It’s been about 6 months since I touched it, but as far as I remember I wanted to talk about queer identity construction in bilingual people. 

Like, people who genuinely have serious linguistic involvement in multiple languages, not just “I learned French in high school” type (which theres nothing wrong with, it’s just not what I’m looking at). I was aiming for a more descriptive approach rather than one where I walk in with a lot of expectations. I did 5 interviews but ended up with 2 corrupted files and no backups so in practice 3 interviews (I need at least 5 so I need to run some more). And I found some things that were worthy of note. All the people were from different places around the world and had different linguistic backgrounds. 

Preliminary potential findings of factors that influence how we relate to queer identities across languages:

1 - How Online are we?

2 - What language did we study in?

3 - What language do we speak at home?

4 - What language do we speak with most of our friends?

5 - What does our family think of queer people/Are we in the closet?

6 - General cultural climate

I’m working with bilinguals who speak English-Something Else (Subjects so far spoke Spanish x2, Turkish, Hindi, and German), and I kind of went into it figuring that English would have been easier to relate or create a queer identity in because that’s my experience, but the interviews showed that it was not exactly how it worked. The biggest influencing factors of the 6 that I identified were (in order so far): 5, 1, 6, 4 with 2 and 3 tied for joint last. I like that English isn’t inherently a language of liberation, because frankly there’s a lot of research into the spread and importance of the language which reads like a linguistic imperialism manifesto. It just happened to be one for me because of my complicated family relationships due to my gender and sexuality. 

But as I only have 3 viable interview transcripts (well 3.5, one of the subjects gave me a written out answer sheet which isnt really the same thing as an interview because there’s no interactive prompting capacity, and as such its much more limited) I can’t really make any conclusions, even tentatively. 

Okay, this... actually helped a lot, thank you for asking!!!!

I mean, it is 100% my fault that I didn’t know about the presentation because i haven’t checked my school email in approximately 6 months but also they really need to sort out their records. Also they swapped out my supervisor for someone else, that I have never met, and who writes saying “oh if you’re on campus tomorrow” as though the university has no record of international students who’s visa renewals they’ve denied. 

It may seem counterintuitive - if I haven’t read the discussion topic, what’s the point of going to class? But if you’re there, you can still listen to the discussion and learn from that. It may even motivate you to do the reading after class to better understand. It might not. But you’ll have learned more than if you hadn’t gone at all.