‘Does the picture below show a heterosexual couple or not?’
Reflexivity, entextualization, scales and intersectionalities in a gay man’s blog
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.34675Keywords:
Reflexivity, Scales, Entextualization, IntersectionalitiesAbstract
In this paper we investigate an intimate encounter in 'Life in the Closet', a blog fed by a Brazilian undergraduate, N.B., between 2011 and 2014. As a case in point, we focus on how a YouTube video advert called 'The Man Man' is successively entextualised in the blog, by following its re-entextualisation into posts made by the blogger himself and other participants. We explore this digital event as an instance of several chained reperformances, observing the highly reflexive activity that goes on in the blog and how such reflexivity operates through the friction of sedimented and transgressive discourses. By using a performative and scalesensitive approach to textuality and subjectivities, we fathom how participants reflexively queer gender, sexuality, age, race and social class by intersectionally making each one of these 'categories' dissolve its solidified meaning in the light of the Other as these meanings are called into being.
References
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Agha, Asif. (2011) Meet mediatisation. Language & Communication 31: 163–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2011.03.006
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987) Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Barnard, Ian. (2004) Queer Race. New York: Lang.
Bauman, Richard; Briggs, Charles. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 58–88. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423
Bauman, Richard; Briggs, Charles. (2003) Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486647
Berlant, Lauren.; Warner, Michael. (2005) Sex in public. In M. Warner (ed.) Publics and Counterpublics, 187–208. New York: Zone Books.
Blommaert, Jan. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511845307
Boellstroff, Tom. (2016) Queer techne: two theses on methodology and queer studies. In K. Browne and C. J. Nash (eds) Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Sciences Research, 215–30. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315603223-14
Butler, Judith. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
Butler. Judith. (1997) Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
Carr, E. Summerson and Lempert, Michael (eds). (2016) Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.15
Duggan, Lisa. (2002) The new normativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. In R. Castronovo and D. Nelson (eds) Materializing Democracy 175–94. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383901-007
Fabricio, Branca Falabella. (2014) The empire blogs back: gendered and sexualized cultural ‘others’ in superdiversified digital trajectories. Discourse, Context and Media 4(5):7–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2014.05.001
Fabricio, Branca Falabella. (2015) Policing the borderland in a digital Lusophone territory: the pragmatics of entextualization. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (eds) Global Portuguese: Linguistic Ideology in Late Modernity 87–104. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michael. ([1975]1995) Discipline and Punish (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Vintage Books
Gee, James Paul. (1990) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. (2007) Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.8
Halberstam, Jack. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394358
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. (2004) Multitude. New York: Penguin.
Lankshear, Colin and Knobel, Michele. (2007) Sampling ‘the new’ in new literacies. In M. Knobel and C. Lankshear (eds) A New Literacies Sampler 1–24. New York: Peter Lang.
Latour, Bruno. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moita-Lopes, Luiz Paulo. (2015) Global Portuguese: Linguistic Ideology in Late Modern Times. New York: Routledge.
Muñoz. José Esteban. (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
O’Brien, Jodi. (2008) Afterword: complicating homophobia. Sexualities 11(4): 496–512. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460708093457
Penedo, Susana López. (2008) El laberinto queer [The Queer Labyrinth]. Barcelona: Editorial Egales.
Pennycook, Alastair. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. New York: Routledge.
Pennycook, Alastair. (2010) Language as a Social Practice. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203846223
Richardson, Diane, McLaughlin, Janice and Casey, Mark E. (eds). (2006) Intersections between Feminist and Queer Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625266
Ruti, Mari. (2017) The Ethics of Opting Out. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/ruti18090
Scott, David. (1999) Refashioning Futures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400823062
Silverstein, Michael. (2016) Semiotic vinification and the scaling of taste. In S. E. Carr and M. Lempert (eds) Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life 185–212. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Silverstein, Michael and Urban, Greg (eds). (1996) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Somerville, Siobhan. (2000) Queering the Color Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stokoe, Elizabeth. (2012) ‘You know how men are’: description, categorization, and common knowledge in the anatomy of a categorial practice. Language and Gender 6(1): 233–55. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i1.233
Sullivan, Nick. (2003) A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press.
Taylor, Yvette. (2016) The ‘outness’ of queer: class and sexual intersections. In K. Browne and C. J. Nash (eds) Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Sciences Research 69–83. New York: Routledge.
Published
2018-12-05
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Moita-Lopes, L. P., & Fabrício, B. F. (2018). ‘Does the picture below show a heterosexual couple or not?’: Reflexivity, entextualization, scales and intersectionalities in a gay man’s blog. Gender and Language, 12(4), 459-478. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.34675
