Language ideologies and legitimacy among nonbinary YouTubers

Abstract

This paper explores how ten nonbinary North American YouTubers appeal to legitimizing discourses (van Leeuwen & Wodak 1999) as rationalizations for their choices regarding identity labels and pronouns. Given the local cultural salience of the implications of their language choices, the YouTubers rationalize their terminological choices through legitimizing discourses that prioritize historical facts, lexical definitions, and personal feelings. I examine how these discourses presuppose particular language ideologies, or implicit assumptions about what language users view as “appropriate” language practices. In the case of the nonbinary YouTubers, I illustrate that the vloggers’ legitimizing discourses appeal to and juxtapose a referentialist ideology (Hill 2008, Silverstein 1979), according to which words should describe the world truthfully, and an ideology of self-identification (Zimman 2019), which prioritizes individual agency. Crucially, deploying these legitimizing discourses is an important strategy that nonbinary YouTubers draw on as part of their advocacy and education projects.

Trans language activism and intersectional coalitions

“…moves the locus of the problem from the trans individual (who must make their preference known) to others (who are responsible for the “correctness” of their speech), while simultaneously validating trans identities. Notions of linguistic correctness unavoidably rest on standard language ideologies, among others (e.g., Crowley, 2022), and in this sense, TLA has the potential to reinforce the sociolinguistic injustice experienced by those judged to speak “incorrectly.” For some students who wish to bring trans affirming language back to their home communities, these discourses could exacerbate preexisting tensions, especially if they are first‐generation, working class, or part of an ethnoracial group that has been systematically excluded from the academy. Alternatively, students may choose not to promote TLA at home because there is no viable discursive model for doing so.…”

Trans theoretical approaches to memory and relatedness: Potentials and suggestions at the intersections of transgender studies and queer studies

“…Taking a cue from recent conversations between Trans Studies and Queer Studies, my ethnographic research in Istanbul encouraged me to revisit the framework of queer postmemory Inspired by the push and emphasis on trans-specific embodied experiences of everyday life and its multiple reflections on the everyday practices of being a trans woman ( trans kadin ) in Turkey, I saw that the vocabulary of “queer postmemory” was not always seen as an open space to discuss the trans specific practices that play with the often taken for granted relationships between time, memory, and relatedness and make these relationships meaningful in their own time and place. Drawing on the discussions of scholars such as Lal Zimman (2017), Archie Crowley (2022), Anamarija Horvat and Jack Halberstam and Thomas Dunn, I started to think if this vocabulary could carry the risk of “erasing what scholar activist Reina Gossett has called the ‘different and beautifully expansive’ language of gender diversity” (DeVun and Tortorici, 2018: 519).…”