The Language of Intersectionality: Researching ‘Lesbian’ Identity in Urban Russia

Abstract

The relationship between identity, lived experience, sexual practices and the language through which these are conveyed has been widely debated in sexuality literature. For example, ‘coming out’ has famously been conceptualised as a ‘speech act’ (Sedgwick, 1990) and as a collective narrative (Plummer, 1995), while a growing concern for individuals’ diverse identifications in relation to their sexual and gender practices has produced interesting research focusing on linguistic practices among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-identified individuals (Leap, 1995; Farquhar, 2000; Kulick, 2000; Cameron and Kulick, 2006). While an explicit focus on language remains marginal to literature on sexualities (Kulick, 2000), issues of language use and translation are seldom explicitly addressed in the growing literature on intersectionality. Yet intersectional perspectives ‘reject the separability of analytical and identity categories’ (McCall, 2005: 1771) and therefore have an implicit stake in the ‘vernacular’ language of the researched, in the ‘scientific’ language of the researcher and in the relation-ship of continuity between the two.