Seeing from the South: Discourse, gender and sexuality from southern perspectives

Abstract

This article frames the Special Issue on ‘Discourse, Gender and Sexuality from the Global South’. It does so by providing an overview of the notion of the South in the social sciences and the humanities. We engage, in particular, with current theoretical discussions around a set of concepts and approaches that have been labelled ‘southern theories’, ‘theories from the south’, or ‘southern epistemologies’. Against this backdrop, we explain why southern perspectives are needed in the study of discourse, gender and sexuality, and sociolinguistics more broadly. We then offer a reflection on our (and our contributors’) ‘loci of enunciation’ (Bhabha ), before concluding with a summary of the articles in this Special Issue and their relations to the points raised in this introduction.

Family Language Policy ten years on: A critical approach to family multilingualism

“…Inasmuch as these observations may sound as methodological truisms, the critical approach proposed in this article, in particular the alignment with a decolonial approach (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007; Mignolo 2011b), motivates the explicit discussion about promoting epistemic diversity (de Souza 2014) and challenging current geopolitics of knowledge (Levon 2017). Furthermore, while postmodern and poststructural critiques also challenge the neutrality of knowledge production and promote a greater involvement with methodological and epistemological reflexivity, and researcher positionality, a decolonial approach takes yet another step and envisages the need to redress the extant erasure of voices from the global South from current sociolinguistic debates (Milani and Lazar 2017) by deliberately bringing to the fore such perspectives, be it by focussing on the particular struggles of peoples from the global South, or by drawing on theory developed in Southern contexts.…”

“…Finally, as long as the relevance of investigating families that go beyond the 'traditional, two-parents model' is framed within a logic of 'denial of coevalness' (Fabian 1983), FLP as a field of inquiry might restrict itself to a liberal understanding of diversity (Kymlicka 1995), and overlook debates that shed light on issues such as social class (Block, 2015) One way to overcome this limitation, and in line with the growing need to include southern perspectives in current sociolinguistic debates (cf. Levon 2017;Milani and Lazar 2017;García et al 2017), the critical approach to family multilingualism proposed here draws on the works of scholars involved with the decolonial turn (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007). Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007) claim that while the forms of domination employed by European nation-states might have changed, the structure that sustains the relations between 'central' and 'peripheral' countries remains the same.…”

Affect as narrative action in the Global South

“…In this respect, queer linguistics is not solely tasked with the analysis of discourses of gender and sexuality, but sets out to explore the intersections between these and other global/local systems of power and identity centred on factors such as ethnicity, social class (Levon, 2015;Milani & Lazar, 2017), and, in the case of this practice, access to and mastery of multilingual resources. Adopting a queer linguistic perspective to investigate the discursive construction of social action in this setting thus means to problematize sexualised notions of North to South knowledge flows, neo-colonial forms of exploitation and conversely empowerment, as well as abiding hetero and homonormative discourses that often subsume practices situated in the Global South.…”

“…Although this inquiry is situated in Cambodia, a geographic region of the Global South, and focuses on the knowledges of social actors there, taking such a position is not to privilege, at risk of essentialising, or even exoticising, one form of knowledge production over another. In contrast, and as explained by Milani and Lazar (2017), it is to: …use the South as a conceptual and analytical lens through which to understand the discursive dynamics of gender and sexuality in non-Northern contexts, and, in doing so, strive towards more inclusive transnational theoretical projects (p. 311).…”

“…Besides the broader research narrative that highlights the significance of these samesex transnational relationships to the spatio-temporal context in which they are initiated and sustained, the analysis draws attention to how narrative research and analysis of small stories may align with approaches from queer linguistics and an ex-centric Southern vantage point (Milani & Lazar, 2017). Moreover, consistent with recent discourse analytic work that has provided understandings of affect as social action, as discussed for example in the context of the research interview (Prior, 2016), in linguistic landscapes of the body (Peck & Stroud, 2015), in acts of citizenship (Milani, 2015), and the interrelations between economies and emotions (Katigbak, 2015), this analysis brings further awareness to the field of narrative inquiry of affect as a powerful interactional narrative resource.…”