Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of language and gender has increasingly become the study of discourse and gender. While phonological, lexical, and other kinds of linguistic analysis continue to be influential, the interdisciplinary investigation of discourse-level phenomena, always a robust area of language and gender scholarship, has become the central approach of the field. It is some indication of the impact of discourse analysis that no fewer than four books treating the topic of language and gender share the title Gender and Discourse (Cheshire and Trudgill 1998; Tannen 1994a; Todd and Fisher 1988; Wodak 1997a). In addition, hundreds of books, articles, and dissertations in numerous disciplines examine the intersection between discourse and gender from a variety of analytic perspectives. This proliferation of research presents problems for any attempt at a comprehensive overview, for although many of these studies are explicitly framed as drawing on the insights of discourse analysis, their approaches are so different that it is impossible to offer a unified treatment of discourse analysis as a tool for the study of language and gender. Hence there is no well-defined approach to discourse that can be labeled “feminist discourse analysis”; indeed, not all approaches to gender and discourse are feminist in their orientation, nor is there a single form of feminism to which all feminist scholars subscribe.The ... log in or subscribe to read full text