John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Journal of Language and Politics 15:5

© 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company
This electronic file may not be altered in any way.
The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be
used by way of offprints, for their personal use only.
Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible
only to members (students and faculty) of the author’s/s’ institute. It is not permitted to post
this PDF on the internet, or to share it on sites such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu.
Please see our rights policy on https://benjamins.com/content/customers/rights
For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the
publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com).
Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com
 Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell-Ginet. (2013) Language and Gender.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107029057 (hb), 276
pp., $ 105.00.
Reviewed by Mariaelena Bartesaghi (University of South Florida)

As a follow-up to their first edition in 2003, collaborators Eckert and McConnell-

Ginet, have produced a dynamic and engaging work with a renewed purpose, fo-
cusing on genders’ fluidity and matters of social change. Though Language and
Gender may be classified as a textbook for advance undergraduates and beginning
graduate students in Women and Gender Studies, Discourse Studies, Linguistic
Anthropology, Sociology, and cognate disciplines, the term does not do their work
justice; rather, Language and Gender is a resource, where, as a discourse scholar, I
have found great data extracts and ideas for the classroom, and a wealth of well-
presented insights.
Grounded in Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s research and long-standing co-
authorship, both of which they take time to describe in their introduction, the
book builds upon the authors’ theoretical framework by means of illustrations of
the work of high caliber scholars such as Deborah Cameron, Kira Hall, Judith
Butler, Janet Holmes, Scott Kiesling, Jennifer Coates and Marjorie Harrness-
Goodwin, among others. There are some surprising (if not glaring) omissions,
however, and this reader was left wondering why there was no mention of Joanna
Thornborrow’s (2002) treatment of police work in a rape interrogation, Deborah
Cameron’s Feminism and Linguistic Theory (1992) and, anything by Dorothy
Smith (e.g., 1972), and, in the chapter on categories, the brilliant work of Carolyn
Baker (e.g., 2001).
In the course of ten chapters, the authors reclaim gender as social inter-action,
showing how discourse is social action: embodied, materialized, inscribed, ver-
balized, ententexualized, and recontextualized as ideological, a social grammar
that the authors offer us, as readers strategies and resources for close looking, as
Harvey Sacks (1992) would say “how the thing comes off.” Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, two notable (and notably problematic) names in the literature on gender and
discourse often come up: Robin Lakoff and Deborah Tannen, and, when they do,
this is often in the context of a critique of the taken for granted, of what we assume
is true and therefore take as truth, as are notions of the “territorial notion of floor”
(troubled by Thornborrow 2002), interruption as power, gender performances as
biologically and socially ingrained (a notion only reinforced by pop psychology

Journal of Language and Politics 15:5 (2016), 653–656.  doi 10.1075/jlp.15.5.10bar

issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
654 Book reviews

books that locate gender differences in planetary origins), and women’s “talk.” By
taking on commonsense, in both top down and bottom up fashion, the authors
connect linguistic tokens to discourse structures at large, Wittgensteinian social
grammars to Heideggerian ways of being in the world.
The authors’ gender reconstruction project begins immediately. By provid-
ing a historical overview of how gender became an object of study, Language
and Gender’s introduction details how two hypotheses, gender as difference
and gender as dominance, reflexively constituted the ontology of gender as bio-
logical, fixed, and measurable in linguistic power imbalances. As someone who
teaches to critique Robin Lakoff ’s (mostly intuitive) study of women’s language,
and Deborah Tannen’s heavily anecdotal treatments of men and women’s talk ,
I found the authors’ constructionist argument about research materializes in the
very stereotypes it wishes to combat very convincing. From the start, Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet trouble masculinities and femininities, by (dis)locating these in
myriad everyday activities, contexts, positioned claims, epistemic practices. In this
respect, the second chapter, “Linguistic Resources,” details how gender is encoded
in language, in a way that is accessible and illuminating to novices to linguistics
and the linguistic study of gender. By moving from micro-level linguistic particles
such as phonemes and morphemes, to discourse-level examples of sensemaking
in grammar, the authors prove the point that gender is an inescapable feature of all
our communication, and therefore our way of doing self and social world.
I find Language and Gender’s Chapters 4, 5 and 6 to be the strongest, for this
is where the authors’ project of gender deconstruction and demystification is most
captivating. By synthesizing diverse and well-chosen research, and by connecting
single utterances to speech activities and events, troubling assumptions of territo-
rial notions of floor, politeness, and assertiveness gendered Eckert and McConnell-
Ginet gendered speech head on, proving that “focusing on difference can have the
effect of erasing similarities” (p. 116) thus maintaining dubious scholarly agendas
of women’s speech being powerless speech. Reading the introduction to “Getting
it Said” (Chapter 4) I was reminded of a familiar exchange with graduate students,
when they tell me that there are (mythical) conversations taking place without
them, and tables at which they are not sitting and speaking, only for me to respond
that this is the conversation and the table. The authors have obviously been in the
same classrooms, and in similar exchanges, for their discussion of how individual
utterances are taken up in public discourse is as rich as it is rewarding. By argu-
ing how conversation is as much a collaborative as it is a competitive enterprise,
rife with issues of face, ever shifting asymmetries, and positioning and by locating
speaking rights at the intersection of speech genres (such as the stereotype that
doing gossip is a woman’s performance), form and content, the authors ably inter-
rogate commonly held assumptions of power as more talk, power as interruption,

© 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
 Book reviews 655

and silence as powerlessness, giving “critical” theory that is not based on empirical
study a run for its money.
I especially appreciated the treatment of conflict and assertiveness in Chapters
5 and 6. In the field of Communication, these are studied as post facto accounts,
that is, when the outcome of what has happened has already been decided, thus
almost guaranteeing that gendering norms remain intact, rather than as an emer-
gent and contingent social interaction. An applied linguistic and discursive ap-
proach (which is what this communication scholar subscribes to) certainly com-
plexifies ideas of politeness strategies as women’s way of making nice, and instead
shows how it can wield the same social power as insults. Eckert’s and McConnell’s
examination of tag questions – one of the best known sites for locating putative
insecurity in women’s speech – is as exhaustive as it is brilliant – for it proves
that even “a single utterance of a tag may itself be multifunctional” and that it “is
the person higher [in status] who is far more likely to offer potential threats to
the other’s…face and therefore to place themselves in a position where the ques-
tion of softening might arise” (p. 147). In sum, tags may very well be an exercise
in wielding power!
In the final chapters of the book, 7-10, the authors work toward dislocating
and extending micro level interaction to social worlds, identities, and ways of be-
ing. Though this is certainly the way to go, and the last chapter connects Fashioning
Selves to social change, I do not find the observations and the treatment of the
material (save for a section on shifting indexicality) as compelling as the majority
of the book. Other readers may disagree with me, of course, and I certainly rec-
ognize the ability of the authors to bring various literatures in conversation with
each other in their discussion of sexualities, bodies, and transgendered identities:
Goffman, Derrida, and sociolinguists and folklorists all make an appearance in the
last chapter. It remains, nonetheless, a bit scattered. Perhaps I am taking issue with
the notion of “style” as an umbrella term to bring the notion of performances and
relational, multiple identities together. (It seems like a return to what the authors
critique about Tannen’s early work?)
As I mentioned before, I am surprised also at the absence of MCA in the book’s
chapter on categories, and the reliance on Putnam’s more traditional work instead.
Lakoff and Johnson (1987) would have also been a great choice here. Both the eth-
nomethodological work of Carolyn Baker and the embodied metaphor arguments
of Lakoff and Johnson might have provided a nicer piece for the kaleidoscope of
research the authors assembled in their book.
Overall, Language and Gender is a much needed work, and a much needed
new edition in these changing times. Kira Hall’s endorsement on the back cover
employs two key terms: convincing and provocative. To which I add: absolutely
necessary.

© 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
656 Book reviews

References

Baker, C. D.. 2001. “Locating culture in action: Membership categorization in texts and talk”. In
Poynton, C., & Lee, A. (Eds.), Culture & Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research
and Cultural Studies: New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 99–113.
Cameron, D.. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Springer.​
doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-22334-3
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M.. 1987. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Sacks, H.. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. I and II. New York: Wiley.
Smith, D.. 1972. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Thornborrow, J.. 2002. Power talk. London: Longman.

© 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved