Oriana Palusci

Giuseppe Balirano

This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of current debates about gender non-conforming people and diverse ways of ‘doing’ masculinities. It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness. The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.

Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies

Paul Baker

How do we learn what it means to be a man? And how do we learn to question what it means to be a man? This collection comprises a set of original interdisciplinary chapters on the linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in a range of new and older media: television, film, online forums, news reporting, advertising and fiction. This innovative work examines new and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts including the role of EU institutions in ascertaining asylum seekers’ sexual orientation, and the European laws on gender policy. The book employs numerous analytical approaches including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, literary criticism and anthropological and social research. The authors show how such texts can disrupt, question or complicate traditional notions of what it means to be a man, queering the idea that men possess fixed identities or desires, instead arguing that masculinity is constantly changing and negotiated through the cultural and political overlapping contexts in which it is regularly produced. These nuanced analyses will bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender, masculinity and queer studies, linguistics, anthropology and semiotics.

Giuseppe Balirano

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