Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course, based primarily on insights from the field of linguistic anthropology, focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then, we expand on themes of social change, desire and identity, difference, kinship, and the significance of global, transnational and postcolonial connections in our understandings of gender and sexuality. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language and other signs that are used to enact gender and sexuality (e.g., in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, online communities, and current events). Throughout this course, we will emphasize the importance of ethnographic approaches to languages and communication-a hallmark of linguistic anthropology that requires a reflexive and critical attentiveness to how researchers co-participate in everyday social interactions with their interlocutors. Beyond the categories of gender and sexuality as studied in Western academic contexts, this course invites students to pay close attention to how non-normative forms of alterity are produced and circulated in the Global South under conditions of political and economic inequality.