Sharing the Indeterminate Space of Gender

Abstract

The in-betweenness of my research is the indeterminate space between being a man and talking like one and being a woman and talking like one. The control of that space is power-driven, and it consists of a permanent struggle to impose one’s discourse as a strong marker of one’s gender. Subliminally, gender takes control of one’s discourse, impregnating it with the linguistic readily inherited data of manhood and womanhood. My research is an investigation of the discursive strategies that both men and women retort to when asked to state their opinion on different matters. Speech acts, vocabulary choices, liaising or showing empathy or, on the contrary, showing disinterest or taking distance will be interpreted in the framework of gender studies. The study has demonstrated that largely-held opinions of what is gender-specific talking are partially contradicted by the participants in the study, which proves my hypothesis right. Different factors, such as education or family background, influence personal speaking policies to the point of sharing features of the opposite gender. Far from being an issue that needs a clear separation, in-betweenness aims at mapping gender-specific and, if any, overlapping strategies in discourse.