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2012

Language and gender, by Mary M. Talbot, Malden,
Polity Press, 2010, 2nd ed
Constanza Rojas-Primus
Kwantlen Polytechnic University

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Original Publication Citation
Rojas-Primus, C. (2012). [Review of the book Language and gender by Mary M. Talbot]. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist
Geography, 19 (3), 401-403.

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Language and gender, by Mary M. Talbot, Malden, Polity Press, 2010, 2nd ed., 273 pp.,
£55.00 (hardback), ISBN978-0-7456-4604-6; £17.99 (paperback), ISBN978-0-74564605-3
The monolithic view of ‘men’ and ‘women’ speech is finally being contested in Mary
Talbot’s book Language and Gender. Throughout a clear and well exemplified
discussion on foundational and current research in the area of language and gender, the
author succeeds in her aim to make the reader more conscious of the social category of
gender and the important role language plays in establishing, sustaining, and challenging
gender divisions in society. The book brings to our attention a wide range of issues within
the field of language and gender, ‘from expectations about how men and women ought to
speak, to restrictions on women’s access to public forms of talk, the division of
conversational “labour” among couples, representations of masculinity and femininity in
the mass media, and much more besides’ (Talbot 2010, 17). These issues are tackled
from different approaches, including variationist sociolinguistics, feminism,
conversational genre studies, poststructuralism, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), all
being supported by original and pertinent data.
The first section of the book is foundational. Its three chapters explore early work on
sex differences in language use and its biases about women due to a former focus on
linguistic sex-exclusive differentiation. Talbot has a masterful approach unfolding the
perennial tendency to conflate sex and gender in these early studies, which resulted in
assumptions that differences in language use between men and women are genetically
determined and therefore natural. This misconception, the author elaborates, ‘has political
underpinnings: it often accompanies a reassertion of traditional family roles, or
justifications for male privileges’ (Talbot 2010, 9). Hence, this preliminary section of the
book considers the distinction between sex and gender as pivotal in the study of language
and gender as well as the understanding of gender not as a male-female dichotomy but as
a continuum where degrees of masculinity and femininity occur as a result of the many
social roles men and women have in society. By considering this social dimension of
gender, Talbot examines some problems of early quantitative study of sociolinguistic
variation and discerns on the interest of feminists in language as a practice that can
unfold with respect to gender inequalities in society.
The second part of the book looks at research on spoken interaction among men and
women mostly studied within the Anglo-American theoretical framework of ‘differenceand-dominance’. In addition to examining men and women’s language grouped under a
variety of speech situations and genres, the first two chapters of this section deal with

some problems when generalizing findings on how men and women engage in verbal
exchanges. The author argues that gender differences in discourse production are highly
culture-specific, and thus the same patterns of language interactions should not be
expected across different cultures. In the last chapter of this section Talbot makes
insightful observations with respect to the overwhelmingly academic preoccupation with
gender as ‘difference’, which inevitably suppresses research findings about gender
similarities. Talbot challenges this reification of gender as ‘difference’ by presenting
research where scholars not only found gender differences but a significant amount of
gender similarities in the linguistic behaviors of boys and girls. Moreover, she culminates
this section by segueing into the influence of poststructuralism in the study of language
and gender in disciplines other than linguistics. Within feminist criticism guided by a
postructuralist perspective, for example, ‘[p]eople’s identities are an effect of language.
Men and women are different because language positions us differently’ (Talbot 2010,
110). Unlike the ‘difference-and-dominance’ study framework within the AngloAmerican academic tradition, in postructuralism-influenced work on discourse and
gender identity the masculine-feminine dichotomy is absent and social identities and
relationships of men and women are assumed not to be homogeneous, but rather being
made by different discourse practices.
It is precisely in the last and final section of the book that the monolithic view of
‘men’ and ‘women’ speech is contested by critically looking at the role language plays in
contributing to both social reproduction and social change. In six chapters, the author
thoroughly examines the construction and performance of gender in discourse. Central to
this section is work in CDA, an approach to the study of language in social context that
aims ‘to stimulate critical awareness of…how existing discourse conventions have come
about as a result of relations of power and power struggle’ (Talbot 2010, 117). The reader
is enlightened with recent research on a variety of feminine and masculine identities
bestowed by discourses in mass media, education, medical care, consumerism, public
talk, sexuality, and sexism. Talbot’s assertion that ‘discourses are historically constituted
bodies of knowledge and practice that shape people, giving positions of power to some
but not to others’ (Talbot 2010, 121) highlights very well the critical nature of CDA and
its application to gender studies. Similarly, Eckert (2005, 16) argues that ‘language is a
practice that unfolds with respect to [an] institution. And it is the accumulation of
practice that produces and reproduces that institution.’ Accordingly, this section’s
preoccupation is on how languages, individuals and social contexts interact, and how this
interaction sustains unequal gender relations. It presents language as a social practice and
how individuals are placed in a broad variety of positions in society set up in discourses.

More importantly, it shows how men and women may engage in language use that
involve gender oppression and exclusion and how by identifying mechanism of
oppressions and exclusion language and gender studies can contribute to social change.
This book is an important contribution to the area of gender identities and its
intersections with sexuality, culture, and place. It is essential for research within
feminism and women’s studies, and is a most-valuable literary contribution to
sociolinguistics. Research on language and society is innately linked with human welfare
as findings can have significant implications on the life of men and women. On this
matter, Mary Talbot’s book Language and Gender (2nd ed.) will enrich the work of
students and scholars alike and make any reader more aware of how language and gender
studies can positively alter social structures.
Reference
Ecker, Penelope. 2005. Variation, convention, and social meaning. Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 7 January 2005, Oakland, CA.
Constanza Rojas-Primus, Ph.D.
Department of Modern Languages, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Surrey BC V3W 2M8, Canada
constanza.rojas-primus@kwantlen.ca
© 2012, Constanza Rojas-Primus