Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick, Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 176. Pb $21.00.

Paul McIlvenny (ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Hb $106.00.

Two recent books, Language and sexuality, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, and Talking gender and sexuality (TGS), edited by Paul McIlvenny, seek to elucidate the social construction of gender and sexuality by combining the methods of interactive discourse analysis with the theoretical insights of poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Guided by the basic ethnomethodological question “How are gender and sexuality ‘done’?”, the authors of both volumes are motivated, at least implicitly, by a political commitment to deconstructing and opposing sexism and heteronormativity (the ideologically enforced assumption that all people are or should be straight). In one way or another, therefore, both books also ask, paraphrasing McIlvenny, “By what linguistic-interactional means might normative gender and sexual identities be ‘undone’?” Although McIlvenny's coauthors all share his theoretical concerns at a general level, the chapters in TGS focus primarily on the means whereby gender and sexual categories are positively instantiated and indexed in talk; only a few explicitly engage how these modes of categorization might be resisted or transformed. Cameron & Kulick take their theorizing one step further, questioning the analytical and political utility of the concept of sexual identity itself.