Abstract
The extensive research work of Jennifer Coates on language and gender has produced many publications that can today be considered essential reading. Taking the standpoint of sociolinguistics and socio-cultural linguistics, Coates’ central argument is that ‘gender plays a significant role in the construction of the linguistic landscape of our everyday lives’ (p. 1). This book gathers some of her key papers, with the general aim of providing ‘an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years’ (p. 1). Most especially, it traces the important theoretical changes that the field has undergone, from a search for stable ‘gender differences’ in talk to a much more dynamic constructivist/performative framework in which the focus is on gendered discourses. With a particular emphasis on conversational data and on single-sex groups, the book constitutes an excellent analysis of the role of everyday talk in the construction of a gendered society.
Part I, which discusses language in all-female groups, illustrates especially clearly the shift towards performativity. Earlier chapters take a gender difference perspective to describe ‘women’s stories’ (Chapter 1) or the use of hedges in ‘women’s talk’ (Chapter 2), while others (Chapters 3–5) are more concerned with the discursive performance of a gendered self, including the analysis of ways of speaking as ideologically loaded representations of femininity, in line with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In general, these chapters underline how female speakers support, challenge and resist dominant discourses of femininity, sometimes in conflicting ways. This leads to the emergence of ‘tensions and contradictions’ that are interpreted, following Weedon (1987), as a reflection of the fact that ‘we are unwittingly involved in the ceaseless struggle to define gender’ (p. 76).
Alternative versions of masculinity or subversive discourses are similarly emphasized in some of the chapters on language in all-male groups (Part II), though to a lesser extent. From a gender difference perspective, Chapter 6 argues on the preference for a one-at-a-time floor in men’s talk, in contrast to the collaborative floor that is often constructed in women’s talk. The other chapters in this part draw on the analysis of conversational narrative. Chapter 7 stresses the role of stories of achievement in reproducing conventional masculinity. Chapter 8 is about the telling of stories in sequence as a form of expressing male solidarity. Finally, Chapter 9 focuses on the display of heterosexual masculinity, including data from mixed talk to highlight homophobic and misogynistic talk, but also the boasting function of men’s stories in front of women, and interactional processes such as collaborative narration involving heterosexual couples.
Part III deals with gendered talk in other contexts, comprising Chapter 10 on the marginalization of discursive styles associated with women in the professional domain, Chapter 11 on the general functions of humour in informal conversation and its role in the display of masculinity and femininity, and Chapter 12 on turn-taking patterns in deaf conversation, demonstrating that a collaborative floor is also possible in these contexts, even if gender differences similar to those noted in Chapter 6 tend to emerge.
The single chapter in Part IV turns away from empirical analyses to focus specifically on the changing theoretical frameworks in the field of language and gender. Its main concern is with the problem of binarism, which was widely criticized in relation to the search for gender differences in talk; nevertheless, Coates argues that binarism is unavoidable and inherent in the gender ideologies central to more current performative approaches.
The book collects highly valuable empirical contributions that have helped, from the 1980s onwards, to understand gender and to raise consciousness of its significant role in everyday talk. But while the chapters it contains unquestionably reflect some fundamental changes in language and gender research over the past 30 years, they fail to address or even mention some key theoretical and methodological issues. For instance, recent trends in Conversation Analysts have problematized the ways in which performativity studies establish connections between local meanings and macro-social categories such as gender, criticizing that they rely heavily on ‘analysts assumptions about what the speakers are doing rather than on what the speakers display to each other as relevant to their conversational business’ (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006: 57). Theoretical debates in this field are now more centred on whether analysts should ‘accept that social categories need to be observably and explicitly salient for participants in order to be considered relevant in their analyses’ (Holmes, 2007: 54) rather than on the problem of binarism, though this issue remains unexplored by Coates. More generally speaking, the book often seems to identify ‘language and gender research’ exclusively with sociolinguistics, ignoring or minimizing other approaches to discourse, and therefore missing the increasingly interdisciplinary nature that language and gender research has acquired over the years.
Despite these limitations, this book constitutes essential reading for any researcher interested in gender and discourse, and especially in gender and spoken interaction. The highly accessible style in which it is written and the great number of conversational extracts that are analysed throughout its pages make it an excellent resource for the teaching of courses on Discourse Analysis and Language and Gender to both undergraduate and postgraduate students.