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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 214

Part of Session 131: Latino Social networks and the city (Other abstracts in this session)

Queer Latina/o Networks in the City: languages, identities and the ties that bind

Authors: Cashman, Holly R.
Submitted by: Cashman, Holly R. (University of New Hampshire, United States of America)

Coming out, or the process by which a gay or lesbian person asserts a gay/lesbian self-identification with relatives, friends, co-workers and other social network ties, has long been considered fundamental to the construction of a gay/lesbian identity in the U.S. Coming out can be seen as a threat, however, to an individual’s ties to her or his family-based social network, the very social structure that has traditionally been viewed as the locus of language maintenance in immigrant communities. This paper examines the sociolinguistic consequences of identity construction and social network among U.S. Latina/o gays and lesbians living in the interstices of the (imagined) Anglo, English-monolingual LGBT community and the (imagined) heterosexual, Spanish/English bilingual Latina/o community. This paper on gay and lesbian social networks, Spanish language maintenance and shift to English is part of a broader sociolinguistic ethnography of gay and lesbian Latinas/os in Phoenix, Arizona that draws from a number of theoretical traditions and encompasses sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and discourse and conversation analysis.

Phoenix, the fifth largest metropolitan area in the U.S. is home to a large Latina/o community that reports a high degree of bilingualism. The analysis departs from the notion that “ethnicity and sexuality…are not separable, nor are they separate from language” (Bucholtz 1995: 369); furthermore, identity in terms of ethnicity and sexuality are viewed as mutable, strategic and interactionally-achieved. Data analyzed consist of in-depth, semi-structured ethnographic interviews with 30 gay and lesbian Latina/o participants, extended participant observation, questionnaires and recordings of spontaneous conversational interaction. The paper examines how gay and lesbian Latinos/as see the relationship between their ethnic and sexual identities, and how this vision affects and is affected by linguistic practice, specifically the maintenance of Spanish versus shift to English within their linguistic repertoires and within their social networks, which extend across the city, across the southwestern U.S. and across the border with Mexico.