“Ties that bind”
The continued conflation of sex, sexuality and gender
Few in the humanities and social sciences will doubt the long-standing historical conflation of sex, sexuality and
gender both within and without academia. Despite research and socio-political movements aiming for the contrary, it continues even
now. This paper discusses the ongoing conflation between these interrelated but independent social categories in current
linguistic research, including how it can serve to reflect and reinforce socio-political antagonism outside of academia. I propose
two potential directions of travel: (1) welcoming ideological pluralism between scholars on the primacy of either sex, gender or
sexuality; and (2) horizontally disaggregating the three categories. I argue that engaging with both strategies in tandem serves
to benefit researchers, participants and the public. The former encourages trust in academic research during a time wherein that
trust is waning. The latter enables an analytical distinction between sex, gender, and sexuality in linguistic research, whilst
continuing to acknowledge their interrelatedness. Implemented together, they will allow researchers to embed research in the 21st
century, which entails pluralistic and competing socio-political activism between equally deserving groups.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Continuing conflation of categories
- 3.Future directions
- Notes
-
References
References
Carr, C. Lynn
2005 Tomboyism or lesbianism? Beyond sex/gender/sexual conflation.
Sex Roles 53(1/2): 119–131.
Grove, Jack
2020 Kathleen Stock: Life on the front line of transgender rights debate.
Times Higher Education 7 January 2020 Retrieved from:
[URL]
Gudonis, Marius
2021 Academic activism in the age of post-truth. In
History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis,
Marius Gudonis &
Benjamin T. Jones (eds), forthcoming. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hines, Sally
2019 The feminist frontier: On trans and feminism.
Journal of Gender Studies 28(2): 145–157.
Hines, Sally
2020 Sex wars and (trans) gender panics: Identity and body politics in contemporary UK feminism.
The Sociological Review 68(4): 25–43.
Hudson, David & Leftwich, Adrian
2014 From Political Economy to Political Analysis.
DLP Research Paper 25. Birmingham: The Developmental Leadership Programme. Retrieved from:
[URL]
John Benjamins Publishing Company
2020 Journal of Language and Sexuality. Retrieved from:
[URL]
Koller, Veronika
2008 Lesbian Discourses: Images of a Community. Abingdon: Routledge.
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Ehrlich, Susan
2019 Language, gender and sexuality.
Annual Review of Linguistics 51: 455–475.
UK Government Equalities Office
2018 Reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 3 July 2018 Retrieved from:
[URL]
Webster, Lexi
2019 “I am I”: Self-constructed transgender identities in internet-mediated forum communication.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2561: 129–146.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Lawson, Robert & Laura Coffey-Glover
2023.
Introducing mediated discrimination: Intersections of gender, sexuality and media discourse.
Discourse, Context & Media 56
► pp. 100739 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.