• News

    Language and Gender 3rd edition – now available!

    The new edition of my book on gender and language came out today. Here’s what I have to say about it on the publisher’s blog (I’m pasting it in here, as it’s not  functioning properly…):

    Language and Gender, 3rd Edition

    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 book’s 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 wouldn’t 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 chapter’s 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.

    On the whole, a productive year…

    “It’s a lesbian!”

     

     

    Cartoon by Alwyn Talbot

     

  • News

    Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality

    Handbook coverAlso out this month is a rather different sort of publication that I’ve contributed to. It’s the second edition of an enormous reference tome for students and scholars of gender, sexuality and language. If it’s anything like the first edition, the contributions will all be highly readable scholarship with global reach and relevance. And it’s a snip at £120!

    The book is The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality and it’s edited by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes.

    My contribution is Chapter 31 Language, Gender and Popular Culture. It contains sections on Popular culture; Magazines, friendship and community; Broadcast talk, gendered styles and professional identities; Talking with the television; Creative engagement: putting gender on the agenda. The last section focuses on cartoons and comics and draws examples from Posy Simmonds and, briefly, from my own Dotter of her Father’s Eyes. Well, fancy that!