ABSTRACT
One of the most important contributions of language and sexuality research over the past 20 years has been to counter reductive beliefs that there exists a binary distinction between homogenous homosexual versus heterosexual (or ‘lesbian/gay’ versus ‘straight’) subjectivities. Instead, work in the field has provided compelling evidence that the ways in which sexuality is experienced, constructed, and perceived are inextricably linked to other categories of social life (e.g. gender, race, nation, religion, social class) and to the norms, expectations, and constraints of local interactional contexts (e.g., audience, setting). In this chapter, I review research on how these intersections between sexuality and other dimensions of lived experiences are manifested in variable linguistic practice. I focus in this review on two broad areas of scholarship in variationist sociolinguistic research: work that has investigated the diversity of practices subsumed under the umbrella label ‘LGB’ or ‘queer’ and work that examined instead the ways in which sexuality and other relevant categories mutually constitute one another. I argue that research in both of these traditions has contributed to the destabilising of binary understandings of sexuality, and has forced a fundamental rethinking of what we mean when we speak of sexuality-linked linguistic practice. I illustrate these arguments with a brief discussion of the interrelationships between language, sexuality, and gender among a group of lesbians in London.
