The Talk of Teenage Girls

Here's the link to the article I shared in class yesterday:
http://linc.nus.edu.sg/search~S19?/Ygender+discourse&searchscope=19&SORT=D/Ygender+discourse&searchscope=19&SORT=D&SUBKEY=gender%20discourse/1%2C18%2C18%2CB/frameset&FF=Ygender+discourse&searchscope=19&SORT=D&12%2C12%2C

It's Chapter 6, Changing Femininities: The Talk of Teenage Girls, from the book Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse by Mary Bucholtz, A.C. Liang and Laurel A. Sutton, although the chapter itself is actually witten by Jennifer Coates. You will have to sign in through your NUSNET ID before you can view the e-book online, pages 123-141.

In this chapter, Coates analysed girl talk to explore the ways in which teenage girls negotiate their identity during adolescence as they move from girlhood to woman hood. She did so by listening to recorded conversations between a group of 4 white, middle-class girls as they grew up from age 12 to age 14. The girls were also allowed to delete any conversations they did not want Coates to hear. When the girls were 12 to 13 years old, Coates noted that the girls took weeks to fill up one 90-minute audio tape to pass to her, but as they progressed to 14 years old, one 90-minute audio tape was sometimes not enough for 1 conversation and they needed more.

The breakdown of her analysis is as follows:

Ages 12-13: The girls openly disagree with each other, cut each other off very often and vie for the floor’s attention. Talk is activity-oriented, hedges and minimal responses are hardly used.

Age 14: A transition to what Coates call CR/self-disclosure discourse, where the girls share more about intimate topics. They expressed agreement more, cut each other off less and does not vie as much for the floor’s attention, taking turns instead. There’s frequent use of minimal responses like “uh huh”, “mm” and hedges. The topic of the talk is now the focus and not on activity-oriented.

Significance: At age 12-13, the girls’ talk seems to resemble what is commonly regarded as masculine speech more, but by age 14, there is a transition to feminine speech already.

Why: Can be a result of the girls trying to cope with their changing identity as they move from being a girl to becoming a woman, and all these talk of mutual assent and understanding is how the girls seek and receive support from a close circle of friends.

Another interesting point: When the girls were talking about their periods, Coates has also noted that these young white middle-class girls, a privileged group who will be the professional women of the next generation, are positioned by their own words to be suffering at the mercy of their female bodies. They talk about their bodies in an overwhelmingly negative way which reflects negatively on their own femininity as a result. Femininity is seen as the cause of them becoming “really horrible” or “a bitch” and this shows how well the girls have internalized the values of patriarchy, where women are given a lower status than men. Coates then ends this point with the sentence, “Or is it more accurate to say that, although they think they are speaking, they are in fact being spoken?” This echoes Cameron’s point in “Myth and Why They Matter” about how language can be used as a tool to reinforce power relations between men and women.