THEN

• Swift 1712- women likely to use soft consonants and vowels and liquids e.g. r, y
• Jesperson 1922- women speak softly and politely with less varied vocabularies and diminutives (e.g. teeny weeny), constructing sentences loosely- could apply to very early versions of comics

NOW

• Meyerhoff 2006- a speaker speaks in a certain way not because they are a certain gender but because they are playing that role e.g. women speaking soft because they’re playing that role

GENDER

Gender is not the same as sex. Gender is a social construct NOT biological e.g. something you can identify as, it can change.

In terms of femininity and masculinity- it’s something you do, a way you behave and is not tied in with a corresponding sex anymore, at least try not to

UK genders are still binary- male or female

DEFECIT MODEL OF GENDER

women are encouraged to speak a certain way- a good way to speak to be treated as deficient and get what you want

DOMINANCE MODEL OF GENDER

men interrupt women more than women and are more dominant in interaction- ties in with power dynamics (men having more power)

DIFFERENCE MODEL OF GENDER

there is no dominance or deficit, just difference between men and women, they have different aims in conversations e.g. men seek upper hand and women negotiate solidarity

DYNAMIC MODEL OF GENDER

gender isn’t seen in terms of men and women it’s how you create you identity which can be negotiated- moving beyond binary oppositions

all of these models can be found in aspects of superhero comics

IN RELATION TO SUPERHERO COMICS

• structuralist codes- conversation achieved through cultural codes
• logemes and syntactemes

SEMIOTICS- the theory of signs (signified and signifier)

• Peirce- three ways of signifying something- icons, indices and symbols
• icons- something that looks like what you’re trying to signify
• indices- analog moving representation of what you’re trying to signify e.g. temperature gauge on car
• symbols- conventional symbolic system