Words, Worlds, and Material Girls

Bonnie S. McElhinny, Bonnie S. McElhinny

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9783110198805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This wide-ranging volume explores how gender and language are used and transformed to discuss, enact, and project social differences in light of global economic and political changes in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. It presents analyses of language and gender from a broad spectrum of national contexts: Catalonia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Vietnam, Philippines, Tonga, and the United States.

Cases studies consider language and gender in changing workplaces, schools and immigrant integration workshops, as well as in new and emerging sites for consumption and the production of identity. They also analyze the changing meanings of multilingualism, and the construction of ideologies about gender and language in colonial and postcolonial/national ideologies. The papers engage with and contribute to theoretical conceptualizations of globalization, cosmopolitanism, (post)colonialism, (trans)nationalism, and public spheres by drawing on a variety of sociolinguistic analytic strategies (variation analysis, media analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology of language, colonial discourse analysis).

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction. Language, gender and economies in global transitions: Provocative and provoking questions about how gender is articulated
• Chapter 1. Symbolically central and materially marginal: Women’s talk in a Tongan work group
• Chapter 2. “Re-employment stars”: Language, gender and neoliberal restructuring in China
• Chapter 3. When Aboriginal equals “at risk”: The impact of an institutional keyword on Aboriginal Head Start families
• Chapter 4. Stage goddesses and studio divas in South India: On agency and the politics of voice
• Chapter 5. Echoes of modernity: Nationalism and the enigma of “women’s language” in late nineteenth century Japan
• Chapter 6. Recontextualizing the American occupation of the Philippines: Erasure and ventriloquism in colonial discourse around men, medicine and infant mortality
• Chapter 7. Out on video: Gender, language and new public spheres in Islamic Northern Nigeria
• Chapter 8. Gender and bilingualism in the new economy
• Chapter 9. African women in Catalan language courses: Struggles over class, gender and ethnicity in advanced liberalism
• Chapter 10. Gender, multilingualism and the American war in Vietnam
• Chapter 11. Shop talk: Branding, consumption, and gender in American middle-class youth interaction
• Chapter 12. Cosmopolitanism and linguistic capital in China: Language, gender and the transition to a globalized market economy in Beijing
• Chapter 13. Gender and interaction in a globalizing world: Negotiating the gendered self in Tonga
• Backmatter