Indexing femininity: Gay men in the twenty-first century. Field: sociolinguistics (language, gender and sexuality).

The project will investigate the use of (feminine) gender-marked forms in English to index (i.e. point to) cisgender gay male identities- a phenomenon which has been attested since the early 20th century, but whose forms, functions and meanings appear to be changing in the early 21st. This use of feminine gender-marked forms has attracted attention within the 'gay community,' where it is evidently regarded as a culturally salient (and not uncontroversial) development, but this proposed thesis will be the first detailed and systematic sociolinguistic investigation of it.

This is a natural progression from my MPhil thesis, wherein I am exploring gay men's use of feminine pronouns for themselves/other men. By expanding my focus to a wider examination of how contemporary gay men index femininity, my MPhil study would serve as the first section of my DPhil thesis with some revisions. The added sections of my DPhil thesis would then inspect some additional ways that certain gay men index femininity that have received little or no prior attention in this field. These include: 1) the gender inversion of sex terms, 2) the employment of feminine-gendered pejoratives, and 3) the use of emojis and reaction gifs/images that depict women or are female-coded.

My research questions are:
1) What versions of femininity are being indexed?
2) Why are gay men's indexicalisations of femininity controversial within the community, perceived by some as problematic or harmful?
3) Have gay men's indexicalisations of femininity changed/developed over time?

To address these questions, I would utilise a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. For my current MPhil research, I am investigating how young gay members of a friend group use feminine pronouns through an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of spoken data; though largely qualitative, this analysis includes some quantitative elements, e.g. considerations of participants' pitch ranges and average pitches in utterances where feminine pronouns are (not) used.
I am also considering gay men's attitudes towards this pronoun-use by analysing posts made on a gay internet forum via a Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis. These approaches would be used in the added DPhil sections too, though I would also incorporate some new approaches. For instance, to examine the use of feminine-gendered pejoratives and gender inverted sex terms, I would analyse tweets, which would be collected using Twitter's API. Other new methods would include sociolinguistic surveys (featuring Likert Scales- I would use parametric statistics on this data) and interviews.