Queering language, gender, and sexuality combines queer theories with linguistic theories and offers critical views to hetero-cis-normativity and language. The book gives an overview of a decade of queer linguistic research, its topics varying from the coming out genre of transgender people to the homosocial construction of heterosexual desire in online dating. As Tommaso Milani points out in the opening chapter of the book, the collection is different from most edited collections in that it showcases only previously published research.

The book consists of four parts. Part I explores the much-debated relationship between identity and desire (Milani). It includes three articles that engage in theoretical debates on the subject and apply the theories in different locations: phrasebooks aimed at American, Canadian, and British audiences (Rusty Barrett), Greece (Costas Canakis), and Sweden (Milani & Rickard Jonsson). Part II revolves around the gender binary. Rodrigo Borba & Ana Cristina Ostermann analyze how travestis manipulate the Brazilian Portuguese grammatical gender system, while Veronika Koller shows that lesbian female masculinity can be constructed by selective use of linguistic camp features. In the third article, Lal Zimman demonstrates that transgender people's coming-out stories differ from gay or lesbian coming out stories. Zimman suggests a division between ‘declaration’ and ‘disclosure’ to better portray coming out as transgender. Unfortunately, Part II,‘Beyond binaries?’, does not include research on speakers who identify as nonbinary. Research on nonbinary speakers is in its initial stage and thus, understandably, did not arrive in time for this collection.

Part III is dedicated to deconstructing heteronormativity. The articles examine how hegemonic masculinity (Russell Luyt), metrosexuality (Matthew Hall, Brendan Gough, Sarah Seymour-Smith, & Susan Hansen), and women's heterosexual desire (Kristine Køhler Mortensen) are constructed. The articles in Part IV marry queer theory with the study of language and space. Ksenija Bogetić utilizes collocation analysis to examine personal advertisements from a web portal called GaySerbia. The teenagers in Bogetić’s study aim to produce hegemonic masculinity and distance themselves from feminine gay men. Thereafter, Brian W. King provides interesting observations on how participants of gay-oriented chat rooms perform both the ‘room’ and sexuality and gender ‘in there’. Lastly, William L. Leap scrutinizes the moral geography of homophobia in Washington, DC.

As all of the articles have been published in Gender and Language before, one might ask, what is the purpose of this collection? Its value lies in its usability as a handbook. Be it an introductory course to queer linguistics or independent reading for a scholar, the book showcases a good number of theoretical and methodological models and examples of research questions revolving around the core ideas of queer theory and activism. Especially for those who enter queer linguistics for the first time, the book provides insight into the history of ideologies and the development of the field, as well as inspiration for further research.