Intersections of class, race and place

This essay presents an analysis of place references in the spontaneous talk of young Londoners from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. These place references function as ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004) which index multilayered meanings well beyond their denotations, constituting important resources for speakers’ local and supralocal positionings. The essay argues that ‘place’ is an important filter for our experience of language, gender and sexuality and provides scholars with a valuable point of departure for explorations of intersectional identities.

Untranslatable wounds

A good starting point for revisiting the intersections of language, gender and sexuality is to acknowledge and understand how colonial wounds and legacies play out in our everyday lives. This essay critically addresses the multiple ways in which we are all marked in one way or another by our colonial relations and their intersections. A careful unpacking of mechanisms and linkages is critical for identifying strategies and tactics of struggle that might lead to more equitable present-days characterised by esperanza (hope). Yet a desire to decolonise language and language practices without recognising the lived experience of our own messy and colonial entanglements will never be enough to resignify the systems that hold racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and linguistic inequalities in place. This essay highlights the acts of desbordar (undoing/overflowing), trasto-car (queering) and resentir (feeling again) as alternative strategies that can be used to fracture the architectures of colonialism, starting with our own.

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.

Order and turbulence in a Swedish bathroom

‘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.

Say my name

This essay is a call out and a roll call of Black women scholars – Black Feminists, Critical Race Theorists, Intersectionality Theorists and co-conspirators – doing the work of the elder women and ancestors whose shoulders we stand on. I frame the research on African American Women’s Language around Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith’s (1982) seminal book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave to shout out not only how language and linguistics researchers got it twisted and need to reckon with truth and say my (language’s) name: African American Women’s Language. And put some respeck on it while you’re at it.

‘A pair of buttocks’ that everybody hates

This article explores radical rudeness, a resistance strategy of deliberate rudeness to disrupt normative structures. Using the Uganda activist Dr Stella Nyanzi as a case study, I examine how women experiencing extreme structural marginalisation and systemic violence use radical rudeness in a nonlinguistic form (defiant disrobing) to speak back to power. Drawing from Black feminist theories of rage, I argue that radical rudeness is an instance of rage, not as a pernicious emotion, but as a legitimate strategy against patriarchy and dictatorial authoritarianism. I argue that Dr Stella Nyanzi’s naked protest utilises three intersecting forms of power – biopower, symbolic power and cosmological power – to resist the authoritarian Ugandan regime, turning her naked body into a powerful weapon of resistance.

How does water talk, and other hopeful questions about and beyond gender and language

The inaugural issue of Gender and Language focused on unanswered questions and unquestioned assumptions. This essay revisits these questions, thinking about next steps not only for the field, but also for the larger feminist, anti-racist, anticolonial world our work aims to build. In particular, I consider two questions with impacts for thinking about how to deepen the political impact of our own work, in the realms of social and environmental justice. First, how can we ensure the kind of work we are publishing in this journal has an impact beyond university conversations? Second, have we gone far enough, as a field, in reconsidering not just questions of gender and of language, but also of what we imagine as persons?

Lingüística se escribe con A: La perspectiva de género en las ideas sobre el lenguaje Teresa Moure (2021)

Lingüística se escribe con A: La perspectiva de género en las ideas sobre el lenguaje Teresa Moure (2021) Madrid: Catarata, 349 pp.

Gender in World Englishes edited by Tobias Bernaisch (2021)

Gender in World Englishes edited by Tobias Bernaisch (2021) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 254 pp.

Language and gender in North Africa

This essay investigates and contextualises the emergence and evolution of the discipline of ‘Language and Gender’ in North Africa in an attempt to remedy the underrepresentation of this region in scholarship. I ground this essay in my experiences with Language and Gender in Morocco and the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), both of which were central in shaping my academic journey. The pre- and post-Uprisings periods surrounding what is often discussed as the ‘Arab Spring’ in the early 2010s carried serious consequences for the emergence of Language and Gender as a discipline. These moments and my involvement in them were deeply impacted by specific historical, sociopolitical and intellectual dimensions, most saliently the women’s movement and the discipline of linguistics. My essay draws on these experiences to advocate for the importance of decolonising the international language and gender canon with North African perspectives that move beyond English and the Global North.