Copyright by Andrea Michele Jacobs 2004 - University of Texas

319 Pages·2004·0.85 MB·English

Copyright
by
Andrea Michele Jacobs
2004
The Dissertation Committee for Andrea Michele Jacobs Certifies that this is
the approved version of the following dissertation:
Language Reform as Language Ideology:
An examination of Israeli feminist language practice
Committee:
S Keith Walters, Supervisor
Elizabeth Keating
Esther Raizen
Joel Sherzer
Anthony Woodbury
Language reform as language ideology:
An examination of Israeli feminist language practice
by
Andrea Michele Jacobs, B.A., M.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
December, 2004
Dedicated to women of the Israeli feminist movement
qqqqzzzzxxxxttttnnnnwwww yyyyqqqqzzzzxxxx yyyyqqqqzzzzxxxx
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many individuals and institutions for their support and
guidance. I would like to acknowledge the Social Science Research Council for
the dissertation research grant that supported the first year of my field research in
Israel. The conference organized by the SSRC for its Middle Eastern grantees in
March 1996 gave me the opportunity to share my ideas at the crucial beginning
stage of my research. The conversations I had with the other participants
challenged some of my assumptions about how and where to conduct my research
and ultimately improved the quality of this work. I would also like to
acknowledge the support of the linguistics department at the University of Texas,
both the staff and the faculty, for assisting me throughout my tenure as a student
in the department.
My next thanks goes to the fifteen women who were willing to give their
time to participate in this project and discuss with me their views on negotiating a
feminist identity in contemporary Israel. Without the willingness of these and
many others to participate in this project and answer my numerous questions,
there would be no data and thus no dissertation. There were many other people in
Israel who also contributed in some way to my research. I would like to thank
Yael Meschler, Orit Kamir, and Mira Ariel, who provided me with advice about
my project and helped me to focus my research on Israeli feminist language
practices. I would also like to thank Yvonne Deustch, Karen Abrams, and Terry
Greenblatt who helped me connect with women at different feminist
v
organizations; and Dr. Gabriel Birenbaum of the Hebrew Language Academy,
who gave me space to conduct research at the HLA and access to the minutes of
the sociology committee; and the librarians at the resource center of the Shdulat
Hanashim who assisted me in collecting examples of sexist language use in the
Israeli media and other public institutions.
For their help in conceiving and guiding this project, I would like to thank
the members of my dissertation committee, Esther Raizen, Elizabeth Keating,
Anthony Woodbury, Joel Sherzer and my supervisor, Keith Walters. Special
thanks go to each for their unique contributions: to Esther for her confidence in
my Hebrew, her willingness to listen my data tapes and review my transcripts for
accuracy, and most importantly for reminding me that my perspective as a non-
native speaker of Hebrew was an asset to my research; to Elizabeth for her
attention to my own use of language in this text and for helping me to strengthen
the feminist and ethnographic focus of my work; to Joel for reminding me that my
work should contribute to the readers’ picture of Israel as well as their picture of
contemporary Israeli Hebrew; and to Tony for encouraging me to draw broader
conclusions about the way speakers ideologize elements of their languages and
the socio-cultural phenomena that result from these processes. Keith Walters has
been my advisor and mentor throughout my graduate studies at the University of
Texas. He has encouraged me at every step of this project and helped find
opportunities for me to present my work to the broader community of scholars
examining issues of language and gender. His confidence in my vision and my
vi
work helped me stay the course and finish the writing of this text, for which I
sincerely thank him.
Within the larger community of linguists, anthropologists, and Israel
studies scholars there are several individuals who helped to advance my work.
First, I must thank Bonnie McElhinny for organizing “Words, Worlds, and
Material Girls: A workshop on language, gender and political economy.” The
conversations sparked by work presented at this conference gave me the
opportunity to exorcise the ghost of a particularly troubling article on gender and
language ideology that had haunted my writing and my thinking. I would like to
thank all the participants for their contributions, especially Charles Briggs, Mary
Bucholtz, Penelope Eckert, Rudi Gaudio, Kira Hall, Noelle Mole, Bonnie
McElhinny, Maureen Murney, Susan Phillips, Keith Walters, Jessica Weinberg,
and Qing Zhang. I would also like to thank colleagues from the University of
Texas and elsewhere with whom I discussed my ideas about gender identity,
Hebrew, and contemporary Israel: Michal Brody, Ginger Pizer, Susan Smythe-
Kung, Amy Peebles, Christina Willis, Augustine Agwele, Douglas Bigham, Sadia
Rodriguez, Elaine Chun, Christine Labuski, Beth Bruinsma, Melissa Biggs-
Coupal, Yaron Shemer, Avraham Zilkha, Megan Crowhurst, Adam Newton, Uri
Horesh, Ouzi Rotem, Ron Kuzar, Yishai Tobin, Rusty Barret, Robin Queen,
David Samuels, Peter Haney, Laura Levitt, Lori Lefkovitz, Susan Kahn, and
Tamar Kamionkowski.
I also must acknowledge the network of friends who supported me during
the three years I spent living in Israel, many of whom have become members my
vii
extended family: Micha, Nitsan, Hezi, Yigal, Gil, Sufnat, Jessica, Aron, Wendy,
Tamar, Susan, Ruti, Mara, Aliza, Nicky, Anat, Edit, Edi, Marla, Rona, Joel,
Nehama, Jennifer, Barry, Allison, Allegra, Ilan, Yotam, Yuval, Jessie, Shari, Ruti,
the Zituny family, and the Levi family. There is another group of individuals
whose intellectual, emotional, and spiritual support in conceiving, writing, and
completing this dissertation was immeasurable: Meredith Barber, Sheila and Alex
Avelin, Elyse Wechterman, Marsha Freidman, Joel Miller, Josh Pfefer, Rachel
Conway, Sarah Benor, Karen Abrams, Gila Silverman, Chantal Tetrault, and
Caryn Aviv. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Barbara, Robert, and
Mary, my sister Francine, my brother-in-law Andrew, and my step-sisters Ryan
and Rachel. Their support and love throughout the entire process gave me the
strength to overcome the many obstacles I encountered during the pursuit of my
degree.
viii
Language Reform as Language Ideology: An Examination of
Israeli Feminist Language Practice
Publication No._____________
Andrea Michele Jacobs, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2004
Supervisor: Keith Walters
This dissertation, an ethnographic and sociolinguistic case study of Israeli
feminist practices, investigates the relationship between language use, language
ideology, and the socio-cultural construction of gender and gender identity.
Taking the definition of language use presented by McConnell-Ginet (1988) as a
guide, I analyze both the linguistic behavior and the metalinguistic discourse of
fifteen self-identified Israeli feminists, to determine how ideologies related to
language, gender, and philosophies of social change interact with the structural
and sociolinguistic facts of Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) to shape these women’s
intentional and habitual practices of language use. I used the theoretical concepts
of “indexicality” (Ochs 1992) and “community of practice” (Holmes and
Meyerhoff 1999) to examine how the participants in my study used the linguistic
ix
resources in their socio-culture repertoire to negotiate a coherent social identity in
both feminist and mainstream Jewish Israeli contexts.
To date, most of the literature on feminist language practice has examined
these issues in English or other Indo-European language speaking contexts. This
dissertation contributes to the discussion on the relationship between language
and gender by examining these issues in a Hebrew-speaking context. Hebrew, a
root-and-pattern language, has a binary system of gender based noun
classification in which agreement is marked on predicates as well as pronouns and
adjectives. Thus, avoiding gender pre-specification of animate referents in
language use, particularly spoken language, is extremely difficult. Furthermore,
the association of cultural gender characteristics with the grammatical categories
of MASCULINE and FEMININE, through the processes of iconization and
erasure (Gal and Irvine 2000), has more implications for meanings of gendered
forms.
Feminist Hebrew is distinguished from the contemporary and the
prescribed standard uses of Modern Israeli Hebrew in three specific ways: (1) the
use of hyper-standardized FEMININE forms for referential and indexical marking
of feminine gender in sex-specific contexts, (2) the use of FEMININE forms for
ambiguous generic or definite inclusive reference, and (3) the overt double
gendering of nominal or predicate forms (the Hebrew equivalent of he/she) in
speaking or writing. The dissertation includes a detailed quantitative and
qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of my informants’ practices to explain how
they used variables from feminist and conventional varieties of MIH to express
x