Language, Gender, and Power
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Language, Gender, and Power, The Politics of Representation and Hegemony in South Asia
by Shahid Siddiqui is now available on all book stores and can be ordered online
The book focuses on the role of language as a powerful tool in representing and structuring the world. It explores how language can help construct stereotypes, identities, and human relationships. By constructing stereotypes language also manifests and perpetuates gender differences. The author examines how gender is in fact made up on a continuous basis in different linguistic and artistic expressions, e.g., sayings and proverbs, jokes, songs, films, TV plays, newspapers, theatre, and slogans behind vehicles, and reveals how these apparently playful activities strengthen gender stereotypes unnoticed. The book highlights the politics of representation and hegemony with regard to women with special reference to language. The readers are encouraged to realize that on the one hand language is a tool of control and hegemony while on the other hand it can be used to mount resistance against hegemony by reversing the discourse.
In this insightful, original and comprehensive book, Shahid Siddiqui draws on the full range of social sciences disciplines to analyse the complex intersections of language, gender and power in South Asian contexts. This represents an enormous and long-overdue contribution to the international literature on this topic. As readers, we gain a much deeper understanding than was previously the case of the ways in which language provides a lens to bring into focus the influence of societal power relations on the performance of gender.
Labels: Books
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 2:40 PM,
,
