At the Crossroads of Language, Race, and Sexuality

Abstract

This chapter explores how researchers have examined race and sexuality as mutually implicated dimensions of language use and interpretation. While past descriptions of language have inadvertently conflated these dimensions by foregrounding certain speakers and erasing others, recent research has decentered the privileged gaze of whiteness and heterosexuality by examining the language of racially and sexually marginalized communities and by exploring the semiotic mapping of hierarchies of race onto those of sexuality. The chapter analyzes interactions among Korean American girls who highlight the sexual value of locally racialized body parts, illustrating how their acts of intersectional highlighting allow them to contest the sexual devaluation of Korean bodies while reproducing the very ideologies they challenge. Researchers are encouraged to reflexively consider their own strategies of intersectional highlighting by asking what ends are served—and not served—when making intersectional facts visible in their analyses.