Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (London: Routledge, 2010).
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Slang is defined here as “a kind of language occurring chiefly in casual and playful speech, made up typically of short-lived coinages and figures of speech that are deliberately used in place of standard terms for added raciness, humor, irreverence, or other effect;language peculiar to a group; argot or jargon: thieves slang.” Argot is defined here “as a specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular group: thieves’ argot.” See →.
In this article I will primarily be focusing on these, and not on other forms of “slangs” that include only a handful of neologisms or semantically altered or reclaimed words, of which there are many worldwide serving diverse communities.
David Van Leer in Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 21.
Heidi Minning in Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language, eds. William Leap and Tom Boellstorff(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 624.
Elias Petropoulos, Kaliarda (Athens: Nefeli, Athens, 1971); Nicholas Kontovas, Lubunca: The Historical Development of Istanbul’s Queer Slang and a Social-Functional Approach to Diachronic Processes in Language, Master of Arts in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, December 2012; Paul Baker, Polari –The Lost Language of Gay Men (New York: Routledge, 2002).
According to Paul Baker, who has conducted extended research on Polari, Cant, a secret language used by criminals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, evolved into Polari via Parlyaree, a slang used by the “despised category” of actors which evolved in the late eighteenth century. The latter also seems to be employed by circus people who used words from “backslang, rhyming slang and gypsies.” According to twentieth-century lexicographer Eric Partridge, circus people also used Italian and Mediterranean Lingua Franca terms. There are also references to “Grafter’s Slang” (by Philip Allingham) which includes Italian, Romani, and Yiddish words, and which Partridge classified as Parlyaree.
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
Interview with Paulistano Juliana Correia de Xaquino conducted in June 2013, and with Carioca artist Pedro Costa conducted on October 2014. Traces found in Antonio Gomes da Costa Neto’s “A Linguagem no Candomblé: Um estudo lingüístico sobre as comunidades religiosas afro-brasileiras” as well as articles in the blogosphere, e.g., by Eloisa Aquino, a Brazilian-born zinister →.
Reinerio A. Alba, “The Filipino Gayspeak (Filipino Gay Lingo),” 2005 →. Sonny Atencia Catacutan, “Swardspeak: A Queer Perspective,” University of the Philippines Open University, MMS121 Multimedia and Popular Culture, 2013–14.
Kontovas, Lubunca.
Baker, Polar.
As a native Greek speaker with a certain proficiency in English and a significant degree of immersion in those cultures (as ambiguous a comment as that may be) after having lived in Greece and England, I believe I am capable of understanding the cultural context and the role this plays in understanding the specific references, the humor, and the “tone” of those slangs. I don’t think I would be able to fully appreciate these slangs had I only known the official languages without having been immersed in the culture. The other six slangs remain inaccessible to me, leaving me in the position of a mere researcher/observer.
Nicholas Kontovas, a researcher who is the only one so far (October 2014) to have published in English a thorough study of Lubunca, claims the same to be true of it. For more information on Lubunca see Nicholas Kontovas, Lubunca, ibid.
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
Quoted in Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), 151.
Ibid.
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
Baker, Polari, 13.
Kontovas, Lubunca.
Baker, Polari, 13.
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
According to Pedro Costa, who first encountered Pajubá words in Umbanda’s terreiro (spiritual place of the Afro-Brazilian religion), these words derived from the religious sphere. According to Eloisa Aquino, it was the need of queers for a more liberal religious practice that pushed them to borrow words from Candomblé practitioners.
Jonathan Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse”→.
Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence.”
Ibid.
(Camp is) “a form of cultural resistance that is entirely predicated on a shared consciousness of being inescapably situated within a powerful system of social and sexual meaning that resists the power of that system from within.” David Halperin quoted in De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet, 20.
De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet, 16.
Ibid., 5.
Author’s Note: While writing this text I tried to create some tables with examples of words and expressions, transliterated and translated from Kaliarda and Polari into English, but I realized it was not going to work, and perhaps it was okay that it did not. What I was forcing was a transparency that didn’t want to be there. What I was trying to accomplish (and miserably failed at doing) was beautifully commented on by Celia Britton, who says that camouflaged language can only be understood in a way that respects its opacity and does not reduce it to transparency:
"For the reader, too, opacity means that the text can never be grasped as a whole, that is, as a wholly known and therefore circumscribed entity. Instead, the areas that remain opaque mean that its borders are left undefined and open. Reading thus becomes similar to 'errance' (see chapter 1), in the sense that 'the wanderer [l’errant] … seeks to know the totality of the world and knows already that he will never accomplish this and that herein resides the en-dangered beauty of the world … He dives into the opacities of that share of the world to which he has access.'" (Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 153 and 156.)