What is it about?
This review article critically engages with the contributions of the 2022 book Gender Diversity and Sexuality in English Language Education: New Transnational Voices. This review celebrates the achievements of the contributors in the field of English Language Education, embracing the diverse range of research and methods it details, yet critically reviewing its contents, authorship, and scope.
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Why is it important?
This review embodies both a Linguistics and Queer Studies approach in engaging with the referent book. The merits of Linguistic research are notable, yet this review highlights the transnational deficits, and Transgender exclusion in discussions of gender in English Language Education. The Queer Studies perspective seeks to not undermine the valuable research presented by contributors, but to encourage later editions to be more inclusive of not only Transgender identities, but globally contingent gender and sexual identities. In considering Transgender identities as communicated in the English language, there opens a space in which English Language Education can be reformed through the embrace of global identities external to English-dominant conceptions of identity.
Perspectives
This publication is important as I engage with research which considers the role of language dominance and the impact on global identities. To include gender and sexuality in English Language Education, primarily as a second language, would benefit from representing local identities which learners engage with socio-culturally. To provide education of gender and sexuality via only English Language norms produces an instance of cultural imperialism which risks the devaluation of global identities. In summary, this publication proposes suggestions to the reviewed book which are more inclusive of the cultures they interact with, rather than reinforcing Anglophile dominance of language and identity knowledge.
Jay Chester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Review of Banegas & Govender (2022): Gender Diversity and Sexuality in English Language Education: New Transnational Voices, Journal of Language and Sexuality, January 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jls.00033.che.
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