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Exploiting the plurality of research methodologies:
-Affordances and limitations of each method for a particular context.
-Specific theoretical and epistemological imperatives.
-Provide plural perspectives on the linguistics enactment of gender in contexts where speakers are often 'positioned' in diff ways.

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RELATIONALLY:
By locating communities of practice in relation to a word beyond - other communities, social networks, institutions and more global, imagined communities.

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COMPARATIVELY
By examining diff but similar kinds of CofP to move beyond particular and specific insights about a community to more general observations about gender and sexuality.

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Role for community of practices: Social practice emphasising the social significance of what people do, goes well beyond simple individual acts or conversations to socially regulated, repeated and interpreted collaborative doings.
It aims to analyse how such 'practices articulate with the wider world and with wider discourses of gender and sexuality.'

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MEN: sophisticated spatial and mathematic skills

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WOMEN:  'hard-wired' to have more advanced verbal and linguistic abilities.

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The rise of biological essentialism

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FUTURE TRAJECTORY AND NEW DEBATES

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Global perspective: wider genre order unless participants signal their orientation to the salience of gender within linguistic interactions there is no evidence that it is relevant.

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Local perspective: Gender can be justified as a category but only on a case-by-case basis, 'from the ground up' before it can be legitimately addressed within research.

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The salience of gender:

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Gender and sexuality: mutually constitutive relationship og gender and sexual identities. Sexuality is perceived as fluid, multi-faceted and a form of desire/identity that is constructed and performed through speech and behaviour, and not simply determined by the sex of people's bodies at birth or by early socialisation.
Recent 'gender and sexuality' research has been upon 'hetero-normativity', the system that naturalises and rewards a particular kind of heterosexuality - complementary, monogamous and reproductive male/female partnerships - as the basis for a stable society.
Another research has investigated the linguistic performances of people who identify with sexual minorities: gay men, lesbians, transgendered and transsexual people who:
-move from one category to another during the course of their lives
-alternate btw differently gendered personae
- refuse to be defined as either men, or women but claim to be sth 'intermediate or indeterminate'

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Social constructionism and the 'post-modern turn':
This theory suggests that males and females are not born, or even simply socialised into a pre-fixed gender identity, but the become gendered through interactions.
Individuals don't have gender, they do gender through repeated behavioural and linguistic interactions.
This post-modern perspective argues that males and females do not have an individual essence, character or 'core'. There are no instrinsic male or female characteristics, only ones that are brought into being through repeated bodily or linguistic actions.
The effects we produce by way of particular things we do. People's identities are performative. ('Perform' many aspects of our identity, such as being femenine or masculine).

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MAIN CURRENT ISSUES

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Cultural difference theory: Women and men constitute different 'sub-cultures' learnt through friendly interactions as children in single-sex peer groups.
-BOYS: learnt how to compete with others for access to 'the floor' (referential, goal-oriented lg, to say things to impact and effect).
- GIRLS: learnt how to build relationships of equality and trust, to co-operate with others, to get things done, and to express emotions and feelings.

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Dominance theory: LAKOFF'S thesis that women constructed their own subordination through their lg use was a forerunner of 'dominance' theory. This had two distinct, parallel branches:
1. lg as social interaction (how gender inequalities were constructed through routine interactions btw men and women)
2. lg as a system ('sexism' within the lg)

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Deficit theory: LAKOFF'S THEORY posited that from an early age, girls are taught how to use a separate 'woman's lg': 'ladylike' way. Women's subordinate status in American society (1970s) was reflected and constructed basically through a deficient version of men's lg (tentative, indirect, more powerless).

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Interactional studies: focus on gendered ways in which people interact in various social and professional contexts. There are 3 theories: emphasised the notion of gender dichotomy
- deficit
- dominance
- difference
'Men are from Mars and women are from Venus'

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Variationist studies:
'Sex-preferential' perspective - a male/female preference for using diff forms of the same lg.
-Landmark studies in phonology, drew a conclusion: within every social class, women use more standard forms than men.
-Trudgill proposed that women prefer standard forms because they are status-conscious, while men prefer vernacular because it has connotations of masculine solidarity ('toughness').
Variationist research TODAY: 'sociolinguistic'. I t has tended to move away from large-scale, quantitative, correlational methods towards more local, contextualised and ethnographic approaches that explore gender with other social identities.

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HISTORY OF THE AREA

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TWO ASPECTS emerged in lg and gender research:
1. How women and men TALKED
2. How women/men/girls/boys were REPRESENTED in lg (code, discourse)
This was to explore how people's IDENTITIES are constructed in gendered ways.

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Lg and Gender is a new field within sociolinguistics. It explore and explains folk-linguistic beliefs that males and females speak and act differently.
The lg was primary used to show hierarchies and inequalities btw men and women.

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"Silence, the final frontier - where no woman has gone before" (British Newspaper headline)
EVIDENCE: Takes a prescriptive perspective rather than a descriptive view about Gender.

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The Lg of women and men seemed to be different

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GENDER