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Research
in Language, Gender and Sexuality Department
of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster
University |
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History The 'Research in Language, Gender
and Sexuality' group (RiGLS), run in the department
of Linguistics and Modern English language, Lancaster University, UK, has
been in existence for 12 years. It started life as LAGIC ('Language and
Gender in the Classroom'), when it was based at the then Institute for
English Language Education, Lancaster University. It then broadened out
beyond the classroom (though the classroom is still a focus) to Gender and
Language (GaL), finally becoming RiGLS in 2012. Aims RiGLS meets weekly during academic terms and its membership consists mainly
of members of staff as well as postgraduate students who are working directly
on aspects of gender and language, or whose work includes aspects of gender.
Most RiGLS members come from within the Department,
though not all, and the group is open to all members of the University. Our
activities are varied. We read and discuss published academic research
articles and chapters, discuss each others'
work-in-progress, share research findings and ideas, and carry out group
projects. These usually result in Conference presentations and publications,
both in-house (Working Papers) and in refereed journals. We have also run
Conferences e.g. the one-day 'Language and Gender' Conferences in 1997, and
the April 2002 IGALA (International Language and Gender) Conference. We have
also produced a bibliography of relevant articles and papers on language and
gender issues, called the Gender and Genre Bibliography. From GaL to RiGLS The recent
re-invention of the Gender and Language research group at Lancaster’s
Department of Linguistics and English Language as RiGLS
(Research into Gender, Language and Sexuality) is part of a burgeoning trend
to incorporate the study of sexuality into gender and language research. 2012
not only sees the launch of the Journal
of Language and Sexuality, but also the 7th conference of the
International Gender and language Association with the theme ‘Resignifying gender and sexuality in language and discourse’.
What is more, a quick search in google scholar
shows that this diversification of gender and language research is gaining
momentum: Searching for all of the words ‘language’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’
anywhere in social sciences, arts and humanities publications returns 49,100
hits for the period 1975-2000, but 57,000 for the time between 2001 and 2012.
Read more. Our research
group meetings centre on discussions of readings, text analysis and
presentations, and we are interested in any research that foregrounds the
links between language on the one hand and gender and sexuality on the other,
including work that foregrounds either. Examples include corpus studies into
terms for gendered self-reference, critical analyses of how sexual identities
are constructed in discourse, conversation analytical work on performing
certain context-dependent gender identities, stylistic studies of erotic
fiction etc. |
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