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Diva in the promised land: a blueprint for newspeak?
Author(s) -
Moriel Liora
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/1467-971x.00096
Subject(s) - hebrew , transsexual , noun , adjective , subculture (biology) , sociology , transgender , appeal , blueprint , semitic languages , grammatical gender , gender studies , arabic , linguistics , law , history , political science , classics , mechanical engineering , philosophy , botany , engineering , biology
Hebrew is a fully gendered language: not every noun and adjective, but also every voice and case, is gendered. There is no accepted gender‐neutral term (‘it’), although ‘man’ and the male third‐person singular is generally taken to include women, despite the protests of feminists. Assigning a particular sex/gender to an inanimate object is arbitrary. The issue of sex and gender in language will be addressed in this paper as a dichotomy not of biology but of performance. It will be suggested that sex is akin to hardware, while gender is like software. Specifically, this paper will analyze the efforts of a successful Israeli singer, Danna International, a male‐to‐female transsexual, to provide an international syllable‐sampling strategy for disco songs that subvert conventions of sex, spelling and cliches. To understand Danna International’s appeal and art, it is helpful to employ Michael Agar’s idea of ‘languaculture’: in this case, the languages (Hebrew and Arabic) and cultures (secular, sacrosanct and sectarian) of Israel and the Middle East, as well as Israel’s gay male subculture (the most overt in the region).