Constructing Identity Through Performative Queerspeak

Joshua Raclaw

Abstract for paper presented at
Conference of the Georgetown Linguistics Society
The Language and Identity Tapestry: Linguistic Re/presentation of Identities in Social Interaction
Georgetown University
Washington, DC
February 18-20, 2005

In the following presentation I explore the notion of queerspeak (Livia and Hall 1997) as it pertains to lesbian language, doing so to the exclusion of a conceptualized lesbian speech community through which this "language" is wholly constructed and reproduced. I instead support previous (Walters and Barrett 1994, Barrett 1997, Queen 1997) research on framing homosexual language use within a linguistics of contact model (Pratt 1987) that deconstructs the imagined boundaries of community and assigns it more of a peripheral focus in identity research.

For all definitive purposes I consider sexuality to encompass those "systems of mutually constituted ideologies, practices, and identities that give sociopolitical meaning to the body as an eroticized and/or reproductive site" (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). I also make reference to Judith Butler's (1990) definition of gender as "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a 'natural kind of being'," which places the concept of gender (and essentially all identity politics) in the context of perfomative identity, thereby defining it as a simple ideology that can change radically in different social contexts.

Such contexts are clearly present in a conversation between Lisa, 50, and Teresa, 45, two middle-class women from New Jersey who are in a lesbian relationship. Neither one is directly involved in any definable homosexual community, though both directly index their queer identities using linguistic forms that carry distinctive meaning within this social group. The speakers analyzed in this study accomplish this through shifts that are neither lexically, intonationally, or phonetically realized; rather, it is the pragmatics of their language use that change throughout the conversation and which are used to authenticate their homosexual identities. This is realized in discourse through the use of direct indexical reference to such identities as well as controlled shifts in topicality which subversively reference the abnormal kinship practices of a number of heterosexual deviants, therefore directly indexing their own lesbian identities as distinct from the dominant heterosexual culture. In doing so they make use of identity detypification by "reassessing the social category 'lesbian' such that it acquires increasingly concrete and precise meanings, positive connotations, and personal applicability" (Jenness 1992).

References
BARRETT, RUSTY. 1997. "The 'Homo-Genius' Speech Community." In Anna Livia and Kira Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. 181-201.

BUCHOLTZ, MARY and KIRA HALL. 2004. "Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research." Language in Society 33. 501-547.

BUTLER, JUDITH. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

JENNESS, VALERIE. 1992. "Coming Out: Lesbian Identities and the Categorization Problem." In Ken Plummer (ed.), Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience. New York: Routledge, pgs. 65-74.

LIVIA, ANNA and KIRA HALL. 1997. "'It's a girl!': Bringing Performativity Back to Linguistics." In Anna Livia and Kira Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. 85-95.

PRATT, MARY LOUISE. 1987. "Linguistic Utopias." In Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin Maccabe (eds.) The linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. New York:Methuen. 48-66.

QUEEN, ROBIN. 1997. "'I Don't Speak Spritch': Locating Lesbian Language." In Anna Livia and Kira Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. 233-256.

WALTERS, KEITH and RUSTY BARRETT. 1994. "Imagining Gay Communities: Gay Language and Acts of Identity." Paper presented at the Second Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, American University, Washington, D.C.

Joshua Raclaw is an MA student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at Joshua.Raclaw@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 1 - June 2005