The 5th issue of the IGALA blog is out
Welcome to the fifth issue of the Igala Blog, the first of 2017. The previous fourth issues have mainly dealt with language and gender, this issue is dedicated to language and sexuality. Coming from gender, I am myself finding this field – language and sexuality – more and more interesting and I am sure you will enjoy the two contributions below. This semester I was lucky to contribute to the module “Communicating Sexuality” at Edge Hill University (while also teaching Langua
Using ethnography to study queer identity construction
In 2012, I spent several months doing ethnography with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth group in Northern England (see Jones 2016). I approached the youth group expecting to see particular interactional patterns that would tell me something about what the youths’ mutual identity was, and how this related to broader ideologies of gender and sexuality. I assumed that the findings of most previous research into language and sexuality would be relevant: lesbi
Video Porn and Audience Translation
One day late at night, I found a Japanese gay pornographic video clip unofficially uploaded by an anonymous person on an aggregated free-porn website. The anonymous uploader invited comments about the video clip by initiating a thread on the website. The thread title reads, as the uploader translated a popular Japanese gay video porn company JAPAN PICTURE’s product, “Straight Asian Twink Gets Tied Down and Worked Over by Two Gay Guys.”[1] Reading this thread title, I couldn’t