The Word of the Day is "Androgyny"

The other day, my Russian housemate showed me a ballet video online.



It's a very interesting piece of modern choreography. I like it from a dance perspective, because they do some unusual things and the fast pointe work is incredible. But it's also interesting from a gender perspective, because it explores relationships. Different people dance together in different ways, and at one point, two female dancers are dressed as men. Before that point, though, during what I thought was a more conventional scene, my housemate asked me a strange question: "Is that dancer a man or a women?"

I told her it was a woman, because the likelihood of a man doing such intricate pointe work is almost nil. (I have seen men on pointe, in the "ballet trocadero," but I have to say that the pointe work was pretty blunt. In my experience, most male dancers don't pursue pointe training at all, so would not be able to perform it with such a high degree of skill). So I told her that the dancer was a woman, but the woman was androgynous.

"How you call this? An-dro-gyn-ous?"

"Yes. Androgynous."

It led me to think about dance in general, how girls from an early age are taught to move in an exceedingly light and delicate mannner, feminine to the extreme. They are also taught to starve their bodies, so that they don't develop a shape with many feminine attributes. Therefore...when a female dancer ceases to move in the typically stylized "feminine" manner traditional to ballet, if she begins to move with force and strength, she automatically becomes androgynous, because neither her movements nor her shape indicate "female." This phenomenon is completely unrelated to her own gender identity. It's simply a matter of gender presentation, which normally goes one way and confuses people when it goes another.

I also find it interesting that of all words I should be teaching people in Russia, "androgynous" is one of the first. I'm not out here and I'm not planning on coming out, but gender is something that seems to follow me. I'm one of the people who notices gender ambiguity in the world, and this means that I end up talking about it to unexpected people, even if I don't talk about its relevance to my personal life.

We didn't talk any more about androgyny, my housemate and I, we just watched the ballet. But I'm happy that one person in Russia now knows the English word for ambiguity in gender.

More Good News (and questions of language)

Huzzah! We now officially have four states in which it's legal for same-sex couples to get married, now that Vermont has joined the team. And our nation's capital has taken the unexpectedly enlightened step of recognizing same-sex unions performed elsewhere, even if not allowing same-sex unions of its own. Hamdulilah, life is becoming good.

On a completely different note, one I'd planned to blog about before I got the celebratory news of increased legality, I'd like to talk about language. Ever since I started learning foreign languages, I've always been fascinated by the idea of gendered words. From the obvious and inane middle-school jokes about "how can you tell if this pencil's a boy or a girl?" to more evolved questions in high school and college, gendered words have always held questions. Why, for example, is the moon in Europe almost always considered feminine and the sun masculine? Why is it reversed in Japan? Who came up with gendered language in the first place? And does it actually affect how we think about the words themselves? I've had several people scoff at this last question, but a researcher at Stanford has now decided to look at this question as well. Her findings? People do indeed think differently about differently gendered words.

When you think of a bridge, how would you describe it?



Which of these sets of descriptions would you describe as more masculine or feminine?








As it turns out, the set of more "masculine" attributes--"strong, sturdy, towering, etc." was chosen by people whose primary language is Spanish, in which "bridge" is a masculine word. The set of more "feminine" attributes was chosen by people whose main language is German, in which "bridge" is a feminine word.

So does gendered language affect peoples' perceptions of objects? I think so. The question now becomes, what do speakers of an ungendered language like English have to say?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102518565&ft=1&f=1007