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"Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism brings together an outstanding collection of internationally recognised researchers to recontextualise some of the questions raised by feminist thinkers 40 years ago. The topic of gender and language has evolved tremendously in the last decades and research has contributed in many ways to a heightened awareness of gender-inflected discourse. Many of the issues discussed in the 70s and 80s, however, continue to be a problem as sexism, racism and ageism in discourses in private and institutional contexts have manifested in fresh ways in recent years. In linguistics and discourse-oriented applied research, the question of plain sexism has been side-lined since sexuality and gender identity seem to be the present concerns of the great majority of gender research. By taking linguistically mediated violence as a central topic, this collection's main objective is to explore the different and subtle ways sexism and violence are materialised in discursive practices. In doing so, this book: Takes a multi-stranded investigation into the linguistic and semiotic representations of sexism in societies today from an applied linguistic and semiotic perspective; Combines critical discourse analysis, multimodality, interactional sociolinguistics and corpus methodologies to look at language, visuals and semiotic resources in the context of consumerist culture; Examines the conflicted position of women and the discourses of discrimination that still exists in every strand of modern societies; Contextualises pervasive gender issues and reviewing key gender and language topics that changed the ways we interpret interaction from the early seventies till the present; Focuses on institutional discourses and the questions of how women are excluded or discriminated against in the workplace, the law and educational contexts. This book is essential reading for those studying and researching gender across a wide range of disciplines"--

Using a discursive/social semiotic perspective, tourism advertising is here investigated as a global discourse worth of critical investigation. Different identities are construed in texts for tourists and they are not purely reflections of personal identities. They are recontextualisations whose realisations and forms are conditioned by the social practices of the advertisers and by their stereotypical views of the countries being advertised. Gender representation is a key factor and the use of the human body, as a branding strategy, is an essential part in the construction of such identities. Exemplifying from tourism brochures and web pages, my aims are to discuss the different types of identities construed in the discourse, the way the representation of the human body is used as a semiotic resource and as a branding strategy, and the values which underlie the appeal to possible travellers and the implications of the branding strategies for gender representation.

Identity, development, and desire : critical questions / Jay L. Lemke -- Branding the self / David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen -- Identity work and transnational adoption : discursive representations of the 'adoptive-parent-to-be' in the satellite texts of a Danish TV documentary series / Pirkko Raudaskoski and Paul McIlvenny -- When (non) Anglo-Saxon queers speak in a queer language : homogeneous identities or disenfranchised bodies? / Maite Escudero Alías -- Multiple identities, migration and belonging : 'voices of migrants' / Michał Krzyżanowski and Ruth Wodak -- Mongrel selves : identity change, displacement and multi-positioning / Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Amelia Maria Fernandes Alves -- By their words shall ye know them : on linguistic identity / Malcolm Coulthard -- Cybergirls in trouble? Fan fiction as a discursive space for interrogating gender and sexuality / Sirpa Leppänen -- 'I'm good.' 'I'm nice.' 'I'm beautiful.' Idealization and contradiction in female psychiatric patients' discourse / Branca Telles Ribeiro and Maria Tereza Lopes Dantas -- Shifting identities in the classroom / Stanton Wortham -- Triple trouble : undecidability, identity and organizational change / Carl Rhodes, Hermine Scheeres and Rick Iedema -- Attempting clinical democracy : enhancing multivocality in a multidisciplinary clinical team / Debbi Long, Bonsan Bonne Lee and Jeffrey Braithwaite -- Embodying the contemporary 'clinician-manager' : entrepreneurializing middle management? / Rick Iedema, Susan Ainsworth and David Grant

Age as an important identity dimension has been comparatively neglected within gender studies. Our paper concerns the semiotic representation of a role performed in the main by older women: that of 'grandmother', a social category particularly associated with ageing. To explore this, we draw on image banks, corpus data and other texts in order to discuss images, lexical/textual labelling and their intermodal relations. We find in our visual data that grandmothers are contextualised in two ways: sharing semiotic resources of childhood or domestic contexts, or presented as transgressive actors, located in incongruous situations or performing behaviours inappropriate for their 'age'. Our discussion of corpus data complements the multimodal analyses, providing further examples of stereotyping: while references to individual grandmothers often evaluate positively, there is also strong evidence of generic, figurative and other usages that trivialise and derogate. Our conclusions point to processes of social devaluation: ageism and sexism are the pervasive and underlining ideologies recurrent in these representations. The broader implications are particularly relevant for the present time, as new forms of grandmothering appear.

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This study investigates a series of news reports of a well-publicised crime in Brazil where a transgender person was involved and implicitly evaluated and condemned by the semiotic resources used in the reporting of the event. Theoretical tools from critical discourse analysis, systemic functional grammar and multimodal theory are applied to the data in order to investigate how verbal and other semiotic resources interpret the story. The findings point to partiality and manipulation when it comes to supporting one of the sides involved in the crime to the detriment of the transgender social actress. Her nonnormative gender identity is represented as a core part of her criminal identity. Through these representations, the media reinforces bias and reproduces biased discourses against travestis, a community that constitutes a permanent zone of abjection, a process through which those deemed unintelligible are excluded by identificatory regimes to delimit the boundaries of the self.

The aim of this paper is to open a discussion about multimodal work in the area of gender, language and discourse, and propose the kinds of multimodal approaches that are most appropriate for this task. Multimodality, we claim, is a rather fragmented and unconsolidated field where many of the tools and concepts applied by different researchers are much less suitable than others. Our intention here is to raise critical questions about the affordances used by communicators in each context of usage and the ideological purposes they are meant to accomplish, so that meanings about gender and sexuality are uncovered.