This collection of articles represents a range of different takes on the subject of language, gender, and sexuality. The editors' definition of their project is deliberately broad: “the role played by language in producing and organizing sex as a meaningful domain of human experience” (p. 1). Accordingly, there are 23 articles organized into two unequal parts. The first is historical and takes up one-third of the book, while the second is contemporary and comprises the latter two-thirds. Each section is prefaced by a brief introduction providing the theoretical background informing the choice of texts. Overall, although occasionally lacking focus, the collection is intellectually stimulating, absorbing, and often downright enjoyable. For instructors teaching a course on language and gender, this reader would make a good starting place for class discussion, including as it does many key pieces on topics like verbally positioning oneself as heterosexual, the discourses of rape and resistance, and the creation of sexual identities among the ambiguously gendered.

Part 1 (including a section on “antilanguages” and another on “gayspeak”) brings together a group of articles mostly written before Judith Butler's landmark Gender trouble appeared on the scene in 1990. These pieces are uninformed by the concept of performativity and do seem rather dated. Four are glossaries, or commentaries on glossaries, while the last three address the question of gay discourse. All assume an unproblematically homogeneous community and are exclusively concerned with gay or lesbian language use. None of the earlier work on glossaries for heterosexual sex acts is included. These gay and lesbian articles may have paved the way for later and more complex studies of language, gender, and homosexuality, but their inclusion at the beginning of this volume does suggest that before 1990, only homosexuals were considered “people of sex,” to coin a euphemism. The last article in this section, “Can there be gay discourse without gay language” by William Leap, was first published in 1999 and seems curiously misplaced. Since Part 2 starts with an article from 1996 on dating advertisements, and since a couple of the other articles in Part 2 reference Leap's work (one on indexing meaning in the production of gay lifestyles, by Rob Podesva et al., and another on African American drag queens, by Rusty Barrett), it seems a bit willful to banish Leap's article to the “historical material” (6). The editors explain that Leap's arguments are “not about sexuality but about sexual identity” (67). Since Celia Kitzinger's zinging analysis of how one displays one's heterosexuality (included in Part 2) could also be said to be more about identity than sexuality, this explanation sounds hollow.

The editors make their criteria for selection explicit: “We take it that most users of this book will be particularly interested by recent and current research” (6). Indeed, the Reader really takes off in Part 2, entitled “Contemporary debates” and further subdivided into sections on “Styles and performances,” “Heteronorms” and “The semiotics of sex.” Justine Coupland's “Dating advertisements” addresses the question of how authors of ads willingly turn themselves into an attractive commodity for the sexual marketplace, pointing to how individuals are able to subvert the system to their own purposes. Following nicely from this is Scott Kiesling's work on how college fraternity brothers position themselves as flamboyantly heterosexual by employing a hyperfeminizing discourse when speaking of other straight men. They refer to each other variously as “bitch boy,” “Hazel” and “honey.” Kiesling explains, cogently and convincingly, how “Hi honey, I'm home,” a greeting straight out of 1960s Brady Bunch territory, may be used not to express homosexuality, but to assert top dog status in an all-male but proudly heterosexual community.

Chapters on lesbian bar talk in Tokyo (discussed below) and gay styles (useful in its insistence on complexity and plurality rather than simple oppositions like “gay vs. straight” [150]), are followed by Barrett's work on African American drag queens (AADQs). This provides not only fascinating data but also a tightly argued analysis showing that AADQs may use the “the white woman style” both to criticize white racism, and simultaneously, to reproduce misogynistic representations of black and white women. Running right through this section on “Sexual styles and performances” is the reminder that discourse communities are often as interested in what they can subvert and divert as in how they can utilize the symbolic power of language in its status quo.

The section on “Heteronorms” includes Kitzinger's work on “Speaking as a heterosexual,” calling into question the idea that the heterosexual discourse is utterly non-deviant; Penelope Eckert's “Vowels and nail polish,” showing how preadolescent girls develop their own linguistic and heterosexual style; Susan Ehrlich's analysis of sexual consent and how it is defined and utilized; Deborah Cameron's short but punchy review of the Antioch College “Sexual offense policy”; and Sanders & Reinisch's interviews with college students concerning which acts they would define as “having sex.” The section is rounded off by Sally McConnell-Ginet's study of definitions of marriage. The normative power of the heterosexual imperative is given a thorough airing. The quality of these individual pieces is uniformly high. Any one of them would make a useful starting point for a discussion on the use of language to circumscribe and the importance of articulating unconsciously held values.

The last section, “Semiotics of sex and the discourse of desire,” includes four powerful pieces but does not come together in any satisfying theoretical way. The first article is by David Valentine and discusses the creation of desire and the political nature of the choice to validate some desires over others, dismissing certain choices as informed by “false consciousness.” I believe I last heard the phrase “false consciousness” used without parodic intent in the early 1980s, at a feminist meeting discussing women who preferred to stay home with their children and not go out to work. Its use in Valentine's contribution makes the article seem like a straw man argument. The real interest in this work is the troubled definitions the transsexuals interviewed have coined for themselves: “You're a woman, transsexual, you're gay, you're homosexual,” one interviewee says; “a man,” the addressee adds with no apparent contradiction. It is the multiple, contradictory, and simultaneous sexual identities at play here that provoke thought.

Valentine's article is followed by two discussions of linguistic communities outside the North American/Western European template. Laura Ahearn examines Nepalese love letters and relates the experience of romantic love to its verbal expression, indicating the creation of “a new ideology of love” (265). The Reader does not seek to address specifically the question of language and sexuality in multicultural perspective and includes only three pieces that focus on cultures outside of the Anglo-American mainstream. These are Hideko Abe's article on lesbian bar talk, in the section on “Sexual styles,” which revisits the question of first person pronouns, commands, and discourse particles; Ahearn's article on desire in Nepalese love letters; and Momoko Nakamura's piece about the production of “schoolgirl” identity in Japan, which follows Ahearn's article in this section. Rich and complex on their own, these pieces would benefit from being read in the context of other articles discussing similar linguistic communities. We learn, for example, in Nakamura's article on schoolgirl speech that the linguistic traits that make up teyo dawa can exist quite separately from any actual schoolgirls, and are available for use by any speaker wishing to index a schoolgirl identity. In Abe's article on lesbian bar talk, we learn further that Japanese lesbians often use the same first person pronouns as schoolboys. Both Nakamura and Abe reference articles by other researchers on the use of gendered pronouns and sentence-final particles in Japanese. Abe's article was reprinted from another anthology, Japanese language, gender and ideology, published in 2004, where its points are elaborated and developed in the other articles in that book. Isolated in this Reader, these three articles lose much of their descriptive and explanatory power.

The Reader ends with Don Kulick's own article, titled with admirable and taunting brevity, “No.” This is a discussion of the use of the word no as a positive exhortative, rather than a rejection, in sado-masochistic sex play. Kulick cites the “homosexual panic defense,” showing that straight men who use this justification for murdering gay men who have come on to them are saying that it is demeaning and feminizing for them even to have to utter the word “no.” The article is short, pithy, and oddly placed. Given that the middle section contains a series of powerful pieces by women on sexual consent, definitions of the sex act, and the “oxymoron” of same-sex marriage (230), this terse examination of no would be bolstered by the more ample discussions of these other articles.