Translanguaging, Gender, and Sexuality

The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of the growing body of research within the field of language, gender, and sexuality that investigates their intersections in multilingual contexts. We adopt a somewhat historical approach, first reviewing scholarship in language, gender, and sexuality that we think can be re-read through a translanguaging lens even though it was not originally formulated in such a way. We then move on to more recent work that has investigated language, gender, and sexuality in multilingual settings, some of which has explicitly engaged with the notion of translanguaging and some that has eschewed terms associated with translanguaging for emic reasons. Crucially, all of the work we discuss considers the crossing of linguistic borders in relation to gender and sexual marginalization, or anti-normativity. Such a focus is the entry point from which (1) to better understand the dynamics between possibilities and constraints—linguistic and otherwise—in performances of gender and sexual identities and desires, and (2) to illustrate the complexity of speakers' own lived experiences of language practices that can end up crossing linguistic borders of various kinds.