A Study Of College-campus Sex And Gender Humor Communication From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Humor, as a “marked” language phenomenon, has attracted extensive academic attention for a long time. The interdisciplinary nature of humor research has been revealed in the vast body of literature on humor covering disciplines like psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. An interdisciplinary study of humor has been proved effective and necessary.Sex and gender problems reflected in humor, however, for one reason or another, are paid less attention to. Gender problems pertaining to humor are far beyond mere gender differences; great dynamics is contained in the simple act of joking about sex and gender with different genders. A field of this sort, with no doubt, is worth exploring.This study, through the application of a global sociolinguistic perspective and the adoption of the conceptual blending theory and the queer theory as a means of meaning interpretation and phenomenon explanation, aims at an understanding of sex and gender communication on college campus both quantitatively and qualitatively. Specifically speaking, three questions are raised and answered in this study:a. What are the factors that influence students’ attitudes toward sex and gender humor on college campus?b. Do gender differences, grade differences and major differences influence students’ attitudes toward sex and gender humor?c. In terms of gender construction, what problems can be found concerning the contents of sex and gender humor on college campus?After a careful study, three research questions are answered and related findings are discovered. Firstly, seven factors influencing students’ attitudes toward sex and gender humor, namely casualness, repulsion, cooperative awareness, opposite sex targeting, discreet awareness, feminist awareness and mockery are identified, and their correlations to the overall attitudes are respectively examined. Secondly, gender differences in attitudes toward gender humor and some of its seven dimensions are proved to be significant; while grade and major differences are not statistically significant. Lastly, problems in gender construction on college campus are identified through a meaning interpretation of humor situations by the adoption of the conceptual blending theory and a phenomenon explanation by the application of the queer theory. It has been clear that dualism is still dominant in college gender culture. Not only females and sexual minorities, but also males are continually discriminated for their sex, gender or sexuality. Nevertheless, humor is also found to be an interesting and better instrument to “do gender” on college campus.