Redefining femininity

Call and response as gendered features in African-American discourse

Bibliographic Data

ID11294288
AuthorsJoanna Pawelczyk (0000-0001-9918-3596, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume22
Issue4
Pages415-437
Publication date2003-01-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMultilingua (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0167-8507 • E-ISSN: 1613-3684
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/mult.2003.021
OpenAlexW2037631060
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited14

In this paper I discuss the use of one of the most unique African-American communicative strategies of call and response as a marker of socially constructed gender among the members of a church committee. The data come from my fieldwork conducted in Ypsilanti, MI in 1999. Call and response, a minimal response, traditionally derives from the Black church. Nowadays, however, it constitutes a legitimate feature of the African-American communication system (Dandy 1991). The traditional sociolinguistic research draws a clear distinction in the use of minimal responses by white women and men and by African-American females and males. Cameron (2000) claims that it is rather a consistent research finding that men use minimal responses significantly less often than women. Stanback (1985), on the other hand, demonstrates that the most striking evidence of communicative asymmetry in African-American discourse is the black women's greater silence in their conversations with black men. One aspect of this silence is fewer minimal responses, including call and response. Most of the traditional sociolinguistic analyses, however, did not interpret the minimal responses in the framework of the goals they served, neglecting the interlocutors' roles in the interactions. This paper, adopting the social constructionist view on gender, aims to reveal how the minimal response of call and response may function as a diagnostic of power in a secular context. The assumption is that the use of call and/or response assigns different (asymmetrical, i. e., powerful or powerless) statuses to the interlocutors in an interaction. This analysis demonstrates how a call and a response take on gendered meanings, i. e., how they are symbolically associated with a masculine or feminine way of speaking in the setting analyzed

Call and response · Context (archaeology · Femininity · Power (physics · Silence · Social constructionism · Sociology · Digital Communication and Language · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Gender Studies · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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