The use of the female pronoun as an identity mark of a gay group from Belém do Pará

Abstract

Third-wave sociolinguistic research (Eckert, 2005) in Brazil is still relatively recent. Some authors began to focus on linguistic variation as an identity mark of subjects/agents within communities of practice. From this perspective, the present study investigates the variation in the use of he/she by self-declared gay cis men. During the participatory observation carried out at the NGO Arte pela Vida, we noticed that the subjects participating in this community, within the community itself, variably use he/she to refer to their peers, that is, other self-declared gay cis men. This variation caught our attention and, therefore, was chosen as the object of analysis for this work. Some studies (Mendes, 2012; Santana, 2018; Ribeiro, 2021), which theoretically support this research, present the importance of the relationship between gender and language, especially with regard to linguistic variation and the construction of homosexual identities. After our analysis, we observed that the use of it to designate cis male people happens: a) when there are only volunteers from the NGO; b) when meetings are informal; and c) between people belonging to the same group previously identified in this text. It was also observed that its use is unusual for people who are not identified in the same way.