Gender in interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. Ed. by Bettina Baron and Helga Kotthoff. (Pragmatics & beyond new series 93.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 352. ISBN 1588111105. $144 (Hb).

Reviewed by: Gender in interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse ed. by Bettina Baron and Helga Kotthoff Ingrid Piller Gender in interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. Ed. by Bettina Baron and Helga Kotthoff. (Pragmatics & beyond new series 93.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 352. ISBN 1588111105. $144 (Hb). This volume brings together twelve papers on gender as an interactional accomplishment. They are grouped into four sections. The introductory section consists of only one paper, Barrie Thorne’s ‘Gender and interaction: Widening the conceptual scope’. The author takes stock of gender studies, which she sees clustered around four levels of analysis: (i) gender as discourse and ideology, (ii) gender as a dimension of social structure and institutions, (iii) gender in relationship to individual identity, subjectivity, and psychodynamics, and (iv) gender as a feature of social situations and everyday interactions. Thorne argues that the most inspiring contemporary gender scholarship reaches across these levels of analysis, as for instance in institutional ethnography, which ‘uses women’s lived experience and the “embodied ground” of daily life and consciousness as a takeoff point for interrogating the “relations of ruling” congealed in texts, discourses, and institutional practices’ (14). The second section is devoted to ‘perspectives on gender in childhood and adolescence’ and comprises four papers. Jenny Cook-Gumperz focuses on the accomplishment of gender among preschool girls. Amy Kyratzis’s work is also with preschoolers and investigates emotion socialization (aggression, fear, and caring attitudes). Both papers demonstrate that, despite efforts to promote nonstereotyped gender practices in contemporary preschools, children continue to practice and reproduce adult gender stereotypes. The third and fourth sections provide ‘perspectives on masculinity’ and ‘perspectives on femininity’ respectively. [End Page 187] In the masculinity section, Robert W. Connell maps the new field of ‘men’s health’ and paints a gloomy picture of the threats to human health and well-being posed by a range of masculinities. Relevant issues include road accidents, drug marketing, occupational health and safety, commercial sport, and violence and armed conflict. Out of the four papers in the femininity section, two deal with academic discourse. Bettina Baron compares female and male styles of arguing during conference debates at a German university. She finds that academic women use strategies of self-deprecation and self-criticism but fail to criticize others. By contrast, academic men avoid or limit self-criticism, but criticize others much more sharply and intensely. The author concludes that public conversational strategies such as those expected during academic argument continue to be ‘foreign’ to women. Instead, they opt for private conversational strategies despite the fact that these are associated with a lack of professionalism and competence in the institutional setting. In her paper on the argumentative style employed by doctoral students at a Swedish university, Britt-Louise Gunnarson similarly observes considerable differences in the strategies employed by female and male postgraduate students. Gunnarson also concludes that female novice academics are less successful than their male peers in adopting an academic habitus. The volume achieves its aim to ‘combine… data analysis, ethnographic description of various social worlds… and theory development’ (xii), and gender researchers, as well as discourse analysts and anthropological linguists more generally, will find it worthwhile reading. Ingrid Piller Basel University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

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