Social Science Research Council

"Language, Ideology and Gay Identity in Israel"

My project is a sociolinguistic and ethnographic inquiry into how Israeli gay men linguistically perform their social identities, and how language is used to negotiate a social space for this emerging category in Israeli society. While Israel is one of the most politically progressive nations with respect to the legal rights of gays and lesbians, up until very recently there was no organized group of people who would be perceived, in an American context, as a gay community. Recently, however, this has begun to change, and a gay community in the traditional sense has begun to emerge. Israelis who have long resided on the periphery of the largely traditional, heterosexual mainstream of society have begun to forge space for themselves, making homo ('gay') and lesbit ('lesbian') viable social identity categories in Israel. This situation provides a unique opportunity to examine how social identities are formed, what influences their formation, and how language plays a vital part in that process. To do so, an understanding of how gay men in Israel conceive of their own socio-sexual identities must be developed - what does being "gay" mean for them? How do they position themselves within the broader ideological landscape of contemporary Israel? How are these men using language to do social work? In my research, I focus on prosodic characteristics, such as pitch, intonation, and voice quality, in the speech of Israeli gay men. I attempt to unite two long-standing traditions within sociolinguistics, namely research on linguistic performance and research on linguistic perception, by investigating the extent to which Israeli gay men's perceptions of certain speech styles may affect their own performance. To obtain the performance data, a detailed ethnography of approximately fifty gay Israeli men is undertaken. These men are observed and recorded both individually and in groups, generating a diverse corpus of the subjects' naturally occurring speech. This corpus is then quantitatively analyzed to determine how these men are using salient linguistic features to present their gay identities. I also adapt an empirical methodology known as subjective salience testing, which is designed to gauge individuals' ideological reactions to language. Subjective salience tests are conducted on the same people observed and recorded during the ethnography, where the subjects are asked to rate those same linguistic features that they themselves were shown to utilize. Correlation analysis between the results of the subjective salience tests and the results of the sociolinguistic analysis of the ethnographic data is conducted, allowing me to ascertain how performance and perception may be working together and/or in conflict in the formation of a gay Israeli identity. It is my hope that this work will not only help us to better understand gay men in Israel, and thus even perhaps Israeli society as a whole, but will also provide a model for understanding the social and ideological motivations that underlie sociolinguistic practice.