displacement of race in language and gender studies

Abstract

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.

You Have Never Lived a Day Outside of Your Body: Engaging Racialized and Gendered Positionality in Ethnographic Research

“…Researcher positionality is crucial to situating one's work (Bucholtz and miles hercules 2021) and may be represented in ethnographic texts in a variety of ways. It may be indexed implicitly through in‐group language use (Shange 2019), overtly through a positionality statement (e.g., Anderson 2019), or inferenced through assumptions that the reader already has knowledge of the author's subject position (Molina 2011).…”