Researching Gender in Language Use

Abstract

Language and gender research has evolved considerably over the last two decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, through a variety of methodological approaches, researchers demonstrated that language use was gender differentiated. Sociolinguists offered competing theoretical explanations based on power and cross-cultural differences for the variation they found in interaction, and feminists concerned with sexist representations documented considerable bias in the lexicon. From the late 1980s to the present, ethnographic and discourse analytic research in a wide range of contexts has begun to reveal complex relations between language, gender, and power, and to illustrate that gender identity, as one aspect of social identity, is largely discursively constituted. This work demonstrates how our language use can reflect and reproduce dominant relations; it can resist dominant practices in favor of alternatives; or it can create new forms of representation and interaction that challenge and potentially transform the social order.