Call for Papers: New Directions in Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research

[Joshua Raclaw]

Apologies for cross-listing - please distribute widely.

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QUEER EXCURSIONS: NEW DIRECTIONS IN LANGUAGE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY RESEARCH

Editors: Jenny Davis, Joshua Raclaw, and Lal Zimman (Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Submissions are invited for a new edited volume in the field of language, gender, and sexuality that seeks to expand the present scope of these research areas. The volume will showcase work that considers how speakers (re)produce gender and sexuality outside of the traditional dichotomies that have been dominant in both scholarship and popular discourses. Topics of chapters currently under consideration focus on issues of linguistic practice among understudied communities such as female-to-male transsexuals, genderqueer individuals, tomboys and their girlfriends in Indonesia, polyamorists and other non-monogamists, and members of Native American two-spirit groups; additionally, much of this work underscores the theoretical limitations of a sociolinguistics driven by binary categorization. The editors welcome abstracts from scholars working within various disciplinary traditions, including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse and rhetorical analysis, gender and queer studies, and others.  


Background:

The past two decades have seen a significant rise in what has been termed a poststructuralist sociolinguistics, a shift reflected in the adoption of a wide range of third-wave feminist and queer stances within language, gender and sexuality research. Adopting the trend toward critical examination of the dominant dichotomization of gender and sexuality, researchers within the last decade have considered additional intersections such as class and ethnicity, have deconstructed the traditional primacy assigned to male/female difference, and have established the importance of examining queer subjecthood. Yet research that looks at gender and sexuality as positioned outside of dichotomous categorizations – such as transgenderism and transsexuality, third and fourth gender categories, bisexuality and pansexuality – has been less forthcoming. Indeed, with few exceptions, the field has paid little attention to how social actors might challenge such binary categories through linguistic means, or to how speakers enact gendered and sexual identities outside of the dominant categories of male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. Rather than just constituting a simple gap in the literature, such trends potentially contribute to the reinforcement of traditional gender and sexual dichotomies by reinforcing the invisibility of those groups and individuals that remain outside of them (cf. Bing and Bergvall 1996).


Submission Guidelines:

Potential contributors should email a 500-1000 word abstract, including a title and a description of the topic of the proposed chapter, theoretical frameworks and methodologies employed, and how this work is situated outside of, or provides new insight into or potential challenges to, the binaries discussed above. Complete manuscripts are also welcome for submission at this time. Please restrict these submissions to a maximum length of 10,000 words and follow the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics (located at http://www.linguistlist.org/pubs/tocs/JournalUnifiedStyleSheet2007.pdf).

Abstracts due June 30, 2008.
First round of full drafts due September 1, 2008.

Please direct all correspondence to the editors at jennifer.davis at colorado.edu, raclaw at colorado.edu, zimman at colorado.edu



Joshua Raclaw - PhD student
Department of Linguistics
Culture, Language & Social Practice
Women and Gender Studies
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~raclaw/