The Politics of Prosody

Abstract

This chapter and the one that follows present analyses of the language practices of the informant population introduced in Chapter 3. Recall that the primary goal of these analyses is to examine how informants use language to make sexuality relevant (Cameron and Kulick 2003) both on an individual level and across locally salient social categories. This means that the analyses are not designed to identify a singular or characteristic “gay/lesbian” way of speaking, but rather to investigate how the informants negotiate the various gendered and sexual ideologies of language that exist in Israeli society. Principal among these ideologies is the concept of dugri speech (Katriel 1986), which as I argue in Chapter 2 represents a style of speaking that is normatively associated with Israeli heterosexual masculinity (see also Levon forthcoming). I propose that dugri embodies the hegemonic “men as soldiers” conceptualization of Israeli masculinity and that it is set in symbolic opposition to a non-dugri speech style that is normatively linked to femininity (i.e., “women as mothers”). In this chapter, I focus on this gendered ideology of language and the ways in which it may influence the speech of my informants during individual interviews that I conducted with each of them (cf. relevant discussion of interviews in Chapter 3). I examine the ways in which informants adopt, reject or reformulate certain dugri features in their speech.