The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality

By Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes

Significantly expanded and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality brings together a team of the leading specialists in the field to create a comprehensive overview of key historical themes and issues, along with methodologies and cutting-edge research topics.

• Examines the dynamic ways that women and men develop and manage gendered identities through their talk, presenting data and case studies from interactions in a range of social contexts and different communities
• Substantially updated for the second edition, including a new introduction, 24 newly-commissioned chapters, ten updated chapters, and a comprehensive index
• Includes new chapters on research in non-English speaking countries – from Asia to South America – and cutting-edge topics such as language, gender, and popular culture; language and sexual identities; and language, gender, and socio-phonetics
• New sections focus on key themes and issues in the field, such as methodological approaches to language and gender, incorporating new chapters on conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and variation theory
• Provides unrivalled geographic coverage and an essential resource for a wide range of disciplines, from linguistics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to communication and gender studies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118584330

Book preview

Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Figures

List of Tables

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Language, Gender, and Sexuality

1. Introduction

2. Key Themes and Issues

3. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Part I: Theory and History

Chapter 1: The Feminist Foundations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research

1. Introduction: Linguistics and Feminism

2. Difference Feminisms

3. From Gender Difference to Gendered Experiences

4. Queering Feminism: From Gender to Sexuality and Back Again

5. A New Linguistic Turn?

6. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Chapter 2: Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology: Toward Effective Interventions in Gender Inequity

1. Introduction

2. The Relationship of Gender to Sex and Sexuality

3. Gender as Activity and Relation

4. Gender and Political Economy

5. Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 3: Language and Desire

1. Theories of Desire

2. Investigating Desire in Language

3. Conclusion

References

Part II: Methods

Chapter 4: Variation and Gender

1. Introduction

2. First and Second Waves of Variation Studies: Production of Gender Differences

3. Perceived Association and Meanings

4. Relativising the Generalisations about Gender and Variation

5. Form versus Function

6. Apparent Gender Paradox in Variation

7. The Cultural Turn

8. Social Constructionist Accounts of Variation

9. Situating Variation in Its Social Context

10. Conclusion

References

Chapter 5: Sociophonetics, Gender, and Sexuality

1. Introduction

2. Pitch and Intonation

3. Vowels

4. Consonants

5. Voice Quality

6. New Horizons

References

Chapter 6: Ethnographic Methods for Language and Gender Research

1. The Historical Emergence of Ethnography as Method

2. The Tools of Ethnography

3. Ethnography, Context, and Indexicality

4. Ethnographic Research on Language and Gender

5. Approaching Language and Gender Ethnographically

Notes

References

Chapter 7: Conversation Analysis in Language and Gender Studies

1. Turn-Taking, Interruption, and Cooperative Talk

2. Reviewing CA as a Method for Gender and Language Research

Notes

References

Chapter 8: Gender and Categorial Systematics

1. Introduction

2. Membership Categorization, Conversation Analysis, and Gender

3. Doing Membership Categorization Analysis

4. Example 1: Finding Patterns in Categorial Formulations

5. Example 2: Going Categorial in Sequential Environments

6. Example 3: Names as Categories

7. Gender and Categorial Systematics

Note

References

Chapter 9: Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Relevance for Current Gender and Language Research

1. Introduction

2. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

3. Key Principles of FCDA

4. Conclusion

Notes

References

Part III: Identities

Chapter 10: Language and Sexual Identities

1. Introduction

2. Situating the Study of Language and Sexual Identity

3. Language, Eroticism, and Identity

4. Sexual Identity and Identification

5. Conclusion

References

Chapter 11: Exceptional Speakers: Contested and Problematized Gender Identities

1. Introduction

2. Footnote Effeminates and Feminists

3. The Woman

4. Hippies, Historians, and Homos

5. Sissies and Tomboys

6. Queers and the Rest of Us

Acknowledgments

References

Chapter 12: Language and Masculinity

1. Introduction

2. Theorizing Masculinity

3. Implicit and Explicit Approaches: When Did Masculinity Become Marked in Language and Gender Studies?

4. Communities of Practice and Ethnographic Methods

5. Hegemonic Masculinity, Performativity, and Other Poststructuralist Accounts

6. Methodological Debates, Gender Relevance, and the Limits of Context

7. Gross Out: A Masculine Discourse?

8. Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 13: Queering Masculinities

1. Introduction

2. Queer: What is It and What is It Good For?

3. Queer Troubles in Researching Language and Masculinities

4. Roy Cohn is a Heterosexual Man who Fucks Around with Guys: Queer Positions and Dominant Discourses

5. Imagining Queer Futures?

Acknowledgments

Note

References

Part IV: Ideologies

Chapter 14: Gender and Language Ideologies

1. Introduction

2. Representing Language and Gender: Diversity and Change

3. Shifting Ideological Landscapes: The Rise of Men and the Return of Biologism

4. Representations and Realities

Notes

References

Chapter 15: The Power of Gender Ideologies In Discourse

1. The Political Roots of the Interest in Gender Ideology

2. Gender Ideology in Anthropology

3. Diversity in Gender Ideology

4. Institutional Contexts for Gender Ideologies in Discourse

5. Implications

References

Chapter 16: Meaning-Making and Ideologies of Gender and Sexuality

1. Semantics/Pragmatics Overview

2. Terminological Preliminaries

3. Speakers Implicitly Exploiting (or Unwittingly Endorsing) Ideologies

4. Hearers Inferring: Ideologically Driven or Ideology-Reinforcing

5. Discourse Effects: Ideologies and Getting Things Done with Words

6. Return to Content Word Meanings: Ideological Struggles and Changing Contexts

Notes

References

Chapter 17: A Marked Man: The Contexts of Gender and Ethnicity

1. Introduction

2. Revealing Ethnic Gender

3. Conflicting Styles

4. Use and Construction of Models

5. Conclusion

Acknowledgment

Notes

References

Part V: Global and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Chapter 18: Language and Gender Research in Poland: An Overview

1. Historical Background: Gender Roles in Poland

2. Terminology

3. Major Themes in Language and Gender Research in Poland

4. Is the Linguistic Gender System Sexist?

5. Feminist Language Reform?

6. Gendered Interactional Styles

8. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Chapter 19: Historical Discourse Approach to Japanese Women's Language: Ideology, Indexicality, and Metalanguage

1. Introduction

2. Japanese Women's Language: Problems

3. Historical Discourse Approach to Women's Language

4. Theoretical Implications of the Historical Discourse Approach

5. Conclusion

References

Chapter 20: Language and Gender in the Middle East and North Africa

1. Introduction

2. Arabic and Its Milieu

3. Research on Language Use and Code Choice

4. Variation in Vernacular Arabic and Gender Differentiation

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Chapter 21: Language and Gender Research in Brazil: An Overview

1. Introduction

2. Methodological and Organizational Notes

3. Variationist Studies in Brazil: Moving Out of Understanding Sex and Gender as Interchangeable and Essentialized Concepts

4. Discourse/Interaction Studies in Brazil: Moving Out of the Disciplinary Bounds in the Understanding of Language and Gender

5. And What Now? Looking Back and Forward at Studies on Language and Gender in Brazil

Notes

References

Part VI: Domains and Institutions

Chapter 22: Language and Gender in the Workplace

1. Introduction

2. Types of Workplace Interaction

3. Small Talk at Work

4. Gender and Workplace Identity

5. Gendered Workplaces

6. Conclusion

7. Acknowledgements

Notes

References

Chapter 23: Language, Gender, and Sexual Violence: Legal Perspectives

1. Introduction

2. Tracking Gendered Ideologies in Trial Discourse

3. Tracing Meaning Transformations in Women's Accounts of Violence

4. Conclusion

Acknowledgment

Notes

References

Cases Cited

Chapter 24: Language and Gender in Educational Contexts

1. Classroom Interaction Research

2. Literacy

3. Second- and Foreign-Language Learning

4. Conclusion

Note

References

Chapter 25: Gender and Family Interaction

1. Introduction

2. Power and Connection in the Family: Prior Research

3. The Ambiguity and Polysemy of Hierarchy and Connection

4. Mother: A Paradigm of the Ambiguity and Polysemy of Power and Connection

5. Power Lines—or Connection Lines—in Telling Your Day

6. Self-Revelation: A Gender-Specific Conversational Ritual

7. Balancing Power and Connection in a Family Argument

8. Gender and Family Interaction: Coda

Acknowledgments

References

Chapter 26: Language and Gender in Peer Interactions among Children and Youth

1. Introduction

2. Binary Views of Gender

3. Challenges to Separate Worlds Considering Class, Contextual Variation, and Power in Girls' Groups

4. Practices for Negotiating the Social Order in Children's Groups

5. Conclusion

References

Chapter 27: Language and Gender in Adolescence

1. Adolescence as Ideology

2. School as Site for the Construction of Adolescence

3. Adolescents as Leaders in Linguistic Change

4. Policing Adolescent Language

5. Conclusion

Notes

References

Part VII: Engagement and Application

Chapter 28: Gender, Endangered Languages, and Revitalization

1. Why Gender?

2. The Blurriness of Gender among the Kaska (Athabaskans)

3. First Nations' Politics and Aboriginal Language Planning in the Yukon

4. Institutions and Axes of Regimentation

5. Norms, the Normative, and the Normal: Practical Intersections

6. Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 29: Gender and (A)nonymity in Computer-Mediated Communication

1. Introduction

2. Access and Use

3. Textual CMC

4. Multimodal CMC

5. Mobile CMC

6. Discussion

7. Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 30: One Man in Two is a Woman: Linguistic Approaches to Gender in Literary Texts

1. Introduction

2. Male and Female Literary Styles

3. Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender

4. Gender and Translation

5. Implications

References

Chapter 31: Language, Gender, and Popular Culture

1. Introduction: Popular Culture

2. Magazines, Friendship, and Community

3. Broadcast Talk, Gendered Styles, and Professional Identities

4. Talking with the Television

5. Creative Engagement: Putting Gender on the Agenda

6. Concluding Remarks

Notes

References

Chapter 32: The Public View of Language and Gender: Still Wrong After All These Years

1. Language and Gender, 1973 to the Present

2. Media Trends: When Scholarly Work Goes Public

3. Quantitative Media Data

4. Conclusion

5. Postscript

Notes

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 31.1

Figure 31.2

Figure 31.3

Figure 31.4

Figure 32.1

Figure 32.2

Figure 32.3

Figure 32.4

Figure 32.5

Figure 32.6

Figure 32.7

List of Tables

Table 8.1

Table 8.2

Table 8.3

Table 17.1

Table 18.1

Table 18.2

Table 18.3

Table 18.4

Table 18.5

Table 18.6

Table 32.1

Table 32.2

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The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Second Edition

Edited by

Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes

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This second edition first published 2014

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Edition History: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2003)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The handbook of language, gender, and sexuality / edited by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, Janet Holmes. - Second edition.

pages cm. - (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65642-6 (hardback)

1. Language and sex. 2. Language and sex-Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Ehrlich, Susan (Susan Lynn) editor of compilation. II. Meyerhoff, Miriam, editor of compilation. III. Holmes, Janet, 1947- editor of compilation.

P120.S48H37 2014

306.44-dc23

2013042749

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-470-65642-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Umberto Boccioni, Under the Pergola at Naples, 1914. © De Agostini / Getty Images

Cover design by Workhaus

1 2014

For our mothers,

Bernice Bunny Ehrlich, Mary Meyerhoff Cresswell, and Muriel Quirk

List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Men's and women's use of the alveolar nasal in unstressed (ing) in three styles and in two social classes, in Norwich

Figure 4.2 Percentage of /r/ deletion in women's and men's speech in Garifuna

Figure 31.1 Assertive and arrogant stances

Figure 31.2 Single-minded and stubborn stances

Figure 31.3 A page from Dotter of Her Father's Eyes

Figure 31.4 These two panels from Dotter of Her Father's Eyes follow the page in Figure 31.3

Figure 32.1Zits, by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

Figure 32.2 Google Trends: search term gender studies

Figure 32.3 Google Trends: search term brain studies

Figure 32.4 Google Trends: search term gender difference

Figure 32.5 Google Trends: search terms brain difference

Figure 32.6 LexisNexis Academic: All-English News

Figure 32.7 LexisNexis Academic: New York Times

List of Tables

Table 8.1 Membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA)

Table 8.2 Steps in membership categorization analysis (MCA)

Table 8.3 Keys to membership categorization analysis (MCA)

Table 17.1 Lakhota clitics, by gender and speech act

Table 18.1 Sex/gender terms in Polish and English

Table 18.2 Two variants of analytic future tense construction in Polish

Table 18.3 Use of analytic future tense with imperfective verbs in the first-person singular in the National Corpus of Polish

Table 18.4 Beliefs about gendered language use

Table 18.5 Trigger sayings: benevolent

Table 18.6 Trigger sayings: hostile

Table 20.1 Distribution of (r) by age groups and gender in Dummar and Shaghoor

Table 32.1 Keyword Gender in the Corpus of Contemporary American English

Table 32.2 Keyword Gender Difference in the Corpus of Contemporary American English

Notes on Contributors

Enam Al-Wer is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her research and publications focus on variation and change, and dialect contact in modern Arabic dialects. She co-edited Arabic in the City (2007) and Arabic Dialectology (2009). She is the co-editor (with Abbas Benmamoun) of the Routledge Arabic Linguistics Series.

Frederick Attenborough is a Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. His current research interests are in discourse analysis, textual ethnomethodology, and membership categorization analysis.

Bethan Benwell is Senior Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Stirling. She has published on discourses of masculinity in popular culture, and discursive approaches to reception. She is editor of Masculinity and Men's Lifestyle Magazines (2003) and co-author (with Elizabeth Stokoe) of Discourse and Identity (2006).

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His last books are Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics (2009), On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation (2011), and Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders (co-edited, 2013).

Mary Bucholtz is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she specializes in language and identity. She is the author of White Kids (2011) and has edited several volumes on language, gender, and sexuality, including Gender Articulated (1995), Reinventing Identities (1999), and Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries (1994).

Deborah Cameron is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. Her publications on language, gender, and sexuality include Feminism and Linguistic Theory (1992), Language and Sexuality (with Don Kulick, 2003) On Language and Sexual Politics (2006), and The Myth of Mars and Venus (2007).

Penelope Eckert is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Her ethnographic work in schools examines the role of variation in the emergence of adolescent social structure. Her work on gender has led her to focus particularly on the social meaning of variation and its role in the construction of personae.

Susan Ehrlich is Professor of Linguistics at York University, Toronto. Her work has focused primarily on language and violence against women in the legal system. Books include Representing Rape (2001), Why Do You Ask? The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse (co-edited with Alice Freed, 2010) and the forthcoming Coercion and Consent in the Legal System.

Alice F. Freed is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research interests include language and gender, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. She is author of The Semantics of English Aspectual Complementation (1979) and co-editor of Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice (with Victoria Bergvall and Janet Bing, 1996) and Why Do You Ask? The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse (with Susan Ehrlich, 2010). She has published works in journals such as Language in Society and the Journal of Pragmatics.

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work investigates how talk is used to build social organization within face-to-face interaction in the social worlds of children and families. Her monographs include He-Said-She Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (1990) and The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (2006), studies that combine the methodologies of long-term ethnography with conversation analysis.

Kira Hall is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Colorado. Her publications focus on issues of language and identity, particularly as they emerge within hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class in a globalizing India. Significant texts include Gender Articulated (with Mary Bucholtz, 1995), Queerly Phrased (with Anna Livia, 1997), and a set of articles with Mary Bucholtz on the theorization of identity in sociocultural linguistics.

Susan C. Herring is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. She was one of the first scholars to apply linguistic methods of analysis to computer-mediated communication (CMC), beginning with a focus on gender issues. She later consolidated those methods into the computer-mediated discourse analysis approach, which she has applied to analyze structural, pragmatic, interactional, and social phenomena in digital discourse. Her current interests include multilingual and multimodal (especially, convergent media) CMC and telepresence robotics.

Janet Holmes holds a Chair in Linguistics and is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project at Victoria University of Wellington. She teaches and researches in the area of sociolinguistics, specializing in workplace discourse and language and gender. Most recently she has been investigating the discourse of skilled migrants as they enter New Zealand workplaces.

Sakiko Kajino is a PhD candidate at the Linguistics Department of Georgetown University. Her dissertation focuses on sociophonetics and regional variation in female Japanese speech across Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka in the domains of fricatives, intonation, and voice quality.

Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak is Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has published and lectured on social dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, as well as language and gender issues. Her current research interests focus on age as a social construct and a sociolinguistic variable.

Celia Kitzinger is Professor of Conversation Analysis, Gender and Sexuality in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK. Her current research focuses on interactions around childbirth and end-of-life decision-making.

Don Kulick is the author of Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (1998), and the co-author, with Deborah Cameron, of Language and Sexuality (2003). His latest book, with Jens Rydström, is Excessibility Guidelines: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of Engagement (forthcoming).

Amy Kyratzis is Professor of Education at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara. She uses ethnography and talk-in-interaction to study children's peer language socialization. Her current research examines preschoolers' bilingual practices in play negotiations. She guest-edited Children Socializing Children: Practices for Organizing the Social and Moral Order among Peers (Research on Language and Social Interaction, 2007, with M. H. Goodwin), and Heteroglossia and Language Ideologies in Children's Peer Play Interactions (Pragmatics, 2010, with J. F. Reynolds and A.-C. Evaldsson).

Michelle M. Lazar is Associate Professor, Assistant Dean for Research, and Coordinator of the Gender Studies Minor Programme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is founding editor of the Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse book series, and is presently the Vice-President/President-Elect of the International Gender and Language Association. Her research includes critical feminist analyses of discourses of gender relations and identities and postfeminism.

Anna Livia(1955–2007), linguist of French literature and lesbian feminist writer, is best known in the field of language and gender for her pioneering work in queer linguistics. She produced a number of significant publications on language and sexuality over the course of her career, among them Queerly Phrased (with Kira Hall, 1997) and Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender (2001).

Sally McConnell-Ginet is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell University, where she also directed Women's Studies (now Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies). She came to linguistics from mathematics and philosophy and continues research on meaning as connected to language structure and as integral to social life and conflict.

Bonnie McElhinny is Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is founding co-editor of Gender and Language. Recent publications include Words, Worlds, Material Girls: Language and Gender in a Global Economy and Filipinos in Canada (2008), as well as articles in American Anthropologist, Philippine Studies, and the Annual Review of Anthropology.

Barbra A. Meek is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan. Her current research and teaching focus on representations and performances of linguistic otherness, in addition to ongoing work on language endangerment and revitalization.

Julia Menard-Warwick is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University of California, Davis. She is interested in second-language learning, multilingual development, and narrative analysis. Her book Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning was published in 2009, and she is working on another book about English teaching in California and Chile.

Miriam Meyerhoff has worked on problems in language variation for more than two decades on a range of languages including New Zealand English, Bequia Creole, Bislama, Tamambo, and Nkep (the last three spoken in Vanuatu). She is co-editor of the Creole Language Library and author of Introducing Sociolinguistics (2006).

Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, His areas of research encompass language politics, media discourse, multimodality, and language gender and sexuality. His publications include articles in Gender and Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Language and Politics, and Language in Society.

Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a Researcher of the Brazilian Research Council. He holds a PhD from the University of London. His most recent book is Português no Século XXI: Cenário Geopolítico e Sociolinguístico (Portuguese in the 21st Century: Geopolitical and Sociolinguistic Scenario, 2013).

Miki Mori is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on second-language academic writing development as it relates to Bakhtinian theory of dialogic voicing, intertextuality, plagiarism, and patchwriting. She has taught English as a second language for several years at university and college level.

Momoko Nakamura is Professor at Kanto Gakuin University. Her recent work in English is Women's and Men's Languages As Heterosexual Resource in Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse (2010). Her recent books are Jendaa de manabu gengogaku (Linguistics and Gender, 2010) and Onna kotoba to Nihongo (Women's Language and Japanese, 2012).

Ana Cristina Ostermann is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos and a Researcher of the Brazilian Research Council. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan. Her most recent book is Humanização, Gênero, Poder: Contribuições dos Estudos de Fala-em-Interação para a Atenção à Saúde (Humanization, Gender, Power: Contributions of Interactional Studies to Healthcare, 2013).

Joanna Pawelczyk is Associate Professor of sociolinguistics at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research interests include language and gender, discourses of psychotherapy and loss, and computer-mediated communication. She has published in a range of international journals and in edited collections on gender and therapeutic discourse.

Susan U. Philips is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is a linguistic anthropologist and is the author of The Invisible Culture (1983) and Ideology in the Language of Judges (1998), and the co-editor of Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective (1987). Her current research is on Tongan lexical honorifics and honorification.

Robert J. Podesva is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. His research examines the social and interactional significance of phonetic variation, particularly in the domain of voice quality. He has co-edited Research Methods in Linguistics (2013), Language and Sexuality (2002), and a special issue of American Speech on Sociophonetics and Sexuality (2011).

Robin Queen is Associate Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and English Language and Literatures and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on language and sexuality, language contact, language in the mass media, and general sociolinguistics.

Sharon Stoergeris Director of the Information, Technology, and Informatics program at Rutgers University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of communication, gender, and emerging technologies. This includes the ways in which technology impacts the educational experience. Much of this work is viewed through a social informatics lens.

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her current research interests are in conversation analysis, membership categorization, and social interaction in various ordinary and institutional settings. She is currently co-editor of Gender and Language.

Mary Talbot has published widely on language and gender, particularly in relation to media, consumerism, and popular culture. Recent books include Language and Gender (2010) and her first graphic novel, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes (with Bryan Talbot, 2012). She is now a freelance writer and consultant.

Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her books include Talking Voices (1989), Conversational Style (1984), You Just Don't Understand (1990), Talking from 9 to 5 (1972), You're Wearing That? (2006), and You were Always Mom's Favorite! (2009). Her website is at www.deborahtannen.com.

Sara Trechter is a Professor of Linguistics at California State University, Chico. Her work on language, gender, and ethnicity has focused on gender in Siouan languages and the discourse construction of whiteness. She currently works with the last fluent speaker of the Nu'eta language to produce accessible, culturally relevant linguistic description.

Sue Wilkinson is Professor of Feminist and Health Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her current research focuses on interactions on telephone helplines, and she is writing a textbook on conversation analysis.

Serena Williams is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of California, Davis, with research interests in language and gender, and the analysis of interaction and discourse in Spanish and English. She has taught Spanish and English as a second language at university level.

Acknowledgments

We have benefited greatly from the practical and moral support of many people at various stages in the production of this book. We would like to thank the following people: Chie Adachi, Paul Baker, Andrew Beach, Debbie Cameron, Agata Daleszynska, Margaret Field, Atiqa Hachimi, Kira Hall, Helga Kotthoff, Don Kulick, Ronald Beline Mendes, Sam Meyerhoff, Tommaso Milani, Liz Morrish, Louise Mullany, Amy Paugh, Robin Queen, Lauren Squires, Jane Stuart-Smith, Jane Sunderland, Shonna Trinch, and Ann Weatherall.

We are grateful to Julia Kirk and Danielle Descoteaux, from Wiley-Blackwell, for their help and support throughout the lengthy process of producing this Handbook. And we thank our careful and meticulous copy-editor, Jacqueline Harvey, and our outstanding freelance project manager, Nik Prowse. Special thanks go to our amazing editorial assistant, Anna Romanov.

Introduction

Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Susan Ehrlich and Miriam Meyerhoff

1. Introduction

The opportunity to publish a second edition of any book is always a welcome one. In this case, it is perhaps particularly so, because the 10 years between the appearance of the first edition of The Handbook of Language and Gender (HLG) and this second edition have seen significant shifts in the study of gender and language, including increased attention to the relationship between gender and sexuality. Thus, the most obvious difference between this edition and the first is its title, The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (HLGS), through which we have attempted to highlight the ongoing importance of sexuality to the field and the close connections between gender and sexuality. A concern with questions of sexuality is, of course, not the only change the field has witnessed in the last 10 years; the field has also been enriched by, among other things, connections forged with research on globalization and on masculinities, topics that both receive greater prominence in this edition of the Handbook.

Another key difference between the two editions of this Handbook lies in our better understanding of how readers want to use HLG as a resource. The purpose of a handbook in any field is to outline the key topics, themes, debates, and methods that give life to that field of study. When we elicited feedback on the first edition we found, somewhat to our surprise, that the first edition of HLG had been adopted quite widely as a teaching text. This was not the primary purpose we had imagined a handbook might serve when we commissioned chapters for the first edition, and understanding this has informed some of our decisions as we revised the book for a second edition. In particular, we felt that a number of the chapters in the first edition read a lot like independent research articles—they offered tremendous analytical depth, but often presupposed a degree of familiarity with language and gender research (and with some of the debates that animated the field at that time) that students might not have. For this reason, not every chapter from the first edition seemed to directly serve the central purpose of the second edition. For the HLGS, we have encouraged authors to emphasize comprehensive coverage of their topics rather than develop complex, in-depth arguments about very specific sets of data. We have commissioned new chapters with these goals in mind and have also asked many of the authors from the first edition to update their chapters in ways that address a broader readership, one that includes not only mature scholars but also students.

The field of language and gender is much better served by textbooks now than in 2003 when HLG was published. Anyone teaching a course on language and gender today can choose from introductory works suited to beginning students or a general readership (e.g., Cameron 2007; Julé 2008), to more advanced texts (e.g., Cameron and Kulick 2003; 2006; J. Coates 2004; J. Coates and Pichler 2011; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; 2013; Lakoff 2004; Litosseliti 2006; Mills and Mullany 2011; Sunderland 2004; 2006; Talbot 2010; Weatherall 2002). Other books focus more explicitly on methods used when studying language and gender (e.g., Lazar 2005; Speer 2005; Harrington et al. 2008; Pichler and Eppler 2009; Speer and Stokoe 2011). In light of this, one might ask what a new edition of HLG has to offer. We believe there is also a need for a comprehensive, authoritative, and multivocal perspective on the state of the art, and that this version of the Handbook offers readers a uniquely broad experience of developments in the field of language, gender, and sexuality. Its breadth lies not only in the diverse list of contributing authors, but also in the approaches they draw on in the service of each chapter.

Knowing the Handbook might be used for teaching purposes led us to make other changes as well. There were some specific topics that we felt ought to be covered if someone were relying on the HLGS as the primary text in an undergraduate or graduate course on language and gender. The main change in this respect was the addition of a section on research methods used in language, gender, and sexuality studies. We are confident that these chapters, written by some of the leading scholars and teachers of these methods (Besnier and Philips (6), Lazar (9), Meyerhoff (4), Podesva and Kajino (5), Stokoe and Attenborough (8), Wilkinson and Kitzinger (7)) will be of value for several different kinds of readers. Naturally, we had in mind our own students who are often looking for ideas on what kinds of data to use, what kinds of questions can be explored most readily with different kinds of data, and what those explorations might look like. However, in addition to novices looking for guidance and practical advice, we hope readers who already have a clear idea about the method(s) they would like to use with a given data set will find reading across these chapters rewarding. Our sense is that it affords the reader an excellent comparative perspective on the kinds of questions asked (and answered) by different methods.

In sum, in attempting to respond to new developments in the field and to the fact that the Handbook could be useful for teaching, we have commissioned new chapters and asked some authors to revise and update their chapters from the first edition (and many have done so in a substantial way).¹ Thus, not only have we introduced a new section on methods, but we have also, in the area of language and sexuality, included a chapter devoted exclusively to language and sexual identities (Queen, Chapter 10). Other new chapters explicitly consider the intersection of language, gender, and sexuality (e.g., Bucholtz, 1; Podesva and Kajino, 5; McConnell-Ginet, 16; Ehrlich, 23), and still others draw attention to the ways in which sexuality, even if it is not foregrounded in a particular interactional context, nevertheless plays a role in circumscribing interactional patterns and sometimes profoundly influencing speakers' life choices and opportunities (e.g., Benwell, 12; Tannen, 25; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 26; Menard-Warwick, Mori, and Williams, 24). In responding to the heightened prominence of studies of language and masculinities, we have included two new chapters, one on language and masculinity (Benwell, 12) and the other on the queering of masculinities (Milani, 13); readers will also find thoughtful discussion of masculinity in chapters on the workplace (Holmes, 22), the legal system (Ehrlich, 23), education (Menard-Warwick, Mori, and Williams, 24), and in case studies illustrating different methodologies (Stokoe and Attenborough, 8; Lazar, 9).

Finally, the increasing importance of globalization to studies of language and gender has resulted in the inclusion of a new section that reviews research on language, gender, and sexuality in non-anglophone locations around the world. Although the HLG highlighted research on language and gender from a wide range of languages and cultures, it did not include chapters that were exclusively dedicated to a particular geographical region. In this edition, we have asked leading scholars to write chapters on language and gender in the context of Brazil (Ostermann and Moita-Lopes, 21), Poland (Kiełkewicz-Janiowak and Pawelczyk, 18), Japan (Nakamura, 19), and the Arabic-speaking world (Al-Wer, 20).

2. Key Themes and Issues

Typically, the introductory chapter for edited volumes provides a brief summary of each chapter in turn. For HLGS, we have decided not to follow this convention; instead we emphasize the key themes and issues we had in mind when commissioning chapters and that have clearly emerged from the chapters when read as a whole. Overall, the HLGS is ordered in a similar way to the HLG. We begin with the most theoretical chapters and progress to those that discuss the specificities of language, gender, and sexuality research in various domains and locales. The book concludes with discussions of applications and extensions of research on language, gender, and sexuality within and beyond the academy.

The purpose of identifying key theoretical and methodological themes that run through many of the chapters is not to provide an overview and history of the field but instead to highlight issues that span multiple chapters and are therefore significant to research on language, gender, and sexuality. (See Bucholtz, Chapter 1 in this volume, for a review of the field from the perspective of its feminist foundations, and many of the other chapters for developments in specific domains or subfields.) In addition, an introduction organized by themes strengthens cohesion between chapters and provides integrity to the volume as a whole. While we acknowledge that theory and practice are intimately intertwined, we start with some observations that are largely theoretical and that recur across a number of chapters; we then discuss some key methodological issues that also emerge in many of the chapters.

2.1 Performativity

Since the 1990s, arguably the most significant theoretical work to influence the field of language and gender has been Judith Butler's (1990) Gender Trouble and, more specifically, her notion of gender as performative. Under such an account, gender is not viewed as a stable, prediscursive construct residing in individuals; rather it emerges in discourse and in other semiotic practices. In other words, individuals do not simply act out a pre-existing gender; they are always actively involved in the doing of gender. While the theoretical claim of Butler's—that identities do not exist beyond their expression—is most transparent when an individual's expressions of identity depart from what we take to be their true identity, the idea is that even the most normative of identities are discursively produced and require repeated iterations. Butler's work was important in moving the field away from monolithic and essentialist understandings of femininity and masculinity to what Cameron (2008, 2) characterizes as the pluralizing of femininities and masculinities: attention turned to the various ways that linguistic resources could be deployed in producing a wide range of femininities and masculinities in different contexts or communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992).

The influence of Eckert and McConnell-Ginet's maxim to think practically and look locally can be discerned in a variety of chapters in this volume. In general, instead of spending time motivating the heterogeneity of gendered identities (as some chapters in HLG did), most of the chapters in HLGS take the diverse ways in which people inhabit and engender social space as a starting point and then move on to explore theoretical, methodological, and action-oriented implications of this view. For example, the chapters in this volume that investigate language and gender in childhood and adolescence are important theoretically because gendered behavior can vary significantly at different stages of the life cycle. While the nurturing woman is a common stereotype, Eckert (Chapter 27) argues that it is based on a particular life stage in a woman's life—motherhood—and that when other stages in women's lives are examined (such as adolescence) this stereotype falls apart. Eckert notes that work on adolescent girls does not support the view that girls' linguistic practices display any more of a ‘connection’ orientation than boys. Goodwin and Kyratzis (Chapter 26) make a related argument to Eckert's in their critique of the separate worlds hypothesis (Maltz and Borker 1982; Tannen 1990)—the idea that women and men, like members of different cultural groups, learn different communicative styles (collaborative versus competitive) because of the segregated girls' and boys' peer groups they play in as children. For Goodwin and Kyratzis, such generalizations cannot be maintained given the considerable variation that exists across girls' groups, depending on social class, ethnicity, race, and context; for example, working-class girls in a variety of communities and cultures have been shown to engage in ritual insult, a discourse genre typically associated with African American men. (See Tannen, Chapter 25, for a different view on the separate worlds hypothesis.)

Investigations of the intersection of gender and ethnicity have also raised important theoretical and methodological questions. Trechter (Chapter 17) considers research that examines the way gender and ethnicity/race are mutually constituted in linguistic practice, although cautioning readers about the circularity that can plague such investigations: they may define the linguistic practices of a particular, predefined, community while also maintaining that the community is defined by its linguistic practice. At the same time, Trechter cites scholars who see a risk in focusing on the performance of identities, arguing that such a focus prematurely erases the racial and ethnic categories (i.e., identity categories) necessary for political mobilization, what McElhinny and Holmes have called strategic essentialism (Holmes 2007; McElhinny 1996). Trechter's comments regarding the tensions that have accompanied the performative turn in language and gender studies are echoed in other chapters in this volume.

Milani (Chapter 13) argues that in spite of the major epistemological shift in the field of language and gender triggered by Butler and other poststructuralist theorists, the largest portion of scholarship on language and masculinities has focused on male participants (and, not unsurprisingly, research on femininities on females). Stokoe and Attenborough (Chapter 8) and Benwell (Chapter 12) make a similar point: they argue that much work claiming to adopt an anti-essentialist, constructivist understanding of gender tends to precategorize groups of people as women and men and then investigates how women do femininity and how men do masculinity. For Stokoe and Attenborough, then, such research raises methodological questions as how best to study gender in nonessentialist ways, that is, without assuming that masculinity and femininity are directly linked (Ochs 1992) to male and female subjects, respectively. (We return to this issue below.) Milani makes a somewhat different argument in the context of his chapter on the queering of masculinities: he maintains that we must engage in a more careful mapping of how women…as well as transgendered and intersex individuals also do masculinities in their daily lives, that is, what he terms, the queering of epistemological normality.

2.2 Queer linguistics

As Bucholtz (Chapter 1) notes, a crucial dimension of Butler's notion of performativity lies in the possibility of disrupting the normative alignment of sex assignment, gender identity, and sexual identity through practices that make visible its constructed nature. Within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this possibility provided the impetus for a series of studies in the 1990s that focused on what McElhinny (Chapter 2) calls sex/gender transgressions—a focus on language users who fell outside of hegemonic norms of sex, gender, and sexuality (e.g., Barrett 1999; Gaudio 1997; Hall 1997; Hall and O'Donovan 1996; Kulick 1998; Livia and Hall 1997). Indeed, Hall (Chapter 11) argues that the study of non-normative gender identity (what she refers to as exceptional speakers), while having a marginal status in the field in its early stages, is foundational to current thinking about language, gender, and sexuality. More recently, researchers have looked at linguistic performances of heterosexuality (Cameron 2005a; Eckert, Chapter 27 in this volume; Kiesling 2002) as a way of understanding how heterosexuality is normalized. That is, in the same way that hegemonic masculinity has been interrogated within the field of language and gender (Kiesling 2002; 2005; 2011; Milani 2011; Benwell, Chapter 12 in this volume), so heterosexuality has become the object of critical investigations that attempt to deconstruct the processes through which it is rendered unmarked (Kitzinger 2005; Milani, Chapter 13 in this volume). In fact, much of this work is devoted to both projects simultaneously given the close connections between hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality. (See Trechter, Chapter 17, for a similar unpacking of whiteness as the unmarked racial category.)

This critical engagement with heterosexuality and heteronormativity is, of course, a hallmark of queer theory, a theory which interrogates heterosexuality by dismissing its claims to naturalness (Cameron and Kulick 2003, 55). Milani (Chapter 13) uses queer theory to cast a critical light on heterosexual masculinities, but in the process notes that queer theory cannot be restricted to critiquing the production and perpetuation of heteronormativity but should also make visible "the ways in which certain forms of same-sex desire can themselves become normalized and legitimized over time." Here, Milani, like other queer theorists, expresses skepticism about a politics that relies on sexual identities as a mechanism for social change.

The tension Milani describes between a politics reliant on identity categories and one suspicious of such categories as the basis for social change has also played out, in a sometimes heated way, in the academic arena of queer linguistics. Indeed, Queen (Chapter 10) remarks that one of the central debates in queer linguistics has concerned the issue of identity. Kulick (Chapter 3), who initiated this debate with the publication of the 2000 article, Gay and Lesbian Language, critiques early work on language and sexuality, arguing that much of it confused symbolic resources with actual linguistic practices in much the same way that early work in language and gender did. As Kulick (this volume) says, this confounding of the symbolic and the actual fails to recognize that the linguistic resources understood to compose a phenomenon like ‘women's language’ (or ‘gay language’) are available to any speaker to use (and any hearer to interpret) regardless of whatever the speaker may think about her or his sexuality, gender or anything else. Kulick goes on to propose that language and sexuality scholars move beyond the study of sexual identities in order to examine the relationship between language and desire.

Queen (Chapter 10) provides a detailed and insightful discussion of Kulick's proposals, and the desire–identity debate more generally. According to Queen, critics of Kulick's proposal, and of the more extended proposal put forward in Cameron and Kulick (2003), maintain that an exclusive focus on desire downplays the fact that sexuality is socially mediated and, consequently, that sexual desires and practices are often linked to subject positions (and object positions) that are expressed as social categories. In spite of such critiques, recent work has investigated both the linguistic details of desire (as does Kulick's chapter (3) in this volume) and of sexual identities and identifications, and Queen ultimately concludes that our understandings of language and sexualities are more likely to advance by taking seriously a focus on both social identification and eroticism. Bucholtz (Chapter 1) also reviews research from a queer perspective that focuses both on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities and on the linguistic dimensions of erotic practices.

2.3 Agency and constraints

As noted above, the theorizing of gender as performative has encouraged language and gender researchers (since the 1990s) to focus on the agency and creativity of social actors in the constitution of gender. At the same time, some scholars have argued that there has been much less emphasis placed on another aspect of Butler's framework—the highly rigid regulatory frame (Butler 1990, 32) within which gendered identities are produced (see McElhinny, Chapter 2, for discussion). This emphasis on the performative aspect of Butler's work, rather than on her discussions of the regulatory norms that define and police normative constructions of gender, may arise because, as Cameron (1997) suggests, philosophical accounts of Butler's rigid regulatory frame have often been very abstract. (See, however, Mills and Mullany 2011 for a more specific articulation of the rigid regulatory frame from Butler's later work.) Nonetheless, regulatory norms make certain performances of gender a ‘natural’ kind of being (Butler 1990, 32) while others are rendered inappropriate or unintelligible and, as Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003) and McElhinny (Chapter 2) point out, subject to social and physical sanctions and penalties, such as gay bashing, the fixing of intersexed infants, and so on. In other words, the challenging of dominant gender norms, although useful in making visible the constructed nature of such norms, can have devastating social costs for those who transgress; as Cameron (Chapter 14) says, the price of non-normality can be high. Cameron makes these comments in the context of her discussion of linguistic ideologies that endow certain speech styles with gendered meanings. Such ideologies, she argues, shape our understanding of what is ‘normal’ and in this sense have a kind of regulatory force. Cameron provides evidence that individuals draw upon these cultural notions of women's language and men's language in producing themselves as gendered subjects because to do otherwise would be to risk the social costs associated with nonconformity. In a similar way, Nakamura (Chapter 19) suggests that Japanese women's language, while an ideological-historical category constructed by metalinguistic discourses such as etiquette books and fictional conversations, nevertheless restricts the speech of contemporary Japanese women. (See Inoue 2006 for a somewhat different perspective.) In fact, Nakamura believes that one of the advantages of her historical discourse approach is that it allows researchers to ask how language ideologies simultaneously enable and restrict actual linguistic practices.

The constraints that ideological representations can impose on gendered performances is also a theme taken up in McConnell-Ginet's chapter (16) for this volume. According to McConnell-Ginet, ideologies of gender and sexuality load linguistic expressions with conceptual baggage in ways that can limit communicative and semantic effectiveness. For example, gendered ideologies can be important to speakers' success in performing certain kinds of illocutionary acts: A woman may say no to a man's sexual advances, but ideologies about women's passive, acquiescing sexualities or women playing hard to get can result in explicit refusals being understood, perhaps strategically on the part of many men, as illocutionary acts of permission. And, when such disputes over meaning enter courtrooms, as they sometimes do, Ehrlich's chapter (23) shows that similar ideologies circulate in the public discourse of rape trials, transforming women's denials into expressions of consent.

The role of ideologies in policing and constraining gendered practices and identities is also evident in institutions, as the preceding reference to courtrooms indicates. Gal (1991) argues that gender is an organizing principle of institutions such that gendered ideologies and norms can form the lens through which practices and behavior are evaluated and allocated resources (see also McElhinny and Philips, Chapters 2 and 15, respectively). As Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003) put it, "No matter what we [as researchers] say about the inadequacy and invidiousness of essentialized, dichotomous conceptions of gender…in everyday life it really is often the case that gender is ‘essential’…that gender as a social category matters (2003, 9; emphasis original). Holmes (Chapter 22), for example, discusses the masculine conception of leadership that characterizes many workplaces. While Holmes reports that effective leaders, both men and women, are generally flexible in their use of discursive styles, female managers are more likely than male managers to be negatively evaluated for this flexibility, in particular, for deploying ways of speaking that are symbolically associated with masculinity. Talbot's chapter (31) on popular culture also considers the fate of women who enter masculine domains. As Talbot points out, women have made major advances in professional media environments, yet her analysis of a female sportscaster routinely positioned as the butt of humor shows that the discursive spaces women can legitimately" occupy on air are restricted. Holmes' and Talbot's chapters, then, remind us of the double bind experienced by many women who occupy powerful positions in traditionally masculine domains (e.g., politics) and are a further illustration of the potential costs associated with the performance of non-normative gendered identities.

Menard-Warwick, Mori, and Williams (Chapter 24) also elucidate the extent to which an institution's norms of evaluation and assessment can be gendered. Women may be positioned as female subjects in classrooms or in learning situations outside of the classroom, yet the standards used to evaluate their learning outcomes are based on the experiences of boys and men. In a similar way, Ehrlich's chapter (23) shows how masculine norms operate in the evaluation of women's attempts to resist perpetrators of sexual assault. Specifically, the unequal power relations that often characterize situations of sexual violence are sidelined in rape trials when women survivors are sanctioned for not expressing their resistance in ways that male norms consider sufficiently forceful and aggressive. As L. Coates, Bavelas, and Gibson (1994, 195) have pointed out, the conception of resistance in play here is based on male-to-male combat, where continued fighting may be appropriate, rather than on a context of asymmetry, where women's physical resistance may only intensify the violence of their perpetrators. Within the family, another social institution, Tannen (Chapter 25) points to the complex relationship between power (negotiations along the hierarchy–equality axis) and connection (negotiations along the closeness–distance axis), focusing in particular on the important contribution of the mother in negotiating gender identities and roles within the family.

The ways in which women may be disadvantaged by the gendered ideologies of institutions is no doubt connected to another theme taken up by a number of chapters in this volume—the historical barriers faced by women in gaining access to public domains (see Al-Wer, Meek, Philips, Chapters 20, 28, and 15, respectively, and also Baxter 2006). As Philips (Chapter 15) points out, a common pattern in cultures of the world has been one in which highly valued public speech genres are symbolically and materially associated with masculinity or certain versions of masculinity. Meek (Chapter 28) argues that women tend to be the primary vector for the transmission of endangered languages and are actively involved in language revitalization. Yet, because this transmission occurs primarily in the private sphere (e.g., homes and preschool immersion programs), women are not positioned as the predominant authorities on the processes of language revitalization. Rather, it is men, associated with highly visible public institutions and bureaucratic attempts to revive endangered languages, who are granted this authority.

That the regulatory force of institutions—or of ideologies embedded in institutions—can be resisted in at least some contexts is a theme developed by Talbot in her chapter (31) on language, gender, and popular culture. As she points out, a Gramscian perspective on popular culture and gender holds that mediated popular cultural forms are involved in securing consent to dominant conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. In contrast to face-to-face interaction, media communication is relatively one-sided and thus has the power to unilaterally construct implied readers or viewers—imaginary addressees who have particular beliefs, values, and interests, that is, particular identities. So, for instance, Talbot's analysis of a feature article in a young women's magazine reveals that the kind of feminine identity constructed for readers is one based on consumption and relationships with men—an identity that Talbot characterizes as unsisterly (Talbot 1995). But what is it that determines whether readers will use these kinds of subject positions in constructing their own identities? Reception studies have shown that readers and viewers do not necessarily consume texts in straightforward or predictable ways. Thus, while Talbot shows that young women's magazines reinforce conventional norms of femininity in order to encourage the consumption of commodities (e.g., cosmetics), she also cites research from Benwell (2005; see also Benwell, Chapter 12 in this volume) and from her own study (Chapter 31 in this volume) of women watching talk shows that attests to the complexity of consumers' practices with respect to media texts.

2.4 Determining when gender is relevant

Central to an ongoing methodological debate within discourse analysis is the question of whose categories—analysts' or participants'—should come to inform the analysis of data. Gender has figured prominently in these debates as a result of a 1997 Discourse & Society article (that provoked a series of other articles, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals) in which Emmanuel Schegloff used the construct of gender to claim that what counts as an explanatory category in a given interaction is that which participants understand to be relevant. In making this argument, Schegloff (1997, 167) seemed to be targeting proponents of critical discourse analysis (CDA) whom he claims display a kind of theoretical imperialism because they allow their own political preoccupations to dominate their analyses. Since there are a multitude of contextual factors potentially relevant to a particular interaction, how does a researcher determine which should be privileged? For a conversational analyst such as Schegloff, without evidence that conversational participants are themselves demonstrably orienting to a feature of the context (such as gender), investigators risk imposing their own a priori analytic and cultural constructs upon interactions.

Stokoe and Attenborough (Chapter 8) believe it is precisely this feature of ethnomethodological approaches like conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) that makes them useful for the study of language and gender. Claims about gender are grounded in participants' orientations rather than in analysts' own assumptions and categories and, for Stokoe and Attenborough, this avoids the a priori theorizing about gender that they suggest is evident in some constructivist work when the (gendered) categories supposedly under investigation are assumed from the outset. Wilkinson and Kitzinger (Chapter 7) make a similar argument about CA: it is able to discover how the social world actually works, rather than reinforcing presuppositions about it. (See also Benwell, Chapter 12.)

It perhaps goes without saying that this ethnomethodological perspective has its critics. As Stokoe and Attenborough (Chapter 8) point out, the question of when gender is relevant or, put differently, how researchers warrant claims about gender is one of the most controversial debates in the field in recent years. Weatherall (2000, 287–288), for example, in a rebuttal to the Schegloff article cited above, argues that gender is a pervasive social category and, as such, is an omnipresent feature of all interactions (see also Wetherell 1998). In a somewhat similar way, Lazar (Chapter 9) suggests gender is always "potentially relevant to an interaction, and Herring and Stoerger (Chapter 29) show us that this potential is realized in mediated online communication in ways starkly reminiscent of the issues arising from the study of gender in face-to-face interaction. That is, even if, as Lazar says an individual's…professional or religious or racial identity is foregrounded in a particular context," the gendering of this professional or religious or racial identity is always a possibility. In contrast to Schegloff who seems to assume that the various dimensions

Reviews for The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What the hell happened to my review? I has a sad. Anyway, this challenges the reductive view of social class linguists all seem to unproblematically swallow (and, implicitly, the simplistic view of language variation held by many non-linguists) by investigating the way sex/gender and class-based approaches to variation are intrinsically incomplete and exclusionary, and then proposes as an alternative to class, a notion of "network" - who do you spend time with? In what relationship? How frequently? How many other people? - that updates the sociological language of class based on money and ill-conceived notions of prestige, and makes class/network a functioning 21st-century concept in ways that go far beyond linguistics. And that's just the Romaine article, which,NB, I USED FOR READING GROUP. DID NOT READ THE WHOLE BOOK.