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Controversy over gendered pronouns, for example using the generic "he," has been a staple of feminist arguments about patriarchal language over the last 30 years, and is certainly the most contested political issue in Western feminist linguistics. Most accounts do not extend beyond policy issues like the official institution of non-sexist language. In this volume, Anna Livia reveals continuities both before and after the sexist language refore movement and shows how the creative practices of pronoun use on the part of feminist writers had both aesthetic and political ends. Livia uses

Livia examines a broad corpus of written texts in English and French, concentrating on those texts which problematize the traditional functioning of the linguistic gender system. They range from novels and prose poems to film scripts and personal testimonies, and in time from the 19th century to the present. Some withhold any indication of gender; others have non-gendered characters. Livia's goal is two-fold; to help bridge the divide between linguistic and literary analysis, and to show how careful study of the manipulation of linguistic gender in these texts informs larger concerns. This fre

This article discusses the problems involved in applying sociolinguistic field methods (which have been carefully honed for use in face-to-face encounters) to the area of computer-mediated communication, and more specifically, the French Minitel. In a mostly anonymous or pseudonymous forum such as the Minitel messagerie, individual demographic information such as age, gender, race, or class may be less important in understanding the message than the community values held by participants. Such ethically required (and heuristically useful) procedures as asking permission to record and giving participants segments of recordings to solicit their reactions and interpretations are often particularly hard to carry out. From this point of view, Minitel research comes to resemble graffiti analysis with its emphasis on the relationship between messages and between messages and ground, rather than on the writer and the written.

This article asks whether it is presumptuous for afeminist writer to create characters quite different from herself. Using the particular example of heterosexual novelists' representations of lesbians, it argues that such presumption-although fraught with difficulties-is essential to feminist truth-telling.