Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk

Abstract

This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics—with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contribute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be.

Co-opting the neoliberal manhood ideal: Masculinity, normativity, and recursive normalisation in Serbian gay men's digital dating profiles

“…However, the process is also seen to work in crossways (Hall et al 2019), multiple, and overlapping directions. The dating context analysed shows that recursive normalisation allows distancing from socially marginalized gender and sexual identities and positioning one's own identity as closer to the traditional model of masculinity.…”

“…What is missing, then, are more fine-grained perspectives on the interconnections of the multiple out-group and in-group normativities that pave the ideological ground on which identities are negotiated in marginalised groups. As Hall, Levon, & Milani (2019) recently argue, bridging this gap requires not only more attention to normativity, but also a more transversal turn looking at how multiple normativities are constructed crossways in interaction, with their inherent intersectionality and contradictions. Here I wish to call attention to the interaction of two processes in such transversal perspective, observable in the dynamics of self- and other presentation in sexually marginalised groups: the recursive intertwining of out-group and in-group values, and its normative and normalising effects.…”

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…Work on certainty—and the anxieties produced by battles to establish certainty during shifts in political economy—brings up the normativity of the unmarked, a theme explored in a special issue. In the introduction, Hall, Levon, and Milani (2019) respond to the challenge that antinormativity in the singular has come to dominate queer theory and argue that the tools of a sociocultural linguistics can examine how the multiplicity of normativities and membership are managed interactionally. In their paper, Milani and Levon (2019) consider criticisms of Israeli homonationalism, and especially the seemingly impossible place of queer Palestinian citizens, to suggest—with inspiration from Foucault's little‐developed concept of heterotopias—how gay Palestinian men index their complex affective attachment to the country through interactional stances.…”

When the Checkpoint Becomes a Counterpoint: Stasis as Queer Dissent

“…Of course, what counts as queer or not is a matter of debate not least because of queer scholars' long-standing defiance against fixing the term into a stable definition (see in particular BUTLER, 1993). With this caveat in mind, we believe that if there is anything distinctive about queer it is its antagonistic rejection of "a minoritising logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal" (WARNER, 1993, p. xxvi, emphasis added; see however WIEGMAN, WILSON, 2015, HALL, LEVON, MILANI, 2019 for critical perspectives on the relationship between queer and anti-normativity). It is our contention in this article that stasis can be deployed as such a radical practice of defiance, and therefore can be queer too.…”