Describing Womanhood: Tracking Relationships Between Words and Social Categories in Queer Communities, 1950’s-present

Abstract

Understanding both linguistic meaning and gender categories as co-created by speech communities, this thesis tracks the relationships between the words butch, lesbian, queer, and woman and the social categories they represent, between 1950 and the present. To this end, I conducted a literature review as well as ethnographic interviews on themes of gender identity and womanhood, with fourteen participants ranging from age 19 to 67. I find that the words in question exist on a spectrum of semantic shiftability across time/space: Butch has experienced the most dramatic changes in usage and meaning over the seventy years studied due to its lack of mainstream institutionalization. Lesbian and queer exist in the middle, and woman exists on the far side of the spectrum due to the strong institutionalized forces that are invested in maintaining the normative category of woman. More specifically: butch seems to have shifted from being solely an individual-level attribute to also being a stage-level attribute; the shifts that lesbian and queer are undergoing seem to be in tension with one another; and for the entirety of the time period studied, woman has remained a collective, and often political, identity. From these findings, I conclude that we are generally moving away from describing people with nouns and more towards describing people with adjectives, and also that the types of social movements explored in this project tend to take place in a “three steps forward, two steps back” model of progress.