Speech and Gender

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 11
Room: 
Toth Gyorgy Istvan Room
Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 3:30pm
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Date: 
Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

This talk responds to both academic concerns and personal experience of gender in speech. It will grapple with three interrelated foci: speech by women, speech about women, and reception of women’s speech in a public context. Beata Stawarska draws on some examples of feminist investigation of language from diverse traditions of inquiry, notably pragmatics and feminist speech act theory, as well popular culture. She will focus the discussion on the gender and power interplays in the lexicon, vocalics, and finally, in speech considered as a social act. Her ultimate objective is to make a case for speech as both reflecting social inequity and enabling social change.

Beata Stawarska is the author of Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology (Ohio UP, 2009), a monograph bringing together the classical phenomenological tradition in an exchange with the dialogic tradition in philosophy (Buber, Rosenstock-Huessy, Rosenzweig), sociolinguistics, developmental psychology, and feminism, to make a case for the primacy of interpersonal connectedness. She has taught and published extensively in the Continental philosophical tradition (especially Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida), and cognitive science. Her essays have been included in edited anthologies, such as Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty; Merleau-Ponty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers; Key Concepts: Merleau-Ponty; and Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, and journals such as Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; Philosophy Today; CHIASMI International; Sartre Studies International; Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.