Language, gender and sexuality in 2019: interrogating normativities in the field

Abstract

In recent years, the study of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly global, multiracial, intersectional, crosslinguistic and queer- and trans-inclusive. The year 2019 continued this trajectory with a wave of research interrogating normativities, both among the speakers under analysis and among the researchers doing the analysing. While the analysis of linguistic practice has allowed language and gender scholars to probe the ways speakers normatively construct and ideologise the prototypical man, woman, gay person and transgender individual, theoretical and methodological advances in 2019 have also invited scholars to interrogate what is considered the prototypical study of language and gender. Interrogating normativities among both speakers and researchers has allowed for theoretical and methodological advances that paint a fuller picture of the multifaceted and context-specific relationship between language, identity and speaker agency.

The liminal (vowel) space of womanhood: Fundamental frequency, formants, and the intersex body in Brazil

“…As King (2014) argues, understandings of 'masculinities' and 'femininities' cannot always be separated from the intersex individual's subjective body experience, with language serving as the vehicle for articulating embodied knowledge. Calder (2020), in their review of the recent landscape of language, gender, and sexuality studies, argues that this body of scholarship has allowed linguists to construct and ideologize the construction of 'man', 'woman', 'gay', and 'trans', and expand beyond sexual and gendered binaries. Similarly, Zimman's (2014Zimman's ( , 2017 work, which has focused on embodied aspects such as fundamental frequency and discursive practices surrounding genitals in transmasculine communities, demonstrates how bodies are at the center of negotiations of trans identities and agency.…”

“…Although the physical body and human sexual dimorphism have been cited as the underlying explanation for gendered linguistic practices, much scholarship, including observations of pitch differences and gendered speech across multiple language families, has demonstrated that purely biological explanations cannot account for the full range of gendered linguistic behavior (Sachs 1975;Simpson 2009;Zimman 2017). Recent research in embodied sociolinguistics and queer linguistics on gender non-normativity in the voice has challenged some of these assumptions about the source of such differences (Calder 2020;Zimman 2020). This coincides with a movement in sociocultural linguistics that has begun to examine the role of the body beyond the voice, bringing us to examine language as not just the voice and speech stream itself, but as part of a larger, embodied semiotic system.…”

La conceptualización de la identidad transgénero en estados unidos: Un estudio léxico, diacrónico y de corpus

“…Desde los inicios de la lingüística queer en la década de los noventa hasta prácticamente la actualidad, la mayoría de los estudios han tratado sobre la relación entre el lenguaje y la orientación sexual o la representación de colectivos como gais (Baker, 2017;Kulick, 2000), lesbianas (Kulick, 2000), y otras orientaciones sexuales queer (Motschenbacher, 2018;Motschenbacher y Stegu, 2013). No obstante, la presencia de la comunidad trans en el área es prácticamente nula hasta la llegada estudios recientes, habiendo sido pasada por alto en este aspecto por el ámbito académico lingüístico (Calder, 2020;Zimman, 2020;Zottola, 2018). Por ejemplo, estudios como los de Konnelly Los estudios recientes relacionados con la conceptualización y representación de identidades trans a través del lenguaje se han centrado en las etiquetas utilizadas (Zimman y Hayworth, 2020) y en ámbitos específicos como son las redes sociales (Bamman et.…”

Innovations and challenges: Women, language and sexism. Carmen Rosa Caldas‐Coulthard (ed.), London and New York: Routledge. 2020. 190pp. 9 B/W illustrations. Pb (9780367133726) US$44.95. Hb (9780367133719) US$160.00. Ebook (9780429026140) US$40.45

“…In the book, the enmeshment of sexism with other systems of gender-and race-based oppression is only alluded to in odd references here and there, and there is little mention of academia's (and the wider world's) struggle with issues of representing marginalized voices. The field of language and gender has recently been reinvigorated by the important insights and fresh perspectives of queer, trans, non-binary, and Black linguists who powerfully show that sexism is inextricable from other crystallized systems of violence and dispossession (see, in this sense, Calder, 2020;Konnelly, 2021;Washington, 2020). Acknowledging these epistemological changes can give analysts of language and gender a privileged vantagepoint from which to analyze sexism in all of its manifold forms and would have further strengthened this book's contribution to the field.…”