Women about Women: Genderlect Manifestations through Positive and Negative Self-Stereotypes in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

The article re-actualises genderlect as one of the key points of male-female differentiation and a relevant object in the humanities, not merely from the perspective of gender studies but linguistic and literary ones. Self-stereotypes in the speech of one or another gender may be considered the result of the complex interaction of collective identity and the subconscious. The excerpts from the selected novels by Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Crusie, Lisa Kleypas, Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith and Candace Bushnell have provided a wide range of patterns of expressing self-stereotypes in the dimension of ‘women about women’. To emphasise the multicultural nature of genderlect self-stereotypes, the writers of different ethnic affiliations are represented. The article also classifies the criteria of self-stereotype polarisation in characters’ speech to explicate the strategies of women’s verbal behaviour. These criteria include marital status, maternal experience, professional activity, ageism and harassment. The impact of gender on verbal behaviour, observed in real life and adapted to fiction through literary representation, is manifested in communication stereotypes. This serves to illuminate the most representative speech self-stereotypes, which make certain images or ideas easier to interpret. The application of an interdisciplinary approach with a set of appropriate methods to theorising and practising genderlect reveals its role as a significant tool for reconstructing a linguistic worldview and contextualises both positive and negative self-stereotypes for the expressive evaluation of speech in fictional discourse.