Speaking to Silence

Journal of Homosexuality, 2003

The majority of nonverbal communication research and pedagogy reproduces heterosexist and sexist ideologies, normalizing and naturalizing gender and sexual binaries, and sanctioning an exceedingly narrow range of gendered and sexualized subjects, practices, and relationships. This essay proposes that nonverbal communication scholarship and pedagogy need to address these issues. First, I provide a brief summary of the history of the field of nonverbal communication. Second, I critique the conspicuous absence of the queer subject, the rigid essentialism, and the pervasive heterosexism in nonverbal communication textbooks in particular. Finally, I discuss three examples of communication research that avoid these pitfalls and herald what queering nonverbal communication might look like.

Journal of homosexuality, 2003

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2021

This article offers two suggestions for the future of queer communication studies: First, we should continue to use language carefully and thoughtfully, especially about gender, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Second, queer communication scholarship should be intentionally and meaningfully intersectional, eschewing superficiality and tokenism related to race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Journal of Homosexuality, 2003

Heteronormativity is everywhere. It is always already present in our individual and collective psyches, social institutions, cultural practices, and knowledge systems. In this essay, I provide some sketches for a critical analysis of heteronormativity in the communication discipline. More specifically, I examine the symbolic, discursive, psychological, and material violence of heteronormativity, and begin exploring ways to heal, grow, transform, and contemplate new possibilities in our social world. To accomplish this, this essay is divided into five sections. First, I discuss the study of sexuality in Communication. Next, through the notion of injury, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity. Third, using the concept of healing, I discuss ways of unpacking heteronormativity through a critique of hegemonic heterosexuality. Further, I offer potential ways for queer world-making through the lens of queer theory. I conclude by exploring the need for more sexuality research in the discipline by engaging the productive tensions between constructive and deconstructive impulses.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018

Queer studies in critical and cultural communication studies concerns itself with interrogating the symbolic and material manifestations of desires, sexualities, genders, and bodies in all manners of our lives, including public policy, everyday talk, protests and direct political actions, and media representations. Although the genealogy of this subfield often rehearses queer studies’ emergence as a point of radical rupture from previous theories and perspectives, another mapping of queer studies is possible if it is understood as an evolution of core questions at the heart of communication studies. Queer studies’ mode of inquiry generally involves a double gesture of identifying implicit and/or explicit biases of a communicative norm and promoting alternative ways of being in the world that do not comport with those norms. Indebted to and conversant with critical race, feminist, and lesbian gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, queer studies in critical and cultural communication studies occupies and contests the terrain of its own possibility in its attention to the intended and unintended consequences of privileging one set of cultural arrangements over another. Without any pure vantage point from which one may start or end a cultural analysis, communication scholars have embraced the contingencies afforded by queer studies to imagine otherwise the cultural legitimacy afforded to some bodies and not others; the necessity of sanctioning some sexual desires and not others; the intersectional affordances of sexuality, race, gender, ability, and class; more and less effective modes of dissent from the various normativities governing our behaviors and beliefs; and the necessity of memory politics and their pedagogical implications.

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This paper discusses the relationship between the gender constructs and nonverbal communication. The data this paper provides includes sources from Ted Talk Platforms in the American culture. The research paper contains articles which signify how nonverbal communication plays a major factor in gender roles. This paper will analyze the relationships between nonverbal and verbal languages along with past studies that have examined the correlations between language and gender. This paper examines the non verbal illustrative gestures in detail that each speaker demonstrates in accordance to gender role.

Sex Roles, 1981

As a step toward understanding sex differences in nonverbal decoding and encoding abilities, the hypothesis that sex-role variables are related to these communication abilities was tested. An analysis was undertaken of 11 studies on the relationship of encoding and decoding abilities to sex roles, including several masculinity and femininity scales, a measure of attitudes toward women, and a questionnaire on sex roles in the home. Although the relationships of the masculinity and femininity measures to decoding were generally weak, more "masculine" people tended to be better decoders. Patterns also emerged showing that the magnitude of the correlations varied with age group, sex, sex-role scale, and channel of communication. In addition, among women, those who were more "liberated" according to several indices were better decoders, at least of a woman stimulus person. Differences between the sexes in encoding and decoding abilities were unaffected by partialling out the masculinity and femininity measures. A hypothesis concerning the adaptive uses of nonverbal sensitivity is advanced, as well as a hypothesis concerning overall sex differences in nonverbal communication skills.

Technium Social Sciences Journal

Nonverbal messages represent an important part of everyday communication. People are seldom aware of them, and thus disregard their individual and cultural variability, in other words, their potential for misunderstandings. The present paper aims to raise students’ awareness of the importance of nonverbal messages for a successful (intercultural) communicative event, and to introduce them to various nonverbal codes. For this, it proposes several activities focusing on nonverbal communication, in general, and on its different codes, in particular. These can be done in (foreign) language and communication classes to prepare students for real-life multicultural communicative events.