Beyond undoing raciolinguistics—Biopolitics and the concealed confluence of sociolinguistic perspectives

Flores and Rosa, in their leading piece, state that one of their main motivations in “undoing” raciolinguistics is their wariness of it becoming siloed as something “raciolinguists” do. As a sociolinguist whose work is primarily classified (with my consent) as various admixtures of queer linguistics, feminist linguistics, and (in my work bridging sociolinguistics and intersex studies) embodied sociolinguistics, I can sympathize acutely with the imposed siloing of critical areas. A feminist linguistic perspective on analysis or a queer linguistic perspective on analysis can be deployed by any scholar (as can a raciolinguistic perspective).

Before the undoing of raciolinguistics began, in my own work I had realized the value of applying a raciolinguistic perspective to studies of language and embodied sexuality. I applied the raciolinguistic perspective on perceiving subjects to explain how sexual embodiment, linguistic cues, identities, and race are reciprocal, and in confluence, extending the toolbox to talk about “cisheteropatriarchal” perceiving subjects (King, 2019). Under this gaze, the embodied practices of those who fall outside of a normative view of what it means to look and act like a straight man become overdetermined (e.g., intersex bodies as well as female bodies and even male commodified bodies), and a lot more is read into their shapes and movements than with normative bodies. It proved very fruitful to bring a raciolinguistic perspective into this embodied sociolinguistic work on sexualized bodies.

Anticipating these issues, Lal Zimman (2021) has recently written about trans linguistics, a project that is not just for trans thinkers, he suggests, but for those who wish to thoroughly divest from transphobic worldviews while materially investing in the well-being of trans humans. At the same time, in a statement compatible with the leading piece, Zimman argues that trans linguists need to address needs and questions raised by thinkers and activists who are similarly engaged with interrogating racialization and other marginalizing implications for language use (Zimman, 2021). So as with Flores and Rosa, there is a sense that the pervasive role of race in worldwide colonialism has injected the relevance of whiteness (and white supremacy) into trans linguistics as well. Serendipitously, Flores and Rosa here draw on the influential work of Riley Snorton (2017), who has emphasized the need to ask what “pasts” have been submerged and discarded to conceal the relevance of race to the sociohistorical development of trans. They adopt that standpoint by asking similar questions about race and linguistics, finding similar concealments. The “colonial co-naturalization” and “joint emergence” of racial and linguistic categories and hierarchies are emphasized in the leading piece, and they remind readers that European colonial logics link European-ness to orderly homogeneity and non-European-ness to unruly heterogeneity as part of this submerging of the past. What had also been discarded is the fact that the historical development of racism and the historical development of the pathologization of trans and intersex bodies cannot be separated, each one propping up the other.

John Money has been credited with pioneering, in the 1950s at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the dominant surgical paradigm for “treating” intersex babies (i.e., those born with problematized sex characteristics) (King, 2022a ). However, the work of Quincy Meyers traces back the disorder framework for intersex (and trans) bodies, demonstrating that it predates John Money by several centuries, and it is a legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. “Biological sex” was, from its foundational moments, racialized into differing categories with Black people perceived as the least sexually dimorphic and white people the most sexually dimorphic. This notion fed into the whiteness of surgical correction to maintain white supremacy (Meyers, 2022). That is, white babies whose bodies did not fit a strict sexual dimorphism were “fixed” to maintain the fiction that white people were more sexually dimorphic, and hence displaying a superior “orderly homogeneity.” It is a biopolitics of race, sex, and gender, and its colonialist logics live on in our (unwitting) current practices.

As a result, colonial racial logics are entangled with the categories trans and intersex (and their pathologization), but this fact has been mostly absent from raciolinguistic, queer, and trans perspectives on sociolinguistic analysis (but for an exception, see Milani, 2014). There has been a “delinking” of sociolinguistics from troubling colonial processes, which still have relevance, in a way that is fundamentally colonial in its logic of severing from the past. We must, as sociolinguists, confront the mutually inflecting history of sex/gender and race and the role that language (and language analysis) can play in reanimating colonial logics (Borba & Milani, 2019) unwittingly and unwillingly in most cases.

This point extends to the field of sociolinguistics itself and its epistemological in/exclusivity. If we hope to heed Busi Makoni's recent call (2021) for deconstructing theories from Western-European contexts so that they can be more epistemologically inclusive, then exploring the entangled biopolitics of sex, gender, sexuality, and race, and its historic legacy of colonial geopolitics that we are still dealing with, then I agree that we must resist the imposed siloing of “raciolinguistics,” and the same holds for “gender and language,” “queer linguistics,” “trans linguistics,” and linguistic work focusing on intersex bodies. Nikki Lane (2021) has emphasized a similar point to Makoni, and she names Black scholars who are writing about language, race, and sexuality but not publishing in linguistics journals. She calls for more humility by sociolinguists in relation to the lived expertise that minority scholars bring, echoing points made in trans linguistics (Konnelly, 2021; Zimman, 2021), adding to the urgency.

While reading the leading piece, I also detected echoes of biopolitics in the text, cohering around the notion that we must grapple with colonial logics that fester in the foundations and practices of sociolinguistics—an orientation that has, in a previous text by Nelson Flores, been framed as the genealogical commitments of a raciolinguistic perspective (Flores, 2021). I will argue that hewing to “genealogical commitments” entails paying attention to biopolitics and furthermore to how biopolitics as a critical orientation supports intersectionality. As Foucault has demonstrated, the apparatuses of sexuality and race are genealogically bound together, and the same can be said of gender (Repo, 2016). I propose that it is attention to biopolitics and biopower (Foucault, 1978, 2003) that will assist raciolinguistic, queer linguistic, feminist linguistic, and trans linguistic perspectives to become available to all sociolinguists as we confront the colonial legacies of the discipline. But first I must explain what I mean by biopolitics before addressing its de-siloing potential in more detail.

Foucault argued that biopower (the modern manifestation of sovereign power) acts on human life via two poles: the anatomo-political and the biopolitical. Anatomo-politics acts on bodies to make them more productive yet docile enough to integrate into systems of control. The biopolitical pole regulates the reproductive capacities of bodies at the level of a population (health, longevity, etc.) as a resource. Sexuality for Foucault was the “hinge” between these two poles, as sex is the activity that generates more bodies and is also amenable to disciplinary intervention (Pugliese & Stryker, 2009). Foucault unambiguously links racism and colonialism into this equation, grasping in his genealogies that state manipulation of race in colonialism was central to the rationality of biopower (Mills, 2018, p. 167). This critical perspective on modern power structures has a lot to offer when one is addressing the topics that a raciolinguistic perspective tackles, in particular “…interrogating the colonial reproduction and transformation of modern knowledge projects and lifeways” (Flores & Rosa, this issue—my emphasis).

On a similar track, using a biopolitical framework, Joseph Pugliese and Susan Stryker (2009) have traced the operation of whiteness as a “macro-political structuration of power” in the micro-political context of racially inscribed bodies, subjectivities, and practices. The usefulness of this biopolitical approach dovetails well with the arguments advanced by Flores and Rosa in this issue.

Flores and Rosa here encourage us to understand race as integral to the modern nation-state as a product of colonialism. It varies in its overt-ness across cases yet requires local investigation of “the dehumanization of Blackness and Indigeneity,” a dehumanization that is contiguous with the dehumanization of trans and intersex people, all part of the “afterlives of slavery” that persist in colonial logics and then get dispersed in the world (Wolff et al., 2022). When conducting sociolinguistic analysis, we must “grapple with” colonial logics at multiple levels: project conception, goals, background explanations, data analysis, and implications. In alignment with the efforts of Flores and Rosa to intervene in the siloing of “raciolinguistics,” I agree that to silo it from “gender & language” or from “language & sexuality” is to perpetuate a colonialist show of smoke and mirrors wherein white, cisheteropatriarchal perceptions are passed off as universal abstract knowledge (for a similar argument, see Milani, 2021; King, 2022b ).

The authors finish by saying that the undoing of raciolinguistics is “…an invitation to interrogate the racializing implications of the universalizing liberal humanist thinking that informs the broader discipline of linguistics as well as the liberal progress narratives that shaped the emergence of sociolinguistics.” They further point out that undoing raciolinguistics requires reconsideration of the structural transformations necessary to uproot racial and linguistic stigmatization. These are also important lessons for queer linguistics, trans linguistics, feminist linguistics, and more. As Branca Falabella Fabricio has so aptly put it, to develop all these areas in tandem is not to demarcate boundaries, rather the array represents “various domains of expertise as part of a conjoint effort in the enactment of an anticolonial narrative whose resolution has no final stop” (Fabricio, 2022, p. 13). Biopolitics, in its theorization of an intertwined history, stands to critically orient us to this joint effort, interweaving our similar thinking and “marshalling together” our various streams of “reasonable anger” into an angry coalition (Milani, 2021) when necessary. Those remaining in the so-called mainstream sociolinguistics silo (perhaps the one true silo) can exit and join us in our reflections, structural dismantling, and relationship building, clearing the way for a still-young discipline to mature.

No conflict of interest.