- ‘Where no cis person has gone before’: exploring politeness in online transgender forums
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Abstract:
- Politeness has been shown to vary across gender, with women being politer than men overall (Brown 1980; Lakoff, 1975). These gender differences have been shown to also exist online, even in conditions of anonymity (e.g. Selfe and Meyer, 1991; Herring, 1993; Brail, 1994, 1996). However, research such as this has been criticised for its binary treatment of gender (e.g. Bing and Bergvall, 1996), and scholars (Fausto-Sterling, 1993; Feinberg, 1996) have argued that transgender individuals cannot be accurately defined by these labels. The present study addresses this deficiency by comparing politeness strategies used by forum users on Susan’s Place Transgender Resources, a forum-based website targeted at transgender individuals. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques and incorporating ideas from politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987) and rapport management theory (Spencer-Oatey, 2002), I find that gender does not predict politeness but that topic type does, lending support to the notion that gender is not necessarily a defining aspect of identity, and that the medical sexual binary model is not sufficient for categorising transgender individuals.
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