Kira Hall

Sissy hypno pornography is characterized by the use of erotic hypnosis tropes to induce a process of self-feminization. Accessible across social media and online porn sites, the genre involves the remix of professionally produced pornography with sounds, images and text to induce a state of sexual arousal. Groups promoting anti-porn and anti-transgender views have cited the genre as dangerous to public health, depicting hypnotic entertainment as having the power to alter an individual’s core sense of identity. While much of sissy hypno imagines feminization through humiliation narratives based in forced gender conversion, a growing subgenre of trans-affirming hypno legitimates transfeminine identification. Metapragmatic data taken from video content and sex worker interviews exposes how progressive content producers shield consumers from the genre’s transphobic tropes by creating narratives based in self-realization. The chapter analyzes online pornography as situated within a politics of identity and thus always evolving, even as its critics remain focused on conventional semiotic orders.

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 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 article draws from ethnographic research among youth in Delhi's expanding middle classes to call for more sociolinguistic attention to the role played by sexuality discourse in the reproduction of class relations. The discussion highlights the centrality of the middle classes to sustaining as well as shifting sexual normativity, suggesting that sexual norms are in part constituted through everyday discourses that situate middle class subjectivity between two class extremes. Specifically, the article tracks how Hinglish, as a mixed‐language alternative to a class system polarized by English and Hindi, came to rival English as the preferred language of sexuality, challenging the elite censorship of “vernacular” languages that began in nineteenth‐century colonialism. However, as demonstrated by two case studies of queer speakers at different ends of the Hinglish continuum, speakers of this internally diverse hybrid variety are not equally able to master the sexuality discourse that has become indexical of upward mobility.

Editorial. Social media has facilitated the rise of a new transnational feminism that refuses to accept silence surrounding violence against women. Often associated with the #MeToo movement, this form of feminist refusal continues to evolve as small-scale grassroots movements are transformed into global icons through the internet’s participatory power.

The rise of India's global economy has reinforced a perception of English as a language of sexual modernity within the expanding middle classes. This article explores this perception in the multilingual humor of Hindi-speaking Delhi youth marginalized for sexual and gender difference. Their joking routines feature the Sikh Sardarji, a longstanding ethnic figure often caricatured as circulating in modernity but lacking the English competence to understand modernity's semiotics. Reflective of the economic restructuring that ushered in the millennium, the humor supports a normative progress narrative that prioritizes an ethnically unmarked urban middle class. At the same time, the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth who tell these jokes—still criminalized under Section 377 when this fieldwork was conducted—shift this narrative by positioning sexual knowledge at modernity's forefront. The analysis reveals how sexual modernity—here viewed as constituted in everyday interaction through competing configurations of place, time, and personhood—relies on normativity even while defining itself against it. (Chronotope, ethnic humor, formulaic jokes, globalization, Hindi-English, Hinglish, media, middle class, normativity, sexual modernity, temporality)*

This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics—with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contribute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be.

This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents that characterize this postelection moment: first, the surreal mix of gendered and racialized nostalgia embedded in Trump’s iconography and message, and second, the intensification of white racism as Trump’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism becomes government. Bringing the responses of our esteemed interlocutors into conversation with the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Susan Sontag and the historical work of Carol Anderson, we suggest that Trump’s spectacle of governing embraces sexual t... Résumé: Cet article s’appuie sur les commentaires d’interlocuteurs répondant à l’article “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein et Ingram, 2016), une étude publiée avant les élections présidentielles de 2016 qui analyse l’emploi de la dérision par Trump lors des primaires Républicaines. Nous poursuivons cette analyse en examinant la manière dont les performances sémiotiques de Trump lors de la campagne deviennent maintenant un support aux politiques concrètes de l’administration Trump. Notre analyse pense deux courants caractérisant le moment post-électoral. D’une part, le mélange surréaliste d’une nostalgie genrée et racialisée encrée dans l’iconographie et le message de Trump, et d’autre part, l’intensification du racisme blanc au moment où la rhétorique patriotique et nationaliste de Trump intégra le gouvernement. En mettant en conversation les réponses très pertinentes de nos interlocuteurs, les travaux philosophiques de Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, et Su...

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven. Résumé: La transition, opérée par Donald Trump, d’homme d’affaire à candidat présidentiel populiste a laissé plus d’un commentateur perplexe. Cet article s’appuie sur les outils de l’anthropologie culturelle, linguistique et sur la théorie réthorique pour suggérer que le succès de la candidature de Trump tient en partie à sa valeur en tant que forme de grand divertissement comique. Nous examinons notamment la manière dont le style politique hors norme de Trump, son utilisation de la gestuelle pour critiquer le système politique et caricaturer ses opposants donnèrent un élan à sa campagne en la rendant spectaculaire. Des théoriciens poststructuralistes et néo-marxistes ont soutenu que le capitalisme tardif valorise le style au dépend du contenu: Trump donne un nouveau souffle à cette tendance. Le portrait-charge du monde sociopolitique que dessinent les gestes de Trump lorsqu’il s’attaque au politiquement correct ou lorsqu’il tente de désarmer ses adversaires, crée du capital visuel dans un univers politiq...