The Metaphorical Models of Gender Transition
Presenter Title/Affiliation
San Francisco State University
Start Date
22-5-2021 10:30 AM
Event Name
Panel discussion
Panel Number
12
Panel Chair Name
Ártemis López
Zoom URL to Join
https://ciis.zoom.us/j/98275740059
Zoom Meeting ID
982 7574 0059
Abstract
Gender transition, like other cultural issues, is both conceptually and politically complicated. As illustrated in a wave of metaphor studies in and out of academia, the models used to inform personal experience have wide-ranging political effects (Lakoff , 2002, 2009; Tibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013). Because transgender individuals make up a frequently ostracized segment of the American population, experiencing disproportionate discrimination and violence (Kenagy, 2005; Lombardi, Wilchins, Priesing, & Malouf, 2002; Stotzer, 2009), attention toward the transgender conceptual experience is a first step in exploring where this marginalization originates at a societal level. With the rapid increase of computer-mediated discourse, personal descriptions of transition in the form of online blogs constitute a growing portion of discourse on gender and transition, helping to shape the public’s perception of trans identity.
In this paper, I show how the conceptual models of gender and transition derive, in part, from a set of repeated metaphors. The model includes several metaphors that share spatial features in their source domains: transition is a journey; the body is a physical barrier between internal and external self (the divided-self metaphor); and a process of belabored decision-making (often communicated through the metaphor decision-making is weighing). In addition to language data, I use public video blogs to examine how co-speech gesture aligns with spoken and written narrative to support a spatially based representation of gender identity. Repeated gestural patterns include inward facing palms used to mime fictive category boundaries, gestural mapping of motion across metaphorical gender regions, manual deictic reference to interior and exterior self, and distancing from past gender assignment signaled through emblematic scare quotes. The data examined in this study confirm the important role gesture plays in supplementing the instantiation of the metaphorical models that organize transgender speakers’ experience with and discussion of gender and transition.
The metaphorical construction of gender categories manifests in newer commonly used phraseology for gender identity: non-binary, non-conforming, agender, etc. In a final portion of the presentation, I discuss the language of “contestation” and lay out some of the conceptual consequences of this emerging lexicon in relationship to gender inclusivity and advocacy.
Presenter Contact
lederer@sfsu.edu
The Metaphorical Models of Gender Transition
Gender transition, like other cultural issues, is both conceptually and politically complicated. As illustrated in a wave of metaphor studies in and out of academia, the models used to inform personal experience have wide-ranging political effects (Lakoff , 2002, 2009; Tibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013). Because transgender individuals make up a frequently ostracized segment of the American population, experiencing disproportionate discrimination and violence (Kenagy, 2005; Lombardi, Wilchins, Priesing, & Malouf, 2002; Stotzer, 2009), attention toward the transgender conceptual experience is a first step in exploring where this marginalization originates at a societal level. With the rapid increase of computer-mediated discourse, personal descriptions of transition in the form of online blogs constitute a growing portion of discourse on gender and transition, helping to shape the public’s perception of trans identity.
In this paper, I show how the conceptual models of gender and transition derive, in part, from a set of repeated metaphors. The model includes several metaphors that share spatial features in their source domains: transition is a journey; the body is a physical barrier between internal and external self (the divided-self metaphor); and a process of belabored decision-making (often communicated through the metaphor decision-making is weighing). In addition to language data, I use public video blogs to examine how co-speech gesture aligns with spoken and written narrative to support a spatially based representation of gender identity. Repeated gestural patterns include inward facing palms used to mime fictive category boundaries, gestural mapping of motion across metaphorical gender regions, manual deictic reference to interior and exterior self, and distancing from past gender assignment signaled through emblematic scare quotes. The data examined in this study confirm the important role gesture plays in supplementing the instantiation of the metaphorical models that organize transgender speakers’ experience with and discussion of gender and transition.
The metaphorical construction of gender categories manifests in newer commonly used phraseology for gender identity: non-binary, non-conforming, agender, etc. In a final portion of the presentation, I discuss the language of “contestation” and lay out some of the conceptual consequences of this emerging lexicon in relationship to gender inclusivity and advocacy.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/saturday/8
