Order and turbulence in a Swedish bathroom

‘Where are all the queers at the school?! I want to hug you’. Thus begins a conversation scrawled on the door to a Swedish high school’s student bathroom that will spark a debate among students on whether the word ‘queer’ should be considered a slur. In dialogue with work on linguistic citizenship and graffiti as a semiotic mode, this article analyses different stages of the unfolding debate. The analytical lens of turbulence captures the interplay of ordering and disordering in the students' efforts to define ‘queer’. Youths' linguistic agency works as a struggle for meaning across different indexical orders, illustrating the difficulty of sustaining mastery of identity labels as they travel through discourse.

Language and Publics in a Global Digital World. What Is Linguistic Citizenship in the 21st Century?

"In this article, I discuss language from a linguistic anthropological perspective, where the existence of standardised languages is understood as an outcome of socio-political discourses in the age of nationalism, in which the technologies of print literacy enabled national public spaces – and with it, national language standards – to emerge. What happens to language standards and public spaces in the era of digital technologies and transnational interaction? I introduce some examples and develop ideas on language policing in settings where monolingual national ideals exist besides other emerging linguistic authorities. Keywords: languages, nationalism, public spaces, standardization, late modernity "

TALKING PARTS, TALKING BACK: FLESHING OUT LINGUISTIC CITIZENSHIP

ABSTRACT One of the greatest challenges of our times is that of lack of voice for abused bodies. These are the bodies of children and men and women who have inherited the brutalities of colonialism, plantation servitude and slavery and now re-live these miseries in the belly of a rampant global neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism. They are the racialized, sexualized, genderized and godless bodies that first took form in coloniality-modernity in conjunction with the emergence of MAN, the White, rational, disembodied male as HUMAN. They retain their shape today through technologies of vulnerability, with which the manufactured lack of voice works in dynamic synergy. This is particularly the case for South Africa, with its tender histories and distraught presents, raw emotion and sore vulnerabilities of racialized and neoliberal patriarchy. In this paper, we suggest that vulnerability, beyond its potentially devastating effect on souls and livelihoods, may also be a productive site for the articulation of alternative, and habitually silenced voices. In this regard, we explore how a focus on acts of Linguistic Citizenship may orientate thinking on voice and agency to different sites of the body, as well as allow insight into the complex technologies and practices of vulnerability.

WHEN THE CHECKPOINT BECOMES A COUNTERPOINT: STASIS AS QUEER DISSENT

ABSTRACT This article was born out of a sense of discomfort with the privilege accorded to movement and mobility in critical scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, including critical work on the relationship between language, sexuality and space. It is our contention in this article that stasis can be deployed as a radical practice of defiance, and therefore can be queer too. In order to argue that stillness can be a form of social action carrying the potential of forging a radical politics of dissent, we take as a case in point the checkpoint in the context of Israel/Palestine. Drawing upon Said’s (1984, 1994) notion of the counterpoint and Stroud’s (2018) theorisation of linguistic citizenship, we illustrate how the checkpoint can become a bodily, discursive and material counterpoint that activates the irreconcilable tensions between utopia and dystopia in the pursuit of “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (WARNER, 1993, p. xxvi).

Minority positioning in physical and online spaces

The study examines how a Sweden Finnish minority language activist group positions themselves by inserting graffiti-like stickers into the Swedish Linguistic Landscape, and how the majority populations in Sweden and Finland react to these revitalisation efforts. Protesting by placing stickers in physical environments is classified as an act of linguistic citizenship (Isin 2009) and, from the majority’s point of view, these acts are a threat to the shared cultural moral order. The data consists of pictures posted on Instagram that depict actual physical environments where activists have placed stickers that encourage the minority to “speak their own language”. The activists utilise temporal, spatial, textual, and multimodal elements in their discursive construction. As a theoretical framework, I apply Harré and Langehove’s (1991) positioning theory. The results show how minorities position themselves in relation to the Swedish majority population with the aim of justifying their status and their right to exist.