Location: G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre

Part of: In-Group Queer Languages Beyond the West (Panel session)

Abstract:

Originating as a cryptolect in the late Ottoman Empire (Kontovas, 2012), Lubunca has since evolved into a complex linguistic phenomenon intertwined with the lives of the contemporary queer community in Turkey and is used to facilitate solidarity, index identity, and provide secrecy (Çakar, 2023). Building on this, this paper examines how Lubunca functions as an infrastructure for queer subcultural reproduction, focusing on how experiences of marginalization and oppression are recontextualized into practices of kinship and cultural continuity. 

Lubunca’s semi-underground circulation and the precarious position of its speakers—the lubunya community—call for a gentle excavation as opposed to total extraction. To account for this, I approach linguistic ethnography through a scavenger perspective (Halberstam 1998; Niang 2024; Tommaso & Borba 2022), keeping ethnographic grounding while adopting scavenger logics for what constitutes data, relevance, and meaning-making. The scavenger perspective loosens disciplinary allegiances and allows meaning to be assembled from heterogeneous fragments through which subcultural life circulates and reproduces itself. In line with this, the data comes from focused ethnographic fieldwork in Lubunya-identified and Lubunya-defined spaces such as bars, pubs, festivals, cafes, and cruising streets in Turkey and is made up of narrative interviews and field notes, as well as artifacts laced with Lubunca, such as fanzines, posters, and murals. The data is analyzed and woven together through multimodal discourse analysis coupled with a queer linguistics lens, with attention to how Lubunca operates across both interactional and material contexts.

The findings illustrate that beyond being a veil of secrecy and a resource for in-group communication, Lubunca functions as a subcultural channel through which alternative queer imaginaries are articulated and made socially meaningful. This is achieved partly through playful processes of lexical resignification of Lubunca words such as ‘digin,’ which enable speakers to recontextualize marginalization and produce shared meanings that circulate across contexts. Moreover, traces of historical oppression embedded in Lubunca—what speakers describe as a form of “sorrowful joy”—complicate its transmission and dissemination as Lubunca generates transhistorical kinship bonds between speakers, across past and present, in their shared becoming toward more capacious futures. In turn, Lubunca facilitates the circulation of shared subcultural knowledge and norms that support emergent forms of queer pedagogy within the community.

Çakar, B. A. (2023). Lubunca in social transition: A sociolinguistic analysis of the secret queer language [Master’s thesis, Vytautas Magnus University, The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz]. VDU CRIS.

Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Kontovas, N. (2012). Lubunca: The historical development of Istanbul’s queer slang and a social functional approach to diachronic processes in language [Master’s thesis, Indiana University]. Indiana University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Niang, S.M. (2024) ‘in Defence of what’s there: notes on scavenging as Methodology’, Feminist Review, 136(1), pp. 52–66.

Tommaso M., Borba R. (2022) Queer(ing) Methodologies in Flick U. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Design. 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP: SAGE Publications Ltd, pp 5–26.

Part of: In-Group Queer Languages Beyond the West (Panel session)

Authors: Seth Palmer, Johary Iharantsoa

Abstract:

In the early 2010s, a vibrant linguistic register known as knou circulated in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, among same-sex desiring and gender non-conforming persons assigned male at birth, but also among some of their close friends and cisgender women sex workers. The register combined a specialized lexicon with distinctive phonological stylization, dramatic prosody, rising vowels, and expressive bodily gestures and came to signify transgressive femininity. Knou has acted as a socially meaningful linguistic register within queer urban networks since at least the 1960s, but by the mid-2010s, elements of the register became visible to a broader heteronormative public through mass mediation. Lôla, a transfeminine character from the widely viewed Malagasy film series Vola, regularly employed knou in dialogue with other characters who did not initially understand the register. As Vola gained popularity, several knou terms that Lôla voiced in the show began to be quoted by Antananarivian youth; its appropriation provided these youth with cultural values associated with stereotypical characteristics of queer personhood, namely verbal wit and material desire (Ilbury 2020).

This paper builds upon sociolinguistic scholarship on the enregisterment and mediation of queer speech by providing an in-depth analysis of how the knou register was mediated through the character Lôla in the film series (Boellstorff 2004; Gaudio 2008). We contextualize Lôla’s place within the series’ narrative, the broader Malagasy-language media landscape and its representation of queerness (Rakotoniera 2018), and existing scholarship on queer representation in African-language cinema and television (Böhme 2015; Green-Simms and Azuah 2012; Gaudio 2008). 

Our analysis draws on a corpus of transcribed scenes featuring Lôla across the seven films in the Vola series. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of these scenes, systematically coding the transcripts for instances of knou lexical items, phonological stylization, and interactional features associated with Lola’s gendered stance-taking. The coding scheme also tracked metapragmatic moments in which knou was commented upon, repeated, or circulated among characters, allowing us to examine how the register is framed and made socially recognizable.

Our paper will focus on two aspects of Lôla’s role in the mediation of knou to the broader Malagasy public. First, we consider Lôla’s role as a “characterological figure”  who reproduces culturally legible tropes of transgressive transfemininity and male homosexuality which are recognizable in Malagasy media (Agha 2003). These tropes include: a comedic figure who gossips and meddles in the affairs of others and a selfish figure who traffics in material excess. The latter, which is also associated with queer characters in other African films, reproduced longstanding Malagasy indexical associations between (trans)femininity, hedonistic consumption, and sexual economies. Secondly, we consider the pedagogical value that Lôla plays in rendering the register intelligible to the heteronormative viewer while simultaneously withholding insight into the everyday experiences of Malagasy persons with non-conforming genders and sexualities.

Works Cited

Agha, Asif. “The social life of a cultural value.” Language and Communication 23 (2003), 231-273.

Boellstorff, Tom. “Gay Language and Indonesia: Registering Belonging.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, no. 2 (2004), 127-308.

Böhme, Claudia. “Showing the Unshowable: The Negotiation of Homosexuality through Video Films in Tanzania.” Africa Today 61, no. 4 (2015), 63-82.

Gaudio, Rudolf. “Out on Video: Gender, Language, and New Public Spheres in Islamic Northern Nigeria.” in Words, Worlds, and Material Girls: Language, Gender, and Globalization. Ed. Bonnie McElhinny, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter (2008), 237-286.

Green-Simms, Lindsey and Unoma Azuah. “The Video Closet: Nollywood’s Gay Themed Movies.” Transition 107 (2012), 32-49. 

Ilbury, Christian.“‘Sassy Queens’: Stylistic Orthographic Variation in Twitter and the Enregisterment of AAVE.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 24, no. 2 (2020), 245-264.

Rakotoniera, Zoly (2018). Hilariously queer: the transgender and transsexual body in Malagasy humour. CODESRIA Bulletin 1 (2018). https://journals.codesria.org/index.php/codesriabulletin/article/view/187