(by Hanna Braswell and Steven P. Black)

The analysis of inequities and inequalities has long been front and center in linguistic anthropological scholarship on language and gender. While some early work on this topic took a gender binary as the starting point for critiques of the hegemony of masculine ways of speaking, more recent work notes that a male/female gender binary is constricting as it does not acknowledge that gender is more than just a binary. Similar to sexuality, gender can be viewed as a spectrum, meaning that there are more than two genders that someone can identify as. However, this definition of gender being based in culture and the roles that are expected of men and women is interesting, because where does that leave those who fall somewhere in between the binary? What roles are expected of them?

In this context, working toward gender equity involves redressing the pervasive social inequalities that privilege heteronormative masculine linguistic and communicative patterns, including recognition of the ways that particular communities have creatively faced gender binaries in language and culture. Click on the “gender” category on the right side of this page to view blog posts about examples relevant to the topic of language, gender, and social justice.