Please join us this Friday, Nov. 18 from 15:30-17:00 in Rosenwald 301. Dozandri Mendoza from UC Santa Barbara will be presenting on the linguistics of nightlife culture as it pertains to trans people. Note that Dozandri will be speaking over Zoom, but that we will watch together in Rosenwald. If you are unable to make the in-person viewing but would like the Zoom link, please email one of the LVC student coordinators.

“Feeling language in the nightclub: Proprioception in linguistic analysis and the semio-somatic vigilance of trans life”

Drawing on ethnographic observations from a concert for trans artist Villano Antillano in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this talk develops a proprioceptive approach to linguistic analysis drawing from performance and dance ethnography (Khubchandani, 2020; Sklar, 1999). I will present a multimodal discourse analysis of the concert venue’s advertisement and reception of Villana’s concert alongside my own autoethnographic account of an interaction with a club bouncer. I use this data to argue how a felt and proprioceptive-based lens on linguistic analysis can illuminate how trans people – especially those that also navigate racialized and colonial positionalities – have to constantly contend with what I call a semio-somatic vigilance. I build on Barrett (2021)’s theory of indexical disjuncture to think through how gender non-conforming embodiment and self-fashioning become rendered incongrous within the confines of a traditionally cisheteronormative nightlife space. While indexical disjuncture can be an important form of queer resistance and cultural production, I highlight how it can also be a carceral mechanism to maintain the material heterogeneity of a space through violent means of exclusion. By attenuating to the felt or what Harkness (2017) calls the closed-circuit of semiosis, I offer recommendations on how linguists can incorporate the proprioceptive to map out and theorize interactional modes of survival for trans of color/colonial subjects.