“Dolls or teddies?”: constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice.

Jones, Lucy

Abstract

The concept of ‘community’ often presents a problem for queer linguists. ‘The gay community’ is often viewed as an impossible site for research due to its imagined status,
whilst local communities of gay people have been considered too heterogeneous and idiosyncratic to draw conclusions from. In this article, however, it is argued that both of these aspects of community can, and should, be a central focus of an investigation into language and sexual identity. Through the analysis of a conversation emerging from a lesbian group, using a sociocultural linguistics framework, it is argued here that the community of practice
approach can play a crucial role in understanding how ideologies from ‘the gay community’ are used to construct a coherent sexual identity on a local level. The analysis reveals how the group engages in practices that enable them to construct micro-level personas in direct response to broader, ideological structures of heteronormativity.

Citation

Jones, L. (2014). “Dolls or teddies?”: constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 3(2), https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.3.2.01jon

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 2, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 2, 2015
• Journal: Journal of Language and Sexuality
• Print ISSN: 2211-3770
• Electronic ISSN: 2211-3770
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.3.2.01jon
• Keywords: identity, lesbian discourse, sociocultural linguistics, community of practice, gay community, gender binary, persona
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/998963
• Publisher URL: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/jls.3.2.01jon/details
• Additional Information: © John Benjamins Publishing Company.; Jones, L. (2014) “Dolls or teddies?” Constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 3(2): 161-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jls.3.2.01jon; Please contact the publisher for permission to reuse this article in any form.