Description

Despite the rather unoriginal title, Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist perspectives is an extremely original book.One thing that this reviewer greatly appreciated was the author's synchronic and diachronic comparative linguistic approach in order to put gender in a wider perspective, and question the naturalness of gender in any one particular language or at any specific time. Most publications in the field deal with the English language, and studies in other languages have been largely missing from the field sofar. Motschenbacher's work therefore helps to fill this gap. He succeeds at combining structural and post-structural linguistics, as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches, both of which arer are in the field. The Queer perspective of the language as a structural system, as well as how it is used pragmatically, opens up many paths for future research, including breathing a new post-structural life into studies on linguistic sexism. Through methodical and insightful analysis, the author shows just how unstable gender binarisms are. Without necessarily rejecting them wholeheartedly, we are strongly encouraged to question their naturalness as categories, and to see them in the light of their discursive history. All in all, Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist perspectives is a fascinating, cutting edge piece of work, accessible to both newcomers to the field of gender and language as well as experts.