Helen Sauntson & Sakis Kyratzis (eds.), Language, sexualities and desires: Cross-cultural perspectives. Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xii, 248. Hb $80.00.

This collection of new research, mostly by scholars from the United Kingdom, intervenes in the study of language and sexuality in two important ways. First, as editors Sauntson & Kyratzis note in their introduction, recent work in this field has often theorized gender performance and speech acts apart from their particular sociocultural contexts. The ten scholars in this volume use applied linguistics to study the culturally specific ways that sexuality and desire are constructed through discourse. The second important contribution of this volume is the distinction it makes between the fraught categories of identity and desire. By distinguishing sexual and social identities from enacted desires and practices, the contributors illustrate how “sexuality is linguistically construed as a form of social identity with little or no reference to desire or sexual activity,” and conversely, how desire is linguistically embedded in relations of power and agency not necessarily dependent on sexuality (p. 4).