Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Description

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight 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 nevertheless 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. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. 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. Contents Series Foreword Editor’s Preface About the Contributors 1. Opposites Attract: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality • Jenny L. Davis, Lal Zimman, and Joshua Raclaw 2. The Discursive Construction of Sex: Remaking and Reclaiming the Gendered Body in Talk about Genitals among Trans Men • Lal Zimman 3 “Speech Creates a Kind of Commitment”: Queering Hebrew • Orit Bershtling 4. “More Than Just ‘Gay Indians’”: Intersecting Articulations of Two-Spirit Gender, Sexuality, and Indigenousness • Jenny L. Davis 5. Language and Non-Normative Gender and Sexuality in Indonesia • Evelyn Blackwood 6. Sexual Subjectivities and Lesbian and Gay Narratives of Belonging in Israel • Erez Levon 7. The Sex Machine, the Full-Body Tattoo, and the Hermaphrodite: Gay Sexual Cinema, Audience Reception, and Fractal Recursivity • William L. Leap 8. Neither In nor Out: Taking the “T” Out Of the Closet • Elijah Adiv Edelman 9. Acting Like Women, Acted Upon: Gender and Agency in Hausa Sexual Narratives • Rudolf P. Gaudio 10. The Emergence of the Unmarked: Queer Theory, Language Ideology, and Formal Linguistics • Rusty Barrett Index