Talk is crucial to the way our identities are constructed, altered, and defended. These essays bring together feminist scholars in the area of language and gender to tackle such topics as African-American drag queens, gender and class on the shopping channel, and talk in the workplace.

Talk is crucial to the way our identities are constructed, altered, and defended. Feminist scholars in particular have only begun to investigate how deeply language reflects and shapes who we think we are. This volume of essays advances that effort by bringing together feminist scholars in the area of language and gender such as Deborah Tannen, Jennifer Coates, and Marcyliena Morgan, to tackle such topics as African-American drag queens, gender and class on the shopping channel, and talk in the workplace.

Introduction: Bad Examples: Transgression and Progress in Language and Gender Studies
PART 1: IDENTITY AS INVENTION
1. No Woman No Cry: Claiming African American Women's Place
2. Coherent Identities amid Heterosexist Ideologies: Deaf and Hearing Lesbian Coming-Out Stories
3. Good Guys and "Bad" Girls: Identity Construction by Latina and Latino Student Writers
4. Constructing the Irrational Woman: Narrative Interaction and Agoraphobic Identity
5. Cnotextualizing the Exotic Few: Gender Dichotomies in Lakhota
PART 2: IDENTITY AS IDEOLOGY
6. Changing Femininities: The Talk of Teenage Girls
7. Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor
8. All Media are Created Equal: Do-It-Yourself Identity in Alternative Publishing
9. Strong Language, Strong Actions: Native American Women Writing against Federal Authority
10. "Opening the Door of Paradise a Cubit": Educated Tunisian Women, Embodied Linguistic Practices, and Theories of Language and Gender
PART 3: IDENTITY AS INGENUITY
11. The Display of (Gendered) Identities in Talk at Work
12. Gender, Context, and the Narrative Construction of Identity: Rethinking Models of "Women's Narrative"
13. Language, Socialization, and Silence in Gay Adolescence
14. Turn-Initial No: Collaborative Opposition among Latina Adolescents
15. Conversationally Implicating Lesbian and Gay Identity
16. Indexing Polyphonous Identity in the Speech of African American Drag Queens
17. "She Sired Six Children": Feminist Experiments with Linguistic Gender
18. Purchasing Power: The Gender and Class Imaginary on the Shopping Channel
19. Folklore and "News at 6": Gendered Discourse Domains and Language Planning
20. Constructing Opposition within Girls' Games
Index