Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism Women, Language and Sexism Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics Series

Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism brings together an outstanding collection of essays from internationally recognised researchers to recontextualise some of the questions raised by feminist thinkers 40 years ago. By taking linguistically mediated violence as a central topic, this collection?s main objective is to explore the different and subtle ways sexism and violence are materialised in discursive practices. In doing so, this book:

• Takes a multi-stranded investigation into the linguistic and semiotic representations of sexism in societies from an applied linguistic and semiotic perspective;
• Combines critical discourse analysis, multimodality, interactional sociolinguistics and corpus methodologies to look at language, visuals and semiotic resources in the context of consumerist culture;
• Examines the conflicted position of women and the discourses of discrimination that still exist in every strand of modern societies;
• Contextualises pervasive gender issues and reviews key gender and language topics that changed the ways we interpret interaction from the early 1970s until the present;
• Focuses on institutional discourses and the questions of how women are excluded or discriminated against in the workplace, the law and educational contexts.

Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism revisits the initial questions posed by the first feminist linguists ? where, when and how are women discriminated against and why, in postmodern societies, is there so much sexism in all realms of social life? This book is essential reading for those studying and researching gender across a wide range of disciplines.

List of illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Preface - Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Part I

Language, discourse and gender violence

1. Women, language and public discourse: five decades of sexism and scrutiny

Alice F. Freed

2. The gender respect gap

Deborah Cameron

3. The transgressive, the traditional: sexist discourses of grandmothering and ageing

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Rosamund Moon

4. Disco divas and heroic knights: a critical multimodal analysis of gender roles in "create the world" LEGO cards

Jai Mackenzie, Laura Coffey-Glover, Sophie Payne, Mark McGlashan

5. Sexual harassment as reported by the Brazilian press: ambivalent and contradictory framings

Branca Telles Ribeiro and Liliana Cabral Bastos

Part II

Sexism and institutional discourses

6. "Until I got a man in he wouldn't listen": evidence for the gender order in New Zealand workplaces

Janet Holmes

7. Sexism and mediatised recontextualisations: the case of a battered woman who killed

Sibley Slinkard and Susan Ehrlich

8. The discourse of (re)exploitation: female victims in the legal system

Nicci MacLeod

9. Language-based discrimination in schools: intersections of gender and sexuality

Helen Sauntson

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard is Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. She is also Senior Research Fellow in the English Department at the University of Birmingham, UK, where she taught and researched for many years. She has published widely in the areas of Critical Discourse, Media and Gender Studies.