Exploring the Metaphorical Models of Transgenderism

Lederer, Jenny

doi:10.1080/10926488.2015.1016809

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…In a cognitive linguistics paper, Lederer (2015), who investigated transgender individuals' posts from Internet forums and YouTube, discovered that the key metaphor of conceiving and expressing transgender transition is based on the JOURNEY cognitive model. Within this model, transition is understood as movement between the gender categories, male and female, represented as bounded regions in space (CONTAINERS).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transition Trauma Metaphor in Transgender Narrative

Martynyuk

2021

eejpl

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This study combines methodological tools of conceptual metaphor theory and narrative psychology with theoretical assumptions of the intersubjective psycholinguistic approach to meaning to explore instantiations of transition narrative metaphors in 16 TED talks given by transgender people and posted on the TED platform within the period between January 2013 and July 2020. The speakers are aged from 20 to 70; 8 males and 8 females; 2 black and 9 white Americans, 2 Filipinos, 1 black South-African, 1 Puerto Rican, and 1 white Australian. The study offers a new interpretation of narrative metaphor based on the intersubjective model of meaning. Within this model, narrative metaphor is conceived as extended conceptual metaphor instantiated in a number of multimodal metaphoric expressions made coherent by the textual, social, cultural, and historical context of the narrative, but primarily by its interactive situational context, which includes the audience into the narrative through empathy and gives them power to change the narrative. The research reveals that all the 16 analysed narratives rest on the TRANSITION IS CONTEST narrative metaphor that represents a conflict between positive self-evaluation of transition by a transgender individual and its negative evaluation / unacceptance by the society, which makes transition a traumatic experience. The density of words and phrases instantiating the CONTEST metaphor in the 16 narratives varies from 2,5 to 3 % which means that they are key linguistic expressions of the narratives. The CONTEST metaphor provides a deeper insight into transgender transition compared to the JOURNEY/TRAVEL metaphor found to represent transition experience in existing cognitive linguistic and transgender studies. The JOURNEY/TRAVEL metaphor fails to grasp the intersubjective and, consequently, traumatic nature of transition experience. The results of the research suggest that narrative as well as narrative metaphor can be given a more accurate interpretation if they are approached from the intersubjective perspective, which reflects their true nature as socially and culturally shaped interactive phenomena.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transition Trauma Metaphor in Transgender Narrative

Martynyuk

2021

eejpl

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“…It is thus possible that the vertical effects for power observed in this study are confounded with, or moderated by, gender. This is (for metaphorical conceptualizations of the gender binary, see Lederer, 2015). Third, to assess the association with gender experimentally, we need to constrain ourselves to a dimension that can be categorized, so as to establish experimental conditions (a male condition and a female condition).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power, Gender, and Individual Differences in Spatial Metaphor: The Role of Perceptual Stereotypes and Language Statistics

Winter

Duffy

Littlemore

2020

Metaphor and Symbol

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English speakers use vertical language to talk about power, such as when speaking of people being "at the bottom of the social hierarchy" or "rising to the top".Experimental research has shown that people automatically associate higher spatial positions with more powerful social groups, such as doctors and army generals, compared to lower spatial positions, which are associated with relatively less powerful groups, such as nurses and soldiers. However, power as a social dimension is also associated with gender. Here, by means of a reaction-time study and a corpus study, we show that professions that display greater gender asymmetries, such as doctor/nurse, exhibit stronger vertical associations. Moreover, we show that people's perception of vertical metaphors for power depends on their own gender, with male participants having stronger vertical biases than female participants, which we propose is due to the fact that men are more prone to thinking about power in bodily terms, as being associated with physical dominance.Our results provide clear evidence for individual differences in metaphor comprehension, thus demonstrating empirically that the same metaphor is understood differently by different people.

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Gesturing the source domain

Lederer

2019

MSW

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Gesture is aptly described as a “backdoor” to cognition (Sweetser, 2007, p. 203). Co-speech gesture has been shown to aid in the representation of abstract concepts (Parrill & Sweetser, 2004) and, specifically, encode metaphorical source domains (Cienki, 1998). This paper examines how co-speech gesture aligns with spoken and written narrative to support a spatially based representation of gender identity. Repeated gestural patterns include inward facing palms used to mime fictive category boundaries, gestural mapping of motion across metaphorical gender regions, manual deictic reference to interior and exterior self, and distancing from past gender assignment signaled through emblematic scare quotes. The data examined in this paper confirm the important role gesture plays in supplementing the instantiation of the metaphorical models that organize transgender speakers’ experience with and discussion of gender and transition.

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Exploring the Metaphorical Models of Transgenderism

Cited by 5 publications

References 32 publications

Transition Trauma Metaphor in Transgender Narrative

Transition Trauma Metaphor in Transgender Narrative

Power, Gender, and Individual Differences in Spatial Metaphor: The Role of Perceptual Stereotypes and Language Statistics

Gesturing the source domain

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