Study 2 Question 4:

Are gendered statements related to the sex of the speaker/writer?

This question is, perhaps, the most important one in the results of the interview and it impacts the other questions and results. All eight interviewees saw feminine as female and masculine as male. Most, if not all, did not differentiate between gender and sex, but saw it as the same thing. Often they would say female or male instead of feminine or masculine when saying what they chose on the survey. Occasionally, they would mix up gender and sex in the same sentence. For instance, Zach said "male or feminine" when talking about equality and language. Zach acknowledged that there are males who speak with more femininity and females who speak with more masculinity, but did not seem to let this influence his answers. Rick also admitted to seeing masculine and feminine as different than sex but didn't differentiate when filling out the survey or answering the questions. The participants' answers, summarized in Appendix D, reflect the integrated views of sex and gender. When summarizing or including the participants' answers I attempted to keep true to their responses and used feminine, female, masculine, and male where they did.

This finding is so important because this blending of gender and sex clearly impacted the interview responses. The participants "saw" feminine statements as female and masculine statements as male. This suggests that gender/sex is not invisible when people read MOO statements, in fact people assign "sex" to statements based on what they saw as feminine or masculine. This is also important because feminine and masculine were not perceived by the participants as something that is more fluid. In their minds a female does not seem able to speak masculinity, nor a male femininely. So whatever fluidity and invisibility the MOOs may provide, the interview participants judged gender and sex together and made gender neither fluid nor invisible.

Study 2:

Participants | Procedure | Analysis and Results: Question 1, Question 2, Question 3, Question 4 | Discussion