This volume explores how gender is actively shaped through language, highlighting how gender norms and imaginaries are constantly contested by innovating new linguistic forms. The chapters bring together empirical studies across Romance and Germanic languages that reframe language as social and political tools, by which speakers disassemble binary gender structures and make space for plural ways of being and becoming.
Rather than viewing language as a static system and gender as a fixed identity, the editors reconceptualize both as dynamic, relational, interactionally negotiated practices. In the introduction and conclusion, Knisely & Russell define language—especially grammatical gender systems—as contested terrains of symbolic struggles. The intertwined agency of individuals in (re)doing gender and language is foregrounded by the concepts of languager and genderer: agents whose linguistic creativity produces non-normative gender realities. Across the chapters, authors show how grammar, pronouns, morphology, and institutional scripts not only reinforce gender and linguistic ideologies. They also represent sites where non-binary gender identities and practices can be enacted, affirmed, and made speakable.
A major theme is the conflict between institutionalized gender binary and creative forms of language-based resistance. Contributions have demonstrated how speakers navigate patriarchal material-discursive regimes that pose structural challenges to gender inclusivity across educational, administrative, healthcare, and workplace spheres. For instance, Kaplan’s ethnography in Québec shows the discursive violence faced by non-binary speakers when confronting linguistic realities built upon binary gendered speech. They must strategically navigate the misalignment between self-identity and institutional procedures that hinge on assigning individuals to pre-determined gender categories, while they are subjected to systematic marginalisation and invisibilization.
Speakers, however, are not passive objects of these norms. Contributors describe how speakers of French, Spanish, German, and Italian modify and reinterpret gendered grammars using strategies like morphological blending (acteurice), pronoun innovation (iel, ille), or simply omitting gendered forms entirely. These practices demonstrate how language can be used practically and epistemologically to affirm gender pluralities that have been silenced and erased by current institutional and grammatical systems.
The fact that linguistic reform is neither linear nor universally progressive is another key takeaway from the volume. Inventive languaging strategies are not always uniform or easy to use. Chapters 3 and 4 show that student reception and institutional support is often inconsistent or merely symbolic, even in classrooms committed to the co-construction of inclusive practices. The tensions between top-down policies and bottom-up linguistic practices are poignant. When institutional scripts demand binary gender performance, speakers as social actors can somehow find room for subversion through interactional choices, silence, or indirect signaling. The conclusion carries the important information that gender plurality must be sustained through everyday situated acts of languaging that are more complex, messy, and continual than policies resting upon regulatory systems of standardization.
In sum, the book’s refusal to fixed, totalizing categories honors the multiplicity of linguistic life in a gender-plural world. For sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, it offers both a conceptual toolkit and rich empirical data for approaching linguistic practices that are central to the politics of inclusion, belonging, and resistance.
