This wide-ranging volume explores how gender and language are used and transformed to discuss, enact, and project social differences in light of global economic and political changes in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. It presents analyses of language and gender from a broad spectrum of national contexts: Catalonia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Vietnam, Philippines, Tonga, and the United States.

Cases studies consider language and gender in changing workplaces, schools and immigrant integration work-shops, as well as in new and emerging sites for consumption and the production of identity. They also analyze the changing meanings of multilingualism, and the construction of ideologies about gender and language in colonial and postcolonial/national ideologies. The papers engage with and contribute to theoretical conceptualizations of globalization, cosmopolitanism, (post)colonialism, (trans)nationalism, and public spheres by drawing on a variety of sociolinguistic analytic strategies (variation analysis, media analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology of language, colonial discourse analysis). From the contents:

Introduction Language, gender and economies in global transitions: Provocative and provoking questions about how gender is articulated, Bonnie McElhinny

Section I. Scattered hegemonies Symbolically central and materially marginal: Women’s talk in a Tongan work group, Susan Philips - “Re-employment stars”: Language, gender and neo-liberal restructuring in China, Jie Yang - When Aboriginal equals “at risk”: The impact of institutional discourse on Aboriginal Head Start families, Susanne Miskimmin

Section II. Emerging into history Stage goddesses and studio divas in South India: On agency and the politics of voice, Amanda Weidman - Echoes of modernity: Nationalism and the enigma of “Women’s language” in late nineteenth century Japan, Miyako Inoue - Recontextualizing the American occupation of the Philippines: Erasure and ventriloquism in colonial discourse around men, medicine and infant mortality, Bonnie McElhinny - Out on video: Gender, language and new public spheres in Islamic Northern Nigeria, Rudolf P. Gaudio

Section III. Commodities and cosmopolitanism Gender and bilingualism in the new economy, Monica Heller - African women in Catalan language courses: Struggles over class, gender and ethnicity in advanced liberalism, Joan Pujolar - Gender, multilingualism and the American war in Vietnam, Binh Nguyen - Shop talk: Branding, consumption and gender in American middle-class youth interaction, Mary Bucholtz - Cosmopolitanism and linguistic capital in China: Language, gender and the transition to a globalized market economy in Beijing, Qing Zhang - Gender and interaction in a globalizing world: Negotiating the gendered self in Tonga, Niko Besnier

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