forward from Sally McConnell-Ginet

[Mary Bucholtz]

I'm afraid I can't take the credit for this one--I'm forwarding it for
Sally McConnell-Ginet.

Mary

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Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 16:56:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: "smg9 at cornell.edu" <smg9 at nc.rr.com>
Reply-To: smg9 at nc.rr.com
To: bucholtz at tamu.edu
Subject: gala-l posting
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Hi, Mary.  The GALA list has rejected two postings from me because they are
not being sent from my Cornell address.  Can you forward them for me?
Here's the first.  I'll send the second in a separate message.  Best, Sally

Lots of interesting contributions on this topic.  Let me just address the
question of labels like "queer" and the related issue of slotting people
into sexual orientation categories.  As several have noted, the usage of
"queer" as an affirming and explicitly inclusive label in academic and some
other communities of practice with explicit political interests does not
coincide perfectly with the (often derogatory) usage of the label in many
other communities of practice.  Andrew Wong's (Stanford) research (some of
it with Qing Zhang, now at Texas) on the evolving meanings of the Chinese
label "tongzhi" to refer to sexual minorities in Hong Kong gives
considerable insight into the complex interplay of linguistic and social
practice with the meaning of social labels.  Like "queer", "tongzhi" (the
form glossed "comrade" in translations of political discourse) is positive
in some contexts and derogatory in others.

As a couple of contributors have noted, the elastic boundaries of the
inclusive label "queer", useful as they often are for political purposes,
seem sometimes at odds with the desire of researchers and others to make
finer-grained distinctions among individuals on the basis of their
sexuality.  The issue of the "reliability" of self-labelling is an
interesting one because there are many different ways to sort: are we
interested in actual sexual activity, sexual fantasies, public
self-identification with some established category, self-identification that
is kept private (esp. from researchers)?  And how are these categories to be
linked to other aspects of people's linguistic practice--e.g., their
favoring so-called vernacular or standard forms in certain circumstances?
One important question would seem to be how people deploy linguistic
resources to create themselves and others as belonging to certain categories
of sexual orientation (or to challenge the very viability of such
categories).  The papers by Robin Queen and Rusty Barrett in QUEERLY PHRASED
offer examples of this kind of approach.

Even if we leave aside the question of erotic preferences and categories
associated with them, there is still the issue of sexing bodies and applying
labels like "girl" or "woman", "boy" or "man".  For linguists, an
interesting question concerns the ways in which linguistic practices enter
into constituting self and others as female or male (and the increasing
awareness of intersexuality).  And this brings us back to some of the
questions raised by the initial contributions to this discussion.

Sally McConnell-Ginet

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