Amanda McMullen

In this chapter, I identify a type of utterance, the “Gendered Normative Utterance” (GNU), which serves to police women’s adherence to sexist norms by being used to indirectly threaten women hearers. GNUs are utterances of sentences meeting three conditions. Firstly, a speaker literally uses a gendered pejorative such as “slut”, “skank”, or “bitch” and predicates it of a subject (I consider atomic predications of a gendered pejorative in this chapter for the sake of simplicity. What I say should also apply to utterances in which the gendered pejorative is in the subject position.). Secondly, there is a woman hearer. Thirdly, that hearer is not also the “target”: the person to whom the gendered pejorative is applied. I claim that GNUs are conditional threats not to the target, but to the woman hearer. This is what makes a GNU a special kind of conditional threat: making an example of the targeted person to the hearer.

In a September 2004 interview, Donald Trump agreed with Howard Stern’s statement that his daughter Ivanka is “a piece of ass.” This utterance is a synecdochical utterance targeting women, by which I mean that its form is such that a term for an anatomical part is predicated of, or could be used by a speaker to refer to, a woman. I propound a theory of what SUTW speakers do in undertaking an SUTW on which the SUTW speaker prompts the hearer to engage in a certain derogatory pattern of associational thinking—that is, taking a “perspective” in Elisabeth Camp’s sense—on the female subject. This perspective is one that reduces her to the bodily part in question—that is, fragments her and biologizes her. Essentially, the hearer thinks of the woman as a “piece of meat.”