Semantics and Pragmatics: Blurring Boundaries and Constructing Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McConnell-Ginet
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Practices

Semantics and pragmatics are increasingly seen as inextricably interwoven in understanding linguistically conveyed meaning. Scholarship on gender and sexuality now mostly considers cultural and bodily/biological concerns as enmeshed, not clearly separable. Gender and sexual identities and practices are also changing. Many contexts no longer support familiar assumptions about what “goes without saying”—for example, marriage is between a woman and a man, someone pregnant must be a woman (or girl), not protesting sexual overtures constitutes consenting to them, and many more. As the landscape surrounding gender and sexuality changes, so do linguistic actions and attitudes in that landscape, constructing new contexts. Familiar labels for sexual identities and activities shift and are often contested, new labels arise for possibilities once unrecognized (sometimes non-existent), people police others’ linguistic practices and jockey for semantic authority. Semantic and pragmatic approaches to language and sexuality show indeterminacy, change, and (sometimes competing) interests of language users.

Semantics and Pragmatics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McConnell-Ginet
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Practices

Semantics and pragmatics are increasingly seen as inextricably interwoven in understanding linguistically conveyed meaning. Scholarship on gender and sexuality now mostly considers cultural and bodily/biological concerns as enmeshed, not clearly separable. Gender and sexual identities and practices are also changing. Many contexts no longer support familiar assumptions about what “goes without saying”—for example, marriage is between a woman and a man, someone pregnant must be a woman (or girl), not protesting sexual overtures constitutes consenting to them, and many more. As the landscape surrounding gender and sexuality changes, so do linguistic actions and attitudes in that landscape, constructing new contexts. Familiar labels for sexual identities and activities shift and are often contested, new labels arise for possibilities once unrecognized (sometimes non-existent), people police others’ linguistic practices and jockey for semantic authority. Semantic and pragmatic approaches to language and sexuality show indeterminacy, change, and (sometimes competing) interests of language users.

Integrating Theories of Gender and Sexuality With Deviance: The Case of Prescription Drug Misuse during Sex

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124322110098
Author(s):  
Laura C. Frizzell ◽  
Mike Vuolo ◽  
Brian C. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Prescription Drug ◽  
Prescription Drugs ◽  
Minority Stress ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
Deviant Behavior ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Drug Misuse ◽  
Identity Conflict ◽  
Prescription Drug Misuse ◽  
Sexual Identities

Social scientists have expended substantial effort to identify group patterns of deviant behavior. Yet beyond the ill-conceived treatment of sexual minorities as inherently deviant, they have rarely considered how gendered sexual identities (GSIs) shape participation in deviance. We argue for the utility of centering theories of gender and sexuality in intersectional deviance research. We demonstrate how this intentional focus on gender and sexuality provides important empirical insights while avoiding past pitfalls of stigmatizing sexual minorities. Drawing on theories of hegemonic masculinity, emphasized femininity, and minority stress together with criminological general strain theory, we demonstrate how societal expectations and constraints generate strains among GSI groups that may lead to distinctly patterned deviance, using the case of prescription drug misuse during sex. We employ thematic analysis of 120 in-depth interviews with people who misuse prescription drugs, stratified by GSI. We identify six themes highlighting distinct pathways from strain to misuse during sex for different GSI groups: intimacy management, achieving sexual freedom, regulating sexual mood, performance confidence, increased sense of control, and managing sexual identity conflict. In this article, we demonstrate the empirical and theoretical importance of centering gender and sexuality in deviance research and provide a roadmap for theoretical integration.

scholarly journals Turkey’s queer times: an introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cenk Özbay ◽  
Kerem Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
And Gender

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

African Masculinities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndubueze L. Mbah
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Social Traits ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Gender System

As a system of identity, African masculinity is much more than a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others. It also refers to more than how African male bodies, subjectivities, and experiences are constituted in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. African masculinities, as historical subjects embodying distinctive socially constructed gender and sexual identities, have been both male and female. By occupying a masculine sociopolitical position, embodying masculine social traits, and performing cultural deeds socially construed and symbolized as masculine, African men and women have constituted masculinity. Across various African societies and times, there have been multiple and conflicting notions of masculinities, promoted by local and foreign institutions, and there have been ceaseless contestations and synergies among the various forms of hegemonic, subordinate, and subversive African masculinities. Men and women have frequently brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular notions of masculinity. Through such performances of masculinity, Africans have constantly negotiated the institutional power dynamics of gender relations. So, the question is not whether Africans worked with gender binaries, because they did. As anthropologist John Wood puts it, African indigenous logic of gender becomes evident in the juxtaposition, symbolic reversals, and interrelation of opposites. Rather, one should ask, why and how did African societies generate a fluid gender system in which biological sex did not always correspond to gender, such that anatomically male and female persons could normatively occupy socially constructed masculine and feminine roles and vice versa? And how did African mutually constitutive gender and sexuality constructions shape African societies?

scholarly journals ‘What do bisexuals look like? I don’t know!’ Visibility, gender, and safety among plurisexuals

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-607
Author(s):  
Rosie Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Social World ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Strongly Connected ◽  
Do So

Plurisexuals are often interpreted as half gay/half straight due to the prevailing belief that multigendered attractions are temporary, or illusory. This interpretation is also strongly connected to the gender binary, gender norms, and cisnormativity. Based on these social forces, this article explores how plurisexuals represent themselves in a culture that does not see their identities as viable, often through the use of gender norms. Informed by queer theory, this research is based on semi-structured interviews (n = 30) and photo diaries (n = 9). Findings demonstrate that plurisexuals wish to present visually, but are not certain of how to do so. Plurisexuals see gender and sexuality as connected, and reference transforming outfits through feminization or masculinization. Finally, plurisexuals reference the homophobic, monosexist, transphobic social world by describing how they communicate gender and sexual identities only in certain spaces, or for certain audiences.

Performing Queer Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Farfan
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
Queer Performance ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

Focusing on some of the best-known stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, while also suggesting that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and Djuna Barnes’s metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove explore manifestations, facets, and dimensions of and suggest ways of reading—and of viewing earlier “readers” reading—queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist and how their coproductive intersection was articulated in and through performance. The book contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relationship between performance history and the history of sexuality. In doing so, it adds to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain underrepresented. It also contributes to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative and more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

scholarly journals Transnational Governmentality and the Politics of Life and Death

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sima Shakhsari
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Local State ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Politics Of Life

One can ignore neither the role of diasporas nor colonial and imperial discourses of modernity in the construction of normative sexual identities and practices in the Middle East, whether in the past or the present. This is not to dismiss “local” forms of regulation, disciplining, and normalization of queers, but to point to the way that “local” state and nonstate norms of sexuality are not detached from “global” trends and transnational relationships of power. My own work on gender and sexuality within Iranian diasporic contexts engages with scholarship that postulates sexuality as a form of transnational governmentality and with analyses of homonationalism and necropolitics. I examine the representational economy of queer deaths during the “war on terror” and suggest that the Iranian transgender refugee, who has become a highly representable subject as a victim of Iranian transphobia in the civilizational discourses of the “war on terror,” dies an unspeakable death if her death disrupts the promise of freedom after flight.

scholarly journals Becoming intelligible woman: Gender, disability and resistance at the border zone of youth

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Slater ◽  
Embla Ágústsdóttir ◽  
Freyja Haraldsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Border Zone ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Intellectual Impairment ◽  
Critical Disability Studies ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
The World ◽  
Disabled Women ◽  
Crip Theory

This paper considers young disabled women navigating ableist and heteronormative constructs of adult womanhood. We consider adult womanhood at the embodied intersection of gender, sexuality and dis/ability (categories themselves mediated by race, class, coloniality, etc.). For young disabled women, questions of gender and sexuality were more often than not denied. Gendered and sexual identities were therefore politically and strategically used to claim “adult” and “woman.” Yet, such identities often felt restricted to binary gendered frameworks. Already positioned through ableism as non-normative, to exist outside of heteronormativity felt dangerous, risking paternalism and non-consensual bodily intervention. Drawing on the cases of Ashley X and Marie Adams, we argue that these dangers are often more severe for those with labels of intellectual impairment and/or considered to have the most “severe” impairments. Adulthood needs to be understood, not as a natural state of development (the endpoint of youth), but as a heteronormative and ableist socio-cultural-political construct, as well as a complex site of negotiation, conflict and resistance, which (differently) restricts how young people are able to become in the world. We fill a gap in scholarship by exploring the intersection of critical disability studies, crip theory and youth studies from a feminist perspective.

scholarly journals Gender trouble beyond the LGB and T: Gender Image and Experiences of Marginalization on Campus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari J. Dockendorff ◽  
Claudia Geist
Keyword(s):  
School Districts ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Department Of Education ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Campus Housing ◽  
Individual School ◽  
Gender Trouble ◽  
K 12

Early in 2017, all Obama era guidance on trans* and non-binary students in K-12 and higher education settings was removed from the Department of Education, which gave the authority back to individual school districts and institutions to decide if and how they want to accommodate their trans* and non-binary students (Department of Education, 2016). In conjunction with amicus briefs filed by the Department of Justice seemingly supporting LGBT+ discrimination by employers or businesses, LGBTQ+ students may feel even more vulnerable in the college environment. But, to assume that homophobia or transphobia is felt only by those who identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, is to misunderstand the fluidity and complexity of gender and sexuality. Because gender is a material aspect of their college experience for all students. College admissions forms typically only ask for the students' sex assigned at birth, and sexuality is typically not asked on admissions' forms. Facilities on campus including bathrooms, changing facilities, campus housing, and athletics are commonly segregated by sex (Beemyn, 2005). Rules that police what genders are allowed in certain spaces do not just impact trans* and non-binary people; however, the extent to which anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment has had negative repercussions for heterosexual and cisgender students, is unknown and understudied.Our goal for this study is twofold. First, we want to explore levels of gender marginalization on college campuses and then, we want to better understand who is at risk of feeling marginalized. In addition to conventional measures of sex, gender and sexual identities we explore novel, scaled measures of how students see themselves, and how they think others see them, with respect to masculinity, femininity, and androgyny.

scholarly journals EDUCAÇÃO, DEMOCRACIA E DIVERSIDADE CULTURAL: das concepções aos aprendizados

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aloirmar José da Silva ◽  
Edna Gusmão de Goés Brennand ◽  
Maria Da Luz Olegário
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
Pedagogical Treatment ◽  
The Many ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Methodological Strategy

Este artigo analisa os principais aprendizados que o componente curricular Educação e Diversidade Cultural possibilitou aos estudantes do 3º Período do Curso de Licenciatura em Pedagogia, da Universidade Federal da Paraíba, sobretudo no que diz respeito às concepções de gênero e sexualidade. A estratégia metodológica utilizada foi a abordagem qualitativa, do tipo exploratória e descritiva. O material empírico foi produzido a partir de relatos extraídos da avaliação final realizada pelos estudantes. Os resultados evidenciaram como aprendizados a desconstrução de uma visão biologicista de gênero e de visões religiosas que naturalizam e essencializam as desigualdades de gênero. Quanto a sexualidade, os aprendizados incluem os muitos modos de vivê-la, o seu caráter transitório, a não identificação de gênero com comportamento sexual e a quebra de preconceitos em torno das identidades sexuais não hétero. De modo geral, os conteúdos estudados e debatidos em sala de aula foram reconhecidos como pertinentes ao universo escolar  e  cruciais ao processo educativo, ao trato pedagógico das diversidades e ao aprofundamento da democracia.Palavras-chave: Educação. Democracia. Diversidade Cultural.EDUCATION, DEMOCRACY AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY: from conceptions to learningAbstractThis article analyzes the main learning that the curricular component Education and Cultural Diversity made possible to the students of the 3rd Pedagogy Period Degree of Paraíba Federal University, especially with regard to conceptions of gender and sexuality. The methodological strategy used was the qualitative, exploratory and descriptive approach. The empirical material was produced from reports extracted from the final evaluation carried out by the students. The results evidenced the deconstruction of a biologicist view of gender and religious views that naturalize and essentialise gender inequalities. For the sexuality, learning includes the many ways of living it, its transitory character, the non-identification of gender with sexual behavior and the breaking of prejudices around non-heterosexual sexual identities. In general, the contents studied and debated in the classroom were recognized as pertinent to the school universe and crucial to the educational process, the pedagogical treatment of diversity and the deepening of democracy.Keywords: Education. Democracy. Cultural Diversity. EDUCACIÓN, DEMOCRACIA Y DIVERSIDAD CULTURAL: de las concepciones a los aprendizajesResumen Este artículo analiza los principales aprendizajes que el componente curricular Educación y Diversidad Cultural posibilitó a los estudiantes del 3º Período del Curso de Licenciatura en Pedagogía, de la Universidad Federal de Paraíba, sobre todo en lo que se refiere a las concepciones de género y sexualidad. La estrategia metodológica utilizada fue el enfoque cualitativo, del tipo exploratorio y descriptivo. El material empírico fue producido a partir de relatos extraídos de la evaluación final realizada por los estudiantes. Los resultados evidenciaron como aprendidos la deconstrucción de una visión biologicista de género y de visiones religiosas que naturalizan y esencializan las desigualdades de género. En cuanto a la sexualidad, los aprendizajes incluyen los muchos modos de vivirla, su carácter transitorio, la no identificación de género con comportamiento sexual y la quiebra de prejuicios en torno a las identidades sexuales no hetero. En general, los contenidos estudiados y debatidos en el aula fueron reconocidos como pertinentes al universo escolar y cruciales al proceso educativo, al trato pedagógico de las diversidades ya la profundización de la democraciaPalabras clave: Educación. Democracia. Diversidad cultural. 

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