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Guerreiras: Linguistic and Social Practices Among Women with Turner Syndrome in Brazil

Dauphinais, Ashlee L
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9008-1024
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1619112827628897

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
This dissertation is a mixed-methods ethnographic and linguistic study of how local understandings of femininity interact with medical practices among women with Turner Syndrome (TS), an intersex chromosomal condition affecting 1/2,500 women. For intersex individuals, social experiences of gender often collide with biological interpretations of sex and its material realities. Innovations in medical technology push the limitations of bodily manipulation and gendered norms and can mitigate tensions between the biological and the social experiences of gender, and this intersection of the social and the biological is particularly salient in intersex populations. While previous research has investigated social categories and their effects on health, few examine how health and medicine interact with social identity formation and linguistic practices. In Brazil, this is amplified as bodies are prominent both in the public eye and in national discourses on beauty, surgery, and hormones, where biomedicine is used to negotiate gendered bodily norms. At the same time, work within sociocultural linguistics and language, gender, and sexuality studies has begun to examine linguistic practices of non-binary populations, while very little previous work on intersex populations has been conducted. Over sixteen months of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I conducted ethnographic and linguistic interviews with TS women and performed participant observation at two endocrinology clinics. In Chapter 1, I set the scene for the dissertation and research context. Chapter 2 presents a detailed analysis of the ethnographic, linguistic, and analytical methodologies employed. In Chapter 3, I examine how intimate characteristics of TS and ideologies of “sex” and “gender” are located in and on the body through an analysis of how women with TS interact with physiological phenomena such as hormone replacement, sex chromosomes, and other material practices. I conduct a discursive analysis of diminutives, constructed dialogue, and quotative markers to show speakers employ these linguistic features to assign agency in medical decision-making that has an impact on the physical body. In Chapter 4, I analyze the role of the body in community formation, engaging with theories of “communities of practice” and intersectionality in engaging larger discussions of what it means to be a woman. I show how the body is implicated in the construction of fictive kinship and a global Turner bioscape. Chapter 5 engages a quantitative study of fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel formants (F1-F3) and the interaction with biomedical factors such as karyotype, height, and growth hormone. I explore the ways fundamental frequency is implicated the construction of womanhood and maturity. Chapter 6 presents conclusions, larger contributions to the fields of linguistics and anthropology, and avenues for future directions. My overall findings demonstrate how intersex women in Latin America mobilize linguistic practices in global TS communities to assert personal agency amidst a body-centric context that exerts pressure to conform to medicalized understandings of femininity. Such social and embodied forces present implications for theories of speech community and embodied sociolinguistics. My research speaks to a broader move in sociocultural linguistics and the field of language and gender to explore practices of non-binary communities. As the first in-depth ethnographic study of linguistic practices among intersex individuals, my dissertation’s central contribution is its analysis of what it means to be “almost” female in Latin America in an age of rapid biomedical advances, and recentering the physical body in studies of language and gender.
Anna Babel (Advisor)
Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Committee Member)
Glenn Martínez (Committee Member)
Gabriella Modan (Committee Member)
340 p.
Cultural Anthropology; Endocrinology; Gender; Gender Studies; Health Care; Language; Latin American Studies; Linguistics; Medical Ethics; Public Health; Sociolinguistics; Womens Studies
sociolinguistics; linguistic anthropology; gender; turner syndrome; brazil; language, gender and sexuality; anthrophonetics; discourse analysis; fundamental frequency; intersex

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dauphinais, A. L. (2021). Guerreiras: Linguistic and Social Practices Among Women with Turner Syndrome in Brazil [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1619112827628897

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dauphinais, Ashlee. Guerreiras: Linguistic and Social Practices Among Women with Turner Syndrome in Brazil. 2021. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1619112827628897.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dauphinais, Ashlee. "Guerreiras: Linguistic and Social Practices Among Women with Turner Syndrome in Brazil." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1619112827628897

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1619112827628897
204
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