Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable

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How the words we use-and don't use-reinforce dominant cultural norms Why is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash" Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing i

Reviews

"Winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Award, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction"
"Winner of the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association"
"The book . . . is rich in insight and has the power to shift a readers worldview. . . . As broad questions of racial, gendered, and religious intolerance are raised nationally by the exclusionary words and actions of the current administration as well as by the revelations of the ongoing Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, the nation is searching for common ground. But a national conversation cannot take place until we have the tools for that dialogue, and this remarkable book shows us how to make the language we need."---Dan Friedman, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Taken for Granted is] a forceful work, requiring us to acknowledge our biases and how they are articulated whether we realize the implications of what were saying, or not."---Grace Parazzoli, Sante Fe New Mexican
"Taken for Granted is an interesting, thought-provoking, easy read, and the bibliography presents a wealth of impressively cross-disciplinary influences, each worth investigating. The book is most poignant, though, in revealing how quickly use of 'marked' language, and underlying cultural norms, can shift."---Andrea Macrae, Times Higher Education

Author Bio

Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. His many books include Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, and Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community. He lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey.