News/Research

Juliana Friend at the LavLang Conference

05 Jul, 2021

Juliana Friend at the LavLang Conference

Juliana Friend receieved a BCNM Conference Grant to help her attend the 27th Annual Lavendar Languages and Linguistics Conference. Read more about her experience in her own words below.

With the support of a BCNM conference grant, I attended the 27th annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, hosted at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The LavLang conference invites queer theoretical frameworks for language, society and politics. More broadly, the interdisciplinary conference explores the role of language in mediating and enacting emergent forms of power and collectivity. The conference provided a lively, welcoming environment for me to present my work-in-progress on pornography in Senegal. Though a linguistic anthropological lens, my paper examined how sex workers in urban Senegal navigate digitally-mediated intimacies in a context where moral citizenship is predicated on the "proper" digital circulation of one's data, body and selves. The paper drew on collaborative discourse analysis with Senegalese women who analyze porn websites as they weigh the benefits and risks of pursuing a career in porn. They are deeply invested in understanding how porn websites discursively construct the social figure of the West African performer. They flag that a clip may be mislabeled with a nationality that does not correspond to the performer's own. This risks undoing the careful work of cultivating moral citizenship. Feedback from scholars outside my discipline encouraged me to address how the legal dimensions of porn in Senegal may affect women's interpretive labor, a valuable insight. A keynote address by Professor Jack Halberstam on the "aesthetics of collapse" capped the conference with an emotionally powerful, intellectually rigorous call to shift attention from world making to "world un-making," a timely provocation with which to close the spring semester.