Professor adjunto do Depto de Letras Anglo-Germânicas da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro onde também atua como professor no Programa Interdisciplinar de Pós-Graduação em Linguística Aplicada (PIPGLA). Co-líder do Núcleo de Estudos em Discursos e Sociedades (NUDES). Atuou como pesquisador visitante no Centre for Discourse, language and communication da King's College em Londres (2013-2014). Em 2015, foi pesquisador visitante (Brazil Fellow) do Centre for Advanced Research in English no Depto de Inglês e Linguística Aplicada da Universidade de Birmingham (2015). Sua tese de doutoramento, "(Des)aprendendo a 'ser': trajetórias de socialização e performances narrativas no Processo Transexualizador", recebeu o Prêmio CAPES de melhor tese na área de Letras/Linguística em 2015. Faz pesquisa em linguística aplicada, linguística queer, antopologia linguística, etnografia da fala, sociolinguística interacional e análise do discurso. Address: Brazil
The formula "gender ideology" has recently gained political traction in several countries. This c... more The formula "gender ideology" has recently gained political traction in several countries. This chapter investigates its conspiracist discursive infrastructure by probing two corpora of far-right media from Brazil and the US. Analysis indicates that "gender ideology" is framed within semantic realms of manipulation, puppeteering, falseness, and danger. It also suggests that anti-gender rhetoric acts as an all-encompassing narrative whereby a cohort of inchoate but ideologically interlinked conspiracy theories are lumped together in a seemingly coherent whole. Comparing datasets from two countries empirically illustrates how anti-gender rhetoric crosses transnational borders and adapts to local specifics along the way.
Mobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globall... more Mobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globally despite their hyperbolic modes of action and conspiracist rhetoric. These anti-gender campaigns rally around “gender ideology,” a trope used to anathemize feminist and LGBTIQ+ activism/scholarship. This paper argues that anti-genderism is a register – a conventionalized aggregate of expressive forms and enactable person-types – of which “gender ideology” is the most famous shibboleth. The paper shows how inchoate collections of words, modes of action, and images of people (i.e. signs) have been enregistered into the cohesive but heterogeneous whole of anti-genderism through semiotic processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting (Gal, 2018; 2019). The paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of anti-genderism to understand the challenges it poses to the enfranchisement of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people.
This article analyses linguistic guerrilla wars being waged over the issue of gender in contempor... more This article analyses linguistic guerrilla wars being waged over the issue of gender in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on two phenomena: on the one hand, Dilma Rousseff’s use of the title presidenta, a strategy that feminizes a word and a political office that have historically been masculine; and on the other hand, the use of the letter x as a neutral gender ending, a strategy that breaks with the cisheteropatriarchal, binary grammatical system of the Portuguese language and that has become visible in the public space over recent years. In the case of Brazil, these phenomena allow us to see how the ‘x da questaõ’ or ‘the [cru]x of the matter’, is no more than the construction of moral panic over the political potency of the concept of gender.
The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gende... more The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gender clinic, creating an emotionally charged local regime of doctor/ patient interactions. Our interest is not only in illustrating how the clinic’s institutionalised normatitivies about transbodies are the result of the crystallisation of particular transnational medical discourses, but also in showing how such a normative framework creates specific conditions for trans people’s acts of resistance. In order to capture this dual perspective on norms and resistance to them, we draw upon three important but somewhat neglected perspectives in sociolinguistic and discourse analytical research, which may bring some fresh insights to the study of language and discrimination more broadly: Hannah Arendt’s (1994) reflections on the ‘banality of evil’; Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ideas about the no less banal ways in which social actors speak back to power via a plethora of ‘tactics of resistance’; an...
A partir de um estudo etnografico realizado entre 2003 e 2004 em uma comunidade de travestis que ... more A partir de um estudo etnografico realizado entre 2003 e 2004 em uma comunidade de travestis que se prostituem em uma regiao urbana do Rio Grande do Sul, o presente artigo traz a baila uma discussao sobre a identidade travesti. Mais precisamente, analisa-se a construcao discursiva da transmasculinidade, ou seja, a “masculinidade” travesti. Essa “masculinidade” especifica e o efeito de posicionamentos interacionais adotados em narrativas orais contadas pelas informantes nas quais caracteristicas ideologicamente tidas como femininas e masculinas sao sobrepostas e, assim, as travestis posicionam-se nas fronteiras dos generos. Para essa discussao, duas narrativas sobre violencia e sobre sexualidade sao analisadas sob o prisma da teoria da performatividade para demonstrar o carater fragmentado, fluido e sempre em devir da travestilidade.
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipati... more This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. In this third issue on the theme of intersectionality, Mel Y. Chen revisits the melancholy they experienced in their training as a linguist pursuing tra...
Bamberg, Michael; Anna De Fina; & Deborah Schiffrin (2007). Selves and identities in narrativ... more Bamberg, Michael; Anna De Fina; & Deborah Schiffrin (2007). Selves and identities in narrative and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baynham, Mike (2015). Identity brought about or brought along? Narrative as a privileged site for researching intercultural identities. In Karen Risager & Fred Dervin (eds.), Researching identity and interculturality, 67–88. London: Routledge. ———, & Anna De Fina (2005). Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement. London: Routledge. De Fina, Anna, & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2012). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendi, Ibram X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. New York: Nation Books.
The formula "gender ideology" has recently gained political traction in several countries. This c... more The formula "gender ideology" has recently gained political traction in several countries. This chapter investigates its conspiracist discursive infrastructure by probing two corpora of far-right media from Brazil and the US. Analysis indicates that "gender ideology" is framed within semantic realms of manipulation, puppeteering, falseness, and danger. It also suggests that anti-gender rhetoric acts as an all-encompassing narrative whereby a cohort of inchoate but ideologically interlinked conspiracy theories are lumped together in a seemingly coherent whole. Comparing datasets from two countries empirically illustrates how anti-gender rhetoric crosses transnational borders and adapts to local specifics along the way.
Mobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globall... more Mobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globally despite their hyperbolic modes of action and conspiracist rhetoric. These anti-gender campaigns rally around “gender ideology,” a trope used to anathemize feminist and LGBTIQ+ activism/scholarship. This paper argues that anti-genderism is a register – a conventionalized aggregate of expressive forms and enactable person-types – of which “gender ideology” is the most famous shibboleth. The paper shows how inchoate collections of words, modes of action, and images of people (i.e. signs) have been enregistered into the cohesive but heterogeneous whole of anti-genderism through semiotic processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting (Gal, 2018; 2019). The paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of anti-genderism to understand the challenges it poses to the enfranchisement of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people.
This article analyses linguistic guerrilla wars being waged over the issue of gender in contempor... more This article analyses linguistic guerrilla wars being waged over the issue of gender in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on two phenomena: on the one hand, Dilma Rousseff’s use of the title presidenta, a strategy that feminizes a word and a political office that have historically been masculine; and on the other hand, the use of the letter x as a neutral gender ending, a strategy that breaks with the cisheteropatriarchal, binary grammatical system of the Portuguese language and that has become visible in the public space over recent years. In the case of Brazil, these phenomena allow us to see how the ‘x da questaõ’ or ‘the [cru]x of the matter’, is no more than the construction of moral panic over the political potency of the concept of gender.
The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gende... more The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gender clinic, creating an emotionally charged local regime of doctor/ patient interactions. Our interest is not only in illustrating how the clinic’s institutionalised normatitivies about transbodies are the result of the crystallisation of particular transnational medical discourses, but also in showing how such a normative framework creates specific conditions for trans people’s acts of resistance. In order to capture this dual perspective on norms and resistance to them, we draw upon three important but somewhat neglected perspectives in sociolinguistic and discourse analytical research, which may bring some fresh insights to the study of language and discrimination more broadly: Hannah Arendt’s (1994) reflections on the ‘banality of evil’; Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ideas about the no less banal ways in which social actors speak back to power via a plethora of ‘tactics of resistance’; an...
A partir de um estudo etnografico realizado entre 2003 e 2004 em uma comunidade de travestis que ... more A partir de um estudo etnografico realizado entre 2003 e 2004 em uma comunidade de travestis que se prostituem em uma regiao urbana do Rio Grande do Sul, o presente artigo traz a baila uma discussao sobre a identidade travesti. Mais precisamente, analisa-se a construcao discursiva da transmasculinidade, ou seja, a “masculinidade” travesti. Essa “masculinidade” especifica e o efeito de posicionamentos interacionais adotados em narrativas orais contadas pelas informantes nas quais caracteristicas ideologicamente tidas como femininas e masculinas sao sobrepostas e, assim, as travestis posicionam-se nas fronteiras dos generos. Para essa discussao, duas narrativas sobre violencia e sobre sexualidade sao analisadas sob o prisma da teoria da performatividade para demonstrar o carater fragmentado, fluido e sempre em devir da travestilidade.
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipati... more This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. In this third issue on the theme of intersectionality, Mel Y. Chen revisits the melancholy they experienced in their training as a linguist pursuing tra...
Bamberg, Michael; Anna De Fina; & Deborah Schiffrin (2007). Selves and identities in narrativ... more Bamberg, Michael; Anna De Fina; & Deborah Schiffrin (2007). Selves and identities in narrative and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baynham, Mike (2015). Identity brought about or brought along? Narrative as a privileged site for researching intercultural identities. In Karen Risager & Fred Dervin (eds.), Researching identity and interculturality, 67–88. London: Routledge. ———, & Anna De Fina (2005). Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement. London: Routledge. De Fina, Anna, & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2012). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendi, Ibram X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. New York: Nation Books.
Paper Presented at the 9th International Language and Gender Association - IGALA 9. City Universi... more Paper Presented at the 9th International Language and Gender Association - IGALA 9. City University of Hong Kong, May 2016.
Sumário do livro Discursos transviados: por uma linguística queer a ser lançado pela Editora Cort... more Sumário do livro Discursos transviados: por uma linguística queer a ser lançado pela Editora Cortez em 2020.
Mais do que descrever como pessoas LGBT falam ou escrevem, a Linguística Queer investiga o papel ... more Mais do que descrever como pessoas LGBT falam ou escrevem, a Linguística Queer investiga o papel da linguagem em conferir ou retirar legitimidade a múltiplas formas de vivenciar a sexualidade. Com previsão de lanamento em setembro de 2020 pela editora Cortez, esta coletânea congrega pesquisadores que têm questionado certos pressupostos dos estudos da linguagem através de práticas teórico-metodológicas inovadoras cujo objetivo é entender dinâmicas de reiteração e contestação de normas excludentes e hierarquizantes. Os capítulos mostram que o estudo de práticas linguísticas a partir de uma perspectiva queer traz ganhos (epistemológicos, metodológicos e políticos) para diversas áreas tais como a sociolinguística, a linguística aplicada, a linguística textual, a análise da conversa, a análise crítica do discurso, a morfologia entre outras. Tais ganhos podem nos ajudar a repensar o lugar do linguístico no social (e do social no linguístico) e produzir pesquisas politicamente responsivas às demandas de um mundo que ainda precisa aprender a lidar com a diferença.
Provas de leitura e revisão (miolo) do livro publicado em 2016 pela Fiocruz. Relate resultados de... more Provas de leitura e revisão (miolo) do livro publicado em 2016 pela Fiocruz. Relate resultados de pesquisa etnográfica sobre o processo transexualizador do SUS. A atenção recai em como se dá o atendimento clínico a pessoas transexuais via uma perspectiva interdisciplinar de estudos da interação.
Queering Paradigms IVa: Insurgências queer ao Sul do equador, junto com o volume Queering Paradig... more Queering Paradigms IVa: Insurgências queer ao Sul do equador, junto com o volume Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms (Lewis et al. 2014), divulga de forma multilíngue pesquisas apresentadas no 4° Congresso Internacional Queering Paradigms (QP4), sediado no Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Ambos os volumes compartilham o objetivo de analisar o status quo e os desafios para o futuro dos Estudos Queer a partir de uma perspectiva inter/multidisciplinar, concentrando-se sobre as relações entre os eixos Sul-Norte. O presente livro oferece capítulos escritos em português e espanhol, línguas subalternas na academia global, visando a privilegiar vozes e conhecimentos do Sul. Os trabalhos reunidos neste volume insurgem contra a colonização epistemológica dos corpos que habitam o Sul global e apontam para os problemas que surgem quando a(s) Teoria(s) Queer do Norte são aplicadas sem adaptação a outros contextos. Além de violências epistemológicas, a falta de atenção ao que acontece ao sul do equador pode levar a uma paralização do debate queer. O convite que esses capítulos fazem é um desafio a olhar para onde não se costuma olhar e ouvir as vozes que não se costuma ouvir, de forma a devolver ao queer seu potencial de contestação. Q u e e r i n g P a r a d i g m s i va ISBN 978-1-78707-192-6
Cet article vise à analyser le contexte de guérilla linguistique autour du genre dans le Brésil c... more Cet article vise à analyser le contexte de guérilla linguistique autour du genre dans le Brésil contemporain. Deux phénomènes nous intéressent : d’une part, l’utilisation du titre de presidenta par Dilma Rousseff, une stratégie de féminisation d’un terme et d’une position politique historiquement masculine ; puis l’utilisation de la lettre x comme terminaison de genre neutre, une stratégie de rupture du système linguistique hétérocispatriarcal et binaire du portugais qui est devenu visible dans l’espace public ces dernières années. Ces phénomènes nous permettent d’entrevoir que « le x de la question », dans le cas du Brésil, n’est que l’expression d’une panique morale vis-à-vis de la puissance politique du concept de genre.
This second issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gend... more This second issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" features seven essays focused on the theme of practice by prominent scholars in the field. Deborah Tannen, Penelope Eckert, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, and Elinor Ochs & Tamar Kremer-Sadlik show how the field’s attention to the micro-details of situated, highly contextualised interaction offers a privileged vantage point for seeing how gender, power and other dimensions of social life emerge as mundane daily actions unfold. Shigeko Okamoto and Marcyliena H. Morgan respectively review how research on the language practices of Japanese women and African American women have been formative to the field while also describing the critical necessity of more attention to these areas moving forward. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Heidi E. Hamilton pays homage to the groundbreaking work of Deborah Schiffrin.
The thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipatio... more The thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current pan-global character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. In this inaugural issue on politics, Robin Lakoff, Susan Gal and Alice Freed analyse the current political scenario from their feminist linguistic lenses, while Sally McConnell-Ginet and Norma Mendoza-Denton share more personal views of the politics involved in doing research on language, gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Amy Kyratzis pays homage to the groundbreaking work of Susan Ervin-Tripp.
This third issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gende... more This third issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" features seven essays focused on the theme of intersectionality by prominent scholars in the field. Mel Y. Chen revisits the melancholy they experienced in their training as a linguist pursuing transdisciplinarity in the 1990s to highlight the broader role played by affective politics in scholarship, while Michèle Foster narrates key incidents in her life that shaped her work giving voice to Black women’s linguistic knowledge and practices. Mary Bucholtz and deandre miles-hercules, Lal Zimman and Susan Ehrlich offer incisive critiques of the field’s limits, drawing on their own positionalities to move the study of language, gender and sexuality beyond its whiteness and cis-centredness. Tommaso M. Milani thinks through the affective loading of the term ‘queer’ to set out the importance of anger and discomfort in building broader, intersectional alliances in the struggle for social justice. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, María Dolores Gonzales offers a moving personal account of the life, work and activism of Chicana sociolinguist D. Letticia Galindo.
This fourth and final issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Lang... more This fourth and final issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia. Read the entire issue at https://journal.equinoxpub.com/GL
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