Call for Submissions: Special Issue of Gender and Language

Gender, Language, Communication and the Media

Gender and Language invite papers on the topic of gender, language, communication and the media for a forthcoming special issue in 2014. We invite papers that deploy various methods (e.g., linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, content analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and sociolinguistics) to explore the relationship(s) between gender and related topics (e.g. sexism, sexuality, sexualisation, post-feminism) and the media as broadly conceived (e.g. newspapers, television, radio, online environments).

Over recent years, issues to do with 'sex' and 'gender' have become increasingly visible across various forms of contemporary media. But how are we to understand the varied ways in which such phenomena are unpacked, reformulated, constructed, deleted, and so on, in and through these media?

This special issue aims to pull together a diverse range of papers that all coalesce around the following sorts of questions:

1. How are contemporary media representations, stereotypes and accounts of gender constructed in the media?

2. What, if anything, is new, unique and distinct about the ways in which gender is constructed in and through such media representations?

3. How is it possible, methodologically, to capture something like gender, and how can we know when we have found 'it'?

Please send a 750 word summary of your proposed paper, detailing *provisional* title, topic, methods, and findings. We will let you know at this outline stage whether or not your paper looks to be a 'good fit' for the special issue. Authors of papers that fit with the issue's aims will then be invited to submit a full length paper of between 5000-7000 words (including abstract, data and references). Papers will be subject to the usual peer review process.

In the event that we end up with more accepted papers than the special issue allows space for, papers may be accepted for future issues of Gender and Language.

The deadline for submitting 750 word summaries is November 30th 2012. Please submit your summary to the special issue editor, Dr Frederick Attenborough.

The deadline for full length papers is May 15th 2013.

Gender and Language is about to head into its 7th year. To promote the journal and establish its impact, the editors ­ Elizabeth Stokoe and Ann Weatherall ­ have recently moved to three issues per year, introduced 'early view' papers published online first with DOIs, and applied for an impact factor ranking. Special issues are part of our strategy for increasing the journal's profile.