Daniel Amarelo is a professor and researcher on Sociolinguistics, LGBTIQ Studies and Galician/Portuguese at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and at the Galician Public Language Schools system. Queer activist and advocate for minoritized languages.
“Ah!, so you study how faggots talk?” This is perhaps the most common response when someone says they research queer linguistics. Another possible (and likely) response comes from within academia itself: “That’s not science, you’re not doing linguistics! At most it would be anthropology, sociology, or gender studies.” In short, queer linguistics is ontologically nothing (serious), it is too epistemologically biased because it deals with “identity” issues, it is theoretically dependent on other disciplines and, methodologically, it is too fluid, inconsistent, and elusive with respect to certain patterns of positivist research. Or so they say.
However, the umbrella term queer linguistics captures a field of study that analyzes the relationships between language, gender, and sexuality today, with research groups and projects, doctoral dissertations, specialized courses, and scholarly publications in different formats across the globe—and, of course, with an interest that transcends the university sphere. Indeed, if we limit ourselves to the first publications that marked the emergence of this field of knowledge, we could say that it has just turned thirty years old. That is, to evoke a somewhat Foucauldian expression, it has all the marks of legitimacy (and perhaps a bit of a mid-thirties crisis). Despite this rootedness, a certain delegitimization of queer linguistics persists, both outside and within academia, often due to ignorance. We always fear what we do not know and, even more importantly, we fear what may call our privileges into question. Before its potential delegitimization crystallizes, taking advantage of the current window of opportunity, this post seeks to introduce queer (socio)linguistics through its main definitions, practices, figures, and future challenges.
What it is (not)
Queer linguistics could be defined as the critical study, of a linguistic and discursive nature, of cisheteronormativity(Motschenbacher, 2011; Bengoechea, 2015): the regime that stipulates the hegemonic (normative) and disciplinary character of masculinity, heterosexuality, and binary, hierarchical gender roles. Therefore, the first point we must dispel is this: no, queer linguistics is not concerned with studying (exclusively) the speech of people identified as LGBTIQ+. It is true that, especially during the twentieth century, there was both popular and specialized interest in addressing how emerging subjects in the social field communicated: glossaries and dictionaries of “homosexual” terms, color codes in meeting rituals among men who have sex with men, or pragmatic features ascribed to lesbians were some of the focal points that first selected “particular” individuals and then attributed communicative codes to them.
In a different vein, if we consider queer (socio)linguistics as the application of queer theory to the study of language in society (Barrett, 2002), we must attend to the impact of the 1990s on discussions about gender. We usually consider that queer theories emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with authors such as Teresa de Lauretis, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler. These ideas quickly spread to the sociocultural and anthropological strands of linguistics that were taking shape in the United States, with pioneering books such as Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Language by William Leap (1995) and Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality by Anna Livia and Kira Hall (1997), which, together with the conferences and subsequent proceedings on Women and Language at Berkeley, inaugurated the field of queer linguistics. Rather than seeking logical equivalences between pre-established categories (woman, gay man) and linguistic features (a wide range of adjectives, a “gay lisp”), scholars began to explore the effects of speech acts and their power in interaction. In other words, it is not because someone is gay that they will have a more “exaggerated”, fronted <s>; rather, that sibilant production will likely change depending on whether the person is speaking in a bar with friends or in front of a lawyer during a trial. Likewise, a heterosexual man might use that sound to ridicule or to perform femininity, for example. Thus, as Rodrigo Borba aptly summarizes, “as identidades sexuais são abordadas, na LQ, como produtos/efeitos de práticas socioculturais locais que somente podem ser verificadas através de estudos etnográficos que analisem, através de uma descrição densa (Geertz, 1989), as performances (corporais e linguísticas) situadas dos indivíduos” (2015: 99).
If a drag queen (assigned male at birth) could use language to construct femininity before an audience during a show, it became important to consider performativity: the process through which, by saying things, we actually do those very things. By saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” (an example much cherished by cisheterosexual normativity), the priest transforms, through his words, the contracting parties into married people. But let us go a bit further. People assigned as “male” are believed to constantly speak with a low voice, so a drag king performer who wants to display masculinity will use a low voice in order to perform that masculinity, in turn reinforcing the idea that certain tones are characteristic of a given gender (in a constant repetition that eventually becomes fossilized).
On the other hand, if a gay man with a highly respected professional reputation changed his sibilants or the type of vocabulary he used depending on the context—from his private home with friends to a medical consultation with patients—it became important to analyze indexicality. That is, the semiotic process through which certain linguistic forms (a diminutive, a linguistic variety) point to—are indices of—particular styles and identities (the shady queen, the country bumpkin, etc.). In other words, the signs we use point toward particular social categories, in the same way that many people form ideas about someone when they hear them speak with a certain accent. In this sense, the indexical relations that connect linguistic features with speakers’ styles and social ideas constitute a very important driving force for language ideologies (e.g., “if they say amorch [love, honey], with <ch>, they’re queer”). Moreover, these social categories exist thanks to discourse, just as gender is the stylized repetition of gestures and practices that, through insistence (“it’s a boy” vs. “it’s a girl,” for example), end up fossilizing into behaviors and, in turn, identities.
However, styles do not essentially belong to identities, and linguistic features and labels can often be appropriated, parodied, exaggerated, or resignified. Iterability—the third major notion in the triangle that allows us to understand queer linguistics—means that any sign must be repeatable in order to function as a sign, as theorized by Derrida. At the same time, that repetition in other contexts, by other speakers, with diverse intentions, always leaves room for difference: an utterance can fail, can parody, can be transformed when reused in interaction (think of the word queer, for example). As the recently deceased Deborah Cameron, one of the pioneering and most important figures in studies of language, gender, and sexuality, taught us, cisgender heterosexual men can also use linguistic resources generally associated with minoritized genders and sexualities. In her 1997 study, she shows how a group of frat boys on a U.S. university campus criticize a classmate in a homophobic way while paradoxically using language that could traditionally be considered “feminine,” enabling them to discursively construct their group identity.
In conclusion, queer linguistics arrived and called a halt: it said no to the gender essentialism of some earlier research on what was termed “women’s speech” (which sometimes reified a narrative of men are from Mars and women are from Venus), while also rejecting the limitations of traditional variationist sociolinguistics, which flattened social categories into macro, unitary, and universal dimensions. Queer linguistics reread Foucault, Derrida, and Austin, and continued engaging with authors such as Butler and Robin Lakoff to analyze the situated social practices of speaking subjects who, beyond the labels imposed by sexual modernity, do things with words—and, importantly, with their bodies.
Diverse, hybrid, non-linear approaches
As mentioned above, although it originally drew heavily from lexicography and somewhat from pragmatics (lavender linguistics), queer linguistics is an undisciplined assemblage of diverse disciplines: it includes feminisms, linguistic anthropology, critical sociolinguistics, poststructuralist approaches to language, (critical) discourse studies, applied linguistics, sociocultural linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, corpus studies, (socio)phonetics, and more. Depending on each researcher’s interests and geographic location, many studies conducted within different curricular spaces could be labeled queer linguistics. Here another misconception must be dispelled: no, queer linguistics is not (exclusively) concerned with inclusive and/or nonbinary language. Although this topic has occupied significant space in debates on language, gender, and sexuality—especially in Europe and in Romance-language contexts—there is more to life than code alone.
In this case, I am interested in maintaining the term with parentheses—queer (socio)linguistics—not only because my research is situated within ethnographically informed critical sociolinguistics, but also because typographically it shows the close relationship that has developed between linguistic practice and critical social theories. In particular, it would be fair for sociolinguistics—if one wishes, “mainstream” sociolinguistics—to acknowledge how sex-gender struggles, along with their dissident theories and practices, have enriched the analytical toolbox it uses, from agency to embodiment, including intersectionality.
It is no coincidence that feminist sociolinguists fired the starting gun and, apparently, continue to sustain the field today in different latitudes. In the case of Galicia, we can trace a particular—yet highly illustrative—genealogy. In 1977, the historic feminist María Xosé Queizán published A muller en Galicia: a muller na sociedade galega, a lingua galega e a muller (análise estructural de dous métodos represivos), the same year that the proto-intersectional manifesto of the Combahee River Collective on Black feminism appeared in the United States, and that Maria-Mercè Marçal, from Catalonia, gifted us her well-known oft-cited poem “Divisa.” Queizán drew on theories from the political economy of language (for example, Rossi-Landi) to theorize the role of women in language shift, as transmitters of the cultural patterns of the bourgeois family. In that work, Queizán criticizes the term “mother tongue,” advocates for multiple forms of linguistic socialization and, as Lluís Aracil would later reflect, connects diglossia with machismo in articulating the triple oppression of Galician women (by class, by gender, and by language/nation). With new visions of gender, contemporary authors such as Teresa Moure, Olga Castro, and Virginia Acuña emerged, laying the foundations for a poststructuralist analysis of language and gender attentive to the Galician sociolinguistic situation. Later, emerging researchers such as Noemi Basanta, Daniel Amarelo, and Vera Santomé also considered the impact of sexuality and queerness from the perspectives of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography.
This reflection leads us to consider a central issue: the process of expansion to countries and research centers beyond the Anglo-Saxon hegemony (the United States and the United Kingdom). Over the past decade, queer linguistics has lived up to its name by attempting to disentangle the normativities that coexist in every intellectual and social space. As it has consolidated in different countries, queer linguistics has begun to show its seams: it has centers and peripheries; it is not immune to the epistemological challenges of decoloniality; as a relatively precarious field of study, it is subject to the global backlash; and it experiments with forms of resistance and emancipation derived from new media within increasingly transnational networks. Recent studies point to linguistics’ historical neglect of trans and nonbinary subjects, racialized and disabled people, as well as drag practices and artists—or even the invisible banner of normativity itself (cishet men)—with scholars such as Lal Zimman, Lex Konnely, Ariana Steele, Rodrigo Borba, Iran Ferreira de Melo, Ernesto Cuba, Vincent Pak, or J. Calder. As Calder notes in a 2020 article, queer linguistics is moving beyond English-language and Western contexts (globalization); beyond cisheterosexual speakers to include trans and nonbinary people and thus illuminate “the way speakers existing at the ideological margins negotiate the tension between normative ideological gender structures and emergent agentive practices” (Calder 2020: 443); and beyond unimodal and monoglossic analyses, understanding language as a multimodal semiotic system, traversed by the body.
Nevertheless, we could argue that queer linguistics’ unfinished business concerns minoritized languages and endangered linguistic varieties. Sociolinguistic inequality based on the distribution of resources and the hierarchical capitalization of speakers and their languages has been scarcely addressed in the field, despite voices such as Holly Cashman, John Walsh, or Michael Hornsby raising concerns about this dynamic in recent years. Since we know that the absence of a language policy is itself a language policy, it is striking that both events and academic journals in queer linguistics are unquestionably dominated by a certain—albeit discreet—English-only norm. Through fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal, 2000), we might say that the incipient “Hispanic” (?) queer linguistics can replicate these biases by failing to critically interrogate what I will call the “methodological nationalism” of Spanish LGBT+ and queer studies, which—more by omission than by action—convey pan-Hispanic, territorializing, and monoglossic language ideologies (“estudios queer/cuir en español”).
An enthusiastic emergence for an absent audience?
Beyond our queer obsessions with constant critique, there are some major structural problems within academia in the Spanish state that must be mentioned (and solved!). The absence of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as other curricular spaces, addressing the relationships between language, gender, and sexuality condemns queer linguistics to chronic precariousness. Although concepts such as performativity, style, prejudice, or pride represent crucial strands in discourse in society—thanks to their development within gender and sexuality studies—many still overlook how they enrich linguistic analysis.
Recently, at an international (Hispanist) linguistics conference in Madrid, a symposium took place on queer approaches to language in the Iberian Peninsula. Although we initially celebrated the large presence of young people and emerging scholars, we quickly moved from delight to disappointment. The near-total absence of senior scholars symbolized the lack of support and investment in this research, which often ends—at best—when the doctoral dissertation does. In this way, a worrying niche effect is created, bringing us back to the beginning of this text: “Ah!, so you study how faggots talk?” And those faggots—and lesbians and trans* and allies—end up speaking to no one, because they have neither interlocutors nor funding nor networks where their work can flourish.
There is, however, reason for hope. Let us persevere! Let us build networks and give attention to pioneering work on queer linguistics in the Spanish state (Jaime Altuna, Miren Artetxe, Garbiñe Bereziartua, Sara Engra, Nacho Esteban, Emma Machado, Carles Navarro Carrascosa, Jone Miren Hernández, Onintza Legorburu, Bel Olid, etc.), without rendering stateless nations and minoritized languages invisible, where reflections on language, gender, and sexuality force us to look back to the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, we did not speak of intersectionality, we did not cite Butler, we were not called woke. But we knew about the covert character of sociolinguistic inequality. As they know it too—those who, as shown in this VOX electoral poster against the officialization of Asturian, bring together Spanish nationalism, monolingualism, masculinity, and heterosexism (The “Adrianes”—Asturian politicians—want to shove their tongue [llingua, in Asturian] down your throat.) Let us put language back into queer linguistics, because we need it. And, above all, let us not forget which language(s) we put into it (sociolinguistic inequality), or queer linguistics will remain incomplete.
REFERENCES
Barrett, R. (2002). Is queer theory important for sociolinguistic theory? In K. Campbell-Kibler et al. (Eds.), Language and Sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice (pp. 25-43). CSLI Press.
Bengoechea, M. (2015). Lengua y género. Síntesis.
Borba, R. (2015). Linguística queer: uma perspectiva pós-identitária para os estudos da linguagem. Entrelinhas, 9(1): 91-107. https://doi.org/10.4013/10378
Calder, J. (2020). Language, gender and sexuality in 2019: interrogating normativities in the field. Gender and Language, 14(4): 429-454. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.18634
Cameron, D. (1997). Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity. In Johnson, S. & Meinhof, U. H. (Eds.), Language and Masculinity (pp. 47-64). Oxford: Blackwell.
Irvine, J. T. & Gal, S. (2000). Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35-84). School of American Research Press.
Leap, W. L. (1995). Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Language. Gordon & Breach Publishers.
Livia, A. & Hall, K. (1997). Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Oxford University Press.
Motschenbacher, H. (2011). Taking queer linguistics further: Sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 212, 149-179.
Queizán, M. X. (1977). A muller en Galicia: a muller na sociedade galega, a lingua galega e a muller (análise estructural de dous métodos represivos). Ediciós do Castro.
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This contribution is part of the recently completed EquiLing research project, specifically its subproject “New speakers as agents of sociolinguistic transformation in Catalonia” – EquiLing-CAT (PID2019-105676RB-C43), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. EquiLing investigates how languages contribute to creating and reproducing sociolinguistic inequalities and how speakers can develop critical awareness and agency to transform them, combining sociolinguistic theory and action research. Through collaborative and ethnographic methodologies in educational and social spaces in Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid, it seeks to foster inclusive linguistic citizenship and a more equitable sociolinguistic order.
