"You'd think that." The Discursive Production of Language and Sexuality in Personal Narrative

Abstract

Sexuality is a contentious topic both within and outside the academy. A debate emerged in the early 2000s regarding how best to study language and sexuality within linguistics and linguistic anthropology. This debate formed around two camps that advocated for differing ways of studying how language and sexuality are discursively produced. One group advocated for Queer Linguistics that is based in an identity framework, the other advocated for a desire-based analysis. Going off of this debate, I argue that a desire-based analysis rooted in identification is a more fruitful way to understand how language and sexuality are entailed in processes through which people come to understand themselves as subjects. We constantly do complex work with language to mark our experiences, instantiate identity, and negotiate our natural and social worlds. Sexuality is an area where the social self is constituted within discourse—narratives. Personal narratives reveal how the expression of sexuality is not only remembered but also negotiated through the relaying of life events that have an emotional meaning to the teller. This paper serves to explore how Queer Latinas use reported speech in personal narrative as a way of recapitulating whole dialogues, which becomes a powerful link between sexuality, identification, performativity, and authenticity within their narrative experience.