Production, resistance, and opposition: Students linguistically constituting ideologies of gender and sexuality

This study analyzes student discourse within the context of an engineering university to demonstrate how language functions in the production, resistance, and maintenance of gender and sexuality ideologies. Previous work in critical discourse analysis examines the connection between language and ideology, yet has not adequately addressed the construction of gender and sexuality. Other studies in cultural practice theory and language and gender have sufficiently examined gender as a social construct, but tend to ignore the role of sexuality. This work expands these studies to investigate the sociolinguistic construction of ideologies within a well-defined technological community. The goal of this research is not only to develop more fully critical theories of language, gender, and sexuality, but also to examine the role of gender and sexuality within the university, and to further the understanding of how and why gender and sexuality are constructed through discourse.; Central to this ethnographic study are semantic and pragmatic analyses of spoken and written texts situated in a variety of campus contexts. The combination of these two analytical approaches provide insight into the cultural meanings created, maintained, and resisted by students, as well as the role of conversational strategies in promoting and silencing particular values, attitudes, and beliefs held by students. Triangulated with qualitative analyses of ethnographic data, such as interviews and participant observations, the linguistic analyses reveal the dynamic interaction between linguistic meaning and interaction that influences the constitution of ideology.; Analyses of the data demonstrate that students simultaneously produce, resist, and oppose resistant ideologies. Thus, ideology is a dynamic, constantly constituted set of cultural meanings with which community members make sense of their world. The findings also suggest that the prevailing ideology within the supposedly gender-neutral context of this technological university is embedded in an androcentric and heterosexual world view--one that fosters traditionally masculine values based on heterosexual relationships. This perspective reinforces the dichotomization of gender roles and expectations, which further contributes to normative notions of sexuality. The dominant ideology of gender and sexuality, in part, accounts for the overall structure of the university, and more important, affects students' access to learning and participating in the campus culture.