Violence and War: Through Gender, Passive Voice and Indirect Discourse  ABSTRACT  This review examines anthropological and linguistic research on the result of violence and war within cultures through language, gender, and social discourse. Five main articles have been selected that together cover gender, passive voice, and indirect speech, which are believed not only to allow for easier toleration and digestion of violence and sexual violence, even war, in our societies throughout the world, but may actually encourage violent thought – therefore violence in action – through language itself. This work asks whether language is responsible for violence and gender hostility and if there is a possibility to eradicate violence, warfare, and even gender conflict at the roots of social and cultural discourse and interaction.   Introduction  

Transgressions of social “taboos” and intimacy bonding, within homosocial

groups, both male and female are enacted through “indirect discourse” which

allows for both males and females “a way out of [their] double binds of cultural

discourse.” (Kiesling, 2005)

Robin Lakoff’s material and claim that gender is indexed indirectly may be

at the heart of language’s culpability for humankinds’ internecine state.

(Language and Women’s Place, 1975)

What is it about language that affects power and violence in society – at

least within English and the romance languages, which were the subjects within

the papers used here? Is language responsible for violence and sexual gender

hegemony? Since the early days of written history man has expressed violence

against fellow man regardless of the language used. Herod the Great saw blood

and kinship as threats to his rule and used violence and murder to eradicate that

threat. This was done without any help or ideas expressed in English or the

romance languages. All the languages of the world have been party to such

violence and destruction, and have catered to all the categories of violence

against mankind, and all living things upon the earth – including earth itself.

Language is just another tool for violence and gender related violence.

Other primates go on war parties exterminating whole groups of competing

primates for domination of feeding areas. Chimpanzee males, after defeating an

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alpha male, will exterminate the children of the previous leader. Lion males after

winning a battle against a reigning male will systematically kill off the former

ruling lions’ cubs, thus ensuring the former ruler will have no surviving “blood” to

contend with. Their bloodlines will be the only bloodlines to continue. This is a

natural selection technique that attempts to ensure that the strongest genetic

material will comprise the only genes that move forward within any singular

species. This may be the deepest factor that explains the need for violence and

war, but why at the gender level? Why must a species fight amongst its own

gender pair to protect itself? How is it that gender difference is responsible for

aggression? Is language just parroting the physical realities of natural selection?

At what level do societies invent or birth their own indexing vernacular, or is it

somehow imposed upon society by the language itself?

Research to date has tended to search for the reasons of passive voice, in

the governmental arena, with race and status as motivators for power (Foucault),

also some studies have shown the passive and or indirect voice in gender

hierarchy (Henley, Keisling). Which came first, the nature of gender and its

combative structure or the language that conforms to that notion – even bolsters

it – does not seem to hard to fathom. Nature and the formation of gender, a

natural physicality, must have precluded our construct of language and social

discourse. Could not what we learn during our preverbal stage also be grist for

suspects that effect our ingestion and utilization of language and its indexes and

qualifiers?

REVIEW AND DISCUSSION 

Uli Linke’s research in 1997 attempted to show that the violence of Nazi

Germany during WWII has returned in present day postwar Germany and that

the “feminized body of the outsider (foreigner, refugee, other) has been

reclaimed as a signifier of race and contagion.” She attempts to show (through a

critical analysis of German public culture) the highly ambivalent and stressed

relation of the national order to the modern and its eventual escape from

modernity through the essentialisms of blood, race, and gender. (Linke, 1997)

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Linke believes in Zygmunt Bauman’s, Modernity and the Holocaust

(1989), that genocide in Germany “must be understood as a central event of

modern history and not as an exceptional episode. The production of mass death

was facilitated by modern processes of rationalization [and that] genocide was

based upon the technological and organizational achievements of an advanced

industrial society.” Linke and Bauman feel that the extreme violence of genocide

“requires rethinking… not as a breakdown of the social (Durkheim 1933), a

suspension of the normal order of things (Sorel 1941), a historical regression

(Canetti 1973; Foucault 1979), or a return to primitive instincts (Freud 1930) and

mythic origins (Girard 1979), but as an integral principle of modernity.”

However this is strangely the antithesis of the empowerment and love

freedoms that are thought to blossom, from and within, the benefits tied to

economic development and the “political economy of late capitalism” that was

discovered in Ahearn’s article Writing desire in Nepali love letters (2002). It

seems that modernity is not the culprit, but the use of language with intent by the

individual or the society is. Linke’s comment that genocide and violence within

the discourse of society is “the result of a sustained conscious effort and the

substitution of moral responsibility with organizational discipline” is both a support

of her thoughts on present German signifiers of violence and difference and also

a denouncement of the fact that any and all thoughts of violence are nothing

more than the concerted effort of a group in power merely seeking to continue

and uphold that power position.

Uli Linke’s many sightings of “the transfiguration of racial others into

blood”, although disturbing, is not new to the pantheon of reasons that have been

utilized by man to subject his fellow man. It is her contention that “blood effusion

takes on sexual connotations when this image of the bleeding body is

symbolically connected to the periodic emission of women’s menstrual flow”

(Linke:1992) that causes us to ponder. Blood metaphors thus establish a

“sanguine connection to sexuality, gender identity, and the biologization of the

Jew [or other]. The German discourse of liquidation is thus integrated into a

pattern of domination that transforms the racial other into woman.” Again this is

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not new to our world of violence. Records (images and text) from as early as

ancient Greece and before depict and describe rape, of both female and male, as

a form of warfare. To rape a male during warfare is obviously to infer the

“weakness” and likeness of women to the defeated group or other.

But why is violence tied to gender and gender difference? Is it because

the only obvious difference within our species and the need for power-over can

only be seen within our gender difference? Is it that in order to “create” an “other”

within a species that is actually completely within and of its own bloodline since a

mere 50,000 years ago, it must tag or index the “other” by the only item of

difference that factually exists within the species – gender? And if so what role

does language play in substantiating this within social discourse?

Bartov’s statement that “fascist soldiers, who used terror against women

as a strategy of war, were dependent on peacetime constructions of society and

gender” (1996) represents the notion that there may be only one method of

differentiating an “other” or outsider, that one group can use to maintain the

illusion that its group, is the one true and rightfully deserving group – that of

gender. If this is so, then it seems obvious that all “subalterns”, rightfully

deserving of subjugation must be likened to women, the only difference that

exists within our species –as long as the concept is originated by a male.

"In what way have we sinned, that we should be treated worse than

animals? Hunted from place to place, cold, filthy and in rags, we wander about

like gypsies and in the end are destroyed like vermin!" (Bartov, 1996) This

statement is not from a victim of the holocaust but from a German soldier during

WWI. Is it incorrect? Is it misleading? Maybe, if taken out of context. But the point

is there are always two sides to a coin and that each individual and group must

condone their actions with rhetoric conducive to those actions. To vilify the

“other” by indexing them as female, is the method many nations have used –

“blood” is the means of objectifying anyone outside their “national” bloodline or

group.

“Violent behaviors, in particular those that are not lethal in outcome, are

defined, legitimated and sanctioned.” (Ruback and Weiner, 1995) This is a very

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chilling notion and one that treads a very fine line. Law and other dominating

groups will use these “sanctioned” ideas, which can be considered loopholes for

evil and crafty reasoning and to legitimate violence at any level. It allows for the

already prevalent thinking and methods of manipulation of language that rapists

use to construe stories and theories that ameliorate their actions. (Lea and

Auburn, 2001)

Marysol Ascencio from Columbia University School of Public Health in

1999 investigated “how society and culture, especially traditional societal and

cultural ideas and their associated values and effects, condition violent

behaviors.” With her work “Machos & Sluts: Gender, Sexuality, and Violence

among a Cohort of Puerto Rican Adolescents” she attempted to understand the

interpersonal violence that had become a public health concern in a lower

income area of NYC. She wanted to “investigate into “how society and culture,

especially traditional societal and cultural ideas and their associated values and

effects condition violent behaviors… [and] how these young people justify

violence by linking it to beliefs about gender roles, sexuality, and biology, and

thus perpetuate gender-role conformity, particularly heterosexual male

dominance.”

Ascencio’s work did not offer any solutions to gender inequality or violence

but it did produce many findings that “machismo”; males supposed stronger

sexual drive that may subsequently free them from social constraints in order to

satisfy their drives (Goldsmith and Goldberg: 1994); the Madonna/whore

dichotomy; and that violence is believed a part of human nature that cannot be

avoided; are all gender-based violence that may not be so much a product of

traditional Latino gender roles as it is the product of social dynamics that affect all

young people from diverse cultural backgrounds living in the U.S. inner cities.

Gender-based violence derives from systems of beliefs that legitimate a

males’ use of violence to control a female’s behavior and it is maintained by

social and socioeconomic inequities. Some of these young peoples’ views were

so skewed that even when they believed that homosexuality was caused by

biological factors (nature), that it still was not acceptable. Nature has been a

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scapegoat for the facts of male superiority, sexual violence and injustice, but not

items they wished to exclude that did not fit those facts of male superiority – such

as homosexuality.

She noted that some researchers feel that the “good” concepts of

machismo such as respect, honor, prestige, and protection could advance

health-related interventions, but these aspects still derive from and maintain,

male dominance and unequal gender and family relations. We see the “macho”

masculine hegemonic hierarchy within societies, and we see the passive voice

used by governments and dominant power groups to deny agency and maintain

control. But the real question is how do these two very influential and control-

effecting methods exist and come about? We know the why of it – individuals or

groups questing for power, but how are these methods perpetrated, how and why

are they agreed upon and used by the subdominant groups they attempt to

control?

Her findings raise questions about 1) the social construction of gender and

sexuality, and the limits placed on female sexuality, which foster and maintain

gender-based violence; 2) the popular stereotype of the “macho” Latino male and

its connection to violence; 3) and the use of biological arguments to justify

violence. She does end on a slightly positive note that “[i]t is important to point

out that not all men abuse women or even approve of violence. Moreover, many

women actively fight back against their victimization in a variety of ways (Klein

1981:67). These points are the basis for believing that effective interventions

against gender-based violence are possible.”

Reducing behavior and social structure to categories of “natural” and

“unnatural” needs to be questioned in theory and practice. The belief that

behaviors labeled as “unnatural” justify social punishment also needs to be

examined. As Weeks observes, “Understanding sexuality involves seeing it not

as a primordially ‘natural’ phenomenon but rather as a product of social and

historical forces.” (1986:15)

Nancy Henley et al., with their work Syntax, Semantics, & Sexual

Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice (1995) tested hypotheses that news

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media often report violence against women in passive-verb format which leads to

be more accepting of VAW than reports using the active voice. She believes that

“how people interpret a message may depend, in part, on the verb voice used to

phrase that message. Such an effect would represent an interaction between

syntax, or structure, and semantics, or meaning.” (Henley et al., 1995)

Many psycholinguists believe that people encode the overall meaning

rather than syntactic structure. But passive voice does tend to direct causal

attribution away from the agent and toward the patient. She reported “passive

voice may be used to hide agency of dominant groups for negative acts.” Sykes

(1988) pointed out the way that the use of passive voice with agent deletion

helped to make welfare dependency, in a report by social welfare administrators,

a personal characteristic of young African Britons rather than a result of racism

pervasive throughout the White-controlled economy.” Support for the analysis of

the use of the passive form to oppress is offered by the linguistic historian Julia

Penelope, most recently in Speaking Freely (1990), wherein she writes: “English

allows us to suppress reference to the agents who commit specific acts,

particularly when the speaker/writer wishes to deny or cover up responsibility”

A study of spoken rather than written language, Anspach (1988) revealed

the use of passive voice as a characteristic feature of medical case presentations

and along with other language acts such as treating medical technology as the

agent, tends to mitigate responsibility for medical decision making. But also many

times we may all be guilty of using passive voice unknowingly. Henley notes that

“selection of passive voice [is] not necessarily conscious; the combination of

cultural knowledge and linguistic knowledge of passive voice usage and

construction is likely sufficient for speakers to adopt passive voice.” With this

statement she anticipates research that we will cover later in the article by Frazer

and Miller done recently in 2009.

Henley also points out that Lamb who in a 1991 analysis of 46 social

science research articles, found that 69% of the sentences about abuse

(battering) obscured male agents through diffusion of responsibility, acts without

agents (passive voice, nominalization), victims without agents, and gender

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obfuscation” is “inconclusive” regarding the questions of the proposed research

and that although important in shaping professionals’ conceptualization of issues,

“do[es] not reach the mass audience that newspapers do” misses the point.

Whether or not the readers were influenced by the agent obfuscation does not

seem to get at the real issue – that being the researchers themselves, while

working to show the effects of passive voice and to get at the roots of this

pervasive tendency, fall victim to the snares of linguistic prevarication and

equivocation themselves.

Henley’s et al undertook three studies. The first was a content-analytic

study that examined mass media, focusing on verb voice using coded control

verbs as well as those of sexual violence. They predicted that verbs describing

sexual violence would be used more in the passive than the active voice. They

also considered another hypothesis based on Penelope’s (1990) analysis that

when the passive voice is used it will often be truncated, lacking a by phrase,

more often than other verbs.

Verb voice:

Active voice: In the U.S. a man rapes a woman every 6 minutes.

Passive voice: In the U.S. a woman is raped by a man every 6 minutes.

Or Truncated: In the U.S. a woman is raped every 6 minutes. You can

omit the agent altogether – often used in reporting.

The results showed that passive voice was significantly more predominant

for certain word types; it was the predominant construction for describing male

sexual violence and nonsexual violence, whereas the active voice predominated

for positive and neutral acts. The absence of by phrase was most common with

male sexual violence, and also for nonsexual violence and positive acts.

However, nonsexual violence was described with passive voice even

more than sexual violence was, so the explanation assumed by other

researchers that passive voice usage was based on a desire to obscure males’

agency in sexual violence cannot explain all the data.

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The second study tested the hypothesis that verb voice does influence

perceptions of violence and its effects and that the greater the negativity

associated with the verb, the greater should be the use of the passive voice.

56 undergraduate and graduate student volunteers from within classes

and their acquaintance circles ranked 10 words on five semantic differential

scales. The ten words were: thank, forgive, touch, rob, rape, murder, beat, share,

steel, rescue, and the 5 bipolar adjective pairs were: good/bad; active/passive;

strong/weak; pleasant/unpleasant; ethical/unethical. The results showed that the

more active a word’s subjective evaluation in Study 2, the greater its proportion

of passive voice usage in Study 1. Passive voice is more likely to be used for

negatively evaluated acts.

The third study attempted to judge the effects of passive voice on readers’

perceptions.

1. Will the readers attribute less harm to the victim?

2. Will the readers attribute more responsibility to the victim?

3. Will the readers be more accepting of rape myths, interpersonal

violence, and battering, and have more negative attitudes toward the

victims?

4. Will the affects be stronger in male than female participants?

Mock newspaper reports were prepared on rape, battering, robbery and

murder – each written in passive and active voice. They had 54 participants from

the Psychology Department subject pool who were all native English speakers.

The results showed that males were more affected by the interaction of voice and

crime type than females. Females gave higher ratings than males for the sexual

violence crimes but did not differ in ratings of the others crimes. The victims of

sexually violent crimes were rated as being more harmed than victims of the

other crimes. Males had harm ratings higher for sexual violence in active than

passive voice, and gave higher harm ratings overall for active voice regardless of

crime type. Men attributed less responsibility to the perpetrator when the stories

were in passive voice, but the difference was far greater for sexual crimes then

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for nonsexual ones. Responsibility ratings were affected for females only by type

of crime. Voice was not as significant for females. Females were less accepting

of violence against women than men were.

The strange thing was that bilinguals held more traditional (violence-

accepting) attitudes than English monolinguals. What does this mean? It seems

that English itself makes allowances for atrocities. Those who only speak English

seem more affected by the linguistics of the language and by syntax and voice to

a greater amount than bilinguals. What about other languages? We have noted

that German is/was responsible for the cultural discourse that contributed to the

holocaust, and that the Spanish of the Porto Ricans is responsible for

“machismo.” Then again we are speaking of languages that “fathered” English.

Was English actually crafted by the power group to ultimately be the language of

dominance?

Henley et al concluded that the newspaper analysis found that rape is

written about frequently in passive voice, and often truncated. That people, when

exposed to reports of crime, including rape and battery written in passive voice,

tend to become more negative toward the victims; more accepting of rape myths;

and more accepting of physical abuse toward women. Although not as led by

passive voice as males to attribute harm or responsibility differently, females

were as affected as males in their attitudes toward sexual violence after multiple

exposure to stories using the passive voice. The frequency of passive voice was

shown to increase with the severity of the crime.

Henley’s study acknowledges that the change in voice does more than

change the topic; it changes the actual content in the realm of degree. “It is as if

attenuating modifiers were inserted: “A woman was sort of raped in the parking

lot last night”, “Mr .B. somewhat beat his wife.” “ (p81) It is presumed that the

passive voice in writing about violence against women and violence in general is

not intentional or conscious, but rather the unconscious working of the collective

culture’s attitudes. Individuals find meaning not only in the propositions but also

in the structure of sentences. So if knowing the “proper” structure and coding of

the language one can “influence” the reader to absorb the content with

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underlying subtexts that could be of benefit to those disseminating the

“information.” The more we understand the effects that certain forms and

structures have on readers, the more empowered we will be to control these

effects.

The fourth article reviewed was Catherine Ashcraft’s Naming Knowledge:

A Language for Reconstructing Domestic Violence & Systemic Gender Inequity.

Her initial premise was that “in attempting to privilege silenced voices and

transform dominant representations that reproduce systemic inequalities,

researchers employ specific communicative choices and discursive practices that

shape the course and influence the success of their efforts. However, these

communicative choices and practices often produce unanticipated results.” She

stated, “The words we have are not always the words we need” and preceded to

offer a language pertinent to subordinate groups – specifically women who are

victims of domestic violence. Her own attempts to expand the linguistic and

discursive options available for framing the issue of domestic violence and other

forms of marital power imbalance, although insightful and encompassing had as

she later included the capacity to be just another albeit, broader range of

terminology that may be used by the dominant society to challenge the

definitions or labels women select to describe their experience (i.e. “well, you

don’t really qualify for domestic violence; you actually suffer from domestic

devaluation or domestic dodging). Her specific reason for attempting to create

more and better detailed terminology for domestic violence was based upon the

fact that “theorists recognize that an individual who experiences a situation or

feeling that has no name often comes to doubt the validity of the feeling itself.”

(p.5) By creating her “power and control wheel” – the “continuum of violence” she

is hoping to empower those who had no ability or recourse to identify the myriad

of violent actions that have remained unnamed and therefore “non-existent” until

now. Before the 1970’s, no terms existed to even describe “the problem of

domestic violence; instead, the problem hovered behind the closed curtains of

private family life.” Her continuum of activity and passivity creates a “conceptual

space to envision ways in which partners control by performing certain actions as

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well as by not performing certain actions. This active/passive continuum,

however, is not intended to indicate varying levels of conscious or deliberate

intent. Active behaviors may be unconscious, and passive behaviors may be

intentional.” But again as noted above all new terminology is still framed within

the already dominant lexicon and will most likely be absorbed and reconstituted

as but benefiting the dominant discourse.

But what of words that happen to be gender neutral, yet positive

adjectives that come to express freedoms of the human spirit? These may be the

most dangerous words to any group in power wishing to control their “subjects”

through fear and browbeating. Gay was one such “fun” word that has been

corrupted. There are not many “fun” harmless words in our lexicon, and when

they do pop up in societies discourse it is not long before they are corrupted and

twisted into some sexist indexing or violent terminology.

The final article used in this review is Frazer and Miller’s Double Standard

in Sentence Structure, which was just completed in 2009. There work, based on

Henley et al., was to further analyze impact of perpetrator gender on verb voice.

Besides reflecting attitudes of writers, verb voice affects reader interpretations of

violent acts, particularly with respect to the victim’s role in bringing the crime on

himself or herself.

Both male and female readers show increased acceptance of rape and

battering of women after exposure to descriptions of sexual assault written

primarily in the passive voice, but why do some writers select active voice for

some descriptions of violent acts and passive voice for others? Is gender of the

people involved an important factor? In assigning responsibility to the

interactants of simple subject-verb-object (S-V-O) sentences, people tend to

assign more responsibility to the subject of these sentences if that person is male

and the object of the action is female than visa versa. Often when a woman is the

recipient of an action of a man, the woman is more likely to be seen as having

triggered that action. This echoes the Asencio article which revealed that the

young girls of the observed group were as supporting of the “macho” stereotypes

as the males.

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Do writers choose verbs that play down men’s causal role as perpetrators

of violence or that play down the causal role of perpetrators in general? They

wished to compare descriptions of violent acts in which women are the

perpetrators with those in which men are the perpetrators. Frazer and Miller used

the same method as Henley et al with respect to the Boston Globe being the

source of the published articles analyzed. The first part of the study identified

articles that could potentially be about domestic violence and could have either

gender as the perpetrator. They selected lead paragraphs that contained the

words: death, murder, kill, husband, wife, man, and woman and had two coders

identify each verb that referred directly to the violent act that was the subject of

the story and then coded that verb for voice (active vs. passive), gender of the

perpetrator, and gender of the victim.

The results revealed that of the 53 verbs remained after the coding, 48

described male-on-female violence and 5 described female-on-male violence.

There were 13 passive and 35 active verbs in the male-on-female violence, and

1 passive and 4 active verbs in the female-on-male violence. The passive male

violence came in at 27%, while the passive female violence showed 20%.

They felt that there was insufficient data from mass media reports which

had too few articles concerning female-on-male violence. They also noted that it

was difficult to establish the gender of writers, editors, or coauthors.

The second study used 86 Northern Arizona University undergraduate

students enrolled in an introduction to psychology course age 18-25. The

participants were presented with an information grid that provided information

regarding the event, victim (name, gender, age), perpetrator (name, gender,

age), weapon, date, and place.

Their main question: How do students write about crime?

The participants were asked to write two 50- to 100-word stories that

incorporated the information shown on the grids. The results produced a

significantly higher proportion of passive-voice sentences for the male-on-female

violence condition, written by both male and female participants. The students

were more likely to include a justification when describing female-on-male

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spousal violence than when describing male-on-female spousal violence.

Male violence included 6 stories with justification, 44 did not. Female violence

included 29 stories with justification, 25 did not.

Results did not support the idea that writers use passive voice to describe

violence against women simply because of a general aversion to using active

voice to describe violent acts. There appears to be a more complex relationship

involving gender of the people involved in interpersonal violence, such that when

women are the perpetrators and men the victims, active voice becomes more

common.

The finding that third party writers made excuses and justifications for

female perpetrators, is an interesting complement to the finding that when male

perpetrators of domestic violence talk about their actions, they tend to use

language that diminishes their responsibility through making excuses and

justifications. Men and women are similar in how they use passive voice to

describe interpersonal violence. It is surprising in that men and “women

presumably have different views about interpersonal violence, given that women

are far less likely to perpetrate this type of act, and are less accepting of rape

myths (Muir, Lonsway, & Payne, 1996), and are less likely to blame victims of

domestic violence (Bryant & Spencer, 2003).” (p.69)

Men are more affected by reading passive voice compared to women.

Structuring sentences in a way that “emphasizes women’s causal role in such

violence, while deemphasizing men’s role, may be one of several mechanisms

by which writers and speakers express their attitudes about gender, sex, and

power. These include the use of erotic rather than violent terminology in rape

trials (Bavelas & Coates, 2001), passive-voice use in rape descriptions (Bohner,

2001; Henley et al., 1995), and victim-blaming language in descriptions of rape

(Kanekar, Kolsawalla, & D’Zouza, 1981).”

The use of passive voice and sentence structure may in turn shape

whether “readers and listeners interpret these acts as voluntary acts of violence

against an undeserving victim or as unfortunate experiences that women…bring

on themselves.” (p.70)

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A woman writing about rape may use the passive innocently and

incorrectly, by starting with what she feels is the most important part of the

sentence or situation – the woman. From the woman’s point the statement – A

woman is raped every six minutes, includes the only thing and message relevant

– that a woman is violated. Thus the truncated form is expressly used to

accentuate the importance of “women” or the woman. But this only exacerbates

and compounds the problem in the normative, sexist language it is written in.

This is the problem of the subaltern attempting to make their view heard while

using the lexicon of the over-ruling party.

Future research could include such questions as: do writers use verbs

passively to deemphasize male agency in a positive action, and actively when a

woman is the subject? It would be informative to inquire deeper into writer

gender. Just how is the social construction of gender and sexuality formed, and

how do they foster and maintain gender-based violence? What are the many

ways that the stereotype of the “macho” Latino male is foisted upon society and

our youth and pervasive is its connection to (and exoneration of) violence? How

can we combat the use of biological arguments that justify violence?

Linke herself posses what may be one of the most pertinent questions

regarding where to search: “Our understanding of… historicity is mediated by the

concept of the unconscious, of dream work, and of fantasy formations…[we

must] recognize the material force of the historical unconscious…the formation,

inheritance, and devolution of essentialist symbolic systems. What are the

building materials of these essentialist constructs? How does [this essentialist

metaphysics] achieve such a deterministic and habitual hold on the experience,

perception, and processing of reality?

CONCLUSION 

How we see gender dichotomy itself, and what must we do to alter our

thinking and perceptions regarding gender to eradicate violence – from the

personal to the international – are the elements we must pursue.

It seems like the individual is always using culture and biology as

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scapegoats. Many researchers are “finding” culture as the source of discourse

that influences people and the masses, and that violence can be attributed to and

held to blame for acts of transgression between individuals and nations.

This again only seems to prove the attempts of certain specific dominant

groups, to use reasoning and language so as not to be held accountable for

inappropriate acts against fellow human beings. Researchers are working on

theories of violence; some are working on gender in interpersonal violence; some

are working on voice and syntax in manipulation of subalterns by power groups;

some are working on the construction of biological, cultural, social structures that

explain, allow for, and condone violence; but few seem to see any comparison

between language, voice, and the control that power groups use to create war

and “subaltern” groups of humanity, with which they “enforce” and “enlist” the

(other) masses to extinguish.

By using a gender basis for the root of control you already have eliminated

(reduced to subaltern) one-half of the worlds population. Now with including non-

normal genders, gay and such, you have again removed a large portion of the

populous from positions of power, or at least weakened their influence by

associations with the “inferior.”

Using a beginning point of physical difference you must by association

give credence to biology, the “natural” order of things, and therefore are

rhetorically able to remove all responsibility and blame. War and violence are

argued for biologically, through metaphysical reasoning, and within the power of

“language” itself. There are loopholes (the structures themselves) of syntax,

voice, and indirectness that convolute the ability to see clearly that which should

not even exist – violence and evil perpetrated upon humanity by humanity. One

of the only reasons that nature could allow this to exist is that it is, at least at this

point in time concerning our evolutionary progress, a method of population

control. And even in that respect it is very inefficient.

What of other languages, their lexicons and sociocultural discourses?

More study needs to be done regarding at least the world’s most major

languages. English is the world’s second most widely spoken language,

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preceded only by Mandarin, and succeeded by Hindustani, Spanish, Russian,

Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, and French. To better

understand languages’ effect on the individual in relation to gender and sexuality,

study in these other languages would be a great benefit. Do languages from

indigenous matriarchal peoples have as much or any of these linguistic problems

and conundrums that we have covered here, as to voice and indirectness,

indexing and gender?

As anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, do we truly find

anything? Or do we “find” want we are looking for? Our finds have as much to do

with educating others to understand, or accept our finds as we wish them to be

understood. Marija Gimbutas’s version of Neolithic matriarchal cultures and the

Kurgan invasions (which brought the Proto-Indo-European languages) that

squelched them have their staunch supporters, as numerous as their detractors

and naysayers, who believe that it is rather vain to know the details of Neolithic

societies’ politics and spiritual components, while so removed in time. But if we

cannot divine these roots of societal beginnings then what chance do we have of

truly understanding the beginnings of language and discourse?

For millions of years the antecedents of man plodded along, seemingly

content with an existence not much different from that of a chimpanzees’ today.

For many hundreds of thousands of years more, we lived a nomadic lifestyle,

content with our fare, gathered from the floral and fauna of the late Pleistocene,

that was offered us amidst the fluctuations of an unparalleled catastrophe known

as the Last Glacial Maximum. The glimmer of celestial reaches remained distant.

Sublime works of anthropomorphic sub consciousness lay buried within the

archaic humans unperceptive mind. The spark lay deep within, or maybe it

remained outside altogether. The triumvirate of man, dog, and horse, were

needed to achieve what never would have been possible from any one creature

alone. The troika that would sweep westerly from the pre-Scythian-Volga region

brought the daughter languages metamorphosed from nascent tongues of the

proto-Indo-European.

What seems to be missing is the complete understanding of the true, or

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encompassing relationship, among the total points of view – the subconscious, or

our “cosmic consciousness.” This realm of Freud and Jung is also a vast and

dark land where the language and discourse of our unconscious plays upon

humanity possibly much more than any individual contributes to that

consciousness.

Yet it is from these deep epochs where we most likely could find the

beginnings of the social discourses that have bred gender hegemony throughout

the world. But Marija’s views of a less violent and bloodthirsty past are much

more welcome than those of other proponents who feel we are all descended

from a dark world of patrilineal ferocity and have no other alternative within life.

The mere fact that she has put forth such thoughts of our embryonic beginnings

enables us to do learned battle with the idea that we can and must contend with

the fallible concept of gender domination either way.

The important thing is to know that the population has the power to

recognize such attempts to control language by any dominant group and with

knowledge and foresight to re-index any violent lexicon through metaphor. The

ability to artistically reanimate jargon through the use of metaphor is the

individuals’ way of sidestepping any groups believed superiority by claiming or

reclaiming, indexing and re-indexing, controlling words that harm or tend to inflict

pain, weakness, and inferiority.

Throughout history those who comprise the dominant party tend to

“martyr” those who are especially good at using language and metaphor to

express individual peace and freedom – from Jesus to John Lennon.

There is something far deeper than the intellectual surface of language

and the grammatical lexicon of justification. This is a very important aspect and

any justification of violence from within the linguistics of language itself is a

shocking thought. But there is something more subliminal, more Freudian and

Jungian that exists within the limbic system, maybe the cellular system – that is

responsible for actions of violence, violence that can exist at the level of

intentional extermination of the blood of others at a nationalistic level. When at

this level, the blood of the opposite is the “other” – language is readily accessed

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to effect the reasonable impulses for the justification of the blood of the other to

be an/the enemy, and this blood by birth cannot but be linked to the other as

gender – for the union of both genders is the basic fact for the extension of any

bloodline. The view that gender encompasses inferiority as part of any difference

must be eradicated. One-half of anything can never be inferior without realizing

that the whole has just been stated to be imperfect.

Language is responsible to some degree (possibly much more than we

realize) for the thoughts of individuals, but it is not responsible for our actions.

We are free to accept or do harm, or use harmful language. With greater

knowledge and understanding regarding languages ability to influence and direct

action we can, individually at least, realize that we do not have to be helpless to

language. After all is said, and any of you readers feel a need to attempt to

ameliorate the negative and hurtful violence, both domestic and international, or

to extricate yourself from languages’ gender influence and power-over subtleties,

remember that every individual has free will and choice of action, and if there is

anything that you can take with you after reading this review remember the old

adage: “It’s not what you say that counts, it’s what you do.”

Articles Reviewed:

Asencio, Marysol. 1999. Machos and Sluts: Gender, Sexuality, & Violence among a Cohort of Puerto Rican Adolescents. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13(1): 107-126. Ashcraft, Catherine. 2000. Naming Knowledge: A Language for Reconstructing Domestic Violence & Systemic Gender Inequity. Women and Language 23(1): 3-10. Frazer, Alexandra K., Michelle D. Miller. 2009. Double Standards in Sentence Structure: Passive Voice in Narratives Describing Domestic Violence. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 28(1): 62-71. Henley, Nancy, Michelle Miller, Jo Anne Beazley. 1995. Syntax, Semantics, & Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 14(1): 60-84. Linke, Uli. 1997. Gendered Difference, Violent Imagination - Blood, Race, Nation.

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American Anthropologist 99(3): 559-573.

Reference:

Ahearn, Laura M. 2002. “Writing desire in Nepali love letters”, Language and Communication 23: 107-122. Bartov, Omer. 1996. Murder in Our Midst. USA: Oxford University Press. Boellstorff, Tom. 2007. "Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 17-35. Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gimbutas, Marija. 1977. "The first wave of Eurasian steppe pastoralists into Copper Age Europe", Journal of Indo-European Studies 5: 277-338. Kiesling, Scott Fabius. 2005. "Homosocial desire in men’s talk: Balancing and re-creating cultural discourses of masculinity", Language in Society 34: 695-726. Lea, Susan, and Timothy Auburn. 2001. “The Social Construction of Rape in the Talk of a Convicted Rapist”, Feminism Psychology 11(1): 11-33. Penelope, Julia. 1990. Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Father's Tongues. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Taylor, Walter W. 1948. A Study of Archeology. The American Anthropological Association. Weeks, Gerald R. 1948. Integrating Sex And Marital Therapy: A Clinical Guide. New York: Brunner-Routledge.  C