Language and Sex (UC Berkeley 2013)

Impact: Studies in language and society impact publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics

Impact: Studies in language and society impact publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics

Some of the most salient inroads made by American second-wave feminists revolved around language. The 1970s saw changes in the lexicon to accommodate and promote gender equality: from the invention and mainstreaming of "Ms." to the promotion of gender-neutral vocational terminology such as "flight attendant" and "postal worker:' Perhaps even more significantlYi second-wave feminists worked to call attention to and stigmatize harmful patterns of linguistic interaction: "sexual harassment" became a problematic category of behavior rather than a diffuse set of playful practicesi sexist jokes, and especially rape jokes, took on a timbre of seriousness that counteracted their seeming frivolity (Gavey 2005). Second-wave feminists argued and convincingly demonstrated that language was important, both as a mechanism of sexism and as a tool for combatting it.

In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, 2016

This chapter calls for an embodied sociolinguistics—or, more precisely, an embodied sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz & Hall 2008). Drawing on scholarship from a variety of approaches that contribute to this interdisciplinary field, we discuss work on embodiment that centers on several important analytic areas: the voice; the bodily semiotics of style and self-presentation; discourses and counterdiscourses of the body; embodied motion, action, and experience; and the mediation of embodiment by material objects and technologies. In the five realms we examine, we consider in particular how a focus on bodies broadens sociocultural linguists’ understanding of the key concepts of indexicality, discourse, and agency. Recognizing that these and other core concepts are both material and linguistic is crucial to the ongoing development of sociocultural linguistics as a fully embodied field of inquiry.

Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2009

In this paper I address issues related to translation from a disciplinary (linguistic) and an interdisciplinary perspective. I theorize translation as a process of travelling between a) languages and b) disciplines. In my discussion of translation as a travelling between languages, I address questions about language as a medium of constituting social reality and shaping experience. Here, I examine how words are related to different conceptualizations across different languages and argue that this linguistic and social context of concepts must be made visible and problematized in processes of translation. To illustrate the need for a reflexive engagement with this issue, I explore two case studies: the different conceptualizations related to various translations of ‘gender; and the sexism embedded in, and reproduced through the use of grammatical gender in Greek. In addition, I claim that the metaphor of translation can be productively used to problematize the travelling of concepts between disciplines. I demonstrate this through a focus on processes of reception, integration and expansion of meanings between linguistics and feminist philosophy and I examine the ways in which the concept of performativity has undergone a process of conceptual translation. Finally, I raise issues of politics and power associated with translation practices.

2010

Genre en séries, 2019

“Vulgarity” is a term that may refer to what is offensive, coarse or unrefined, and therefore necessarily appeals to subjective criteria; vulgarity is in this sense intrinsically ideological. This article explores how vulgarity may be expressed linguistically. Analysis centers on the use of syntactic and lexical markers, as well as two prosodic markers: creaky voice and the High Rising Terminal contour (HRT). The corpus is composed of scenes from an episode of NBC’s television series Parks and Recreation (season 6, episode 4). The linguistic markers are used humorously in order to create a frivolous, oblivious female character thanks to a strategy of feigned accommodation. It is suggested that this occurs because several markers are both likely to be stigmatized, and because they may be perceived as intrinsically female.