Language and gender research at the intersection of the global and local

Abstract

While globalization has become a central lens through which social scientists have reframed old questions in the last couple of decades, students of language and gender in their sociocultural context have been slower to do so. Yet global processes are of concern to people’s daily lives in all contemporary societies, as they gender themselves and each other through the intersubjective negotiation of the intersection of the global and the local. This paper illustrates these processes with two examples from Tonga, and proposes that attention to the global can enrich our understanding of both the gendering of everyday life and global processes.