Gender Language And Culture

This book analyzes the relationship between gender, age and role in Japanese television interviews. It covers a wide range of topics on Japanese communication; cultural and gender variables are interwoven in the interpretation of the findings. The study shows how participants interact through language and how they project their identities in the context of the interview. Based on a qualitative analysis, speech in mixed and same gender interactions is analysed, turntaking, terms of address and aizuchi (listener's responses) are examined. The findings reveal interesting characteristics of all-female interactions, such as the influence of age that appears to be more important than gender; an observation that has repercussions in the study of gender and language differences in modern Japan. This book is an interdisciplinary study that integrates notions of politeness and theories of gender and language, and will be of interest to people researching Japanese culture and communication, gender studies and institutional language.

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman," and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution. Finally, the book proposes that the feminine figures of Orientalist texts are often interwoven with representations of language, and more specifically with representations of language as an alien and resistant code—something other than the transparent medium of ideas. It suggests that in promoting awareness that language is not simply the neutral medium of thought and experience, these veiled figures of language function as "foreign bodies," creating disruptive effects within an economy orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. However, the book also argues against the view, espoused by certain critics, that the self-reflexivity of Orientalist writing fully counteracts its polarizing political effects, arguing instead for a process of "double reading" that acknowledges both the geopolitical power encoded within Orientalist representation and the ways in which specific texts resist this power.

This volume examines important themes in the theoretical debates on the relationship of language and gender. It analyses this relationship across a range of different disciplinary perspectives from linguistics, literary theory, cultural studies and visual analysis. The focus of the book goes beyond an analysis of women's language to discuss the complexities of gendered language with chapters on lesbian poetics, the language of girls and boys and the relationship between gender and genre.

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change is the first book to bring together the topics of language and gender, African languages, and gender in African contexts, and it does so in a descriptive, explanatory and critical way. Including fascinating new work and new, often challenging data from Botswana, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this collection looks at some ‘traditional’ uses of language in relation to the gender of its speakers and the gendered nature of the languages themselves; it also identifies and explores social change in terms of both gender and sexuality, as reflected in and constructed by language and discourse. The contributions to this volume are accessibly written and will be of interest to students and established academics working on African sociolinguistics and discourse, as well as those whose interest is language, gender and sexuality.

This is an up-to-date textbook in the area of language and gender. Mary Talbot examines the language used by women and men in a variety of speech situations and genres.

Approx.394 pages

Most studies of gender differences in language use have been undertaken from exclusively either a sociocultural or a biological perspective. By contrast, this innovative volume places the analysis of language and gender in the context of a biocultural framework, examining both cultural and biological sources of gender differences in language, as well as the interaction between them. The first two parts of the volume on cultural variation in gender-differentiated language use, comparing Western English-speaking societies with societies elsewhere in the world. The essays are distinguished by an emphasis on the syntax, rather than style or strategy, of gender-differentiated forms of discourse but also often carry out the same forms differently through different choices of language form. These gender differences are shown to be socially organized, although the essays in Part I also raise the possibility that some cross-cultural similarities in the ways males and females differentially use language may be related to sex-based differences in physical and emotional makeup. Part III examines the relationship between language and the brain and shows that although there are differences between the ways males and females process language in the brain, these do not yield any differences in linguistic competence or language use. Taken as a whole, the essays reveal a great diversity in the cultural construction of gender through language and explicity show that while there is some evidence of the influence of biologically based sex differences on the language of women and men, the influence of culture is far greater, and gender differences in language use are better accounted for in terms of culture than in terms of biology. The collection will appeal widely to anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and other concerned with the understanding of gender roles.