Seeing from the South: Discourse, gender and sexuality from southern perspectives

This article frames the Special Issue on ‘Discourse, Gender and Sexuality from the Global South’. It does so by providing an overview of the notion of the South in the social sciences and the humanities. We engage, in particular, with current theoretical discussions around a set of concepts and approaches that have been labelled ‘southern theories’, ‘theories from the south’, or ‘southern epistemologies’. Against this backdrop, we explain why southern perspectives are needed in the study of discourse, gender and sexuality, and sociolinguistics more broadly. We then offer a reflection on our (and our contributors’) ‘loci of enunciation’ (Bhabha), before concluding with a summary of the articles in this Special Issue and their relations to the points raised in this introduction.