scholarly journals Queer linguistics and identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Jones

Abstract In this short essay, I offer some reflections on language and sexuality work over the past decade. My discussion is focused on the increasing influence of queer theory, in particular, and I comment on trends in research into language and queer identities. I take into account not only the work published in the Journal of Language and Sexuality and beyond, but also that presented over the past decade at the annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics conference.

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali E Erol

During the summer of 2013, Turkey witnessed the largest protest movement in the history of the republic. The protests began with environmentalist concerns to save a public park in central Istanbul, Gezi Park, from becoming a shopping mall. However, in a matter of days, the protests turned into a reaction against what many protestors perceived to be the authoritarian rule of the prime minister at the time. While the mainstream protest discourses focused on reacting against such perceptions, which produced sexist and heterosexist discourses, queer discourses were centered on celebrating coexistence and diversity through resistance. Drawing on literatures of queer theory that focus on queer space and moral geography, this article builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space. Using queer linguistics to investigate blog posts that were written at the time of the protest by queer individuals who were taking part in protest, this article investigates the ways in which queer discourses construct the moral geography of the Gezi Park and at the same time challenge neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies.


Author(s):  
Peter T. Daniels

It seems to me that the study of writing is about where the study of language was before the development of linguistics over the past century-and-a-bit. Everyone we know knows how to write, and therefore everyone we know thinks they know about writing. This paper looks at how writing has been presented to the general public, and how it has been treated in linguistics since the first real textbook of 1933.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 404-427
Author(s):  
Leticia Cesarino

ABSTRACT In the past decade or so, populism and social media have been outstanding issues both in academia and the public sphere. At this point, evidence from multiple countries suggest that perceived parallels between the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist discourse may be more than just incidental, relating to a shared structural field. This article suggests one possible path towards making sense of how the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist mobilization have co-produced each other in the last decade or so. Navigating the interface between anthropology and linguistics, it takes key aspects of Victor Turner’s notion of liminality to suggest some of the ways in which social media’s anti-structural affordances may help lay a foundation for the contemporary flourishing of populist discourse: markers of social structure are suspended; communitas is formed; the culture core is addressed; mimesis and anti-structural inversions are performed; subjects become influenceable. I elaborate on this claim based on Brazilian materials, drawn from online ethnography on pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2018.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe C. Baveye

In recent years, many researchers have claimed that world reserves of rock phosphate were getting depleted at an alarming rate, putting us on the path to scarcity of that essential resource within the next few decades. Others have claimed that such alarmist forecasts were frequent in the past and have always been proven unfounded, making it likely that the same will be true in the future. Both viewpoints are directly relevant to the level of funding devoted to research on the use of phosphate fertilizers. In this short essay, it is argued that information about future reserves of P or any other resource are impossible to predict, and therefore that the threat of a possible depletion of P reserves should not be used as a key motivation for an intensification of research on soil P. However, there are other, more compelling reasons, both geopolitical and environmental, to urgently step up our collective efforts to devise agricultural practices that make better use of P than is the case at the moment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Khairul Asyraf Mohd Nathir ◽  
Mohd Sukki Othman

Kemukjizatan al-Qur’an atau I’jāz al-Qur’an merupakan satu bentuk ilmu yang menjelaskan tentang keagongan al-Qur’an dalam pelbagai bentuk disiplin ilmu.  Salah satu pecahan utama adalah melibatkan penggunaan gaya bahasa yang meliputi tatabahasa, balāghah dan linguistik. Kajian ini bertujuan menerobos perkembangan I’jaz Bayāniy dalam kajian al-Qur’an berdasarkan karya dari sarjana terdahulu. Pendekatan melalui analisis kualitatif terhadap hasil karya sarjana lampau dilihat sebagai satu metodologi utama kajian ini. Hasil penelitian mendapati, penggunaan istilah I’jaz Bayāniy tidak hanya tertumpu kepada ilmu bayān sahaja, bahkan meliputi ilmu ma’ani  dan badi’. The Miracle of the Qur’an or I’jāz al-Qur’an is a form of knowledge that explains the greatness of the Qur’an in various forms of disciplines. One of the major discussion involves the use of language styles that include grammar, balāghah and linguistics. This study aims to examine the development of I’jaz Bayāniy in the study of the Qur’an based on the research of previous scholars. The approach through qualitative analysis from the past scholars is seen as one of the main methodologies of this study. The results of the study found that the use of the term I’jaz Bayāniy is not only focused on the bayān only, but also covers the ma’ani and badi ’.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Dixon

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse assözde Ermeni sorunu(the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as1915 olayları(the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-90
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Abstract This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of ‘kairological history’, on the model of the artist Paul Chan’s ‘kairological art’. On this analysis, ‘kairological history’ engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about ‘telling time’. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a ‘classical’ past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time.


English Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 58-59
Author(s):  
J. M. Hernández-Campoy

Since Romaine's (1982) pioneering work, historical sociolinguistics has been studying the relationships between language and society in its socio-historical context by focusing on the study of language variation and change with the use of variationist methods. Work on this interdisciplinary sub-field subsisting on sociology, history and linguistics is expanding, as shown, for example, by Milroy (1992), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (1996; 2003), Ammon, Mattheier & Nelde (1999), Jahr (1999), Kastovsky & Mettinger (2000), Bergs (2005), Conde-Silvestre (2007), Trudgill (2010), or Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (2012). These works have been elucidating the theoretical limits of the discipline and applying the tenets and findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past. Yet in the course of this development historical sociolinguistics has sometimes been criticised for lack of representativeness and its empirical validity has occasionally been questioned. Fortunately, in parallel to the development of electronic corpora, the assistance of corpus linguistics and social history has conferred ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence on the discipline.


Author(s):  
Brian Bocking

In this short essay written for Professor Ursula King’s Festschrift I reflect on the general problem of researching and recovering events and individuals previously ‘lost’ to historians of religions, taking as my example recent collaborative research into forgotten early Irish Buddhists. I consider also the problems of researching other traditionally under-represented figures, including many women; for example, the wife (Rosa Alice Hill) and mother (Caroline Pounds) of the Irish Buddhist Charles Pfoundes. In the second and rather more speculative part of the essay I look at some ways in which increasingly sophisticated and increasingly accessible technological developments, allied with growing ‘crowd’ participation in the provision and analysis of historical data, might in future enable us to discover far more than we currently can about events and individuals in the past.


Author(s):  
Didier Fassin

Over the past few decades, most societies have become more repressive, their laws more relentless, their magistrates more inflexible, independently of the evolution of crime. In this book, using an approach both genealogical and ethnographic, distinguished anthropologist Didier Fassin addresses the major issues raised by this punitive moment through an inquiry into the very foundations of punishment. What is punishment? Why punish? Who is punished? With these three questions he initiates a critical dialogue with moral philosophy and legal theory on the definition, justification, and distribution of punishment. Going against the triumphing penal populism, this investigation, based on ten years of empirical research on police, justice, and prison systems, proposes a salutary revision of the presuppositions that nourish the passion for punishing and invites readers to rethink the place of punishment in the contemporary world. The theses developed in the volume are discussed by the criminologist David Garland, the historian Rebecca McLennan, and the sociologist Bruce Western, to whom Fassin responds in a short essay, asking, What is a critique of punishment?


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document