Dealing with 'community' in
queer linguistics research
Lucy Jones
6th BAAL Gender and Language Special Interest Group, Aston University, 10.04.2013
Why ‘community’?
• ‘The gay community’
– Ideological/imagined
• Gay scenes
– Shared language may be spoken by some gay
people in some gay contexts, but that does not:
• Make it a ‘gay language’ (Darsey 1981: 63, Graf and
Lipia 1995: 233).
• Make it exclusive to gay people (Kulick 2000)
– Not all within a gay community are gay (Barrett
(1997)
Why ‘community’?
• Gay contexts
– E.g. Podesva (2007): gay identities produced
within gay spaces
– E.g. Queen (1998): ‘the gay community’ often
reified through local interaction
‘Community’ in language and sexuality
research: what’s the problem?
• No homogenous community of gay and
lesbian speakers who share a language that
they all use.
• But the gay community is a prevalent
ideological construct.
• Language can represent both levels of
community
Communities of practice
• Barrett (1997) speech community cannot account for
differences within demographic groups
• Coupland (2003) we engage in multiple communities
and have multiple identities as a result
• CoP: speakers who engage together in something in
a mutual way which, over time, leads to shared ways
of doing things, or practices (Eckert & McConnellGinet 1992)
– Language: part of a coherent, mutual and jointlynegotiated response to broader structures and cultural
ideas.
Local gay scene
CoP
Global gay
community
Typical lesbian
Instantiated through interaction
Sociocultural linguistics
• “the social positioning of the self and other”
(Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 586)
• POSITIONALITY PRINCIPLE
– Identities emerge from interaction
– Ethnographic context (CoP)
– Macro-level demographic categories
The Sapphic Stompers
• Lesbian hiking group: middle-aged, middleclass, white, British women
• Stomper practice
– Conformity to some lesbian stereotypes
– Articulation of feminist values
– Production of a binary
• dyke/girl
– CoP-specific reworking of butch/femme
Dolls or teddies?
Constructing the binary
• Positionality principle
• Fleeting moment – dolls Vs teddies
• Ethnographic norm – in/authentic binary
• Ideological level – typical in imagined lesbian community
• Dykey
• Girly
– Preferred by gay boys
– Preferred by ‘all lesbians’
– Symbol of heteronormative
– Not dolls!
womanhood
• Pretend babies
• Maternal instinct
Discussion
• Dialogic construction of stances against dolls
– Rejection of heteronormative femininity
• Relationship to broader ideological structures;
‘the lesbian community’
– Index a dykey identity
• A community endeavour
• Specific to the Stomper CoP
The women reify
stereotypes and
position
themselves as a
part of imagined
lesbian community
Conclusions
• ‘Community’ should remain a research question
– We might benefit from explicitly recognising the relevance
of the imagined gay community
• E.g. Stompers drawing on ideologies of lesbians as
masculine/gender inversion
– We need to consider local communities of speakers;
people who produce a queer-oriented identity in given
contexts.
• E.g. Stompers’ rejection of dolls is salient to CoP-specific ‘dyke’
identity
– The Stompers produce identities in line with:
• What it means to be a member of a particular community of
practice
• Ideals and stereotypes which make up a broader ‘lesbian
community’
“Dolls or teddies?” Constructing
lesbian identity through communityspecific practice
@jones_lucy
lucy.jones@hull.ac.uk
Lavender Languages and Linguistics 20, February 15-17 2013