Introduction
There has been surprisingly little analysis of impoliteness itself, in research on politeness in general; perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that much of the research is dependent on a view of conversation which ‘emphasises the harmonious aspect of social relations, because of an emphasis on conversational contracts and the implicit establishment of balance between interlocutors’ (Spencer-Oatey 2000: 3). However, there are occasions when people attack rather than support their interlocutors, and sometimes those attacks are considered by others to be impolite and sometimes they are not. Keinpointner argues that non-co-operative behaviour should be seen as less exceptional than most politeness theorists see it (Keinpointner, 1997). He suggests that it is idealistic to assume that everyone tries to co-operate for most of the time. However, Eelen argues that the model of politeness drawn on by researchers in this field is one which implicitly or explicitly focuses only on politeness and sees impoliteness as a deviation; this causes theoretical difficulties since ‘the concepts involved can never explain impoliteness in the same way or to the same extent as they explain politeness. So the polite bias is not just a matter of differential attention, it goes far deeper than that: it is a conceptual, theoretical structural matter. It is not so much quantitative, but rather a qualitative problem’ (Eelen, 2001: 104). Furthermore, the polarisation of politeness and impoliteness might lead us to assume that, for interlocutors, behaviour falls into either one or the other category.
In recent years the analysis of gender in feminist linguistics and in feminist theory in general has radically changed. Before going on to analyse the complex relationship between gender, politeness, and impoliteness in chapter 5, in this chapter, I discuss the theoretical and methodological problems in feminist linguistic analysis in relation to the question of ‘women's language’. I then consider feminist thinking which tries to move beyond the assumption that women's speech is always necessarily different from men's speech, and I examine the complexity of gender when analysed alongside other variables and stereotypical forms. Finally, I analyse the language of strong women speakers and gendered stereotypes to challenge further the notion that women's language is homogeneous.
Dominance or difference?
Feminist language research in the 1970s focused on the question of male dominance and female deference in conversation (Lakoff, 1975; Spender, 1980). It criticised both the social system which it viewed as patriarchal, and which it saw as forcing women to speak in a subservient way, but also individual males who were seen to violate the rights of their female interlocutors. Robin Lakoff's polemical analysis of what she considered to be female language patterns was one of the first feminist linguistic analyses which made a clear causal connection between the social and political oppression of women as a group and their linguistic behaviour. This subordinated status was displayed in the language patterns which she describes as ‘talking like a lady’ (Lakoff, 1975: 10).
Given the model of gender described in the last chapter, and given the model of linguistic politeness as described in chapters 2 and 3, it is difficult, if not impossible, simply to approach the relation between gender and politeness as a question of an investigation of the production, by individual men or women of a number of linguistic features which are assumed to be unequivocally polite or impolite. What I should like to do instead is to consider the complexity of the relationship between gender and politeness, so that the common-sense nature of gender and politeness and their relation to each other is troubled. Here, I aim to analyse the way that certain practices which are considered to be polite or impolite are, within particular communities of practice, stereotypically gendered. As I discussed in chapter 4, these stereotypes do not actually exist as such, but are hypothesised by particular speakers and hearers within communities of practices, on the basis of their representation by others, and are then negotiated with. It is this connection between gendering of practices and assessments of politeness and impoliteness which is of interest. These stereotypes of behaviour which are considered to be appropriate within particular contexts feed back into individual participants' assessments of what is appropriate in terms of their own behaviour.
First, in this chapter, I analyse stereotypes of gender and politeness, and then move on to a discussion of the theoretical work on gender and politeness which I argue seems to replicate stereotypical views of women's politeness, rather than describing women's or men's actual linguistic performance or interpretative frameworks.
