Commentary II: Queering language and normativity

The subject matter of queer linguistics has long been in dispute. This is one of many ways in which queer linguistics models the fluid and fractured properties of the sociolinguistic experiences that it purports to theorize. Even so, as the articles in this special issue suggest, work in queer linguistics is finding areas of common interest in critical studies of homonormativity. Broadly described, these studies explore, as a primary concern, how linguistic practices reflect, reproduce and validate the heteronormative order; and by doing so, they expose the regulatory processes lending authority and privilege to certain – but not all – forms of sexuality, racial/ethnic background, class position and citizenship and, in some cases, transnational loyalties.

Granted, a queer linguistics defined in terms of these interests does not resemble the queer linguistics of an earlier time, when the focus of research addressed the linguistic practices of sexually marginalized subjects, and then, freed of the constraints of pre-determined identities, began to explore linguistic representations of desire. As the articles by Koller, Milani, Motschenbacher and Schneider suggest, queer linguistics need not reject studies of desire in order to pursue the study of normativity. However, the queer linguistics that is being modeled in these articles adopts a critical stance in relation to the analysis of language and desire. ‘Critical’ has become a fashionable orientation to social inquiry, thanks to the popularity of post-structural theory. But a critical stance becomes especially valuable for studies of sexuality – for language-centered studies, especially. Critical inquiry requires an analysis that refuses to treat social phenomena as if they are self-contained formations, and thus subject to explanation in their own terms. For Fairclough, ‘the aim of critical social research is better understanding of how societies work and produce both beneficial and detrimental effects, and of how the detrimental effects can be mitigated if not eliminated’ (2003: 203). Thus, a critical linguistic inquiry always orients to the analysis of linguistic practices so that the inquiry discloses connections between linguistic practice, social organization, benefit and detriment. Studies of language and sexuality ask how aspects of the sexual, as represented and negotiated through linguistic practices, help shape, and are shaped by, those connections. Desire is one component of the sexual, of course; but viewed from a critical perspective, desire ceases to be an interiorized formation and becomes instead a site of social organization, benefit and detriment – in other words, a site of normativity and regulatory power.

Schneider’s discussion of heteronormativity recreated in salsa dancing is a useful example here. Schneider’s article compares aspects of salsa performance in Frankfurt (Germany) and Sydney (Australia). And as statements like the following show, the fiery passion of the salsa performance emerges only when the female partner submits to the leadership of the male dancing partner. A male salsa dancer in Frankfurt told Schneider:

Also,

beim Salsa

mußt du die Emanzipation zuhause lassen. (C1, Frankfurt)

[You know,

in Salsa,

you have to leave emancipation at home.] (Schneider, 2013)

Similarly, a female salsa dance instructor in Sydney told Schneider:

I am sure that’s what the guys and the girls,

that’s what they love about it.

The girls want to be led, firstly.

And ahm,

the guys want to dance with somebody who can follow them

actually, you know, ahm,

you know, five minutes where the man is the man and leads

and the woman has to be a woman,

in terms of, you know, a concept or view of women have to follow

and men have to lead. (M28, Sydney) (Schneider, 2013)

Schneider cites her own ill ease at having to ‘leave emancipation at home’ when she began dancing salsa with a male partner. But something else also helped her understand the regulatory power of salsa partnerships: Schneider’s observations were based in settings that were heterosexual-identified and populated by heterosexual couples. However, on certain occasions, two men or two women might dance together during a salsa party. Such pairings violated the normative expectations that ordinarily mapped leadership and submission into messages of gender difference. Yet other dancers, watching these ‘same-sex couples’ perform, diffused the potency of the violation in each case – though not in identical ways. When two men danced together, other dancers claimed that the pair was engaged in parody – one figure retaining authority, the other ‘playing’ at submission, and at times said to be doing at least as good a job of submission as his female counterpart. When two women danced together, other dancers recast the performance from ‘real’ dancing into acts of remediation or rehearsal. Female pairs were never allowed to engage in parody: as one respondent explained to Schneider, ‘when guys doing the same thing, it’s comic [and] has that element of fun . . ., [but] two girls together, not so much’ (Schneider, 2013).

Schneider does not explain why same-sex pairings occur in these settings, beyond noting that some women, and presumably some men, enjoy performing in the style of their gender opposite. Even so, the example shows that even lighthearted attempts to transgress normative assumptions will end up strengthening the regulatory authority of those assumptions. So, Schneider’s article asks, under what circumstances would the heteronormative domain be open to disruption in this setting? That is, when would the authority of heteronormative linguistic practice begin to wane and the evidence of a counter-normative linguistic formation (or, more succinctly stated, a queer linguistics formation) begin to emerge? At the same time, Schneider’s article directs us to conditions where disruption has not emerged, reminding us that critical inquiry needs to address the workings of normativity and regulatory practice, even when counter-normative/queer formations are not in evidence.

This is the point richly documented in Coates’ article in this special issue. The examples she assembles demonstrate that heteronormative assumptions are at work in even the most ordinary of conversations. So, without having stated the point directly, two women are able to acknowledge the fact of their marriage to men, and the long-term stability of the marital bond, simply through their choice of pronouns, adjectives and metaphors. And since there is nothing about the phrasing that merits comment or question from the listener, each woman accepts her colleague’s language use without question, thereby marking as unexceptional the language use and the subject matter that her language use indexes.

So a speaker’s participation in these everyday conversations is a form of regulatory practice, but it is also an occasion for language socialization. Speakers come to understand the obligations and limitations of normative authority, even as they are being regulated by them, whenever face-to-face discussion addresses expectations associated with gendered and sexuality norms. This is a likely outcome of the conversational work displayed in Coates’ Example 11, where a young boy attempting to ‘read with expression’ leads classmates to accuse him of ‘speak[ing] like that and mov[ing] your hands like a queer’ (Coates, 2013). Similarly, in Coates’ Example 12, exasperated at her friends’ attempts to pressure her into overcoming her disinterest in dating, Helen finally exclaims: ‘I might not have anyone to go out with but I’m not fucking desperate yet Margot’ (Coates, 2013).

Both of these examples also illustrate the performative dimensions of normative regulation. Performativity, in the sense that naming the action calls the action into being, has been central to the queer linguistic agenda since the publication of Livia and Hall’s Queerly Phrased (1997). But the connections between performativity and normative compliance are more recent additions to that agenda.

Motschenbacher’s article in this special issue lends a particular focus to this discussion by showing how language choices, as well as national and transnational loyalties, are implicated in performative practice. Motschenbacher’s discussion focuses on language use at the annual Eurovision Song Contest. The preferred language in the contest setting is English, since English ensures that a musical performance and press conference conversation will be able to reach a wide audience. Moreover, by making public statements in English, contest participants foreground their affiliation with the pan-European Union in those instances where participants deem such a transnational affiliation to be worthwhile. At the same time, however, speaking in English also limits the participants’ ability to express nationalist loyalties through their on-site linguistic practice in those instances where the participants’ national language is not English. And in some cases, the morphological and lexical systems of English conceal details of gendered or sexual messages that the morphological and lexical systems of other languages (German, Portuguese, Albanian, Lithuanian) convey with greater precision; so while performers may be able to express certain representations of desire or object choice directly in their own language, those representations become obscured (or erased entirely) when they are (re)positioned within an English framework.

Overall, then, the language choice-making that occurs throughout the Eurovision Song Contest settings is not the result of binary decision-making, but the product of a performative process shaped by competing language loyalties, structural regularities and forms of regulatory control from other sources. Milani’s article discusses a similar performative process. In this case, the setting is the South African social website meetmarket. Milani reviews the profiles that ‘men seeking men’ post to this website, and examines the regulatory processes that guide users of the site as they position themselves as ‘desirable’ men and indicate the criteria that others must meet in order to satisfy the same criteria. Website users employ a variety of terms to build these descriptions, but a frequently cited descriptor for desirability is ‘straight-acting’. Milani explains the frequency of this phrase in two ways: he notes that ‘straight-acting’ is connected to the image of the ‘desirable gay man’ that is widely attested in the global circuit; at the same time, by endorsing a ‘straight-acting’ stance, users of meetmarket refute the long-standing stereotype that equates sexual sameness and effeminacy. Under both of these explanations, users of meetmarket position themselves – performatively – as modern sexual subjects, persons freed from the constraints of tradition, and in touch with understandings of sexuality that circulate far beyond the national boundary. To continue this argument, and underscore their modernist stance, users of meetmarket might be expected to adopt a stance of racial inclusion in their posting, avoiding phrases like ‘white only’ (which would have a particularly strong historical force in a South African setting) and including language welcoming replies from users of diverse racial backgrounds. But this is not the pattern that Milani finds attested in the user profiles. When racial specificity is indicated,

it is predominantly self-identified black men (59.14%) who overtly refer to blackness in their descriptions of the desired Other. Following a similar pattern, it is mainly men who identify as white (64.91%) who explicitly state that they are looking for white men. From this distribution, it could be inferred that desire on meetmarket often runs along rather than across racial lines. (Milani, 2013)

Here, Milani suggests, apartheid-era historical legacies have not been completely overthrown: public affirmations of inter-racial object choice remain less desirable than public affirmations of racial sexual sameness – for many black as well as white men.

In these arguments, Milani draws attention to the need for temporal analysis in the discussion of normativity, and Koller’s article addresses this issue with a comparison of two texts: (1) ‘the opening paragraph of the 1970 manifesto “The woman identified woman”, written by a New York-based group of lesbian feminists calling themselves Radicalesbians … [and] the first statement of an autonomous lesbian feminist politic’ (Koller, 2013) and (2) ‘an article taken from the July 2010 edition of the nationwide US lesbian magazine Curve, … [which] addresses the evolving and increasingly complex in-group representation’ that was being associated with terms like ‘lesbian identity’ in the new millennium (Koller, 2013). Each publication addressed a different set of intended readers and the publication dates are separated by a span of 40 years. Even so, Koller’s analysis shows that the statements address similar issues, differences in audience and time frame notwithstanding.

Koller’s point here is not that ‘lesbian’ is a timeless or ahistorical category. Rather, Koller’s analysis shows how the meaning of categories like ‘lesbian’ are constructed within particular social moments. So, even if formations appear to be similar, those appearances should mask differences in contextual details – in this case, 1970 radical lesbian mobilization versus 2010 lesbian movements in the mainstream – or in the discursive practices relevant to each context. To return to Milani’s example, just because meetmarket operates in a post-apartheid South Africa, this does not in any sense suggest that apartheid legacies no longer have potency. To return to Motschenbacher’s example, to suggest that Eurovision performers choose to sing or answer questions from the press in English does not mean that their (language-related) sense of national loyalty has been completely subdued.

To conclude: the common theme in this special issue’s discussions of queer linguistics is not the linguistic practices associated with gay/lesbian identities or with sexual marginality. The common theme could be phrased as ‘desire’, provided we recognize that these discussions engage desire as a materialized formation, not as an interiorized dynamic. But the point of queer inquiry as displayed here is to reach beyond such features as ‘fantasy, repression, pleasure, fear and the unconscious’ (Cameron and Kulick, 2003: 106) and explore how social experience engages normative practice and its regulatory constraint, recognizing that language as well as desire and other components associated with sexuality are primary sites through which the work of normativity and regulatory control unfold in everyday life. Queer linguistics is not the only mode of critical inquiry engaged in such exploration; but queer linguistics is the only mode of inquiry willing to insist that language and sexuality remain at the center of this interrogation. Drawing on a variety of examples, methods and theoretical stances, the articles in this special issue make this argument convincingly.