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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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Gay Male Speech Patterns

Some linguistics made a study trying to isolate the gay male speech to understand in what topics the gay language is different from that of their heterosexual men. The process is tough because there are many varieties of gay and straight groups and, moreover, there is a wide range of speech in each of them, which might be categorized as masculine or feminine. In addition to this, the gay community has a lot of minor groups so it is difficult to isolate the markers of gay speech too.

“Categorizing leather daddies, drag queens, circuit boys, gay prostitutes, activists, and ‘straight-acting’ males as one linguistically homogenous group would obviously be an inaccurate portrayal of the gay male community.” (PODESVA, 2001).

Beside these obstacles, however, some linguists have studied men’s speech since the 20th century. One of the most typical aspects of analysis is by contrasting gay men’s speech with straight male speech or with some female speech.

Gay speech has stereotypically been thought as resembling women’s speech.

David Crystal also describes gay male speech as “effeminate.” He describes the use of a "simpering" voice, for instance, a characteristic that for him is largely attributable to the use of a wider pitch-range than is normal (for men), with glissando effects between stressed syllables, a more frequent use of complex tones (e.g. the fall-rise and the rise-fall), the use of breathiness and huskiness in the voice, and switching to a higher (falsetto) register from time to time." (CRYSTAL,1975). However this is not a positive status to gay men in relation to woman and many times this characteristic is considered derogatory to women, in a way that they consider the speech a copy of female’s speech.

However this comparison is not a good thing since the studies seems categorize the speeches in a sexist way. Everything that is deviance of the standard norm is considered effeminate. So masculine-feminine speech comparison is a gender-biased view.

Rudolf Gaudio’s social perception experiment analyzed the acoustics of male speech and listeners’ perception of it. Eight male volunteers aged 21–31 participated. Four of the men identified as gay, and the other four as straight.

The volunteers had to read two texts while being recorded. The first one they were asked to read as if they were giving a lecture and the second one (a dramatic one) as if it was a play. After the recording they were interviewed whe they were asked about general issue in their lives.

Sixteen segments of the recordings were subjected to an analysis, which was done by undergraduate volunteer listener-subjects. The records were split by two groups: eight of them of the lecture record and the other eight of the play record. Listener-subjects were to categorize each of the recorded speeches using four semantic differential pairs (straight/gay, effeminate/masculine, reserved/emotional, and ordinary/affected) that corresponded to commonly held stereotypes of gay men in the United States.

The listener-subjects were generally able to correctly identify the sexual orientation of the speakers based on the recorded speech segments. The listener-subjects’ ratings of the recorded speech segment using the four sets of polar adjective pairs reflected common American stereotypes of gay and straight men’s speech.

References:

Gaudio, Rudolf P (1994). "Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men". American Speech. 69: 30–57.

Crystal, David. English Tone of Voice: Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage. London: Edward Arnold, 1975

Podesva, Robert J., Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. "Sharing Resources and Indexing Meanings in the Production of Gay Styles ." Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (2001): 175–89.

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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Lavender Linguistics and the Sociolinguistics Performance

Lavender Linguistics is the linguistic term used by linguists – specially William Leap – to describe language as a study bounded to LGBTQ speakers. The origin of the term came from the association with the lavender color which was considered a LGBT color.

The term incorporates the field of sociolinguistic that studies the spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation and use of certain vocabulary.

The term was first used in 1951 by Gershon Legman, who studied the gay lexicon – which includes words specifically used in the gay community with different purposes. One purpose was the establishment of a community but also to have a specific code to be able to communicate safely. Due to homophobia it was important to hide the sexuality and cover it up with non-suspicious terms. One of them was the Polari slang, for instance, that was a way of the gay men communicate without being caught by policemen.

Later in the 1990’s, the term was used again by William Leap, an anthropologist and linguist, that includes also topics of culture and gender, very attached to Lavender Linguistic.

The performance as a use of language

Different ways of speaking can create a unique one with a cohesive identity in which would help the social movements. That is what happen with the Lavender Linguistic. Sexuality is a social identity, with a constructed discourse very well represented. With some political organization and sharing of terms of language, the identity can be strengthened. Therefore the language can be used in theses relations of gender and sexual identities and register a well done code of speaking for LGBTQ community.

In this way speech communities are formed through the use of language. Each one in your specific part of LGBT field, such as gays or lesbians. A speech community is a community that shares linguistic traits and tends to have community boundaries that coincide with social units. Membership in speech communities is often assumed based on stereotypes about the community as defined by non-linguistic factors. The same happens with the Black English, since this speech community resists culturally against the dominant standard dominant language, maintaining its on varieties of speech.

Another field of the study is related to gender performativity. This on relates the speech to the modifications that people might do in a consciously or unconsciously way because of the gender role. In this way men often pick speech performances that reflect the masculinity defined by the gender, but gay men often have their speech performances associated with some kind of femininity by others perceive. One example of this is that when a gay man is represented, the stereotype of gay style is always associated with some feminine speech performance.

Masculinity, and speech associated with a heterosexual male, is constrained by cultural expectations for men to avoid 'Abjection'; due to this fact the speakers try to incorporate another kind of speech performance – the one with the masculinity demanded – which confront their identities. 'Masculine' speech is associated with non-feminine sounding speech and because some gay men may not wish to identify with straight masculine speech in some contexts, they may access other speech styles to convey their identity (because the possibilities have two options, 'masculine' or 'feminine,' to be not-'masculine' is often associated with 'feminine'). The boundary between 'masculine' and 'feminine' is maintained by cultural norms and societal orders, that do not permit masculinity to include femininity, the abject.

However the language use can also incorporates the stereotyped forms or the culturally dominant ones. “Performing identity can only work as long as the indexes used are conventional and socially recognized, which is why stereotypes are sometimes adopted.” (KULICK: 2000, 85). The members of the community might establish association with some other people that share the same way of speaking, acting and thinking. But sometimes this boundary is so stricted that might be fall out of use with the historical changes, such as Polari slang.

The disuse of some cants might happen by the inclusion or segregation of different members in order to maintain the speech community’s social identity. It may also excludes the outsiders, in a way that the secret language – cryptolect – provide a manner to recognize their own members, taking off those ones who view the community in a negative vision. It is pretty normal in LGBTQ ones.

Some members of a community may use stylistic and pragmatic devices to index and exaggerate orientations and identities, but others may deliberately avoid stereotypical speech. Similarly, LGBTQ speech has a relationship with the speaker's community of practice. Speakers may have a shared interest, and respond to a mutual situation, and through communicating regularly they may develop certain speech norms. The innovative speech norms, that LGBTQ folks may use within their communities of practice, can be spread through institutions like schools where person of many classes, races, and genders, come together. These particular speech traits may be spread through the adoption of use by people with association to LGBTQ identities.

Code-switching styles

Changing speech styles, or code-switching, can indicate which identity individuals want to put forward as primary at a given time. The different choices of language use among LGBTQ people might depend on the audience or the context, and shift depending on situational needs such as the need to demonstrate or conceal gay identity in a particular environment. Likewise, lesbians may foreground lesbian identity in some contexts but not in others.

“Exploratory switching” can be used to determine whether an interlocutor shares the speaker's identity. For example, a gay man might use certain key words and mannerisms generally known by the community as a test to see whether they are recognized by the interlocutor. This allows the gay man to establish solidarity with a community member previously unknown to him without having to disclose his orientation to a heterosexual and potentially hostile person. However, inconsistency of language use between different sub-groups of the LGBTQ community, along with the existence of non-members who may be familiar with a gay mode of speech, can make such exploratory switching unreliable.

People may also can change the use of code-switching to parody the society for entertainment. Black drag performers usually use stereotypical “female white English” to disrupt societal assumptions about gender and ethnicity, thus they express criticisms of these assumptions. These parodies do not necessarily represent actual language use of a community, but rather the generally recognized stereotypical speech of that group. In the language of drag performers, language play is also marked by juxtaposition of contradictory aspects such as very proper language mixed with obscenities, adding to the queens' deliberate disruption of cultural and linguistic norms.

References:

Kulick, Don (2000). "Gay and Lesbian Language". Anthropology Annual Review. 29: 243–85

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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Lavender Language and the legacy of William Leap

Bill Leap, perhaps the world’s most respected scholar in the field known as lavender linguistics, talks in a Southern drawl and cusses like a trucker’s wife.

“Let me tell you what it is, honey,” he says on a Monday afternoon from his home in Tampa, Fla. “Miss Piggy’s English is so queer.”

Leap, an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., is writing a book, Language Before Stonewall.

“Back in the ’20s and ’30s, there was this massive use in some social sets in gay America of French as the quintessential gay language, and that continues to the ’70s,” he says. “Honest to God, Miss Piggy spoke fluent gay English. The way she slips in these little French things, the use of ‘moi’ and the hand gesture to the bosom, this is so 1930s gay.”

In 1993, Leap created the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, now in its 24th season. The two-day event draws about 150 attendees from all over the world and is the longest-running LGBT-studies conference in the U.S., and the only one dedicated to language issues, according to Leap. In 1993, much like today, the community squabbled over language politics, starting with what to call the field of study — queer language? Gay and lesbian language? Leap went with lavender.

“I thought, Let’s use that ancient term ‘lavender’ and let’s offend everybody,” he says. Lavender, he points out, has been associated with the occult and mysticism, with women’s power in Africa, and with forms of power in the West in the Roman Imperial Court and the Catholic Church.

“It surfaces in the 20th century with a lesbian women’s movement in England, which was marked in public by women who wore lavender-colored rhinoceros pins on their lapel,” he says.

In his current research, Leap is looking at Harlemese, the language of the Harlem Renaissance, where he cites a rich and dynamic queer presence and a manner of speaking that, while being not exclusively queer, has influenced both gay and mainstream language to this day.

“Harlem was the site for internal colonialism. Its sexual value was there for the convenience of white folks. But it had its own identity and formation in spite of the fact that white folks were intruding,” he says.

Words like “hot” and “hunk,” when describing an attractive person, came from the clubs and after-hours parties of Harlem, he says.

Around the same time, in Britain, Polari, what scholars call an anti-language, was at its peak among gay men, but the jargon would be completely unrecognizable to most English speakers today.

“Nada to vada in the larda, what a sharda,” says Paul Baker, the world’s pre-eminent Polari scholar, when asked about his favorite phrase.

Translation: What a shame, he’s got a small penis.

“I like the rhyming,” he says.

In the early 1990s, Baker stumbled upon Polari while looking for a thesis topic and soon found himself in a gay-run hotel in Brighton where the innkeepers recalled some phraseology. He talked to several old-timers in the area who helped him amass a small dictionary of words, numbering around 500 today and available on a new app called Polari, and wrote transcripts of dialogue from two popular British radio characters in the 1960s named Julian and Sandy, who spoke Polari. (Not coincidentally, the two actors playing the roles — Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick — were gay themselves.)

Polari has roots in 1600s England and is a mixture of Molly slang (Regency England men who dressed in drag and coined words like “bitch” and “trade”), thieves cant (the Elizabethan rigmarole of criminals, circus travelers, and other undesirables), East London cockney slang, and Italian brought home by sailors in the Mediterranean.

Other colorful Polari terms include: “pastry cutter” (a man’s oral sex technique), “naff” (meaning either tasteless or heterosexual), “cleaning the cage out” (cunnilingus), “tipping the ivy” (tuchus lingus), “tipping the velvet” (oral sex), “he’s got nanti pots in the cupboard” (he’s got no teeth), your “mother’s a stretcher case” (I’m exhausted), “vogue us up ducky” (light me a cigarette), and Hilda Handcuffs, Betsy Badge, and the orderly daughters (terms for the police).

“It doesn’t always have to do with secrecy and protection,” Baker says. “I think it also has to do with forming an identity as an affected group, as marking yourself as different, or maybe a bit superior in some way, a mind-set of evaluating mainstream society as somehow inferior to the Polari speaker’s point of view.”

Unsurprisingly, Morrissey was versed. The title of his album Bona Drag means “nice outfit.” In his song “Piccadilly Palare,” he sang, “So bona to vada, oh you, your lovely eek and your lovely riah.” (So nice to see you, oh you, your lovely face and your lovely hair.) And in the song “Girl Loves Me,” on his 2016 album Blackstar, David Bowie sang,

Cheena so sound, so titty up this Malchick, say

Party up moodge, nanti vellocet round on Tuesday

Real bad dizzy snatch making all the omies mad, Thursday

Popo blind to the polly in the hole by Friday

Translation:

Women, I trust you, fix up this boy, say

Make your own fun, man, no drugs around on Tuesday

Really naughty airhead, making all the men mad [on] Thursday

Don’t care about the money spent by Friday

Polari was rife with “she-ing,” an academic term that refers to the linguistic practice of feminizing people and things. She-ing appears almost universally and across centuries in gay language, from Peru to the Philippines to South Africa (where gay slang is called Gayle), to Israel (called oxtchit, derived from an Arabic word meaning “my sister”), to Soviet-era Russia. It was initially practical, enabling gay men to talk about sex and lovers in public without fear of arrest or persecution.

“You can she anybody,” Baker says. “You can she your father or the police. It’s inverting mainstream society’s values so that everybody is potentially gay and everybody is potentially feminine.”

In the West, the gay lexicon dried up after Stonewall, relatively speaking. But in Putin’s Russia, where the environment remains extremely hostile for LGBT people, the website Gay.ru, according to a paper by researcher Stephan Nance, lists a course on how to speak present-day Russian gay, a slang called goluboy — from a word related to the bluish color of a dove — presumably to help gay Russians identify one another. The site addresses readers as devachki (“girls”), discusses misgendering, and provides instruction on gay tonal inflections when saying words like “sister” (“sestraaaa!”). Gays in Putin’s Russia have also Russo-fied Western terms such as queer (“kvir”) and coming out (“kaminaut”).

In 1880s St. Petersburg, men cruising for sex with men were called “tëtki,” or “aunties.” (In polite society, they might be said to be getting up to “barskie shalosti,” or “gentlemen’s mischief.”)

Denis Provencher, department head of French and Italian at the University of Arizona, has yet to identify a similar argot as Polari or research into gay-specific slang in French, where discourse, in typical French fashion, operates as more waltz than stride. Recently, however, many of Marcel Proust’s personal correspondences came to auction at Sotheby’s and revealed he used Latin as a secret code when writing to his lovers.

“The closet is really an American social construction based on a narrative of Judeo-Christian ideology — death and resurrection,” Provencher says. “Coming out of the closet is like being reborn. In French, we are talking about living in good faith and in bad faith, being authentic in society.”

The verb assumer is used, he says, and operates beyond talking of one’s sexuality.

“When you say, ‘je m’assume,’ it means, ‘I assume my social role.’ And in France you would never come home and say, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m gay and this is my boyfriend Frank.’ You’d say, ‘This is Frank and we love each other.’ ”

Provencher’s forthcoming book, Queer Maghrebi French, looks at LGBT North Africans living in France and their relationship to language.

In Arab societies, “the harem is this enclosed space that we think of as a feminine space. The harem is also the house of the father. So if you’ve ‘come out of the harem,’ you’ve come out of the patriarchy. Young North African men use the harem as an analogy of the closet. There’s also this analogy of dropping the veil. Women who drop the veil in Western society are seen as sexually progressive,” he says. “You also get these strange narratives where men talk about wandering through the city looking for sex, but they’re also wandering toward Mecca as well.”

While vocabulary might be the most fun part of lavender linguistics for the layperson, scholars are concerned with aspects such as tone, inflection, and gesturing, as well as the political and cultural implications of language — how the press write about LGBT issues, for example, or how queer people communicate with each other privately and at work, or how gay language is learned.

“All this talk about assimilation and acceptance still requires a certain kind of conformity, and, despite your group that’s all in favor of the heteronormative, many same-sex-identified persons are not comfortable with that mold,” Leap says. “And so you’ve got to let off some frustration. You’ve got to let off a certain amount of steam and anger. And talking gay is one way of doing that.”

That raucous gay tongue of yore perseveres most strongly in American drag culture, and, for word lovers today, it might be the only bright spot of innovation. The film Paris Is Burning centers entirely on the lexicon of 1980s drag balls, where terms like “realness,” “house,” “mother,” and “shade” flash on-screen and move the narrative. (Those terms are so mainstream now that, in May, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign accused the Democratic National Committee of “throwing shade.”)

“[The participants on RuPaul’s Drag Race] have quite a clever use and attitude toward slang. There’s a celebration of language and a joy and a humor which feels like a successor to Polari,” says Baker. “Even though it’s American.”

Online, where most evolution in the lavender lexicon occurs today, one might say there’s a bit less joy.

“It’s more utilitarian and based around hookup culture when you’re typing away on Grindr,” Baker says. “Shorter phrases that have more to do with sexual things. Gay people on the Internet don’t want to come off as funny or showing these rather creative uses of language. They want to show themselves as being as masculine as possible. There’s a sort of performance there.”

That performance, like she-ing before, crosses the East/West divide. On hookup apps in Russia, you’re bound to see users protesting “bez korony.” That means “without a crown,” or, in gayspeak, not a queen.

Interview and arcticle by Out Magazine via: https://www.out.com/out-exclusives/2016/8/17/lavender-linguistics-queer-way-speak

#queer #out

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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The Polari Slang

“Oh varda that bona chicken the one with the lovely dark riah, such a handsome eek.

What a strange word choice. What is this? I can understand the English among those words but it is the only thing that I can really get. What language is that?

The language we are reading above is called Polari. That is not exactly a real language but a cryptolect, since it is a cant used by a subculture. The real meaning of the sentence would be: “Oh look that good young man with the lovely dark hair such a handsome face.” Pretty different, right?

The Polari is used by a subculture formed by actors, merchant navy sailors, prostitutes and other marginalized people specially gay men though. That is a mix of Romance (Mediterranean Lingua Franca), Romani, London and thieves slang. The origin is not dated by it can be traced back to 19th century or even 16th (but even speculation) in Britain. There is a long-standing connection with Punch and Judy street puppet performers who traditionally used Polari to converse.

It was used in circuses or the theater companies and since there was many homosexuals men working on the entertainment it was spread to the gay community. Once the homosexuality had been considered a crime, the gay community used the cryptolect to talk to each other in a way that policemen would not understand.

It was also used extensively in the British Merchant Navy, where many gay men joined ocean liners and cruise ships as waiters, stewards and entertainers. That’s why the slang was mixed with the navy merchants features.

It had begun to fall in disuse amongst the gay people by the late 1960’s. The popularity of the Julian and Sandy characters played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams ensured that some of this secret language became public property,[13] and the gay liberationists of the 1970s viewed it as rather degrading and divisive as it was often used to gossip about, or criticise, others, as well as to discuss sexual exploits. In addition, the need for a secret subculture code declined with the decriminalization of adult homosexual acts in England and Wales under the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Here is one of the most important words of Polari:

Basket or Packet............The bulge in a mans jeans

Betty bracelet...............Policewoman

Bijou.......................... Small

Bod............................ Body

Bold........................... Daring

Bona.......................... Good, Nice

Buns.......................... Ass cheeks

Butch......................... Masculine

Camp......................... Effeminate

Capello....................... Hat

Carsey........................ Toilet

Chicken........................ Young man

Charper....................... To Search

Charpering omi................ Policeman

Cottage....................... Public Toilet

Cottaging..................... Looking for sex in a cottage

Crimper....................... Hairdresser

Dish .......................... Nice looking man, Nice arse

Dizzy.......................... Scatty

Dolly........................... Pretty

Drag........................... Women's clothes

Eek ........................... Face (Backslang ecaf)

Esong.......................... Nose

Fantabulosa .................. Wonderful

Fruit........................... Old queen

Gay............................ Good as you

Gelt............................ Money

Glossies........................ Magazines

Hoofer......................... Dancer

Kaffies........................ Trousers

Lallies.......................... Legs

Latty........................... House

Lills............................ Hands

lilly Law........................ Police

Luppers........................ Fingers

Mangarie....................... Food

Mince........................... A camp walk

Naff ........................... Awfull ( Not Available For F--king)

Nanti........................... None, no

National handbag ............. Dole money

Oglefakes...................... Glasses

Ogles.......................... Eyes

Omi............................. Man

Omipolone...................... Camp man

Palliass......................... Back or rear

Polari........................... Talk , to chat

Polone........................... Woman

Pots,........................... Teeth

Riah............................ Hair

Riah shusher................... Hairdresser

Shush bag..................... Bag or Holdall

Slap.............................. Makeup

Thews.......................... Thighs

Trade........................... Sex

Troll ............................. To go walking

Varda........................... See, To look

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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"They would tell us to go across the street, and we would follow the police orders; and there would be another cop across the street waiting to give us a ticket for jaywalking.”

#queer

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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The Queer Movement in San Francisco in the 70′s. We can see also Harvey Milk, an activist and important policital image for LGBT people, who became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California.

LGBT empowerment

Via: https://www.buzzfeed.com/gabrielsanchez/this-is-what-the-lgbt-community-in-san-francisco-looked?utm_term=.dqnaRk45Y2&bftw=lgbt#.vvkbR6PwNd

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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“We are here, we are queer and get used to it!” – The Queer Theory spread in Universities

Since in some ways the Gender Theory becomes a political one – tied up with LGBT social movement – the theories had to undermine the judgments and seeming timelessness of the concepts of heterosexual/homosexual.

“The gender theory then examines how much social constructions and normalized values are represented in diverse models of cultural expression.” (HALL 2006:111)

So many academic works approached the cause and claimed for equality of treatment for gays and lesbians. Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, argued that the gay men have always been in society and they have done important contribution to it, but they are treated in different degrees of tolerance. Also the Judy Graham’s Another Mother Tongue denoted the importance of lesbian for the cultural expression.

The social movements – specially against the fear of AIDS secured by the society “norm” - proclaimed and end to the status quo authority. “We are here, we are queer and get used to it!” became an anthem of resistence in the early 1990’s.

In the same time this rage has incorporated in philosophical and academic language.

Different academic thesis appeared, starting with Gayle Rubin’s Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality in 1984, argued that gender and sexuality must be analytically separate. Besides that, a little bit later than this, emerges Judith Butler, one of the biggest voices of the queer theory, responsible for Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity in 1990. The thesis changed the path of queer identity in the Universities for your dissemination of ideas.

The questioning of this problematic leads queer movement to receive norms of gender and energize the political activism and critical/intellectual activity.

In the beginning of the century, but equally important, emerges Viviane Nameste, sociologist that writes about the transgenders and was one of the responsible for the dissemination of the topic in the academic environment. She went further by characterizing the trans issue, in which was a nonconforming individual into the field of study. “Critics in queer theory write page after page on the inherent liberation of transgressing normative sex/gender codes, but they have nothing to say about the precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered and who is unable to access a woman’s shelter because she was not born a biological woman.” (NAMASTE 2000: 9-10)

The struggle of the challenge of being a transgender woman gave space also for the analysis of the difficulties suffered by the oppressed individuals.

This works have developed a serious increase of queer people in topics like identity and sexuality. Looking back today the doors opened are tremendous and all the visibility are important. People now have more knowledge about it.

Now with the help of technology, the means of communication spread way faster and the conjuncture and the theories now stumble upon the post-colonialist way of think.

Thus the theory itself can provide only a snapshot of a moment in time. There is a lot of time to persue. Perhaps some prejudice has been surpassed and the dynamism hopefully achieve new studies.

The gender theory urges us to see these choices not always that “free” or easy, but certainly as worthy for discussion and a great material for study of differences of people from our humanity.

References:

HALL, Donald E.. Gender and Queer Theory. In: MALPAS, Simon; WAKE, Paul (Org.). The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. 2. ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cap. 9, p. 111.

#queer

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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Queer’s Theory

Queer Theory is a subtopic of post-structuralist theory that emerges in the 1990’s on the fields of queer studies and woman’s studies. The queer theory is created in the lines of feminism challenges and in order of the examination of the social interactions and identity. It questions the gender as a part of essential inner problematic of LGBT people, from their behavior to social bounds. Unlikely to the gay/lesbian studies, the queer theory focus on any different sexual activity or identity than the normative.

This theory examines the “mismatches” of sexes, genders and sexualities in a way that it develops an expansion of gay/lesbian question, remaking the post-structuralist idea of a multiple and unstable positions of different identity. It examines the constitutive discourses of homosexuality of last century to place now “queer”.

A lot of the theory came from Judith Butler’s book. She is considered the “mother of queer theory”.

Butler said that there are historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. In other words, rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times.

The very fact that women and men can say that they feel more or less 'like a woman' or 'like a man' shows, Butler points out, that “the experience of a gendered... cultural identity is considered an achievement.” She argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler's approach - inspired in part by Foucault - is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors. Butler says: 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.' (Gender Trouble, p. 25). In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.

It is a mistake to think that queer theory is another name for lesbian and gay studies. They're different. Queer theory has something to say to lesbian and gay studies -- and also to a bunch of other areas of sociology and cultural theory.

References:

BUTLER, J. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, Routledge.

#queer

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queer-reporter-blog · 8 years ago

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WHY “QUEER”? IS IT A SLUR?

Where did the word “queer” come from?

The word “queer” has debated origins, but it most likely originated in Europe. It was used in 16th century Scottish to mean “strange, peculiar, or eccentric.” Queer continued to appear in texts throughout Europe, and began to appear in the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Its first homophobic use appeared at the end of the 19th century, and it continued to be used derogatorily toward the LGBTQ community for many decades.

Its current definitions include “questionable and suspicious,” “differing in some way from the norm,” and “not quite well.” Some dictionaries note that the use of queer to refer to the LGBT community is and has been used in a disparaging way, but that the term has been reclaimed by some in the last two decades to represent a neutral or positive term.

How was “queer” used as a slur?

Some research notes that the first appropriation of the word queer to degrade people in the LGBT community occurred in late 19th century Britain, in a letter from a man to his son denouncing his other son’s affair with a man. In the United States, it was used to debase and belittle the LGBT community almost from the beginning, highlighting the community’s “strange” or “other”-ness.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, queer has been used to refer degradingly to the LGBT community, and in its earlier uses, it was a dismissive label applied particularly to men who did not adhere to prescribed norms of masculinity. Queer also became more frequently used as a noun instead of just an adjective, often in contempt toward LGBT people. Current use of the term varies by community, but typically using the term as an adjective (“they identify as queer” or “they are a member of the queer community”) is considered less disparaging than using the term as a noun (“she is a queer”).

Why do some LGBT people use the word “queer” if it’s a slur?

The meaning of the word queer is dependent on specific contexts and speakers, and has been used for so long in English as a derogatory term toward the LGBT community that it is often difficult to assess what makes the word offensive and what allows the word to be reclaimed. An exploration of different individuals’ and organizations’ use of the term, and the careful thought they have put into its use, allows some insight into how the word has been reclaimed in recent decades.

The first group to publicly and widely reclaim the word queer was a group of New York activists in the 1990s that named themselves “Queer Nation.” A group of radical activists, Queer Nation reclaimed the word, emphasizing that it was less exclusionary than lesbian or gay. Queer Nation believed that queer could be taken out of the hands and mouths of anti-LGBT people if it was reclaimed by LGBT people themselves. Queer Nation questioned, challenged, and expressed anger against many forms of oppression that affected the queer community.

Since then, many have reclaimed and reintegrated the word into their everyday speech, into the missions of their organizations, and into religious and secular LGBTQ educational materials. The website feministing.com explains that they use the word queer because it encompasses many expressions of sexual orientation and does not limit gender expression to two genders like the term “bisexual” does. The site also acknowledges that not everyone has reclaimed the word in a positive way.

Outright Vermont, an organization that works to build safe and healthy environments for queer youth, dedicates a portion of their website to explain why they use the word queer. In parsing out the definition and the word’s history, the organization emphasizes that queer encompasses all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and questioning identities, among others.

While some people find empowerment and inclusion in reclaiming the word, others continue to regard queer as a derogatory word and take issue with its reclamation by the LGBTQ community. Some feel that it does not accurately describe their identity or orientation, and others feel that is has been used for so long as a disparaging term that it cannot be reclaimed.

When is it OK to use the word “queer”?

The word queer can be used as a reclaimed and empowering word that encompasses many sexual identities and orientations, and it can also be used in line with its historical and painful anti-LGBTQ connotations. Careful consideration of context, speaker or writer, receiver, other people present, and mode of communication are important factors in determining whether the use of queer might be degrading or affirming.

Above all, a person’s self-identification is a key factor in using the term queer respectfully. There are many layers to the reasons why a person may choose to identify as queer, and just as many layers to the decision not to identify as queer. Some people are comfortable with the use of multiple terms to describe their sexual identity and/or orientation; for example, a person may identify as queer and bisexual, or queer and transgender. Others see the term queer as offensive and unreclaimable, and would prefer that it not be used at all to describe their identity or orientation.

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s suggestions for the validation and empowerment of those who identify as queer challenge people to think beyond dualisms such as gay versus straight and masculine versus feminine. They also call on people to think carefully about their linguistic choices beyond the word queer, including the use of “children” instead of “boys and girls,” and “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters.” The continued use of non-binary terms makes space for those who identify as queer, and aids in the reclaiming of the word for those who find power in it.

arcticle published via: http://queergrace.com/queer/

#queer #empowerment #lgbtq

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