This chapter discusses intersectionality primarily in its application to scholarship on language, gender, and sexuality. Focusing on its purpose in conceptualizing the multiplicative effects of overlapping systems of oppression on individuals’ experiences, the chapter outlines major features of the theory and exemplar case studies. The chapter builds on previous Black feminist scholarship (or rather, Blackfemme(inist) scholarship) to explore how semantic bleaching has shifted understandings of intersectionality in public and academic discourse over time. Contending that the process is undergirded by a failure to engage with the architecture of race and racism, the chapter demonstrates how neoliberal conceptualizations of identity obstruct intersectional analyses of systemic oppression. A review of sociocultural linguistic scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality surveys representative work in the area. Adding to that line of research, the chapter examines the linguistic construction of Blackqueerness and concludes by suggesting a number of ways to “integrate” intersectionality more fully into the fold of language, gender, and sexuality research.
Increasing commodification of progressive language in public discourse over the past four decades has resulted in users’ indexical alignment with anti‐racist politics becoming unmoored from expectations of legitimate action toward dismantling white supremacy. In this essay, we describe how this process is enacted through virtue signaling—highlighting one’s morality through the use of language and other signs that invoke progressive sociopolitical values—and the ways it mobilizes the linguistic repertoire of anti‐Blackness. Theorizing this behavior provides a framework to locate and confront the mechanisms that maintain white supremacy and the actors who align themselves with it.
As a collaboration between the two authors, this essay first addresses each author’s individual perspective on language and gender studies, particularly as it has taken shape in the US context, and then offers a jointly developed argument regarding the field’s history and trajectory. We write from the respective standpoints of our lived experiences within and beyond the academy. Mary is a white cis female-identified linguistics professor who was deeply involved in the Berkeley Women and Language Group in the 1990s and has conducted research on language and gender throughout her career, especially with respect to its intersection with race. deandre’s Black and gender-creative subjectivity substantially colours the lens through which they experience and interpret the social life of language.
The authors present a lab-based research model that engages graduate students in undergraduate research mentorship positions that are mutually beneficial for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty. They show how this model can be scaled up and adapted across the range of English disciplines. The authors share examples of the different types of research that they have engaged in for linguistics, literary archival studies, creative writing, and writing pedagogy. These examples illustrate how undergraduate research mentorship can prepare graduate students to teach and mentor students using effective methods in various institutional contexts.
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