speak up or they back down even when they have a good point. They tend
to be more emotional and to personalize business matters. Women say that
men leave them out of shop talk, and informal talk, where the "real"
business gets done. The misunderstandings are often so severe that they
give rise to the complaint that men and women do not even speak the
same language. As Suzette Haden Elgin ( 1993) pointed out, this is the
ultimate disclaimer. Here again, there is a wealth of material aimed at a
popular audience. Bestselling author John Gray ( 1992) claimed that men
and women are so different, they even behave as if they live on different
planets: Men are from Mars and women, from Venus.

Language is key too in the campaign for language reform, where I show
that the debate is really about issues of race, gender, class, or culture. To
advocate deliberate change is to threaten the status quo, the prevailing
moral order, and a particular view of the world. Whose values will prevail
in public discourse? If "only" words were at stake, why is there so much
resistance?

Because the gender and communication interface impacts across such a
broad social, cultural, and political spectrum, I believe its study must be
truly cross-disciplinary. In writing this book I have necessarily had to poach
on the terrain of a great many other disciplines such as anthropology,
biology, communication, education, economics, history, literary criticism,
philosophy, psychology, and sociology. I was particularly concerned to
bring a linguistic perspective to bear on central issues in feminist theories.
I have learned a great deal by reading through the continually expanding
literature on gender and sexuality, written primarily by feminist scholars
over the past 25 years. Similarly, within the field of postcolonial studies,
I have benefited from the work of Edward Said, which has led me to see
more clearly how deeply embedded in racism and colonialism is the "mas-
ter" narrative underlying the Western liberal humanist tradition.

Because modern linguistic theory is essentially a product of 19th-century
European scholarship, some notions basic to linguistic analysis, such as the
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and theories of markedness, are also
embedded in this master narrative of masculinist science. Writing this book
has been a fascinating, yet sometimes depressing, experience. Although I
was well aware of the more obvious ways in which language has discrimi-
nated against women as well as how the discipline of linguistics has tended
to marginalize the study of language and gender, I was at times surprised
at how deeply ingrained such prejudice is in the intellectual discourses and
metaphors of the Western and other traditions.

The limitations of this viewpoint lead me to reject essentialism and to
adopt a rather broad definition of feminism that goes beyond the subject
of women. An examination of bipolar categories such as men and women
is necessary, but does not exhaust the issue. The categories are not the

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