The Voice of Others:
Identity, Alterity and Gender Normativity among
Gay Men in Israel
Erez Levon
Queen Mary University of London
October 2010
Abstract
The use of "gay" slang varieties has often been viewed as a form of resistance to oppression,
a way to subvert dominant stereotypes by recontextualizing them as positive and identity-
arming (e.g., Baker 2002; Leap 1996). Recently, however, this kind of approach has been
criticized for reductively assuming that language use can be unproblematically understood
as identity performance, in eect foreclosing the possibility that identities can also emerge
in linguistically more subtle, and even backhanded, ways (Hastings & Manning 2004). In
this paper, I evaluate this critique in relation to an Israeli gay slang variety called oxtchit.
I argue that a close reading of how oxtchit is described and used by a cohort of gay men
in Israel reveals the limits of the identity as explicit performance approach and forces us
to consider alternative, more ethnographically nuanced interpretations.
Queen Mary's OPAL #18
Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics
Acknowledgements: The research upon which this article is based would not have been possible
without the guidance of Rene Blake, Rudi Gaudio, Greg Guy, Don Kulick and John Singler or the support
of the Social Sciences Research Council (with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and
the Torch Fellowship Program at New York University. Special thanks also to Paul Baker, Deborah
Cameron, Ben Rampton and Devyani Sharma for their helpful comments on earlier versions. All errors
and shortcomings are, of course, my own.