ABSTRACT
The anti-normative approach lays the foundations for queer lexicography and for critical research on the heteronormativity of traditional lexicography. By queering lexicography, this chapter exposes the unnaturalness of norms to reveal the dominant discourses of heteronormativity within the final product, the dictionary itself. Although often used as reference works and thus imbued with significant authority, dictionaries are often regarded as objective and purely descriptive reflections of language use. The imbalances in power are typically reflected and reinforced in interlingual dictionaries, where often one language dominates over the other, which is typically linked to the purpose of the dictionary. As words from more than one language are selected and placed into a relationship with one other, interlingual lexicography, like translation, participates in the distribution of cultural capital among languages. In order to avoid inserting all found word forms into the dictionary, the lexicographer usually reduces them to a basic form, the lemma.
