In their introduction to this volume, editors Erez Levon & Ronald Beline Mendes advocate an approach to ‘locating sexuality in language’ that draws on two theoretical frameworks: intersectionality, a model of social identity formation developed by Kimberé Crenshaw and other scholars, and Pierre Bourdieu's framework for analyzing the workings of symbolic power in relation to social fields. The book's ten substantive chapters, evenly divided between quantitative and qualitative studies, investigate the intersections of language, sexuality, and other phenomena in a range of settings, including multiple studies each from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. All of the chapters except one deal with languages other than English. With its linguistic and geographical breadth, methodological ecumenism, and theoretical sophistication, the volume makes significant contributions not only to the scholarly literature on language and sexuality, but to sociolinguistics in general.
The book's chapters are grouped into three sections, each highlighting a different level in Bourdieu's model. The first section explores how patriarchal power structures impinge on the sociolinguistic practices of sexual minorities, begetting different configurations of complicity and resistance. Andrew Wong studies the sexual labeling practices of Cantonese-speaking lesbians in Hong Kong. Wong's particular focus is on the term tongzhi ‘comrade’, which Chinese activists have embraced in a manner somewhat analogous to English-speaking activists’ appropriation of queer. Hong Kong lesbians who do not participate in activist organizations tend to eschew the label and employ circumlocutions to refer to same-sex desires and identities. According to Wong, such indirectness perpetuates homophobia. For the activists, the term tongzhi has both progressive and oppressive effects. Its public use challenges societal homophobia, yet in the discourses of male-dominated activist organizations, tongzhi often refers only to gay men; this erases lesbians’ presence and reinforces patriarchal inequity.
Stephanie Rudwick & Thabo Mbisi describe analogous contradictions in the speech of skesana, men in the Zulu-speaking region around Durban, South Africa, who describe themselves as feminine and pursue erotic relationships with conventionally masculine men. Skesana perform their femininity in part by using a linguistic register known as isiNgqumo, which is modeled after a Zulu honorific register normatively associated with married women. In using this register skesana defy the gender and sexual norms they are expected to uphold as biological males. Yet in modeling their own behavior after that of ‘respectable’ Zulu wives, skesana reproduce heteronormativity and patriarchal power. (That said, the glossary defines skesana as ‘those who switch between penetrative and receptive roles in homosexual sex’ (54), suggesting that skesana might not all be consistent in affirming heterosexual norms.)
Claire Maree analyzes promotional flyers that advertised ‘women-only’ club events in Tokyo in the 1990s. Examining linguistic as well as nonverbal elements, such as orthography, punctuation, illustrations, and graphic layout, Maree's multimodal analysis reveals contradictory meanings. On one hand, the flyers assert and even glamorize queer women's presence in urban space by featuring explicit images of female same-sex eroticism as well as English terms like gay women, lipstick lesbian, and dyke. On the other hand, the flyers rarely use the Japanese terms for ‘lesbian’ or ‘bisexual’ because, according to event organizers, such terms invoke the kind of fetishized pornographic images of lesbians produced for heterosexual men, and because the organizers wanted to maximize their market share by encouraging straight women to attend as well. In recent years, the ‘women-only’ label has become contested as transgender awareness has grown.
The second section comprises four experimental studies examining listeners’ perceptions of linguistic features that are stereotypically linked with gay men, femininity, and other attributes. Marie Maegaard & Nicolai Pharao investigate a phonetic feature of Copenhagen Danish, the fronting of /s/, that has various—seemingly incompatible—gender, sexual, class, and ethnic associations. When presented with samples of men speaking mainstream ‘modern’ Danish or the ‘street’ Danish associated with working-class immigrants, high school students perceived the fronting of /s/ differently. In the former case, the listeners perceived fronted /s/ as feminine, gay, and middle-class. But in the latter case, the variable had no effect on listeners’ ratings with respect to gender or sexuality; stereotypes of immigrant men seem to exclude the possibility that they could be feminine or gay.
Ronald Beline Mendes’ study of nonstandard plural marking in Brazilian Portuguese investigates somewhat similar stereotypes whereby gay men are construed as elite and feminine, while working-class men are supposedly straight and masculine. In an experiment that asked listeners to evaluate the speech of four São Paolo men, Mendes found that male listeners were more apt to describe the standard plural forms as ‘feminine’ and ‘gay’, and the nonstandard forms as ‘masculine’ and ‘straight’, whereas female listeners attended first to other attributes—rating standard forms as ‘high-class’ and ‘educated’, for example—and only secondarily attended to gender or sexuality. These findings lead Mendes to ask whether ideologies of masculinity are more strongly established for men than for women.
Sara Mack also investigated perceptions of a variable—postvocalic /s/ in Caribbean Spanish—that is marked in terms of class and education. She first asked students in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rate clips of male speakers as ‘gay’ or ‘straight’. She then played clips of each of those men reading aloud two versions of various sentences—one with the standard /s/, one with /s/ deleted—and asked students to indicate whether the contrasting clips had been produced by the same or different speakers. Mack found differences in the ways listeners responded to ‘gay’- vs. ‘straight’-sounding voices, and suggests that ‘gender prototypicality’ might explain these differences.
Péter Rácz & Viktória Papp used social media to recruit Hungarian speakers for an online survey that asked them to evaluate clips of one man's speech where the pitch (mean F0) had been digitally raised or lowered. Contrary to expectations, the lower-pitch version was rated as more ‘feminine’ and ‘gay’, and these judgments were correlated with a host of other negative attributes like ‘short’, ‘ugly’, and ‘poor’. Curiously, the latter correlations were more pronounced for listeners who self-identified as gay. These findings run contrary to studies in English-speaking societies, and remind us not to assume that linguistic and social stereotypes are consistent cross-culturally.
The chapters in the last section explore how individuals use language to negotiate conflicting pressures and identifications as they relate to gender and sexuality. In a study with interesting parallels to Maegaard & Pharao's research, Robert Podesva & Janneke Van Hofwegen examine the indexical meanings of /s/ in Redding, a small town in rural California. While fronted /s/ has been shown to index femininity and/or gayness in the state's coastal cities, Podesva & Van Hofwegen found that older speakers with a ‘country’ (as to opposed to urban) orientation favor a retracted /s/ that may originally have been brought by migrants from Oklahoma and Texas. Gay men in Redding produce an intermediate /s/, while lesbians’ speech is more variable, with half their lesbian subjects using retracted forms. According to Podesva & Van Hofwegen, in the region's generally homophobic social climate, rural gay men are compelled to limit the extent to which their sociolinguistic behavior signals a nonnormative gender/sexual identity. Lesbians, by contrast, face fewer such pressures because retracted /s/ indexes not only masculinity but also a ‘country’ orientation. The few trans women in their study display sociolinguistic behaviors similar to gay men's, while the trans men sound more like lesbians. This contrasts with research in larger urban areas, where trans people's phonetic behaviors pattern with their own gender group.
Pavadee Saisuwan's chapter compares the first-person pronouns used by Thai-speaking cis women and trans women known as kathoey in postings to websites dealing largely with beauty and physical appearance. Using both quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, Saisuwan found that kathoey use conventionally feminine pronouns more frequently than cis women, in different proportions, and for different reasons. Her main finding is that, whereas cis women use feminine pronouns primarily to signal an affective stance, kathoey often use the same pronouns to index femininity per se. Kathoey thus creatively resignify the Thai pronominal system for their own purposes.
In the final chapter, Erez Levon analyzes an interview with an Orthodox Jewish Israeli man who is married to a woman and has erotic relationships with men. According to Levon, ‘Igal’ uses creaky voice to index a stance of moral-emotional distance and resignation regarding his same-sex erotic desires, which conflict with his religious faith. Levon compares his findings with research in English-speaking settings where creak is perceived (perhaps iconically) to index the suppression of affect. Ideologies of gender figure prominently in those studies, as they do in all of the other chapters in this volume; but gender is not central in Levon's discussion of Igal. In marking this difference, I do not mean to suggest that his analysis is flawed. On the contrary, it highlights the need for sociolinguists to problematize the intersectional ideologies of language, gender, and sexuality that prevail not just in the communities we study, but in our own analyses as well. The chapters in this volume make important contributions in that regard, in different ways and to varying degrees.
