Part of: Queering Identity
Abstract:
Narratives are not simply accounts of past events, but interactional sites where speakers evaluate experiences and position themselves in relation to broader social structures (Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008; Du Bois 2007). Oral history interviews provide a context in which such narratives are produced through guided reflection on past experiences. Queer oral histories extend this further by documenting lives shaped by stigma (Goffman 1963), institutional regulation, and participation in sexual and social communities; they thus provide a resource for examining how experiences are retrospectively interpreted and made meaningful (Cvetkovich 2003).
This paper examines how sexuality is interactionally constructed as a shifting social category in a discourse analysis of a queer oral history interview from the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project (1981–1987). Focusing on three narratives conceptualized as small stories (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008), the analysis applies John W. Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle framework to track how evaluative, affective, and epistemic positioning shape the emergence of sexuality across narrative contexts, while attending to shifts in interactional framing (Goffman 1974). It draws selectively on tools from membership categorization analysis (Stokoe 2012) and Bucholtz & Hall’s (2005) tactics of intersubjectivity to support the analysis of specific interactional moments.
Across the three stories, sexuality is constructed in distinct but related ways: as a mechanism of institutional gatekeeping and exclusion (Goffman 1963), as a site where sexual knowledge is sought but disrupted under conditions of surveillance and stigma, and as a domain of embodied knowledge and ethical responsibility within queer sexual practice (Barrett 2017). These shifts are accomplished through changes in stance and interactional framing, including moments of interviewer uptake that reconfigure the trajectory of each narrative.
Read together, these narratives trace shifting relations to belonging and non-belonging, as sexuality is negotiated through exclusion from institutional and normative masculine pathways, disrupted attempts at entry into queer social worlds, and the emergence of alternative forms of belonging grounded in practice, expertise, and relational norms. These shifts are also tied to changing configurations of masculinity, as sexuality is constructed through relations to institutional authority (Air Force), vulnerability and exposure (Buffalo), and forms of expertise and control (S&M) that become differentially legible across contexts. Rather than assuming a singular hegemonic masculinity, the analysis treats masculinities as historically contingent and hierarchically organized (Zimman 2013; Milani 2014; Bucholtz & Hall 2004), showing how forms of authority, vulnerability, and expertise become differentially valued across interactional contexts.
The paper argues that sexuality is not a stable identity or pre-existing attribute, but an interactional achievement that emerges through stance, narrative organization, and shifting normative frameworks of sexuality. It shows how sexuality operates as a shifting site of access, knowledge, and authority across institutional and subcultural contexts. As a methodological pilot for a broader dissertation project, this study contributes to a larger program combining interactional narrative analysis with sociophonetic analysis to examine the diachronic construction of queer masculinity, authenticity, and vocal style in Toronto and Southern Ontario, addressing a relative gap in recent Canadian scholarship on language and sexuality.
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