This is a pre-publication version of the following article: Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2019. “Methods in language, gender and sexuality studies: An overview.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 84: 43-70. When citing from or referring to this article, please use the final publisher version. This article documents work carried out within the LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity) Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 740257. 1 Methods in Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies: An Overview Heiko Motschenbacher Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen
[email protected] 1. Introduction Language, gender and sexuality (LGS) studies have developed into a vast and internally heterogeneous field that draws on a broad range of linguistic methods (see the contributions in the collection on language and gender methodologies edited by Harrington, Litosseliti, Sauntson & Sunderland 2008, and Motschenbacher 2012a or Zimman & Hall 2016 for bibliographical overviews). This article presents an overview of these methodologies. Based on an outline of major theoretical strands in LGS research (feminist linguistics, lavender linguistics, discursive gender linguistics and queer linguistics), the methodological overview discusses common approaches in three areas: gender- and sexuality-related structural linguistics, sociolinguistics and discursive linguistics. Even though an attempt is made to cover the field in its entire breadth, the discussion centres on queer linguistics as the most recent strand of work in LGS studies. The critical reflexivity in terms of method selection that contemporary research on LGS necessitates is further illustrated by a discussion of the methodological challenges of corpus linguistics for queer linguistic inquiry.