Order and turbulence in a Swedish bathroom

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henning Årman

‘Where are all the queers at the school?! I want to hug you’. Thus begins a conversation scrawled on the door to a Swedish high school’s student bathroom that will spark a debate among students on whether the word ‘queer’ should be considered a slur. In dialogue with work on linguistic citizenship and graffiti as a semiotic mode, this article analyses different stages of the unfolding debate. The analytical lens of turbulence captures the interplay of ordering and disordering in the students' efforts to define ‘queer’. Youths' linguistic agency works as a struggle for meaning across different indexical orders, illustrating the difficulty of sustaining mastery of identity labels as they travel through discourse.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 811-822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Mao ◽  
M. L. Haupert ◽  
Eliot R. Smith

Can a perceiver’s belief about a target’s transgender status (distinct from gender nonconforming appearance) affect perceptions of the target’s attractiveness? Cisgender, heterosexual men and women ( N = 319) received randomly assigned labels (cisgender cross-gender, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary) paired with 48 cross-sex targets represented by photos and rated the attractiveness and related characteristics of those targets. The gender identity labels had a strong, pervasive effect on ratings of attraction. Nonbinary and especially transgender targets were perceived as less attractive than cisgender targets. The effect was particularly strong for male perceivers, and for women with traditional gender attitudes. Sexual and romantic attraction are not driven solely by sexed appearance; information about gender identity and transgender status also influences these assessments. These results have important implications for theoretical models of sexual orientation and for the dating lives of transgender people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 1636-1658
Author(s):  
Christopher Stroud ◽  
Quentin Williams ◽  
Ndimphiwe Bontiya ◽  
Janine Harry ◽  
Koki Kapa ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT One of the greatest challenges of our times is that of lack of voice for abused bodies. These are the bodies of children and men and women who have inherited the brutalities of colonialism, plantation servitude and slavery and now re-live these miseries in the belly of a rampant global neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism. They are the racialized, sexualized, genderized and godless bodies that first took form in coloniality-modernity in conjunction with the emergence of MAN, the White, rational, disembodied male as HUMAN. They retain their shape today through technologies of vulnerability, with which the manufactured lack of voice works in dynamic synergy. This is particularly the case for South Africa, with its tender histories and distraught presents, raw emotion and sore vulnerabilities of racialized and neoliberal patriarchy. In this paper, we suggest that vulnerability, beyond its potentially devastating effect on souls and livelihoods, may also be a productive site for the articulation of alternative, and habitually silenced voices. In this regard, we explore how a focus on acts of Linguistic Citizenship may orientate thinking on voice and agency to different sites of the body, as well as allow insight into the complex technologies and practices of vulnerability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-424
Author(s):  
Jenei Dániel Ferenc ◽  
Csertő István ◽  
Vincze Orsolya

Háttér és célkitűzések:Tanulmányunkban azokat a narratív eseménykonstrukciós eszközöket vizsgáljuk, amelyek összefüggésbe hozhatók a kollektív áldozati tudat (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori és Gundar, 2009) közvetítésével és fenntartásával. Igazolni kívánjuk, hogy a László (2012) által felvázolt áldozati narratív kompozíciós eszközök (nyelvi ágencia, értékelés, és pszichológiai perspektíva csoportelfogult használata) révén közvetíthető egy csoport áldozati pozíciója. Továbbá megvizsgáljuk, hogy egy csoport konfl iktustörténetének percepcióját képes-e megváltoztatni a narratív kompozíció kísérleti úton történő manipulálása: lehetséges-e elkövetőből áldozatot kreálni pusztán a nyelvi megszerkesztettség útján?Módszer:A társas észlelési paradigmára épülő vizsgálatban nemzeti csoportok áldozati történeteinek szisztematikus nyelvi manipulációján keresztül kialakított elfogult és elfogulatlan változatát megítélve, kérdőíves módszerrel (Egyéni és Csoportvélekedés Skála, Eidelson, 2009) mértük fel a narratív kompozíciós eszközök észlelésre gyakorolt hatását.Eredmények:Az áldozati narratívum kompozíciós eszközei statisztikai értelemben is hatással voltak a bemutatott csoportok áldozati pozíciójának észlelésére. A csoportok megítélése attól függően változott, hogy a résztvevők melyik szövegváltozatot olvasták: az elfogulatlan eseményleírás esetén az „áldozati” csoport, az elfogult változat esetén az „agresszor” észlelt áldozati pozíciója válik hangsúlyosabbá. Egyúttal azt is sikerült bizonyítani, hogy pusztán a nyelvi megszerkesztettség útján megváltoztatható egy agresszor csoport észlelése, és áldozati színezettel is bemutathatók tetteik.Következtetések:A László és munkatársai által leírt narratív kompozíció közvetíti az áldozati tudattal összefüggő hiedelmeket, és a csoport szemantikus szerepe képes felülírni az objektíven meghatározott cselekményszerepeket.Background and goals:In this paper we explore the narrative event-constructional devices that can be linked to the transmission and sustainment of collective victim consciousness (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori, and Gundar, 2009). Our goal is to verify that with the narrative compositional devices (linguistic agency, evaluation, group-biased use of psychological perspective) described by László (2012), a group’s victim position can be transmitted. It is further explored, if the perception of a group’s confl ict-story can be altered by the experimental manipulation of the narrative composition: is it possible to create a victim from a perpetrator by just the linguistic composition?Method:The study is based on the social perception paradigm, in which biased and unbiased variants of national groups’ victimhood stories were created through systematic linguistic manipulation. The effect of the narrative compositional devices on the perception of the stories was evaluated with a questionnaire (Individual- and Group Beliefs Scale, Eidelson, 2009).Results:The narrative compositional devices of the victimhood narrative had a statistically signifi cant effect on the perception of the introduced groups’ victimhood position. The evaluation of the groups changed according to which variant of the story was introduced: in the case of the unbiased event-description, the „victim” group’s victim position is salient; and in the case of the biased event-description, the „perpetrator” group’s victim position becomes more salient. In addition, it is demonstrated that the perception of a perpetrator group can be changed by only the narrative construction and their actions can acquire a „victim tone”.Conclusion:The narrative compositional devices described by László et al. transmit the beliefs linked to victimhood consciousness, and the group’s semantic role can overwrite the objectively defi ned roles.


2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062110577
Author(s):  
Matthew C.B. Lyle ◽  
Ian J. Walsh ◽  
Diego M. Coraiola

Organizational identity scholarship has largely focused on the mutability of meanings ascribed to ambiguous identity labels. In contrast, we analyze a case study of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) to explore how leaders maintained a meaning ascribed to an ambiguous identity label amid successive identity threats. We found that heightened dissensus surrounding meanings attributed to the organization’s “reform group” label at three key points spurred theoretically similar manifestations of two processes. The first, meaning sedimentation, involved leaders invoking history to advocate for the importance of their preferred meaning while mulling the inclusion of others. The second, reconstructing the past, occurred as leaders and members alike offered narratives that obscured the history of disavowed meanings while sharing new memories of those they prioritized. Our work complements research on identity change by drawing attention to the processes by which meaning(s) underlying ambiguous identity labels might survive.


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