Indexing femininity: Gay men in the twenty-first century. Field: sociolinguistics (language, gender and sexuality).

该项目将调查英语中（女性）性别标记形式的使用，以索引（即指向）cisgender男同性恋身份-这一现象自世纪初以来一直得到证实，但其形式，功能和意义似乎在21世纪初发生变化。这种使用女性性别标记形式已经引起了“同性恋社区”的关注，在那里它显然被认为是一个文化上突出的（而不是没有争议的）发展，但这篇论文将是第一个详细和系统的社会语言学调查。这是一个自然的进展，从我的哲学硕士论文，其中我正在探索男同性恋者使用女性代词为自己/其他男人。通过扩大我的重点，以更广泛的检查当代男同性恋者如何指数女性，我的哲学硕士研究将作为我的哲学博士论文的第一部分与一些修订。我的博士论文的附加部分将检查一些额外的方式，某些男同性恋者指数女性化，在这个领域很少或根本没有受到关注。其中包括：1）性别术语的性别倒置，2）使用女性性别贬义词，3）使用描绘女性或女性编码的表情符号和反应GIF/图像。我的研究问题是：1）哪些版本的女性气质被索引？2)为什么男同性恋者对女性气质的索引化在社区内引起争议，被一些人认为是有问题的或有害的？3)男同性恋者对女性气质的索引化是否随着时间的推移而改变/发展？为了解决这些问题，我将利用一系列的理论和方法论方法。对于我目前的哲学硕士研究，我正在调查一个朋友群体中的年轻同性恋成员是如何通过对口语数据的社会语言学分析来使用女性代词的;虽然这一分析主要是定性的，但也包括一些定量因素，例如，在使用（不使用）女性代词的话语中，考虑参与者的音高范围和平均音高。我还考虑了男同性恋者对这个代词的态度-通过计算机介导的话语分析，分析了在同性恋互联网论坛上发表的帖子。这些方法也将在增加的哲学博士部分中使用，尽管我也会加入一些新的方法。例如，为了检查女性化的贬义词和性别颠倒的性别术语的使用，我将分析推文，这些推文将使用Twitter的API收集。其他新方法包括社会语言学调查（以李克特量表为特色--我会对这些数据使用参数统计）和访谈。

The project will investigate the use of (feminine) gender-marked forms in English to index (i.e. point to) cisgender gay male identities- a phenomenon which has been attested since the early 20th century, but whose forms, functions and meanings appear to be changing in the early 21st. This use of feminine gender-marked forms has attracted attention within the 'gay community,' where it is evidently regarded as a culturally salient (and not uncontroversial) development, but this proposed thesis will be the first detailed and systematic sociolinguistic investigation of it. This is a natural progression from my MPhil thesis, wherein I am exploring gay men's use of feminine pronouns for themselves/other men. By expanding my focus to a wider examination of how contemporary gay men index femininity, my MPhil study would serve as the first section of my DPhil thesis with some revisions. The added sections of my DPhil thesis would then inspect some additional ways that certain gay men index femininity that have received little or no prior attention in this field. These include: 1) the gender inversion of sex terms, 2) the employment of feminine-gendered pejoratives, and 3) the use of emojis and reaction gifs/images that depict women or are female-coded. My research questions are:1) What versions of femininity are being indexed?2) Why are gay men's indexicalisations of femininity controversial within the community, perceived by some as problematic or harmful?3) Have gay men's indexicalisations of femininity changed/developed over time? To address these questions, I would utilise a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. For my current MPhil research, I am investigating how young gay members of a friend group use feminine pronouns through an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of spoken data; though largely qualitative, this analysis includes some quantitative elements, e.g. considerations of participants' pitch ranges and average pitches in utterances where feminine pronouns are (not) used.I am also considering gay men's attitudes towards this pronoun-use by analysing posts made on a gay internet forum via a Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis. These approaches would be used in the added DPhil sections too, though I would also incorporate some new approaches. For instance, to examine the use of feminine-gendered pejoratives and gender inverted sex terms, I would analyse tweets, which would be collected using Twitter's API. Other new methods would include sociolinguistic surveys (featuring Likert Scales- I would use parametric statistics on this data) and interviews.