This paper reviews current research on language and gender and discusses the implications of such work for gender-based research in second language acquisition. Recent work in sociolinguistics, generally, and language and gender research, more specifically, has rejected categorical and fixed notions of social identities in favor of more constructivist and dynamic ones. Thus, in this paper I elaborate a conception of gender that has not generally informed research in the field of second language acquisition, and point to more recent work in the field that theorizes and investigates gender as a construct shaped by historical, cultural, social, and interactional factors.