Gender and Language

"Janet Shibamoto's important book demonstrates
convincingly that syntactic structures
in Japanese vary significantly depending on
the sex of the speaker.

The book eschews the current sociolinguistic
overemphasis on formal structures and
meaningless statistical compilation in favor of
clear exposition of the internal logic of real
language functioning in contexts witnessed by
Shibamoto herself in a rigorous fieldwork routine.
Her achievements are the more admirable
because she has focused on casual speech,
requiring that she attend with the utmost care
to the extralinguistic support systems underlying Japanese
language use.

Japanese is often cited as one language that
has "true female speech," as opposed to "male
speech"; however, the parameters that delimit
these speech varieties have not been described
with much success. Superficial differences include variation in lexicon, morphology, pitch and intonation, use of honorifics, use of Sino-Japanese lexical items, avoidance of"vulgar" speech by women, and differences in self-reference and address."

This essay examines gender, sexuality, and society through the lens of apocryphal sexual acts, specifically the Donkey Punch, the Cleveland Steamer, and the Houdini. Although these acts are so disgusting, degrading, dangerous, or even deadly that they seem to exist in name only, such imagined acts serve a normative function, providing limits on not only sexuality, but also on the kinds of individuals worthy of such acts.

The field of sociolinguistics has flourished in recent years, pushing against the traditional boundaries of linguistics to consider how social context and power are involved in the enacting of linguistic practices. The advent of queer linguistics is an exciting new project within this broader movement that incorporates the deconstructionist and anti-essentialist insights of queer theory with the study of language. In this context, Koch's Language and Gender Research from a Queer Linguistic Perspective: A Critical

This study investigates meetmarket, a South African online community for men who are looking for other men. Utilising a quantitative approach to queer linguistics, the article presents a textual analysis of a large corpus of personal profiles in order to map meetmarket’s ‘libidinal economy’. More specifically, the article seeks to tease out the ways in which the members of this community valorise, and thereby make more desirable, certain identities at the expense of others. This then makes it possible to understand the extent to which these men (re)produce or, conversely, contest and overturn dominant forms of social categorisation in their expressions of same-sex desire.