Cheers Make Girls Do Silly Cartwheels

Abstract Chapter 5 uses a scene from the film But I’m a Cheerleader to illustrate the claim that generics are instructions to treat people in certain ways. This helps us explain how stereotypes expressed as generics give rise to stereotypes in thought, action, and culture. The chapter introduces a category of quasi-normative generic, and argues that normative, quasi-normative, and social generics have the illocutionary force of instructions. Specifically, the illocutionary act associated with a generic “Fs are Gs” is the indirect and defeasible instruction: treat those Fs one encounters as though they are G. If a generic is an instruction, and if people are used to obeying instructions that they hear, then hearing certain kinds of generics can shape beliefs and behavior.