Reviewed by Caroline Gagné, Université Laval

Sara Mills’s book offers a critical examination of the study of sexism in language. Although many previous papers have argued that sexism in language was easy to identify, M claims that even in feminist circles, sexism in language has been a problematic concept. In this volume, M develops a third wave feminist analysis of sexism that includes the specifications of the second wave. Based on her multidisciplinary studies of conversational and textual data, M identifies two forms of sexism (i.e. overt and indirect).

In the introduction, M presents her theoretical position, which is based on third wave feminism and critical discourse analysis. Additionally, she explains the differences between second wave and third wave feminist analysis—namely, that the second wave studies women’s language as a subordinated group, whereas the third wave focuses on the homogeneity of women. The remaining chapters reflect the evolution of sexism.

Ch. 2 investigates overt sexism, which is sexism that is clear and unambiguous. Overt sexism is the type of sexism analyzed by the second wave. In this book, overt sexism is used to describe generic pronouns and nouns as well as other derogatory connotation towards women. Because overt sexism is direct and focuses not only on sexism but also on racism and homophobia, antidiscriminatory language campaigns have condemned it.

In Ch. 3, M describes campaigns against discriminatory language as well as some strategies of antihomophobic and antisexist language campaigners. Common strategies include inflecting pejorative words positively and using alternative terms and neologisms. M also discusses the impact and the effectiveness of these campaigns along with some reactions to them. The remaining chapters focus on those reactions.

Ch. 4 covers political correctness. M explains why the term political correctness is viewed negatively whereas political incorrectness is viewed positively.

Ch. 5 focuses on indirect sexism, the second response feminist campaigns on language received. Indirect sexism must be studied contextually by examining and interpreting surrounding utterances. Usually, indirect sexism is hidden under humor and irony; therefore, it can be quite hard to identify. Based on the third wave feminist analysis of sexism, M offers new ways to analyze the most common forms of indirect sexism (e.g. humour, presupposition, conflicting messages, scripts and metaphors, collocation, and the androcentric perspective).

This well-written book will be useful for linguists and sociologists, especially those interested in discourse analysis or feminist and sexism studies.