[Linganth] Lavender Languages Panel: Queer Linguistic Futures - Linguistic Insurgents and Homonormativity

[Brian Adams-Thies]

Panel Title: Queer Linguistic Futures:  Linguistic Insurgents and
Homonormativity

Lavender Languages XV -  Rhode Island College

April 20-22, 2018



This panel is designed to interrogate how queers (broadly defined) continue
to work in concert and challenge established forms of queer language
created through homonormativities present in various socio-cultural
contexts.  Duggan (2002) claimed homonormativity demanded a retreat from
the public sphere by anchoring gay culture in the domestic.   Puar, on the
other hand, describes the intersections of homonormativity and the public,
national, and international (2007).  Many have built upon these works to
explore various intersections of homonormativity and socio-cultural
formations, among them: the relation to the state in the USA (Canaday
2009); in relation to physical ability (Tyburczy 2014); in relation to
queer political resistance in Singapore (Lazar 2017); and the ways language
and normativity intersect within various linguistic contexts (Leap 2013).
Though we know homonormativity continues to shape the lives of queers, we
are interested in how and in what ways ‘language insurgents’ continue to
challenge homonormative language and what the responses to those challenges
might be. We are interested in how homonormativity and linguistic
performance both work together and yet, also against one another in
ethnographically specific contexts.



This panel seeks to better understand ‘queer linguistic insurgents’ who
challenge, reinvent, and and re-work long-standing homonormative linguistic
practices.   We are especially interested in papers addressing new media;
homonormativity and its effects in the writing of ethnography; sustained
ethnographic inquiry into communities of practice whose linguistic
insurgency continues into the present; imagined futures of linguistic
insurgents.



Please send paper abstracts (up to 300 words) to:



Brian Adams-Thies, PhD

Faculty – The University of Arizona North Valley

badamsth at email.arizona.edu



AND



Sean Nonnenmacher

Linguistics Ph.D. Student – University of Pittsburgh

sen40 at pitt.edu




Current Papers:



Sean Nonnenmacher

University of Pittsburgh – PhD Student

Abstract: Linguistic insurgency: queer and trans adolescent discourse in
new media



This study assesses the language practices and associated orders of
indexical meaning (Silverstein, 2003) of queer- and trans-identified
adolescents in real-time online chat rooms. Even with more widespread
acceptance of LGBT people in the United States today, internet sites like
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr remain havens for some queer- and
trans-identified (Q/TI) users. Q/TI adolescents in particular gravitate to
online spaces because of their ability to facilitate fast and easy
connections with others who present virtually as embodying similar
real-world experiences. Q/TI adolescents are exploring nuanced
subjectivities and elaborating what it means to be “gay” or “lesbian” or
“trans” or “queer.” Real-time online chat rooms present spaces for open and
(at least initially) anonymous conversation about topics with significant
real-world implications: relationships (sexual/romantic and platonic),
coming out to friends and family, and activism/advocacy. Chat rooms also
allow users to express themselves creatively through the (re-)appropriation
of cultural icons in the form of memes and GIFs, whose success often
depends on the effective deployment of linguistic play (whether in form or
meaning). Through an analysis of real-time chat room discourse, I will
demonstrate how queer and trans adolescents are (1) building a new
terminology to describe their experiences that isn’t necessarily available
to the broader (online and offline) population of LGBT adults, (2)
developing extensive virtual networks calibrated to their own specific
experiences (as asexual/ace or pansexual/pan, for instance), and (3)
forming layers of circulating indexical meaning around terminology and
their constructed social worlds. These processes result in potentially
ambivalent attitudes by LGBT adults toward Q/TI adolescents, who might be
considered linguistic insurgents of historically defined queer (including
gay and lesbian) and trans identities.







Brian Adams-Thies, PhD

Faculty, The University of Arizona – North Valley

Abstract:  No Longer the Solitary Vice: Bators, Bonding, and Homonormativity



This research addresses the rise of a community of men who self-identify as
‘bators’.  These men participate in semiotic communities where masturbation
becomes socially meaningful in new manners.  Bating and bators as sexual
subjectivites are a fairly recent phenomenon.  These subjectivities, and
the cultural practices attendant, have been fomented through the use of
online communications.  Masturbation, once thought to be a shameful and
debilitating practice, is reconfigured as a source of brotherhood, male
bonding, and the building of community.  Bators can be gay, straight,
bisexual, and solosexuals.  Bators practice of masturbating alone and with
other men bears no necessary connection to the ways they self-identify
their own sexuality.  For instance, a straight-identified bator can
masturbate with other men, including touching other men, and not lose their
claim to heterosexuality.  Bators practice masturbation alone, in couples,
and in groups.  Many of these interactions are video recorded and uploaded
to various websites including ‘bateworld.com’. In this piece, I look
closely at how ‘bators’ speak to one another in self-produced masturbation
videos posted to bateworld.com.; and how the participants in the videos
think about their own language use. Analyzing speech interaction and
associated discourse between masturbators indicates three important themes
for this group of men:  1) masturbating and talking about masturbating with
other men is a form of reclaiming a childhood culturally configured as
sexless; 2) a resistance to stable sexual identities where if one
participates in homosexual acts then one is therefore, always a homosexual;
3) a new form of male-bonding where the masturbating the penis, talking
about masturbating the penis, and penis-worship coalesce to produce
community, brotherhood, and a universal experience of maleness.






*Brian Adams-Thies, PhD*
*brianat73 at gmail.com <brianat73 at gmail.com>*
*Facebook: Brian.Adams-Thies*
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