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Merely diversifying? : Intersectionality in sexual consent guidance
No full textYoung people, especially multiply marginalised youth, report a gap between the information they need about sexuality, consent, and healthy relationships, versus the education they actually receive (Girlguiding 2015). Although intersectional approaches to sexuality have been popular for decades (Eckert 1989, Crenshaw 1989), the question of what successful intersectional education and research looks like remains problematic (Ecker 2014, Crenshaw 1991). Within sociolinguistics, intersectionality has been widely interpreted as recommending that analyses not simply add sociodemographic categories together, but rather attend to specific lived experiences of multiply marginalised populations, to understand how axes of social differentiation interact to produce social inequalities, and how they are resisted (Levon and Beline Mendes 2016, Wong 2016).
Drawing on a c. 120,000-word corpus of consent guidance produced by UK institutions for the British public, I show that intersectionality sometimes eludes even the most well-intentioned practitioners. Combining corpus linguistics and feminist discourse analysis, I argue that the texts construct solidarity with heterosexual men survivors, especially when distancing men from others’ perception of them as gay. But texts which discuss intersectional LGBTQ experiences construct intersectional experiences distally.
Paradoxically, then, highlighting the specificities of lived experience may privilege heterosexual men’s experiences over those of LGBTQ survivors, and present intersectional experiences as exceptional. I therefore argue that “merely diversifying” educational materials is not necessarily emancipatory, and may exacerbate rather than alleviate “fractal recursivity” (Gal and Irvine 1995, cf Eckert 2014). I conclude by suggesting future directions for intersectional education and research
A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Discursive Construction of LGBTQ Singaporeans in Media Coverage of Pink Dot
No full textBeginning in the spring of 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore’s LGBTQ communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBTQ Singaporeans; the inaugural theme was “freedom to love.” Within a few years, the event had morphed into a budding social movement and by 2018, organizers settled on the more assertive theme of “We are Ready,” which challenged the governments assertions that Singaporeans were “not ready” to embrace LGBTQ equality. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People’s Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. Following the models of Baker (2004) and Findlay (2017), this paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog “The Online Citizen.” Two separate language corpora (state-run press and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 80,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgariff et al. 2004), top keywords (i.e. love, family unit, homosexual, lifestyle) were identified by comparing these corpora to the EnTenTen 13 corpus. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance
PROUD. TOGETHER. : A Discursive Analysis of the Michael Kors and Levi’s LGBTQ Pride Month Advertising Campaigns
No full textUtilizing Theo Van Leeuwen’s (2005) concepts of speech acts and genre in combination with Gunther Kress’ (2010) social-semiotic theory of modality, and critical discourse analysis, this presentation provides a multimodal critical discourse analysis of two fashion advertising campaigns through in-store images and websites that were on display for LGBTQ Pride 2019. This multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals how Michael Kors and Levi’s create meaning in their advertising campaigns during LGBTQ Pride month and highlights the contrast between the two in their marketing. This paper asks if this contrast reflect differences between the organizational values and cultures of the two corporations.
Corporate advertising campaigns represent the brand of an organization. The brand communicates its core values and internal culture. In creating marketing campaigns, the company imparts its brand, overtly or covertly, through illocutionary acts. These acts are attempts to connect with its audience on an emotional level in order to sell its product, the intended perlocutionary act. According to Paltridge (2012), “A key point [Van Leeuwen] draws from speech act theory is how a speech act is both an illocutionary act (what the speech act is aiming to do) and a perlocutionary act (the effect it has on the thoughts and actions of people).”
The Michael Kors campaign commodifies the LGBTQ community by manipulating a symbol of pride and not acknowledging their identities, instead reproducing a heteronormative narrative. In addition, the advertisements use youth and beauty to sell its high-cost products to women. The Levi’s LGBTQ Pride month advertising campaign works to sell product as well, however, unlike Michael Kors, Levi’s creates meanings of support, inclusivity, and being “Proud.” and “Together.” with the LGBTQ community. The Levi’s advertising campaign does not utilize tropes of youth and beauty to sell its products. Instead, it reflects real people of diverse identities. By looking at the illocutionary acts of the Michael Kors and Levi’s advertising campaigns, this multimodal critical discourse analysis provides insight into the core values and cultures of the corporations. This presentation concretely demonstrates how multimodal critical discourse analysis is useful in research regarding language and sexuality
The Journey Back to Wholeness that Already is
Get PDFIf we are born into this world with in an already heightened state of consciousness, at what point in human development do we begin to disconnect? Is the human experience innately traumatic? Through the exploration of Piaget’s stages of development, and in coherence with the concept of transgenerational trauma, I explore moments and modes of intervention, with the intention of building on what is already whole instead of waiting until it is broken. Rather than spending another generation spending our lives trying to heal, reaching for enlightenment and soul connection, what if our end point was actually our beginning one
The Varieties of Spiritual States Triggered by Sex: A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature
Get PDFThis systematic review integrates the empirical evidence of spiritual experiences triggered by sexual activity, including studies by 10 authors. Despite venerable sexual meditative traditions of embodied spiritual practices, such as Hindu Tantra, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Taoism, empirical studies of sexual spiritual experiences are in their infancy. This review presents the range of sexual altered states experiences identified to date and how they qualify as spiritual experiences phenomenologically and in terms of their lifechanging effects. Seventeen distinct sexual-spiritual states have been identified across authors, with 4 others identified at significant levels in qualitative studies by individual authors. As an emergent area of scholarly interest, research on this topic remains scattered across disciplines and is characterized by small studies, many advanced by doctoral students conducting dissertation research. This article integrates the empirical research and situates it in a larger, diverse theoretical, historical, and anecdotal literature, to critically assess consensus on the topic. Deliberate practices, adventitious conditions, human physiology, and other dynamics that conduce to sexual spiritual experiences are discussed
Mystical Experience and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Twenty-first Century Gnosis
Get PDFThis article addresses three ideas: mystical experience, the evolution of consciousness, and gnosis. There are different interpretations of these ideas, so I begin by saying how I intend to understand them. Mystical experience I see as a wider, broader, deeper perception of things and their relations than our usual limited view allows. It provides an ‘unitive’ and ‘participatory’ form of consciousness, in which the usual ‘subject/object’ divide has dissolved. The evolution of consciousness is the notion that our present consciousness is not consciousness per se, but has been arrived at over time. This suggests that there have been other forms of consciousness before it. As Barfield and others have suggested, earlier peoples not only had different ideas about the world than we have, they also saw a different world than we do. This suggests that the consciousness of people of a future time may also differ from ours. Gnosis I see as the cognitive character of mystical consciousness, the ‘knowledge content’ provided by its immediate, direct, non-discursive perception of reality. These ideas are discussed in some length in the present essay
Decomorose: The Somatic Flowering of the Living Quality
Get PDFThis essay is an exploration of the human maturation process from a transpersonal point of view. The main premise of the essay is the notion that our maturation on the level of consciousness (the living quality) is not synonymous with our bodily maturation or the ongoing construction of our social personality (the identity project). It suggests that transpersonality is a fundamental component in human development, but has been overlooked and left out in most areas of modern culture. The recent rise of mental illnesses and the overall frustration or discontent within our society is a direct result of infrastructures that have not allowed the unique principal of consciousness to flourish into the transpersonal state. Our society has portrayed the identity project as the panacea to our most primal longing for expansion, yet Decomorose suggests that an enlivening and recapitulation of our consciousness to incorporate transpersonal dimensions is key to unlocking deeper and newer human potentials. As we seek to remedy our old ways of life and create something new we can no longer afford to pay the crippling price of maintaining conventions that no longer suit the expansion of the human spirit
Dropping the H-bomb : Marriage, Language and Queering the Normative
No full textWhen it comes to discussions of homonormativity, rare is it that you will read an article or book chapter that does not mention same-sex marriage. This is unsurprising given the fact that Lisa Duggan (2002) identified the right to marry as a key interest for those invested in what she termed ‘the new homonormativity’. In defining homonormativity, Duggan name-checked the likes of Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan and the Log Cabin Republicans as examples of a gay and lesbian movement politically (and financially) invested in same-sex marriage legislation - often at the expense of other social justice issues. While offering an important counter to the rhetoric of Sullivan and his kind, subsequent critiques of homonormativity have fixated on same-sex marriage as a concept, rather than as a lived practice. Yet it is only through an examination of same-sex marriage as it is practiced today that we can begin to understand the ambivalent politics of such unions.
In this presentation, I draw on data from in-depth interviews with forty British men involved in a same-sex marriage or civil partnership. Focusing on their responses to the question “how do you refer to each other?”, I explore the politics of marital terminology and examine when, where and why participants choose (not) to ‘drop the H-bomb’ (‘husband’). My research illustrates the ways in which same-sex marriage in the UK represents both a privatizing force for homosexual relationships and a publicizing of queer desire. With marriage conferring a new form of visibility on gay (male) couples, I discuss how my interviewees negotiate, mitigate and celebrate this new status in public.
Through this example of ‘marital language’ in action, I draw attention to the need for a more complex, nuanced and ‘grounded’ interrogation of homonormativity; one that calls into question the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’, between ‘political’ and ‘domesticated’, and between queerness’ and ‘homonormativity’
Gay Enough to Stay’: Exposing the Normativity of Western LGBT Terminology in Asylum Processes
No full textPeople flee their homes for a multitude of reasons. In the process of claiming asylum, these reasons have to be specified. Over the last years, an increasing number of asylum seekers in Europe have asked for international protection on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). In order to apply for asylum, the asylum seekers are required to give evidence of their SOGI-based persecution which is assessed by the decision-makers reviewing the asylum applications. At disproportional high rates, these claims are met with unfair treatment and are even refused.
Apparently, language problems, malfunctioning communication, and the lack of fitting terminology for taboo topics often contribute to negative asylum decisions. However, homotransphobia, the reliance on stereotypes, and homonationalism on the part of the decision makers also play a crucial role. Over the last years, several cases hit the headlines where asylum applications were rejected because the applicant was deemed either “not gay enough” or even “too gay.” At the same time we can also observe initiatives and efforts with the aim of ensuring a fairer treatment of asylum applicants in the process. A result of such efforts with a particular focus on the linguistic challenges in the asylum process is the ORAM glossary on “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression,” published by the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration in 2016 in five languages.
In my talk, I will offer an analysis of this glossary from a queer lexicographical perspective to lay bare its strengths and weaknesses. I will show how the entire asylum decision-making process boils down to choosing the “right” terminology and to filling the given signifier with the “right” performance. On a broader scale, I aim to expose the normativity and the influence of Western “LGBT culture” and its terminology on the asylum processes
Queering gender and sexual dimensions in EU Directives. The case of EU Italian and English versions
No full textThe last decades have seen the international spotlight on human rights of gender non-conforming diversities and traditionally overlooked sexual dimensions, i.e., transgender people and women among others (Motschenbacher 2010). This has triggered awareness-raising movements advocating for the urgent need to mainstream gendered and sexual perspectives into everyday action and language-use. The commitment of such grass-root campaigns has affected the high circles of transgovernmental institutions like the EU, forcing them to take into consideration the existence of complementary and often neglected realities in need of formal recognition and, ultimately, of appropriate linguistic designations. Being at the crossroad of discourse studies, terminology and EU studies, the present contribution aims first of all to identify terms related to the diverse ways of expressing gender and sexual dimensions within highly codified LSP (Language for Special Purposes) texts like EU Directives (Gotti 2016). Secondly, a Critical/Queer perspective both on Language, Gender and Sexuality and on EU Studies intends to uncover the degree of “heteronormative reiteration” (Butler 1993), i.e., the strict binary classification of human beings into women and men, producing gendered and/or sexual meanings that through specific linguistic designations provide taken-for-granted practices and ways of conceptualisation that construct social knowledge of the outside world (Motschenbacher 2010).
The texts considered are EU Directives in their English and Italian versions whose content overtly addresses matters related to the enhancement of gender and sexual equality. Specifically, these comprise: Directives 2000/78/EC, 2004/113/EC, 2006/54/EC, 2010/18/EC, 2010/41/EC, 2011/36/EC, 2011/99/EC and 2012/29/EC. In order to locate the specified terms, quantitative and qualitative analysis are combined with the objective of producing fine-grained results. Firstly, the close-reading of texts is employed to qualitatively locate terms related to gender and sexual dimension; secondly, the results are triangulated with the output offered by the keyword analysis obtained via the combination of the two concordancers WordSmith Tools and SketchEngine. So far the findings have echoed an ongoing fight against heteronormative stances. Although the prevailing tendency reveals dichotomy-based and unbalanced linguistic choices, this prevalence is accompanied by a timid widening of the gender/sex spectrum as far as EU languages are concerned. This slow but constant exploration marks on the one hand the ongoing political struggles in the EU arena between pursuit of socio-democratic principles and promotion of neo-liberal policies; on the other, it testifies to the pivotal role of EU linguistic policies in setting the long-term standards for a full recognition of sex and gender equality