New book announcement: Queer Excursions

[Jenny L Davis]

New Book Announcement: Winner of the 2014 Ruth Benedict Prize for
Outstanding Edited Volume

*Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality*
Edited by Lal Zimman, Jenny L. Davis, and Joshua Raclaw

Oxford University Press, Studies in Language and Gender

256 Pages

ISBN: 9780199937318



http://global.oup.com/academic/product/queer-excursions-9780199937318?cc=us&lang=en&#

*Queer Excursions *explores and challenges binaries between gender and sex,
masculine and feminine, cis- and transgender, and queer and normative by
analyzing language use in a diverse range of ethnographic contexts. The
volume’s original linguistic analysis of queer speech communities
retheorizes both particular binaries and the larger social logic of the
binary central to queer and feminist theory.

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries have been
problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and erasure of
non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters in *Queer Excursions *offer
a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries, as well as on a number
of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that permeate the gendered
and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the limiting or
misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that
binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular
communities of study.

Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding
them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary
qualities, this volume advocates for a re-theorization of the binary that
affords more complex and contextually-grounded engagement with speakers'
own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that
contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries,
including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the
same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by
researchers, and those that re-contextualize familiar divisions with
innovative meanings. As a collection, *Queer Excursions* argues that
researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own
preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the
communities we study.

*Table of Contents*

1.     Opposites attract: Theorizing binarity in sociocultural linguistics
Jenny Davis (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Lal Zimman (Reed College)
Joshua Raclaw (Metropolitan State University of Denver)

2.     The discursive construction of sex: Remaking and reclaiming the
gendered body in talk about genitals among trans men
Lal Zimman (Reed College)

3.     "Speech creates a kind of commitment": Queering Hebrew
Orit Bershtling (Haifa University)

4.     "More than just 'gay Indians": Intersecting articulations of
Two-Spirit gender, sexuality, and indigenousness
Jenny Davis (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

5.     Language and non-normative gender and sexuality in Indonesia
Evelyn Blackwood (Purdue University)

6.     Sexual subjectivities and lesbian and gay narratives of belonging in
Israel
Erez Levon (Queen Mary, University of London)

7.     The sex machine, the full-body tattoo, and the hermaphrodite: Gay
sexual cinema, audience reception and fractal recursivity
William Leap (American University)

8.     Neither in nor out: Taking the "T" out of the closet
Elijah Edelman (University of Maryland, College Park)

9.     Acting like women, acted upon: Gender and agency in Hausa sexual
narratives
Rudolf P. Gaudio (State University of New York, Purchase)

10.  The emergence of the unmarked: Queer theory, language ideology, and
formal linguistics
Rusty Barrett (University of Kentucky)
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