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| Formation | 1999 |
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| Purpose | An international interdisciplinary academic group that promotes research on language, gender, and sexuality |
President | Claire Maree |
The International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), is an international interdisciplinary academic organization that promotes research on language, gender, and sexuality. [1] Claire Maree is its current president. [2]
The association was formed in 1999, having developed out of the graduate-student-run Berkeley Women and Language Group. [3] IGALA holds a biannual conference. [4] The society's official affiliated academic journal is Gender and Language , launched in 2007 by Equinox Press. [5] IGALA also publishes volumes of selected proceedings. [6] Together these projects have helped shepherd in the expansion of gender studies into a wider set of topics from a wider range of regions than before, expanding beyond the earlier focus on English speakers that dominated work of earlier decades. [7]
The International Gender and Language Association is made up of several members who believe in their cause and support the organization. There are many different roles and levels of participation in this organization as well.
The President
The current President of IGALA is Claire Maree. [11] The post itself is elected, and runs for two years. [11] She is responsible for representing IGALA, working for balancing policies that take into consideration multiple genders, sexuality, and those language aspects. [11] She also works to establish positive working relationships with other academic organizations, and strives to make sure everyone in the organization has a voice. [11] In addition to balancing these responsibilities, she creates the agenda for meetings, chairs the executive meetings, monitoring the IGALA site, and maintaining positive relationships with the journal editors. [11]
The Secretary
The current Secretary of IGALA is Kristine Kohler Mortensen, [11] who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg in the Department of Swedish Language. [12] The role of the secretary is to maintain meeting records, calling and running elections, posting minutes of public meetings and results of elections, and maintaining membership lists and records. [11]
The Social Media/Communications Officer
The current Communications Officer of IGALA is Lucy Jones, [11] an Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics based at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. [13] The role of the communications officer is maintaining mailing lists, maintaining the IGALA website, updating and maintaining the IGALA social media, advising on appropriate social media strategies, reporting on communications, and ensuring the consistency in the voice of IGALA. [11]
The Graduate Student Representative
The current Graduate Student Representative of IGALA is Rachel Elizabeth Weissler. [11] She is responsible for bringing issues of concern to graduate students to the IGALA board, working with board members to make sure graduate students have an active presence in the organization, developing graduate student workshops, and organizing the IGALA Graduate Student Essay Competition. [11]
Ordinary Members
Some current ordinary members are Linda McLoughlin, Benedict Rowlett, and Denise Troutman. [11] While these members are on the advisory council, they serve as a voice for the ordinary members. [11] The role of the ordinary members is to organize IGALA Conferences, liaising with journal editors, maintaining and developing the IGALA website, moderating and running the GALA-list, promoting visibility on matters of gender, sexuality, and language, making National Science Foundation grant applications for conferences, organizing an IGALA book prize or Best Article Prize, and much more. [11]
At the centre of its publications, IGALA runs its own journal under the title Gender and Language , which publishes both articles and reviews. It has sizeable archive of published works since 2007 in a total of thirteen annual volumes. With Rodrigo Borba of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Kira Hall, of University of Colorado Boulder, and Mie Hiramoto of National University of Singapore as its editors, Federica Formato of University of Brighton as the book review editor and 46 members on its editorial and advisory boards, Gender and Language publishes an average of more than 23 articles every year. Overall, Gender and Language has published 26 editorials, 190 articles, 78 reviews, 1 research note and 1 response adding up to a total of 296 publications. The subjects focused on include but are not limited to 'feminism', 'masculinism', 'relationships', 'language of media', 'homosexuality, and 'ethnicity'.
IGALA upholds specific by-laws with a total of sixteen articles with detailed regulations under each. They include the name of the association, its powers, membership rules, due payments, officers, executive committee, advisory council, conferences and meetings, quorum, nominations and elections, balloting referendums, finances, and amendments. The entire set of regulations addressed by each article has been clearly outlined in a downloadable file which can accessed via this link.
Gender includes the social, psychological, cultural and behavioral aspects of being a man, woman, or other gender identity. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures and gender expression. Most cultures use a gender binary, in which gender is divided into two categories, and people are considered part of one or the other ; those who are outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term non-binary. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as third genders. Most scholars agree that gender is a central characteristic for social organization.
Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies.
Mary Bucholtz is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.
Deborah Cameron is a British linguist and feminist who currently holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University.
Object sexuality or objectophilia is a group of paraphilias characterized by sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects. Individuals with this attraction may have strong feelings of love and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. For some, sexual or close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible. Some object-sexual individuals also often believe in animism, and sense reciprocation based on the belief that objects have souls, intelligence, and feelings, and are able to communicate. Questions of its legality or ethical provenance have not arisen, given that inanimate objects are inert and are not 'harmed' through this specific paraphilia. Public sexual consummation of object sexual desires may be dealt with through public nudity or anti-exhibitionism legislation.
LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.
William Leap is an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University and an affiliate professor in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University. He works in the overlapping fields of language and sexuality studies and queer linguistics, and queer historical linguistics.
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Janet Holmes is a New Zealand sociolinguist. Her research interests include language and gender, language in the workplace, and New Zealand English.
Miriam Meyerhoff is a New Zealand sociolinguist. In 2020 she was appointed as a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Bethan Benwell, is a British linguist. She has been a senior lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, for the Division of Literature and Languages, at the University of Stirling since 2008.
Susan Lynn Ehrlich is a Canadian linguist known for her work in both language and gender, language and the law, and the intersections between them. She studies language, gender and the law, with a focus on consent and coercion in rape trials.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia, and has not been linked to higher gender equality.
Judith Baxter was a British sociolinguist and Professor of Applied linguistics at Aston University where she specialised in Gender and Language, and Leadership Language. She served in editorial positions with several academic journals.
The Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference is an international conference for LGBT linguistics and other related queer language research and discourse studies. It provides a place for emerging queer linguistics scholarship. The conference is the longest continually running LGBT studies conference in the US.
Lal Zimman is a linguist who works on sociocultural linguistics, sociophonetics, language, gender and identity, and transgender linguistics.
Meredith Helena Marra is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in sociolinguistics and workplace discourse.
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