Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012

This discourse analysis examines teens’ explorations of gender and sexual identities through their talk about their preferred texts accessed in the Young Adult section of a Midwestern public library. The discourse data collected over a two year period and analyzed using a recursive, ethnographic-style approach is informed by queer theory and New Literacy Studies. The practices of teens in the library complicate popular and scholarly discourse that constructs teens as peer-oriented, hormonally-controlled, and transitioning into adulthood. Their practices illustrate savvy, individual choices that allow teens to subvert the heterosexual norms of the adult controlled schools. The close connection between literacy choices and identity implies a need for educators to advocate for adolescents’ access to their preferred texts.

This article investigates how the process of coming out as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) is represented both on internet sites and in paper pamphlets offering advice. The analysis of the texts makes use of script formulation theory, as developed by Edwards (1994, 1995, 1997, 2004), and reveals a degree of interdiscursivity between the texts, in that coming out is scripted with a high level of homogeneity. A number of different scripts relating to coming out are identified and consideration is given to the rhetorical functions performed by these particular scripts. It is argued that the selection, elaboration, support and opposition of particular scripts formulates coming out as a rational, positive and emancipatory action for an LGB individual to undertake. Moreover, the writers present coming out as an ordered and predictable event, which functions to persuade the reader that coming out is an achievable and attainable objective.

This article is based on retrospective life history interviews with Dominican gay and bisexual immigrant men who live or have lived in New York City. It offers an alternative to established and influential interpretations of queer subject constitution that overemphasize abjection while ignoring the polyvalence of identities. Through an engagement with the conditions that make the figure of la loca [the effeminate homosexual] instrumental in the expression of closeness and intimacy among the men with whom I spoke, the article analyzes the way this signifier operates in the making and regulation of networks of self-identified Dominican gay and bisexual men. It conceptualizes “code swishing,” borrowing from scholarship on bilingualism and “code switching.” But it revises this work to implicate the body and gender dissent as communicative practices and to make clear that these men juggled their desire to establish and sustain networks with one another so long as expressions of camaraderie and connection did not threaten their legitimacy in daily life and their investments in normative masculinity. For them, surviving and being respected was more important than any sense of “community” they may have felt toward one another.

Education is arguably one of the most significant, urgent, and rapidly changing arenas for research on language and sexual identity, but there has been little synthesis to date of the knowledge and theories of knowledge that are emerging through this work. Here I survey a relatively small but important segment of this disparate literature: studies that investigate classroom talk about and by students who either self-identify as gay, lesbian or queer, or who are positioned as such by others. By bringing together such studies from applied linguistics as well as education and literacy/composition, I seek to consolidate and to cultivate critical explorations of sexual identity, language and learning as interlinked domains. To this end, I identify some defining features of the queer epistemologies that are emerging in the empirical, lingua-centric literature on ‘gay’-student discourses, and I suggest future directions for this sort of work.

This study addresses how language interacts with the erotic and ‘place’ (our socially understood surroundings) in an online, text-only, mostly linguistic environment to create an erotic atmosphere, and how eroticised atmosphere relates to linguistically driven sexual subject formation. Analysis focuses on extracts from a conversation in which public erotic discussions unfold between participants who are (ostensibly) men who desire men. A ‘room’ spatiality is continually performed, sometimes relying upon idealised images of ‘erotic oases’ from the offline world to build an erotic atmosphere. These offline erotic oases are places of ‘deviance’ characterised by semi-public sex (e.g. parks, public washrooms, and saunas). This type of atmosphere is contested by some participants while others embrace it. Analysis demonstrates that eroticism, spatiality, and language adapt to one another along a reformulating path. This suggests that a more nuanced understanding of language and the erotic depends on spatial investigations as much as discursive theory.