Book Review

As I was flying to San Francisco in late May to attend the annual meetingof the International Communication Association (ICA), the captain on my flight issued the following directive: “At this time, I would ask our lovely stewardesses to go ahead and restrain themselves for landing. ” My feminist sirens went off—did he really just say lovely and stewardesses (and restrain yourself)? What were the implications of constructing that particular message versus “Flight attendants, please prepare for landing”? What sort of masculine posturing (whether intentional or not) had I just been witness to (and had the flight attendants been subjected to)? At the time I (literally) had in my lap Karen Ashcraft and Dennis Mumby’s (2004) book Reworking Gender: A Feminist Communicology of Organization, which I was rereading for this review. I was on my way to an ICA precon-ference where, along with myself and other scholars, Karen and Dennis were talking with doctoral students about “differences that make a differ-ence. ” The experience was weirdly coincidental, because in applying their feminist communicology of organization, Ashcraft and Mumby analyze th