Gender and Politeness (review)

Mills’s intent is to challenge research paradigms that have relied heavily on flawed assumptions about gender and politeness. She asserts that traditional linguistic views are too simplistic because concepts about politeness vary across contexts and people. Along with challenging historical research on politeness, she confronts long-held notions concerning the construction of gender. M has difficulty with the ‘common sense models’ that linguists employ in the construction of hypotheses and data analysis. She alleges that linguists are less critical of data than those who practice cultural analysis. For instance, she asserts that transcribed conversations leave out nontext translatable aspects of the environment that clearly affect the unfolding conversation. She disagrees with the idea, which she believes is held by numerous linguists, that interaction ‘is a product, rather than a process’ (38) because the construction of normal dialogue is too chaotic to be viewed so.

She challenges almost every tool, qualitative and quantitative, that linguists have put to use in gender and politeness research. For example, she reemphasizes the well-known assumption that survey respondents often provide answers that reflect stereotypes or incorrect assessments about how they react to real-life situations.

M partially discounts Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s analysis of politeness, claiming that the reason it works across so many languages is because their idea of politeness is so narrowly constructed. She argues that politeness encompasses behaviors outside this limited view, and polite patterns may be employed for reasons other than politeness. Additionally, speakers’ intentions are affected by context, among other factors, that may guide perceptions of politeness.

M observes that impoliteness has been little studied, which she attributes to the fact that research has focused on cooperation in the construction of conversations to maintain amicable relationships. In reality, speakers do not always intend to cooperate. Furthermore, M claims that traditional views foster the idea that all speech that is not polite is the opposite. She makes the intriguing point that ‘impoliteness has to be seen as an assessment of someone’s behavior rather than a quality intrinsic to an utterance’ (122), an observation with implications for how research should be constructed.

M traces the shift from theory geared towards a dominance paradigm, that women’s speech reflects their lack of power, to theories oriented towards gender differences. She contends that a closer look at gendered identities is necessary to avoid a static model. Finally, in the fifth chapter we get to the topic anticipated by the title. This chapter confronts the commonly held notion that women and their speech are more polite than men and provides other interesting commentary on gender and politeness.

If you can get past the ‘we/they’ cast of the prose, there is much here that is worth considering. The challenges she makes should be considered in rethinking approaches toward study of gender and politeness. Although she does not offer a new paradigm (never her stated intent), she does point us to a wealth of research that may provide guidance in an evolution of our models.