In this paper, we discuss how masculine images associated with the James Bond character (i.e. independent of any particular actor who portrays him) change over time through mediatized attributes such as use of language and mannerisms. We... more
In this paper, we discuss how masculine images associated with the James Bond character (i.e. independent of any particular actor who portrays him) change over time through mediatized attributes such as use of language and mannerisms. We will especially focus on comparisons between different Bond characters to demonstrate how they accomplish ”sexualization of language in time and space,” in the domain of scripted speech.
This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The phenomenological experience of participating in voluntourism is captured in the form of reflective Ins...
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Pinkdot is Singapore’s annual LGBTQ pride event with over 10 years of history. Over the course of its operations, it has successfully made visible and raised awareness for LGBTQ people and their sociopolitical rights. However, there has... more
Pinkdot is Singapore’s annual LGBTQ pride event with over 10 years of history. Over the course of its operations, it has successfully made visible and raised awareness for LGBTQ people and their sociopolitical rights. However, there has always been dissident opinions against the LGBTQ community from political and/or religious parties. One of them is a newly established Christian ministry, TrueLove. While Pinkdot’s mission is to call for greater inclusivity of LGBTQ individuals by accepting non-heteronormative love, TrueLove focuses on relabelling gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as struggling with same sex attraction, and coaxing them towards a more godly life that does not include pursuing their homosexual desires. We have been investigating how these two opposing groups try to reason their views in discourses of love in their websites and promotional materials such as videos, blog posts, and campaign posters. The two parties are similar in how their websites are well maintained with content regarding sexuality and love, e.g., For family, for friends, for love (Pinkdot) and True love never gives up (TrueLove). Although they position the idea of love in a similar manner by appealing to their audiences’ affects, their agendas are completely polarized. As a result, these materials function as the center of multiple public debates on politics, religion, and sexuality. We employ Peterson’s (2016) approach to homophobic discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Goffman’s (1974) work on frame analysis as methodological tools to investigate the ideologies that accompany the two organizations’ multimodal materials about treatment of queer Singaporeans. As part of a larger study, this presentation shows a comparative study on both organizations’ discourses of love found in their promotional videos to understand how love and desire is linguistically constructed. Two individuals with a strikingly similar background, Pauline (Pinkdot 2016) and Tryphena (TrueLove 2019), were selected for analysis. Both are pastors and have identified as a lesbian woman; they talk about their experiences regarding homosexuality, love, and desire. Nonetheless, the findings show that the fundamental definition of love that they use to justify their positions towards homosexuality is nuanced in their presentations
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This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader study of language and sexuality. Chinese martial arts films, often described as highly masculine and dominated by male heroes and male... more
This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader study of language and sexuality. Chinese martial arts films, often described as highly masculine and dominated by male heroes and male characters, are a rich site for the analysis of the social construction of gender and sexuality, particularly in the way they portray an idealized male dominance through Confucian ideologies. These films are thus viewed as a legitimate space, albeit fictional and mediatized, for the application of a linguistic landscape perspective. Based on samples of over 200 films, the analysis argues that features in the linguistic landscapes of these films—among them referential names of landmarks and material constructions of settings and costumes—semiotically mark the gender and sexuality of the martial arts practitioner characters. Most notably, the linguistic landscapes in these films glorify celibacy—or controlled asexuality—as an ideal practice that goes along with ultimate masculinity, as seen in the homosocial rejection of romance and celebration of chastity.
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This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who... more
This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus's initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien‐derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence‐final adverbs (already, also, only). As CoSEM is an ongoing project, we conclude the article with notes on future directions.
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This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader study of language and sexuality. Chinese martial arts films, often described as highly masculine and dominated by male heroes and male... more
This chapter outlines the benefits of a linguistic landscape studies approach for the broader study of language and sexuality. Chinese martial arts films, often described as highly masculine and dominated by male heroes and male characters, are a rich site for the analysis of the social construction of gender and sexuality, particularly in the way they portray an idealized male dominance through Confucian ideologies. These films are thus viewed as a legitimate space, albeit fictional and mediatized, for the application of a linguistic landscape perspective. Based on samples of over 200 films, the analysis argues that features in the linguistic landscapes of these films—among them referential names of landmarks and material constructions of settings and costumes—semiotically mark the gender and sexuality of the martial arts practitioner characters. Most notably, the linguistic landscapes in these films glorify celibacy—or controlled asexuality—as an ideal practice that goes along wit...
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Workshop 6: Synchronic transfers in Colloquial Singapore English: Case studies based on text message data
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This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is known for its unique phonology compared... more
This study investigates changes in Tōhoku dialect speakers’ phonology after their immigration to Hawaii, specifically concerning intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers. Tōhoku dialect is known for its unique phonology compared to other Japanese dialects and, for this reason, it is often stigmatized. Previous studies of second dialect acquisition have suggested that older speakers tend to retain the phonological features of their original dialects during dialect contact situations. The results from adult Japanese plantation immigrants, as expected, suggested that adult Tōhoku dialect speakers demonstrated limitations in acquiring second dialect phonology in their contact with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers. However, there are different degrees of second dialect acquisition between the intervocalic voicing and alveolar/palatal mergers among the Tōhoku dialect immigrants who interacted with non-Tōhoku dialect speakers on a daily basis and those who did not; namely, the former e...
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Acknowledgements This special issue presents articles based on presentations at the Sociolinguistics of Globalization conference that was held in Hong Kong in June of 2015. The conference was hosted by the Department of English at the... more
Acknowledgements This special issue presents articles based on presentations at the Sociolinguistics of Globalization conference that was held in Hong Kong in June of 2015. The conference was hosted by the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong. We thank the conference participants for useful feedback. Our sincere thanks also go to Tommaso Milani and Michelle Lazar for their invaluable assistance.
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Previous sociolinguistic research concerning the use of Hawai‘i Creole (HC) in public discourse has posited a link between a negative public image and subsequent discouragement of its use by government and media (e.g. Romaine 1999; Sato... more
Previous sociolinguistic research concerning the use of Hawai‘i Creole (HC) in public discourse has posited a link between a negative public image and subsequent discouragement of its use by government and media (e.g. Romaine 1999; Sato 1989, 1991, 1994), except in some limited venues. This paper reports on the emerging trend of HC use in media discourse, presenting data from local television advertisements and discussing the role of language therein. Despite the fact that HC has traditionally been a stigmatized variety in public discourse, its employment in television advertisements is currently on the rise, riding a wave of positive sentiment for Hawai‘i’s local culture. The use of HC in the commercials is strategic and carefully controlled; while heavy Pidgin (basilectal HC) is still avoided as possibly detrimental to brand image, the right touch of HC is a favored tactic among these advertisement producers. HC is one of a number of criteria for implicit membership for the Hawai‘...
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Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population),... more
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language...
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This paper discusses contributions of the Journal of Language and Sexuality made in the past decade in publication in relation to a development of the field currently recognized as language, gender and sexuality. I detail the development... more
This paper discusses contributions of the Journal of Language and Sexuality made in the past decade in publication in relation to a development of the field currently recognized as language, gender and sexuality. I detail the development by using studies on joseigo ‘Japanese women’s language’ and discuss how it has impacted the field as a domain of scholarship and practice in the current moment beyond the study of the Japanese language. Lastly, I end the paper by commenting on directions in which language and sexuality studies have not yet examined but ought to address in future inquiry.
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Abstract: This special issue explores the contested notion of Chineseness through an examination of the language ideologies and practices of those who are arguably on its margins. The six ethnographic cases presented in this issue not... more
Abstract: This special issue explores the contested notion of Chineseness through an examination of the language ideologies and practices of those who are arguably on its margins. The six ethnographic cases presented in this issue not only shed light on how language mediates the relationship between race, ethnicity, and nationality, but also reveal the myriad ways in which ideologies of language, race, and nation work together to produce a variety of racial and ethnic subject positions. Expanding the scope of raciolinguistics, they demonstrate why we cannot lose sight of China and Chineseness when studying the relations between language, race, and ethnicity.
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This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The phenomenological experience of participating in voluntourism is captured in the form of reflective Ins...
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The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality of cuteness or kawaii aesthetics in the general context of Japanese culture. This concept has become prominent in many aspects of Japanese... more
The Japanese word kawaii means ‘cute’, ‘lovable’ or ‘adorable’ and is used to express the quality of cuteness or kawaii aesthetics in the general context of Japanese culture. This concept has become prominent in many aspects of Japanese modern culture, including clothing, personal appearance, food, toys, behaviour and mannerisms. While entities culturally characterized as kawaii are considered adorable and delicate, they also tend to appeal to people’s deep inward affections in a visceral manner. Scholarly discussions of kawaii have tended to focus on specific entities like commodified objects or school children, and these target entities are treated as relatively isolable units that happen to be imbued with kawaii attributes. Concomitantly, this also means that the question of how kawaii entities or other features associated with kawaii aesthetics might be integrated into the broader sociocultural environment has tended to remain relatively underexplored. Drawing attention to kawaii as a key component of Japanese material culture, this paper investigates selected kawaii data taken from banal civic signs in Tokyo’s semiotic landscapes. We then analyse the role of kawaii in matters traditionally not associated with kawaii through the lens of affection and viscerality.
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Cowboy Bebop , a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop , chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are... more
Cowboy Bebop , a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop , chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativity. Scripted speech used in the anime functions as a role language which indexes common ideological attributes associated with a character’s demeanor. This study focuses on how ideas, including heterosexual normativity and culture-specific practices, are reproduced in media texts in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience.
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Cowboy Bebop, a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop, chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized... more
Cowboy Bebop, a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop, chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativity. Scripted speech used in the anime functions as a role language which indexes common ideological attributes associated with a character’s demeanor. This study focuses on how ideas, including heterosexual normativity and culture-specific practices, are reproduced in media texts in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience.
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The modern conception of the self is grounded in stability and identity. Under this perspective, anxiety and insecurity of the border are only characteristic of peripheral communities. However, anxiety and insecurity are much more... more
The modern conception of the self is grounded in stability and identity. Under this perspective, anxiety and insecurity of the border are only characteristic of peripheral communities. However, anxiety and insecurity are much more fundamental to linguistic life; heterogeneity of linguistic practice and our constant movement across communities, positions, categories, and identities mean that uncertainty and indeterminacy are just as salient in the way we use language. This special issue builds upon this insight to explore the subjectivities of border crossing in contexts of language contact under globalization. By bringing together studies that explore cases of language and cultural contact across the Asia-Pacific region from the perspective of anxiety and insecurity, it aims to highlight the importance of considering subjectivity in our analysis of language in globalization, and considers the new insights we may gain through an emphasis on the subjective dimensions of contact situat...
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In the last 50 years, the name James Bond has become synonymous with masculine sophistication. Through iconic characteristics of confidence and wit, Bond’s image as a debonair Englishman has been carefully orchestrated and upheld. For... more
In the last 50 years, the name James Bond has become synonymous with masculine sophistication. Through iconic characteristics of confidence and wit, Bond’s image as a debonair Englishman has been carefully orchestrated and upheld. For this, much credit is due to the many secondary characters who exist primarily to index him as the ideal man, often at their expense. To achieve this, the films frequently employ methods of othering, particularly through exaggerating racial identities to the point of exoticization. While accusations that the Bond film series is riddled with racial stereotypes are not new, there exist gaps in scholarship addressing East Asian presence and stereotypes. This paper investigates (mis)representations of East Asian characters, examining them separately as allies and villains, through analyzing processes which mediatize their languages and cultures. Ultimately, it confronts the mediatization processes of East Asia within the Bond film series and explores the so...
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Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to... more
Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops.
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This essay, authored by the co-editors of the journal Gender and Language for their 2020 debut issue 14.1, analyzes the transnational uptake of the Chilean feminist protest "Un violator en tu camino" ('A Rapist In Your... more
This essay, authored by the co-editors of the journal Gender and Language for their 2020 debut issue 14.1, analyzes the transnational uptake of the Chilean feminist protest "Un violator en tu camino" ('A Rapist In Your Path') as a response to neo-nationalist discourses framing "gender" as the enemy. Introducing articles by Deborah Chirrey, Deyanira Rojas-Sosa, Grace Diabah, and Emma Putland, the essay considers how research on language, gender, and sexuality continues to matter in our current age of mediatized 21st century politics.
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The media are avid portrayers of gender binarism and the belief in male-female distinctions, which are mainly attributed to perceived differences of a physical nature. In this paper, we investigate representations of female kung-fu... more
The media are avid portrayers of gender binarism and the belief in male-female distinctions, which are mainly attributed to perceived differences of a physical nature. In this paper, we investigate representations of female kung-fu practitioners (nuxia) in films to discuss how processes of mediation and mediatization depict their femininity, so as to mitigate their appropriation of Chinese martial arts masculinity. Often, nuxias are portrayed as empowered women who are equipped to take control of their own lives and to courageously take on challenges from a variety of opponents. However, multimodal deconstruction of the various characteristics of nuxias must be placed in an Asian-specific context in order to understand the femininity specific to these characters and to move beyond Western gender ideologies displayed by the media. Perpetuating Confucian patriarchal ideals, nuxia roles constantly and consistently associate conformation to Confucian values with virtuousness and non-con...
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We examine promotional materials produced by two organisations in Singapore, TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot, to investigate how these two groups employ discourses of love to support their opposing views regarding the reconcilability of... more
We examine promotional materials produced by two organisations in Singapore, TrueLove.Is and Pink Dot, to investigate how these two groups employ discourses of love to support their opposing views regarding the reconcilability of Christianity and same-sex desire. TrueLove.Is is a Christian ministry that encourages LGB Christian Singaporeans to “come out, come home”, while Pink Dot is Singapore’s largest and foremost LGBTQ movement. We identify similarities and differences in their persuasive discourse strategies regarding ideas of love as discussed by lesbian Christian pastors. Although they position the idea of love similarly, their agendas are completely polarised. TrueLove.Is takes the position that non-heteronormative activity is ungodly and sinful, while Pink Dot offers a reconciliation between Christianity and same-sex desire. We employ Peterson’s (2016) approach to homophobic discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and a comparative discourse analysis to i...
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at... more
This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. In this third issue on the theme of intersectionality, Mel Y. Chen revisits the melancholy they experienced in their training as a linguist pursuing tra...
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Although World Englishes (WE) scholarship is concerned with the study of English varieties in different social contexts, there is a tendency to treat postcolonial ones as homogenous regional phenomena (e.g., Philippine English). Few... more
Although World Englishes (WE) scholarship is concerned with the study of English varieties in different social contexts, there is a tendency to treat postcolonial ones as homogenous regional phenomena (e.g., Philippine English). Few researchers have discussed variation and social differentiation in detail with empirical evidence. Thus, in order to understand how layers of different varieties of WE operate within a specific group of speakers, this study takes an empirical intergroup approach from a substratist framework. This study explores distinctive features of a metropolitan Manila variety of Chinese English used in the Philippines, Manila Chinese English (MCE), an English contact variety used by Manila Chinese Filipinos. After comparing the frequencies of selected features observed in a 52,000-word MCE database with frequencies in Manila English and American English corpora, this study found that a distinct variety – MCE – most likely emerged in the 1960s due to the extensive co...
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This essay, authored by the co-editors of the journal Gender and Language for their 2020 debut issue 14.1, analyzes the transnational uptake of the Chilean feminist protest "Un violator en tu camino" ('A Rapist... more
This essay, authored by the co-editors of the journal Gender and Language for their 2020 debut issue 14.1, analyzes the transnational uptake of the Chilean feminist protest "Un violator en tu camino" ('A Rapist In Your Path') as a response to neo-nationalist discourses framing "gender" as the enemy. Introducing articles by Deborah Chirrey, Deyanira Rojas-Sosa, Grace Diabah, and Emma Putland, the essay considers how research on language, gender, and sexuality continues to matter in our current age of mediatized 21st century politics.
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While the properties of gender across different cultures have degrees of overlap, representations of Japanese men in popular Western media are characterized by distinctive elements. This article discusses popular Hollywood action films... more
While the properties of gender across different cultures have degrees of overlap, representations of Japanese men in popular Western media are characterized by distinctive elements. This article discusses popular Hollywood action films featuring ninja and tracks its portrayal in Anglophone media. We pay particular attention to cinematic constructions of masculinity and sexuality from the integrated theoretical viewpoints of sociolinguistics, masculinity studies, and film semiotics. Based on the notions of linguistic and visual enregisterment, we employ concepts of mediation and simulation to illustrate two pointsd (1) a widely accepted martial arts typecasting of the ninja is a 'copy without an original' in Hollywood productions, and (2) characteristics of heroic and villainous ninja are conventionalized via dominant discourses of hegemonic masculinity based on race.
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The thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the... more
The thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current pan-global character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. In this inaugural issue on politics, Robin Lakoff, Susan Gal and Alice Freed analyse the current political scenario from their feminist linguistic lenses, while Sally McConnell-Ginet and Norma Mendoza-Denton share more personal views of the politics involved in doing research on language, gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Amy Kyratzis pays homage to the groundbreaking work of Susan Ervin-Tripp.
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This second issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" features seven essays focused on the theme of practice by prominent scholars in the field. Deborah Tannen,... more
This second issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" features seven essays focused on the theme of practice by prominent scholars in the field. Deborah Tannen, Penelope Eckert, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, and Elinor Ochs & Tamar Kremer-Sadlik show how the field’s attention to the micro-details of situated, highly contextualised interaction offers a privileged vantage point for seeing how gender, power and other dimensions of social life emerge as mundane daily actions unfold. Shigeko Okamoto and Marcyliena H. Morgan respectively review how research on the language practices of Japanese women and African American women have been formative to the field while also describing the critical necessity of more attention to these areas moving forward. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Heidi E. Hamilton pays homage to the groundbreaking work of Deborah Schiffrin.
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This fourth and final issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the... more
This fourth and final issue of the 2021 four-part Theme Series "Thirty-year Retrospective on Language, Gender and Sexuality Research" shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia. Read the entire issue at https://journal.equinoxpub.com/GL