This collection aims to redress the marginalization of linguistic structures in the field of language and gender and challenges linguists to pay attention to what the editors call ‘minor phenomena’ (9): small features, which, despite being consequential for linguistic and social practices, remain peripheral in theory, methods, and analytical perspectives. Abbou & Baider transform the peripheral status of linguistic gender into a theoretical heuristic to analyze power ‘from the depth of grammar to the semiotic negotiation of gender categories’ (3). Noting that the notion of periphery has been fruitful to several disciplines, the authors—in varying degrees and with different levels of success—use the periphery as is understood in feminist and social theories for inspecting the dynamics between minor language structures and society. To do so, the editors highlight three challenges the periphery brings to (structural gender) linguistics: (i) deterritorialization—investigating understudied languages (however, a book that erases Latin America deterritorializes pero no mucho!); (ii) decolonization—opening a space for ‘non-Western linguistic analyses’ (9) (the reader is, though, left uninformed of what this means since the book lacks engagement with decolonial theories); and (iii) methodological diversification, which challenges analysts to investigate interfaces between language structures and cross/extra/trans/inter/meta/linguistic phenomena.
The section ‘Undoing grammatical gender’ bundles seven chapters that examine the ideological facets of grammar. Malka Muchnik investigates a case of regressive language change. In Classical Hebrew, feminine function words were used for masculine referents and had more visibility. Modern Hebrew, despite women's role in its revivification and the Zionist promise of an egalitarian society, is strongly androcentric with regards to masculine generics and occupations. However, the author discusses neutralization strategies, such as the use of double gender forms and feminine generics. Despite its past and contemporary attempts at language reform, masculinization is the trend even in feminist circles, which highlights that grammatical gender is socially and semantically motivated.
Mariem Guellouz studies how Arabic grammarians constructed the masculine as the original (asl), and the feminine as secondary. She scrutinizes ‘rebellious adjectives’ that, despite being female-specific (e.g. hamel ‘pregnant’, taliq ‘repudiated’), are not grammatically feminine. This could be the result of linguistic economy, that is, there would be no need to gender the referent. Her historicization of these adjectives in grammarians’ narratives about the origins of magic, however, shows that these discourses forge ‘a two-sided imaginary about women, feared and admired at the same time’ (61) and provides a compelling analysis of how linguistic structures feed into (and are fed by) cultural ideologies.
The two subsequent chapters outline an empirical poststructuralist approach to gender structures. Heiko Motschenbacher explains that language should not be viewed as stable but as the result of (re)citational processes whose repetition produces the appearance of grammatical substance. Motschenbacher investigates gender in English, Croatian, and German through cross-linguistic comparison, historical linguistic description, and analyses of usage of given forms. This enables him to de-essentialize linguistic structures and show their instability and heterogeneity. Julie Abbou &Angela Tse question the genderless character of Cantonese via linguistics and gender studies to hermeneutically redefine gender structures as the outcome of semiotic negotiations that are power-laden. By analyzing a corpus of sentences translated from English into Cantonese, the authors pinpoint the strategies used to make gender relevant in the interlingual space, demonstrating that attention should be paid to processes of structuration instead of structure itself.
Francis Crequi Ngoyi Tshimanga's investigation challenges the idea that ‘genderless’ languages, such as Cilubà—a Bantu language—reflect the social absence of sexism. Although this language does not inflect gender in its morphology, it offers syntactic and discursive resources that keep gender hierarchies intact. Direct transitive verbs of marriage and sexuality, for instance, only allow the assignment of agentic semantic roles to men and the status of object to women. Metaphors construct the conceptual system of men as dominant and women as their property, perpetuating unequal gender relations in this society despite its lack of grammatical encoding.
The last chapters of the section, however, sit somewhat uncomfortably in the collection by not fully engaging with the challenges set by the editors, namely taking structure not as a point of departure but as a construct to question. Abhishek Kumar Kashyap's chapter describes grammatical gender in Bajjika, an understudied Indo-Aryan language, which encodes gender in nominal forms, definitive particles, and verb agreement. The author notes that although in spoken language masculinity and femininity are mandatorily inflected, in written texts this is not necessarily so. Kashyap argues that writers seem to ‘neutralize’ gender by adopting masculine-agreement morphemes for female referents. What I see, though, is the structuration, at discourse level, of masculine generics and the erasure of the feminine, which linguistically perpetuates the disenfranchisement of women. Maryia Turchynskaya's chapter is caught in a similar trap of taking structures at face value. With an analysis of the semantics of nouns in English and Belarusian corpora, she argues that the lexical paradigm based on sex distinctions limits the semantic constituents by profiling ‘proper’ attributes to males (superiority/dominance/rationality) and females (care/silliness/faintheartedness). This analysis is unsurprising after all, but had the author engaged the editors’ challenge, she would have been able to describe—and, perhaps, question—the broader processes that produce such semantic profiling (and the stereotypes they perpetuate).
‘Intersectional peripheries’, the second section, encompasses five chapters that discuss the complex liaisons of grammar and multiple axes of power such as ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Chryso Hadjidemetriou discusses the acquisition of Cypriot Greek grammatical gender by Armenian migrants, whose L1 is genderless. The author focuses on deviations from native grammar and notes that they occur in various interlanguage levels. Even when the Armenian speakers use the correct gender inflection, they tend to engage in self-initiated self-repair and override the Greek tripartite gender system with the neuter. Although the author eyes this phenomenon with suspicion, it is an interesting case of neutralization in which speakers flaunt the system (however inadvertently) and make gender redundant.
The enregisterment of gendered speech styles through phrase-final enclitics in Lakota is the focus of Jessica Fae Nelson's contribution. The mixture of quantitative and qualitative approaches to early twentieth-century narratives and early twenty-first-century teaching materials allows the author to analyze metapragmatic discourses about gender-indexing enclitics that (re)construct normative speech frameworks. She notes that one century ago females used fewer enclitics than males in most speech contexts: women's and men's styles seem to be a matter of quantity rather than quality of enclitic usage. However, current teaching materials enforce ‘correct’ gender-indexing ‘as if leaving an assertion enclitic out … were … less Lakota’ (259). This creates a context in which learners are oriented toward idealized gendered styles, which impede the use of language as a complex semiotic resource.
Highlighting that Moldovan/Romanian marks masculine, feminine, and neuter in its grammar, Anna-Christine Weirich shows how, despite linguistic and political limitations, the system offers resources for nonsexist practices. She uses the notion of peripheral linguistic markets, which are in opposition to the dominant linguistic rules, yet depend on them, to describe how Moldovan migrants in Germany were able to (re)create the linguistic system in order to challenge masculine generics and binarisms that are omnipresent in their L1. The speakers designed antisexist strategies to neutralize the gender system while obeying dominant linguistic rules. Some of these include the use of epicenes and the invention of the pronoun elea—a mix of el (third person sing. masc.) and ea (third person sing. fem.)—among others. Although these strategies may not be new to other Romance languages, Weirich's study pioneers the debate on antisexist language in Moldovan/Romanian.
Grounded on an extensive ethnography in Korea and Malaysia, Dimitrios Michael Handzantonis peels apart language practices that Eastern lesbians and gay men use to negotiate spaces of belonging. He notes that in regions where religious dogmas intersect with rigid social structures, members of nonhegemonic sexual identities are forced by national and transnational discourses to negotiate ascribed marginalizations by forging linguistic affordances and networks. The analysis of code-switching, address terms, positionings, stance-taking, and other practices demonstrates how sexual minorities in urban Asian areas draw identity resources from the larger sociocultural context, re-read them intertextually, and produce communal spaces in which they are able to challenge exclusion.
Begoña Echeverria provides a fitting end to the collection by analyzing the semantic derogation of the Basque second-person gender marker noka. The author highlights that noka and its masculine counterpart, toka, are grammatically equal, but the former is pragmatically viewed as disrespectful and is socially linked to ‘dangerous’ women, that is, those who go against Catholic morals. Such negative meanings were forged in religious texts such as the mid-nineteenth-century translation of the Old Testament Echeverria scrutinizes. This text uses the feminine allocative marker to refer to inanimate addressees (a city or a country) that were castigated by God for treason or adultery. As such, she illustrates how ideologies of religion and language construct gendered moral distinctions and hierarchies.
With their methodological and theoretical eclecticism, the chapters show that gender structures are not coherent systems but exhibit fractures at various levels—from grammar, to lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse—and, thus, deserve detailed analytical attention. Although not all authors seriously engage the periphery, they demonstrate that linguistic gender is intimately intermingled with the cultural, historical, and political contexts it helps constitute.
