Dr phil body dysmorphia kayleigh full episode

Gender in Communication

Third Edition

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This book honors our mothers:

Maj. Helen Mary Finks Palczewski (1921–1999)

Victoria DeFrancisco Leto (1924–2004)

Adele Eilers Pruin (1929–)

Mary Lu Dick (1956–)

This book also honors Cate’s life partner:

Arnold James Madsen (1958–2017)

Arnie was a good man. In this political moment, during which good men committed to gender/sex justice are sorely needed, our loss of Arnie is particularly painful. Be good. Do good.

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Gender in Communication A Critical Introduction

Third Edition

Catherine Helen Palczewski University of Northern Iowa Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco University of Northern Iowa Danielle Dick McGeough University of Northern Iowa

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Palczewski, Catherine Helen, author. | DeFrancisco, Victoria L. (Victoria Leto), author. | McGeough, Danielle Dick, author.

Title: Gender in communication : a critical introduction / Catherine Helen Palczewski, University of Northern Iowa, Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco, University of Northern Iowa, Danielle Dick McGeough, University of Northern Iowa.

Other titles: Communicating gender diversity

Description: Third Edition. | Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications, [2018] | Revised edition of the authors’ Gender in communication, [2014] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034869 | ISBN 9781506358451 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex role. | Gender identity. | Communication—Social aspects. | Communication—Sex differences. | Sexism in language.

Classification: LCC HQ1075 .D43 2018 | DDC 305.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034869

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Acquisitions Editor: Terri Accomazzo

Production Editor: Laureen Gleason

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Proofreader: Sarah J. Duffy

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https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034869
Indexer: Marilyn Augst

Cover Designer: Scott Van Atta

Marketing Manager: Allison Henry

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Brief Contents

1. Preface 2. PART I: Foundations

1. Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens 2. Chapter 2 Theories of Gender/Sex 3. Chapter 3 Gendered/Sexed Voices 4. Chapter 4 Gendered/Sexed Bodies 5. Chapter 5 Gendered/Sexed Language

3. PART II: Institutions 1. Chapter 6 An Introduction to Gender in Social Institutions 2. Chapter 7 Families 3. Chapter 8 Education 4. Chapter 9 Work 5. Chapter 10 Religion 6. Chapter 11 Media 7. Chapter 12 One Last Look Through a Critical Gendered Lens

4. References 5. Index 6. About the Authors

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Detailed Contents

Preface Events Informing the Third Edition

The 2016 Presidential Election The Women’s March on Washington The Silencing of Elizabeth Warren The Scolding of April Ryan and Maxine Waters

Why Studying Gender in Communication Is Important Core Principles Organization of the Book New to This Edition Individual Acknowledgments Social Acknowledgments

PART I: Foundations Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens

Intersectionality Gender and Sex, Gender/Sex Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Sexuality and Romantic Attraction Race and Ethnicity National Identity Socioeconomic Class Intersectionality Conclusion

Communication Systemic Gendered Violence Conclusion

Chapter 2 Theories of Gender/Sex Biological Theories

Chromosomes (Hormones and Genitalia) Brain Development Biological Theories Conclusion

Psychological Theories Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Feminism Social Learning Psychological Theories Conclusion

Critical/Cultural Theories Shared Assumptions Multiracial and Global Feminisms

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Queer Theory Critical/Cultural Theories Conclusion

Applying Gender Theory: Some Useful Criteria Conclusion

Chapter 3 Gendered/Sexed Voices Conversation Work

Politeness Humor Swearing

Identity Work Feminine Conversational Style Masculine Conversational Style Gay and Lesbian Conversational Styles Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Conversational Styles

Relationship Work Children’s Play Ineffective Conflict Management Conversational Aggression

Conclusion Chapter 4 Gendered/Sexed Bodies

Body Politics Gender Performativity Objectification

Disciplining Gendered Bodies Attractiveness Attractive Men Attractive Women Clothing Embodied Space Embodied Movement

Refusing the Command Performance Agency Using Norms Against Each Other Making Norms Visible Overtly Challenging Norms Revaluing the Body

Conclusion Chapter 5 Gendered/Sexed Language

The Power of Language Language Can Be Used to Oppress and Subordinate

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He/Man Language Semantic Derogation Semantic Imbalance Semantic Polarization Marked and Unmarked Terms Trivialization Naming Lack of Vocabulary The Truncated Passive The Falsely Universal We The Deverbing of Woman Language as Violence

Language as Resistance Talking Back Developing a New Language Resignification Strategic Essentialism and Rhetorics of Difference Moving Over

Conclusion PART II: Institutions

Chapter 6 An Introduction to Gender in Social Institutions Prejudice Versus Institutionalized Discrimination Institutional Control Institutionalized Gendered/Sexed Violence Preview

Chapter 7 Families Defining Family and Gender/Sex Roles The Nuclear Family The State of Families Doing and Undoing Motherhood Communicating in Families

Parent-Child Communication Couple Communication

(Un)Doing Family Singles and Childfree People Creative Undoing of Family Engaged Fatherhood Same-Sex Parents Raising Transgender Children

Conclusion

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Chapter 8 Education The Politics of Knowledge

The History of Education: Gendered/Sexed, Raced, and Classed Hidden Curriculum: Sexist, Racist, Classist, and Heterosexist

Gendered Expectations and Interpersonal Communication Classroom Interactions Bullying, Harassment, and Sexual Assault

Emancipatory Education Curricula Laws Globally

Conclusion Chapter 9 Work

Pay Equity and Job Segregation Sex Discrimination in the Workplace Work as Liberation and Locations of Empowerment Conclusion

Chapter 10 Religion Why Study Religion, Gender, and Communication? Religion and Gender/Sex Roles

Gender, Sex, and Religiosity Sex and Institutional Religious Power Complementarians and Egalitarians Muscular Christianity

Religion and Sexuality Religion as Liberation and Locations of Empowerment

African Americans and Religion Veiling Practices Rereading the History of Women Religious

Conclusion Chapter 11 Media

Defining Media and How They Function Media Hegemony or Polysemy Media Polyvalence

The Gaze(s) Ways of Seeing The Gaze An Oppositional Gaze

Who Is Represented in Media News

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Film Television and Scripted Programming Video Games

How People Are Represented Sexualization of Women “Masculinity in Crisis”

Conclusion Chapter 12 One Last Look Through a Critical Gendered Lens

References Index About the Authors

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Preface

As we worked through the revisions for this third edition throughout 2016 and into the summer of 2017, a number of events transpired that threw into relief the importance of gender in communication: the presidential campaign, the Women’s March on Washington, the silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the scolding of reporter April Ryan and Representative Maxine Waters. All these events have historical antecedents. So first a little more detail on the events.

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Events Informing the Third Edition

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The 2016 Presidential Election

In the summer of 2016, former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but she later lost the electoral college vote to businessperson and reality TV figure Donald Trump. No single factor explains the election, but research indicated that sexism likely had something to do with the result (Maxwell & Shields, 2017). Although polls indicated many Trump voters prior to the election voiced concerns about Clinton’s use of personal e-mail, after the election they indicated they were not concerned about Trump’s use of a personal e-mail server, leading one commentator to conclude, “This news proves that Hillary Clinton’s loss was about sexism, not her emails” (Strassner, 2017). Even though Clinton testified for more than 11 hours about Benghazi and turned over all her files and nothing was found, criticism persisted. Why?

An experimental study about backlash against female politicians provided one explanation. Male politicians who were perceived as power-seeking were also perceived to be “more assertive, stronger, and tougher” and have “greater competence” while women politicians who were perceived as power-seeking were seen as uncaring and people responded to them with moral outrage (Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010). General resistance to female candidates has been demonstrated in experiments that found 26% of the population express anger at the idea of a female president (Streb, Burrell, Frederick, & Genovese, 2008).

The findings of these predictive studies were confirmed by research on 2016voters. University of Arkansas researchers found that “modern Sexism did influence the 2016 presidential election for many Americans” (Maxwell & Shields, 2017). Modern sexism, defined as hostility or resentment toward working women, generally was more pervasive among White U.S. citizens and southerners and was not exclusive to men. The conclusion of the study: Of White Independents and Democrats, 11 million men and 6.5 million women “feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them— even from their own party” (Maxwell & Shields, 2017).

Regardless of your opinion of the electoral outcome, gender in communication played a role in the election. But it is important to remember that this was not the first, or only, election in which gender and sex played a role. For every contemporary example of women in politics, a long history of struggle precedes it.

Clinton was not the first woman to run for the presidency. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull ran, even before women had the right to vote. In 1884, Belva Ann Lockwood was the first woman to actually appear on ballots. In 1964, Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to receive nomination votes at a major party’s convention. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, earned delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink and Linda Jenness ran in 1972, Pat Schroeder in 1988, Elizabeth Dole in 2000, and Carol Moseley Braun in 2004. For any contemporary issue related to gender in communication, a long history precedes it. The same is true for this book. Our ability to write this book, and to cite research about gender in communication, is the product of a history of activism, scholarship, and writing by others.

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Many of the arguments for Trump and against Clinton hearkened back to arguments originally used to deny women the right to vote. On at least 12 different occasions, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, commented on how Trump being “broad-shouldered” qualified him for the presidency. For example, Pence indicated he agreed to run with Trump because “he embodies American strength, and I know that he will provide that kind of broad-shouldered American strength on the global stage as well” (as cited in Chait, 2016). Although Pence denied that the comments had anything to do with masculinity (Griffiths, 2016), the repeated references to shoulders and strength sounded similar to comments from 100 years ago.

One of the main arguments against women voting was that their bodies were too weak to enforce their vote. The New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, in a circa 1910 statement presented to both houses of the U.S. Congress, noted: “To extend the suffrage to women would be to introduce into the electorate a vast non-combatant party, incapable of enforcing its own rule” (as cited in Hazard, 1910, p. 88). British-born historian and journalist Goldwin Smith, in his commentary on the question of woman suffrage, explained: “Political power has hitherto been exercised by the male sex . . . because man alone could uphold government and enforce the law” (as cited in “Opinions,” 1912, p. 6). Author Rossiter Johnson worried, “To make any party victorious at the polls by means of blank-cartridge ballots would only present an increased temptation to the numerical minority to assert itself as the military majority. . . . If an election is carried by a preponderance of votes cast by women, who is to enforce the verdict?” (as cited in “Opinions,” 1912, p. 5). Men’s physical strength was foregrounded as central to their political strength. These contemporary comparisons to historical moments did not end with the election.

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The Women’s March on Washington

On January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration and 10 weeks after the election, the Women’s March on Washington occurred, at which over 470,000 people marched. Across the globe, 999 marches occurred with an estimated 5.6 million people participating, the largest single protest event in history (“Feet,” 2017; see also “Sister Marches,” 2017). In describing the mission of the March, organizers noted how “the rhetoric of the past election cycle has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual], Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault.” The final element of the mission was “HEAR OUR VOICE” (“Mission & Vision,” n.d.). For every contemporary example of a march about gender injustice, a long history of marches precedes it.

This was not the first women’s march on Washington. On March 3, 1913, the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the first national woman suffrage procession occurred. Five thousand women participated, including a contingent of Black women from Howard University who had to fight for their inclusion, as an estimated 100,000 people watched. The march was important, but the crowd’s reaction (first verbally and then physically attacking the suffragists) and the police department’s failure to respond together catapulted woman suffrage into national attention. According to the New York Times, “for more than an hour confusion reigned. The police, the women say, did practically nothing, and finally soldiers and marines formed a voluntary escort to clear the way”; a police officer designated to guard the marchers was overheard shouting, “If my wife were where you are I’d break her head” (“5,000 Women,” 1913, p. 5). Suffrage movement organizers described how marchers were “struck in the face by onlookers, spat upon, and overwhelmed by rabid remarks” (Blatch & Lutz, 1940, p. 196). Our ability to write this book is made possible by the work of activists who made clear women’s issues were public issues and fought for women’s voices to be heard.

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The Silencing of Elizabeth Warren

In February 2017, during Senate debate about attorney general nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Senator Elizabeth Warren read the words of Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions for suppressing the vote of Black citizens. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell interrupted and prevented Warren from completing the remarks, enforcing a senate rule that prohibits one senator from “impugning” another. Commenting on this moment, Megan Garber (2017), a reporter for The Atlantic, wrote:

There are many ways that American culture tells women to be quiet—many ways they are reminded that they would really be so much more pleasing if they would just smile a little more, or talk a little less, or work a little harder to be pliant and agreeable. Women are, in general, extremely attuned to these messages; we have, after all, heard them all our lives. . . . [W]hen Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell intervened to prevent her from finishing the speech—many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt that silencing, viscerally. And when McConnell, later, remarked of Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt it again. Because, regardless of their politics or place, those women have heard the same thing, or a version of it, many times before. (paras. 1–2)

Instead of recognizing the gender politics at play, other Senators reinforced sex roles. Senator Orrin Hatch agreed that Warren should have been silenced because she was criticizing another senator. Hatch’s reason: Warren needed to “think of his [Sessions’s] wife” (as cited in Crockett, 2017). In response, a meme was born: “Nevertheless, she persisted” adorned T-shirts, hashtags, and profile pages. For every contemporary example of persistence in the face of gendered opposition, a long history of persistence precedes it.

It is important to remember that in 1917 representatives of the National Woman’s Party would be the first group to protest at the White House directly. Even when the United States entered World War I, the Silent Sentinels kept up the protests in front of the White House only to face arrest, violent crowds, and police violence after arrest. Nevertheless, they persisted.

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The Scolding of April Ryan and Maxine Waters

At a March 2017 press conference, Press Secretary Sean Spicer thought it was appropriate to tell American Urban Radio Networks’ veteran White House correspondent April Ryan to “stop shaking your head” (as cited in Silva, 2017). The same day, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly answered criticisms of Trump made by Representative Maxine Waters by snidely commenting: “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig” (as cited in Taylor, 2017).

These events motivated educator and activist Brittany Packnett to create the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork, under which Black women noted the range of ways their nonverbal communication and bodies were disciplined in the workplace, for example, by being told their hair was unprofessional or not being recognized as being the owner or manager. Packnett explained:

This idea that a black woman’s presence is to be policed or politicized in the workplace is what we’re talking about. The idea that Sean Spicer can tell April Ryan what to do with her face, irrespective of her years in journalism, the idea that Maxine Waters’ voice is less important than her hair, is what black women are experiencing every single day. (as cited in Taylor, 2017)

For every contemporary example of Black women fighting for their rights, a long history of struggle precedes it.

It is important to remember that when the U.S. Congress was debating whether to extend voting rights to women, congressmen argued that the vote should not be extended to women because, while the South had figured out ways to suppress the Black man’s vote, they would not be able to suppress Black women’s vote. Representative Clark (1918) explained that Black women would not be as easily cowed as Black men and would be “fanatical on the subject of voting” and “much more insistent and vicious” in their “demands for social recognition which will never be accorded them” (p. H90).

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Why Studying Gender in Communication Is Important

The examples of Clinton, Warren, Ryan, Waters, and the March illustrate four points.

First, gender matters. To be able to understand and explain current events and analyze communication, you need to be able to name and articulate the way in which gender operates in communication. Trump was performing a particular type of masculinity just as much as Clinton and Warren were disciplined for not performing femininity appropriately. Additionally, people’s perceptions of the candidates were refracted through expectations tied to the candidate’s sex. More than actual differences in communication patterns, perceptions and expectations of other people’s behaviors are gendered. In Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, psychologist Rosalind Barnett and journalist Caryl Rivers (2004) critiqued social myths of gender differences. They argued that the belief in gender differences has created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which people’s stereotypes actually create the differences.

Second, race matters. One is never just a gender, and the communication challenges Black women, Latinas, Asian woman, and Native American women face are distinct from those that White women face. The challenges Black men, and other people of color, face are distinct from those that White men and women face.

Third, masculinity matters. Gender is as much about masculinity as it is about femininity. And being held to a gender binary, masculine or feminine, limits all people.

Fourth, protest matters. People using their voices to advocate for issues about which they are passionate makes a difference. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington was not the first time women marched for rights in the capitol of the United States, Elizabeth Warren was not the first person to persist in the face of being silenced, and the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag was not the first attempt to make clear the unique challenges Black people face as a result of how their race and sex intersect. Social change regarding gendered expectations and sex roles does not happen overnight; instead, repeated acts of communication—of public protest, of interpersonal interactions, of small-group discussions—are needed to make change.

Because gender is a constantly evolving concept in individuals’ gender identity, in the larger culture’s predominant notions about gender, and in continuing research, absolute claims are not possible and would be irresponsible. Instead, our intent is to better equip readers with tools you can use to examine and make sense of gender in communication. As such, this book is not simply a review of communication research but is rather an attempt to place the research in the context of larger theoretical, social, and political issues that influence, and are influenced by, gender in communication. We have attempted to write this book as an extended conversation in which we interact with research and popular discussions of gender in communication that have most excited our own scholarly imaginations.

We study the variety of ways in which communication of and about gender and sex enables and constrains people’s identities. We believe that people are social actors and create meaning through their symbolic interactions. Thus, our emphasis is not on how gender influences communication but on how communication

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constitutes gender. We believe people are capable of being self-reflexive about communication processes and creative in generating new ways to play with symbols.

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Core Principles

To study how people construct, perform, and change gender and what factors influence these performances, we draw on seven principles:

1. Intersectionality. You cannot study gender or sex in isolation. How a particular sexed body performs gender always intersects with other identity ingredients, including race, ethnicity, social class, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, and more. People are who they are, and act the way they act, not just because of their sex or gender. People are wonderfully complex and form their gendered identities at an intersection of influences from multiple identity ingredients, and the social structures in which people operate are never formed solely along sex lines. Dominance and power also are best understood through an intersectional analysis. Thus, to more accurately study gender, we study gender in the context of other social identities.

2. Interdisciplinarity. We seek to fuse and balance social scientific, humanistic, and critical methods. Thus, we cite quantitative, qualitative, rhetorical, critical, and creative scholarship. As coauthors, we have the benefit of drawing on three fields of communication studies that often operate independent of each other but that are inextricably interlinked: rhetoric, social science, and performance studies. Palczewski, trained as a rhetorical scholar, was a college debate coach for 15 years and studies political controversies and social protest. DeFrancisco, trained as a social scientist, uses qualitative research methods to study how gender and related inequalities and acts of resistance are constructed through interpersonal relationships and individuals’ identities. Dick McGeough, trained in performance studies and qualitative methods, uses creative approaches to explore scholarly questions. Most texts on gender in communication focus on social science studies of gendered interpersonal interactions and, thus, fail to recognize how broader public discourse can influence gender.

Not only do we bridge methodological chasms within our own discipline, but we do so among disciplines. We purposely reviewed each topic from multiple disciplinary and activist perspectives. Throughout the text, we honor the contributions of Black womanist theory, we celebrate the challenges offered by third-wave feminisms, we gratefully include lessons taught by queer and trans theory, we integrate the insights of men’s studies scholars, and we happily navigate the tensions between global and postmodern feminisms. The result is a richer, fuller understanding of the topic that stretches the boundaries of what is commonly considered relevant for a communication text.

We do not present research consistent with our view only. People learn most by stepping outside their academic or personal comfort zones to consider other perspectives. We value engaged and vital disagreement because we believe readers are able to glean more from our presentation of substantiated arguments than they could if we presented the research as if it were all consistent and value free. We express our views of the material, and we hope this encourages you to do the same. Know up front that we believe agreement is neither a necessary nor a preferred requirement for learning from this book, and disagreement is not a sign of disrespect.

3. Gender diversity, not sex differences. We do not subscribe to typical conceptualizations of gender as a form

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of difference. Instead, we problematize the differences view by showing how it engages in essentialism, ignores power, reinforces stereotypes, fails to account for intersectional identities, and is inconsistent with statistical analyses demonstrating that sex does not consistently account for differences in communication. However, our rejection of the differences approach does not mean that we deny differences exist. Instead, we seek to recognize differences within genders as a result of intersectionality. We reject binary ways of thinking. We embrace a gender diversity approach. Research embracing this approach continues to grow, and we make a concerted effort to recognize multiple femininities and multiple masculinities and complex mixtures of them.

4. Gender is performed. Gender is something a person does, not something a person is. Gender is not something located within individuals; it is a social construct that institutions, groups, and individuals maintain (and challenge). Thus, we examine the microlevel (how an individual might perform gender), the mesolevel (how groups within institutions communicate about gender), and the macrolevel (how social understandings of gender are performed on individuals).

5. Masculinity. The study of gender is not exclusively the study of women. However, the study of gender has traditionally been considered a “women’s issue,” hence researchers and textbooks often have focused almost exclusively on women and femininities, underemphasizing men and masculinities. Thanks to the recent growth in men’s studies, we have at our disposal a rich literature base that considers gender and masculinity.

6. Violence. To study gender in lived experiences means to study the darker side of gender: oppression and violence. In this textbook, we do not shy away from this uncomfortable reality. Ours is not a narrative that says, “We are all just different, and isn’t that nice?” To tell the whole story one must go deeper, making visible connections to the realities of gendered violence. This does not mean we are bashing men or that we presume all men have the potential to be violent and all women are victims. Rather, we recognize violence as systemic. That is, who can be violent and who can be a victim and who can be viewed as violent and who can be viewed as a victim are all part of a socially constructed system to maintain differences and inequalities. Gendered violence includes domestic abuse, rape, violence against LGBTQ people, street trafficking, and cyberbullying.

In each chapter, we make visible the connections between presumably innocent gendered practices and a range of specific social injustices connected to the topic. By linking gendered practices to more overt forms of gendered violence, we move beyond superficial generalizations about gender differences and make visible the struggles many people face in their unique contexts.

7. Emancipation. Even as we recognize how gendered norms are linked to gendered violence, we also seek to make visible the emancipatory potential of gendered practice. To focus only on the negative would be to reinforce stereotypes and ignore the ways people challenge gendered norms to create spaces for diverse individual and group choices. Gender identity need not be oppressive and limiting. We offer examples of how diverse groups of people have created strategies to free themselves of stereotypical gender restrictions and other cultural expectations.

We do not shy away from complex and controversial subjects. We reject the sex binary of male and female, instead recognizing the existence of intersex, transgender, and gender non-conforming people. We reject the

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binary-differences approach to studying gender as masculine or feminine, instead finding people to be wonderfully diverse and competent at adjusting their behavior according to situational needs. We reject the false assumption that the norm is to be cisgender (meaning one’s sex and gender are consistent according to social dictates), instead recognizing most people are far more complex. We reject heteronormativity, instead seeing heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and queer sexualities as equally valid sexual orientations.

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Organization of the Book

The book is divided into two parts. “Part I: Foundations” includes five chapters that describe the fundamentals of studying gender in communication: definitions and explanations of key terms, theoretical approaches, gender in conversation, gendered bodies, and language. These chapters provide a foundational vocabulary that enables you to study gender in communication with more subtlety and nuance. “Part II: Institutions” includes an introductory chapter to explain a focus on social institutions, followed by five chapters on the institutions that make evident the intersections of gender and communication: family, education, work, religion, and media. Each chapter examines how individuals experience and enact gender within the institution and how institutional structures and predominant ideology influence the experience and performance of gender. The concluding chapter highlights links among the preceding chapters and presents visions for future study.

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New to This Edition

The third edition of this textbook is revised and updated to make it accessible to undergraduate students while still challenging them. Graduate students will still find it a strong critical introduction to the study of gender in communication. The chapters on voices, work, education, and family have been completely rewritten to reflect major shifts in the state of knowledge. New sections on debates over bathroom bills, intensive mothering, humor, swearing, and Title IX have been added. The sections on trans and gender non- conforming people have been expanded and updated to reflect changes in language. All other chapters have been updated with new examples, new concepts, and new research. Over 500 new sources have been integrated. In an effort to be more inclusive, we have replaced the pronouns his or her with they in most cases even if the reference is singular.

We hope our third edition challenges the way in which readers think about gender and sex, as well as how gender and sex intersect with race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and nationality. Instead of providing simplistic answers, we hope we provide guidance on how to ask good questions. We also hope this book will inspire researchers to contribute to the study of gender in communication, further stretching the boundaries of culturally gendered perceptions.

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Individual Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the assistance of our colleagues. People too numerous to list have helped us as we wrote this book, but a few deserve special note for the extra time they spent sharing resources, reading chapters, and providing invaluable research assistance. The chapters would not have been as grounded in current scholarship, and the examples would not have been as rich, had it not been for the excellent contributions of graduate research assistants and students over the years: Derk Babbitt, Ruth Beerman, C. A. Brimmer, Kiranjeet Dhillon, Danelle Frisbie, Tristin Johnson, Ashley Jones, Christian Kremer-Terry, Jessany Maldondo, Megan Mapes, Emily Paskewitz, and Eric Short. Colleagues, students, friends, and staff served as resources, offering ideas, examples, and other support: Rob Asen, Judith Baxter, Harry Brod, Dan Brouwer, Patrice Buzznell, April Chatham-Carpenter, Jeanne Cook, Melissa Dobosh, Valeria Fabj, Jennifer Farrell, Patricia Fazio, John Fritch, Susan Hill, Kelsey Harr-Lagin, Stephanie Logan, Karen Mitchell, Amymarie Moser, Harrison Postler, Jennifer Potter, Alimatul Qibtiyah, Martha Reineke, Kyle Rudick, Colice Sanders, Montana Smith, Mary Beth Stalp, Leah White, and Nikki Zumbach Harken. We thank the UNI library staff, especially Christopher Neuhaus and Rosemary Meany. We recognize that no book is created in isolation. We thank Julia Wood (Gendered Lives), Diana Ivy and Phil Backlund (GenderSpeak), and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Man Cannot Speak for Her) for helping pave the way in gender/sex in communication textbooks. We thank our life partners, Arnie Madsen, David Pruin, and Ryan McGeough, for honoring our work.

We thank the Sage staff. Our Sage editor, Matthew Byrnie, advocated for this third edition. We also want to thank the skilled Sage professionals who worked with us through the final stages of the publication process: Terri Accomazzo (acquisitions editor), Erik Helton (editorial assistant), Laureen Gleason (production editor), and Deanna Noga (copy editor). Support for the development of this book was provided in part by the University of Northern Iowa’s Graduate College, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of Communication Studies, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Sage Publications gratefully acknowledges the following reviewers: Cynthia Berryman-Fink, University of Cincinnati; Derek T. Buescher, University of Puget Sound; Sandra L. Faulkner, Syracuse University; Lisa A. Flores, University of Colorado Boulder; Jeffrey Dale Hobbs, University of Texas at Tyler; Charlotte Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark; D. K. London, Merrimack College; Linda Manning, Christopher Newport University; M. Chad McBride, Creighton University; Elizabeth Natalle, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Narissra Punyanunt-Carter, Texas Tech University; Leah Stewart, Rutgers University; and Lynn H. Turner, Marquette University.

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Social Acknowledgments

Not only is it important to recognize the individual people in our lives who helped make this book possible, but it also is important to recognize the historical and contemporary movements that made our lives as professors, and the ideas presented in this book, possible. Communication scholars Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (2014) were right when they pointed out women’s (and gender) studies in communication is “a field of study that emerges from activist efforts and grassroots social movements” (p. 262). We need to acknowledge the contributions of those movements and activists.

This book would not be possible were it not for decades, if not centuries, of social movements and protests that have made clear that gender, sex, and sexuality are public issues and not merely personal expressions. For this reason, we have integrated examples of social movements that have influenced understandings of gender/sex throughout our chapters (e.g., social protest about sexual harassment, fat activism, gender-inclusive bathroom activism, LGBTQ social protests, woman suffrage, equal pay activism, farm worker’s rights). We could write an entire book about protests and movements for sex and gender justice, but this is a not a textbook about social movements.

Instead, we want to make clear how this book, about this topic, written by three people who identify as women, was made possible as a result of social activism by those who came before us—activism that challenged sex-based restrictions on who could be educated, who could speak in public, which topics could be spoken about in public, and what evidence counted in debates over those topics. The historical centering of some communicators (e.g., White educated men), and the marginalization of others (e.g., White women, women and men of color, poor people, and LBGTQ people), informs contemporary practices. An understanding of that history can help you understand contemporary communication practices and research.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled for centuries to create space for women to speak publicly as knowledgeable experts. We recognize the work it took in Western countries for anyone other than a White land-owning man to be given the chance to speak. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989), in her germinal two-volume Man Cannot Speak for Her, outlined the history of exclusion that women speakers faced even as “public persuasion has been a conscious part of the Western male’s heritage from ancient Greece to the present” (Vol. I, p. 1). For decades in public address classes, the speeches of great men were studied, from Pericles’s funeral oration to the most recent presidential state of the union. Unfortunately, “women have no parallel rhetorical history” (Vol. I, p. 1). In fact, for much of Western history, women were explicitly prohibited from speaking publicly by social mores and law.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995), in Beyond the Double Bind, collected some of the religious, cultural, and legal statements prohibiting women’s speech. We reproduce only a few of them here to make clear how communication, when it emanated from bodies coded as female, was disciplined. Public punishment was used against the speaking woman: “In seventeenth-century colonial America, the ducking stool held a place of honor near the courthouse alongside the pillory and the stock. After being bound to the stool, the ‘scold,’ ‘nag,’ ‘brabling (sic),’ or ‘unquiet’ woman was submerged in the nearest body of water, where she could choose

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between silence and drowning” (pp. 80–81). Philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, proclaimed in 1844, “Silence is not only woman’s greatest wisdom, but also her highest beauty” (as cited in Jamieson, 1995, p. 80). Biblical injunctions, repeated through the early 1900s, reinforced these social restrictions: “I am not giving permission for a woman to teach or tell a man what to do. A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first and Eve afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin. Nevertheless, she will be saved by childbearing” (1 Timothy 2:12–15). To even conceive of a book about gender in communication, pathbreakers had to create the possibility of people other than White men communicating.

Even as we write about how silence was the right speech of White womanhood, we want to recognize that silence was resisted. Scholar and educator bell hooks (1989) cautioned against reading the history of silence as universal:

Within feminist circles, silence is often seen as the sexist “right speech of womanhood”—the sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority. This emphasis on woman’s silence may be an accurate remembering of what has taken place in the households of women from WASP backgrounds in the United States, but in black communities (and diverse ethnic communities), women have not been silent. Their voices can be heard. Certainly for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard. (p. 6)

hooks’s warning about reading history in too absolute a way also encourages a rereading of the history of women. Just because women have been exhorted to silence, and punished for speaking in public, does not mean they actually have been silent. A book that recognizes that gender is diverse and intersects with ethnicity, class, citizenship, religion, and other identity ingredients would not be possible were it not for the work of people of color who have made clear that gender norms concerning what it means to be a good woman and a good man have long assumed only White women and White men.

In the early 1830s, Maria Miller Stewart, an African American woman, became the first U.S. woman to speak to audiences in the United States that included both women and men (Sells, 1993). In the mid-1830s, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a slave-owning family, began writing about abolition and spoke to small groups of women in parlor meetings (Japp, 1993; Vonnegut, 1993). As their renown as abolitionists grew, they began to speak to mixed-sex audiences and expanded their advocacy to include women’s rights. All three faced rebuke and scorn because of their speaking. Yet they paved a pathway for others to follow: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, to name only a few. Our voices in this book would not have been possible were it not for the voices of those who opened space for people other than White men to speak.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled for centuries to challenge the sexualization of women in public. Sex and sexuality were intertwined with the

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admonitions against women’s public communication. Jamieson (1995) argued that “since silence and motherhood were twinned, a corollary assumption was formed of the alliance: Public speech by a woman is the outward sign of suspect sexuality” (p. 14). Although women’s actual public participation is far more rich and complex than the narrative of men’s and women’s separate spheres would indicate (Eastman, 2009; Matthews, 1992; Piepmeier, 2004; Ryan, 1992), women faced discipline for violating social dictates concerning separate spheres. As strange as it might now sound to contemporary ears, the very term public woman was synonymous with prostitute through the 1800s in the United States. Thus, if a woman ventured outside the private sphere into public spaces, the assumption was that she was sexually available.

Two stories illustrate this. First, in May of 1862, the commander of the Union forces in New Orleans issued the following General Order:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans . . . it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation. (as cited in Ryan, 1992, p. 3)

Second, in December of 1895, New York City police arrested young, White, working-class Lizzie Schauer for engaging in disorderly conduct. Her crime? She was out in public at night and asked for directions from two men. She was what was then considered a “‘public woman,’ or prostitute” (Matthews, 1994, p. 3). We want to make clear the centuries of work that people completed just to carve out a public space where women could communicate and not fear loss of their virtue. As these examples make clear, it is impossible to talk about gender in communication without also talking about sex and sexuality.

We could not write a book about the multiplicity of genders, and the way people are never just a sex, were it not for the activists who made clear the importance of ethnicity. In 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper challenged White woman suffrage activists when they argued against enfranchising Black men before White women, saying “the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position” (as cited in Bacon, 1989, p. 35). In 1974, the Combahee River Collective Statement made clear,

There have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique.

Gender is never only about sex. Feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) wrote, “To define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being ‘women’ has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender. But no one ‘becomes a woman’ . . . purely because she is

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female” (p. 55). Arguments against essentialism and for intersectionality are not new, although the language to talk about them might be.

In 1863, poor women made clear that neutral government policies did not affect everyone equally. As the Civil War raged, and the Union forces needed public support for conscription, poor women protested because the draft impacted them more because “the loss of a male wage earner was the most devastating fate to befall the poor wives and mothers of New York, a sure sentence to poverty given the dearth of women’s employment opportunities and the paltriness of their wages” (Ryan, 1992, p. 149). These women, along with men, engaged in riots to protest the forced conscription of working men on whom families depended. In response, the city of New York suspended its draft and only reinstated it after it had set aside $2.5 million to purchase exemptions for the poorest families (Ryan, 1992, p. 150). Studying gender only by thinking about its relationship to sex would offer an incomplete analysis.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear gender is not biologically determined. Even after achieving some degree of legal recognition of equality, activists had to struggle for social equality. To do that, they had to challenge the idea that men and women were naturally different. The work of activists in women’s movements made clear that many of the differences between men and women were the result of socialization, not an innate characteristic. The work of activists in the Civil Rights Movement, the Red Power Movement, and the United Farmworkers Movement made clear that many of the differences between White people and people of color were the result of socialization and unequal social relations, not an innate characteristic. We honor the work of the Black Women’s Club Movement of the 1890s, the Woman Suffrage Movement whose work spanned from 1848 to 1919, and the feminist and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s through the 1970s.

To be able to write a book that explores gender diversity requires not only that gender not be biologically determined, but also that we could imagine a range of ways to do gender. Trans activist Leslie Feinberg (1998) used the metaphor of poetry to explain the possibilities of gender:

That is why I do not hold the view that gender is simply a social construct—one of two languages that we learn by rote from early age. To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. When I walk through the anthology of the world, I see individuals express their gender in exquisitely complex and ever-changing ways, despite the law of pentameter. (p. 10)

Although there are prosaic constraints on how each person performs gender, we hope this book allows the poetry of each person’s individual gender artistry to sing.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists in the trans and intersex communities who have pushed scholars to think about gender and sex in more complex and nuanced ways. Feinberg (1998) made clear the need to consider gender, and not just sex, when fighting for liberation: “Women’s oppression can’t be effectively fought without incorporating the battle against gender oppression. The two systems of oppression are intricately linked. And the population of women and trans people overlap”

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(p. 17).

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear the importance of sexuality to understanding sex and gender and the reality that families come in many forms. The Mattachine Society (founded in 1950) and the Daughters of Bilitis (founded in 1955) laid the groundwork so that when in 1969 the police again harassed the Stonewall Inn, the patrons there, including drag queens and trans people of color who high kicked their way against the police line, would catalyze a wave of activism (Duberman, 1993; Vaid, 1995). The innovative protest actions of ACTUP in the 1980s continue to guide contemporary protest (Westervelt, 2017) and marriage equality was not realized until the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. The political imagination of lesbian, gay, and queer people offered new ways of world-making and expanded the understanding of gender beyond the masculine/feminine binary.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear we need new ways to think about able-bodiedness, neuro-typicality, and gender. To write a book that celebrates diversity requires that we think about those who are disabled and able-bodied, about those who are neuro-typical and neuro-atypical. Alison Kafer (2013), in Feminist, Queer, Crip, offered the idea of “crip futurity” as a way to imagine new futures “that might be more just and sustainable. In imagining more accessible futures, I am yearning for an elsewhere—and, perhaps, an ‘elsewhen’—in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral” (p. 3). In thinking about the way in which able- bodiedness and contemporary conceptions of femininity intersect, Kafer began to question “the naturalness of femininity” and then to “question the naturalness of disability, challenging essentialist assumptions about ‘the’ disabled body” (p. 14).

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for the masculinity studies scholars who made clear gender is never just about women and femininity. Those people who have, across time, challenged the way in which all people were confined by the limits of binary gender restrictions made clear gender in communication is as much about masculinity’s expectations placed on men as it is about femininity’s expectations placed on women.

We could not write a book about gender in communication about and in education were it not for those who worked to make education accessible to people of color and women. Women’s right to receive an education was not freely given, but had to be fought for. After Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), a Mexican nun, poet, and theological writer, distributed an essay, she was chastised by a bishop. Her response, La Respuesta, defended women’s rights to education, presaging the U.S. women’s demands for educational and social equality by almost a century.

In the United States, after White women were given access to education, African American enslaved people were denied education and even the right to meet, not just in public but also in private. The Virginia Revised Code of 1819 declared

that all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with

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such slaves at any meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY; and any justice of a county, &c., wherein such assemblage shall be, either from his own knowledge or the information of others, of such unlawful assemblage, &c., may issue his warrant, directed to any sworn officer or officers, authorizing him or them to enter the house or houses where such unlawful assemblages, &c., may be, for the purpose of apprehending or dispersing such slaves, and to inflict corporal punishment on the offender or offenders, at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.

Thus, even before those who were not land-owning White men could participate in movements for abolition of slavery, workers’ rights, equal suffrage regardless of race, or equal suffrage regardless of sex, they had to create conditions whereby their communication would not be met with punishment.

We could not write a book about gender in communication about and in work were it not for a history of women who blazed the way into workplaces and challenged unfair practices. Women mill workers in the early 1800s were, according to historian Glenna Matthews (1992), “pioneers of changing gender roles” because they were the first group of women to live away from home for work (p. 97). They also “went on strike and publicly protested what they deemed to be unjust treatment by their bosses” (p. 98). In 1834, 800 women struck, one of the first all-woman strikes in U.S. history. By 1860, cotton textile manufacturing companies in New England employed more than 60,000 women. Although many originally were native-born, starting in the 1850s most were immigrant women. Women have worked for as long as the United States has existed. The fact that women can work at paid labor can be traced to the pioneering efforts of others who entered the realm of work and made clear paid labor is “women’s work.”

As these vignettes should demonstrate, there was never one single “women’s movement” that flowed along one single path in three waves. Instead, a broad range of social forces ebbed and flowed, reshaping the contours of how we understand sex and gender, and how sex and gender interact with communication. We acknowledge the importance of all these, and other, movements that made it possible for us to do this work.

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Part I Foundations

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Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens

Gender, the behaviors and appearances society dictates a body of a particular sex should perform, structures people’s understanding of themselves and each other. Communication is the process by which this happens. Whether in a person’s communication or in how others interpret and talk about the person, gender is “always lurking” in interactions (Deutsch, 2007, p. 116). Gender is present in an individual’s gender performance and in other messages that create, sustain, or challenge gender expectations. To illustrate this, consider an example from popular culture: the seemingly innocent custom of assigning infants pink or blue based on the baby’s biological sex.

When parents announce the birth of a child, typically what is the first question asked? “Is it a boy or girl?” or “Is the baby healthy?” “Is the baby eating and sleeping well?” “Is the birth mother okay?” What do birth celebration cards look like? Spend some time in the greeting card section of a store, and you will find two main choices: pink or blue, and the pink cards are decorated with flowers and docile girls while the blue cards are decorated with animals or transportation vehicles (planes, trains, automobiles, and ships) and active boys. What mistake tends to cause people the most embarrassment when complimenting new parents on the birth of their child? What happens if you say, upon seeing a baby boy, “Isn’t she pretty” instead of “He is so big”? Or what happens if you say, upon seeing a baby girl, “Wow, what a bruiser” instead of “She is so cute”?

At the moment of birth (before, if sex identification happens in vitro), people differentiate children on the basis of sex and begin to impose gendered expectations on them with clothing, activities, and interactions (Zosuls, Miller, Ruble, Martin, & Fabes, 2011).

In case you think pink and blue color designations have been practiced forever or exist across cultures, consider this:

Color segregation on the basis of sex is primarily a U.S. and Western European custom, although Western commercialization spread it globally. Sex-based color assignments did not appear until the early 1900s. When first assigned, the generally accepted rule was pink for the boy and blue for the girl. Pink was thought to be a more decisive and stronger color while blue was seen as delicate and dainty (Ladies Home Journal, June 1918, as cited in Frassanito & Pettorini, 2008). The colors assigned to babies did not switch until the 1950s. No one seems to know why. Advice books and magazines targeted at White, upper-class people in the United States stipulated pink was for girls and blue was for boys. Although sex-segregated colors lessened in the 1970s, by the 1980s their dominance returned, as is evidenced by the fuchsia pink and cobalt blue aisles of toys at major retailers (McCormick, 2011; Paoletti, 2012).

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The color-coding of children inspired artist JeongMee Yoon’s “The Pink and Blue Project.” Noting the international sex-targeted marketing, Yoon photographed children in the United States and South Korea. The results were visually astounding. Rooms awash in blue for boys and pink for girls (visit “The Blue Project” Jake and His Blue Things, 2006 and “The Pink Project” Dayeun and Her Pink Things, 2007 at http://www.jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm).

If you look at babies dressed in blue or pink, you may see an unremarkable cultural practice. But if you look at the practice through a critical gendered lens, you might begin to ask some questions: Why do we need to assign sex to infants? What does it mean that pink is seen as passive and blue is seen as strong? Why does it seem that a cultural choice is made to appear as a biological necessity?

Obviously, the colors are not biologically caused or universally gendered the same way. The color designations result from the communication practices of specific time periods in commercialized cultures and a particular set of political beliefs about differences between women and men. Further, the color designations indicate how people are conditioned to differentiate between sexes and genders. Although babies may now wear green, yellow, and purple, few parents are daring enough to dress a boy baby in pink or a girl baby in blue. The symbols people use to describe the sexes (pink or blue, pretty or strong), and the way they interact with others on the basis of their sex, matter.

This example reveals that gender is communicated in a variety of forms, even those as mundane as greeting cards. Communication scholar Bren Murphy (1994) made this clear in an analysis of holiday cards targeted at children, noting cards are “part of a social discourse that constructs everyday gender patterns and perceptions” (p. 29). A variety of cultural texts “construct our understandings of gender and gendered relationships” (Keith, 2009, p. iv). Thus, to study gender in communication, you need to study not only how gendered bodies communicate, but also how gender is constructed through communication in cultural texts.

Figure 1.1 Screenshot From Lloyd in Space (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvIpiGLAK9k)

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http://www.jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvIpiGLAK9k
Source: Lloyd in Space. Disney.

Tellingly, many people do not know how to talk to or about a person without first categorizing that person as female or male. This very conundrum was the focus of one episode of the Disney Channel’s animated series Lloyd in Space, about the adventures of a group of teenage aliens (see Figure 1.1).

In the ninth episode of season three, “Neither Boy Nor Girl,” the main characters argue over the relative merits of two bands, the girls advocating for Aurora and the boys for Total Cosmic Annihilation. They decide the tie-breaking vote belongs to the new kid: Zoit. After Zoit’s answer praising both bands, the boys and the girls each claim Zoit was their sex. Given this is a world populated by aliens, you might assume the human sex binary no longer applied, but it did. As this screen shot illustrates, even alien bodies can be marked in ways that sex and gender them. Body size and shape, hair length, clothing, lip coloration and plumpness, eyelashes, and posture mark some of the bodies as boy and others as girl, except for Zoit. Zoit is purple, does not wear clothes, and has expressive eyes. Visually, no explicit clues are provided about sex.

Demonstrating the obsession with categorizing people by sex, the remainder of the episode is spent trying to box Zoit into one sex. The characters try observing Zoit’s preference in notebook design (Zoit likes monsters and rainbows), whether Zoit rides a “boy bike” or “girl bike” (Zoit rides a unicycle), and which restroom Zoit uses after imbibing an extra-large 640 fluid ounce drink (Zoit claims to be absorbent). Like many, the characters conflate sex and gender, assuming that by observing things Zoit says and does, they can figure out Zoit’s biological designation.

Eventually, the boys and girls decided to ask Zoit: “OK, we gotta know. What the heck are you, a boy or a girl?” Zoit explained that their species is neither boy nor girl until their 13th birthday, when they are free to choose either. On Zoit’s 13th birthday, Zoit decided but kept it to themselves, again sending the friends into

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a flurry of questions, concluding with: “So we’ll never find out if you’re a boy or a girl?” To this, Zoit replied: “You’ll find out some day when I get a crush on one of you.” Here, another conflation occurred: between sex and sexual orientation.

To say that most gender and sex differences are socially constructed rather than biological does not mean that no differences exist or that perceived differences do not matter. Our argument throughout this textbook is that a range of differences exists. We celebrate human beings’ wonderful diversity. To limit one’s understanding of diverse human communication to only two choices, feminine or masculine, reinforces stereotypes. Still, that is often how people think about gender in communication—as a description of the differences between how women and men communicate. If you start from the assumption that women and men communicate differently, then you tend to see only differences between them rather than the more common similarities (Dindia, 2006).

More than actual differences in communication patterns, cultural and individual perceptions of women’s and men’s behaviors are gendered. People see baby girls and baby boys as different because people code them that way; girls are pink, sweet, and pretty, and boys are blue, agile, and burly. This leads people to interact differently with babies, coddling ones they think are girls and playing more roughly with ones they think are boys (Frisch, 1977; Rubinstein, 2001). Emphasizing sex differences reinforces separate expectations about how women and men should behave. In doing so, it restricts what is considered acceptable behavior for all people, and it puts rigid limitations on children’s potential.

In The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children, journalist Caryl Rivers and psychologist Rosalind Barnett (2011) argued that gendered social myths are growing out of control, supported by popular media and consumer demand. As a result, a new biological determinism is emerging supported by questionable data that human beings are born with “brains in pink and blue” (p. 10). This social myth creates a self-fulfilling prophecy to which parents and teachers contribute by maintaining assumptions of sex-based gender differences. Instead, “human beings have multiple intelligences that defy simple gender pigeonholes. Unfortunately, the real (and complex) story line is generally missing from the popular media. It is buried in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and articles that seldom see the light of day” (p. 2). We exhume some of the complexity in this textbook.

Although the predominant culture continues to assume that women and men are different, and therefore communicate in different ways, actual research does not support this (e.g., Anderson & Leaper, 1998; Burleson & Kunkel, 2006; Edwards & Hamilton, 2004; Holmstrom, 2009). Researchers have found that gendered behavior variances among women and among men are actually greater than those between women and men (Burleson & Kunkel, 2006; Dindia, 2006; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014; Hyde, 2005, 2007; Mare & Waldron, 2006; Ye & Palomares, 2013). Many other factors affect behavior, such as social roles, ethnicity, individual differences, and purpose of the interaction (Aries, 2006; Deutsch, 2007; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014). The focus exclusively on sex differences is too simplistic. Consider the following question: Do all women around the world and across ethnic groups and generations communicate the same way? Do all men?

People believe in universal sex and gender differences for a variety of reasons. For starters, sex is a primary way

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in which people categorize themselves and others, and people have a great deal invested in maintaining these categories. Because society expects everyone to be heterosexual unless proven otherwise, early on, girls and boys are encouraged to see each other as the “opposite” sex and to vie for the other’s attention. Heterosexual dating is a primary means to popularity for many in U.S. middle and high schools. And heterosexual weddings are the ultimate heterosexual social ritual (Ingraham, 2008), so much so that some states amended their constitutions to bar marriage among gays and lesbians. It took the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to make clear that the Constitution requires states to recognize marriage between same- sex individuals.