Here's another part of the queering pronouns project I've been intermittently working on. This bit deals with pronouns and face. For those of you who aren't Rhetoric Nerds, "face" is defined as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact.” It's a colloquial term as well as a Rhet Nerd one, though: think about the last time someone you knew "saved face" or "lost face" in a situation. It's that sort of deal.

Anyway, here 'tis:

The pronoun is such a small thing - that tiny piece of language that lets us move through the world, that bit of identity that assures our place within the accepted gender binary. “He” and “she” are a priori for most of us, tags given and accepted without a second thought. Most consider them only as a function of grammar: “any of a small set of words in a language that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context.” (emphasis mine, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.) But what if your gender is constructed rather than given, the result of not only a second thought but of life-long deliberation? What if you cross that surgical line, and assume a gender identity that is no longer “understood in the context” by normative society? What if the affirmation of your identity, your face, hung on another’s use of pronouns? That bit of grammar becomes a constant indicator of the success or failure of your identity.

If one cannot be easily slotted into a normative gender convention, then face is lost. According to Goffman, “a person may be said to be in wrong face when information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him” (Jaworski and Coupland, 307). If the information “brought forth” indicates your gender to be one other than the one you desire to perform, and your audience comments on this information, then face is inevitably lost. Kate Bornstein, a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual activist, was born Albert Bornstein. She underwent a full transformation in her thirties and for a time identified exclusively as female, although she now describes herself as living “beyond gender.” At the time she wrote Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, she still identified as female and was very invested in living up to the female face that she had adopted. In that book, she relates a conversation with an acquaintance that involved pronoun use and loss of face:

“…someone I knew only peripherally came over to my house on an errand – he was with an ex-lover of mine. In casual conversation, he slipped on a pronoun and referred to me as ‘he’.

“Let me tell you what happened, the way it looked from inside my head. The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body. The words echoed in my ears over and over and over. Attached to that simple pronoun was the word failure, quickly followed by the word freak. All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant, and every moment I’d ever fucked up crashed down on my head. Here was someone who’d never known me as a man, referring to me as a man. Instead of saying or doing anything, I shut down and was polite to him for the rest of the time he was in my house.

“Now, here’s the telling point: all three of us were aware of that slip, and none of us said anything. … We all knew he’d slipped on a pronoun, and none of us said anything – not a giggle, not an ‘oops,’ not one comment. Each of us was far too embarrassed to say anything ‘til the next day.”

Gender Outlaw, 126

As briefly discussed earlier, face relies on audience, and audience is linked to community. An utterance that can be chalked up to ignorance in one community becomes a terrible faux pas in another. If a speaker is from a known sympathetic community, then I would argue that all participants typically feel more comfortable and less concerned about face. This necessarily makes the sudden, unexpected loss of face even more traumatic. In this case, the participant who slipped on his pronouns was a trained sex worker who specialized in working with gender minorities. As a member of a sympathetic community he was assumed to know better, and did, but slipped anyway.
Goffman notes that participants are invested not only in maintenance of their own face but also the face of others in the conversation (Jaworski and Coupland, 308). This is evident in Bornstein’s assertion that “Each of us was far too embarrassed… .” The speaker would have been embarrassed to have caused another participant to be in wrong face, and he would also have felt that he himself had lost face as a community member by making this pronoun choice.

The loss of face to both the speaker and Bornstein was so severe that none of the participants felt able to attempt immediate verbal face-work. Their only social salvation was poise. Goffman defines poise as “the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others.” In Bornstein’s recounting of the event, it certainly seems that this was the social skill that she fell back on: “Instead of doing or saying anything, I shut down and was polite to him for the rest of the time he was in my house” (Bornstein, 126). In this way, she was able to save face.