This book is deliberately figured as a successor to Language and Masculinity, the 1997 volume edited by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof. That book was the product of a zeitgeist, and the volume currently under review is a more than worthy heir to its inspirational volume, and even surpasses it: the contributions in the current volume push forward significantly the fields of language and gender and language and sexuality. The book evinces an eclectic collection of methods, with the unifying theme being that the research subject for every chapter is somehow connected to language and men or masculinity. This wide range of perspectives and methods is a strength, and in the end the methods do not clash but create a whole that exceeds the sum of its chapters. The volume is organized, as Milani comments, in order to move from those contributions most focused on heterosexual, male-bodied hegemonic masculinities toward studies of the displacement of masculinity from specific men and to explore how the entire notion of masculinity within a gender binary becomes problematic for many people. We are left with a satisfying exploration of gender and language and excitement about new frontiers in language and sexuality, desire, and identity.
The volume opens, following a summarizing and contextualizing introduction by Milani, with Milani's theoretically focused chapter that parallels Johnson's (Reference Johnson, Johnson and Meinhof1997) ‘Theorizing language and masculinity: a feminist perspective’. Milani constructs his chapter, titled simply ‘Theorizing Language and Masculinities’ in intertextual relation to Johnson's, and reminds us just how much this field has shifted in the last 20 years. Milani identifies three major themes that have become important for the wider field: the performativity of masculinities indexed through connections to hegemonic ideals; the intersectional ‘nexuses’ that problematize a straightforward reading of masculinity as power (and a further pluralizing of masculinities); and dislocations of masculinity from ‘non-male-bodied’ people. What is interesting in this chapter, and echoes through the rest of the book, is the tension between a still-dominant cultural masculine ideal and positionalities that do not fit into that ideal.
Paul Baker addresses the changing nature of what is hegemonic in his chapter by analyzing the adjectival collocates of man in a historical corpus of American English from 1810 to 2009. The idea is that the kind of adjectives most frequently used with man will show what the hegemonic ideal is like. Baker's findings are intriguing: adjectives early in the period are mostly character traits (kind-hearted, sane), while later in the period descriptions using appearance adjectives (tall, handsome, bearded) increase. Throughout all periods, age is the most prominent. Baker argues that this shows an increased focus on men's appearance to define what is hegemonic, although the data for woman seems to present a similar trend (p. 48). I'd want to see some more data on this, but Baker shows us a promising method for approaching the question of exactly how hegemonic masculinity is understood in a particular culture.
In the following chapter, Rob Lawson peels apart the complex layers that lurk in the seemingly simple and straightforward (although problematic) notion of ‘covert prestige.’ Lawson's ethnographic and sociophonetic discussion of working class high school men in Glasgow shows that not all of the men orient to ‘covert prestige,’ and that this concept relies on a rich combination of particular types of masculinity. These complementary analyses take ‘covert prestige’ out of the explanatory black box and show how phonetic variation is used by the men as part of relatively different masculine styles, and in fact that not all men will be seen as ‘tough’ or ‘licensed to use’ such language. As such it provides a vivid caution against making sweeping generalizations about gender patterns that do not take into account intersectional realities.
Quentin Williams' chapter takes up this theme in a different site, rap battles in South Africa, and focuses even further on the ways the men draw on language ideologies associated with different varieties. Through an analysis of lyrics from a live rap battle, Williams shows how varieties help to perform a toughness through the indexing of ‘tough’ words in ‘tough’ varieties. The detailed exploration of form in interaction that demonstrates the real-time indirect indexicalities to ideologically imagined figures, is another important unpacking of the ‘prestige’ associated with particular kinds of masculinities (and arguably lacking a feminine counterpart). Lawson's and Williams' chapters together suggest that there are ideologically inflected stances – toughness – that index masculinity more generally.
Michelle Lazar's chapter moves in a much more political direction, and discusses comments on a letter posted by a Singaporean feminist organization (Association of Women for Action and Research). The central claim of this letter is that gender equality in Singapore is lacking substantially because of the failure of men to take an equal parenting role. The ‘anti-feminist backlash’ positions that Lazar focuses on highlight policies that disadvantage men. The discourses she highlights are clearly of the sort in which men complain that they do not see their lives as easy or privileged, and are at a loss for how to ‘step up’ to other responsibilities. None of the arguments are particularly new or surprising, and it is not clear what is going on linguistically beyond these arguments. The whole problem is one in which all men are constructed as individually privileged, which is of course only true of a small minority. A more intersectional analysis and a view to trying to understand why such discourses ring true to so many men would have been a useful turn in the analysis, rather than simply identifying them as ‘antifeminist’ and identifying a ‘masculine crisis.’ Lazar argues that ‘the problem arises…when men are slower to change, thereby causing dysfunctional behavior among them’ (p. 115). This view misses the variety of experience and the actual powerlessness that many (most?) men experience in a changing, highly socioeconomically stratified, society.
The book turns back to more quantitative linguistic patterns with Ronald Beline Mendes' analysis of diminutive use in Brazilian Portuguese. Here the book also begins to detach gender from bodies through language, as diminutives become (variably) associated with and used by women and gay men. Mendes' analysis, however, shows much more subtlety than this generalization suggests (for example, he makes no overreaching claim in the vein of ‘gay men use diminutives’); importantly, we see how the use of diminutives are not somehow caused by a man being gay (or a woman being a woman), but that some gay men use them to construct a specific kind of gay masculinity, while others avoid it. In addition, he shows that the diminutives associated with this type of gay masculinity are often used by heterosexual men for particular stance purposes, once again showing the contingency of the indexicalities of identity in language.
Erez Levon's chapter focuses on the coming out stories of three gay Israeli men, providing a fascinating intersectionality of nationalism, sexuality, and gender. Levon demonstrates a common tension between the ‘good Zionist man’ and a less-valued gay masculinity evinced in the men's coming out stories. He shows how their coming out stories resolve through the realization (creation?) of a third way, in which there is a kind of gay masculinity ‘in which Zionist tropes of masculinity and morality remain intact’ (p. 151). Here we find the plural masculinities to be important not only analytically and theoretically, but in fact important for the speakers themselves, as a strategy for managing conflicts with perceived hegemonic masculinities.
The last four chapters are the most challenging to the gender binary, and show ways in which language/style are used to challenge dominant gender/sexual ideologies. Veronika Koller's chapter analyzes a text that puts the fluidity of gender, sexuality, desire, and language at the heart of a narrative. The text is an erotic piece of short fiction in which the protagonist meets a person and has sex with them multiple times and with differing roles over a night and day. These roles are reflected in part through shifting gender positions, and indicated through language. Koller shows some of the ways that the linguistic indexicality captures this fluidity while at the same time relying on particular ideologies of gender and sex.
Lucy Jones argues, based on ethnography with a lesbian community of practice, that the idea that butch style is simply ‘female masculinity’ is problematic. The women in the group she spends time with do not think of themselves as taking on practices and stances that are masculine although they describe themselves as butch. Rather, there is in fact a separate category of butch that is outside of, and challenges, the strict gender binary, even though it shares some characteristics with masculinities. This is an important point that researchers tend to forget because the gender binary is assumed.
Lal Zimman analyzes changes in the articulation of /s/ among trans men, showing that while many modify this articulation to be more ‘masculine’ as they move through transition, such a generalization is premature and misrepresents what occurs. Zimman argues that the diversity of patterns that the men show is indexical of a number of different stylistic strategies for being a trans man and argues for a category of transmasculinity, and that this analysis has implications for gender, sexuality and language more generally: ‘Even as transmasculinities bring the disclocation of gender into sharper focus, gender assignment, expression, and identity are elements of gender-normative, non-trans women's and men's experience as well’ (p. 206).
The final chapter completes the cline of the book toward the non-binary, as Brian King discusses the linguistic practices of an intersex individual, Mani Bruce Mitchell. King shows how Mitchell's ‘subjective body knowledge is put into words in Mani's stories and how this knowledge interacts with discourse’ (p. 226). King shows through this analysis, then, how the body and the social are co-constructed in performance and interaction through language. Mitchell was born with ‘ambiguous genitalia’ and hir body was surgically altered to be female in childhood (King uses hir and s(he) as the preferred pronouns to refer to Mitchell). S(he) begins to recover hir sexual history only in adulthood and reclaims hir intersexness in hir 40s. King provides a skillful analysis of how Mani represents this process in narrative, both the ‘feminization’ that takes place early in hir life and the reclaiming of the masculine, and the desire for that identity, that occurs later. The chapter provides a fitting end to the book, as it reminds us that, while ideologically constructed and constrained, people also come with bodies that they have to contend with, and they use (and possibly reshape) language to accommodate those bodies. We are pointed theoretically to a third-order future in which language, gender, sexuality, desire, and bodies are not connected in naturalized discourses, but neither are they completely ignored as the multitude of genders is further explored.
