Words, Worlds, and Material Girls: Language, Gender, Globalization / Edition 1

by Bonnie S. McElhinny

Overview

This wide-ranging volume explores how gender and language are used and transformed to discuss, enact, and project social differences in light of global economic and political changes in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. It presents analyses of language and gender from a broad spectrum of national contexts: Catalonia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Vietnam, Philippines, Tonga, and the United States.

Cases studies consider language and gender in changing workplaces, schools and immigrant integration workshops, as well as in new and emerging sites for consumption and the production of identity. They also analyze the changing meanings of multilingualism, and the construction of ideologies about gender and language in colonial and postcolonial/national ideologies. The papers engage with and contribute to theoretical conceptualizations of globalization, cosmopolitanism, (post)colonialism, (trans)nationalism, and public spheres by drawing on a variety of sociolinguistic analytic strategies (variation analysis, media analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology of language, colonial discourse analysis).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110195750
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Series:	Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP] , #19
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	460
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bonnie S. McElhinny, University of Toronto, Canada.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Language, gender and economies in global transitions: Provocative and provoking questions about how gender is articulated   Bonnie McElhinny     1
Scattered hegemonies
Symbolically central and materially marginal: Women's talk in a Tongan work group   Susan U. Philips     41
"Re-employment stars": Language, gender and neoliberal restructuring in China   Jie Yang     77
When Aboriginal equals "at risk": The impact of institutional discourse on Aboriginal Head Start families   Susanne Miskimmin     107
Emerging into history
Stage goddesses and studio divas in South India: On agency and the politics of voice   Amanda Weidman     131
Echoes of modernity: Nationalism and the enigma of "women's language" in late nineteenth century Japan   Miyako Inoue     157
Recontextualizing the American occupation of the Philippines: Erasure and ventriloquism in colonial discourse around men, medicine and infant mortality   Bonnie McElhinny     205
Out on video: Gender, language and new public spheres in Islamic Northern Nigeria   Rudolf P. Gaudio     237
Multilingualism, globalization and nationalism
Gender and bilingualism in the new economy   Monica Heller     287
African women in Catalan language courses: Struggles over class, gender and ethnicity in advanced liberalism   JoanPujolar     305
Gender, multilingualism and the American war in Vietnam   Binh Nguyen     349
Commodities and cosmopolitanism
Shop talk: Branding, consumption and gender in American middle-class youth interaction   Mary Bucholtz     371
Cosmopolitanism and linguistic capital in China: Language, gender and the transition to a globalized market economy in Beijing   Qing Zhang     403
Gender and interaction in a globalizing world: Negotiating the gendered self in Tonga   Niko Besnier     423
Subject Index     447
Author Index     454