As its title indicates, Critical sexuality studies, lavender languages, and everyday life brings together two academic fields—critical sexuality studies and lavender languages—and highlights the benefits of such a combined approach to the study of language. The edited volume is organized around four concepts in critical sexuality studies (power, concepts or ‘folk categories’, normativities, and abject bodies). Within each part, two chapters exemplify how these concepts can guide sociocultural linguistic analysis and provide fruitful frameworks for research.
In Part 1, ‘Power’, Leyla Savloff (chapter 1) analyses how sex-work activists in Argentina use gender-expansive language in ways that contest hegemonic colonial power through a multivocal approach to sex activism. By contrast, Sean Nonnenmacher (chapter 2) investigates an oft-overlooked figure in language and sexuality research, that of the child, to show how Arizona lawmakers use constructed speech to articulate imagined adult-children interactions that motivate harmful changes to state law for queer and trans children.
In Part 2, ‘Contexts’, Aiden Christoper VanderStouwe focuses on the practice of ‘reading’ in the local drag community of a medium-sized American city to highlight how understanding a read relies not only on local norms and expectations but also on broader sociopolitical and historical references. Meg Robertson (chapter 4) explores how stylization manuals discuss gender-neutral language and highlights the prescriptivist frictions and power imbalances that are at play in such manuals.
In Part 3, ‘Normativities’, Lex Konnelly & Archie Crowley (chapter 5) analyse the gaps between cis-centric hegemonic discourses about trans couples and trans people’s own discourses about their relationships, highlighting the ways in which mainstream media recast t4t (trans for trans) relationships into biologically reductive cisgender heteronormative understandings of romantic partnerships. Meri Lindeman (chapter 6) focuses on a bigender speaker of Finnish to show how cisgender normative assumptions of gender as static and inflexible do not hold when engaging real-life micro-situations where experiences such as misgendering or gender dysphoria/euphoria impact the linguistic practices of gendered subjects.
Finally, in Part 4, ‘Abject bodies’, Gleiton Matheus Bonfante (chapter 7) analyses how several cartoons aiming to satirize right-wing figures like Trump and Bolsonaro only ended up reifying the men’s power through their use of abject depictions of sexual practices such as homosexuality, anal sex, and BDSM. Chloe Brotherton & Eric Louis Russell (chapter 8) provide a deeply complex analysis of linguistic events surrounding Trieste, Italy’s mayor Roberto Dipiazza, who defended allegations of sexual harassment against women as natural behaviour and as mere compliments, while reacting with anger and disgust when finding himself on the receiving end of such ‘compliments’ from another man.
Despite a lack of representation of African and Asian contexts, readers will welcome the variety of geopolitical contexts investigated as well as the breadth of what is understood here as ‘everyday language’. Overall, the volume is a much welcomed addition to the myriad of conceptual frameworks available to sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists. Scholars of gender and sexuality studies will similarly find here tools and methods to bring a stronger linguistic lens to their field.
