Deborah Tannen There Is No Unmarked Woman Analysis

By merely reading the beginning of Deborah Tannen’s, There Is No Unmarked Woman essay, the reader becomes an inevitable perpetrator of Tannen’s concept of “marked women.” Tannen’s central thesis is that women cannot be “unmarked,” which implies that her character is first judged by her appearance, which is subject to judgment in any circumstance. The structure of the essay, which consists of an opening scene that takes place in a conference room with four women (including Tanner) along with several men, is effective because the scene ultimately helps Tanner reinforce her claim that appearance “marks” women inevitably. “Instead of concentrating on the discussion I found myself looking at the three other women at the table, thinking how each …show more content…
The women become the victims of our judgment as we read about them because we make assumptions about their character based solely on their appearance. Tannen does not reveal what the true characterizations of each woman really are, and instead gives the us (the readers) the freedom to develop our own judgments. The structural means of including the office scenario in the beginning is essential to the rest of the essay because the scene relates to the rest of the essay. We better understand what it means to be “marked” because we “marked” the women subconsciously as we read about them. We assume that because “the third [woman] had blue bands under her eyes, dark blue shadow, mascara, bright red lipstick and rouge,” she is more “wild” and cares more about her appearance. It is also assumed that the second woman is shy and reserved from the mere description of her hairstyle because it “was cut in a fashionable style that left her with only one eye, thanks to a side part that let a curtain of hair fall across half her face (…) and created a barrier between her and the listeners.” These descriptions reveal a troubling, yet frank, reality where the amount of or lack of makeup that a woman wears, or the styling of her hair have a prominent role in the characterization and judgment of that female. In fact, the characterizations that most often derive from appearance have negative effects. Because hair is “marked,” a particular hairstyle may, “call attention to her hair and away from her lecture,” and “gender markers pick up extra meanings that reflect common associations with the female gender: not quite serious, often sexual.” The inability to escape being “marked” heightened by the fact that the reader subconsciously characterized the women in the conference room. Subsequently, the