Skip to main content

Introduction to the Study of Gender in Italian

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality ((PSLGS))

  • 657 Accesses

Abstract

Italy is a fruitful epistemological site, apt to investigate gendered language in relation to a deep-rooted sexist culture and an imbalanced society. Women in private and public spheres are still evaluated and judged against ‘male as a norm’. Notwithstanding an increase in the number of women accessing political arenas, they are still seen as interlopers. In this context, language operates to reproduce the discursive status quo, leaning on ideological stances and imaginaries that re-establish a natural gendered order where women are perceived as inferior to men. Resisting voices are attempting to counterbalance this order. Feminist linguistics, discourse and ideology, are at the core of the investigation of gender made relevant through language explored through quantitative (mainly corpus linguistics) and qualitative methods.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abbou, Julie. 2011. Double gender marking in French: A linguistic practice of antisexism. Current Issues in Language Planning 12 (1): 55–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Paul. 2006. Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Paul. 2014. Using corpora to analyse gender. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baxter, Judith. 2003. Positioning gender in discourse: A feminine methodology. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Subjectivity in language. Problems in General Linguistics 1: 223–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bucholtz, Mary. 2014. The feminist foundations of language, gender, and sexuality research. In The handbook of language, gender, and sexuality, ed. Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes, 21–47. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, Deborah. 2006. Theorising the female voice in public contexts. In Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts, ed. Judith Baxter, 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, Deborah, and Sylvia Shaw. 2016. Gender, power and political speech: Women and language in the 2015 UK General Election. London: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1998. Communities of practice: Where language, gender and power all live. In Language and gender: A reader, ed. Janet Coates, 484–494. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2007. Putting communities of practice in their place. Gender and Language 1: 27–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical discourse analysis. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 2001. Language and power, 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Formato, Federica. 2014. Language use and gender in the Italian parliament. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Formato, Federica. 2016. Linguistic markers of sexism in the Italian media: A case study of ministra and ministro. Corpora 11 (3): 371–399.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Formato, Federica. 2017. ‘Ci sono troie in giro in Parlamento che farebbero di tutto’. Italian female politicians seen through a sexual lens. Gender and Language 11 (3): 389–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michael. 1972. The discourse on language. In Truth: Engagements across philosophical traditions, ed. Jose Medina and David Wood, 315–335. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fowler, Roger. [1991] 2013. Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ginsborg, Paul. 2001. Italy and its discontents, 1980–2001. London: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guaraldo, Olivia. 2011. Insignificante padrone: Media sesso e potere nell’Italia contemporanea. In Filosofia di Berlusconi, ed. Carlo Chiurco, 97–128. Verona: Ombre Corte.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gundle, Stephen. 2000. Il bel paese: Art, beauty and the bult of appearance. In The politics of Italian national identity, ed. Gino Bedani, 106–136. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gundle, Stephen. 2007. Bellissima: Feminine beauty and the idea of Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gundle, Stephen. 2015. How Berlusconi will be remembered: Notoriety, collective memory and the mediatisation of posterity. Modern Italy 20 (1): 91–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hawthorn, Jeremy. 1992. A concise glossary of contemporary literary theory. London: Edward Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heath, Shirley Brice. 1989. Language ideology. International Encyclopedia of Communications 2: 393–395.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hellinger, Merlin, and Hadumod Bussmann (eds.). 2002. Gender across languages. The linguistic representation of women and men, vol. 1–3. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hipkins, Danielle. 2011. ‘Whore-ocracy’: Show girls, the beauty trade-off, and mainstream oppositional discourse in contemporary Italy. Italian Studies 66 (3): 413–430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Irvine, John Thomas. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16 (2): 248–267.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Sally, and Tommaso Milani (eds.). 2010. Language ideologies and media discourse: Texts, practices, politics. London: Continuum. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/language-ideologies-and-media-discourse-9781441155863/.

  • Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, Robin. 1973. Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2 (1): 45–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lazar, Michelle (ed.). 2005. Feminist critical discourse analysis: Gender, power and ideology in discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Litosseliti, Lia. 2006. Gender and language. Theory and practice. Hodder Education: London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macdonell, Diane. 1986. Theories of discourse: An introduction. Oxford and New York, NY: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. 2000. The Italian broadcasting system between politics and the market. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5 (2): 157–168.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McEnery, Anthony, and Andrew Wilson. 2001. Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McEnery, Anthony, and Paul Baker (eds.). 2015. Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Andrea Deumert, and William Leap. 2000. Introducing sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyerhoff, Miriam, and Janet Holmes (eds.). 2003. The handbook of language and gender. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milani, Tommaso. 2010. What’s in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14 (1): 116–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mills, Sara. 2004. Discourse. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Parsons, Talcott. 1970. Equality and inequality in modern society, or social stratification revisited. Sociological Inquiry 40 (2): 13–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Philips, Susan. 2014. The power of gender ideologies in discourse. In The handbook of language, gender, and sexuality, ed. Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potts, Amanda, and Federica Formato. forthcoming. Women victims of men who murder: XML mark-up for nomination, collocation and frequency analysis of language of the law. In The handbook of language, gender and sexuality, ed. Judith Baxter and Jo Anguri. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity. 1998. Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spallaccia, Beatrice. 2017. Misogynistic hate speech on social networks: A critical discourse analysis. PhD thesis, Monash University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Oxford and New York, NY: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sunderland, Jane. 2004. Gendered discourses. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Tannen, Deborah. 1990. Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 16 (1): 519–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaccari, Cristian. 2011. The news media as networked political actors. Information, Communication & Society 14 (7): 981–997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Dijk, Teun. 1988. News analysis: Case studies of international and national news in the press. Hillsdale: Lawrence Elbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walby, Sylvia. 1990. Theorizing patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walsh, Clare. 2001. Gender and discourse. Language and power in politics, the church and organisations. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.

    Google Scholar 

  • West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing Gender. Gender and Society 1 (2): 125–151.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, Ruth (ed.). 1997. Gender and discourse. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolf, Naomi. 1990. The beauty myth. New York: Harper Collins.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Formato, F. (2019). Introduction to the Study of Gender in Italian. In: Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96555-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96556-7

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics