No ELA Without Ella: Understanding the Naming and Crafting of Gendered Subjectivities in Puerto Rico
At the beginning of the 20th century, the official metadiscourses about gendered job titles sedimented the idea that names or indexes pointing to women should be interpreted as unskilled, cheap, or even free labor in Puerto Rico (Azize, 1985; Muñiz Mas, 1998; Baerga-Santini, 1999). For this reason, Puerto Rican women organized and fought for equality in work settings. Furthermore, they became more active in politics and the government. Nevertheless, the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) and local media discourses and interpretations about women’s labor discouraged them from participating in more senior positions (Acevedo Gaud, 2012). However, this interpretation seemed to have changed in 2016 with the official appointment of three women in the most important institutions of the ELA: the Department of Education, the Police Department, and the Executive Office. At that moment, the local media put these women at the center of public discourse. Yet, the government and the media confronted a noteworthy sociolinguistic problem: there was no “appropriate” way of naming these senior public female officials. To solve this problem, local newspapers created new names and feminized job titles, receiving thousands of reactions from their readers and public officials. In this dissertation, I argue that naming these women caused a breach, a moment of dissonance and discontinuity in public discourse (Garfinkel, 1967; Mangual Figueroa, 2019). This breach prompted readers and social media users to negotiate the appropriateness of these names to address these senior female public officials. At the same time, the public’s comments uncovered the process of crafting and interpreting gendered subjectivities in the 21st century. Moreover, they showed how gendercraft, which I define as the process that combines institutionalized modes of perception, legal and economic consequences, and instances of linguistic materiality (i.e., names), naturalizes the interpretation of working women as expendable labor for the modern colonial state.
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education, Critical and Cultural Studies, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication, Journalism Studies, Latin American Languages and Societies, Linguistic Anthropology, Political Economy, Puerto Rican Studies, Social Influence and Political Communication, Social Media, Spanish Linguistics, Women's Studies, language, gender, labor, coloniality, Puerto Rico
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