Queering Language Gender And Sexuality

Identity and Desire. Models of Gay Male Identity and the Marketing of "Gay Language" in Foreign-Language Phrasebooks for Gay Men / Rusty Barrett -- Incomprehensible Language? Language, Ethnicity and Heterosexual Masculinity in a Swedish School / Tommaso M. Milani, Rickard Jonsson -- The Desire for Identity and the Identity of Desire: Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Greek Context / Costas Canakis -- Unpacking Heteronormativity. Constructing Hegemonic Masculinities in South Africa: The Discourse and Rhetoric of Heteronormativity / Russell Luyt -- On-line Constructions of Metrosexuality and Masculinities: A Membership Categorization Analysis / Matthew Hall -- A Bit too Skinny for Me: Women's Homosocial Constructions of Heterosexual Desire in Online Dating / Kristine Kohler Mortensen -- Beyond Binaries? Do Bodies Matter? Travestis? Embodiment of (Trans)Gender Identity through the Manipulation of the Brazilian Portuguese Grammatical Gender System / Rodrigo Borba, Ana Cristina Ostermann -- Butch Camp: On the Discursive Construction of a Queer Identity Position / Veronika Koller -- The Other Kind of Coming Out: Transgender People and the Coming out Narrative Genre / Lal Zimman -- Gender, Sexuality and Space. Language, Sexuality and Place: The View from Cyberspace / Brian W King -- Homophobia as Moral Geography / William L. Leap -- Normal Straight Gays: Lexical Collocations and Ideologies of Masculinity in Personal Ads of Serbian Gay Teenagers / Ksenija Bogetic

A pioneering collection of articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual language.

How do we learn what it means to be a man? And how do we learn to question what it means to be a man? This collection comprises a set of original interdisciplinary chapters on the linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in a range of new and older media: television, film, online forums, news reporting, advertising and fiction. This innovative work examines new and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts including the role of EU institutions in ascertaining asylum seekers’ sexual orientation, and the European laws on gender policy. The book employs numerous analytical approaches including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, literary criticism and anthropological and social research. The authors show how such texts can disrupt, question or complicate traditional notions of what it means to be a man, queering the idea that men possess fixed identities or desires, instead arguing that masculinity is constantly changing and negotiated through the cultural and political overlapping contexts in which it is regularly produced. These nuanced analyses will bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender, masculinity and queer studies, linguistics, anthropology and semiotics.

This book makes an innovative contribution to the relatively young field of Queer Linguistics. Subscribing to a poststructuralist framework, it presents a critical, deconstructionist perspective on the discursive construction of heteronormativity and gender binarism from a linguistic point of view. On the one hand, the book provides an outline of Queer approaches to issues of language, gender and sexual identity that is of interest to students and scholars new to the field. On the other hand, the empirical analyses of language data represent material that also appeals to experts in the field. The book deals with repercussions of the discursive materialisation of heteronormativity and gender binarism in various kinds of linguistic data. These include stereotypical genderlects, structural linguistic gender categories (especially from a contrastive linguistic point of view), the discursive sedimentation of female and feminine generics, linguistic constructions of the gendered body in advertising and the usage of personal reference forms to create characters in Queer Cinema. Throughout the book, readers become aware of the wounding potential that gendered linguistic forms may possess in certain contexts.

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight have been problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters in Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries, as well as on a number of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a re-theorization of the binary that affords more complex and contextually-grounded engagement with speakers' own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries, including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by researchers, and those that re-contextualize familiar divisions with innovative meanings. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. As a collection, Queer Excursions argues that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities we study.

Language, Gender, and Sexuality offers a panoramic and accessible introduction to the ways in which linguistic patterns are sensitive to social categories of gender and sexuality, as well as an overview of how speakers use language to create and display gender and sexuality. This book includes discussions of trans/non-binary/genderqueer identities, embodiment, new media, and the role of language and interaction in sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Drawing on an international range of examples to illustrate key points, this book addresses the questions of: how language categorizes the gender/sexuality world in both grammar and interaction; how speakers display, create, and orient to gender, sexuality, and desire in interaction; how and why people display different ways of speaking based on their gender/sexual identities. Aimed at students with no background in linguistics or gender studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying language, gender, and sexuality for the first time.

This lively and accessible textbook provides a clear introduction to the relationship between language and sexuality.