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Gender and Language Research Group

Department of Linguistics and English Language

Lancaster University

 

 

 

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Introduction to Third Edition

The (loosely titled) Gender and Genre Bibliography is intended both for students working on some area of gender and language in essays, dissertations or research projects, and for those teachers and dissertation supervisors who get asked questions such as ‘I want to look at gender and language in X – do you have any references?’ Teachers and supervisors who find the Bibliography useful may well be working in Applied Linguistics, but will also hopefully include those working in the fields of Women’s Studies, Language and the Media, Culture and Communication, and Discourse Analysis in the wide sense.

This Bibliography is the fruit of the labours of many different people. It began life as a project undertaken by the Lancaster University ‘Gender and Language Research Group’ (GaL), based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language. For the first edition, Susan Sing, Isidora Kypridaki, Vasiliki Adampa, Michelle Lazar, Lydia Tseng, Ren-Feng Duann, Emanuela Guarella and Jane Sunderland brainstormed the categories, divided them up among the group members, and then searched edited collections, back copies of journals, and databases such as ERIC and BIDS for relevant references. We sent our entries to a ‘shared file’, set up for us by Damien Cashman. Ren-Feng Duann took on the task (which she claims she found fascinating) of more broadly checking edited collections and journals, and of tidying up the entries in terms of sequencing and making them stylistically more consistent.

Next, we added selected references from the Bibliography of the ‘Language and Gender’ course taught at Lancaster University, which was created over the years by Norman Fairclough, Sarah Kiaer, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Jane Sunderland and Mary Talbot. We then sent the Bibliography to people working in different areas of gender and language, seeking still further suggestions. Many thanks to Tess Cosslett, Rosemary Deem, Vic Forrester, Janet Holmes, George Jacobs, Sally Johnson, Maureen McNeil and Jariah Mohd Jan for providing these, and thanks in particular to Rosa Maria Jimenez Catalan for sending several references to work written in Spanish, which both help to make the Bibliography a little less Anglocentric, and allow access to works which may otherwise not have been discovered by many readers. Apologies to the many people whose advice we did not seek, but who could also and would like to have contributed references – we had to stop somewhere!

Mary Bulcholtz then posted the GGB on the GALA (now IGALA) website http://www.stanford.edu/group/igala/index.html, and it has been more recently posted on the CLSL website at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/pubs/clsl/current.html (Lancaster University). It can be downloaded free from both.

Paul Baker took responsibility for the Second Edition (2002), consulting journals and edited collections published since 1999, and incorporating suggestions made by many people as a result of the GGB being available to a worldwide audience.
Due to the numerous books and articles on language and gender being published yearly, the Bibliography was revised yet again to produce the Third Edition (2005) by Surinderpal Kaur. The Bibliography was given its own webpage not only to make it more accessible online, but also so that it could be updated frequently to keep abreast of the rapid new developments in the field of language and gender.

We are aware that a project such as this is problematic and raises theoretical and analytical problems, as well as those of selection. Starting with selection, Conference papers are not included, since the Bibliography is already long, and since Conference papers are not usually readily accessible. The categories are inevitably overlapping, and some references will be rightly found under more than one category. In the various editions, efforts have been made to include new categories and further divide others. As the Bibliography is an ongoing process, further revisions will be made regularly.
As regards ‘genre’, we began by seeing this as ‘written text type’ – advertisements, songs, and so forth. This was with the idea that the focus would be gender representation in written text, and, implicitly, the potential construction of gender by this. However, as we found more and more entries, the spoken/written division began to break down. We thus went beyond the notion of ‘genre’ to that of ‘domain’ – and the Bibliography now includes references to talk, in private as well as a range of public contexts. The danger here is that the focus of much of the older work listed is on the outdated, conservative and unproductive search for ‘gender differences’ – which is however still, perhaps understandably, seen as an attractive topic by many undergraduate students. This poses an ongoing challenge for teachers and dissertation supervisors.

The Bibliography has also extended into some areas which are difficult to describe either as ‘genre’ or ‘domain’. CMC, for example, can accommodate a range of genres, and is perhaps better described as a ‘channel’ of communication. ‘Gay and Lesbian Talk’ is hardly a genre either, or, even less so, domain. However, we retained this category on the simple grounds of usefulness.

What distinguishes this Bibliography from a more general ‘Gender and Language’ Bibliography, then, is that each entry refers to a study of gender and language in relation to a particular, though often broadly conceptualised, genre/domain. Because of space limitations, it does not include entries of a purely theoretical nature, important though these are.

No Bibliography of work in a complex and fast-moving field can ever be comprehensive. Neither can it ever be said to be ‘finished’, given the exponentially increasing flow of journal articles and chapters on gender and language in journals and books in our libraries and bookshops. Given the size of this Bibliography, there may also be inaccuracies, and entries may be stylistically inconsistent. We would like to know about such inaccuracies or inconsistencies. We would also like to know about acknowledgements we should have made but have omitted.

The ‘Gender and Language Research Group’ aims to go on updating the Bibliography and improving it. To this end we welcome further suggestions, both for new entries within existing categories, and for new categories (with at least one entry). We look forward to hearing from you.

Jane Sunderland, Paul Baker, Ren-Feng Duann and Surinderpal Kaur
2005

[A procedural note: For reasons of space, we have not included all the relevant bibliographical details for the references to chapters of edited collections, since these appear in ‘General Works and Collections’. If you are printing one section (e.g. ‘Legal Documents’), it therefore makes sense to print ‘General Works and Collections’ as well.]

Continue to the bibliography