Deborah Tannen You Just Don T Understand Summary
A Contextual Review of Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand
Terron Graham
University of Pennsylvania One of the most culturally significant pieces of literature in the field of language and gender is Deborah Tannen’s non-fiction book, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (henceforth also referred to as YJDU). Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University who specializes in discourse, posited in this book that because of differences in basic underlying cultural understandings between men and women, their speech was like an interlanguage communication. While this piece draws on research done by Tannen and other researchers at the time, it was widely viewed with a level of skepticism by academics even in the early 1990’s. Despite this though, the book spent four years on the best sellers’ list and eight …show more content…
This was meant to be an academically rigorous piece to fight off some of the criticism that was received for her use of anecdotal evidence and shifting blame from men’s actions to their language. The title of this book is surprisingly non-editorialized, lending one to expect an ambitious foray into two concepts that are simultaneously ambiguous and controversial, gender and discourse. Cameron states that ‘gender should not be used as a bottom line explanation because it is a social construction needing explanation itself’ (Cameron, 1992, p. 214). While Tannen acknowledges socialization in children in particular as a place of difference, she never fully acknowledges the origins of where these gender norms come from or where they are placed in the context of wider culture. It is difficult to seriously accept many of the statements inside the book when there are no conversations of the construction of gender, or of the relation between sex and
Terron Graham
University of Pennsylvania One of the most culturally significant pieces of literature in the field of language and gender is Deborah Tannen’s non-fiction book, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (henceforth also referred to as YJDU). Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University who specializes in discourse, posited in this book that because of differences in basic underlying cultural understandings between men and women, their speech was like an interlanguage communication. While this piece draws on research done by Tannen and other researchers at the time, it was widely viewed with a level of skepticism by academics even in the early 1990’s. Despite this though, the book spent four years on the best sellers’ list and eight …show more content…
This was meant to be an academically rigorous piece to fight off some of the criticism that was received for her use of anecdotal evidence and shifting blame from men’s actions to their language. The title of this book is surprisingly non-editorialized, lending one to expect an ambitious foray into two concepts that are simultaneously ambiguous and controversial, gender and discourse. Cameron states that ‘gender should not be used as a bottom line explanation because it is a social construction needing explanation itself’ (Cameron, 1992, p. 214). While Tannen acknowledges socialization in children in particular as a place of difference, she never fully acknowledges the origins of where these gender norms come from or where they are placed in the context of wider culture. It is difficult to seriously accept many of the statements inside the book when there are no conversations of the construction of gender, or of the relation between sex and