Contributions to this work deal not only with grammatical gender but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which have not received extensive linguistic and discourse analysis, such as Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. Questions of English grammatical gender are also dealt with. The studies argue that feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. They also suggest that the broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.