Rusty Barrett Defining "Community" in Research on Language and Gender/Sexuality

University of Michigan
Department of Linguistics
4080 Frieze Building
105 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
rustyb@umich.edu
www.umich.edu/~rustyb

About Rusty Barrett

Barrett is an acclaimed teacher and scholar whose innovative work on language choice and performance among African American drag queens offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of how the appropriation of gendered linguistic forms can challenge gender and sexual ideologies. He has also brought clarity to the recent debate concerning the viability of sexuality as an analytic category, a debate that parallels in many ways the question of the analytic status of gender.

Abstract

This workshop will examine questions of how the traditional concept of the "speech community" relates to linguistic expressions of gender and sexuality. After reviewing traditional definitions of the speech community in linguistic research, we will consider the extent to which these definitions are useful for studies related to questions of gender/sexuality. We will then examine several alternatives to the traditional notion of a homogeneous speech community in order to compare their ability to handle data related to language and gender. These alternative models include communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), self-categorization theory in social psychology (Tajfel 1978, Turner 1987) the concept of the habitus (Bourdieu 1991), and queer theoretic views of communities formed through the performative use of language (Butler 1993, 1997).

Workshop Materials

Coming soon!



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