Abstract:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Queer linguistics has been consistently critiqued for its Western focus (e.g., McEwen & Milani 2014). This paper offers a non-Western intervention by examining the deployment of sajiao\u2014a hyper-feminine speech style associated with vulnerability and cuteness (Yueh 2012)\u2014among gay men in China. Building on previous work showing how sajiao circulates online as part of a recognisable submissive gay male persona (Author, forthcoming), this study shifts attention from public-facing influencers to everyday gay male individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This paper is situated within a three-year ethnographic project on sexual non-normativity across Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu. Specifically, it focuses on interview speech, contextualised by self-recordings and ethnographic fieldnotes, to ask whether sajiao persists beyond platformed economies of attention and, if so, how its use is socially patterned. Rather than treating sajiao as categorically present or absent, I model it as a gradient stylistic resource varying in both intensity and duration. To do so, I develop a Time-Weighted Sajiao Intensity Coefficient (TW-SIC). Drawing on 16 recurrent phonetic and prosodic features identified in the data, such as high overall pitch, sentence-final rising intonation, vowel lengthening, and nasalised voice quality, I assign each sajiao-containing intonational phrase an intensity score based on the number of co-present features. Each phrase-level score is weighted by duration and aggregated at speaker level, capturing both how intensely a speaker stylises sajiao and how long such stylisation is sustained. TW-SIC is then tested against social variables derived from prior scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, including sexual role identification (\u201c0\/1\u201d, i.e., top\/bottom), degree of outness, age, and residential site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The findings complicate several expectations in the existing literature. First, sajiao intensity does not systematically align with \u201c0\u201d (bottom) identification, challenging the assumption that feminised vocal stylisation is principally tied to bottom-identified men or submissive gay male personae. While \u201c0\u201d and \u201c1\u201d remain salient as circulating figures of personhood (Agha 2003), they do not deterministically govern the deployment of sajiao as a stylistic resource. Second, age does not predict sajiao intensity, suggesting that sajiao is not a straightforwardly age-graded variable. Third, sajiao intensity shows no clear correlation with outness, whether measured globally or by interactional domain. This complicates dominant models in Anglophone queer linguistics, where overt stylistic markedness is interpreted as legible identity work that may risk outing the speaker (e.g., Leap 1996, Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2014). Together, these findings suggest that sajiao is not tightly tethered to stable identity categories or high levels of sexual identity visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most notably, sajiao intensity is highest in Beijing, the political capital often associated with disciplined institutional masculinity and heightened hegemonic and heteronormative regulation. Rather than showing assimilation or concealment, this pattern suggests that where overt expressions of non-normativity may entail tangible social risk, linguistic stylisation may be intensified or recalibrated as a comparatively low-cost semiotic channel for negotiating queerness. The paper therefore contributes to queer linguistics by decentring visibility-based, identity-centred models of queer speech derived largely from Anglophone contexts, and by showing how queer expressions can operate through gradient, partially legible, and contextually conditioned forms of semiotic practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Part of: Masculinities and Femininities Abstract: Queer linguistics has been consistently critiqued for its Western focus (e.g.,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"confab_track":[28],"session_locations":[32],"class_list":["post-827","confab_session","type-confab_session","status-publish","hentry","confab_track-cm-2","confab_location-seminar-room-2-cm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/confab_session"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":828,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/827\/revisions\/828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"confab_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fconfab_track&post=827"},{"taxonomy":"confab_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fsession_locations&post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}