Gendered Lives Chapter 6 -Forms of Gendered Nonverbal Communication

In this chapter Wood outlines the different functions and forms of nonverbal communication. She begins with the 3 main functions that nonverbal communication serves. The three main functions of a nonverbal communication are to supplement verbal communication, regulate interaction and to establish the relationship of meaning.


Nonverbal communication supplements verbal communication in 5 different ways: repeating, contradicting, complementing, replacing and accenting phrases. When you point to something and say what it is that is an example of repeating, which furthers the point you are making. When you say that you are feeling okay but you are doubled over that is how we regularly contradict a verbal message.Giving stern looks or smiles while making statements lets the receiver complements what you are saying to give it a more definite meaning.  Replacing words like "yes" with a nod and "I don't know" with a shrug are common ways we replace verbal messages with nonverbal communication. Lastly when we accentuate a word in a phrase it gives the statement a completely different meaning.
On a daily basis we use nonverbal communication both intentionally and unintentionally to regulate communication. We do this through facial expressions, eye contact and body movements. These things can indicate our disinterest in a conversation, desire to speak, or to signal the conclusion of a statement. Men and women indicate these desires differently. We establish the relationships through communicators through three dimensions of expression. Showing attentiveness through solid eye contact, nodding, attentive body posture are ways that we can show our responsiveness, which is the first dimension of relationship level meaning. The second dimension is liking. We express this through different things like touching, standing close and vocal warmth. These expressions show a liking or acceptance for someone. The last dimension is power or control. Men exert power and control through their voice and the space they take up. Women are less likely to exert these same things as forcefully as men.


Next, Wood goes on to explain the six forms of nonverbal communication.

The first form of nonverbal communication is artifacts. These artifacts are personal objects that expresses identity and influences how we see ourselves and how we want others to view us. These artifacts are things such as toy cars for young boys and dolls for young girls. For adults clothing is an important artifact that signifies what gender we would like to be called, what socioeconomic status we would like to identify with, what group we would like to identify with and so on and so forth. Artifacts are extremely important to human identification.

The second form of nonverbal communication is proximity and personal space. Men and women both operate differently with space. Women tend to take up less space and make them selves smaller whilst men do the opposite by taking up more space make themselves seem larger. Also the notion of power is correlated with space and can be seen through the sizes of office space. More important executives for the most part, have larger offices while secretaries who are less valuable and can be easily replaced usually have a significantly smaller allotment of space.

The third form of nonverbal communication is haptics. From a young age, boys are socialized to associate haptics, or touch, with control and power while girls are socialized to associate haptics with nurturing and nurturing. This explains that men why men, who are generally larger than women , tend to be more willing to use physical force  in a more controlling manner.

The fourth form of nonverbal  communication is kinesics. Kinesics are movements of the face and body. This includes the facial expression a person gives and the body movements a person utilizes. Males are less likely to use facial expressions during conversation while women are more likely to.

The fifth form of nonverbal communication is paralanguage. This consists of all of the different vocal cues a person uses during conversation. Men and women both are socialized to use different paralinguistic systems. There are some emotions that causes for different paralinguistic cues. But we should ask why does our society associate certain different paralanguage with gender? What would our society be without social norms? Would that eliminate the divide between the rights of men and women?

The last form of nonverbal communication is physical appearance. We are influenced now more than ever by media. The media that we are exposed to directly affects how we feel toward certain things. Because the only thing men and women see on TV is fit, muscular people, we tend to feel that we should make ourselves look like that. That is seen as the ideal body type and in order to feel attractive , we should look like that. Typically women more than men, tend to allow issues with their appearance affect their self esteem.


In conclusion, Wood summarizes the approaches to nonverbal communication and provides information to allow readers to critically analyze the patterns of socialized gender in nonverbal communication. I found myself thinking about the ways in which I perform gender and how I see others perform it as well. It is important to note how everything that people do is socialized. We are all so interwoven into this system that controls our train of thought.