Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

Oftentimes, critical examinations of oppression solely focus on one type and neglect others. In this single volume, Pierre Orelus examines the way various forms of oppression, such as racism, classism, capitalism, sexism, and linguicism (linguistic discrimination) operate and limit the life chances people, across various race, class, language, and gender lines, have. Utilizing dialogue as a form of inquiry, Pierre Orelus conducts in-depth interviews carried over the course of two years with committed social justice educators and intellectuals from different fields and foci to examine the way and the extent to which these forms of oppression have profoundly affected the subjectivity and material conditions of women, poor working-class people, queer people, students of color, female faculty and faculty of color. This book presents a novel and critical perspective on race, social class, gender, and language issues echoed through authentic, collective, and dissident voices of these educators and intellectuals.

'Here be dragons' was the traditional warning used by ancient mapmakers to indicate dangerous, or simply unknown, lands. These were the dwelling places of fantastical beasts, creatures such as dragons, sea serpents, unicorns, griffins and mermaids. Throughout the ages, such beasts have been viewed in complex and contradictory ways because they embody both our fear and our fascination of the unpredictable natural world around us. They appear in the earliest myths and accompany the heroes of medieval romance and folktales. Whether as the symbolic creatures of myth, or as the marvellous beasts of medieval legend and travellers' tales, fantastic animals have always inspired art and literature. Today they feature among the many marvels that populate the alternative worlds of fantasy and the outer reaches of cyberspace. Drawing on sources as diverse as myth, history and folklore, this book explores the ways in which mythical beasts continue to inhabit our fantasies and to define our constantly changing relationship to both real and imagined worlds.

From imaginary numbers to the fourth dimension and beyond, mathematics has always been about imagining things that seem impossible at first glance. In x+y, Eugenia Cheng draws on the insights of higher-dimensional mathematics to reveal a transformative new way of talking about the patriarchy, mansplaining and sexism: a way that empowers all of us to make the world a better place. Using precise mathematical reasoning to uncover everything from the sexist assumptions that make society a harder place for women to live to the limitations of science and statistics in helping us understand the link between gender and society, Cheng's analysis replaces confusion with clarity, brings original thinking to well worn arguments - and provides a radical, illuminating and liberating new way of thinking about the world and women's place in it.

Ever since the uprisings that swept the Arab world, the role of Arab women in political transformations received unprecedented media attention. The copious commentary, however, has yet to result in any serious study of the gender dynamics of political upheaval. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance is the first book to analyse the interplay between moments of sociopolitical transformation, emerging subjectivities and the different modes of women's agency in forging new gender norms in the Arab world. Written by scholars and activists from the countries affected, including Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, this is an important addition to Middle Eastern gender studies.

Testing second language listening proficiency validly and reliably has always posed a challenge. In the days before the widespread availability of recorded material, tests were reliant upon the voice of the examiner. Each test administration was a unique phonetic event, with enormous variations of delivery between examiners and even within the performance of a single examiner on different occasions. The presentation was read-aloud, and the texts chosen were often those that had been written to be read (including literary extracts). The resulting input to test takers bore little resemblance to natural connected speech.

This collection of original research highlights the legacy of Michael Toolan’s pioneering contributions to the field of stylistics and in so doing provides a critical overview of the ways in which language, text, and context are analyzed in the field and its related disciplines. Featuring work from an international range of contributors, the book illustrates how the field of stylistics has evolved in the 25 years since the publication of Toolan’s seminal Language, Text and Context, which laid the foundation for the analysis of the language and style in literary texts. The volume demonstrates how technological innovations and the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies, including those from corpus, cognitive, and multimodal stylistics, point to the greater degree of interplay between language, text, and context exemplified in current research and how this dynamic relationship can be understood by featuring examples from a variety of texts and media. Underscoring the significance of Michael Toolan’s extensive work in the field in the evolution of literary linguistic research, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in stylistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

This interdisciplinary collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western assumptions. The diverse studies in AsiaPacifiQueer demonstrate convincingly that in the realm of sexualities, globalization results in creative and cultural admixture rather than a unilateral imposition of the western values and forms of sexual culture. These essays range across the Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression, examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and magazines, and historical studies. By investigating complex processes of localization, interregional borrowing, and hybridization, the contributors underscore the mutual transformation of gender and sexuality in both Asian Pacific and Western cultures. Contributors are Ronald Baytan, J. Neil C. Garcia, Kam Yip Lo Lucetta, Song Hwee Lim, J. Darren Mackintosh, Claire Maree, Jin-Hyung Park, Teri Silvio, Megan Sinnott, Yik Koon Teh, Carmen Ka Man Tong, James Welker, Heather Worth, and Audrey Yue.

Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation. The volume is organized into sections focused on activism and activists, employment and education, literature and the arts, and boundary crossing. Some chapters shed light on ideas and practices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typically been considered feminist; others revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to complicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs. The chapters are contextualized by an introduction that offers historical background on feminisms in Japan, and a forward-looking conclusion that considers what it means to rethink Japanese feminism at this historical juncture. Building on more than four decades of scholarship on feminisms in Japanese and English, as well as decades more on women's history, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a diverse and multivocal approach to scholarship on Japanese feminisms unmatched by existing publications. Written in language accessible to students and non-experts, it will be at home in the hands of students and scholars, as well as activists and others interested in gender, sexuality, and feminist theory and activism in Japan and in Asia more broadly.