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• W1529096607 abstract "Charteris-Black, J. and Seale, C. Gender and the Language of Illness . Houndmills, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2010 . 247 pp £50.00 (hbk). 978-0-2302- 2235-9 On the day I began reading Gender and the Language of Illness, a UK junior health minister made a speech suggesting that overweight people would be more likely to change their lifestyles if health professionals stopped calling them ‘obese’ and told them bluntly that they were ‘fat’. The minister was expressing her common-sense understanding of why and how linguistic choices matter for health; but the same questions are also of interest to many academic researchers. In this book, the central concern is with the linguistic choices made by women and men describing personal experiences of serious illness. How does gender influence the language of illness, and what might the consequences be? To investigate the first of these questions, Charteris-Black and Seale have applied the methods of corpus linguistics, where computer software is used to identify statistical patterns in large samples of naturally-occurring language data. Here the sample came from Healthtalkonline, a collection of interviews with patients and carers from which the authors extracted around 2 million words produced by 99 male and 99 female subjects (subdivided for age and socioeconomic status), living with a range of conditions including depression, chronic pain, heart disease and cancer. The linguistic analysis centres on the identification of ‘key’ words and concepts–words, or clusters of semantically-related expressions, that occur significantly more frequently in the discourse of one group compared to others. While unsurprisingly there are similarities between male and female illness-narratives, analysis also revealed some significant gender differences. Overall, men’s accounts tended towards avoidance, abstraction and emotional distancing, whereas women’s were more emotionally direct, and often represented illness as a transformative experience. The authors relate these tendencies to the view that women generally manage illness more effectively, both because this is a familiar part of their role as wives and mothers, and because the life-changes associated with illness, such as increased dependence on others, are less in conflict with the norms of femininity than masculinity. However, it is important not to over-generalise here, since the study also uncovered significant variation within gender-groups, especially among the men. Higher-status and younger men were more likely to adopt a ‘modern’ masculinity marked by an emotional vocabulary comparable to women’s; some sub-groups of men, such as carers and those with serious heart disease, made use of the more typically ‘feminine’ narrative of agency and self-transformation. This study is an interesting addition to the empirical research literature on male and female language-use, but theoretically I felt it left important issues unresolved. In particular, it is never clear how the authors theorise the relationship between words and the world. Sometimes they seem to be proposing that language reflects speakers’ thought-processes and underlying conceptual schemas (thus telling us something about the differing ways in which illness is experienced by men and women); at other times they take a more ‘discursive constructionist’ line, according to which the way illness is talked about actively shapes people’s experience of it (which implies that men’s experience might be changed by adopting alternative modes of discourse). And on occasion their comments suggest a third possibility, that the experience of illness and its verbal representation are separate phenomena: men’s problem is that their authentic experience cannot be verbalised without transgressing cultural gender-norms. Which of these accounts we should prefer is, of course, a complex question. But since the answer materially affects the conclusions that may be drawn from the empirical findings, I felt it merited more extended discussion. In their own brief conclusion, Charteris-Black and Seale appear to come down on the side of discursive construction: they suggest that a shift towards ‘feminine’ discourse would be good for men’s health, and might help to close the gender-gap in life expectancy. But like the minister’s preference for ‘fat’ over ‘obese’, this seems to owe more to common-sense conviction than scientific evidence. As the authors acknowledge, there is no way of knowing if the subjects they identified as having more ‘feminine’ discourse styles fared any better than those whose discourse was ultra-‘masculine’: even if they did, it would be difficult to disaggregate the effects of discourse style from other variables. True, studies have found that people living with serious illness typically claim to benefit from certain kinds of talk, but these self-reports are not based on any objective assessment of the health effects, and they may not even reflect the individual subject’s personal feelings: interview talk is always shaped by what people understand to be a socially intelligible/acceptable/desirable way of discoursing on a given topic. On this point it would have been interesting to examine the relationship between interview subjects’ talk and wider cultural discourses on health. I would also have welcomed a fuller statement of what (if anything) the authors took to be the implications of their research for policy and practice. There is always a danger that gender-difference research will be interpreted reductively to reinforce pre-existing folk-beliefs, such as in this case the popular ‘male deficit’ model which says that men cannot communicate or express their feelings. Such a ‘deficit’ framing can easily license victim-blaming – a particularly problematic tendency in the context of health and illness. I am sure the authors would not endorse it, but by addressing the issue more explicitly they could perhaps have done more to pre-empt it. Gender and the Language of Illness does what it says on the tin – it presents a detailed descriptive account of the way a sample of women and men verbalised their experiences of illness – and I would certainly recommend it to linguists interested in gender and/or corpus analysis. For readers who approach it from the perspective of health studies, by contrast, I think its value would have been enhanced by more sustained engagement with larger theoretical and political questions." @default.
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• W1529096607 title "Gender and the Language of Illness" @default.
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