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This extensive collection of articles is testimony to the continuing topicality and diversity of research in language and gender, spanning a wide range of disciplines, theoretical stances, and methodological approaches and examining gender in a vast variety of linguistic, sociocultural and group-specific contexts. Contributors draw on their backgrounds in linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, psychology, education, and even information science and thus reflect the interdisciplinary nature and appeal of current language and gender debates. The Handbook is unique in its endeavor to represent a wide range of languages and thus contains some in-depth analyses of and a large number of references to languages other than English, including Greek, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Gullah Creole, Guyanese Creole, Bislama, Tongan, Tagalog, Malagasy, Lakhota, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Afrikaans, and Gaelic. This heterogeneity is reinforced by contributions that aim to go beyond a focus on adult, white, heterosexual, middle-class speakers, examining South African gay personal advertisements, the construction of Tongan transgendered identities, or the discursive practices of bilingual Central/Mexican American working-class elementary-school girls and of white Anglo adolescent high-school students from varying social backgrounds. Although the majority of chapters focus on spoken interaction in everyday and in institutional settings, the Handbook also examines grammatical gender and both the construction and the representation of gender in literary and newspaper texts as well as in online communication.
The editors structure the 31 chapters within the five main sections in a way that highlights both common grounds and differences in current language and gender research. On several occasions, one chapter in a section offers an additional or even alternative perspective on a specific issue discussed in the previous chapter, which turns the reading process into an enjoyable and stimulating debate. This thought-provoking effect, however, could have been rendered more accessible, particularly to undergraduate students, if some of these differences and similarities had been commented on explicitly in a brief introduction at the beginning of each section.
After an excellent introductory chapter by Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, the first section provides historical and theoretical background of the field. The opening chapter in this section is Bonnie McElhinny's challenging scene-setter for many of the following contributions. McElhinny problematizes the notions of gender and sex dichotomies, but her discussion of current...