Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk KIRA HALL a , EREZ LEVON b AND TOMMASO M. MILANI c a University of Colorado Boulder, USA b Queen Mary University of London, UK c Göteborgs universitet, Sweden and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa MOVING ATHWART 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 in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics —with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contrib- ute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be. It is a truism that queer theory has become increasingly prominent throughout the humanities and social sciences, including in linguistics. Research in this area ‘puts at the forefront of linguistic analysis the regulation of sexuality by hegemonic heterosexuality and the ways in which non-normative sexualities are negotiated in relation to these regulatory structures’ (Bucholtz & Hall 2004:471). One of the key tenets of queer theoretical perspectives is the belief that, as scholars, we should be wary of simple conflations between sexual processes (e.g. same-sex desire) and sexual identities (e.g. ‘straight’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’), since forms of sexual categorization are themselves the products of historical processes that work primarily in the interest of modern state power (Foucault 1978). In light of this, queer theorists warn against a too optimistic reliance on sexual identity categories as catalysts for social change. In their view, a politics based on sexual identities can, in the best of cases, lead only to a temporary re-calibration of power inequalities, ultimately leaving the homo/heterosexual binary intact and unchallenged (Yep 2003:47; see however Cashman, this issue; Hall, this issue). In order to achieve a radical project of deep social transformation of the status quo, queer theoretical approaches instead promote a questioning of the seemingly ‘normal’ and widely accepted nature of the homo/heterosexual divide itself in an effort to destabilize the very truth of that normality. Crucially, © Cambridge University Press, 2019 0047-4045/19 $15.00 481 Language in Society 48, 481–489. doi:10.1017/S0047404519000447 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404519000447 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Colorado Boulder, on 22 Aug 2019 at 18:36:31, subject to the Cambridge Core