Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Enacting burikko

Adopting a single case analysis, this article examines how the learning of the Japanese word burikko is occasioned in a bilingual lunch conversation through enactments that are employed for three interactional purposes: (a) renewal of laughter, (b) vocabulary explanation (VE), and (c) demonstration of understanding. The interactional analysis is enhanced by Praat to respecify the role of prosody in enactments. I first describe how burikko, the laughable of a humor sequence, becomes a learnable through a repair sequence. I then analyze a reinitiated joking sequence, where the VE recipient categorizes one of the co-participants as burikko and escalates the categorization through multimodal enactments. I argue that this jocular mockery, occasioning a demonstration of understanding, exhibits that the learning opportunity has been taken. Furthermore, I discuss how a repair work embedded within a larger humor-oriented activity may afford resources for language learning outside of the classroom, while sacrificing progressivity for intersubjectivity. The fact that the VE recipient, after intersubjectivity has been achieved, resumes the original activity of pursuing humor through the same means employed for the explanation of the target word offers interesting implications for CA-SLA and pragmatics.

Collective discursive representation of the Chinese Dream by public speech and media discourse from the perspective of positive discourse analysis

A positive discourse analysis is conducted on the collective discursive representation of the Chinese Dream by the discourse of the sovereign state and the national media, with the aim to show how discourses at different levels could collaborate to promote the power of the Chinese Dream discourse in the domestic communication. Borrowing the dialectical-relational framework of critical discourse analysis, the present research carries out structural analysis and interactional analysis of President Xi Jinping’s speech at the closing meeting of the 12th National People’s Congress and the subsequent media discourse produced by official news outlets. The structural analysis reveals Xi’s speech on the Chinese Dream forms a genre chain with related news reports, editorials, and features within a couple of days, in which the appeal to the public is repeatedly made. The interactional analysis indicates the news discourses facilitate concreteness and enrichment of the Chinese Dream by recontextualizing various components of the original speech and adopting specific represented processes and modality to echo and promote the constructed Chinese Dream by the speech. The findings reveal the inspiring Chinese Dream discourse is produced and consumed among different official discourses, collaboratively representing a bright future for the public.

‘It is this ignorance we have to fight’

Growing legal LGBTQI+ representation in Greece is systematically targeted by Greek homophobic and transphobic nationalism, commonly articulated in public by (far) rightwing politicians and church representatives. The present article brings into attention a more subtle way in which discriminatory discourses make their way into the public sphere, disguised behind progressive narratives of inclusivity. I examine an interview with two transgender activists on the occasion of the gender recognition law passed in Greece in 2017. According to the journalist, the interview seeks ‘to fight ignorance’ and, by extension, transphobia. Drawing on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I identify two discursive strategies through which the journalist disrupts his initial framing: (1) elaborated questions which invoke and assume gender normativity and (2) references to the overhearing audience, which assume (and reproduce) a generalised scepticism regarding transgender identity. This interview instantiates a new powerful genre of politics in disguise which deserves attention and requires nuanced interactional analysis in order to be traced and unpacked.

Police Powers and Public Assemblies: Learning from the Clapham Common 'Vigil' During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The policing of peaceful public assembly during the Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the most central challenges to the legitimacy of policing. This is arguably because mass gatherings are associated with a high risk of contagion yet, at the same time, peaceful public assembly is a protected human right. In this paper we explore this juxtaposition empirically using a case study to provide a detailed chronological interactional analysis of the policing operation surrounding a highly controversial public assembly, that took place on Clapham Common in London in March 2021. We explore the utility of a research and theory-based model for public order policing in pandemics as a framework for understanding the way the event evolved and identifying what lessons can be learnt for policing assemblies for both future pandemics and more generally. We contend that ambiguity in the application of emergency powers created a polarisation between stakeholders that culminated in a leadership vacuum among protesters. Moreover, the context of acute political sensitivity led to a highly centralised public order operation that limited the capacity of police to enact dialogue-based solutions when leadership (re)emerged during the event. We conclude by discussing the implications of our analysis for understanding the inherent dangers of regulatory frameworks that place too heavy a burden of discretionary power into the hands of police in determining whether public assemblies are ‘lawful’, and under what conditions they can occur.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Responding to the honor of the festschrift, I name and honour those who guided me, especially my mentor, Elliot Mishler. I describe a path from initial fascination with the idea of a “story” to my subsequent work that expanded the study of narrative in the human sciences. Efforts to understand how individuals interpreted—made sense of—events and situations that had interrupted their lives led me to discoveries about narrative form, apparent only after close textual interactional analysis. Recently, the appeal of narrative has mushroomed; I urge scholars not to lose sight of features that distinguish it from other forms of discourse.

READING GENRE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH

Genre is a type or a kind of reading text commonly found in writing. Reading text is one of the four skills that students must master in English. The various types of the text that students learn can help them to improve their skill. Such as narrative, recount, descriptive text and so on. A part from that, the teacher must be able to choose and analyze the right text so that can help the students develop reading and writing skills. The stages in analyzing text are as follows: register analysis, grammatical rhetorical analysis, interactional analysis and genre analysis. The approach used to teach the genre is an approach emphasizing understanding the text production such as grammar, objectives and language features. The characteristic in the genre based approach are language learning as social activity, explicit teaching and apprenticeship teaching. The pedagogical approaches to teach genre are multiple pedagogical approaches to genre, implicit genre pedagogies, explicit genre pedagogies, and interactive genre pedagogies. Besides that, we can use implicit and explicit method approaches in developing genres. Moreover, the benefits from reading genre analysis are the students can understand the content of the text as a whole, both in term of grammar, factions and so on.