Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative, and I ...

Sociolinguists have investigated relationships between gender and language in a variety of communities and contexts in order to explore the role of power in language and gender. For example, language and gender has been studied in many institutional and organizational environments including medical, legal, law enforcement, academic, and business settings. While all of those settings have historically been marked by gender-based differentials in opportunity, pay, and power, one of the most metaphorically and demographically gender-differentiated institutions has remained unexamined in the sociolinguistic literature: the military.

One of the reasons the military is particularly interesting for linguistic study is that it is veritably synonymous with the sociocultural construction of American masculinity, and therefore an interesting venue for the study of language, gender, and power. Masculinity theorists have determined that key components in the construction of masculinity include a display of the willingness to fight, homosocial enactment for other men’s approval, and denunciation of the feminine. Those characteristics, taken together with the hierarchical nature of both the military structure and the ritually competitive nature of men’s conversational styles, would seem to set the stage for linguistic construction of gender identity in the military. And while the power dynamics of the military hierarchy may assist enactment of masculinity, it is a hierarchy which sometimes dictates that a man’s superior is a woman. Furthermore, inasmuch as the military requires a sense of community, cooperation, and teamwork, as well as nurture and caretaking of subordinates, it can be argued to be a richly feminine endeavor which is nevertheless subsumed by its own masculine representation.

The study of language in society has established that language reflects, and constitutes, social construction. In this, the first in-depth study employing the techniques of discourse analysis through the methodology of interactional sociolinguistics (IS) in a military setting, I was interested to begin an ongoing process of applying language and gender research in a military environment. One of my goals is to add to the literature an additional perspective on the dynamics of power in studying language and gender.