Book review: Sara Mills, Gender Matters: Feminist Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Gender Matters: Feminist Linguistic Analysis is a collection of articles and essays that Sara Mills has published since 1992, all belonging to the domain of feminist linguistic analysis and forming a comprehensive overview of what feminist analysis can do. On the one hand, the book provides an analysis of literary and non-literary texts from a feminist perspective by covering such genres as novels, poems, lyrics and movies through the themes of gendered reading/writing and sexism. On the other hand, Mills examines conversation via everyday interaction and public speeches to highlight the relationship between gender and politeness and gender and public speaking. The individual chapters, therefore, can be read separately. The major strength of this book lies in its potential to cover a wide range of topics, genres and methods, thus opening it up to a broader audience than merely students of Literature, Popular Culture or Linguistics. Mills has an engaging style and the examples and the variety of text genres she draws on are impressive. Each essay is introduced with a paragraph that explains its focus and relationship to the other essays in that section. This paragraph, often a version of the original abstract, is especially useful as it often comments on the context of the creation of the individual essay (as some of them were written in the 1990s) and makes particularly useful recommendations for further use of the method of analysis in question. Perhaps more details regarding the location of the specific essay in the present context would be even more useful for those not so familiar with the specific area of study. The book consists of an introduction and four parts. The introduction focuses on why feminism is needed and what feminist linguistic approaches have achieved and can achieve. The explanation of terminologies such as gender, feminism and feminist theory makes this section very reader-friendly and accessible to a non-specialist audience too, as well as providing relevance to the main themes the essays discuss. Part 1 consists of two chapters and has a literary theme. The first chapter examines the so-called 'female sentence' (the deficient) as opposed to the 'male sentence' ('the norm',

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“…Discourse analysis with Sara Mills' perspective emphasized how women were imaged in a text. The focus of the critical discourse of Sara Mills' model was on the position of the subject-object as well as the position of the reader in the story(Agnes Bodis 2014;Lillian 2016;Mills 2016).…”