In this collection of essays, a group of linguists and social scientists examines specific instances of language use, and centers its analysis around the speakers/writers and their contributions to message-exchange within a setting. These prominent scholars create a basis for a bold exploration of homosexual dialogue as an independently developed linguistic construction, by arguing in support of distinctively constructed lesbian and gay languages.

This pioneering collection of previously unpublished articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender language combines queer theory and feminist theory with the latest thinking on language and gender. The book expands the field well beyond the study of "gay slang" to consider gay dialects (such as Polari in England), early modern discourse on gay practices, and late twentieth-century descriptions of homosexuality. These essays examine the conversational patterns of queer speakers in a wide variety of settings, from women's friendship groups to university rap groups and electronic mail postings. Taking a global--rather than regional--approach, the contributors herein study the language usage of sexually liminal communities in a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts, such as lesbian speakers of American Sign Language, Japanese gay male couples, Hindi-speaking hijras (eunuchs) in North India, Hausa-speaking 'yan daudu (feminine men) in Nigeria, and French and Yiddish gay groups. The most accessible and diverse collection of its kind, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality sets a new standard in the study of language's impact on the construction of sexuality.

Publisher Description

Excerpts from foundational work, recent journal articles and pieces written for this text about the role of communication in the construction and performance of sexualities in interpersonal contexts and public discourses.

In this book Denis M. Provencher examines the tensions between Anglo-American and French articulations of homosexuality and sexual citizenship in the context of contemporary French popular culture and first-person narratives. In the light of recent political events and the perceived hegemonic role of US forces throughout the world, an examination of the French resistance to globalization and 'Americanization', is timely in this context. He argues that contemporary French gay and lesbian cultures rely on long-standing French narratives that resist US models of gay experience. He maintains that French gay experiences are mitigated through (gay) French language that draws on several canonical voices - including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre - and various universalistic discourses. Drawing on material from a diverse array of media, Queer French draws out the importance of a French gay linguistic and semiotic tradition that emerges in contemporary textual practices and discourses as they relate to sexual citizenship in 20th- and 21st-century France. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, linguistics, media and communication studies and French studies.

This book explores the construction of identities within a lesbian group, outlining interactive tactics used in the production of mutually-negotiated norms of authenticity. Using ethnography and discourse analysis, a range of group-specific personae are revealed to be continually reworked and reproduced within the women's interaction.

"This handbook is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective. A growing number of scholars hold that rather than fixed and pre-determined, race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within specific histories, political economic systems, and everyday interactions. This handbook demonstrates how linguistic analysis brings a crucial perspective to this project by revealing the ways in which language and race are mutually constituted as social realities. Not only do we position issues of race, racism, and racialization as central to language-based scholarship, but we also examine these processes from an explicitly critical and anti-racist perspective. The process of racialization-an enduring yet evolving social process steeped in centuries of colonialism and capitalism-is central to linguistic anthropological approaches. This volume captures state-of-the-art research in this important and necessary yet often overlooked area of inquiry and points the way forward in establishing future directions of research in this rapidly expanding field, including the need for more studies of language and race in non-U.S. contexts. Covering a range of sites from Angola, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Italy, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and unceded Indigenous territories, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on the field of language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and finally, the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result"--