Heiko Motschenbacher

This book advances the theorization of normativity as a key concept in language and sexuality studies, bringing together some of the author’s previous work with new material for a comprehensive exploration of the influence of normativity on the relationship between language and sexuality. The first section of the book outlines fundamental areas of inquiry in language and sexuality studies today, with a focus on queer linguistic inquiry, and elucidates the book’s theoretical frameworks around normativity. Chapters in the section reflect on the ways in which normativity shapes sexuality-related language, how language is employed to convey sexual normativities and queer linguistic challenges for the use of research methods in the discipline through a discussion of their implementation in corpus linguistics. The second part of the book builds on these theoretical foundations by featuring seven case studies that illustrate a diverse range of methods and language data, with a concluding chapter considering the implications of their findings for furthering theoretical debates and future research on normativity in language and sexuality studies. This volume will be of interest to scholars in language and sexuality, language and gender, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Corpus-Based Evidence

Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity

Doing Gender als Strategie der Werbesprache

"Women and men like different things"?

This comprehensive, state-of-the-art bibliography documents the most recent research activity in the vibrant field of language, gender and sexuality. It provides experts in the field and students in tertiary education with access to language-centred resources on gender and sexuality and is, therefore, an ideal research companion. The main part of the bibliography lists 3,454 relevant publications (monographs, edited volumes, journal articles and contributions to edited volumes) that have been published within the period from 2000 to 2011. It unites work done in linguistics with that of neighbouring disciplines, covering studies dealing with a broad range of languages and cultures around the globe. Alphabetical listing and a keyword index facilitate finding relevant work by author and subject matter. The e-book version additionally enables users to search the entire document for specific terms. Sections on earlier bibliographies and general reference works on language, gender and sexuality complete the compilation.

An Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Language, Gender and Sexuality (2000-2011)

Hadumod Bussmann

Marlis Hellinger

This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and its follow-up volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 1: Arabic, Belizean Creole, Eastern Maroon Creole, English (American, New Zealand, Australian), Hebrew, Indonesian, Romanian, Russian, Turkish.

The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men

Gender Across Languages

This is the fourth volume of a comprehensive reference work which provides systematic descriptions of the manifestations of gender in languages of diverse areal, typological and socio-cultural affiliations. To the 30 languages already analysed in previous volumes, Vol. 4 adds another 12 languages whose gendered structures have received little or no academic attention in the past. Again, the collection includes a broad spectrum of languages: It contains languages with and without grammatical gender, a language with noun classification and a classifier language; larger national languages as well as smaller languages with minority status; and, of course, members of diverse language families, i.e. Indo-European as well as Finno-Ugrian, Iroquois, Tai-Kadai and Niger-Congo. The volume illustrates the tremendous variation found in the area of gender representation across languages. At the same time, it will provide the much-needed material required for an explicitly comparative approach to linguistic manifestations of gender.

Volume 4

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 advertising and the usage of personal reference forms to create characters in Queer Cinema. Throughout the book, readers become aware of the wounding potential that gendered linguistic forms may possess in certain contexts.

Poststructuralist Perspectives

Language, Gender and Sexual Identity

This book focuses on linguistic practices of identity construction in a popular culture media context, the Eurovision Song Contest. Subscribing to a normativity-based approach to critical discourse analysis, it studies Europeanisation as it surfaces at the discursive interface of European, national and sexual identities in Eurovision lyrics and performances. Research in critical discourse analysis that deals with Europeanisation, or the discursive work involved in European identity formation, has so far mainly studied data from EU political contexts that illustrate a top-down approach to what Europeanness means. The present book complements this earlier research in several ways, focusing on the linguistic construction of identities, and its interrelation with non-linguistic modes of signification in the Eurovision Song Contest. Discursive mechanisms that prove to be central for the normative shifts of Europeanisation in the given context are de-essentialisation, inclusion, camp, crossing and languaging.

Heiko Motschenbacher

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