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Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity)

Teaser

LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity), the first large-scale language and sexuality research project, is carried out in collaboration with Florida Atlantic University and Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. The project analyses data that serves as evidence for...

Summary

LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity), the first large-scale language and sexuality research project, is carried out in collaboration with Florida Atlantic University and Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. The project analyses data that serves as evidence for the constitutive role of language in sexual normativity formation, thus generating an empirical basis for the development of normativity as an analytical concept in (sexuality-related) critical discourse studies. The motivation behind the project is to study how shifts in sexual norms are associated with changes in linguistic practices. Operating against a Queer Linguistic, poststructuralist theoretical background, the project challenges essentialist notions of sexuality as an unquestionable, natural or biological phenomenon and provokes ontological questions about its social constructedness and cultural as well as historical relativity. For this purpose, LIDISNO studies the linguistic effects of three sexuality-related normative shifts from different time periods through historical comparative analyses of linguistic corpus data.
The project presents new empirical evidence that highlights sexuality and sexual normativity as linguistically mediated, continuously changing discursive formations and seeks to address the following overarching research questions:
1. How is language involved in sexual normativity formation?
2. How do sexuality-related normative shifts influence the way language is used to talk or write about sexuality?
3. Which consequences do the findings have for gender-/sexuality-related language policies?

Work performed

For the first two years of LIDISNO, the researcher has been working at Florida Atlantic University.

Year 1: The first part of the project dealt with the question how a coming out shapes the way we communicate about a person and used the public coming out of US Latino pop star Ricky Martin as a case study. The stay at FAU has enabled the researcher to obtain first-hand experiences with the cultural context of Southeast Florida and its strong presence of both Latino and LGBT cultures. Against the backdrop of these insights, the researcher carried out a corpus linguistic study of news reports on Ricky Martin. He compared the language use in texts published before the artist’s coming out as a gay man in 2010 with texts published afterwards. The corpus linguistic analyses carried out involved keyword, collocation and concordance analyses.

Results: The study showed that a public coming out is associated with discursive shifts in the way the media report on the artist. While the singer’s ethnicity was strongly foregrounded in the news reports dating from the time before the coming out, sexual identity has become the central orientation point for the news coverage after the coming out. This attests to a subtractive relationship of the two identity facets and to a shift from the discursive construction of a desire-focused Latin lover persona to a homonormative construction of Martin as a gay man whose identity revolves around domesticity and consumption rather than sexual desire. The concomitant shift from a Latino person to a person approximating the stereotypical lifestyle of white gay men renders Martin a questionable role model for Latino gay men in the US.

Year 2: The second part of the project focused on discursive shifts connected to the Stonewall Riots (1969) as a central event of LGBT liberation in the US and Western societies more generally. US gay men’s pre-Stonewall life narratives were studied using a corpus linguistic methodology. The analysis of the data involved processes like keyword, collocation and concordance analysis. A linguistic landscape analysis of the homonormative space of Wilton Drive in Wilton Manors, Florida, has given the researcher a better understanding of gay culture in the US and has advanced the theorisation of normativity within the LIDISNO project.

Results: Year 2 has improved our understanding of how the shifts in sexual normativity associated with Stonewall have affected the way we use language to talk or write about same-sex sexualities. While same-sex sexualities were discursively constructed as pathological and/or criminal before Stonewall (even by men who experience same-sex attraction themselves), their treatment in post-Stonewall times shows a stronger connection to affirmative gay identity discourses that treat same-sex sexualities as legitimate in their own right. The study thus attests to the central role of Stonewall, not just as a major event of gay liberation for Western societies, but also as a development that has promoted our conceptualisation of sexuality in terms of identities.

Final results

The work in years 1 and 2 has provided insights related to research questions 1 and 2 (research question 3 will be in focus at the end of the LIDISNO project, after year 3).
Research question 1: The research has highlighted how language is involved in the discursive construction of sexual normativity. Sexual identity labels and other sexuality-related terminology play an important role in this. Keywords and collocations provide evidence of quantitatively based normativities (“what many people do”), while an analysis of concordance lines helps us get a better understanding of qualitatively based normativities (“what people should do”).
Research question 2: The two sexuality-related normative shifts studied so far have been shown to have a substantial impact on the way we use language to communicate about sexuality. In year 1, for example, it has been shown that the language used by news media to report on Latino pop star Ricky Martin before and after his coming out as a gay man pays witness to shifts in which aspects are treated as salient in the artist’s persona. Table 1 summarises the major focal points of the news coverage in the two time periods, based on keyword evidence.

In year 2, we saw substantial linguistic shifts in the way gay men narrate their pre-Stonewall life experiences. This is illustrated, for example, by the keyword lists presented in Tables 3 and 4. They show that, within the conceptual domain of sexuality, the narratives created before Stonewall draw more frequently on terminology from the semantic domains “sexual practices”, “sexual desire”, “sexual relationship”, and “body”, while these are almost completely absent in the keyword list of the narratives produced after Stonewall. Sexual identity vocabulary is common in both corpora, but there are qualitative differences (relation to normality, pathology, gender identity in PRE; positive, affirmative sexual identity labels in POST). The connection of sexual identity to the notion of an identity-based community is specific to the keyword list of the narratives created after Stonewall.

The work carried out in year 1 and 2 will be an important reference point for the third project year, which studies the conceptualisation of sexuality in the 19th century. Future research after LIDISNO on the pre-Stonewall experiences of lesbian women and/or trans people can exploit the present study as a point of comparison. This is likely to create an awareness of how language use is involved in the normative construction of non-heterosexual identities and thus will enable the researcher to formulate recommendations on how to avoid discursive processes of stigmatisation, discrimination and exclusion when talking or writing about non-heterosexual people.

Website & more info

More info: https://quinguistics.de/9-0-LIDISNO.html.