Lavender Speech and Drag Glossary as a Community of Practice

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Lavender linguistics is a term used by linguistics and advanced by William Leap to describe the study of language as it is used by gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) speakers. It "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBTQ communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon.

• Theories about the reasons for differences in language use

Traditionally it was believed that one's way of speaking is a result of one's identity, but it is also the case that the way we talk is a part of identity formation, specifically suggesting that gender identity is variable and not fixed.

• Language use as performance

Shared ways of speaking can be used to create a single, cohesive identity that in turn help organize political struggle. Sexuality is one form of social identity, discursively constructed and represented. This shared identity can in some cases be strengthened through shared forms of language use and used for political organizing. Language can be used to negotiate relations and contradictions of gender and sexual identities, and can index identity in various ways, even if there is no specific gay or lesbian code of speaking.

Gay men and lesbians may, through the use of language, form speech communities. A speech community is a community that shares linguistic traits and tends to have community boundaries that coincide with social units. Membership in speech communities is often assumed based on stereotypes about the community as defined by non-linguistic factors. Speakers may resist culturally dominant language and oppose cultural authority by maintaining their own varieties of speech.

Gender performativity relates to speech in that people may consciously or unconsciously modify their speech styles to conform with their gender role, which men often pick speech styles that reflect the culturally defined standards of masculinity. Gay men may be associated with 'femininity' in their speech styles because others perceive that their speech performance doesn't conform with their gender.

For example, in the west, parodies of gay styles are heard as hyper-feminine, supporting the notion that gay speech is feminine. However, because many speech varieties associated with 'masculinity' are learned and not biological, certain gay men may be using a wider variety of speech than a stereotypical 'masculine' male.

According to Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, these stylistic innovations are made possible by the ‘iterability’ of speech and are used to index elements of identity that often do not conform with the gender binary. Conversely, lesbian women already have a wider variety of speech available yet refrain from using a distinctive style of speech. Masculinity, and speech associated with a heterosexual male, is constrained by cultural expectations for men to avoid 'abjection' (as further elaborated in Gender Trouble); power differences amongst the genders may lead to speakers adopting different speech styles that conform with their identities, or expected gender performances (e.g. adolescent males often use the term 'fag' to police one another, which challenges their sexual orientation through gender performance, and reinforces the avoidance of the 'abject' or femininity). 'Masculine' speech is associated with non-feminine sounding speech and because some gay men may not wish to identify with straight masculine speech in some contexts, they may access other speech styles to convey their identity (because the possibilities have two options, 'masculine' or 'feminine,' to be not-'masculine' is often associated with 'feminine'). The boundary between 'masculine' and 'feminine' is maintained by cultural norms and societal orders, that do not permit masculinity to include femininity.

In a particular example of how this process of language community formation happens in a specific LGBTQ community, transsexuals and transvestites may use vocabulary that includes members and excludes non-members to establish social identity and solidarity and to exclude outsiders. As these social groups are particularly likely to be viewed negatively by outsiders, the use of a private language can serve to keep membership in the group a secret to outsiders while allowing group members to recognize their own.

Some members of a community may use stylistic and pragmatic devices to index and exaggerate orientations and identities, but others may deliberately avoid stereotypical speech. Gender is frequently indexed indirectly, through traits that are associated with certain gender identities. In this way, for example, speaking forcefully is associated with masculinity but also with confidence and authority. Similarly, LGBTQ speech has a relationship with the speaker's community of practice. Speakers may have a shared interest, and respond to a mutual situation, and through communicating regularly they may develop certain speech norms. The innovative speech norms, that LGBTQ folks may use within their communities of practice, can be spread through institutions like schools where person of many classes, races, and genders, come together. These particular speech traits may be spread through the adoption of use by people with association to LGBTQ identities. (certainly this is true for the drag speech on Drag Race)

• Goals of distinctive language use among gay men

People often are members of multiple communities, and which community they want to be most closely associated with may vary. For some gay men, the primary self-categorization is their identity as gay men. To achieve recognition as such, gay men may recognize and imitate forms of language that reflect the social identity of gay men, or which are stereotypically considered to be characteristic to gay men. For example, the use of female pronouns dissociates gay men from heterosexual norms and designates them in opposition to heterosexual masculinity. The reason for using female pronouns and the frequency of use may vary, however. For example, they may be used only in jest, or may be used more seriously to stabilize a group of gay men and bond its members together.

• Goals of distinctive language use among lesbians and heterosexual women

The development of gay identity may differ for men and women. For many women, regardless of orientation, female identity is more important than sexual identity. Where gay men need to distance themselves from heterosexual masculinity, due to the strict enforcement of male roles in Western society, lesbians may be more concerned about sexism than about lesbian identity. (this may also be due to the ‘intersectionality’ of lesbian identity, since they are already marked as women).

Most studies of lesbian speech patterns focus on conversational patterns, as in Coates and Jordan (1997) and Morrish and Saunton (2007). Women draw on a variety of discourses, particularly feminist discourses, to establish themselves as not submissive to heteropatriarchy by using cooperative all-female talk, which is marked by less distinct turns and a more collaborative conversational environment. Often the conversational bond between women overrides their sexual identities. However, the content of lesbian discourse can separate those who use it from heteronormativity and the values of dominant cultures. Discourse involves resisting dominant gender norms through more subtle creation of solidarity, and not necessarily resisting “gender-typical” linguistic behavior.

An example of a distinctive way of speaking for a female community is that of female bikers. Dykes on Bikes, a mostly lesbian group, and Ladies of Harley, a mostly heterosexual group, have demonstrated shared experiences. Though the two cultures differ, both have a focus on female bonding and motorcycles and have a shared female biker language. Their shared language helps to establish their shared identity in a largely male-dominated domain and to mark boundaries between them and traditional femininity. (Speech community or community of practice?)

• Code switching

Code-switching, can indicate which identity individuals want to put forward as primary at a given time. Choices of language use among gay men depend on the audience and context, and shift depending on situational needs such as the need to demonstrate or conceal gay identity in a particular environment. Likewise, lesbians may foreground lesbian identity in some contexts but not in others. “Exploratory switching” can be used to determine whether an interlocutor shares the speaker's identity. For example, a gay man might use certain key words and mannerisms generally known by the community as a test to see whether they are recognized by the interlocutor. This allows the gay man to establish solidarity with a community member previously unknown to him without having to disclose his orientation to a heterosexual and potentially hostile person. However, inconsistency of language use between different sub-groups of the LGBTQ community, along with the existence of non-members who may be familiar with a gay mode of speech, can make such exploratory switching unreliable. (Non-gays are part of gay speech communities!)

People may also switch use code-switching to comment on society or for entertainment. Black drag performers often use stereotypical “female white English” to disrupt societal assumptions about gender and ethnicity and to express criticisms of these assumptions. Imitations do not necessarily represent actual language use of a group, but rather the generally recognized stereotypical speech of that group. In the language of drag performers, language play is also marked by juxtaposition of contradictory aspects such as very proper language mixed with obscenities, adding to the queens' and kings' deliberate disruption of cultural and linguistic norms.

• Queer Speech Community?

Rusty Barrett suggests that the idea of the homogeneous speech community could perhaps be more accurately replaced by one of a queer community based on community spirit or a queer cultural system, since language use varies so greatly. Kulick proposes, instead of studying speech communities that he concludes "do not and cannot exist" because of methodological problems, researchers should study "language and desire" through examining repression in the context of linguistics, considering both what is said and what is not or cannot be said. Kulick addresses the need for consideration of the role of sexuality in sexual identity, unlike some lavender linguists who neglect sexuality in favor of linguistic features that might be more likely than sexuality to legitimize gay identity.

• Gay male speech patterns & Comparison to female speech

Gay speech has stereotypically been thought of as resembling women’s speech. In her work Language and Woman’s Place, Robin Lakoff not only compares gay male speech with women’s speech traits, but she also claims that gay men deliberately imitate these traits. According to Lakoff, stereotypical gay male speech takes on the characteristics of women’s speech including an increased use of superlatives, inflected intonation, and lisping. Later linguists have reevaluated Lakoff's claims and concluded that these characterizations are not consistent for women, but rather reflect common beliefs about how women speak.

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• Traits believed to characterize the speech of gay men

Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler have studied differences in gay male speech by examining the following traits in their study, Sharing Resources and Indexing Meanings in the Production of Gay Styles:

Duration of /æ/, /eɪ/

Duration of onset /s/, /l/

Fundamental frequency (f0) properties (max, min, range, and value at vowel midpoint) of stressed vowels

Voice-onset time (VOT) of voiceless aspirated consonants

Release of word-final stops

While the researchers found some correlation between these speech traits and sexual orientation, they clarify that these traits characterize only one of the many speech styles used by gay men.

• Lesbian speech patterns

Distinguishing characteristics of lesbian speech are much debated however, in experiments, self-identified lesbians tended to speak at a lower fundamental frequency, and with lower pitch variation than did self-identified heterosexual women.

Robin Queen argues that analyses have been too simplistic. She suggests that a uniquely lesbian language is constructed through the combination of sometimes-conflicting stylistic tropes: stereotypical women's language (e.g. hypercorrect grammar), stereotypical nonstandard forms associated with the (male) working class (e.g. contractions), stereotypical gay male lexical items, and stereotypical lesbian language (e.g. flat intonation, cursing).

Sometimes lesbians deliberately avoid stereotypical female speech, according to Queen, in order to distance themselves from "normative" heterosexual female speech patterns. Clothing and physical mannerisms, however, are seen as more likely indicators of a woman's sexual orientation. Because femininity is a marked style, adopting it is more noticeable than avoiding it, which may add to the lack of socially salient styles for lesbians in contrast with socially identifiable stereotypically gay male speech styles.

• Transgender speech patterns

Transgender people, or people whose gender identity does not match their assigned sex at birth, often develop distinctive speech patterns as they transition out of their assigned sex and into their real gender.

Transgender-specific speech patterns that are gender non-specific include "decoupl[ing] the specific corporeal characteristics of [genitals] from the masculinity [or femininity] entailed by words like dick [or other terms for genitals].” Referring to genitals as a transgender person requires a suspension of the gendered reality of traditional Eurocentric anatomical standards; describing clitorises as 'cocks,' vaginas as 'front holes,' penises as 'girl dicks' or 'clits' both subverts societal expectations of the genitals themselves, and deconstructs the binarism of genital descriptions. This in turn helps normalize intersex experiences, as genital, reproductive, endocrine, and secondary sexual characteristics do not always follow binary, easily categorizable rules, and blurring the line between "vagina" and "penis" both allows transgender individuals to describe themselves more comfortably and validly and intersex individuals to make their own decisions about intersex surgery, or genital reconstructive surgery, as consenting adults and to be more visible and accepted in medical and social communities as non-conforming to binary sex descriptors.

• Multiplicity of social identity

Identities emerge in a time series of social practice, through the combined effects of structure and agency. Because social identities are not static, the speech community model, which was traditionally employed as a sociolinguistic framework in the study of language and gender, is not as reliable as the community of practice model, the new framework emerged from practice theory. Also, because social identities are not static, speech styles are actively subject to change, such that one's speech styles have different social meanings across time. Similarly, it is possible for an individual to engage in multiple identity practices simultaneously, and move from one identity to another unconsciously and automatically, and thus the term polyphonous identity. An individual's speech styles can change not only across time, but also across space, depending on which social identity the individual is attempting to engage in under a given situation.

• Examples of non-Western sexual identities and their language use

According to many language scholars, it is misleading to assume that all sex and gender roles are the same as those that are salient within Western society or that the linguistic styles associated with given groups will be like the styles associated with similarly identified Western groups.

Bakla

Baklas are homosexual Filipino men, but the concept of bakla identity does not map cleanly to Western male homosexuality. With baklas, as with other non-Western sexual minority groups, sexual identity is very closely related to gender identity. Baklas often assume female attributes and dress like women. They also use female terms for themselves and occasionally for their body parts and are sometimes referred to and refer to themselves as not being "real men".

Although they have contact with other gay cultures through technology, bakla culture remains fairly distinct. They have their own rapidly shifting linguistic code called Swardspeak, which is influenced by Spanish and English loan words. This code mostly consists of lexical items, but also includes sound changes such as [p] to [f]. Some baklas who move to the United States continue to use this code, but others abandon it, regarding it as a Filipino custom that is out of place abroad and replacing it with aspects of American gay culture.

Hijras

Hijras are Indians who refer to themselves as neither man nor woman. Some describe hijras as a "third sex". Their identity is distinct from a Western gay or transgender identity, though many hijras have male sexual partners. There is a distinctive mode of speech often attributed to hijras, but it is stereotypical frequently derogatory. It is often the standard for Hijras to adopt feminine mannerisms, feminine gender agreement when addressing the self or other Hijaras, and pronouns, depending on context and their interlocutors, to create solidarity or distance. They also use stereotypically male elements of speech, such as vulgarity. Hijras often refer to themselves as masculine in the past tense and females in the present. Their combined use of masculine and feminine speech styles can be seen as reflecting their ambiguous sexual identities and challenging dominant sexuality and gender ideologies. Thus, hijras use grammar as a form of resistance against gender roles.

DRAG GLOSSARY in Progress

Beating your face: To apply the perfect amount of makeup on the face, resulting in a flawless look, i.e., “her face is beat for the gods.”

Busted (adj.): the act of appearing to be unkempt, messy, unrefined, unpolished, or poorly presented.

Bye Felicia: An expression used to dismiss someone. This person is usually irrelevant and annoying. The term is a reference from the film Friday.

Camp (adj.) Exaggerated comical presentation of femininity, sometimes presented as satire. Traditional camp inspired by Hollywood idols (see Uber-Femme), as well as caricatures like the drag queen Divine, in the movie Hairspray.

Clock (v.): (a) To spot what someone is trying to hide; (b) to call out a person’s flaws; (c) to uncover or reveal the truth in a situation. For example, “You cannot clock that mug,” or “Phi Phi clocked Willam for his five o’clock shadow.”

Condragulations: The drag queen version of “congratulations.”

Death drop (n.): A fall, drop, or descent backward onto one’s back with one’s leg folded underneath, in dramatic style. Usually part of a dance routine. This move is part of the voguing style of dance.

Dick Van Dyke (n.) A Lesbian who is so butch, she might as well be a man (insulting) As in: Is that a guy? No, she's a dick van dyke.  Antonym: Uber femme

Drag daughter (n.): See Drag mother.*

Drag mother (n.): Also drag daughter, drag family. An experienced drag performer who acts as a mentor and guide to someone who wants to learn the art of drag. Often, the new drag queen, who is referred to as the drag mother’s drag daughter, takes the last name of her drag mother to pay homage to her. A drag family is made up of a drag mother and all of her drag daughters.*

Drag Family (n.) see Drag mother*

*There is sub-cultural variation here, as drag queens of color tend to define their drag families and drag family members as having real and full fictive kin relationships, these can include people that are not drag queens but are important in the culture: costumers, choreographers, those that support the lifestyle (the person that took me off the streets, that taught me how to be a gay man, that showed me how to be a proud black man, my real family, the people that are there for me, the girls I take care of, etc.)

Dusted (adj.): The act of looking polished, flawless, or perfect. The opposite of “busted.”

Feeling the fantasy: The giddy feeling you get when you absolutely love what you are doing in a particular moment.

Fishy (adl./adv.): A term used to describe a drag queen who looks extremely feminine or one who convincingly resembles a biological woman. The term refers to the supposed scent of a woman’s vagina, which is colloquially likened to the smell of fish. (As feminists, we don’t love this word, but drag doesn’t take itself seriously, so we shouldn’t either. Besides, fish is healthy and delicious.)

For the gods (adv.): Abbreviated use of the phrase “fit for the gods,” used to qualify an act done perfectly or flawlessly—e.g., (a) “Her face is painted for the gods,” (b) “That dress is clinging to her like a second skin because it is tailored for the gods.”

Gag (v.): To react intensely, usually as a result of shock; may also be used as an exclamation—e.g., “I am gagging on that three-foot-high wig!”

Giving me life: A phrase that shows how much you enjoy something.

The house down: Another term used for an exclamation point at the end of a sentence to indicate how extra fabulous something is—e.g., “Kennedy is dancing the house down.” Another usage is the house-down boots.

Hunty (n.): A contraction of the terms “honey” and “cunt,” used as a term of endearment among drag queens.

Kai kai (n.): The circumstance in which two drag queens engage in sexual activity in drag. Not to be confused with kiki.

Kiki (n.): A term used for gossip, small talk, chatting, or a heart-to-heart.

Let them have it!: A phrase that refers to impressing people with your fabulous drag.

The library is open: A phrase announcing that a queen is about to share some criticisms about another person or queen. These criticisms are known as reads. See Reading.

Mug (n.): A queen’s face.

No tea, no shade: A phrase meaning “No disrespect.”

Paint (v.): To apply makeup to one’s face—e.g., “It takes two hours to paint my mug.”

Reading (v.): To wittily and incisively expose a person’s flaws (e.g., “read them like a book”), or exaggerating or elaborating on them; an advanced form of the insult. Another usage is to read someone to filth, which just means that you are being extra nasty with your insults.**

**"Reading" usually comments on and critiques someone by their unacceptable appearance or behavior: how fat they are, how they smell, or how promiscuous they are- categories by which women and their sexuality are policed; revealing male-dominated, hetero-normative cultural practices.

Realness (n.): A likeness that is deemed to be as close as possible to a specific category or genre—e.g., “She is serving warrior princess realness.”

Serve (v.): To present oneself in a certain way. See Realness.

Shade (n.): The casting of aspersions. A form of insult. Subtly pointing out a person’s aws or faults. Derived from the term “reading”—e.g., “I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly,” a quote from the movie Paris is Burning

Shady (adj.): Possessing a blunt and insulting manner.

Sickening (adj.): Incredibly amazing; excessively hot.

Slay (v.): To achieve something spectacular. Sometimes also written as slay the children with the same meaning.

Tea (n.): A back-formation from the letter T for “truth”; refers to gossip, news, information, or true facts, e.g., “What’s the tea?”

Throwing shade: The act of criticism delivered in a blunt and insulting manner, e.g., “Tyra was throwing shade at the other queens on the show.”

Tuck (v.): To arrange one’s male genitalia in a way that they are not visible so that one resembles a woman; (n.) the result of a man containing his genitalia (typically with duct tape and multiple pairs of pantyhose) so that they are not visible.

Turn the party: To captivate, enthrall, and overwhelm an audience with one’s fabulosity.

Uber-Femme (n.) Exaggerated femine portrayal usually associated with Hollywood icons like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich. Also a term for an extremely flamboyant homosexual. Antonym: Dick Van Dyke.

Werk (v.): (a) A term meaning to “work your body”; (b) to strut, especially on the runway; (c) to give an outstanding presentation.