In this class, students will become acquainted with Queer Linguistics, which is a field that ”primarily deals with the linguistic construction of heteronormativity and its stabilizing mechanism, normative gender binarism” (Motschenbacher 2011: 151). We will first reconstruct the development of the field (including the more recent subfield of trans linguistics), establish the basic theoretical background and consider ethical and political questions. After that, we will turn to select topics, for example names, pronouns and category labels, and methods, for example (corpus-assisted) critical discourse analysis, which can be used in order to study how groups of people are represented, and sociophonetics, which is concerned with the phonetic aspects of sociolinguistic variation, as well as the social significance of phonetic variation.
- Dozent/in: Berit Johannsen