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

该项目将调查在英语中使用（女性）性别标记形式来索引（即指向）顺性同性恋男性身份——这种现象自20世纪初以来就得到证实，但其形式、功能和意义似乎在21世纪初发生了变化。这种女性性别标记形式的使用引起了“同性恋社区”的注意，在那里，它显然被认为是一种文化上的突出（并不是没有争议的）发展，但这篇拟议的论文将是对它的第一个详细和系统的社会语言学研究。这是我的哲学博士论文的自然发展，我在论文中探讨了男同性恋者对自己/其他男性使用女性代词的情况。通过将我的研究重点扩大到更广泛的研究，即当代男同性恋者如何衡量女性气质，我的哲学博士研究将作为我的哲学博士论文的第一部分，并进行了一些修改。然后，我的博士论文的附加部分将考察某些男同性恋者衡量女性气质的一些其他方式，这些方式在这个领域很少或没有得到事先的关注。这些包括：1)性别术语的性别倒置，2)女性化贬义词的使用，以及3)使用描绘女性或女性编码的表情符号和反应动图/图像。我的研究问题是：1)哪些版本的女性气质被编入索引？2)为什么男同性恋者对女性特质的指数化在社会上引起争议，被一些人认为是有问题或有害的？3)随着时间的推移，男同性恋者对女性气质的指数化是否发生了变化/发展？为了解决这些问题，我将使用一系列理论和方法方法。在我目前的哲学硕士研究中，我正在通过对口语数据的互动社会语言学分析，调查一个朋友群体中的年轻同性恋成员是如何使用女性代词的；虽然这种分析主要是定性的，但也包括一些定量的因素，例如考虑参与者在使用（不使用）女性代词的话语中的音高范围和平均音高。我也通过计算机媒介话语分析，分析同性恋网络论坛上的帖子，来考虑男同性恋对这种代词用法的态度。这些方法也将用于添加的哲学博士部分，尽管我也将合并一些新的方法。例如，为了检查女性性别贬义词和性别颠倒性术语的使用情况，我将分析使用Twitter API收集的tweet。其他的新方法包括社会语言学调查（以李克特量表为特色——我会在这些数据上使用参数统计）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.