This book brings together leading academics and practitioners working in the area of language, gender, sexuality and education, consolidating recent developments and moving the field forward in a contemporary context. This unique and timely volume captures current themes, debates, theories and methods in the field, and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working around the world in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Education, Sociology and Discourse Studies.

A path-breaking study of the role played by language in constructing sexual identities in schools. It will be of keen interest to a wide audience of educational practitioners and academics in the fields of applied linguistics, gender studies and English language and linguistics.

This edited book examines how sexuality and sexual identity intersect and interact with other identities and subjectivities – including but not limited to race, religion, gender, social class, ableness, and immigrant or refugee status – to form reinforcing webs of privilege and oppression that can have significant implications for language teaching and learning processes. The authors explore how these intersections may influence the teaching of different languages and how pedagogies can be devised to increase equitable access to language learning spaces. They seek to open the conversation on intersectional issues as they relate to sexuality and language teaching and learning, and provide a conversational space where readers can engage with the notion of intersectionality. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, and sociolinguistics, outlining possible future directions for intersectional research.

This book makes an innovative contribution to the relatively young field of Queer Linguistics. Subscribing to a poststructuralist framework, it presents a critical, deconstructionist perspective on the discursive construction of heteronormativity and gender binarism from a linguistic point of view. On the one hand, the book provides an outline of Queer approaches to issues of language, gender and sexual identity that is of interest to students and scholars new to the field. On the other hand, the empirical analyses of language data represent material that also appeals to experts in the field. The book deals with repercussions of the discursive materialisation of heteronormativity and gender binarism in various kinds of linguistic data. These include stereotypical genderlects, structural linguistic gender categories (especially from a contrastive linguistic point of view), the discursive sedimentation of female and feminine generics, linguistic constructions of the gendered body in advertising and the usage of personal reference forms to create characters in Queer Cinema. Throughout the book, readers become aware of the wounding potential that gendered linguistic forms may possess in certain contexts.

Presenting a range of data obtained from secondary schools in the UK and US, this path-breaking book explores the role played by language in constructing sexual identities. Analysing the often complex ways in which homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity are enacted within school contexts, it shows that by analysing language, we can discover much about how educators and students experience sexual diversity in their schools, how sexual identities are constructed through language, and how different statuses are ascribed to different sexual identities.

Representations of gender in learning materials convey an implicit message to students about attitudes towards culturally appropriate gender roles for women and men. This collection takes a linguistic approach to exploring theories about gender representation within the sphere of education and textbooks, and their effects on readers and students within an international context. In the opening section, contributors discuss theories of representation and effect, challenging the conventional Althusserian model of interpellation, and acknowledging the challenges of applying Western feminist models within an international context. Following chapters provide detailed analyses focusing on a number of different countries: Australia, Japan, Brazil, Finland, Russia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Germany, Qatar, Tanzania, and Poland. Through linguistic analysis of vocabulary associated with women and men, content analysis of what women and men say in textbooks, and discourse analysis of the types of linguistic moves associated with women and men, contributors evaluate the extent to which gendered representations in textbooks perpetuate stereotypical gender roles, what the impact may be on learners, and the ways that both teachers and learners interact and engage with these texts.

This lively and accessible textbook provides a clear introduction to the relationship between language and sexuality.