gender and language

[Uri Horesh]

Since I am incapable of replying with a learned argument supported by
references, let me just throw a few questions into the air. Do people feel
that the emergence of the term "queer" in the scholarly literature and its
use in everyday life are parallel to one another? My impression is that the
latter is still in transition, at least in American English, and may be at
even earlier (or simply different) stages in other varieties of English and
in other languages. Here at Penn, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Alliance has
recently changes its name to the Queer Student Alliance. We still have the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Center, but it hosts events like
the Queer Men's Coffee Talk and the Queer Women's Coffee Talk. Fewer people,
I gather, use "queer" in more casual speech. And when they do, I suspect
that Brits and Yanks may mean different things by it. In Modern Israeli
Hebrew, we just say "homo", "lezbit", and if we're really PC we'll add "bi"
and "trans". Occasionally one might hear the borrowings "gay" and "queer" in
a more scholarly or political context. (A nice pun, which didn't really
catch on in casual speech, is "ge'ot", "ge'im", literally 'proud' [pl.f. &
pl.m., respectively]. Sounds like "gay" but has an added political value.)

I guess my other question is, if indeed "queer" is becoming a more widely
accepted blanket term (that's easier to pronounce than "LGBT") is it really
aiding us in being more inclusive, thus more accurate in our accounts of
what constitutes the non-straight speech community, or are we in fact
eliminating the fine-grain distinctions, which perhaps ought to be made in
accounting for language variation? I feel that we're conflicted between the
desire not to leave anyone out and the urge to be precise.

Any illuminating thoughts?

Uri


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Uri Horesh
Graduate Student
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
619 Williams Hall
Philadelphia PA 19104-6305

Phone: (215) 732-7133 (Home)
       (267) 475-5594 (Cell)

E-mail: urih at babel.ling.upenn.edu
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~urih/home
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on 10/25/01 12:50 AM, Suzanne Evans at suzanne at SAS.UPENN.EDU wrote:

> However, much depends on how one defines the subjects of one's study as
> gay(queer). We have to rely on speakers' self-identifications, yet as Zwicky
> points out in "Queerly Phrased", these are not always reliable. This is due,
> in part, to the continuum of sexual self-identification that encompasses not
> only gay/straight, but bisexual and many other shades of sexuality.