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Legal and Policy Approaches to Protecting Indigenous Lifeways and Homelands
No full textFrom International legal tools to state-level policy and planning processes, to recognized national conservation mechanisms, and tribal jurisdictional innovations, this talk will explore several creative opportunities and inspiring precedents for protecting and affirming Indigenous rights and responsibilities to homelands
Simultaneous Translation from Brazilian Sign Language to Brazilian Portuguese: Strategies for well-formed syntactic structures from the voices and images of effeminate deaf gays
No full textThe service of simultaneous bimodal translation from Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) to Brazilian-Portuguese in its oral modality started to be highlighted in Brazil when Libras was acknowledged as a lawful means of communication for the Deaf People. Both Law # 10. 436/2002 and Decree # 5.626/2005, in addition to Law # 12.319/2010, have been crucial for the legal and linguistic acknowledgement of Libras. In this context, both the voices and the images of the Deaf gained visibility e legitimacy from the approval of these bills. Certainly, the translating service becomes essential and communicative interaction between Deaf and Hearing People are thus assured. However, when dealing with the utterances in sign language used by Effeminate Deaf Gay, as well as by following the concept of communities of practice approached by Wenger (1998), Eckert; Mccgonnell-Ginet (2003) e Veloso (2014), theoretical approaches and intersections between the fields of Translation Studies and the third wave of Sociolinguistics are needed. Additionally, we have followed the notion of ‘Style’, as defended by Irvine (2001), “’style’ crucially concerns distinctiveness”. We have evidenced that Effeminate Deaf Gays express a particular discourse style similar to the gestures generally associated with behavioral patterns of women such as: gesture fineness, high pitched tone of voice, metalanguage of women’s community of practice, and so forth. We argue that sign language translators and interpreters must not only be aware of this distinctiveness, but also emulate such distinctiveness in their translation process. Our experience with the deaf and LGBTQIA+ communities of practice make us think that the observation of the ‘Style’ may contribute to the better translation performance in terms of the target language. This way, voices and images of (Effeminate) Deaf Gays will be kept in the oral language. Moreover, the linguistic features of the communities of practice of the Deaf Gays must not only be understood but also be in accordance with the discourse of the Portuguese language
Queer Stance: Metalinguistic attitudes towards slur reclamation among LGBTQ young adults
No full text“Queer” as an identity label has undergone significant semantic shift since the LGBT rights movements of the 1980s and 90s. Today, many consider it a “reclaimed” or ameliorated slur, as attested by the existence of Queer Studies as a discipline in major universities. Social media and legal discourse, however, show that not all LGBTQ people, institutions, and corporations are comfortable with reclaimed uses of “queer.” In this paper I explore the metalinguistic attitudes of young queer people (age 18-35) towards reclaimed use of “queer” and other anti-LGBTQ slurs.
I conducted twelve- to- twenty-minute interviews with young, self-identified members of the LGBTQ community in a college town in Central Illinois. Following Jaffe 2009, Bucholtz and Hall 2004, and a discourse analytic framework, I analyzed their stance-taking tactics towards “queer” as a slur and/or an identity label, and towards wider discourse on language and LGBTQ identity. Preliminary results suggest that these young people hold positive metalinguistic attitudes towards “queer”; their discourse positions “queer” as a useful umbrella term and/or as a marker of non-normativity in the face of mainstream trends towards homo-, hetero-, or cisnormativity. Multiple participants named “faggot” and the supposedly neutral “gay” (as opposed to “queer”) as the homophobic slurs they have heard most often at home, on the Internet, and in school settings. These interviews, and the wider discourse around LGBTQ identity labels, has implications for the study of the life cycle and semantic shift of slurs. This discourse also has bearings on institutional and legal policies surrounding the use of (reclaimed) slurs in social media, trademarks (see Anten 2016), and academic settings
Parents, trans children, and agency: The constitution of trans identities in childhood
No full textRecent work in trans studies suggests that trans childhoods offer particularly useful occasions for the exploration of evolving discourses of gender, including not only understandings and embodiments of trans and gender non-conforming identities, but also evaluations of those identities (Gill-Peterson, 2019; Meadow, 2018). Trans children begin life under a unique set of constraints due to the beliefs and actions of parents or legal guardians, political and educational policies, access to medical resources, and other types of formal and informal influence. Trans childhoods give researchers a promising (but unsettling) opportunity to look at the co-construction of transness and childhood in interaction and to trace trans kids’ ability to exert agency over their own gendered self-understandings vis-à-vis the understandings of adults in their lives. In this project, we used Membership Categorization Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (Stokoe, 2006; Fairclough, 1995) to examine the role of parents in discursive constructions of trans childhoods and to investigate the meanings and boundaries of agency in relation to trans children. Using data sets that include interactive parent-child talk from three documentaries about trans children (PBS’s Growing Up Trans, National Geographic’s Growing Up Trans and Mormon, and Them’s Kai Shappley: A Trans Girl Growing Up in Texas ), we argue that traditional and dominant discourses of transness (i.e. “being born in the wrong body”) are used to normalize trans children’s gender identities and allow parents to accept their child’s transition without fundamentally altering their understanding of the membership categorization device for cis-heteronormative gender (consisting of the members ‘man’ and ‘woman’). We contend that discourses surrounding the parenting of trans children should question the assumed subversiveness of trans identities and push for conceptualizations of transness centered around liberation from rather than assimilation to hegemonic gender discourses
Gender on the Line: Agency, Power, and Fundamental Frequency of Transfeminine Individuals
No full textFor many transgender people, changes to their voice are a significant part of their transition given that the voice is an important factor in the perception of gender. Previous work in transgender linguistics has examined the role that fundamental frequency plays in the performance of gender but has largely focused on transmasculine populations (Zimman 2012, Zimman 2017). Research on transfeminine people and their voices is needed in a world with transphobic violence and increasingly hypervisible icons to aspire to (Gossett, Stanley and Burton 2017).
While speech therapy and hormone replacement therapy offer ways for transgender people to transition their voice, these methods often fall short as they do not align with the goals and needs of the participant in the therapy or, in the case of feminizing hormone replacement therapy, has little to no effect on the voice at all. To improve the efficacy of speech therapy for transfeminine populations, this paper examines four transfeminine speakers and their fundamental frequency values in three scenarios: reading off of a word list, reading a written passage, and participating in a sociolinguistic interview. Average fundamental frequency values were found to be higher for the more formal and structured scenarios (word list/reading passage) when compared to the values of the sociolinguistic interview.
These results demonstrate that transfeminine speakers, like cisgender speakers, modulate their pitch depending on the particular social scenario that they find themselves in. The agency that transfeminine populations have over their voice is one way in which they are reclaiming power over their own lives and experiences. Using this data will help return more power to this marginalized population and aid in shaping future speech therapy programs geared for transfeminine people