Dealing with 'community' in queer linguistics research

1. Dealing with 'community' in queer linguistics research Lucy Jones 6th BAAL Gender and Language Special Interest Group, Aston University, 10.04.2013

2. Why ‘community’? • ‘The gay community’ • Ideological/imagined • Gay scenes • Shared language may be spoken by some gay people in some gay contexts, but that does not: • Make it a ‘gay language’ (Darsey 1981: 63, Graf and Lipia 1995: 233). • Make it exclusive to gay people (Kulick 2000) • Not all within a gay community are gay (Barrett (1997)

3. Why ‘community’? • Gay contexts • E.g. Podesva (2007): gay identities produced within gay spaces • E.g. Queen (1998): ‘the gay community’ often reified through local interaction

4. ‘Community’ in language and sexuality research: what’s the problem? • No homogenous community of gay and lesbian speakers who share a language that they all use. • But the gay community is a prevalent ideological construct. • Language can represent both levels of community

5. Communities of practice • Barrett (1997) speech community cannot account for differences within demographic groups • Coupland (2003) we engage in multiple communities and have multiple identities as a result • CoP: speakers who engage together in something in a mutual way which, over time, leads to shared ways of doing things, or practices (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992) • Language: part of a coherent, mutual and jointly-negotiated response to broader structures and cultural ideas.

6. Local gay scene CoP Global gay community Typical lesbian Instantiated through interaction

7. Sociocultural linguistics • “the social positioning of the self and other” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 586) • POSITIONALITY PRINCIPLE • Identities emerge from interaction • Ethnographic context (CoP) • Macro-level demographic categories

8. The Sapphic Stompers • Lesbian hiking group: middle-aged, middle-class, white, British women • Stomper practice • Conformity to some lesbian stereotypes • Articulation of feminist values • Production of a binary • dyke/girl • CoP-specific reworking of butch/femme

9. Dolls or teddies?

10. Constructing the binary • Positionality principle • Fleeting moment – dolls Vs teddies • Ethnographic norm – in/authentic binary • Ideological level – typical in imagined lesbian community • Girly • Preferred by gay boys • Symbol of heteronormative womanhood • Pretend babies • Maternal instinct • Dykey • Preferred by ‘all lesbians’ • Not dolls!

11. Discussion • Dialogic construction of stances against dolls • Rejection of heteronormative femininity • Relationship to broader ideological structures; ‘the lesbian community’ • Index a dykey identity • A community endeavour • Specific to the Stomper CoP The women reify stereotypes and position themselves as a part of imagined lesbian community

12. Conclusions • ‘Community’ should remain a research question • We might benefit from explicitly recognising the relevance of the imagined gay community • E.g. Stompers drawing on ideologies of lesbians as masculine/gender inversion • We need to consider local communities of speakers; people who produce a queer-oriented identity in given contexts. • E.g. Stompers’ rejection of dolls is salient to CoP-specific ‘dyke’ identity • The Stompers produce identities in line with: • What it means to be a member of a particular community of practice • Ideals and stereotypes which make up a broader ‘lesbian community’

13. “Dolls or teddies?” Constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice @jones_lucy lucy.jones@hull.ac.uk Lavender Languages and Linguistics 20, February 15-17 2013