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Queerly Phrased: language, gender, and sexuality
ANNA LVIA & KIRA HALL, Eds, 1997
New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press
460 pp., 0 19 510471 4, pb, L22.50.
My reading of this book coincided with the publication of Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook in Britain-its review (in the Independent on Sunday of 8 March 1998) attracted my attention, most of all because of its heading `Time to kiss your genitals goodbye'. Queerly Phrased has no less to offer. Articles like `Go, suck your husband's sugarcane' or subheadings such as `Men with cunts, chicks with dicks' should not deter the fainthearted from diving deeper into this divine reader on language, gender and sexuality.
This compilation of articles is, as I understand, the first of its kind to analyse language and gender from a completely queer perspective, contrary to the vast majority of literature which seems to deal usually with the question of how men and women communicate with each other. Or rather how heterosexuals communicate with each other. Previous publications handling gay issues include, e.g. James Chesebro's Gayspeak. gay male and lesbian communication (1981) and books such as Jeffrey Ringer's Queer words, Queer images: communication and the construction of homosexuality (1994).
The editors of this collection, Anna Livia and Kira Hall, both contributors to the articles, started to compile papers in 1994, mainly because they were struck by the vast variety of different approaches to feminist and queer theory. In their preface they quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (p. 5): `The study of sexuality is not co-extensive with the study of gender, correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry.' (The Epistemology of the Closet, 1990).
Queerly Phrased is a reader containing 25 articles, subdivided into three main sections: I. Liminal Lexicology; II. Queerspeak and finally III. Linguistic Gender-Bending. Apart from one article (Moonwomon-Baird), all of the papers here are presented for the first time in print. Although predominantly by US-American authors, the range of topics presented is a global one, covering languages and cultures such as Japanese, Yiddish, Hausa, Hindi and sign language (quantitatively well represented), alongside North American and European issues.
I generally agree with the three part layout of the book....