Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014

The concept of ‘community’ often presents a problem for queer linguists. ‘The gay community’ is often viewed as an impossible site for research due to its imagined status, whilst local communities of gay people have been considered too heterogeneous and idiosyncratic to draw conclusions from. In this article, however, it is argued that both of these aspects of community can, and should, be a central focus of an investigation into language and sexual identity. Through the analysis of a conversation emerging from a lesbian group, using a sociocultural linguistics framework, it is argued here that the community of practice approach can play a crucial role in understanding how ideologies from ‘the gay community’ are used to construct a coherent sexual identity on a local level. The analysis reveals how the group engages in practices that enable them to construct micro-level personas in direct response to broader, ideological structures of heteronormativity.

I examine data from my fieldwork with Japanese professional matchmakers and their attitude towards new, “less masculine” masculinities. Matchmakers’ ideologies of conversation show that they understand “good partners” as having personality traits that are not particularly ascribed to any gender. Consequently, they allow for flexibility in gendered behavior, as long as their clients can be brought within the heterosexual institution of marriage. As in previous work in the field of language and sexuality, I focus on the way that genders and sexualities are performed through language. However, by focusing on matchmakers, I aim to examine the institutional structures and language ideologies that constrain the process of self-fashioning. Like other recent work on topics such as “personal development”, I treat “self-fashioning” as a multiparty process by addressing the role of the expert in constructing the advice by which clients are supposed to (re)fashion themselves.

The ‘It Gets Better Project’ (IGBP) is an online anti-homophobic bullying initiative directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. To date, 50,000 user-generated IGBP videos have attracted over 50 million views. In this critical discourse analysis of IGBP videos in the “Faith” category, I note how the projected ideologies therein overlap with and depart from conservative Christian rhetoric in surprising ways. I ask what gets better, for whom, and how that might happen. I then compare messages uploaded by laypeople and spokespeople of religious institutions. I argue that neoliberal assumptions are frequently evident in laypeople’s emphases on individualism, economic success, urban spaces and heteronormative conceptions of time. Spokespeople, conversely, tend to emphasize community-based opposition to homophobia in the here and now. This ideological struggle highlights barriers to “it getting better” in the present but also creates space for politics of redistribution and an unexpected queering of societal norms.

The aim of this study is to explore some of the main linguistic features that characterize the discourse of sexual harassment of peers at an institution of higher learning in Zimbabwe. One hundred undergraduate female students aged between 19 and 24 were asked to respond to a questionnaire on sexual harassment and describe what they recalled the harassers said to them. The results reveal that the discourse of sexual harassment is characterized by (a) the use of monologic utterances, (b) extensive use of code-mixing and, most importantly, (c) the use of excessively impolite utterances that are couched in hostile jokes.

The vital political processes of those who perform drag king acquire consciousness from historicity but they are also oriented towards the margins of the (hetero) normative construction of feminine subjectivity, independently from any self-definition in relation to gender identities and erotic-sexual desires. Drag king performance is not a linear process, whose practices are simply justified by feminisms and transfeminisms. Drag king performance becomes a site of movement where feminisms and transfeminisms support familiar and unfamiliar practices of resistance. This article draws from conversations with a person who performs drag king in Barcelona and aims to give an overview about how this resistance is not only discursive, but also somatic and corporal.