Queering Language, Gender and Sexuality - Tommaso M. Milani
4. Incomprehensible Language? Language, Ethnicity and Heterosexual Masculinity in a Swedish School
Queering Language, Gender and Sexuality - Tommaso M. Milani
Tommaso M. Milani [+]
University of Gothenburg
Professor of Multilingualism
Rickard Jonsson [+]
Rickard Jonsson is a researcher in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University.
Description
This chapter investigate the ways in which a group of those ‘multi-ethnic young lads’ whose linguistic practices have been singled out as incomprehensible, sexist and homophobic in the Swedish media actually use language in a school in a suburb of Stockholm. Essentially, the argument is that the linguistic repertoire of the participants in our study indeed encompasses, though is not reducible to, ethnic, sexist and homophobic insults and jokes. However, such language use is by no means incomprehensible, but conveys specific social meanings and serves particular interactional purposes.