Language and power in the heterosexual market

Gender and sexuality are not so much individual properties as social arrangements, and the relation between either of them and sociolinguistic variation lies in the dynamics that unfold in those social arrangements, and in their role in the political economy. Gender and sexuality can also not be considered separately, for the gender of one’s sexual partners is salient only because in this particular society and at this particular historical juncture, there is a strict hegemonic division into two gender categories, and an imperative that sexual activity should occur only across categories. And this division involves a central institution of long-term cross-category alliances that are basic to the system of economic exchange. Power is closely tied to heterosexuality, and a certain amount of that power lies in the potential for heterosexual partnerships to enhance social and economic positions at the individual and family levels. Our discourses of romance allow most of us to live in denial of the economic aspects of heterosexuality, but as I will argue here, our earliest experiences of romance are quite fundamentally about the relation between social power and heterosexuality. In what follows, I will relate developments in phonological variation to the emergence of a peer-based social order among preadolescents – a social order in which status and power are directly linked to heterosexual practice.