Sally Johnson & Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (eds.), Language and masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Pp. x, 244.

Abstract

This book calls attention to an area of language and gender research that has been too long overlooked. Most studies in the field have centered either on women or on comparative analyses of women's and men's linguistic practices, while relatively few have focused primarily on the language use of men and boys. Such an enterprise is fraught with political peril, since feminists may object that making men more central to language and gender studies necessarily detracts attention from the study of women. However, as an invisible norm, masculinity frames the gendered lives of women as well as men. The study of language and masculinity is therefore a vital part of the feminist linguistic project – linked to the study of other categories rendered normative, and hence invisible to scrutiny, such as whiteness and heterosexuality. Although Language and masculinity gives little attention to the question of how the processes of racialization and gender are mutually constituted, two chapters explore the construction of heterosexuality as part of the project of normative masculinity. While the book focuses primarily on white middle-class English speakers, it includes a wide range of national contexts, genres, and social groups, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches.