More Heat than Light
More Heat than Light:
Sex-difference Science & the Study of Language
by Deborah Cameron
$10.95
- February 2013
- print ISBN: 978-1-55380-221-1
- ebook ISBN: 978-1-55380-222-8
- PDF ISBN: 978-1-55380-223-5
- 5 3/4″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 34 pp
- Non-Fiction
- 9 b&w images
- Out of print
In the Sedgewick lecture for 2012, Professor Deborah Cameron investigates the age-old question of whether men and women are different kinds of beings, both physically and intellectually. She begins by noting that in the 19th century that most writers saw men as being intellectually superior to women in their use of language. But she also observes that this position was gradually modified in the 20th century, that is, until the 1990s, when there was a sudden resurgence of the essentialist idea, this time with many writers concluding that women were programmed to be the better language users. Cameron examines closely the claims of a number of popular self-help books on the subject, and then proceeds to show how many of the more supposedly scientific books rely on a form of “neurobabble” to make similar claims about the alleged hard-wired intellectual differences between men and women. The question then becomes, why is it that this essentialist view has caught on? Cameron suggests that it is in part a way of responding to the pervasive anxiety brought about by massive social changes in the roles of men and women. She also cautions that this new essentialism is having potentially drastic consequences on the theories and practice of how boys and girls, men and women, are educated.
Click here to read an excerpt from More Heat than Light.
Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lectures:
- From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place by Stephen Burt (2015)
- Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization and the Waking Dream of Paradise by Jonathan Gil Harris (2011)
- John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist by P.G. Stanwood (2008)
- Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions by J. Edward Chamberlin (2005)
- Spontaneous Overflows and Revivifying Rays: Romanticism and the Discourse of Improvisation by Angela Esterhammer (2004)
- “Servile Ministers”: Othello, King Lear and the Sacralization of Service by Michael Neill (2003)
- Grandchild of Empire: About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth by W.H. New (2002)
- The Generation of Caliban by Jonathan Goldberg (2001)
- Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality and Imperialism by Anne McClintock (2000)
- Professing English at UBC: The Legacy of Roy Daniells and Garnett Sedgewick by Sandra Djwa (1999)
