This book analyses gendered language in Italian, shedding light on how the Italian language constructs and reproduces the social imbalance between women and men, and presenting indirect and direct instances of asymmetrical constructions of gender in public and private roles. The author examines linguistic treatments of women in politics and the media, as well as the gendered crime of femminicidio, i.e. the killing of women by their (former) partners. Through the combination of corpus linguistics, surveys, and discourse analysis, she establishes a new approach to the study of gendered Italian, a framework which can be applied to other languages and epistemological sites. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, discourse analysis, Italian and other Romance languages.
"Gender, discourse and ideology in Italian brings forth a theoretical discussion of key concepts, such as gender, ideology, and feminism. It also provides data on how Italians actually respond to gendered language. ... These matters deserve attention and can be further exploited in future research." (Erika Coachman, Language in Society, Vol. 49 (2), 2020)