Tommaso M. Milani

Language testing and citizenship: a language ideological debate in Sweden

This thesis is concerned with three language debates that reached their most crucial peaks in Sweden at the beginning of the twenty-first century: (i) the debate on the promotion of the Swedish language, (ii) the debate on language testing for citizenship, and (iii) the debate on mother tongue instruction. The main scope of the thesis is to take a theoretically multi-pronged approach to these debates trying to shed light on the following aspects: Why did such debates emerge when they did? Which discourses were available in those specific historical moments? Who are the social actors that intervened in these debates? What is at stake for them? What do they claim? What systems of values, ideas and beliefs – i.e. ideologies – underlie such claims? What are the effects in terms of identities, objects of political intervention, commonsensical knowledge and authority that these discourses and ideologies produce?Taking Sweden as a case in point, the thesis adds to the existing literature another example of how language debates are the manifestation of conflicts between different language ideologies that struggle for hegemony, thus attempting to impose one specific way of envisaging the management of a nation-state in a time of globalisation. In their outer and most patent facets, these struggles deal with the relationships between languages in today’s Sweden, and how the state, through legislation, should – or should not – regulate such relationships in order to (re)produce some kind of linguistic order. However, the thesis also illustrates that when social actors appeal to a linguistic order, they not only draw boundaries between different languages in a given society, but they also bring into existence a social world in which the speakers of those languages come to occupy specific social positions. These linguistic and social hierarchies, in turn, are imbricated in an often implicit moral regime of what counts as good or bad, acceptable or taboo in that society.

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 identities at the expense of others. This then makes it possible to understand the extent to which these men (re)produce or, conversely, contest and overturn dominant forms of social categorisation in their expressions of same-sex desire.

Sexed signs – queering the scenery

Abstract 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 character, can easily be ignored, but nonetheless “(in)form our understandings and experiences of [gender,] sexuality and subjectivity” (Sullivan 2003: 190). In doing so, the article also argues for the importance of incorporating queer theory into the analytical apparatus of Linguistic Landscape research, because it provides us with a valuable theoretical lens through which to unveil the operations of power in relation to gender and sexuality (and other social categories) in public space.

Ready-to-wear sexual politics: The semiotics of visibility on Wits Pride T-shirts

The aim of this article is to investigate T-shirts as semiotic tools of the politics of visibility, showing which role these sartorial artefacts may play in competing struggles for recognition in which gender and sexuality intersect with other axes of social categorisations. Drawing on a queer multimodal approach, the article offers an analysis of the four promotional T-shirts that were distributed each year between 2011 and 2014 by the Transformation and Employment Equity Office at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, in the context of the annual Pride parade on campus. Our main argument is that changes over time in the design of Wits Pride T-shirts represent a shift both in what is claimed to be the main goal of campus sexual politics and in the proposed means to achieve such a goal. If one were to imagine that each T-shirt is a corporeal embodiment of Wits Pride, then this body has changed considerably in four years: from a gay man who is (supposedly) ashamed of voicing his sexual identity; into a camp though masculine figure that loudly urges to counter racial division within same-sex desire; into a more multifaceted individual who proudly carries their gender and sexual uniqueness; and finally, into an activist who, in tension with the complex intersections that underpin discrimination, is perhaps a little reluctant to foreground gender and sexuality at all.

Queer skin, straight masks: same-sex weddings and the discursive construction of identities and affects on a South African website

Abstract 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 radically anti-normative, but are a ‘homo’ version of a well-established heterosexual normality. Same-sex couples who make the choice to get married are portrayed as the epitome of a responsible lifestyle, whereas those who do not are constructed by implication/omission as immoral and irresponsible. Moreover, the queer skin under the otherwise straight masks remains predominantly white. On a more theoretical level, the article argues for an affective turn in the study of consumerism, culture and media in South Africa in order to appreciate how some emotions (but not others) are attached to social class, race, gender and sexuality for marketing purposes.

The everyday life of sexual politics: A feminist critical discourse analysis of herbalist pamphlets in Johannesburg

Abstract This article investigates a corpus of herbalist pamphlets – fairly common, everyday texts found in (South) African cities – which promote the services of traditional healers and promise solutions to a plethora of ailments and life problems. The articles multi-pronged approach brings feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), corpus linguistics (CS) and multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS) into dialogue with each other. Encompassing both quantitative and qualitative components, this eclectic framework illustrates the ways in which dominant gendered discourses reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative order by positioning men and women differently. This dominant form of gendered representation, however, co-exists with more resistant discourses which positively thematise same-sex desire. Essentially, the article demonstrates that herbalist pamphlets are key sites of ‘entanglement’ (Nuttall 2009) where complex identity nexuses of gender, sexuality, race, age and culture intersect and compete with each other within the larger regime of representation in South Africa.

‘It’s time for Afrikaans to go’ . . . or not? Language ideologies and (ir)rationality in the blogosphere

Unlike most existing scholarship, which highlights the highly emotional, nearly irrational component of media debates surrounding the Afrikaans language, this article argues that rationalisation is present in even the most heated language ideological scenarios, taking several conflicting guises that are particular in nature. To this end, the article investigates a small-scale, self-contained discussion in the ‘new media’ that can be seen as a manifestation of enduring and deeply rooted beliefs about the role of Afrikaans in todays South Africa.

The topography of masculine normativities in South Africa

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine representations of masculinity in the English-language South African print media. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to interrogate a large corpus (18 million words) of English-language newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, we investigate the ways in which different South African masculine types are positioned with respect to one another in the media and examine how these positionings draw on broader tropes of gender, race and social class that circulate in South African society. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a more nuanced picture of gender/sexual hegemony in South Africa that goes beyond a simple opposition between dominant versus subordinate forms of masculinity to explore the range of competing normativities in the region. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to debates about the role of norms and normativities in the theorizing of masculinity more broadly.

Queering the matrix? Language and identity troubles in HIV/AIDS contexts

The aim of the present paper is to take a queer approach to language and HIV/AIDS discourse, one which problematizes the no tions of sexual identity and group categories, and instead calls for a foregrounding of (sexual) practices and desires. In support of this argument, I will examine two very different examples of patient - doctor interaction. One is a fictional verbal exchang e taken from the TV miniseries Angels in America , in which one of the main characters, the lawyer Roy Cohn, is diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The other one is a personal experience in a state - financed medical practice in Stockholm, Sweden, where the symptoms of tonsillitis became re - interpreted by the doctor as manifestations of HIV/AIDS infection as soon as I disclosed that I was dating a man.

Editorial: Language in the South African media

Language Matters 44 (2) 2013 pp. 1—4 ISSN Print: 1022-8195 ISSN Online: 1753-5395