Words, Contexts, Politics

Abstract

The aims of this introduction are twofold: first, to introduce the articles included within 'Gender, Language and the Media' , this special issue of Gender and Language; and second, to locate them, individually and collectively, among the wider principles and practices of a certain kind of discourse analytic sensibility that I want to suggest is 'there' , however inchoately, across each and every type of discourse analysis to be found at work within the field of gender and language studies. In order to achieve this, the following discussion is organised around three topics-words, contexts and politics-that are central to and for any understanding of how the articles comprising this special issue index that particular sensibility. Words Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between gender and language is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within gender studies, linguistics, feminist media studies, interactional sociolinguistics, feminist psychology, conversation analysis, media studies and cultural studies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, this is an area of study that has evolved in the absence of-indeed, has never been structurally capable of producing-any kind of epistemological or methodological orthodoxy; there is, in other words, no single approach that could be said to 'hold the field'. Discursive, poststructural, ethnomethodological,