Full Description
This volume aims to demonstrate that the centre/periphery tension allows for a theory of gender understood as a power relationship with implications for a political analysis of language structures, language uses and linguistic resistances. All of the 12 chapters included in this volume work on understudied languages such as Moldovan, Lakota, Cantonese, Bajjika, Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Ciluba, Cantonese, Cypriot Greek, Korean, Malaysian, Basque and Belarusian and they all explore from the margins different dimensions of social gender in grammar. The diversity of languages is reflected in the range of theoretical frameworks (linguistic anthropology, systemic functional linguistics, contrastive syntactical analysis to name a few) used by the authors in order to apprehend the fluidity of gender(-ed) language and identity, to highlight the social constraints on daily discourse and to identify discourses that resist gender norms. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers working on the interface of gender with morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.
Contents
1. Periphery, gender, language: An introduction (by Abbou, Julie); 2. I. Undoing grammatical gender; 3. Trying to change a gender-marked language: Classical vs. Modern Hebrew (by Muchnik, Malka); 4. Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic (by Guellouz, Mariem); 5. A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics: Initial considerations (by Motschenbacher, Heiko); 6. A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality: Semiotic and structural categorisation of gender in Hong Kong Cantonese (by Abbou, Julie); 7. Gender bias in Bantu languages: The Case of Ciluba (L31) (by Crequi Ngoyi Tshimanga, Francis); 8. The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse (by Kumar Kashyap, Abhishek); 9. The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction and the semantics of its constituents in English and Belarusian (by Turchynskaya, Maryia); 10. II. Intersectional peripheries; 11. When She and He become It: The use of grammatical gender in the Greek of the Armenians of Cyprus (by Hadjidemetriou, Chryso); 12. Lakota men's and women's speech: Gender, metapragmatic discourse, and language revitalization (by Nelson, Jessica Fae); 13. "Moldovan" and feminist language politics: Two distinct peripheral linguistic markets (by Weirich, Anna Christine); 14. Eastern boys and girls! Comparative linguistic anthropologies of lesbian and gay communities, Kuala Lumpur and Sorwool (by Hadzantonis, Michael Dimitrios); 15. Harlots and whores but not lovers: Dressing down the pronoun for a female addressee in a Basque Old Testament (by Echeverria, Begona); 16. About the contributors; 17. Language index; 18. Name index; 19. Subject index
