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Book Review Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language Edited by William Leap and Tom Boellstorff. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 288 pp. $44.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-252-07142-5

K. Aaron Smith

There are two themes that organize and focus the collection of ten essays in William L. Leap’s and Tom Boellstorff’s edited volume into a coherent group. The first of these concerns the cross-cultural study of gay language, with data culled from a broad set of speakers and cultures. These studies look at how local cultural and linguistic practices come to play in expressing same-sex desires, practices, and subjectivities and at the globalizing effects of gay English, mostly of the Anglo-American variety, on such practices. However, in doing so, the authors do not merely continue the tradition of equating globalization with Westernization, but instead look at how a wide variety of language contact situations can arise, some accepting of gay English, some rejecting, but all them ultimately arising out of the unique set of cultural and linguistic traditions of the groups who use and participate in them. The second major theme of this collection, is language, or more precisely gay language/gay English, and thus, a first important issue to approaching (and appreciating) the essays in the book is to understand what the authors mean by gay language. It is clear that language, as used in the volume, cannot be taken in the narrow linguistic sense of a set of mentally stored patterns of sounds, word forms, and sentence structures and the rules for combining them. In this view, the papers in the Leap and Boellstorff collection would have very little to do

with language (see e.g., Newmeyer, 2003), but instead would fall under the rubric of language use, a dichotomy going back at least to the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole (Saussure, 1916/1986), the former referring to our mental knowledge of what constitutes a given language (i.e., the mentally stored patterns that comprise the set of well-formed utterances of that language) and the latter comprising the actual use of language among speakers. However, as Leap and Boellstorff state in their introduction, “Globalization and ‘New’ Articulations of Same-Sex Desire,” language in the sense used by the authors of the essays in this book must be understood broadly to include not only phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features, but also a number of other aspects of language use including shared patterns of discourse practice. In exploration of gay language(s), broadly defined, the authors of the articles draw on diverse academic and intellectual traditions, including sociology, anthropology, history, performance studies, comparative literature, ethnic studies, and linguistics. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should make it interesting to many researchers and useful as well in courses on GLBT studies as a way to focus on a number of different language and cultural issues. Following the editors’ informative introduction, which summarizes concisely some of the current issues concerning gay language study, Denis M. Provencher, in the first article

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to K. Aaron Smith, Department of English, Campus Box 4240, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790. E-mail: [email protected] ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 82 © Copyright 2004 National Sexuality Resource Center, San Francisco State University, all rights reserved.

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of the collection, “Vague English Creole: (Gay English) Cooperative Discourse in the French Gay Press” observes lexical borrowings from gay English as well as practices of cooperative discourse in the making of texts in French gay media. Provencher finds that there are instances of borrowing that draw on American gay male experiences, such as the Stonewall Riots of the early 1970s, but, as he concludes, consistent with a theme that runs through many of the articles, such borrowings are limited and French is still the primary language of gay French experiences, although gay English borrowings do allow for involvement in transnational experiences as well. Heidi Minning, in her article, “Qwir-English CodeMixing in Germany: Constructing a Rainbow of Identities,” comes to a conclusion very similar to that of Provencher concerning the use of English among German GLBT communities. She states that the use of gay English does not remove participants from a local German identity but instead builds identity within a group seen as having a wider geographical domain while simultaneously locating a different group participation within local cultural traditions. The outcome, then, is not that German speakers simply borrow gay English, but rather that they construct a new Lavender German, which has incorporated certain elements of gay English. In the following article, “French, English, and the Idea of Gay Language in Montreal,” Ross Higgins studies gay language practices in the bilingual setting of that city, where one must consider not only the interaction of two dominant languages (English and Canadian French), but also the encoding of gay identity within each language as well as the reciprocal influences of gay culture and language between the two. Higgins demonstrates that in this setting, and particularly in the gay liberation movement where Canadian French has been the preferred language, the impact goes in two directions and is not limited to the influence of English on French speakers. This is one of the most attractive features of this book; it presents gay language as a linguistic and cultural exchange and not merely a unidirectional, English-based influence. Liora Moriel, in her article, “Dancing on the Needle’s Edge: Gay Lingo in an Isreali Disco,” examines poetic texts written in Hebrew by Israeli lesbian, gay,

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and bisexual authors as well as performances by an internationally-known transsexual, Dana International. In these texts, she discovers that GLBT groups in Israel strategically borrow English terms in order to provide alternatives to the linguistically obligatory gender categories in Hebrew and thus allow for more fluid gender identification. Furthermore, Moriel concludes that the use of English is attractive because it is less associated with local politics and is viewed as lending a certain amount of sophistication and worldliness. However, she also finds evidence that Hebrew is increasingly preferred in gay discourses where its gendered categories can be reanalyzed to fit the linguistic needs of the GLBT community. William L. Leap’s article, “Language, Belonging, and (Homo)sexual Citizenship in Cape Town, South Africa,” develops a similar theme through discussion of the code-switching practices between the local language, Xhosa, and English in the black townships of Capetown, South Africa. He shows that this codeswitching serves to maintain local cultural identity while at the same time allowing participation in national (and perhaps even international) linguistic practices associated with gay identity, particularly those based in urban Capetown. David A. B. Murray’s article, “TakatŅpui, Gay, or Just HO-MO-SEXUAL, Darling? MŅori Language, Sexual Terminology, and Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” focuses on a different topic from the use of English within local languages to tap into national and international gay identity. Instead he shows that MŅori same-sex identified men in New Zealand tend to move toward greater use of the MŅori language for discussions of same-sex desires and practices, despite the low number of MŅori-proficient language users in New Zealand. Murray explores how a number of unique conditions have set the stage for this linguistic state of affairs, including MŅori-based activism in other areas of New Zealand political life. Similarly, Tom Boellstorff in his article, “‘Authentic, of Course!’: Gay Language in Indonesia and Cultures of Belonging,” discusses the use of Bahasa-gay among Indonesian gay men. Bahasa-gay is based on the national language of linguistically diverse Indonesia and has not developed merely as a secret code (cryptolect), but instead as a set of linguistic practices that engage the national language in

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order to demonstrate belonging in a post-colonial setting. One such practice involves substituting the meaning of one word for another based on first-syllable homophony (i.e. same sound). For instance, kelinci means “rabbit” in standard Indonesian but is used to mean “small” in Bahasa-gay since the first syllable of the standard word for “small” kecil is homophonous with that of kelinci. As we see in this example, gays do not “go outside” Indonesian to make a gay language, but instead draw upon indigenous linguistic material. Peter A. Jackson shows in his article, “Gay Adaptation, Tom-Dee Resistance, and Kathoey Indifference,” that in the Thai language the common word for a gay male is gai (which has an obvious etymology from the English term) but that not all terms for talking about queer sexuality in Thailand are so directly related to English. For example, the expression for a femme-butch relationship is tom-dee, where tom is from English tomboy while dee is the last syllable of lady; thus the expression is ultimately of English origin but not transparently so. Also, in Thai the terms for transgender individuals are clearly Thai in origin and include kathoey, an older word used to refer to a third phet or sexuality, a male-female blend, and phu-ying praphet sorng, meaning “second type of woman.” These Thai data show the emergence of a culturally unique set of categories and labels arising from the interaction between older local practices of talking about sexuality and use of newer English terms. In her article, “Pájaration and Transculturation: Language and Meaning in Miami’s Cuban American Gay Worlds,” Susana Peña discusses the use of language in Miami’s bilingual Cuban (Spanish)-English communities arguing that employing a transculturation model is the best way to understand the interactions between sexuality and language among groups of gay men in the city. As Peña points out, English and Spanish terms for queerness within these groups cannot be understood solely in terms of either their traditional Cuban (Spanish) meaning or their monolingual English meanings because these men are actors in a transcultural experience. That is, speakers are not merely beings who go between two isomorphic cultures, but instead embody the mix of both cultures. As a result, the behavior of such individuals, including language, is an expression of this mix. Peña’s point is

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an important one and one that would benefit from more linguistic data of the type that she provides with the lexical blend, pájaration. In the final article of the collection, “Mother Knows Best: Black Gay Vernacular and Transgressive Domestic Space,” E. Patrick Johnson shows that while gay English has its place among groups of African American gay males, it is not fully accepted and black vernacular traditions, particularly those that draw on heterosexual concepts of home, family and mother, serve to create what he labels as gay Black English, which allows speakers to reclaim sexual citizenship in a society that has not fully accepted them by appropriating terms such as house, mother, family, etc. to the black gay experience. Patrick makes this point most clearly in his conclusion: “…black men have created ‘houses’ that allow them to go home…; refigure ‘mother’ as a complex mix of fierce gender-bending love and protection;…and become ‘children’ who commune on the dance floor, in the streets, or together against homophobia” (p. 274). Most previous writing about gay language has engaged the important first questions concerning what gay language is and how it should be studied (e.g., Cambell-Kibler, Podesva, Roberts, & Wong, 2002; Kulick, 2000). These works have concluded that such study can best happen in an interdisciplinary space, such as the one represented by the collection of articles in this book. The approach in this volume clearly strengthens this very young area of academic inquiry and the articles in it move us significantly closer to an understanding of gay language, although almost exclusively as a sociological phenomenon. It is somewhat disappointing to me that at least some of the articles in the collection do not address the issue of gay language from a more cognitive point of view, which could be done by adopting/adapting linguistic theories that do not maintain a sharp distinction between langue and parole, that is linguistic theories that include language use as part of the mental/cognitive representation of language. (e.g., Bybee, 2001). For a volume made up of 9 essays plus an introduction, the overall quality of the writing is consistently good. Additionally, many of the articles are accessible even to readers not steeped in the jargon of culture studies and linguistics. Some of the articles,

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particularly the introduction to the volume, make excellent reading for both graduate and undergraduate classes where gay language, approached broadly, is under study. Because the book increases our knowledge of gay language as a commodity in transcultural exchange and global gay subjectivities, it is also a good resource in any class concerned with global issues.Š

References Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Cambell-Kibler, K., Podesva, R.J., Roberts, S.J., & Wong, A. (Eds.). (2002). Language and sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Kulick, D. (2000). Lesbian and gay language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29, 243-285. Newmeyer, F.J. (2003). Grammar is grammar and usage is usage. Language, 79(4), 682-707. Saussure, F.de. (1986). Course in general linguistics. (R. Harris, Trans.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing. (Original work published 1916)

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Book Review Sexual Rights in America: The Ninth Amendment and the Pursuit of Happiness Paul R. Abramson, Steven D. Pinkerton, and Mark Huppin. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 226 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8147-0692-4.

Joe Rollins

In Sexual Rights in America Abramson, Pinkerton, and Huppin set out to demonstrate that there is, “a vital and functional constitutional foundation for sexual rights in America, based on the Ninth Amendment” (p. 1). That amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Such rights, they aver, are natural, fundamental, and should be counted among the unenumerated rights protected by the Ninth Amendment, despite the lack of specific textual and historical support for that position. The authors deploy varied rhetorical strategies in order to make their case and their goals are lofty and laudable. Chapter 1, “Sex and the Constitution,” begins with a novel and unexpected version of constitutional originalism: the “sexual transgressions” of what the authors call the “Philandering Fathers” (pp. 3-9). While many scholars ground constitutional arguments in the plain language of that document or in historical analyses of debates about its framing and ratification, it is unusual to find a strategy for constitutional interpretation rooted in the sexual behaviors of the Framers and the mores of their era. Here the authors summarize the sexual exploits of Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, providing the reader with an overview of their adulterous affairs, illegitimate children, and engagements with

prostitutes, in order not to condemn these men but to “shed some light on the variability of the moral climate of the times” (p. 7). Exhuming these affairs is intended to demonstrate that the sexual mores of the eighteenth century placed sexual rights among the unenumerated, and thus unspoken—yet, they argue, protected—rights that were woven into the Constitution when it was drafted and ratified. In short, the argument runs, the Framers did not need to specify and articulate the sexual freedoms of citizens; they were simply assumed to exist beyond the gaze of the state. Since many of the Supreme Court’s privacy decisions have involved reproductive choices, it is appropriate that the authors situate their exploration of sexual rights within that framework. To their credit, they recognize that very little sexual activity is undertaken for the intended purpose of procreation (p. 11), and thus the substantive chapters of the book avoid rehashing Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973), reproductive cases that established principles central to their analysis, and focus instead on more controversial and legally unsettled forms of sexual expression: telephone sex, prostitution, and child pornography. The third case upon which they rely extensively is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), and fortunately, much of their commentary in this instance has become outdated in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The end of Chapter 1 foreshadows an argument

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joe Rollins, Department of Political Science, Queens College, CUNY, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard., Flushing, NY 11367. E-mail: [email protected] ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 86 © Copyright 2004 National Sexuality Resource Center, San Francisco State University, all rights reserved.

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for increased sexual literacy, a concept they develop more fully in their conclusion. Chapters 2 and 3 offer, respectively, a historical sketch of the Ninth Amendment’s history and interpretation, and an argument about its shortcomings. Here the authors summarize debates about expressed versus implied federal powers, tracing a line from the Federalist Papers through James Madison’s drafting of the Bill of Rights, and ultimately anchoring their position in a Lockean conception of natural rights. What they refer to as “The Poverty of Privacy” is drawn from a synoptic treatment of Griswold, Roe, and Bowers: Thus, in these cases we find that protecting a person’s (or couple’s) right to privacy requires doctors who are able to dispense information or contraceptives (Griswold) and perform abortions (Roe)—activities that seem somewhat tangential to the sexual decision making that lies at the heart of the privacy debate. Yet strangely, the right to privacy does not protect someone from being prosecuted for engaging in private, consensual sexual behaviors that others might find distasteful or unconventional (Bowers). (p. 57) The limitations of privacy as a constitutional right, these authors assert, can be found in the lessons of these three decisions. The Supreme Court had (until Lawrence) protected sexual privacy indirectly through the associated issues attendant to reproductive freedom (Griswold and Roe). Juxtaposing it with Bowers, they observe that a constitutional right to privacy is less about sexual expression and more closely linked to medical decision-making. Consequently, they conclude that “the right to privacy provides a weak and unstable basis for sexual rights in general” (p. 63). In Chapter 4 the authors attempt to provide a “Solid Foundation for Sexual Rights.” Although they quote Justice Goldberg’s Ninth Amendment analysis from Griswold on several occasions elsewhere in the book (most extensively on pp. 61-62), that argument is curiously absent here where it might have provided greater rhetorical potency. Instead, the argument returns to Locke, the Founding Fathers, and the pursuit of happiness, which is presented as fungible with sexual pleasure. Through a surprising rhetorical shift, the authors tether sexual pleasure to evolution and

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natural selection and then advance it as a natural right. If we accept the contention that sexual pleasure is a natural right, it can then be resituated among the unenumerated rights that the Framers of the Constitution intended to protect through the language of the Ninth Amendment. The substantive chapters of the book, Chapters 57, examine dial-a-porn, prostitution, and child pornography. All three chapters offer an historical sketch of state regulation in each area. In their review of debates about regulating phone-sex, the authors observe that “[t]he dividing line between indecency and obscenity is slippery at best” (p. 104), but note that indecent telephone communications are protected when the listener consensually participates in such exchanges. Indecent speech is constitutionally protected; obscenity is not. Extending the analogy, they assert that the difference between indecent and obscene sexual acts should be determined by whether or not the participants consented to the acts in question. In the case of prostitution, the analogy and its legal potential seem sound if we accept the premise that the relationships between sex workers and their clientele are freely and mutually chosen. Moreover, existing evidence suggests that the authors are correct when they argue that the negative secondary effects of prostitution (most notably, sexually transmitted diseases) would be lessened through legalization and appropriate state regulation. However, when they conclude the chapter by asserting that, by and large, women “control sexual access,” that they should have the “right to initiate sex for romantic, experimental, or commercial reasons,” and that restricting such exchanges undermines women’s power and economic options in “an unjustified restraint of free trade” (p. 136), they are asking the reader to overlook too many alternative points of view. Allocating control of sexual access primarily to women seems a somewhat dubious move, and while women should indeed have the right to initiate sex for whatever reasons they deem appropriate, it is curious that the authors have omitted the pursuit of sexual pleasure from this passage. The oversight seems especially jarring when, in the final sentence of the chapter, they assert that “if we can charge a price for disposing of the dead, it seems

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reasonable to be able to charge a price for providing sexual pleasure to the living” (p. 137). Regardless of the fact that men like Alexander Hamilton were willing to pay a price for sexual access (p. 137), locating prostitution within a free trade narrative is dangerously telescopic. Such a rhetorical move reduces it from a complex issue situated among a nexus of social problems (e.g., gender, economic, reproductive, and racial inequality) to a potentially misogynist simplicity. Informed consent is again the lynchpin of the argument in Chapter 7, “Child Pornography,” and in this instance the authors are understandably cautious, focusing their attention on legal gray areas and linking the notion of consent with the potential for harm. The concern here is not with explicitly sexual images of children, which the authors agree should remain criminalized, but with images that fall into more innocent categories: the classically embarrassing bearskin rug photo, artistic nudes of the Sally Mann variety, and “lifestyle nudes” emanating from nudist and other belief systems (p. 160). Since children themselves cannot give consent, that task is here assigned to their parents, who will arguably make decisions in their children’s best interests. Recognizing, however, that not all parents can foresee future potential for harm or exercise sound judgment, the authors allow for judicial intervention. “Because harms may not materialize until years after an image was produced, children should have recourse to challenging parental decisions within some reasonable window (e.g., ten or twenty years) following the attainment of legal majority” (p. 161); determinations of harm would have to be made on a case-by-case basis. Thus, the concern here is less with child pornography per se, and more with borderline cases wherein stable, healthy parents may be persecuted after taking innocuous or artistic pictures of their children. Sexual Rights in America develops an argument that is useful, timely, well conceived, and will provide a handy primer for courses designed to introduce students to the basics of constitutional privacy. Scholars working in the intersection of law and sexuality, however, will likely agree that the book avoids too much potentially useful literature from across the academic spectrum. We might forgive the bibliographic absence of Foucault (1978), Rubin (1984),

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or Hamer and Copeland (1994), scholars whose theoretical and methodological inclinations are less proximally legal. But an argument situated at the intersection of law and sexuality that sidesteps the vast literatures of feminist and queer legal scholarship feels thin, especially when the authors have relied on so many other discursive structures to shore up the foundation of their work. Illustratively, Chapter 8 draws from set theory to schematize the relationship between enumerated rights, rights recognized by the Supreme Court, and the greater natural rights of “mankind” (p. 169). The authors then jump to a genetic metaphor and assert that the American constitutional genotype (i.e., the text) interacts with a changing political environment to produce an evolving social phenotype (i.e., interpretations of that text) (pp. 170172). The book concludes with a call for greater sexual literacy, a concept that the authors rightly recognize as too enormous for complete discussion, but they do offer a schematic summary of what that might include: basic biology; psychological concerns; and social, cultural, and political issues (p. 177). In sum, Sexual Rights in America risks venturing onto highly contested sexual terrains and offers an agreeably sketched roadmap for reconsidering the relationship between sexuality and the Constitution.

Acknowledgment Thanks to the following people for providing helpful comments on this review: Alyson Cole, Ziva Flamhaft, Peter Hegarty, Victoria Pitts.

References Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). Foucault, M. (1978). History of sexuality: Volume 1. New York: Vintage Press. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). Hamer, D., & Copeland, P. (1994). The science of desire: The search for the gay gene and the biology of behavior. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In H. Abelove,

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M. A. Barale, & D. M. Halperin (Eds.), (1993). The lesbian and gay studies reader (pp. 100-133). New York: Routledge.

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