Hosted by the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Applied Linguistics & cosponsored by the University Libraries, TQT is bringing sociolinguist J Calder to Penn State to speak on “The Transnormative Perceiving Subject in the Perception of Sibilants,” followed by a dinner reception catered by the Turkish restaurant Kitchen Garden.
J Calder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Their work straddles the fields of sociolinguistic variation and linguistic anthropology. Using sociophonetic and ethnographic methods, they explore the role of phonetic variation in the construction of marginalized identity in communities of queer/trans individuals and people of color. They’ve published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, and Gender and Language. Their forthcoming monograph, Handsome Women, explores the constraining pressures of the cisgender perceiving subject— a normative vantage point that expects language and visual presentation to conform to standards of gender appropriateness— and how a group of radical San Francisco drag queens challenge and respond to these normative pressures.