Timetable September 22

Hall

Room SA49

Room SA49

In this talk, I introduce the field of Queer Linguistics, explaining how scholarship in this area challenges cisnormativity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity through the analysis of language use. A brief explanation of how this work has drawn upon interdisciplinary developments within Queer Theory is provided, alongside an account of current debates and priorities in the field; this includes the real-world applications of Queer Linguistic scholarship. Thereafter, I show how linguistic analysis can inform current thinking in Queer Theory via a case study of young trans people describing their experiences of being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. Through a sociocultural linguistic analysis, I show how their experiences reveal cisnormative expectations around trans people’s embodiment. I also argue, however, that the young resist these expectations by recontextualising the language used by others to describe their bodies. In this way, I argue that a Queer Linguistic analysis should go beyond identifying the ways in which language reproduces problematic ideologies; it should also explore how those who are marginalised through such language can gain agency by actively subverting and challenging it.

Queer geographies emphasise how queer bodies and performances disrupt the cis-, hetero-, white-normativities at work in and across different spaces. These disruptions take place at different scales: the body, the home, the city, the nation, the globe. We build on these theoretical perspectives to explore queer geographical disruptions from our personal experiences as travelling/migrating queer geographers. The intervention we offer is the result of dialogues between us over the past two years, during which we gradually shared our personal travellings/migrations, the points of similarity and connection between these as well as their differences and detachments, as a means of forming a dialogical understanding of the important roles that (our) queer bodies play in disrupting the spaces they/we inhabit and cross. We chart the unfolding of this dialogue and explore what emerges when our bodies stick to the specificities of various linguistic, political, cultural, social and legal discourses anchored in space, and what gets dragged in the wake of our movement and (dis)locations.

Hall

This talk examines the role of hook-up apps in the lives of gay, bi, trans, and queer immigrants and refugees in Denmark, and how the online culture of these platforms promotes belonging or exclusion. Within the context of the so-called European refugee crisis, this research focuses on the experiences of immigrants from especially Muslim-majority countries to the greater Copenhagen area, a region known for both its progressive ideologies and its anti-immigrant practices.
Grindr and similar platforms connect newcomers with not only dates and sex, but also friends, roommates and other logistical contacts. But these socio-sexual platforms also become spaces of racialization and othering. Weaving together analyses of real Grindr profile texts, immigrant narratives, political rhetoric, and popular media, the talk provides an in-depth look at the complex interplay between online and offline cultures, and between technology and society.

This talk examines how heteronormativity is embedded in housing taxation regimes producing a link between asset accumulation and normative formulations of familial structures. House prices have risen widely across Europe in the last decades. However, the windfall in the appreciation of residential properties is unequally distributed. While older households have largely benefitted from a buoyant housing market as they downsize; younger households and private renters struggle to access homeownership while facing unaffordable rents. These life-cycle patterns are accentuated in many countries by taxation regimes that lack tenure neutrality, that is, favour mortgagors and homeowners over renters. This presentation argues that housing policy has implicit biases towards particular forms of household composition readable in asset formation strategies. What does queer theory have to say about housing tenure and taxation? How does the lack of tenure neutrality affect queer populations? This presentation develops a reading of housing policy from a queer lens to unpack the assumptions about asset and family formation embedded in housing taxation.  First, the focus will be on the theoretical possibilities of inserting queer theory in the housing taxation literature drawing from queer approaches to analyse housing policies with a focus on homeownership subsidies. Secondly, the presentation will interrogate the opportunities and barriers present in the main micro household-level datasets in the UK and the Netherlands to prospect the possibilities of quantitative empirical analyses. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to problematise the links between housing policy and household formation from a queer perspective