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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020
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Constructing the digital self in the Global South
Author(s): Baird Campbell and Nell Haynespp.: 1–13 (13)More LessAbstractThe papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.
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Sutura 2.0
Author(s): Juliana Friendpp.: 14–47 (34)More LessAbstractWolof ethics of sutura “discretion” have historically conflated perceived communicative excess with bodily contagion and associated both with queer subjects. For health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), online dating among gay Senegalese men presents two risks to sutura: contagious sex and contagious discourse. A Senegalese eHealth NGO hires gay men to send HIV/AIDS prevention messages through Facebook and online dating websites in order to contain HIV and, invoking sutura, contain queer communication and bodies. This NGO projects a heteronormative metapragmatic model of health communication, casting information as instrument of containment, and a unitary, de-eroticized digital self as informational messenger. In what I call queer biocommunicability, eHealth activists create erotically seductive digital personae incongruous with offline characteristics. Construed as communicative-bodily excess, digital seductions actually facilitate information exchange. NGOs instrumentalize queer biocommunicability to bolster a care framework that marginalizes queer subjects. This paper traces historical underpinnings and ethical-political implications of heteronormative biocommunicability’s dependence on queer transgression.
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“Choose yourself?”
Author(s): Jolynna Sinananpp.: 48–68 (21)More LessAbstractSocial media is often assumed to espouse ego-centred networking. Yet by comparing posts to Facebook and Instagram, it becomes apparent that the experience and aspirations of the individual are often embedded in structures of family and other institutions that have been historically determined. This article locates images posted by women to two social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, within the Caribbean island of Trinidad’s wider history of the significance of visibility and visuality. What individuals choose to make visible and its consequences form a visual language in which Trinidadians are entirely fluent. By extension, images are used to communicate forms of differentiated identity that are made visible through social media.
The material gathered was based on 15 months of ethnographic research in a semi-urban town in Trinidad where, generally, uses of social media are expressive of a place-based sense of identity. The town is simultaneously a place that urban dwellers look down on and villagers look up to. Visual content posted to Facebook and Instagram reveal that while individuals seek to craft and shape images and aesthetics according to their own tastes, this must be done in a socially acceptable way; that is, placing emphasis on group conformity is far more of a social value than expressing individual distinction. Social media in this context communicates the imagination of oppositional futures and a divergence of lifestyles for young women: those who identify with being locally-oriented and those who identify with being globally-oriented.
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‘Overloaded like a Bolivian truck’
Author(s): Nell Haynespp.: 69–92 (24)More LessAbstractMemes have become an important linguistic tool not only for communicating emotions and ideas, but also are integral to constructing the self in online space. This paper concentrates on copper miners in northern Chile and the ways they use memes to make claims related to (hetero)sexuality, mestizaje, and nationalism. With men at the mine during week-long shifts and families in towns several hours away, social media is important for maintaining communication as well as representing the self. Miners present their labor as central to their sense of self, with memes that indirectly index heterosexuality, modernity associated with resource extraction, and racial mestizaje linked to nationalism. The visibility of these memes across spaces of both mine and town gives men an opportunity to construct a cohesive digital self, with implications for reinforcing assumptions about what is appropriate gender performance.
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Sauntson, Helen. 2018. Language, Sexuality and Education
Author(s): Lisa Caseypp.: 96–100 (5)More LessThis article reviews Language, Sexuality and Education
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