Introduction

Abstract

This book has its origins in my interest in the relations between language and people’s sense of self and the world. The underlying idea of the volume is that language mediates reality by enabling and constraining individuals’ understandings of the reality, as well as the actions which follow from them. The awareness of the relations is accompanied by my concern with language itself — its meaning-mediating mechanisms and capabilities. Added to this curiosity, there is another vital object of the current exploration — gender. Much of what people think and do is connected to the ways in which they see themselves as women and men. Pertinent to both the language that individuals use and the notion of gender they develop is their exposure to media, especially given the media’s overbearing presence in the contemporary world. Because of their pervasiveness, the media accompany people’s everyday lives unheeded, similarly to language, which mediates human thoughts and actions basically unnoticed, and similarly to the gender binaries, which are taken for granted as the axiomatic categories of human ontology. It is usually seen as obvious that we use language, we are born men and women (and live accordingly), and that we are accompanied by a continuous stream of media-generated information and stimulation.