The handbook of language and gender

Extract

Janet Holmes & Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The handbook of language and gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 776. Pb $44.95.

This extensive collection of articles is testimony to the continuing topicality and diversity of research in language and gender, spanning a wide range of disciplines, theoretical stances, and methodological approaches and examining gender in a vast variety of linguistic, sociocultural and group-specific contexts. Contributors draw on their backgrounds in linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, psychology, education, and even information science and thus reflect the interdisciplinary nature and appeal of current language and gender debates. The Handbook is unique in its endeavor to represent a wide range of languages and thus contains some in-depth analyses of and a large number of references to languages other than English, including Greek, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Gullah Creole, Guyanese Creole, Bislama, Tongan, Tagalog, Malagasy, Lakhota, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Afrikaans, and Gaelic. This heterogeneity is reinforced by contributions that aim to go beyond a focus on adult, white, heterosexual, middle-class speakers, examining South African gay personal advertisements, the construction of Tongan transgendered identities, or the discursive practices of bilingual Central/Mexican American working-class elementary-school girls and of white Anglo adolescent high-school students from varying social backgrounds. Although the majority of chapters focus on spoken interaction in everyday and in institutional settings, the Handbook also examines grammatical gender and both the construction and the representation of gender in literary and newspaper texts as well as in online communication.