ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, the field of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly concerned with challenging binary and static constructions of gender, sex and sexuality, and it is now accepted that gender is fluid, variable and contingent. Furthermore, much recent work has drawn attention to how ideological concepts such as ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ can be ‘detached from the bodies to which they are ideologically linked, with language playing a crucial role in this process’ (Davis et al., 2014: 3). This is perhaps highlighted the most clearly when examining the practices (including language practices) of those who live as gender variant or transgender. It is these users of language who are the focus of this chapter. Existing work on language, transgender and gender variance falls into two broad areas: socio-phonetic studies of voice and discourse analysis studies of how language practices work to construct identities for transgender and gender-variant speakers. In this chapter, I briefly consider the first of these areas, but I spend more time looking at the latter area, as students wishing to research this topic are likely to have more access to the skills and resources required for conducting discourse analysis-based research into transgender, gender variance and language. I also briefly consider some recent work examining representations of transgender people in the press.
