An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality
In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to
studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of
Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And
yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that
typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as
disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black
sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of
urgency.
References
Bailey, Marlon M.
2013 Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Ball, Arnetha, Makoni, Sinfree, Smitherman, Geneve & Spears, Arthur K.
2003 Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Boylorn, Robin
2020 The frustrations of watching the Kardashians as a Black woman.
[URL]. (Posted 9/30/2020, Site visited 9/30/2020)
Cooper, Brittney C.
2007 (Un)clutching my mother’s pearls, or ratchetness and the residue of respectability. In
The Crunk Feminist Collection.
Brittney C. Cooper,
Susanna M. Morris &
Robin M. Boylorn (eds), 217–221. New York: The Feminist Press.
Lewis, Heidi R.
2013 Exhuming the Ratchet before it’s Buried.
The Feminist Wire.
[URL]
Stallings, LaMonda Horton
2007 Mutha’ is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture, Black Performance and Cultural Criticism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
King, Brian W.
2023.
Beyond undoing raciolinguistics—Biopolitics and the concealed confluence of sociolinguistic perspectives.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 27:5
► pp. 436 ff.
Zimman, Lal
2023.
Language, Gender, Race, and Sexuality. In
A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology,
► pp. 523 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.