Order and turbulence in a Swedish bathroom
Youths’ negotiations of the meaning of ‘queer’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.18826Keywords:
queer subjectivities, linguistic citizenship, turbulence, bathroom graffiti, school ethnographyAbstract
‘Where are all the queers at the school?! I want to hug you’. Thus begins a conversation scrawled on the door to a Swedish high school’s student bathroom that will spark a debate among students on whether the word ‘queer’ should be considered a slur. In dialogue with work on linguistic citizenship and graffiti as a semiotic mode, this article analyses different stages of the unfolding debate. The analytical lens of turbulence captures the interplay of ordering and disordering in the students' efforts to define ‘queer’. Youths' linguistic agency works as a struggle for meaning across different indexical orders, illustrating the difficulty of sustaining mastery of identity labels as they travel through discourse.
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