Overview
- Brings grammatical gender to the forefront of discussions around sexist uses of language
- Presents examples of imbalanced linguistic constructions of gender in public and private roles
- Examines how the Italian language can be used to systematically construct and maintain gender inequality
- Contextualises and discusses approaches to language reform
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality (PSLGS)
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About this book
This book analyses gendered language in Italian, shedding light on how the Italian language constructs and reproduces the social imbalance between women and men, and presenting indirect and direct instances of asymmetrical constructions of gender in public and private roles. The author examines linguistic treatments of women in politics and the media, as well as the gendered crime of femminicidio, i.e. the killing of women by their (former) partners. Through the combination of corpus linguistics, surveys, and discourse analysis, she establishes a new approach to the study of gendered Italian, a framework which can be applied to other languages and epistemological sites. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, discourse analysis, Italian and other Romance languages.
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Keywords
- sociolinguistics
- corpus linguistics
- criminology
- language in the law
- grammar
- Femminicidio
- Italy
- gendered crime
- Sexist language
- Italian Politics
- Media
- Social media
- violence against women
- femicide
- grammatical gender
- the cult of beauty
- Italian press
- language ideology
- linguistic anthropology
- androcentrism
- language and gender
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Gender, discourse and ideology in Italian brings forth a theoretical discussion of key concepts, such as gender, ideology, and feminism. It also provides data on how Italians actually respond to gendered language. … These matters deserve attention and can be further exploited in future research.” (Erika Coachman, Language in Society, Vol. 49 (2), 2020)
“Federica Formato has produced a thoughtful and thorough treatment of the way that language use in Italy perpetuates a range of subtle and crude gender biases, covering both language as system (the embedded grammatical rules of expressing gender in Italian), and language in use (the ways that female politicians and women who are killed are written about in the news). Her book represents an important and timely contribution to feminist scholarship.” (Paul Baker, Professor of English Language, Lancaster University, UK)“Federica Formato’s timely contribution is an innovative and systematic investigation of gender and language from a linguistic perspective. It is particularly valuable for its insights into the Italian context and will be essential reading for scholars in this area but it also goes far beyond the specifics of one country and will reward anyone interested in the intersection of language and sexism.” (Charlotte Taylor, Senior Lecturer in English Language & Linguistics, University of Sussex, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Federica Formato is an independent scholar who has taught linguistics at various UK universities. She has published on the topics of direct and indirect instances of sexism in Italian from quantitative and qualitative perspectives, and gender and language in the law. Her research interests include gender, politics, violence against women and corpus linguistics.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian
Authors: Federica Formato
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-96555-0Published: 17 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07213-1Published: 13 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-96556-7Published: 04 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2947-9169
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9177
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 299
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: Language and Gender, Romance Languages, Discourse Analysis, Gender Studies, Politics and Gender, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime