This revised text provides a thorough overview of the key issues in language and gender to date. Part 1 examines foundational work in the field, while also considering the pervasive stereotypes about the sexes that can be found within it. Talbot begins by attending to the fundamental, yet problematic, distinction between sex and gender. The focus then turns to early sociolinguistic research from William Labov and Peter Trudgill, which highlights women's use of standard or prestige forms. Talbot demonstrates that within these early social stratification studies both data collection and interpretation methods were influenced by existing stereotypes. Two key texts are also employed in chapter 3 to investigate early feminist research into ‘women's language’: Robin Lakoff's Language and woman's place (1972) and Dale Spender's Man made language (1980). The author summarises their contributions to the field before pointing out major issues with each, such as Lakoff reinforcing a deficit model of women's language and thus implicitly setting up men's ways of speaking as authentic, and Spender's monolithic notion of language.

Part 2 provides an overview of men's and women's spoken interaction, primarily within the difference and dominance models. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the division of labour within two specific genres: storytelling and conversation. Chapter 6 considers the main issues with the theoretical frameworks presented so far: deficit, difference, and dominance. The focus here is on difference, which is unpacked largely in reference to Deborah Tannen's series of ‘self-help’ texts and the two-cultures view of men's and women's interactional styles, which Talbot rejects. Part 2 concludes by introducing poststructuralism as a valuable alternative to the difference-dominance model.

Part 3 shifts in focus towards critical perspectives on gender and sexuality, and in particular, work within critical discourse analysis. Chapter 7 explores gender identity and introduces the reader to the notion of gender as actively constructed and performative, which provides the backdrop for the discussion of consumerism as a salient component in the accomplishment of gender in chapter 8, and the construction of masculine identities in chapter 9. Chapter 10 focuses on the marginalisation of women's voices in the professional sphere and has been updated to include the phenomenon of ‘gendered cyberhate’. Talbot notes how, far from the nonhierarchical gender-free arena cyberspace was once hailed to be, the internet is instead a fertile breeding ground for sexism and misogyny. Chapter 11 returns to the notion of identity as performed and examines the policing of gender norms, and how people can queer gender and resist heteronormativity. Particular attention is paid here to non-normative sexual and gender identities, including a subsection devoted to trans identities. The final chapter looks at the ongoing challenges for feminism in the face of a new ‘anti-PC’ discourse, epitomised by Trump.

This is a rich and comprehensive introduction to the field. Talbot's treatment of the various issues and approaches is both engaging and easy to comprehend, and the updated focus on matters such as trans identity and cyberhate make it a relevant, contemporary textbook for students, or anyone with an interest in language and gender.