Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies.
Gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies, particularly within North American English. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized, so that such features were often reduced in certain settings, such as the workplace.
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
Political lesbianism is a phenomenon within feminism, primarily second-wave feminism and radical feminism; it includes, but is not limited to, lesbian separatism. Political lesbianism asserts that sexual orientation is a political and feminist choice, and advocates lesbianism as a positive alternative to heterosexuality for women as part of the struggle against sexism.
Michael G. Flood is an Australian sociologist and a professor at the Queensland University of Technology School of Justice. Flood gained his doctorate in gender and sexuality studies from the Australian National University. His areas of research are on violence against women, fathering, pro-feminism, domestic violence, the effects of pornography on young people, safe sex among heterosexual men, men's movements as a backlash to the feminist movement, men's relationships with each other and with women, homophobia, men's health, and gender justice. He is a regular contributor to and is regularly quoted in the media on these and other issues.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.
The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? is a book by Deborah Cameron that was originally released in the autumn of 2008, which was published by Oxford University Press. The title refers to the central conceit of the book by John Gray of January 1992, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which Cameron’s book is (partially) the response to.
LGBTQ linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBTQ communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBTQ communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBTQ communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.
Stevi Jackson, is an academic and writer working in the field of gender and sexuality. She has been Professor of Women's studies at the University of York, England since 1998, and is Director of the University's Centre for Women's Studies.
Rosalind Coward is a journalist and writer. She is an Emeritus Professor of journalism at Roehampton University, and a former member of the board of Greenpeace UK (2005–12).
William Leap is an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University and an affiliate professor in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University. He works in the overlapping fields of language and sexuality studies and queer linguistics, and queer historical linguistics.
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
"The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" is a feminist essay on women's sexuality written by American radical feminist activist Anne Koedt in 1968, and published in 1970. It first appeared in a four-paragraph outline form in the Notes from the First Year which resulted in an extended article in Notes from the Second Year journals published by the New York Radical Women and was partially based on findings from Masters and Johnson's 1966 work Human Sexual Response. It was then distributed as a pamphlet in its full form, including sections on evidence for the clitoral orgasm, female anatomy, and reasons the "myth" of vaginal orgasm is maintained.
Bethan Benwell, is a British linguist. She has been a senior lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, for the Division of Literature and Languages, at the University of Stirling since 2008.
Susan Lynn Ehrlich is a Canadian linguist known for her work in both language and gender, language and the law, and the intersections between them. She studies language, gender and the law, with a focus on consent and coercion in rape trials.
Lisa Adkins is a sociologist and academic. As of 2018, she holds a professorship at the University of Sydney, where she is also Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. From 2015-2019 she was a Distinguished Professor in the Academy of Finland. She has previously held professorships at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published in the fields of economic sociology and feminist theory, most recently on the welfare state and labour markets under finance capitalism and in post-industrial societies. She is co-editor-in-chief of Australian Feminist Studies.
Lal Zimman is an American linguist who works on sociocultural linguistics, sociophonetics, language, gender and identity, and transgender linguistics.
