This is an interdisciplinary volume, examining the important themes in the current theoretical debates on language and gender. Comprising chapters from leading linguists, it aims to bring together debate between the areas of linguistics/language studies and literature/literary studies.

List of Contributors AcknowledgementsIntroduction, Sara Mills Section 1: Position Papers: Difference or Dominance 1. Language, gender and career, Jennifer Coates2. Rethinking language and gender studies: some issues for the 1990s, Deborah CameronSection 2: Lesbian Poetics3. Constructing a lesbian poetic for survival, Liz Yorke4. Sappho and the other woman, Margaret Williamson5. `Her wench of bliss: gender and the language of Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack, Deborah Tyler-BennettSection 3: Gender/Genre6. Cyborgs and cyberpunk: rewriting the feminine in popular fiction, Jenny Wolmark7. Claiming the speakwrite: linguistic subversion in the feminist dystopia, Elisabeth MahoneySection 4: Gender, Language and Education8. Feminising classroom talk?, Joan Swann and David Graddol9. Primary school teachers' explanation of boys' disruptiveness in the classroom: a gender-specific aspect of the hidden curriculum, Cleopatra Altani10. `We're boys, miss!': finding gendered identities and looking for gendering of identities in the foreign language classroom, Jane SunderlandSection 5: Gender, Language and Children11. Dominance and communicative incompetence: the speech habits of a group of 8-11 year old boys in a Lebanese rural community, Farida Abu-Haidar12. Voice and gender in children, Alison Lee, Nigel Hewlett and Moray NairnSection 6: Language Media/Visual Analysis and Gender13. Feminism, language and the rhetoric of TV wildlife programmes, Barbara Crowther and Dick Leith14. Man in the news: the misrepresentation of women speaking in news-as-narrative-discourse, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard15. Commonplaces: the woman in the street: text and gender in the work of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Helen Mills Conclusions, Sara MillsBibliographyIndex