Words, Worlds, and Material Girls: Language, Gender, Globalization

✍ Scribed by Bonnie S. McElhinny (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 460
• Series: Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP]; 19
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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