Journal of Language and Sexuality - Current Issue

Abstract

This study explores flirting practices in Danish Tinder chats, focusing on how users employ social categories to pursue intimacy. Drawing on membership categorization analysis and the small story paradigm, and engaging with sexual script theory, it is demonstrated how participants invoke and negotiate standardized relational pairs (SRPs) to playfully position themselves and their potential partners. The research reveals that users creatively deploy asymmetrical SRPs, such as prince-princess, doctor-patient or serviceperson-hotel guest, as metaphorical devices to introduce and explore romantic or sexual scenarios. These practices allow users to navigate the challenges of self-presentation and relationship-building in online dating contexts, balancing humor, creativity, and sexual innuendo. The study demonstrates how participants simultaneously reproduce and challenge traditional gender roles and sexual scripts through their interactions. By examining these micro-level linguistic practices, we gain insight into the broader sociocultural norms and expectations surrounding online dating and intimate relationships in a Danish context.

Abstract

In 1653, Margaret Rany was indicted before a court in Edinburgh for having sexual intercourse with a horse. It was unusual for a woman to be charged with bestiality, but what made the case more unusual was that a forced examination of Rany’s body caused widespread debate over the nature of Rany’s ‘true’ sex: were they a woman, man, or ‘hermaphrodite’? Conflicting accounts of Rany arose as reports of the trial spread from legal records to newspapers, and even to early English dictionaries. In attempting to do justice to Rany’s life and the traces it left behind, this paper proposes sexed trajectories as one tool for analysing how a person’s body can be discursively remodelled through successive texts and text-types. But the paper also attends to how the echoes of a body’s sensations and affects might exceed, disturb, or slip away from the discursive structures that try to order it.

Abstract

While the Drag Race television franchise continues to expand across linguistic and cultural contexts, some linguo-cultural specificities resist translation for the global audience. This paper critically analyzes the intertextual management of Drag Race España participants’ use of the reclaimed slur maricón. Following shocked reactions from Anglophone fans, the Season 1 translation (f*g) was abandoned, and instead, in Season 2, the utterance was frequently omitted in both English and Spanish subtitles and/or translated as bitch — a common utterance in Anglophone iterations of the show. We argue that this shift domesticates the language of the Spanish contestants, defanging the political potency of contestants’ reclamation of a slur targeting their own sexualities and camp femininities, and instead leaving discussions of reclamation orphaned, as their active illustration is replaced with a more broadly reclaimed term, which likely has not been used as a slur against the contestants and therefore lacks the same political force.

Abstract

An emerging avenue for research is the relationship between gender presentation — individual expression of gender through aspects of behavior and appearance — and acoustic correlates of speech within sexual minorities (e.g. Calder 2024, Zimman 2017). The present paper examines whether gender presentation within a population of lesbian women correlates with significant differences across phonetic variables typically described as varying across genders. The study finds that, as speakers rate their gender presentation more masculine, their mean F decreases, average change in F lowers and percentage of creak increases; however, there are no differences in center of gravity of /s/ across participants. These results support the idea that the construction of non-normative identity through language is a type of bricolage in which signs that index certain social identities do not necessarily co-occur in speech.

Abstract

Gender-neutral language is important for fostering inclusivity of gender-diverse individuals. Spanish grammar incorporates gender-based distinctions, making it challenging to achieve gender neutrality. The aim of the present research was to examine factors related to the acceptance of gender-neutral terms in Spanish. Previous research highlighted age, gender, exposure, and modern sexism’s impact on gender-neutral language attitudes. No previous research has explored machismo, openness to experience, or attitudes toward gender and transgender individuals. We investigated factors related to attitudes among 184 native Spanish speakers proficient in English (M = 29.73 years, SD = 10.40). The results of hierarchical multiple regression models indicated a significant gender difference and highlighted that affirmation beliefs matter for cisgender men while machismo beliefs matter for cisgender women. Our findings have implications for how attitudes about gender-neutral language may be changed through educational interventions to promote linguistic inclusivity.

This article reviews Linguistic Representations of Gender in Children’s Literature: Feeling, Thinking and Doing

This article reviews The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sexuality