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Gender and Sexual Identities in Transition: International Perspectives
Editor: José Santaemilia and Patricia Bou
Date Of Publication: Sep 2008
Isbn13: 9781847186683
Isbn: 1-84718-668-8
The aim of this volume is to offer an international panorama of gendered and sexualised experiences, with new and original data collected from a variety of cultural settings and sociopolitical contexts. We look at many parts of the world (Japan, Sweden, Poland, Cyprus, Spain, US, Australia, Canada, Hungary) with different assumptions and expectations, often revealing various research practices and traditions. Gendered or sexualized discourses are unstable constructions, in permanent transition, in a perpetual struggle to gain social legitimacy and to counter the workings of opposite discourses. They constitute privileged vantage points from which one can observe and judge power relationships. New identities are created and reproduced, refused and challenged.

This volume explores, among other issues, the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity in Evangelical universities; the pharmaceutical industry’s promotion of biometaphors involving a shopping strategy which revolves around compulsory heterosexuality; the perpetuation of Greek-Cypriot men’s sexual superiority over women; the Catholic Church's attempt to impose a restrictive view of religion and of sexual ethics; the consolidation of American TV shopping channels as a setting where middle-class femininity and consumption are linked stereotypically; the negotiation of gender- and sex-related norms in groups of British Bangladeshi girls. Even heterosexuality, as the unmarked form of sexual identity and the primary site for the reproduction of gender difference, needs to reassert its normative and prescriptive status, maybe through the silent workings of tradition. By suggesting the concept of transition, we resist seeing the idea of identity as a fixed and definitive category. Gender and sexual identities are never at rest. One is never finished developing into a woman or a man, or any other gender/sexual identity.

Contributors include: Joan Pujolar, Andrea Simon-Maeda, Allyson Jule, Stina Ericsson, Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Joanna Pawelczyk, Nóra Schleicher, Elli Doukanari, Pilar Garcés-Conejos, Lidia Tanaka, José Santaemilia and Pia Pichler.

The editors are Associate Professors of English Language and Linguistics at the Universitat de València. José Santaemilia has edited Género, lenguaje y traducción (Valencia, 2003) and Gender, sex and translation: The manipulation of identities (Manchester, 2005), and his main research interests are gender/sex, language and translation. Patricia Bou has edited Ways into Discourse (Granada, 2006) and coedited Pragmática, discurso y sociedad (Valencia, 2007), and her research interests concern social and intercultural pragmatics.

"This thought-provoking collection presents a culturally diverse range of new research which examines the dynamic relationship between language, gender and sexual identities. It makes a genuine contribution to the internationalisation of research in this area, encompassing many different languages, and both global and localised identities. This book provides valuable new material for language and gender courses, as well as a stimulating resource for scholars in this area."

Professor Janet Holmes, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand

"Jose Santaemilia and Patricia Bou have produced a refreshingly, genuinely international collection of papers on language, gender and sexuality. This refers not only to the cultural diversity of the contributors but also to their topics: while some of the reported work is set in hitherto under-explored (for the language and gender field) contexts, other work reported is truly global."

Jane Sunderland, Director of Studies, PhD in Applied Linguistics by Thesis and Coursework and New Route

"I would like to endorse the volume which Jose Santaemilia and Patricia Bou are editing on Gender and sexual identities in transition: International Perspectives, with Cambridge Scholars Press. This seems to me a timely publication, with a good range of languages and cultural contexts addressed. This book will range over Hungary, Japan, Western and Eastern Europe, Greek, and will thus set the research on American and British usage in perspective. Gender and language studies have moved from considering male and female differences to examining gender in a more complex way, and this volume certainly reflects that more complex concern with the way identity is constituted through language. This volume indicates that it is not concerned to esentialise identity but will rather see identity as something acieved within talk, and as such is tapping into the current research field. I am sure that this volume will add greatly to the current research in this field."

Professor Sara Mills, Sheffield Hallam University

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