Sexuality and Language Theorists Flashcards
What did Robin Lakoff (1973) suggest in terms of gay men and speech?
Compared gay speech traits to those of women and argues that gay men consciously and deliberately imitate these traits. Gay men adopt deficit features in order to mirror women’s language.
What did Halliday (1987) suggest in terms of ‘anti-languages’?
Anti-language is a minority dialect or method of communicating within a minority speech community that excludes members of the main speech community. “Anti-languages may be understood as extreme versions of social dialects. They tend to arise among subcultures and groups that occupy a marginal or precarious position in society, especially where central activities of the group place them outside the law.
What does Judith Butler (1990) suggest gender is within her book ‘Gender Trouble’?
‘The act that one does, the act one performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene.’ Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance of a natural sort of being. Your use of language and your behaviour can perform an identity. For example, gay men may choose to adopt feminine speech patterns to consciously be different from heterosexual men.
What does Bent, Munson et al (1997) suggest in terms of vowel production among gay men?
Findings show that vowel production was not influenced by sexual orientation at birth however, homosexuals selectively adopt their speech patterns to fit into a particular social group.
What does Paul Baker (2002) characterise lavender language as?
Lavender language is characterised by acronyms, puns, double meanings and a range of lexis only intended to be understood by the gay community. It is used to create an identity now that Polari has died out.
Why does Motschenbacher et al (2013) suggests language and gender to be correlating to an individual’s sexuality?
Study gender performity which is the way we feel we have to perform according to our gender. They claim that people perceive a non-normative gender performance is an indication of non-normative sexual identity. In other words, if a female isn’t feminine enough it is an indication that she is a homosexual.
