Language and Sexual Identity
Project Title: Language and Sexual Identity
Project Leader: Liz Morrish
Funded by: NTU
A. Book Title: New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity (2007)
Authors/ Publisher: Dr Liz Morrish and Dr Helen Sauntson. Palgrave Press
Description: New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity demonstrates how gay men and lesbians employ language in the discursive construction of sexual identity. Whilst previous work in the field of language and sexuality has been characterised by multi-disciplinary approaches, this book offers an approach which is informed more centrally by linguistics. The book uses analytical techniques such as spoken discourse analysis, critical text analysis and corpus linguistics to uncover and investigate how sexual identities are discursively constructed across a range of real-life contexts and text types. Another unique feature of the book will be its use of lesbian data, which has sometimes taken second place to data collected exclusively in a gay male context.
New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity presents a range of new and exciting data to illustrate and explore aspects of the relationship between language and sexuality. Using data drawn from lesbian and gay conversations and narratives, reflections on coming out, representations of lesbians in film and erotic fiction, and representations of prominent gay men in newspaper reports, the book exemplifies some of the ways in which lesbians and gay men construct identity from among the symbolic resources available within lesbian and gay communities of practice.
B. Book Chapter
Morrish, L. and Leap, W. (2007). Sex Talk: Language, Desire, Identity and Beyond. In Helen Sauntson and Sakis Kyratzis (Eds.) Language, Sexualities, Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Palgrave.
This chapter responds to recent discussions regarding language and sexuality which urge that researchers reduce the contexts, content, styles, attitudes expressed through GLB language to a single topic: language about desire. Don Kulick's recent (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2000) article on the subject is most closely associated with this reductive argument. Kulick's paper makes several charges: that work in the field has failed to identify uniquely structural features for gays and lesbians; that the categories of gender and sexuality have been conflated; and that earlier work has missed the point - the only uniquely defining feature of GLB language is its articulation of desire. This chapter responds to Kulick's criticisms by exploring perspectives on language, sexuality and gender which are curiously absent from Kulick's critical review, including Queer Theory, political economy, and recent work in Sociolinguistics which foregrounds the place of sexuality and gender within "Communities of Practice." Data from extensive interviews with gay men in Cape Town, South Africa is used to exemplify and develop several of these theoretical themes. In particular, this work shows how the performance and lived experience of sexuality depends upon the subject’s race, geographical location in relation to “gay city” in Cape Town, gender performance and economic resources.
