Gender and language change: theoretical and methodological reflections for Sociolinguistics

Abstract

In this article, we acknowledge that the correlation between gender and linguistic variation has often been guided by essentialist interpretations. As an alternative, we propose treating gender as a social and historical dimension, performatively constituted and continuously reiterated through discourse practices, based on a theoretical-methodological reinterpretation grounded on performativity theory (Butler, 2018a, 2018b) and gender as a technology (Lauretis, 1994). In order to demonstrate the applicability of this perspective, we conduct a historical sociolinguistic analysis of variation between second (2P/tu) and third-person (3P/você) forms in subject position in early twentieth-century Brazilian Portuguese (1915-1932). Our study draws on a corpus of 432 letters published in A Cigarra, a magazine directed toward female readership, contrasting it with a control group, composed of 416 letters distributed across two different samples, defined along a continuum of gendered representations: Revista da Semana ([+feminine ↔ −masculine]) and Correio Paulistano ([+masculine ↔ −feminine]). Results suggest that both social context and discourse orientation shape the use of the variants in the material under investigation. Our analysis shows how women’s press, understood as a gender technology, constitutes a space for performative practices, offering new perspectives for understanding social meaning in processes of language change.
Keywords: Variationist Sociolinguistics. Historical Sociolinguistics. Gender Studies. Female gender. Women’s press.