Kira Hall

Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: (1) identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; (2) identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; (3) identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (4) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and (5) identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions.

Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research

The field of language and sexuality has gained importance within socioculturally oriented linguistic scholarship. Much current work in this area emphasizes identity as one key aspect of sexuality. However, recent critiques of identity-based research advocate instead a desire-centered view of sexuality. Such an approach artificially restricts the scope of the field by overlooking the close relationship between identity and desire. This connection emerges clearly in queer linguistics, an approach to language and sexuality that incorporates insights from feminist, queer, and sociolinguistic theories to analyze sexuality as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. These intellectual approaches have shown that research on identity, sexual or otherwise, is most productive when the concept is understood as the outcome of intersubjectively negotiated practices and ideologies. To this end, an analytic framework for the semiotic study of social intersubjectivity is presented. (Sexuality, feminism, identity, desire, queer linguistics.)*

Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Queerly Phrased is a groundbreaking collection of previously unpublished essays that examine the relationship between language and the construction of gender and sexuality. Bridging the gap between sociolinguistics and gay studies, the contributors draw on traditional models of language anaylsis of well as recent developments in gender theory to show how language plays a crucial role in the creation of culture and its representation.

Finding identity: Theory and data

Abstract This commentary responds to the papers in the special issue ‘Accomplishing identity in bilingual interaction’ and particularly to the use of Bucholtz and Halls (2004a, 2004b, 2005) framework for the linguistic analysis of identities in interaction. The commentary focuses on the relationship between theory and empirical work, with attention to the role of ethnographic context in the analysis of both microlevel interaction and macrolevel sociopolitical and sociohistorical processes, the place of language ideologies in the interactional construction of bilingual identities, and the necessity to ground theoretical claims in rigorous empirical analysis.

The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.

Boys’ Talk: Hindi, Moustaches and Masculinity in New Delhi

Since the 1990s, scholars working within the area of language and gender have increasingly considered the ways in which masculinity informs and structures everyday language practice. While the paradigms that frame scholarship on language and masculinity differ, with early studies focusing on differences between men’s talk and women’s talk (e.g., Johnstone 1990; Tannen 1990) and later studies seeking to explain how men’s talk is produced performatively through appeal to ideologies of gendered language (e.g., Cameron 1997), the research has left us with a trove of data regarding linguistic possibilities for the enactment of masculinity. Whether explicating the homophobic story-telling strategies of male friends in Britain (Coates 2007), the use of sentence-final particles by white-collar Japanese men (SturtzSreetharan 2006), or employments of the address term dude among American college-aged men (Kiesling 2004), linguistic research on masculinity has decisively demonstrated that ‘maleness’ is as much gained as it is given, with speakers reproducing, and often exploiting, ideological links between form and meaning in the production of a gendered subjectivity. The burgeoning body of literature on women’s appropriation of purportedly masculine forms of discourse has offered a kind of proof for this theoretical position, establishing the floating and hence endlessly flexible nature of the linguistic sign (e.g., Queen 2005; Matsumoto 2002; Tetreault 2002; McElhinny 1995).

Commentary I: ‘It’s a hijra!’ Queer linguistics revisited:

In a review of contributions to a special issue of Discourse & Society on queer linguistics, this article argues that the concept of indexicality, as theorized across diverse fields in sociocultural linguistics, has the potential to offer a much richer account of subjectivity than found in dominant strands of queer theory. While queer theory valorizes practice over identity, viewing the latter as fixed and necessarily allied with normativity, research on language and social interaction suggests that an analytic distinction between practice and identity is untenable. The indexical processes that work to produce social meaning are multi-layered and always shifting across time and space, even within systems of heteronormativity. It is this semiotic evolution that should become the cornerstone of a (new) queer linguistics.

Epilogue: Facing identity

DE GRUYTER MOUTON DOI 10.1515/pr-2013-0006 Journal of Politeness Research 2013; 9(1): 123–132 Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz Epilogue: Facing identity Kira Hall: Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology, 295 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0295, USA, e-mail: kira.hall@colorado.edu Mary Bucholtz: Department of Linguistics, 3432 South Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100, USA, e-mail: bucholtz@linguistics.ucsb.edu The day we began reading the articles included in this special issue, a gunman clad in full bulletproof clothing and wielding multiple weapons entered a Colo- rado movie theater and opened fire on an unsuspecting audience. As the inci- dent unfolded in the media over the next several weeks, its details grew graver and more perverse in every telling. This gunman was special. Mass killings in the United States, which now occur with unprecedented frequency, tend to involve a gunman who takes his own life when confronted by law enforcement. But this man came dressed in a defensive package of body armor that included riot helmet, vest, gas mask, throat protector, groin protector, and black tactical gloves. So deeply villainous was his embodied performance that audience mem- bers assumed he was some sort of opening-night gimmick sponsored by the producers of the superhero film they had come to see: the Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. Witnesses to the event reported watching the gunman walk slowly and calmly up the aisle, saying nothing as he threw baseball-sized canisters of tear gas into the audience and then fired the weapons that led to 59 injuries and 12 deaths. “It was so in sync we thought it was part of the movie,” recalled a stunned survivor. Indeed, when the police found the gunman minutes later outside a rear exit door standing next to his white Hyundai sedan, he identified himself only as “the Joker”. The name, of course, is that of Batman’s infamous archenemy, the red-lipped intellectual psychopath renowned for his sadistic sense of humor. Even though it is now known that this gunman’s legal identity is James Holmes, a possibly mentally disturbed former neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado, the most prominent image that continues to be displayed in the media at the time of writing is one that supports his delusion: a wide-eyed man with disheveled hair dyed a cartoon shade of red. We were extremely hesitant to begin this epilogue with reference to such a horrifying violation not only of civility but of the most fundamental human

Gender, Sexuality and Language

756 Gender, Grammatical Zubin D & Ko¨pcke K (1986). ‘Gender and folk taxonomy: the indexal relation between grammatical and lexical categorization.’ In Craig C (ed.) Typological Studies in Language 7: Noun classes and categorization: proceed- ings of a symposium on categorization and noun classifi- cation, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 139–180. Gender, Sexuality and Language Au th or s y op Pe rs Gender initially became a focus of linguistic inter- est in the first half of the 20th century when field linguists discovered what they perceived as stark differences between European languages and the in- digenous languages they had begun to document in the Americas and elsewhere. Of particular interest was the finding that a number of these languages differentiated between women’s and men’s speech on the basis of grammar, phonology, and lexicon. These so-called ‘women’s languages’ and ‘men’s languages’ were characterized as vastly different and mutually exclusive, and were often held up as evi- dence for the rigidity of gender roles in traditional societies in contrast to the enlightened gender liberal- ism of Western modernity. In addition to the prob- lematic exoticism of native languages and cultures that informs this view, such a dichotomy between traditional and modern structures of gender is empirically untenable. It has recently been shown, for instance, that it was only under the conditions of modernization that gender differentiation through the creation of ‘women’s language’ emerged in Japan. In these early texts, sexuality was not theoret- ically distinguished from gender; researchers assumed a direct mapping from one to the other and of both onto language. Thus a speaker’s departure from normative speech patterns was interpreted as gender deviance as well as sexual deviance, with ‘effeminate’ and ‘bisexual’ speakers occupying the margins as linguistic exceptions to an otherwise unyielding gender dichotomy. What was missing from such a perspective was the concept of ‘indexicality,’ the pro- cess whereby language ‘points to’ the social and dis- cursive context of its own production. Seen in this way, many instances of perceived cross-gender lan- guage use might more accurately be understood as C ! 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. indexing interactional stances such as affect or force/ mitigation, not gender identities. Despite its flaws, the early anthropological re- search on women’s and men’s languages did call at- tention to the important relationship between gender and sexuality. However, this connection was not de- veloped theoretically until the 1990s, in spite of the small but steady stream of linguistic publications on sexuality. In the 1970s, a number of ethnographically oriented researchers published a flurry of studies on sexualized insults and banter, focusing primarily on male speakers. Although the intention of such work was to bring underinvestigated communities and gen- res into linguistic scholarship, many of these studies unwittingly worked to reinscribe stereotypes of the licentious and hypersexed Other. As linguistic anthropologists began to turn their attention to at least some aspects of sexuality, gender was gaining a more central role in linguistic scholar- ship due to the influence of second-wave feminism, especially in sociolinguistic research on Western lan- guages. One of the earliest and most important con- tributions to this new line of feminist scholarship offered a different conceptualization of ‘women’s lan- guage’ as primarily pragmatic rather than structural and suggested that women’s speech both produced and reflected real-world powerlessness. This view was complicated by contemporary anthropological re- search, however, which revealed that women’s speech in other cultures could be forceful and assertive, though still devalued. Recognizing the widespread deprecation of social practices associated with women, by the 1980s many feminist social scientists, including linguistic anthro- pologists, were seeking to validate women as compe- tent cultural members in their own right. Meanwhile, the concept of ‘culture’ was adopted by some re- searchers of American society to account for what were still seen as vast differences between women and men. Though inspired by anthropological work on cross-cultural communication, this body of work overlooked widespread efforts to rethink the concept of culture within anthropology in this period. on al M Bucholtz, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA K Hall, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 4, pp. 756–758

Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump

This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents that characterize this postelection moment: first, the surreal mix of gendered and racialized nostalgia embedded in Trump’s iconography and message, and second, the intensification of white racism as Trump’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism becomes government. Bringing the responses of our esteemed interlocutors into conversation with the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Susan Sontag and the historical work of Carol Anderson, we suggest that Trump’s spectacle of governing embraces sexual transgression, civil lawlessness, and excessive opulence, all of which encourage a pro-white semiotics and a return to racisms past.