Two cultures, one room: investigating language and gender in Kuwait
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Kuwait is a gender-segregated country. Its conservative cultural ideology is evident in all
areas of social life, including the way people communicate. Men and women have to
make conscious language choices during everyday interaction. Certain aspects of Kuwaiti
conversational registers are exclusive to either men or women, which reflects not only
men’s and women’s separate socialization as children but also separate lifestyles as
adults. Kuwait’s gendered context is therefore bound to be unique and of particular
sociolinguistic interest, especially since mainstream language and gender literature has
more often focused on English-speaking cultures. Thus, there is little knowledge of Arab
gender-segregated cultures and this could possibly be due to complications that the
researcher inevitably encounters when examining a sensitive issue such as gender within
these constraints. The present research study investigates mixed interaction between
Kuwaiti men and women in online chat rooms. In this particular online context, chat
room users employ interactional strategies to negotiate the norms of heterosexual
interaction which are often non-existent in offline Kuwaiti society. A combined
framework of sociolinguistic, ethnographic methods is adopted to examine chat room
interactional choices that enable men and women to construct gendered chat room
identities as well as create a virtual online community of practice without undermining offline gender norms.
Authors
Algharabali, NadaCollections
- Theses [3919]