Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

A corpus of abstracts from the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference was subjected to a diachronic keywords analysis in order to identify concepts which had either stayed in constant focus or became more or less popular over time.1 Patterns of change in the abstracts corpus were compared against the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in order to identify the extent that linguistic practices around language and sexuality were reflected in wider society. The analysis found that conference presenters had gradually begun to frame their analyses around queer theory and were using fewer sexual identity labels which were separating, collectivising and hierarchical in favour of more equalising and differentiating terminology. A number of differences between conference-goers’ language use and the language of general American English were identified and the paper ends with a critical discussion of the method used and the potential consequences of some of the findings.

This paper investigates the relationships between gender, sexuality and space, understood both in material and discursive terms. To this end, it brings under the spotlight Safe Zones, an anti-homophobia campaign spearheaded in 2011 and 2012 by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. More specifically, the paper draws upon Queer Linguistics in order to deconstruct a sample of banal sexed signs, produced as part of the campaign. Essentially, the argument is that Safe Zones contributed to changing, albeit fleetingly, the character of university corridors, notice boards and office doors. The campaign brought about a sexed visual environment, one in which the invoking of specific identities went hand in hand with the highlighting of more fluid practices and processes. Because of the multimodal nature of the data, the paper argues for the need for Queer Linguistics to engage with the no less meaningful visual and material properties of public texts.

One of the premier social issues in contemporary US politics is that of same-sex marriage. This research explores language use and identity construction by same-sex marriage supporters through narratives of discrimination. This paper analyzes data collected through the non-profit Marriage Equality USA, wherein narrators respond to a survey question about experiences of discrimination during California’s Proposition 8 campaign, a statewide initiative that repealed the rights of same-sex couples to marry. In doing so, narrators use ideologies of religion and religious affiliation to: (1) construct a victim identity in relation to their experiences, (2) use this as a springboard to challenge their victimization, (3) establish opposition between individual and institutional positioning of religious identity, and (4) switch roles with their victimizers with respect to victim and empowered positions. In doing so, narrators use victimization as empowerment to convey a progressive position in an inevitably successful social movement.

This article introduces discourses of heteronormativity in Western Salsa contexts. In these, gender discourses from different cultural backgrounds come into contact. Heteronormative structures are a constitutive component of many Western Salsa communities and are here analysed with the help of ethnographic data and qualitative interviews. The observations show that informants display a strong appeal to ‘traditional Latin’ gender performance. This, however, is not understood as natural but justified explicitly in interview data. Yet, despite a conscious negotiation of different discourses on gender, dichotomous gender categories are not destabilised. In the final section, potential motivations for establishing ‘traditional’ gender identity are discussed. This discussion links Salsa discourse to contemporary discourses on gender, emancipation, capitalism, the globalisation of culture and current developments of modernity.

This article questions what happens to “safe space” in classrooms when students are marginalized by their social locations and identities. Based on three years of ethnographic research in a Northern California urban public high school, the author examines how language like “that’s so gay” and “that’s so ghetto” leaves distinct traces of gender, sexuality, race, and class meanings and relations. Drawing on students’ deployment of “that’s so gay” and “that’s so ghetto” in school contexts, this research demonstrates how these expressions marginalize the students that they target. Such speech acts interpellate students’ bodies and identities in an educational environment that strives toward constructing “safe” and “politically correct” space. Complicating the very possibility of such educational goals, this article highlights the violence of performative speech acts while closely examining the thin line between politically correct speech and hate speech, which may look different yet lead to similar results — the violence of silencing.