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Advertisements are a key site for gender and language study, many ads constructing relationships between femininity and consumption, and gender relations of a (hetero) sexual nature. In this paper I look in a qualitative way at how two ads in the form of 'tiny texts' indirectly index gender inflected with both ethnicity and sexuality. Printed on sugar tubes found in a café in modern urban Botswana, one of these ads shows a black woman, the other a white woman. I adopt a feminist discourse analytic approach to argue that the many lexical and other intertextual associations of 'sugar' and 'sweetness' in relation to women and sex function to sexualise the black woman (in particular), and that these in turn intertextually sexualise the white woman in ways which index women's 'availability' within an overall discourse of multiculturalism and social liberalisation.

In this largely theoretical paper, I look at contradictions as these may be experienced by feminist readers of sexist jokes, and at ways active readers may deal with these. Drawing on the notions of interpellation (e.g. Althusser, 1998) and focalisation (Genette, 1972; Montgomery, 2000), I start with ways of reading the text in question – a set of sexist jokes. Then, drawing on the rather diverse theoretical notions of reader response(s), discourse(s), irony, double voicing and post-feminism, I look at ways of articulating feminist readings of the set of jokes. I propose four 'alternative reading positions' for feminists; in this way, the paper also contributes, modestly, to a theory of reading. I conclude by examining the implications of the study for everyday practice and for feminism itself.

In this paper, we examine a range of issues associated with the study of gender and language in sub-Saharan African contexts. These include whether (and in what sense) such contexts may constitute a 'special case', the relevance of feminism, and what might be encompassed by 'context', 'African contexts' and 'African topics' – and a substantial amount of what we write is relevant to Applied Linguistics in Africa more broadly (see Makoni and Meinhof 2004 for a discussion). We argue that while all the gender issues are of interest and importance to language and gender study in general, it is possible to see some of these issues as 'characteristic' of African contexts (albeit with 'echoes' elsewhere). It will be evident from this first paper (and those which follow) that along with taking on board commonalities in terms of the theoretical notions used in our field in African and non-African contexts, there is also a need to recognise a range of situated understandings of gender identities, gender relations, understandings of gender more broadly, and feminism.