This article presents a grounded critical discourse analysis of six feature-style articles published in right-leaning newspapers at the peak of negative media attention to Mermaids, a UK charity that advocates for trans young people. The results show how British "gender-critical" writers have manufactured a conspiracy-style narrative around the threatened futures of women and children, positioning trans young people as victims of an extreme ideology that is spreading through Britain. This threatened futures conspiracy narrative represents a distinctively British manifestation of global "anti-gender" discourse, with columnists reshaping and recycling long-standing specters of threat to the British nation such as violence against women and children, the foreign Other, extremism, and radicalization. Such fears are reignited and mobilized against British trans youth in these feature articles, contributing to an increasingly hostile environment for these young people and their supporters.
This article focuses on L & oacute;xoro, a Peruvian cryptolect stereotypically associated with trans women sex workers, and the metapragmatic discourses about its use and vitality. I argue that contrary to the external, dominant belief that L & oacute;xoro is a full-fledged secret language exclusively employed among trans women in extreme situations, many transgender women view L & oacute;xoro as a set of linguistic signs that lightly encrypt daily speech. Based on my interviews with trans women, I reconceptualize L & oacute;xoro as a queer argot. I analyze three recurrent enregisterment discursive elements that deviate from the exoticizing narrative reinforced by Peruvian media. L & oacute;xoro is not only used by transgender women, it is also performed for joy and building community, and it is getting lost among newer generations of trans women.
Name changes are a major yet understudied component of transgender and/or nonbinary experiences. We analyzed 40 oral history interviews from the New York City Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP) to discuss transgender naming practices in the context of personal experience narratives (PENs). Using a qualitative methodology based on constructivist-grounded theory approaches alongside mixed-methods elements, we built our understanding of trans naming practices in our dataset in four categories: (1) name changes as a part of the transition process, (2) name changes in the context of relationships, (3) name changes as multiple and fluid, and (4) name changes as intersectional phenomena. We use these approaches to construct a dynamic and nuanced understanding of name-changing practices, which often intersect with cultural and migration-related concerns. Applying theories of gender and language to our data, we argue that transgender and/or nonbinary name-changing practices are a part of a cluster of phenomena related to processes of linguistic transition.
This study investigates how online advertisements for female-targeted sex toys in China discursively commodify sexual pleasure as part of neoliberal biopolitics of gender. Employing Asif Agha's framework of enregisterment, it examines 482 multimodal advertisements for 55 products on the e-commerce platform of Wave, a popular Chinese sex toy retailer. The analysis demonstrates how commercial discourses organize texts and semiotic emblems to reflexively link sex toys with three predominant lifestyle formations-romanticized self-pleasing, playful heteronormativity, and technologized inconspicuousness of sexual consumption-each framing sexual pleasure as an optimizable resource for performing idealized womanhoods such as cosmopolitanism and playful heterosexual intimacy. These lifestyle registers circulate online as value regimes to normalize sexual consumption as aspirational gendered conduct. The study argues that this process constitutes a distinctive biopolitics of gender in post-reform China, wherein liberalized market forces align sexual pleasure, consumerist lifestyles, and neoliberal self-regulating femininities to sustain economic growth while reproducing gendered, state-compatible subjects.
This paper draws on queer linguistics, with a focus on drag performances, to explore the intersection of language, gender, and sexuality in sociolinguistically minoritized communities. Although queer and drag linguistics have been examined over the past two decades, the intersection of conflicted, minoritized languages and LGBTQ+ issues remains understudied. Ethnographic research into rural and urban queer festivals in Galicia and Catalonia (both bilingual, stateless nations in Spain) reveals certain trends connecting language minoritization and revitalization to queerness. Multilingual and multimodal drag practices at these events indicate post-identity and post-national approaches to ethnolinguistic belonging that parody purism, masculine nationalistic references, and linguistic oppression by the hegemonic language (in this case, Spanish). In these performances, the bodies and voices of the queens and kings drag the nation and offer new meanings to what Galician and Catalan represent for their speakers, who gather at queer events to negotiate both their gender and sociolinguistic identities. Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on the broader, more pressing issue of how language ideologies operate within queer collectives and events, where sociolinguistic minoritization can be experienced, reinforced, and subverted, and where new forms of queer language advocacy can emerge.
