Gender and Grammar in Chinese

The significance of the encoding of sex and gender for questions about the relationship between language and culture, and between language and thought, is just beginning to be explored systematically.' Language and gender research, arising within the tradition of Western feminist theory, has overrelied on examples from IndoEuropean languages and cultures and has, moreover, not integrated this research very well with the current discourse on the nature and meaning of language in culture and society.2 In much of the literature on language and gender there is an assumed but not well documented relation between the extent of patriarchal bias in a culture and what has become known as sexism