What We Talk about When We Talk about Sex

Language and Sexuality. Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xvi + 176 pp.

Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick's often brilliant and always fascinating book, Language and Sexuality, provocatively undertakes a broad study of how language is tied up in complex, intricate, and (dare I say) intimate ways with sexuality. In their well-informed and well-written text, Cameron and Kulick reflect on the slowly growing body of research that attempts to think critically about how language and sexuality are intertwined, and they convincingly argue that studies of sexuality must take into account language practices: "What we know or believe about sex is part of the baggage we bring to sex; and our knowledge does not come exclusively from firsthand experience; it is mediated by the discourse that circulates in our societies" (15-16). Even more to the point, "language produces the categories through which we organize our sexual desires, identities and practices" (19). Language also disciplines sexual subject positions and knowledge about sexuality within the social matrix. Analyzing how tells us much about both sexuality and language.

Beyond simply positing and exploring relationships between sexuality and language, Cameron and Kulick have broader and more ambitious goals. Their aim is to "consider [new dimensions in] how linguists and other social scientists might think about, research and analyse the complex and multifaceted relationship between language and sexuality" (ix). To do this, they draw on a wonderfully interdisciplinary array of scholarship, describing and examining research in sociology, psychology, linguistics, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, and they hope that their book will serve as an inaugural gesture in "map[ping] out a field of language and sexuality" (xii). As they say in their conclusion, "One of our main purposes in writing this book was to synthesize a diverse body of research into a coherent field that could be called 'Language and Sexuality'" (133)—a field that would stretch our understanding of the relationship between the two.

Cameron and Kulick's interest in mapping out such a field stems from their conviction that past studies in language and sexuality have been hampered by too acute a focus on issues of queer identity. They acknowledge that good work has been undertaken in the study of language and homosexuality, and they point to studies such as Anna Livia and Kira Hall's Queerly Phrased, which explores speech patterns of gay men and lesbians and asks what the characteristics of queer speech are.¹ "The widely shared assumption among scholars studying Gayspeak," Cameron and Kulick suggest, "was that the languages spoken by gay men and lesbians must have their locus in, and be reflective of, gay and lesbian identities" (92). The scholarly literature reflects, however, a fair amount of disagreement about that assumption: can gays and lesbians, in fact, be identified by the way they speak? Arguing that the evidence is inconclusive at best, Cameron and Kulick maintain that the question might even be wrongheaded, given the diversity of queer identities, practices, and possibilities, all of which suggest that drawing conclusions about language practices from a diverse and contentious identity category might be, at best, problematic.

Further, Cameron and Kulick argue that heterosexuality, as much as queerness, needs to be studied as a sexuality in its relationship to, and construction within, language: "Heterosexuality is an important influence on people's verbal self-presentation, shaping what they say, how they say it, and also what they do not say" (11). Citing a rich body of research, they recap how language and gender have been a frequent topic of scholarly inquiry into (often unmarked) heterosexual relationships, as well as a subject for more "popular" books, such as Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand, which analyzes miscommunication between men and women.² These studies frequently examine heterosexuality as it is connected to "gender-appropriate" speech, and...