Unmaking Gender Binaries, Remaking Gender Pluralities

This book explores the undoing of gender binaries in non-Anglophone communities and contexts, through their connected linguistic and social unscripting. This is an important step in scholarship in language and gender, one that will inform a public increasingly aware of these remakings, both within and beyond grammatical gender.

Language and gender are interconnected, social and relational acts through which we constantly remake our worlds. But what happens when our ways of doing gender cannot be neatly categorized into traditional binary systems, including not only the social groupings of roles, practices and identities, but also the forms and structures through which we do language? This book brings together a broad range of scholars to explore the undoing and redoing of gender binaries in non-Anglophone communities and contexts, in and through their linguistic and social reimaginings. Each of the contributions to this book reflects on this ongoing change and its place in our everyday lives, including the ways that its outcomes are both contested and fluid. This volume represents an important step in scholarship in language and gender, one that stands to inform a public increasingly aware of these remakings and one that calls on all of us to stand in the tensions of our own humanity and look through it for how our languaging might ‘do’ imaginary worlds that are more equitable, more connected, and more just for us all.