals of their speech using stand-up comedy. This article analyzes the comedic work of Rona B, an ASE comedienne. Using data on her YouTube channel, I argue that Rona B draws on her intersectional experiences as a female ASE speaker to construct a voice that critiques both the political agendas of anti-linguistic discrimination, which downplays gender, and of antisexism, which minimizes sociolinguistic differences. This study expands on contemporary calls in sociolinguistics that position intracategorical intersectionality as key for analyzing performances on language variation. (Gender, variation, American Stuttering English, performance, stand-up comedy, language ideologies)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , June 2016 , pp. 353 - 374
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ahearn, Laura M. (2001). Agency. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), Key terms in language and culture, 7–10. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, & Reyes, Angela (eds.) (2011). Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions. A special issue of Discourse & Society 22(4).Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Auslander, Philip (1993). ‘Brought to you by fem-rage’: Stand-up comedy and the politics of gender. In Hart, Lynda & Phelan, Peggy (eds.), Acting out: Feminist performances, 315–36. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1977). Verbal art as performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard, & Briggs, Charles L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.Google Scholar
Beeman, William O. (2010). Performance pragmatics, neuroscience and evolution. Pragmatics and Society 1(1):118–37.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren (1988). The female complaint. Social Text 19/20:237–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. (1988). Competence in performance: The creativity of tradition in Mexicano verbal art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (1999). ‘Why be normal?’: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28(2):203–23.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2011). White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah (1995). Verbal hygiene. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine (2004). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of Mock Asian. Pragmatics 14(3/4):263–89.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill (1990). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:139–67.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 1991:1241–99.Google Scholar
Dill, Bonnie Thornton (2002). Work at the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference in higher education. Connections: Newsletter of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Fall:5–7.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. (2006). Transcription and the delicacy hierarchy: What is to be represented? Paper given at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Albuquerque, New Mexico.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. (2010). Towards a dialogic syntax. Santa Barbara: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, ms.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W.; Cumming, Susanna; Schuetze-Coburn, Stephan; & Paolino, Danae (1992). Discourse transcription (Santa Barbara papers in linguistics 4). Santa Barbara: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.Google Scholar
Dumas, Nathaniel W. (2010). Morphophonological practice: An ethnographic study of grammar and discourse in four American English Stuttering speech communities. Berkeley: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley dissertation.Google Scholar
Dumas, Nathaniel W. (2011). Transcripts as legacy-reproducing and legacy-disrupting: Beyond pathology in the American English Stuttering speech community. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Montreal, Canada.Google Scholar
Dumas, Nathaniel W. (2012). More than hello: Reconstituting sociolinguistic subjectivities in introductions among American Stuttering English speakers. Language & Communication 32(3):216–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumas, Nathaniel W. (2013). Keeping it SAFE: Stuttering, competing masculinities, and US public space. Paper presented at American Anthropological Association 2013 meeting, Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro (2004). Agency in language. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 451–73. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic variation as social practice. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–76.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:87–100.Google Scholar
Fox, Aaron (2004). Real country: Music and language in working-class culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ghomeshi, Jila; Jackendoff, Ray; Rosen, Nicole; & Russell, Kevin (2004). Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22:307–57.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Joanne R. (1997). Performing marginality: Comedy, identity, and cultural critique. Text and Performance Quarterly 17(4):317–30.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Joanne R. (2004). Performing marginality: Humor, gender, and cultural critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Glick, Douglas J. (2007). Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization. Language & Communication 27:291–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (2006). The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hall, Kira (2005). Intertextual sexuality: Parodies of class, identity, and desire in liminal Delhi. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):125–44.Google Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1986). Authenticity and ambivalence in the text: A colonial Maya case. American Ethnologist 13(4):721–44.Google Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1990). Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hanks, William F. (2005). Explorations in the deictic field. Current Anthropology 46(2):191–220.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, & Drager, Katie (2007). Sociophonetics. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:89–103.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (1984). A change of state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In Atkinson, J. Maxwell & Heritage, John (eds.), Structures of social action, 299–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita (2006). From the kitchen to the parlor: Language and becoming in African American women's hair care. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra (2000). Comic performance and the articulation of hybrid identity. Pragmatics 10(1):39–59.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb (2001). Voice. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), Key terms in language and culture, 268–71. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott (2004). Dude. American Speech 79(3):281–305.Google Scholar
Koziski, Stephanie (1984). The standup comedian as anthropologist: Intentional culture critic. The Journal of Popular Culture 18(2):57–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kulick, Don, & Schieffelin, Bambi B. (2004). Language socialization. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 349–68. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labrador, Roderick N. (2004). ‘We can laugh at ourselves’: Hawai'i ethnic humor, local identity and the myth of multiculturalism. Pragmatics 14(2/3):291–316.Google Scholar
Landar, Herbert (1961). Reduplication and morphology. Language 37(2):239–46.Google Scholar
Lanehart, Sonja L. (2009). Diversity and intersectionality. Texas Linguistics Forum: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium about Language and Society – Austin 53:1–7.Google Scholar
Latham, Walter (producer), & Lee, Spike (director) (2000). The original kings of comedy [motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.Google Scholar
Laver, John (1980). The phonetic description of voice quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lipsitz, George (1995). The possessive investment in whiteness: Racialized social democracy and the ‘white’ problem in American studies. American Quarterly 47(3):369–87.Google Scholar
Lipsky, Mark (producer), & Murphy, Eddie (director) (1989). Harlem nights [motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.Google Scholar
McCall, Leslie (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3):1771–1800.Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma (2011). The semiotic hitchhiker's guide to creaky voice: Circulation and gendered hardcore in a Chicana/o gang persona. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(2):261–80.Google Scholar
Mintz, Lawrence E. (1985). Standup comedy as social and cultural mediation. American Quarterly 37(1):71–80.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4):478–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. (2013). Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types. In Cathcart, Chundra, Chen, I-Hsuan, Finley, Greg, Kang, Shinae, Sandy, Clare S., & Stickles, Elise (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 427–48. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society/Linguistic Society of America.Google Scholar
Raymond, Geoffrey (2006). Questions at work: Yes/no type interrogatives in institutional contexts. In Drew, Paul, Raymond, Geoffrey, & Weinberg, Darin (eds.), Talk and interaction in social research methods, 115–34. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scarpetta, Fabiola, & Spagnolli, Anna (2009). The interactional context of humor in stand-up comedy. Research on Language & Social Interaction 42(3):210–30.Google Scholar
Schechner, Richard (1985). Between theater and anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.; Jefferson;, Gail & Sacks, Harvey (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2):361–82.Google Scholar
Seizer, Susan (2011). On the uses of obscenity in live stand-up comedy. Anthropological Quarterly 84(1):209–34.Google Scholar
Shamberg, Michael (producer), & Chrichton, Charles (director) (1988). A fish called Wanda [motion picture]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1989/2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Troutman, Denise (2006) ‘They say it's a man's world, but you can't prove that by me’: African American comediennes’ construction of voice in the public space. In Baxter, Judith (ed.), Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts, 217–39. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Willett, Cynthia; Willett, Julie; & Sherman, Yael (2012). The seriously erotic politics of feminist laughter. Social Research 79(1):217–46.Google Scholar
Wong, Andrew (2010). Intersectionality theory: What it is and why it matters to variationists. Plenary paper presented at NWAVE 2010, San Antonio, TX.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (1985). Language variation and cultural hegemony: Toward an integration of sociolinguistic and social theory. American Ethnologist 12(4):738–48.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (1987). Comedy and codeswitching in Catalonia. Papers in Pragmatics 1(1):106–22.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (2004). Codeswitching. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 73–94. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M., & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1987). Plain and expressive morphology. In Aske, Jon, Beery, Natasha, Michaelis, Laura, & Filip, Hana (eds.), Berkeley Linguistics Society: Proceedings of the thirteenth annual meeting/general session, 330–40. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar