ABSTRACT
The theme of language and gender has aimed to encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. Rather than simply discussing language and gender so that colleagues and fellow researchers can learn about our work, it is an important part of feminist praxis that we should write in an accessible way so that we make our work available to other researchers from other fields. In attempting to define lesbian language, we would need to consider the perceived institutional constraints that heterosexism imposes on language; we would then define the parameters of lesbian language in relation to other uses of language, for example heterosexual female use and the elided male, institutionalised language use. Rather than theoretical statements are being made about disembodied pieces of discourse, now the focus of attention is on genre distinctions, differences of register, the differences between literary and non-literary writing, the visual and the textual.
