Perspectives on gender and identity that emphasize variability of performance, local context and individual agency have displaced earlier paradigms.These are now perceived to have supported gender stereotypes and language ideologies by emphasizing gender difference and homogeneity within genders. In a secondary analysis of health and illness narratives we explore the interaction of class and gender in individuals' constructions of gendered identity. High social class men perform gender in particularly varied ways and we speculate that this variable repertoire, including the use of what was once termed `women's language', is linked to a capacity to maintain social distinction and authority. Men's performance of conventional masculinity is often threatened by both the experience of illness and being interviewed about personal experience. Lower social class women in particular demonstrate an intensification of a pre-existing informal family and support group culture, marking successful members by awarding them the accolade of being `lovely'.
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. London : Verso Books.
2.
Bergvall, V.L. (1999) `Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Language and Gender', Language in Society28: 273-93.
3.
Billig, M. (1988) `Methodology and Scholarship in Understanding Ideological Explanation', in C. Antaki (ed.) Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Case Book of Methods, pp. 199-215. London : SAGE.
4.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
5.
Bourdieu, P. (1986) `The Forms of Capital', in J.G. Richardson (ed.) The Handbook of Theory: Research for the Sociology of Education, pp. 241-58. New York: Greenwood Press.
6.
Cameron, D. (2003) `Gender and Language Ideologies', in J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender, pp. 447-67. Oxford : Blackwell.
7.
Coates, J. (2004) Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edn. Harlow: Pearson.
8.
Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
9.
Doel, M.A. and J. Segrott (2003) `Self, Health and Gender: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in theBritish Mass Media', Gender, Place and Culture10(2): 131-44.
10.
Eckert, P. (1990) `The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation', Language Variation and Change1: 245-67.
11.
Eckert, P. and E. Wenger (2005) `Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistics', Journal of Sociolinguistics9(4): 582-9.
12.
Emslie, C., D. Ridge, S. Ziebland and K. Hunt (2006) `Men's Accounts of Depression: Reconstructing or Resisting Hegemonic Masculinity?', Social Science and Medicine62(9): 2246-57.
13.
Freed, A. (1992) `We Understand Perfectly: A Critique of Tannen's View of Miscommunication', in K. Hall , M. Bucholz and B. Moonwomon (eds) Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, pp. 144-52. Los Angeles: University of California.
14.
Garnett, M. (2003) `Sustaining the Cocoon: The Emotional Inoculation Produced by Complementary Therapies in Palliative Care', European Journal of Cancer Care12(2): 129-36.
15.
Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
16.
Hunt, M.W. (1991) `Being Friendly and Informal: Reflected in Nurses', Terminally Ill Patients' and Relatives' Conversations at Home', Journal of Advanced Nursing16: 929-38.
17.
Kiesling, S.F. (2005) `Homosocial Desire in Men's Talk: Balancing and Re-creating Cultural Discourses of Masculinity', Language in Society34: 695-726.
18.
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Women's Place. New York: Harper and Row.
19.
Lave, J. and E. Wenger (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
Li, S. (2004) `Symbiotic Niceness: Constructing a Therapeutic Relationship in Psychosocial Palliative Care', Social Science and Medicine58(12): 2571-83.
21.
McEnery, A. and Z. Xiao (2004) `Swearing in Modern British English: The Case of fuck in the BNC', Language and Literature13(3): 235-68.
22.
Rayson, P. (2005) `Wmatrix: A Web-based Corpus Processing Environment', Computing Department, Lancaster University, URL (consulted January 2008): http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/
23.
Rayson, P., G. Leech and M. Hodges (1997) `Social Differentiation in the Use of English Vocabulary: Some Analyses of the Conversational Component of the British National Corpus' , International Journal of Corpus Linguistics2(1): 133-52.
24.
Rose, D. and D.J. Pevalin (2005) The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification: Origins, Development and Use. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
25.
Savage, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press.
26.
Scott, M. (2005) Wordsmith Tools 4.0. Oxford : Oxford University Press, URL (consulted January 2008): http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version4/
27.
Seale, C., S. Boden, P. Lowe, D. Steinberg and S. Williams (2007) `Media Constructions of Sleep Disorders: A Study of UK National Newspapers', Social Science and Medicine65(3): 418-30.
28.
Seale, C., J. Charteris-Black and S. Ziebland (2006) `Gender, Cancer Experience and Internet Use: A Comparative Keyword Analysis of Interviews and Online Cancer Support Groups' , Social Science and Medicine62: 2577-90.
29.
Speer, S. (2005) Gender Talk: Feminism, Discourse and Conversation Analysis. London: Routledge.
30.
Stokoe, E. and A. Weatherall (2002) `Gender, Language, Conversation Analysis and Feminism', Discourse and Society (special issue)13(6): 707-864.
31.
Talbot, M.M. (2003) `Gender Stereotypes: Reproduction and Challenge' , in J. Holmes and M. MeyerhoffThe Handbook of Language and Gender, pp. 468-86. Oxford: Blackwell.
32.
Townsend, P. and N. Davidson (1982) Inequalities in Health. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
