Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist Perspectives

IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society #29

by Heiko Motschenbacher

This book makes an innovative contribution to the relatively young field of Queer Linguistics. Subscribing to a poststructuralist framework, it presents a critical, deconstructionist perspective on the discursive construction of heteronormativity and gender binarism from a linguistic point of view. On the one hand, the book provides an outline of Queer approaches to issues of language, gender and sexual identity that is of interest to students and scholars new to the field. On the other hand, the empirical analyses of language data represent material that also appeals to experts in the field. The book deals with repercussions of the discursive materialisation of heteronormativity and gender binarism in various kinds of linguistic data. These include stereotypical genderlects, structural linguistic gender categories (especially from a contrastive linguistic point of view), the discursive sedimentation of female and feminine generics, linguistic constructions of the gendered body in adve

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 2010

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this book the 1st monograph on Queer Linguistics.