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from the Preface

As the inaugural volume of Studies in Language and Gender, Reinventing Identities offers a broad vision of what the field of language and gender studies will look like in the new millennium.

Reinventing Identities is as wide-ranging as gender itself, which takes on new and surprising forms in new contexts. The volume emerges from what might be called the "third wave" of language and gender scholarship. The goal of this new approach is to understand the diversity of gendered experiences as they play out in a variety of situations. Third-wave language and gender research makes explicit its connections to feminist theory; of particular significance are those constructionist perspectives that emphasize how gender identities and ideologies are achieved in discourse.

But this approach does not examine language to the exclusion of other social practices, such as physical self-presentation, gesture and movement, and activities. Such details are crucial for arriving at specific, local forms of gender, in contrast to approaches that aim for a general description of "women's use of language." Reinventing Identities counters this well-intentioned but reductive strategy with a series of studies of gender on the ground, formed under conditions of community and contact, shaped moment by moment through the details of discourse.

This undoing of a single unified tale of language and gender is the first step to envisioning new forms of feminist scholarship within linguistics.

To begin, please select an item from the Table of Contents.

This web site was designed by Rose Coste (rcoste@tamu.edu).

Send comments or questions to Mary Bucholtz at bucholtz@linguistics.ucsb.edu.
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