- Home
- e-Journals
- Linguistic Landscape
- Previous Issues
- Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
Linguistic Landscape - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018
-
Mothering Brooklyn
Author(s): Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdrpp.: 214–237 (24)More LessAbstractThis paper examines how Brooklyn retail signage represents how gentrifying women struggle for claiming space in public and the way in which different intersectional identity formations are used and implicated in transforming urban space. In exploring different ethnographic dimensions to retail storefronts, we show how women, many of whom are college-educated, married, and new mothers, play a significant role in redefining Brooklyn and cultural norms of motherhood more broadly. Yet, as newly arriving women emerge as key players in the gentrification project, they experience backlash against their public roles. We explore how women also employ race, inequality, and patriarchal notions of heteronormative sexuality as a cover for their public challenges to patriarchal power. Drawing on visual ethnography, interviews, and digital archival material we argue that the ambiguity of word play accomplishes both the pushing of normative boundaries as well as the protective cover of public meanings.
-
Cosmopolitan English, traditional Japanese
Author(s): Thomas Baudinettepp.: 238–256 (19)More LessAbstractThe Linguistic Landscape of Tokyo’s premier gay district, Shinjuku Ni-chōme, contains much English-language signage. Previously described in touristic literature as marking out spaces for foreign gay men, this article draws upon an ethnographic study of how signage produces queer space in Japan to argue that English instead constructs a sense of cosmopolitan worldliness. The ethnography also reveals that participants within Ni-chōme’s gay bar sub-culture contrast this cosmopolitan identity with a “traditional” identity indexed by Japanese-language signage. In exploring how Japanese men navigate Ni-chōme’s signage, this article deploys Piller and Takahashi’s (2006) notion of “language desire” to investigate the role of LL in influencing individual queer men’s sense(s) of self. This article thus broadens the focus of LL research to account for how engagement with an LL may impact identity construction, with an emphasis placed on how learning to “read” an LL influences the formation of sexual identities.
-
Linguistic landscapes as pornoheterotopias
Author(s): Rafael de Vasconcelos Barboza and Rodrigo Borbapp.: 257–277 (21)More LessAbstractDrawing on multimodal analysis of graffiti in male public restrooms at the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, this paper investigates how notions of place and gendered/sexualized subjects are discursively (re)constructed in interactions with the materiality and historicity of the public realm. The analysis focuses on the indexicalities of public signage and the ways they (in)form understandings of and access to certain spaces. By investigating the fragmented history of entextualizations of these toilet graffiti as well as the indexicalities of their lexical, graphic, and co(n)textual aspects, we argue that places can be queered since they are semiotically constructed and discursively performed. The paper illustrates how static assumptions about place, gender, and sexuality can be disrupted and ressignified which highlights the pornoheterotopic character of these public restrooms in which semiotic processes that (de)regulate gender and sexual dissidence are emplaced.
-
Tel Aviv as a space of affirmation versus transformation
Author(s): Tommaso M. Milani, Erez Levon, Roey J. Gafter and Iair G. Orpp.: 278–297 (20)More LessAbstractIn this article we investigate the spatial politics of sexuality in Israel by focusing on two different but related data sets: (1) the official video for Tel Aviv Pride 2013 produced by the Mizrahi Jewish music group Arisa; and (2) a protest against the Occupation of Palestine performed at Tel Aviv Pride in 2017. We analyze these examples with the help of a theoretical framework that offers a dynamic conceptualization of citizenship and its semiotic manifestations, drawing on Fraser’s (1995) distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies of social justice. In line with the remit of this special issue, we highlight the importance of taking sexuality as an entry point for Linguistic Landscape analysis. More specifically, we argue that a focus on sexuality in space opens up a window into the affective, intimate and embodied dimensions of politics.
-
Commodification of women’s breasts
Author(s): Doris Correa and Elana Shohamypp.: 298–319 (22)More LessAbstractCosmetic surgery has become a widespread phenomenon in the last decades, especially in Colombia where a large number of women undergo it every year. This surgical boom is reflected in several Linguistic Landscape resources including the internet, where a growing number of cosmetic surgery centers advertise their procedures. Particularly common among these procedures is breast augmentation, which many Colombian women have at a young age. This article reports on a study which drew on critical linguistic landscape and feminist theories to explore how local cosmetic surgery websites contribute to the commodification of women’s breasts, and its implications for users of these websites. Data collected for this study included text and images from 12 local websites advertising cosmetic surgery in Colombia, including breast augmentation. Data analysis showed that these websites contributed to the commodification of women’s bodies by using a series of ideological mechanisms. Implications for users of these public spaces include asking critical questions about these websites and becoming more socially active in their consumption.
Most Read This Month

-
-
Making scents of the landscape
Author(s): Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji
-
-
-
Translanguaging and linguistic landscapes
Author(s): Durk Gorter and Jasone Cenoz
-
-
-
Skinscapes
Author(s): Amiena Peck and Christopher Stroud
-
- More Less