Lesbian at the vanguard

This tribute considers the work of linguist and novelist, Anna Livia (1955–2007). Anna was a noted fiction writer before becoming a linguist and much of her work considered language play in literature. Anna brought her experience as a lesbian activist to queer linguistics, where she played an important role in establishing the field. Her work continues to be an important example of linguistic research on lesbians, an area that continues to be underrepresented in the field.

Beyond the cis gays’ cis gaze

Trans and other nonnormatively gendered subjectivities served a foundational role in queer linguistics, but it is only recently that a wave of trans researchers have begun to carve out distinctively trans approaches to the study of language. This commentary explores the question of why this shift has taken so long and how certain disciplinary norms have made linguistics a less-than-attractive home for trans scholars, namely an apoliticised ideology of descriptivism, the flippant indulgence of linguistic curiosity and claims to linguistic authority. Importantly, these processes are vulnerable to furthering not only transphobia but also racism, colonialism, ableism and linguistic subjugation. These convergences present opportunities for coalition-based responses to the maintenance of social hierarchies in linguistics and allied disciplines, and underscore the importance of community-based approaches to research on language and gender alterity.

Resignifications: Linguistic Resistance and Queer Expressions of Latinidad

The resignification of language practices among LGBTQIA+ communities has seen the reclamation of terms like queer, dyke, and faggot enter mainstream discourse. Marginalized communities who view the reclamation of language as a form of empowerment also have a long history of resignifying certain forms of pejorative language to revalorize meanings along ethnic and racial lines. This chapter provides an overview of contributions from queer theory, queer studies, and queer linguistics that center the reclamation of historically pejorative terms used for queer communities, but situates these queer resignifications within the context of linguistic reclamations enacted around ethnic and racial affiliations. The chapter specifically focuses on the reclamation of the Spanish terms joto/a/x and jotería by Latinx communities in the United States—terms that have historically been used to denigrate men performing traits associated with femininity—to illustrate how linguistic reclamation provides an avenue for resistance by creating and maintaining new worlds of possibility.

Nuance and normativity in trans linguistic research

While normativity has been central to queer linguistic research, the emergent field of trans linguistics (Zimman forthcoming) provides opportunities for greater nuance and elaboration on the concept. Drawing from interviews with non-binary people documenting their narratives of doctor-patient visits, I present a series of recounted interactional moments where what might be considered ‘normative’ is in fact a survival strategy, highlighting how we might view certain invocations of the transnormative (Johnson 2016) in more complicated ways. Notions of normativity and authenticity, which are too often weaponized against trans people as a means to measure their ‘success’ in approximating cisheteronormative ideals, are not easily transported from queer linguistics to trans linguistics. As concepts imbricated with a history of violence for trans people, they must be treated with care and responsibility, as part of an active devotion to dismantling transphobia.

An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality

In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of urgency.

Queer linguistics and identity

In this short essay, I offer some reflections on language and sexuality work over the past decade. My discussion is focused on the increasing influence of queer theory, in particular, and I comment on trends in research into language and queer identities. I take into account not only the work published in the Journal of Language and Sexuality and beyond, but also that presented over the past decade at the annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics conference.

From “Gay Lisp” to “Fierce Queen”: The Sociophonetics of Sexuality’s Most Iconic Variable

The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagination, spurring a wave of research investigating what makes someone “sound gay.” This chapter follows the trajectory of the sociophonetics of LGBTQ+ speakers, focusing on what is perhaps the most robustly studied phonetic variable in queer linguistics: the /s/ sound. The chapter explores how a group of non-normative drag queens in San Francisco use acoustic dimensions of /s/ to project radical queerness, illustrating how this community’s practices bear on greater conversations in sociolinguistics involving the connection between phonetic variation and the articulation of identity.

Transgender Language, Transgender Moment: Toward a Trans Linguistics

This chapter sketches out trans linguistics as an emerging framework for research on language in populations defined by their deviation from gender norms. Although queer linguistics has always been concerned with both sexual and gender (non)normativity, some early queer linguistic analyses of transgender or otherwise gender-variant populations were limited by the absence of openly trans scholars and distinctively trans analytic perspectives. Trans linguistics, by contrast, centers trans practices and subjectivities not as rare exceptions, but as central to any understanding of gender. Three domains of language are discussed here, including grammatical gender, gender difference in the voice, and gender in discourse. In each case, trans linguistic research offers new perspectives on gendered power, the nature of categories, the significance of embodiment, and the linguistic navigation of persistent dehumanization. Crucially, trans linguistics is committed not only to trans analytic lenses, but also to social and linguistic justice for gender non-normative communities.

Research of the Czech language from the perspective of Queer Linguistics

The aim of this minireview is to analyse the existing Czech research in the field of Queer Linguistics with the use of the meta-linguistic perspective. After a short introduction of Queer Theory ideas and ideas of Queer Linguistics focusing on the terms queer and heteronormativity, the author deals with the Czech denomination of this field. Against the backdrop of the state of Czech Gender Linguistics, additional circumstances of the current state of Czech Queer Linguistics are presented. Those include (apart from the unavailability of relevant literature in Czech libraries) a limited number of experts dealing with the topic, offering queer-linguistic lectures and seminars at Czech universities. In the next part of the article, the existing publications dealing with various topics from the field of Czech Queer Linguistics are analysed. In the final part of the article, some topics which may extend the publication basis of the field are outlined as they also may help to reflect the current social topics in the Czech Republic.

Discourses of (hetero)sexism in popular music

This article analyses interview data to explore how participants negotiated discourses of (hetero)sexism in relation to the controversial pop song Blurred Lines. Our previous work, based on questionnaire data, interrogated interpretations of Blurred Lines (Handforth, Paterson, Coffey-Glover & Mills 2017) and showed how participants drew on discourses of sexism in their responses. Several participants experienced significant conflict in their interpretations, and here we focus on these more complex interpretations, considering the “small stories” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) identified in follow-up interviews with participants. Individual narratives acted as mechanisms through which participants linked Blurred Lines to wider issues such as rape culture, drawing parallels between these and their own lives. Following research in queer linguistics (King 2014; Leap 2014; Motschenbacher 2010) our use of thematic analysis, corpus linguistic tools and narrative analysis highlights the various subject positions that participants negotiated in their storytelling, and how these positions both echoed and challenged normative understandings of gender and sexuality.