Mary Talbot - Language and Gender

Third Edition

MARY TALBOT

polity

Copyright Mary Talbot 2020

The right of Mary Talbot to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3012-0

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talbot, Mary M., 1954- author.
Title: Language and gender / Mary Talbot.
Description: Third edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006573 (print) | LCCN 2019008204 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530120 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509530090 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509530106 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Sex differences.
Classification: LCC P120.S48 (ebook) | LCC P120.S48 T35 2019 (print) | DDC 306.4/4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006573

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Language and Gender first appeared in 1998. The opportunity to produce a third edition has been a challenge, but a very welcome one. The field has continued to be vibrant. In constant development, it has seen significant shifts since the books initial publication twenty years ago. The content and format of the original evolved from teaching in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the time it presented the field at its most up to date. It was certainly the first book of its kind to examine men and masculinities. If I were writing a book such as this from scratch, would I approach it differently? Yes, of course I would. I certainly wouldnt include a chapter on masculinities focusing solely on cis-gender men, for example.

What I have done for this volume is integrate new perspectives and research with established work, which allowed me to maintain the important historical overview. The historical perspective gives necessary background for an understanding of more recent, theoretically challenging developments.

For the second edition I engaged with key new advances in the field, largely by producing two entirely new chapters. One of these examined gender and sexuality, focusing on heternormativity and resistance. For this new edition, I have added to it some attention to transgender in its coverage of LGBTQ issues. The other new chapter for the second edition dealt with public talk, particularly in politics and the workplace. As well as updating the chapters coverage generally for this new edition, I have incorporated attention to the worrying onslaught of online misogyny. Of course, many of the issues that the book addresses merit chapters indeed books on their own, but in this introduction to the field that would be impossible, owing to constraints of space. In an attempt to compensate for this necessarily limited coverage, I indicate sources providing greater detail in the Further Reading sections for each chapter.

Thanks to Angela Smith, Michelle Lazar and Lucy Coleman for their help and support. Im also grateful for the useful suggestions of two anonymous reviewers. Thanks, too, to British cartoonist Jo Nesbitt, for her 1979 postcard that inspired the Its a lesbian! cartoon in .

Cartoons by Alwyn Talbot.

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

Janet Holmes, Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence: Some evidence for hedges as support structures, Te Reo 27: 4762 (1984).

Judith Baxter, Speaking Out (2006) Palgrave Macmillan.

Susan Ehrlich, The discursive reconstruction of sexual consent, Discourse & Society 9(2): 14972 (1998).

Gender is an important division in all societies. It is of enormous significance to human beings. Being born male or female has far-reaching consequences for an individual. It affects how we act in the world and how the world treats us. This includes the language we use and the language used about us. I want this book to make you more conscious of the social category of gender, of the divisions made on the basis of it and, not least, of the part language plays in establishing and sustaining these divisions.

Politically, this books agenda is feminist. Feminism is a form of politics dedicated to bringing about social changes, and ultimately to arresting the reproduction of systematic inequalities between men and women. Feminist interest in language and gender resides in the complex part language plays, alongside other social practices and institutions, in reflecting, creating and sustaining gender divisions in society. It is this role played by language that is the subject of this book. Examining it will involve us in a wide range of issues, from expectations about how women and men ought to speak to restrictions on womens access to public forms of talk, the division of conversational labour among couples, representations of masculinity and femininity in the mass media, and much more besides.

, Preliminaries: Airing Stereotypes and Early Models, looks at some early work on sex differences in language use and at stereotypes about women. Its three chapters provide a grounding in early work in the field and its central, but problematic, distinction between sex and gender.