Why Gender/Race Relations Stories Run On And On
American power elites have lost exclusive rights to frame
'the story," says UC Berkeley linguist
12 Jun 2000
By Patricia McBroom, Media Relations
Berkeley - Why do some stories, like the O.J. Simpson trial, the Thomas/Hill hearings or the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal, run on for months and even years, while other, ostensibly more important stories hardly get noticed by the news media?
Many would say the press panders to the masses or
gives in to sensational journalism.
But a linguist
from the University of California, Berkeley, has a more
discerning answer, one that places these and several other
big stories of recent years at the crux of a major national
struggle over who gets to say what things mean in American
culture.
"These stories are battles in the war to
control meaning between groups that already have the power
to interpret reality -white, middle class men - and those
struggling to get the power - women and blacks," said Robin
Tolmach Lakoff, UC Berkeley professor of linguistics, in a
recent interview.
The stories last because "in
addition to being gossipy and salacious, they are deep and
convoluted," writes Lakoff in a new book, "The Language
War," (University of California Press) published this month.
"We know that something we need to understand is
playing out before our eyes. We use these stories to explore
the hardest questions we have to face, often about race and
gender."
Lakoff added in the interview that such
stories often end in a puzzling way or they don't end at
all, evidence that a struggle over interpretation is going
on. The narrative has so many installments that it passes
what the linguist calls the UAT or Undue Attention Test.
Departing in her book from the traditional linguistic
focus on words and syntax, Lakoff considers the narrative in
her analysis, suggesting that a language war is a large part
of a culture war, and to the victor falls the right to tell
the story.
She argues that the long-established power
elite dominated by white men has given events their meaning
for so long that its version, its ways of creating a
narrative and interpreting its meaning, has become "normal"
reality.
But now "we are currently engaged in a great
and not very civil war," she writes, "testing whether the
people who always got to make meaning for all of us still
have that unilateral right and that capacity."
The
answer seems to be no, said the linguist.
There is no
longer just one story. But several equally plausible stories
may be told by different groups of people, said Lakoff.
During the Thomas/Hill hearings, for example, women
succeeded in establishing the reality and importance of
sexual harassment, while Clarence Thomas had his own story
about the sexual exploitation of a black man. Where was the
real story? Had Thomas harassed Anita Hill or had she been
put up to her accusations by those seeking a "high-tech
lynching?" No one could legitimately frame the narrative for
all.
The same was true a decade later during
President Clinton's impeachment when conservatives,
feminists, and men and women of all persuasions had
different stories to tell. Heroes and villains crossed over
and merged. Ambiguity was the order of the day.
There
was the "Clinton as philanderer" story of a president who
either should or should not be brought down. In a very
different vein, the "Starr witch-hunt" story turned on
misogyny and anti-sexuality. All the while, media
storytellers imbued the antagonists with bizarre and
unsympathetic traits: Clinton as sex-crazed and a liar;
Kenneth Starr as puritanical and monomaniacal. On
television, these two men appeared to be cooperative and
rational, allowing the public to make even more narratives.
In the stories spun around the First Couple and their
personalities lie some of the most complicated, convoluted
meanings of all, said Lakoff.
Hillary Rodham Clinton,
in particular, occupies a "huge swath" of public attention
and gets a "strikingly different" kind of media attention
than have previous first ladies.
"Scarcely a day goes
by without some report of her activities or some analysis of
her psyche. Images of her are remarkably diverse, ranging
from strongly adulatory to ferociously critical; they
represent her as a person of wildly different personalities,
doing and saying what it is hard to imagine a single
individual doing or saying," writes Lakoff.
In a
chapter titled "Hillary Rodham Clinton: What the Sphinx
thinks," Lakoff contends that the First Lady has so far been
able to resist interpretation.
"She has always found
ways, either direct or subversive, of retaining control over
her own narrative, her own meaning," said Lakoff. " I
believe this is, to some degree, deliberate. She's a new
woman, and she doesn't want the guys in power to tell her
what she's about."
Nevertheless, they try, said
Lakoff.
"We are continually constructing her. 'What
does she mean when she says....?' Is she a pushy, aggressive
bitch or someone who wants to do good things? Does Hillary
make her own story, or does (New York Times columnist)
Maureen Dowd do it?"
Lakoff said that women have been
subjected to polarized interpretations in the media because,
until recently, they have had little ability to create
public meaning. As a result, they continue to be seen
through a male prism.
"A man in public life doesn't
have to stand for all men," she said. "We don't polarize his
traits, don't demonize him. He is allowed to be more human.
"Hillary is not allowed to be a human being, and
whatever she does is more closely scrutinized."
Lakoff does not offer the nation's audience any
reassurance that our public narratives will become less
confused.
"After thirty years of skirmishes, no clear
winner in the language war has emerged," said Lakoff. The
dominant male power structure has lost exclusive rights to
frame the story, leaving the nation with antagonisms and
unresolved jealousies that carry over from one event to
another, she said.
"Maybe we will learn to appreciate
our different voices and work together to create a new
understanding," said Lakoff, "and maybe we won't."
ENDS