Welcome to this very special issue of the IGALA blog – the graduate student issue!
Having been the Graduate Student Representative on the IGALA advisory board for the past few years, and as a recent graduate student myself, I have been constantly impressed by how much the IGALA community positively embraces and supports the work of its graduate student members. From the Graduate Student Best Paper Prize and conference workshops to networking and academic support, IGALA aims to provide a space in which graduate students feel welcome and valued as early caree
Investigating the representation of transgender people in the British press
In 2015, when I first began researching for my Ph.D., I was struck by the power of media discourses to quickly change and strongly impact on society, giving attention to some matters and consequently backgrounding others. By doing so, the attention of the masses can immediately be channeled on specific topics. Social media such as Twitter, have the potential to direct the attention of large numbers of people onto specific issues in a mere matter of hours. Contemporarily, I no
Exploring Normative Regulations of Sexual Intrusive Thoughts via (Virtual) Ethnographic Approaches a
My PhD research lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics (esp. queer linguistics) and health communication. More specifically, I use corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis and virtual ethnography to analyze how people who suffer from sexuality and relationship-themed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) use language online to make sense of their mental health, and how they linguistically orient to normative ideas of gender and sexuality to construct their identity.
The interrelation of sexual and national identity construction in talk: Greek homosexuality
Greek national identity has been for centuries bonded with Orthodoxy, which explicitly recognizes two genders and one sexual identity (heterosexual), inclusive of the fixed and stable relation between them. Thus, it is unsurprising that “Discourses that seek to align ethnicity, religion and heterosexuality against homosexuality and LGBT visibility” (Canakis 2013: 305) predominate in Greece and in the Balkans generally (see end note 1). However, at the same time, the growing i
Helping Faith Communities Talk Better about Sex
About a year ago, I was slogging through dissertation writing when I came upon a call for applications for a program run through my university called Humanities in the Community. My dissertation is about Baptists and sex, and yet I was still having trouble making my topic feel fresh and relevant and – well, sexy. (Ironically, I struggled with this same conundrum when I was writing my masters thesis and desperately trying to make my research on laughter be anything other than
‘Genderlect’ in a spectrum: Language used by non-binary people, women, and men participating in a co
Within sociolinguistics, gender has long been considered distinct from biological sex; Postmodernist sociolinguists view it as a socio-cultural factor (Butler, 1990; Coates, 2004: 4). A nice (but somewhat simplified) way to envision this is through the ‘coat rack’ metaphor (Nicholson, 1994: 81) which combats biological essentialism by positing that the human body is a ‘coat rack’, constant across time and cultures. Conceptions of gender are like the ‘coats’, which can be inte
Breaking the binary with pronouns
My PhD project concentrates on 3rd person singular pronouns from a sociolinguistic gender perspective. For this blog post, I want to concentrate on the biggest current question: how do we refer to a person who does not identify as a he or a she? This ‘gap’ in the language has been filled with what I am calling ‘nonbinary pronouns’ – pronouns that can be used to refer to someone who does not (exclusively) identify as female or male, and does not wish to be referred to as a he
