This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics—with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contribute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be.

The rise of India's global economy has reinforced a perception of English as a language of sexual modernity within the expanding middle classes. This article explores this perception in the multilingual humor of Hindi-speaking Delhi youth marginalized for sexual and gender difference. Their joking routines feature the Sikh Sardarji, a longstanding ethnic figure often caricatured as circulating in modernity but lacking the English competence to understand modernity's semiotics. Reflective of the economic restructuring that ushered in the millennium, the humor supports a normative progress narrative that prioritizes an ethnically unmarked urban middle class. At the same time, the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth who tell these jokes—still criminalized under Section 377 when this fieldwork was conducted—shift this narrative by positioning sexual knowledge at modernity's forefront. The analysis reveals how sexual modernity—here viewed as constituted in everyday interaction through competing configurations of place, time, and personhood—relies on normativity even while defining itself against it. (Chronotope, ethnic humor, formulaic jokes, globalization, Hindi-English, Hinglish, media, middle class, normativity, sexual modernity, temporality)*

This article questions queer theory's investment in antinormativity and anti-identitarianism by applying a queer multimodal discourse analytic approach to the ethnographic context of queer, bilingual Mexicans/Latinxs in the US Southwest. The article explores the complexity of ways that norms are taken up and resisted (or not) in discourse, with particular attention to the activist use of discourses about community and identity. A close analysis of several texts illuminates how language practices and social practices—as seen, for example, in advertising strategies, participation in annual LGBTQ Pride festivals, and activism surrounding the undocuqueer movement—become invested with social meaning among queer Mexicans/Latinxs. (Antinormativity, queer theory, bilingual, sexual identity, community, Latinx, jotería)*

This article investigates how naturalized models of hegemonic masculinity affect race and sexuality in the James Bond film series. Through close analysis of film dialogue and paralinguistic cues, the article examines how the sexualities of East Asian female and male characters are constructed as oversexed and undersexed, respectively. The analysis therefore affirms Connell's (1995) conception of white heterosexual masculinity as exemplary: East Asian characters are positioned not only as racial Others, but as bodies upon which Bond's heterosexual masculinity is reflected and affirmed as normative and, by extension, ideal. In this way, race is curiously invoked to ‘explain’ sexuality, and Bond's unmarked white masculinity becomes the normative referent for expressions of heterosexual desire. By showing how the sexuality of East Asian characters is typecast as non-normative, the article gestures toward the possibility of theorizing racialized performances of heterosexuality as queer. (East Asia, James Bond, sexuality, race, masculinity, femininity, normativity, film)*

This article presents a case study of the discursive construction of sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) as it surfaces in posts to an online mental health forum. SO-OCD is an anxiety disorder that involves having unwanted, intrusive thoughts as a consequence of conflict with normative sexual beliefs. The study focuses on the way normativity regulates communication about sexual identities, desires, and practices in a corpus of online posts by heterosexual men who pathologically doubt their sexual identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic methods, we investigate how writers linguistically orient to normativity in their posts. More specifically, analyses of keywords, n-grams, and concordances are used to uncover linguistic mechanisms that play a central role in users’ orientation to normativity and in the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with SO-OCD. (Sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD), heterosexuality, masculinity, normativity, heteronormativity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics)

This study investigates the sequentially occasioned provision of what I term category accounts in interaction. Category accounts tap into and make use of normative assumptions about identities and membership categories in order to explain away moments of what the participants view as category deviance. To introduce this concept, I focus on sequences in which speakers’ initiations of repair (e.g. Huh?) are oriented to as indicative of a problem of understanding. In the cases examined here, recipients of such initiations of repair treat divergence from some gender/sexuality norm as the source of the misunderstanding, which is revealed through their attempt to resolve the trouble by providing a category account, thereby closing the repair sequence and providing for the resumption of progressivity. These and similar accounting sequences are thus a means through which participants collaboratively normalize momentary departures from normativity, while at the same time reconstituting what exactly constitutes ‘normativity’ and ‘departures therefrom’, and for whom. (Gender, sexuality, identity, membership categorization, Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, repair, social interaction, normativity, deviance)*

Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israelis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalist project. For this purpose, we analyze the documentary Oriented (2015), produced by the British director Jake Witzenfeld together with the Palestinian collective Qambuta Productions. More specifically, the aim of the article is twofold. From a theoretical perspective, we seek to demonstrate how Foucault's notion of heterotopia provides a useful framework for understanding the spatial component of Palestinian Israeli experience, and the push and pull of conflicted identity projects more generally. Empirically, we illustrate how Israel is a homotopia, an inherently ambivalent place that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, and that generates what we call vicious belonging. (Code-switching, heterotopia, homonationalism, normativity, pinkwashing, sexuality, space)*