This collection of new research, mostly by scholars from the United Kingdom, intervenes in the study of language and sexuality in two important ways. First, as editors Sauntson & Kyratzis note in their introduction, recent work in this field has often theorized gender performance and speech acts apart from their particular sociocultural contexts. The ten scholars in this volume use applied linguistics to study the culturally specific ways that sexuality and desire are constructed through discourse. The second important contribution of this volume is the distinction it makes between the fraught categories of identity and desire. By distinguishing sexual and social identities from enacted desires and practices, the contributors illustrate how “sexuality is linguistically construed as a form of social identity with little or no reference to desire or sexual activity,” and conversely, how desire is linguistically embedded in relations of power and agency not necessarily dependent on sexuality (p. 4).
Weighing the merits of desire and identity-centered approaches in chapter 1, Liz Morrish & William Leap explore the benefits of a flexible and context-dependent Communities of Practice theory that focuses primarily on desire. While identity is often perceived as a stable category, its “multiple and fluid” nature is productively revealed by desire-centered research that views sexuality as “a complex, multivalent construction whose particulars have to be disclosed, not assumed prediscursively” (36). Chapters 2 and 3 extend this discussion through research on the spontaneous conversation of particular social groups. Jennifer Coates analyzes male friendship groups and their discourse of hegemonic British masculinity; Pia Pichler studies the ways that heterosexual and gender identities are constituted through the sex talk of adolescent girls. Both scholars use speech samples from a cross-section of social classes and ethnicities and compellingly illustrate how dominant cultural values and norms are learned and transmitted through linguistic practice. The following chapters, by Sakis Kyratzis and Yvonne Dröschel, look at two evolving conversational strategies: the uses of metaphor and slang. Kyratzis's combination of cognitive linguistic analysis and socio-psychoanalysis reveals the culturally situated meanings that are encoded within metaphor; but, as Dröschel says of gay men's slang, these meanings are mutable and constantly renegotiated through use. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 10 focus mainly on the analysis of written narratives, including online stories of coming out, diary entries about the gay male body, amateur erotic fiction and poetry, and lesbian advice pamphlets. Deborah Chirrey and Stephen A. Grosse focus on linguistic constructions of identity, and Michael Hoey employs literary and narrative theory to analyze the structures that scaffold various discourses of desire. Finally, Lia Litosseliti's research uses samples from newspaper articles and focus groups to expose a rhetoric of moral panic in the British media. Defining this panic as “a tension between a private moral code and a collective or public morality” (219), Litosseliti analyzes the way normative and deviant identities are constructed through symbols, metaphors, and vocabulary.
Though working with theoretical approaches that span the disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, and beyond, this volume's contributors demonstrate the necessarily central role of language in any study of sexual identity or desire. This cross-cultural collection provides a richly varied look at the ways that contextually specific linguistic practices shape notions of love, desire, and sexuality.
