This article explores how three Black women use the culturally grounded semantic and rhetorical strategies of their discursive practices as modes of symbolic action to negotiate alternative relationships and realities in response to white supremacist patriarchy. Placing intersectional feminist perspectives in conversation with the literature on African American Women’s Language (AAWL), this research applies critical discourse analysis to cases of signifying and resignification (semantic reclamation). The interactions are taken from contemporary US politics: Maxine Waters’ assertion ‘Reclaiming my time’, Therese Okoumou’s literal retooling of ‘We go high’ and Samirah Raheem’s reclamation of ‘slut’. Together they highlight three iterations of Black womanhood, intersectional feminist linguistic resistance and gendered, racialised defiance to engage with the inclusive scope of feminism. The application of interdisciplinary insights to the analysis of AAWL herein demonstrates the broader social significance and productive political power of language for intersectional women, people of colour and gender minoritised communities.
This paper explores linguistic ideologies surrounding The 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement. The reform, which aims to uniformize Lusophone orthographies and strengthen Portuguese as a global language, is approached through the reactions of native speakers participating in an online debate within a Portuguese-language blog. Drawing on the notion that language planning is a personal, political and ideological rather than a purely linguistic enterprise, the study focuses on the social meanings assigned to Portuguese orthography by the Lusophone debaters. Upon so doing, it tracks the different ideologies orienting participants’ arguments for or against the reform, showing the interplays of language ideologies with culture, nation and citizenship; how linguistic practices and language-mediating technologies, like orthography, become sites of ideological (re)production; and how “folk” and “expert” perspectives about language are not distant but rather dialectically inform and implicate one another, with local debate discourses embedded within broader and older social process and relations.
Comprehensively understanding religious repression requires a critical examination of discursive-linguistic practices, given that language is a semiotic resource for ritual practice and negotiations of religious identity. Language has also been weaponized within colonial domination and religious subjugation because of how religious and linguistic practices intersect. This article explores linguistic appropriation as part of the symbolic and material(ized) violence that represses African-matrix religions. Focusing on Salvador, Brazil, I analyze cases of linguistic-spiritual appropriation wherein commercial industries and evangelical Christians adopt Nagô/Yoruba expressions derived from African-matrix liturgical registers and reshape them to the detriment of their source communities. This investigation highlights how kindred ideological processes, like evangelicalism and the national projects of mestiçagem and democracia racial, become entextualized and reconstituted through discursive processes. It demonstrates the paradox of socially and politically dominant groups co-opting, commodifying, and capitalizing on the very ritual practices and institutions that they restrict, malign, and criminalize.
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