Available From UC Press

Beyond Gender Binaries uses a feminist, intersectional, and invitational approach to understanding identities and how they relate to communication. Taking readers outside the familiar binary constructions of gender and identity, Cindy L. Griffin addresses—through a feminist intersectional lens—communication, identity, power and privilege, personhood and citizenship, safety in public and private spaces, and hegemony and colonialism. Twelve chapters focus on critical learning through careful exploration of key terms and concepts. Griffin illustrates these with historical and contemporary examples and provides concrete guides to intersectional approaches to communication. This textbook highlights not just the ways individuals, systems, structures, and institutions use communication to privilege particular identities discursively and materially, but also the myriad ways that communication can be used to disrupt privilege and respectfully acknowledge the nonbinary and intersectional nature of every person’s identity.

• Intersectional approaches to explaining and understanding identities and communication are the foundation of each chapter and inform the presentation of information throughout the book.
• Contemporary and historical examples are included in every chapter, highlighting the intersectional nature of identity and the role of communication in our interactions with other people.
• Complex and challenging ideas are presented in clear, respectful, and accessible ways throughout the book.

Cindy L. Griffin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. She has authored, coauthored, and edited seven books and numerous articles on communication, persuasive and invitational rhetoric, feminism, intersectionality, and civility.

"Beyond Gender Binaries is the gender and communication textbook for this millennium. It challenges tacit, taken-for-granted constructions by centering an understanding of gender as multiple, diverse, and open to self-definition and transformation. Cindy Griffin tackles the most important topics in gender and communication studies today and does so with attention to the way that people of diverse identities and experiences are impacted and are responding to make their social worlds more livable."—Sara L. McKinnon, author of Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics

"Cindy Griffin invites readers to consider the complexities of our intersectional identities, how we communicate through and about them, and how we might practice more ethical symbolic modes of sharing our lives with others. This textbook's commitment to intersectional theories and examples provides a strong foundation upon which instructors can create their own unique courses in communication and gender."—Isaac West, Professor of Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University