In Other Words Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable,
A boy and his father are in a car accident. The father dies, and the boy is taken to a hospital. The surgeon, upon seeing the boy, announces, “I can’t operate on my own son!”
This riddle is recounted in Eviatar Zerubavel’s Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable as a classic example of andronormativity — that is, “a person is presumably male unless specifically designated otherwise.” The surgeon is, of course, the boy’s mother; another outcome might be that the surgeon is the boy’s gay father. Zerubavel notes our culture’s heteronormativity by indicating that whereas Google yields 22.2 million search results for “gay marriage,” only 89,500 results turn up for “straight marriage.” A modifier-less marriage is still widely assumed to be a straight one. Adding the adjective “straight” is “semiotically superfluous.”
In a slim 100 pages of text, Zerubavel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, provides a stream of examples of how assumptions permeate the English language. “Male nurse” and “family man” imply that their counterparts, “female nurse” and “family woman,” are the usual way of things, in no need of clarification by gender. The term “white trash” “actually marks not only ‘white trash’ but also ‘white trash’ ”: “If they were black, or so goes this essentially racist default assumption, the term black trash, for example, would have been considered redundant.” Zerubavel explains that “marked” terms, in which a particular feature or quality is drawn attention to, create distinctions from the default.
The political implications of the default’s unmarked status are profound. Zerubavel writes, “The more dominant a social group, the more likely is its identity to remain unmarked. It is thus socially dominant identities such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness that are conventionally assumed by default and taken for granted, and their bearers who therefore often become culturally invisible.” (Zerubavel states in the preface that his own maleness, whiteness, and straightness give him inevitable biases. He also writes eloquently of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the course of writing the book, which made him realize how many physical capabilities he had taken for granted.)
In an engrossing academic book, the most compelling passages are those that address movements and trends toward heightening consciousness of markedness and unmarkedness. Instances include the term “cisgender,” whose first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from just a few decades ago (1994) and whose use has grown steadily in the past few years, according to Google Trends. Zerubavel writes that placing “transgender” and “cisgender” on “equal semiotic footing tacitly helps normalize the former by subverting the latter’s presumed normality and therefore cultural privilege of remaining unnamed.”
Perhaps the most prominent instance of conscious linguistic marking in recent years is the Black Lives Matter movement — here, the choice in naming was to mark, to add specificity, and to raise awareness of police brutality toward, and racial profiling of, black people. The name started as a hashtag, which was used about 12 million times from 2013 to 2016.
Social media has, of course, had a vast effect on language, giving users the opportunity to coin new terms, start linguistic trends, and use language to develop affiliations. Zerubavel does not explore social media’s role in markedness and unmarkedness, or on the movements that have used language as part of their push toward social change. His research is thorough, but one source he depends on heavily is Google; Google search results vary depending on factors such as location, and perhaps they should be used supplementarily, and sparingly, as evidence. But these are small points, beside the main one.
Taken for Granted is a forceful work, requiring us to acknowledge our biases and how they are articulated — whether we realize the implications of what we’re saying, or not. — Grace Parazzoli