ABSTRACT
Noticing that gender is in language and that how a person speaks is related to their gender identity is not new. Linguists have long noted situations in which gender is related to language. Robin Lakoff was channeling the second-wave feminist zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s in which women were discovering the myriad ways that society was organized to advantage men; a social organization of institutions, traditions, laws, ideologies, and practices often referred to as a single entity: ‘the patriarchy.’ Lakoff argued that there was an inequality in the ways that English referred to women and men. The critique of work on language and sexual identity is in some part a reaction to the uptake of Butlerian performance theory in this area, in which researchers were showing that linguistic forms were transportable to different identities and available to be used in creative ways that were ‘detachable’ from the identities with which they were originally indexed.
