Bad Examples: Transgression and Progress in Language and Gender Studies

Abstract

Abstract For much of its existence, language and gender research has had an uneasy relation ship with feminist theory. Following an initial flurry of interest in linguistic approaches at the beginning of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist theory retained its concern with language but soon found less inspiration in linguistics than in surrounding disciplines such as philosophy and literary criticism. At the material level, this tension has been manifest in the disproportionately low representation of linguists, broadly defined, in women’s studies programs, conferences, and journals. At the intellectual level, the divide between the two enterprises has been evident until very recently in each field’s relative lack of influence on the development of the other.