Lacunas and Vistas: Sexuality, Sex and Gender in New Zealand Discourse Research

Abstract

For a number of years now, I have been analysing discourse in New Zealand at the macro, meso and micro levels, querying what discourse analysis might reveal about sexuality, sex, and gender, particularly at the potential rupturing points of binaries (i.e. female/male, woman/man, masculine/feminine, straight/gay). Queer Linguistics has been the primary field informing these efforts, aligning with this field’s aim to use a discourse analytical ‘zoom lens’ while exploring the normative authority and institutional practices associated with sexuality. I have also embraced its aim of ‘picking at the knots’ of tensions between global vs. local voices that might be expressing such normative authority in everyday life. While undertaking various projects it has become obvious to me that there are several very broad lacunas in New Zealand discourse research on sexuality, sex, and gender, but these omissions reveal vistas of timely research that can now be undertaken, without delay, across the numerous analytical traditions represented at this conference. Using data collected in different field sites (i.e. formal sexuality education classrooms, informal sexuality education gatherings, and activist discussion groups), and drawing on my published analyses of conversational data, I will outline four main topics for which a great deal of further attention is overdue. These are (a) heteronormativity at the intersection of sexuality, gender and ethnicity, (b) Hip Hop Nation Language in multiple spheres of use, (c) sexual embodiment and discourse, and (d) communicating sex variation. By exploring the actions of research participants in New Zealand, and their enactment of norms across a wide range of social settings, researchers working in Discourse Studies in its broadest definition stand to make a lasting contribution through our immanent and socio-diagnostic critiques. Finally, the proposed research has the potential to produce implications that cut to the core of some of the most burning current human rights issues of our times, with potential impact from local communities to the United Nations.