This study illustrates how body-part vocabulary can contribute to linguistic gender construction. As a starting point, gendering mechanisms pertinent to body-part terms are delineated. On a theoretical plane, the study is indebted to poststructuralism and the notion of performativity in identity construction. Gender performativity via body-part vocabulary is explored by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing material from a corpus of 2,000 advertisements from the two magazines, Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health, yielding evidence on how two specific commercial versions of femininity and masculinity are discursively constructed. The findings are highly stereotypical and therefore bear witness to body-part lexemes as traces of dominant gender discourses whose gender indexicality can be strategically exploited. The concluding discussion advances a theorization of linguistic identity construction in line with performativity, which departs from more traditional variationist approaches that see identity as a pre-discursive fact. (Language and gender, body, advertising discourse, body-part vocabulary, poststructuralism, performativity)

This article analyzes a set of anti-immigrant jokes with which Jay Leno entertained his national television audience in 2006, when the U.S. public was focused on unprecedented demonstrations urging justice for immigrants. Leno adroitly mocks immigrants and their cause to give his audience emotional release by distancing them from immigrants. It is argued that political comedy can be an insidious discursive practice that reduces its audience’s critical judgment as it signifies social boundaries. It should be carefully scrutinized because, with a few laughs, Leno can steer sentiment about public policy and instantiate divisiveness for an audience of 6 million who, in the words of Leno’s official website, “are drifting off to dreamland.” (Humor, political comedy, late-night television, immigrant rights marches)*

This article discusses stylistic and contextual variations in the political oratory (kabary politika) of urban Madagascar. New imported oratorical styles and older styles of kabary represent competing linguistic markets where political leaders field broader issues of political modernity, fighting government corruption through reforms toward transparency. Kabary has become the object of criticism in models for transparent government practice. This has affected the way leaders speak to and about the country, reifying a moral structure arguing what constitutes truth and how speakers understand language as conveying that truth. In this respect, this article describes linguistic and metalinguistic encodings of transparency versus corruption in the political communication styles of highland Malagasy political orators. It looks at how the rhetorical modes of an urban polity are reorganized in ways that reshape vernacular epistemologies of truth in language and shift the production of particular publics and their access to participation in political process. (Madagascar, kabary, oratory, democracy, linguistic variation, language ideology, truth and ethics, public opinion, public culture)*

Scholars have long noted that the imagination of a national public hinges on ideologies of standard language. This study uses ethnographic and media data from Catalonia to reflect on this relationship, focusing on language professionals, the stewards of Catalan’s standard register. The ideological portrait of Catalonia that emerges is one of a national public that is precarious because a standard register of the Catalan language is taken to be the whole language. It is argued that the imagined failings of a Catalan national public suggest conditions for the successful imagining of a national public more generally. In particular, the projection of a taken-for-granted national public appears to depend on a language imagined as standard and homogeneous when contrasted with other national languages but as internally variable when examined within the national context. At one taxonomic level, registers are erased in order for one register imagined as standard and homogeneous to count as the named language in contrast with other named national languages. At a lower recursive level, these registers must be imagined to exist in order for the language and its corresponding national public to be able to account for “everyone” in the projected national public. When these conditions are not met, as in the case of Catalonia, the national public is imagined as fragile. (Language ideology, standardization, publics, enregisterment)*