The realization of subjectivity through language use is a key concern of sociolinguistic research. We argue for examining it by juxtaposing Goffman's participation framework and Du Bois’ stance triangle. We focus on museums’ commenting platforms as ‘stance-rich’ media (Du Bois 2007:151) by examining the communicative affordances of a visitor book at the Florida Holocaust Museum and analyzing museumgoers’ texts (3,064). These texts are homogeneous in their morally indignant evaluation of the Holocaust and their alignment with the museum, but heterogeneous in positioning and participation framework. Museumgoers’ texts are highly responsive to the setting and previous discourses of the museum and include patterns of shared authorship and principalship. These patterns allow museumgoers to construct shared, institutionally mandated, subjectivities while maintaining personal commitment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the construction of subjectivity as inherently dialogic, and as involving the purposeful use of a multiplicity of contextual resources. (Participation framework, stance triangle, repetitions, principalship, commitment, Holocaust, museums, visitor books)

After decades of relative methodological stagnation, language attitude research is witnessing an influx of new experimental methods originally developed in social psychology. One such measure is the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT), a reaction-time-based method that measures the association between two concepts. The P-IAT has been used successfully to measure language attitudes, yet presents a number of challenges, like the fact that it measures attitudes void of linguistic or interactional context. This article aims to address that challenge and introduces a contextualized version of the P-IAT, which was used alongside an explicit measurement to explore attitudes towards varieties of Dutch in formal vs. informal settings. While the explicit attitudes show the expected pattern of preference for the standard variety in formal contexts, results from the implicit measurement are not as clear-cut. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and reflect on consequences for future sociolinguistic research using the P-IAT. (Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT), context dependence of language attitudes, sociolinguistics)*

This article presents a case study of the discursive construction of sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) as it surfaces in posts to an online mental health forum. SO-OCD is an anxiety disorder that involves having unwanted, intrusive thoughts as a consequence of conflict with normative sexual beliefs. The study focuses on the way normativity regulates communication about sexual identities, desires, and practices in a corpus of online posts by heterosexual men who pathologically doubt their sexual identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic methods, we investigate how writers linguistically orient to normativity in their posts. More specifically, analyses of keywords, n-grams, and concordances are used to uncover linguistic mechanisms that play a central role in users’ orientation to normativity and in the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with SO-OCD. (Sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD), heterosexuality, masculinity, normativity, heteronormativity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics)

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two Irish towns to examine the mobilisation of the Irish language as a resource for business by new speakers of Irish. We examine how local community-level Irish language advocacy organisations have implemented initiatives to specifically promote the use of Irish in business, primarily as visual commercial engagement with the language paired with the use of the cúpla focal. The article explores how new speakers of Irish understand what might be perceived as the tokenistic mobilisation of Irish and what value they invest in their efforts to use the cúpla focal. We explore tensions over language ownership that emerge as more fluent proprietors of ‘bilingual businesses’ position themselves in relation to the ‘newness’ of these speakers. (Irish, commodification, language ownership, language advocacy, language policy, commercialisation, language in business, new speakers)*

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions from a language management perspective. It focuses on the ways the students engage with various levels of interventions in their language practices. The study mainly draws on a group of college-age minority students’ experiences and perspectives collected through semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that the students, in making decisions to use their ethnic language and Vietnamese, the mainstream language, responded to interventions by the school and the ethnic community by adapting to the latter's language policy, while reinterpreting to conform to/deviate from interventions by other individuals such as their parents, their teachers, or their peers. In that process of managing their language practices, they reframed their identity in which both maintenance and transformation orientations were active. Implications related to minority language policy and language maintenance are then suggested. (Language management, individual language management, language practices, language choice, language policy, language maintenance, ethnic minority)*

This study investigates the sequentially occasioned provision of what I term category accounts in interaction. Category accounts tap into and make use of normative assumptions about identities and membership categories in order to explain away moments of what the participants view as category deviance. To introduce this concept, I focus on sequences in which speakers’ initiations of repair (e.g. Huh?) are oriented to as indicative of a problem of understanding. In the cases examined here, recipients of such initiations of repair treat divergence from some gender/sexuality norm as the source of the misunderstanding, which is revealed through their attempt to resolve the trouble by providing a category account, thereby closing the repair sequence and providing for the resumption of progressivity. These and similar accounting sequences are thus a means through which participants collaboratively normalize momentary departures from normativity, while at the same time reconstituting what exactly constitutes ‘normativity’ and ‘departures therefrom’, and for whom. (Gender, sexuality, identity, membership categorization, Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, repair, social interaction, normativity, deviance)*

Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israelis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalist project. For this purpose, we analyze the documentary Oriented (2015), produced by the British director Jake Witzenfeld together with the Palestinian collective Qambuta Productions. More specifically, the aim of the article is twofold. From a theoretical perspective, we seek to demonstrate how Foucault's notion of heterotopia provides a useful framework for understanding the spatial component of Palestinian Israeli experience, and the push and pull of conflicted identity projects more generally. Empirically, we illustrate how Israel is a homotopia, an inherently ambivalent place that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, and that generates what we call vicious belonging. (Code-switching, heterotopia, homonationalism, normativity, pinkwashing, sexuality, space)*