ravensrandoms:
“ writing-question-mark:
“ touzen:
“ datarep:
“ “He kidnaps, she screams”: words associated with gender in Wikipedia plot descriptions
by variance_explained
”
In linguistics we call this “social gender”, which is basically whether a...

ravensrandoms:

writing-question-mark:

touzen:

datarep:

“He kidnaps, she screams”: words associated with gender in Wikipedia plot descriptions

by variance_explained

In linguistics we call this “social gender”, which is basically whether a word has a feminine or masculine connotation. This kind of thing can be hard to intuit, since there are no hard and fast rules. Obvious examples include words like “nurse”, which may be technically gender neutral, but it’s got such a strong feminine connotation that many people will clarify “male nurse”. Less obvious examples are words like “muscles”, which all humans have, but the default interpretation is like, a manly guy with bulging biceps.

Many many words have social gender that’s difficult to notice, either because of the natural struggle to see gender, or because it’s just that subtle. So a corpus analysis like this is exciting because it gives concrete data on words we might not have thought twice about!!

Hey writers, here are some word choices that you can either subvert or reinforce to a subtle-yet-potent effect

*thrown back into recollections of the increasingly icy back-and-forth exchange I once had with a line-editor when my author had a male character “giggle” and the line-editor kept sending me the file with escalating versions of “I suggest changing this; it’s a girl word” and I kept sending it back with escalating versions of “I’m fully aware of how it’s perceived, as is the author, and the fact that you’re continuing to push this comment on two lgbtqipa people who, by virtue of existing, are considered to not be performing gender correctly and who spend much more of their lives having to think about this stuff than you do and who used this word very deliberately for multiple reasons, including 1) fuck gendering a word, 2) fuck encouraging toxic genderism, 3) this character is gay af and very aware of gender bullshit, 4) he literally giggles, fuck off… this does indicate a problematic lack of comprehension and awareness on someone’s part, but that part is not ours”*

She started it.