ABSTRACT
While Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is today a widely applied approach to language and gender (e.g., Kosetzi 2008; Lazar 2014, this volume; Wodak 2008), researchers in language and sexuality have drawn relatively little on CDS as an analytical framework to date. This lack of attention to CDS is due to the historical development of language and sexuality studies, a field which has had a strong focus on non-heterosexual (non-normative) identities, maybe to complement earlier research in language and gender, which often concentrated on normative, heterosexual femininities and masculinities. The study of non-normative sexualities, as found in Queer Linguistics – the most vibrant strand within contemporary language and sexuality studies – has proven to be most fruitful at the local level of concrete interactional contexts. This explains why ethnographic, bottom-up (rather than discourse analytic) approaches, often taking an in-depth look at sexuality-related identity performances in specific communities of practice, have figured prominently within the field (e.g., Jones 2012; Sauntson and Morrish 2012; Schneider 2013).
