ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts analytical approaches drawn from interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics to explore how speakers construct intersecting gender and national identities through stereotype-based humour in the House of Lords. Sociolinguistic scrutiny is critical to exploring how inequality manifests through institutional norms and practices in this understudied institution. The chapter analyses the multiple ways in which Scottish and Welsh national identities and nationality-based stereotypes are invoked by peers in the Queen’s Speech Debates over a five-year period. Particular attention is paid to how these constructions intersect with gender, as well as age and social class, as speakers strive to construct their professional identities as competent, legitimate politicians.
Several researchers have identified the House of Commons as a public space dominated by masculine discursive norms and practices. I will demonstrate how intersecting identities constructed through competitive humour reproduce stereotypically masculine communicative norms, which have become normative professional communication practices in the House of Lords. This promotes a narrow range of acceptable social and geographically based identities which may exclude some participants and increase distance from the heterogeneous UK public.
