Sexed signs – queering the scenery
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Tommaso M. Milani
Abstract
The main argument of this article is that Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship has largely ignored – erased even – gender and sexuality, two important axes of power along which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested. In order to partly redress this academic oversight, this article investigates a small data set of banal sexed signs, mundane semiotic aggregates, which, precisely because of their fleeting and unassuming character, can easily be ignored, but nonetheless “(in)form our understandings and experiences of [gender,] sexuality and subjectivity” (Sullivan 2003: 190). In doing so, the article also argues for the importance of incorporating queer theory into the analytical apparatus of Linguistic Landscape research, because it provides us with a valuable theoretical lens through which to unveil the operations of power in relation to gender and sexuality (and other social categories) in public space.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
- Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
- Sexed signs – queering the scenery
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
- Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
- Sexed signs – queering the scenery
