The Real Tea: Language at the Intersections

Abstract

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.

Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise

“…But the people captured by these labels are not all the same: “woman” and “man” are not monoliths but categories that are heterogeneous and locally realized (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Eckert & Podesva, 2021:26). In addition, there is erasure of other aspects of identity (Levon, 2015; miles-hercules, 2022) that are co-constructed with gender, including those unmarked identifications packaged alongside “woman” and “man” like heterosexual, gender-normative, white, English-speaking, and middle-class with concomitant erasure of diversity within those aspects of social structure as well. A second type of erasure comes about through the exclusion of speakers, those who do not fit into the categories “woman” and “man” or sit on or cross their borders.…”

Toward a non‐binary semiotics of intersectionality: linguistic anthropology in the wake of coloniality

“…Lazar, 2019; Liu et al, 2013; Nash, 2008; Puar, 2007). Its use has proliferated, but as sociocultural linguist deandre miles‐hercules has argued, the term “intersectionality” has undergone indexical and semantic bleaching through both the erasure of the blackwomen&femme scholars who developed the analytic (and who did so even before the term as such existed); and, concomitantly, through the warping of its meaning and application (miles‐hercules, 2022, 4–5). In the academy, this has manifested less in critiques that take intersectionality as nothing more than “identity politics on steroids” or just a way to “turn white men into the new pariahs,” as Crenshaw noted in a recent interview when speaking on right‐wing alarmism aimed at intersectionality in the U.S. (in Steinmetz, 2020).…”

“…In the academy, this has manifested less in critiques that take intersectionality as nothing more than “identity politics on steroids” or just a way to “turn white men into the new pariahs,” as Crenshaw noted in a recent interview when speaking on right‐wing alarmism aimed at intersectionality in the U.S. (in Steinmetz, 2020). Instead of bald‐faced dismissal, the term more often gets stripped of its dual commitments to “(a) addressing the ways single‐axis analyses of systemic inequality make invisible the experiences of multiply‐bound subjects and (b) disrupting the hegemonic order that conditions this erasure” (miles‐hercules, 2022, 4). The result has been a conflation of intersectionality with marginalization or complexity in general, resulting in defanged, discursively encompassing claims like “culture itself is intersectional” (Boellstorff, 2005, 18, cited in miles‐hercules, 2022, 5).…”

“…Instead of bald‐faced dismissal, the term more often gets stripped of its dual commitments to “(a) addressing the ways single‐axis analyses of systemic inequality make invisible the experiences of multiply‐bound subjects and (b) disrupting the hegemonic order that conditions this erasure” (miles‐hercules, 2022, 4). The result has been a conflation of intersectionality with marginalization or complexity in general, resulting in defanged, discursively encompassing claims like “culture itself is intersectional” (Boellstorff, 2005, 18, cited in miles‐hercules, 2022, 5). Across both scholarly and lay domains, the bleaching of intersectionality reproduces the structures of white supremacy, anti‐Blackness, and misogynoir—the nexus of anti‐Black racism and misogynistic representation that targets Black women (Bailey, 2021)—even in work that claims to do the opposite.…”

“…In our second section, we explicate what we mean by intersectionality‐as‐method, focusing on the ways that intersectionality both reconfigures and amplifies methodologies and epistemologies for the study of semiosis broadly, and socially situated language use specifically. Next, we outline the implications that this approach has for locating the personal in the ethnographic, refusing the (neo)liberal presumption that identities are discreet, perduring, and given, and that persons preexist their thinking, interpreting, and doing in the world (miles‐hercules, 2022, 6; see also Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). In this section, we engage with the multimodality of ethnographic situations as both an empirical fact and methodological warrant and trace out both the implications of a non‐binary intersectional method and the ways that contributors to this issue elaborate on these stakes and affordances.…”