Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2017

This article examines the language used by bloggers in Iran who write about same-sex relationships. Homosexuality is a criminal offence in Iran and discussion of sex is tabooed so blogging potentially acts as a form of empowerment for bloggers who desire such relationships. By conducting a qualitative analysis of a small sample of blogs, we show how Iranian bloggers have developed a range of techniques to avoid censorship of their postings, as well as examining how they orient to discourses around same-sex relationships, oppression of their identities and heteronormativity.

By analysing 200 posts on a Japanese gay dating Bulletin Board System (deai-kei BBS), I investigate how users strategically deploy language to construct desirable identities and “sell themselves” online. Drawing upon both quantitative and qualitative analysis, I demonstrate that users of the BBS creatively manipulate stereotypical identity categories known as Types (taipu) to construct highly nuanced yet specific discourses of the Self and the desired Other. Through a discursive analysis of the strategies users employ to construct their own identities, and the identities of their desired partners, I argue that identity categories marked as masculine and hunky (sawayaka) are privileged as more desirable than feminine and cute (kawaii) identities. Through this analysis, I suggest that users of this particular forum appear to valorise heteronormative masculinity, which they link to being hunky. Furthermore, I argue that being cute is considered undesirable due to its perception as transgressing normative masculine gendered traits.

In 2014, a British journalist coined the term spornosexual to account for the emergence of a body-obsessed version of metrosexuality. While metrosexuals practice beautification rituals, spornosexuals are men obsessed with developing muscular bodies and self-objectifyingly flaunting them online. In an age of neoliberalism and globalization, this form of masculinity has now spread worldwide, including to Singapore, as a hegemonic ideal male figure. Using a multimodal analysis, we investigate four racially Chinese, Singapore-based Instagram users who represent prototypical spornosexual ideals through their bodies and fitness practices. We examine the way these Instagram users embody the personhood of a spornosexual through their construction of mediatized identities online. The meanings and values associated with the muscular body are also explored and subsequently compared with traditional notions of masculinity in Singapore.

This study looks at the evolution of the discourse of sexuality in the Moroccan women’s magazine Femmes Du Maroc [Women of Morocco] from 1997 to 2014 (Femmes du Maroc 1997–2014 ), specifically how sexuality is discursively constructed by Moroccans and how this discourse has changed over time. The results show that sexual topics have become more visible on the covers of the magazine and that women’s sexual language has shifted from a timid, euphemistic discourse around the medical aspects of sex to a more assertive expression of women’s sexuality emphasizing playfulness and pleasure.

Since the late twentieth century, Buenos Aires has been widely publicized outside Argentina as a “gay-friendly” destination. This period has also seen increasing immigration to the city from other parts of South America, especially neighboring countries and others with sizeable indigenous populations. An ongoing popular national narrative highlights hyper-masculinity as a preeminently Argentine characteristic. Distinct discourses characterizing Argentina as racially white-majority and anti-foreign and anti-indigenous, overinvested in machismo, and at the same time welcoming to nonheterosexual foreigners seem, on the surface, to be at odds. In this essay I explore intersections among race, gender, sexuality, and foreign origin as cross-cutting planes of discourse, which are all subsumed within and constitutive of the Argentine national imaginary. While these distinct domains of reference can isolate and contain different sectors of Argentine society, I argue that it is the overlapping, simultaneous application of raced-sex terms that necessarily denies masculine superiority to others and promotes it among Argentine men. Ultimately, therefore, a “permissive” atmosphere cannot challenge heteronormativity. I consider the ways that racial and sexual epithets (including maricón and puto “fag,” boliguayo “Bolivian + Paraguayan alien” or “Indian,” and brasileño, literally “Brazilian” but code for “Afro-heritage/black”) are differently used in conversational settings and media reports about sports teams and sporting events, especially soccer, as well as during those events.