Tommaso M Milani
Biographic Data
| ID | 669646 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tommaso M Milani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tommaso M |
| FAMILY NAME | Milani |
| SIGNATURE | MILANI T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gothenburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7237-5501 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 483 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Homonationalism as a sentimental matrix: Contestation of Palestinian LGBTQ+ rights in the ‘Tahini Incident’
This article examines the 2020 ‘tahini incident’ as an empirical site for understanding the affective and discursive operations of Israeli homonationalism. We argue that homonationalism in Israel-Palestine operates through what we call a sentimental matrix: an affective–discursive regime that mobilises empathy, compassion, and narratives of Palestinian LGBTQ+ suffering to produce moral hierarchies between a purportedly progressive Israeli Self an…
Writing Poetry in Yiddish During the Destruction of Gaza? Linguistic Citizenship in a Time of Moral Crisis
In this commentary, we foreground the dilemmas that arise when ethics and politics clash. Taking the Yiddish‐language poem Khurbn Aze [lit. The Destruction of Gaza] as our entry point, we argue that Stroud's sociolinguistic notion of linguistic citizenship together with Levinas's moral philosophy can offer a productive theoretical lens for understanding the complex nexus of ethics and politics. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we argue that th…
Language Ideology and Public Discourse
Language ideology is a concept that grasps the social production of meanings and values of different linguistic practices, varieties, or styles. While linguistic phenomena are viewed as equal by linguists, they are not in society at large so that, say, a language is believed to be “better” or “more beautiful” than a dialect. Research in language ideology aims to trace the social processes of naming, signifying, and valorizing/devaluing linguistic…
Why Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist and Why We Should Study Language to Understand It
Towards a New Chapter for Language in Society
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Looking back - Looking ahead
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Why should we care about multilingualism, gender, and sexuality
In this introductory essay, we lay some theoretical ground to the special issue on Queering Multilingualism. We outline what we mean by ‘queering’, and why it is necessary in relation to multilingualism. Ultimately, our argument is that a focus on gender and sexuality allows us to expand our understanding of the complexity of power relations in multilingual settings, encounters, and lived experiences. With the help of examples from the contributi…
Theorizing checkpoints of desire: Multilingualism, sexuality and (in)securitization in Israel/Palestine
In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate the affective constraints that political conflicts impose. Specifically, we consider the role of multilingualism in enabling sexual and romantic intimacy between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel/Palestine. Our data are drawn from a close examination of the speech of Fadi Daeem, one of the protagonists in the 2015 documentary Oriented. Building …
Navigating whiteness from the margins: Finnish, Somali, and Arabic speakers’ experiences of racialization, (in)visibility, and (im)mobility in Gothenburg, Sweden
This paper examines the relationship between language, (in)visibility, and (im)mobility in racialized spaces, focusing on Finnish, Somali, and Arabic speakers in Sweden. Using a theoretical framework based on hegemonic whiteness and intersectionality, the study explores how multilingual practices and subjectivities intersect with race, religion, gender, and class to shape social visibility and mobility. The research draws on linguistic ethnograph…
Gender equality in the name of the state: State feminism or femonationalism in civic orientation for newly arrived migrants in Sweden
This article contributes to ongoing discussions in the social sciences about how to interpret the incorporation of gender equality into integration policies – is it a form of state feminism or femonationalism? Drawing upon intersectionality, we analyse how gender equality is presented, discussed and negotiated in relation to ethnicity and nationality in Sweden. Methodologically, we employ a bifocal lens that combines (1) a quantitative investigat…
Writing or reading? An incommensurable choice? [Language in Society]
In this article, we reflect upon Wolfgang Klein's provocative suggestion, in Writing or reading, but not both or: a proposal to reintroduce cuneiform writing using the hammer and chisel, that "every scientist" at universities or other research institutions "may and must publish exactly thirty pages a year." In our view, Klein's proposal to limit the number of pages each author should be allotted in a given year is comparable to a pill that treats…
A semiotics of the otherwise: Space, temporality and politics in Rana Bishara's Roadmap for Elimination
This article presents an analysis of Rana Bishara's installation Roadmap for Elimination, which is semiotically and materially interesting due to the skillful combination of language, maps of Palestine, and other key symbolic elements of Palestinian resistance such as cactus leaves. The article illustrates how, in the artwork, space and time fold into each other for political purposes in such a way that the European colonial past is visually over…
Virgile Cirefice, « L’espoir quotidien »: Cultures et imaginaires socialistes en France et en Italie (1944-1949)
Patterns of democratic participation in twentieth-century Europe were transformed by the rise of a new model of political party. Since German political scientist Sigmund Neumann observed that, under the Weimar Republic, parties based on social integration (Integrationspartei) were gradually replacing parties based on individual representation (Repräsentationspartei) by achieving the “inclusion of the whole person in the political organisation” an…
Language, translocality and urban change: Online and offline signage in four Gothenburg neighbourhoods
This article addresses the role of translocal interconnectedness between offline and online spaces by examining the varied presence of language displays in such spaces. Quantitative findings on language presence in the offline public spaces of four Gothenburg neighbourhoods are contrasted with the online presence found in three Swedish search portals, and the differences are interpreted in light of the broader socioeconomic processes of gentrific…
Introducing the political economy of language in place/space
In the last years, there has been a strong drive within Linguistic Landscape studies to 'go beyond the signs. ' This methodological challenge has often been interpreted as talking to the producers, owners, and readers of signs in order to learn more about how they conceptualize the value and meaning of signs and languages in place. This undertaking has contributed to underlining social agency in the production and interpretation of Linguistic Lan…
Locating Sweden in Time and Space: National Chronotopes in Civic Orientation for Adult Migrants
The aim of this article is to use courses in civic orientation for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden as the empirical entry point from which to investigate whether, and if so, how, civic values are tied to the Swedish nation through specific discourses and narratives. With the help of a framework that brings together theorisations of the discursive construction of the nation with the notions of the chronotope and ‘social narratives’, the art…
Constructing the “Good Citizen”: Discourses of Social Inclusion in Swedish Civic Orientation
Sweden has long been described as a beacon of multiculturalism and generous access to citizenship, with integration policies that seek to offer free and equal access to the welfare state. In this article, we use the policy of Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants as a case with which to understand how migrants’ inclusion is discursively articulated and constructed by the different constituencies involved in interpreting the policy and orga…
Of discursive passports and checkpoints
This commentary advances the notions of passports and checkpoints as heuristics through which to theorise the external and internal push and pull of identity and desire within specific regimes of normativities and geopolitical imbalances. More specifically, passporting happens when normative regimes of representations issue what one could call discursive passports – that is, institutionalised identity bundles, which sediment over time, defining i…
Translanguaging in a Context of Colonized Education: The Case of EFL Classrooms for Arabic Speakers in Israel
Previous studies of translanguaging in educational contexts indicate that translanguaging practices have the potential to generate a decolonial, emancipatory process for language-minoritized students. However, these insights are mainly based on studies of minoritized learners of English as a second language. Drawing on a one-year ethnographic study conducted in six Palestinian schools in Northern Israel, the present study investigated the effects…
Responsibility for justice in action: Commemoration, affect and politics at Il Memoriale della Shoah in Milan
In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) and multidirectional memory. This analytic approach allows us to examine the nonlinear shape…
Discourses of collective remembering: Contestation, politics, affect
This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three c…
Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel and the mediatization of street art
This article offers a critical semiotic analysis of the media discourses about Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem. Unlike the existing burgeoning scholarship on this tourist initiative, the article focuses less on the space of the hotel itself and the street art therein than on their mediatization. With the help of the notion of mediatization, the article offers a granular account of the discursive circulation of Banksy’s street art assemblag…
Street art/art in the street – semiotics, politics, economy
The last decades have seen the ideological transformations of graffiti and street art once constructed as criminal acts and associated with urban decay to being acceptable and profitable forms of commercial art. The spaces and places where these art forms are found have long transcended streets to art galleries and corporate advertising billboards and campaigns making them "the most visible forms of global urban culture and urban transgression" (…
Knowledge negotiation and interactional power: Epistemic stances in Arabic–Swedish antenatal care consultations
This article concerns knowledge negotiations as an aspect of interactional power in three-way interaction between Arabic-speaking women, Swedish-speaking midwives and interpreters in Swedish antenatal care. The notion of epistemic stance is used to investigate how all three participants negotiate knowledge, and how this affects the ongoing consultation. The data consist of audio recordings of 33 consultations, involving five midwives. Using an in…
Jean-Numa Ducange, Razmig Keucheyan, Stéphanie Roza (dir.), Histoire globale des socialismes, XIXe-XXIe siècles: Paris, PUF, 2021, 1156 p
Producing a one-volume global history of socialism from its early days to the present may be an unnerving task for any historian, who would understandably struggle to come up with a single, overarching narrative while also providing a reasonably comprehensive coverage of the many geographically sparse and ideologically multifarious phenomena that the word ‘socialism’ has come to encompass over time. All this without mentioning the impossibility o…
Are ‘queers’ really ‘queer’? Language, identity and same-sex desire in a South African online community
This study investigates meetmarket, a South African online community for men who are looking for other men. Utilising a quantitative approach to queer linguistics, the article presents a textual analysis of a large corpus of personal profiles in order to map meetmarket’s ‘libidinal economy’. More specifically, the article seeks to tease out the ways in which the members of this community valorise, and thereby make more desirable, certain identiti…
Seeing from the South: Discourse, gender and sexuality from southern perspectives
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 sou…
Sexual cityzenship: Discourses, spaces and bodies at Joburg Pride 2012
This article explores an incident that took place in the context of Joburg Pride 2012, where the activist group One in Nine Campaign attempted to temporarily stop the Pride parade through means of a die-in protest, resulting in resistance and violence on the part of the Pride participants. The article argues that Pride and the One in Nine protest are manifestations of two very different types of sexual cityzenship. Whilst Pride is an orderly clai…
What's in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate1
This paper investigates a recent print-mediated discussion about linguistic phenomena that are perceived by many commentators to be 'deviant' from 'standard Swedish.' The aim of the paper is to illustrate how this language debate is built on two closely entwined discursive processes: a struggle to define the name, meaning, and value of a specific linguistic phenomenon; and the indexical processes through which such a phenomenon is bound up with a…
Language testing and citizenship: A language ideological debate in Sweden
This article explores a public debate that took place in Sweden in 2002 in relation to the Swedish Liberal Party's proposal to introduce a language test for naturalization. On the basis of textual analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper articles, it examines the explicit and implicit facets of an ideology of language testing. It is argued that a seemingly liberal, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory ideology is emerging, which, in it…
Discourse and affect
This introductory article lays some theoretical ground that stimulated this special issue: first, the argument that affect is not “in”, or indeed “outside of” the individual or the social, but relates to the circulation of emotion between different sites, objects or bodies; and, second, that how this circulation of emotion works, in and through discourse, has not been sufficiently taken up and explored by semioticians, linguists and (critical) di…
Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk
This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions i…
Who's Afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance
Over the last 30 years, linguistic practices of young people in highly dense urban environments in Sweden (also called Rinkeby Swedish) have become something of a Foucauldian conundrum: a phenomenon to be investigated, a problem to be regulated. The present article will explore the dynamic interplay between the ideologies and practices with regard to Rinkeby Swedish. The article will focus on (1) a panel debate that took place in the context of t…
Sexing diversity: Linguistic landscapes of homonationalism
Thematising multilingualism in the media
The focus of this special issue is on the opportunities presented and challenges posed by the thematisation of multilingualism in the media. A number of case studies from a variety of linguistic, media, political, social, economic and educational contexts are presented, with the objective of addressing the challenges and opportunities that arise when multilingualism becomes thematised. In this introduction, we would like to address two main theor…
Language and citizenship: Broadening the agenda
The main argument advanced in this article that frames this special issue is that citizenship is not just a highly polysemic word employed by the media and other political institutions; it is also a set of norms and (linguistic) behaviours that individuals are socialised into, as well as a series of practices that social actors perform through an array of semiotic means including multilingualism, multivoicedness, the body, and affect. In light of…
No-go zones in Sweden: The infectious communicability of evil
The focus of this article is on the mundane nastiness of language. Drawing on Arendt’s (1963) banality of evil and Briggs’s (2005) notion of infectious communicability, the article highlights the moral dimensions of political and media discourses that spread a communicable image of Sweden as a country in disarray. I demonstrate that this image is made of two discursive ingredients: the spatial trope of the no-go zone , and the truthiness of its d…
Citizenship as status, habitus and acts: Language requirements and civic orientation in Sweden
This article employs the notions of citizenship as status, habitus and acts as a framework through which to capture how sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower intersect in the context of Sweden’s current management of migration. Through an analysis of policy and media debates, the article first illustrates how citizenship as status and sovereign power in Sweden have undergone a shift from actively endorsing multilingualism and cultural …
Colonial intertexts: Discourses, bodies and stranger fetishism in the Brazilian media
Israel as homotopia: Language, space, and vicious belonging
Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israelis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalist project. For this purpose, we analyze the documentaryOriented(2015), produced by the British direc…
At the intersection between power and knowledge: An analysis of a Swedish policy document on language testing for citizenship
The aim of this article is to analyse a policy document in which the Swedish Liberal Party attempts to substantiate the proposal to introduce a Swedish language test for naturalisation by referring to academic production. Taking this specific text as a case in point, the article draws upon Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to show how the rationalisation and legitimation of a particular political proposal is ine…
Doing critical multimodality in research on gender, language and discourse
The aim of this paper is to open a discussion about multimodal work in the area of gender, language and discourse, and propose the kinds of multimodal approaches that are most appropriate for this task. Multimodality, we claim, is a rather fragmented and unconsolidated field where many of the tools and concepts applied by different researchers are much less suitable than others. Our intention here is to raise critical questions about the affordan…
Incomprehensible language
In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a ‘matrix of intelligibility’ (Butler 1999 [1990]) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike…
Expanding the Queer Linguistic scene: Multimodality, space and sexuality at a South African university
This paper investigates the relationships between gender, sexuality and space, understood both in material and discursive terms. To this end, it brings under the spotlight Safe Zones, an anti-homophobia campaign spearheaded in 2011 and 2012 by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. More specifically, the paper draws upon Queer Linguistics in order to deconstruct a sample of banal sexed signs, produced as part of the ca…
Discourses of collective remembering: Contestation, politics, affect
This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three c…
Mediatizing intersectionality
Street art/art in the street – semiotics, politics, economy
The last decades have seen the ideological transformations of graffiti and street art once constructed as criminal acts and associated with urban decay to being acceptable and profitable forms of commercial art. The spaces and places where these art forms are found have long transcended streets to art galleries and corporate advertising billboards and campaigns making them "the most visible forms of global urban culture and urban transgression" (…
Making the threatening other laughable: Ambiguous performances of urban vernaculars in Swedish media
Crossing boundaries
The main argument of this article is that Israel seeks to govern its expat citizens not so much through the mobilisation of their ‘rational capacities to evaluate truth claims but through affects’ (Isin, 2004:225). Such viscerality of Israeli nationalism can be seen in the ways in which speci?c emotions – mourning, shame, guilt and fear of loss – are activated through particular semiotic choices. These affective resources, in turn, are marshalled…
The banality of evil
The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gender clinic, creating an emotionally charged local regime of doctor/ patient interactions. Our interest is not only in illustrating how the clinic's institutionalised normatitivies about transbodies are the result of the crystallisation of particular transnational medical discourses, but also in showing how such a normative framework creates specific con…
Language Planning and National Identity in Sweden: A Performativity Approach
Much of the existing body of literature on language planning and national identity in Sweden has underscored the absence of language planning and a sense of a traditional national identity until the mid-1990s (for example, Teleman 2003; Teleman and Westman 1997). This was followed in the late 1990s by the flourishing of a series of debates on the Swedish language both among academics and politicians. The new overt interest in language planning is…
Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World
Sally Johnson, Spelling trouble: Language, ideology and the reform of German orthography
Sally Johnson, Spelling trouble: Language, ideology and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp viii, 208. Hb $89.95, Pb $39.95. Since the 1990s language ideology has developed into a field of inquiry of its own. Research on language ideology seeks to investigate how linguistic forms and practices and their conceptualizations are enmeshed in other contextually bound cultural patterns and practices, and how l…
Language politics and legitimation crisis in Sweden: A Habermasian approach
Since the late 1990s the question of whether to ratify the status of Swedish as the “principal” language of Sweden by means of a language law has been subject to considerable public dispute. Drawing on Blommaert’s concept of a “language ideological debate,” we explore how and why this particular debate seemingly ground to a halt without achieving any kind of tangible closure. In order to do so, we introduce Habermas’s notion of “legitimation cris…
Sociolinguistics of Identity
Language testing and citizenship: A language ideological debate in Sweden
This article explores a public debate that took place in Sweden in 2002 in relation to the Swedish Liberal Party's proposal to introduce a language test for naturalization. On the basis of textual analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper articles, it examines the explicit and implicit facets of an ideology of language testing. It is argued that a seemingly liberal, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory ideology is emerging, which, in it…
At the intersection between power and knowledge: An analysis of a Swedish policy document on language testing for citizenship
The aim of this article is to analyse a policy document in which the Swedish Liberal Party attempts to substantiate the proposal to introduce a Swedish language test for naturalisation by referring to academic production. Taking this specific text as a case in point, the article draws upon Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to show how the rationalisation and legitimation of a particular political proposal is ine…
What's in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate1
This paper investigates a recent print-mediated discussion about linguistic phenomena that are perceived by many commentators to be 'deviant' from 'standard Swedish.' The aim of the paper is to illustrate how this language debate is built on two closely entwined discursive processes: a struggle to define the name, meaning, and value of a specific linguistic phenomenon; and the indexical processes through which such a phenomenon is bound up with a…
Incomprehensible language
In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a ‘matrix of intelligibility’ (Butler 1999 [1990]) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike…
Unity in disunity: Centripetal and centrifugal tensions on the BBC Voices website
This paper takes as a point of departure the website of the “Voices” project, a large media enterprise on languages in the UK conducted by the BBC in 2003–2005. With the help of the notions of language ideology and the analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis, the paper shows how representations of languages on the website are a discursive terrain on which negotiations of national identities are played out. Essentially, the argu…
Thematising multilingualism in the media
The focus of this special issue is on the opportunities presented and challenges posed by the thematisation of multilingualism in the media. A number of case studies from a variety of linguistic, media, political, social, economic and educational contexts are presented, with the objective of addressing the challenges and opportunities that arise when multilingualism becomes thematised. In this introduction, we would like to address two main theor…
Language Ideology and Public Discourse
Over the past two decades, the notion of language ideology has gained considerable momentum in different strands of scholarship that aim to unpack how language works in society. Language ideology has its roots in North American linguistic anthropology as a concept within which to explore the “mediating links between social forms and forms of talk” (Woolard, 1998, p. 3). Whilst it is axiomatic for linguists that “all languages are equal” in terms …
Who's Afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance
Over the last 30 years, linguistic practices of young people in highly dense urban environments in Sweden (also called Rinkeby Swedish) have become something of a Foucauldian conundrum: a phenomenon to be investigated, a problem to be regulated. The present article will explore the dynamic interplay between the ideologies and practices with regard to Rinkeby Swedish. The article will focus on (1) a panel debate that took place in the context of t…
Are ‘queers’ really ‘queer’? Language, identity and same-sex desire in a South African online community
This study investigates meetmarket, a South African online community for men who are looking for other men. Utilising a quantitative approach to queer linguistics, the article presents a textual analysis of a large corpus of personal profiles in order to map meetmarket’s ‘libidinal economy’. More specifically, the article seeks to tease out the ways in which the members of this community valorise, and thereby make more desirable, certain identiti…
Expanding the Queer Linguistic scene: Multimodality, space and sexuality at a South African university
This paper investigates the relationships between gender, sexuality and space, understood both in material and discursive terms. To this end, it brings under the spotlight Safe Zones, an anti-homophobia campaign spearheaded in 2011 and 2012 by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. More specifically, the paper draws upon Queer Linguistics in order to deconstruct a sample of banal sexed signs, produced as part of the ca…
Queer & trans Art-iculations: Decolonising gender and sexualities in the global South
This special issue has grown out of the exhibition queer & trans Art-iculations: Collaborative Art for Social Change which featured the jointly exhibited works of South African art activists, Zanel
Querying the queer from Africa: Precarious bodies – precarious gender
A large body of scholarship across several disciplines has convincingly illustrated how the gender binary – the distinction between males and females as complementary and desirable opposites – is constantly reproduced through everyday, apparently ‘banal’, practices. Such process is not innocuous but is part and parcel of hegemonic ideological formations of gender and sexuality that contribute to positioning some individuals as ‘normal’ and ‘desir…
Signs in context: Multilingual and Multimodal Texts in Semiotic Space
Sexed signs - queering the scenery
The main argument of this article is that Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship has largely ignored - erased even - gender and sexuality, two important axes of power along which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested. In order to partly redress this academic oversight, this article investigates a small data set of banal sexed signs, mundane semiotic aggregates, which, precisely because of their fleeting and unassuming …
The performativity of the body: Turbulent spaces in Greece
This article explores the “performativity of the body” (Butler, 2011) using ‘anarchic’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ protests in Greece as empirical starting points. We analyze the ways in which bodies speak politically by producing spatial turbulence in interaction with other bodies, and the materiality of urban environments. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the expansion of linguistic landscape scholarship into what Peck and Stroud (2015) call …
Gender and Language – Looking ahead
Queer skin, straight masks: Same-sex weddings and the discursive construction of identities and affects on a South African website
This article showcases an exploratory study of the website of a Cape Town-based company specialising in arranging same-sex weddings. Informed by queer theory, the article deconstructs the discursive strategies – both linguistic and visual – through which same-sex weddings, and the affects attached to them, are represented on the website. Essentially the argument is that the identitarian and affective constructions on this website are not so radic…
Sexual cityzenship: Discourses, spaces and bodies at Joburg Pride 2012
This article explores an incident that took place in the context of Joburg Pride 2012, where the activist group One in Nine Campaign attempted to temporarily stop the Pride parade through means of a die-in protest, resulting in resistance and violence on the part of the Pride participants. The article argues that Pride and the One in Nine protest are manifestations of two very different types of sexual cityzenship. Whilst Pride is an orderly clai…
Language and citizenship: Broadening the agenda
The main argument advanced in this article that frames this special issue is that citizenship is not just a highly polysemic word employed by the media and other political institutions; it is also a set of norms and (linguistic) behaviours that individuals are socialised into, as well as a series of practices that social actors perform through an array of semiotic means including multilingualism, multivoicedness, the body, and affect. In light of…
Ten Years of Gender and Language
Sociology (59 works) · Political science (46 works) · Politics (33 works) · Gender Studies (32 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (32 works) · Linguistics (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Art (19 works)