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This article explores how mobility shapes language, gender and sexuality during periods of indeterminacy, focusing on the discursive construction of masculinities. Using styling/'styling the other' as an interpretive framework, the article analyses how economic precarity leads to ambivalence in the masculinities of Zimbabwean heterosexual-identifying male migrants (ages 26–30 years) in Johannesburg. Interview data suggests that these men engaged in male-to-male sex work to achieve economic security. To solicit wealthy white men, the men performed stereotypical Black hypermasculinity and sophisticated, cosmopolitan gay subjectivities through language crossing and physical styling. These performances ultimately aimed to achieve the normative masculine identity of being a husband and provider. The article elucidates the paradox in which the men appropriated Polari, a British gay patois, and foreign or white understandings of Black/African masculinity to style the 'other' while fulfilling traditional Zimbabwean notions of masculinity.

This article explores radical rudeness, a resistance strategy of deliberate rudeness to disrupt normative structures. Using the Uganda activist Dr Stella Nyanzi as a case study, I examine how women experiencing extreme structural marginalisation and systemic violence use radical rudeness in a nonlinguistic form (defiant disrobing) to speak back to power. Drawing from Black feminist theories of rage, I argue that radical rudeness is an instance of rage, not as a pernicious emotion, but as a legitimate strategy against patriarchy and dictatorial authoritarianism. I argue that Dr Stella Nyanzi's naked protest utilises three intersecting forms of power – biopower, symbolic power and cosmological power – to resist the authoritarian Ugandan regime, turning her naked body into a powerful weapon of resistance.

AbstractIn this article, I reflect upon the persistence of racial injustice and sexism in the process of knowledge production. This gendered racial injustice is seen in publication rates, citation rates, and appointments to editorial boards. The underrepresentation of women in general, and black women in particular, discursively constructs scholarly enquiry as normatively white and masculine. The exclusion of nonwhite scholars partially emanates from a reliance on Euro-American theoretical frameworks that are applied, often uncritically, in other contexts as if the Euro-American experience were universal. The result is scholarship that is incongruous with local experiences and practices. As theJournal of Language and Sexualitycelebrates its tenth year of publication, it would benefit from including epistemic perspectives that are pluralistic in ontologies, cosmologies, and insights.

Abstract
This article explores metalinguistic discourses of black African
immigrants (BAIs) in Johannesburg on how they mobilize multilingual and
multimodal resources in their communicative practices to pass as South Africans
(SAs), concealing their identities as non-SAs to avert violent xenophobic
attacks. Drawing data from semi-structured interviews and group discussions with
BAIs, the article investigates how BAIs report on creatively, strategically
using translanguaging and multimodality in performance of ingroup membership as
local black SAs, blurring the boundaries between "outsiders" and "insiders."
BAIs use passing as a social identity management strategy, to negotiate their
putative identity and resist ascription of the foreigner-outsider categorization
and attendant social meanings. Besides language(s), BAIs use modes of corporeal
practice (embodiment, clothing semiosis, skin-bleaching) as legitimating markers
of belonging. The article argues that using passing unsettles the distinction
between local/insider/citizen and migrant/outsider/non-citizen – concepts framed
around a nation-state – revealing tensions, contradictions, and complexities in
the politics of identity in Johannesburg.

This article reports the results of an exploratory study on how third-generation American-born Africans (ABAs) (i.e., descendants of African immigrants born and raised in the United States) construct their identities in and through learning African languages as heritage languages. Drawing from qualitative data in the form of in-depth interviews, the article argues that while ABAs contest and negotiate their identities through learning African languages and through other, multimodal semiotic practices such as clothing, there is a prevalent valorization of African identity indexed by proficiency in an African language irrespective of whether this is a heritage language. The impetus for this valorization of heritage identity is a feeling of dislocation and delocalization resulting from erasure of ABAs' English native-speakerhood and constant misidentification as non-Americans
by the dominant culture. Learning heritage languages fosters a sense of belonging and connection with an "imagined" home located "there" as distinct from "here." Thus, through heritage language learning, ABAs construct an "identity of resistance." The article concludes by pointing out how positive heritage identity metamorphoses into an awareness of not only the cultural and symbolic value of heritage languages but also the potential of translating proficiency in one's heritage language(s) into economic capital in the global market.

AbstractDrawing from Fishman's ideas on language planning and multilingualism, the aim of this article is to explore

This article explores the discursive construction of sexual racism through names assigned to the black penis by black male college students in Southern Africa. This analysis reveals use of three frequently occurring metaphors: zoomorphs, weapons and heroic historical figures. Collectively, these frequently occurring metaphors associate Southern African black men with notions of (i) wild, animalistic sexuality, (ii) dangerous, violent behaviour, and (iii) large sexual organs, which were prevalent racist ideologies of black male bodies during the colonial period. In addition, perceptions of sociocultural power dynamics attributed to patriarchy are foregrounded through metaphors related to royalty, indicating that names assigned to male genitalia align not only with the colonial construction of sexual racism but also with patriarchal gender relations. The article concludes by suggesting that names assigned to the black penis embody inherent contradictions that are not only characteristic of Southern African masculinities but also significantly complicate the dichotomy between 'self' and 'other', or 'us' and 'them', in contemporary Southern Africa.

This study explores the establishment and maintenance of gendered ideologies and practices within the household of dual career Zimbabwean migrants in the Diaspora, viewed from the lens of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. With a limited sample, the study explores the construction of gendered identities by analysing language use in responses to photographs of men engaged in activities that, in normative gender discourses, are considered 'women's work'. Drawing on qualitative data in the form of responses to inter-discursive photographs, the findings suggest that patriarchal norms significantly influence responses, which may reflect the establishment and maintenance of gendered 'cultural' identities and roles regarding household tasks. On the one hand, household tasks are viewed as indexical of femininity and the upholding of African cultural value systems, thus naturalizing the association of women with the home. Some women 'collude' in reinforcing divisive patriarchal and familial beliefs about female and male roles and view any potential reconstruction of gendered identity within the household as a transgression of socioculturally prescribed behavioural norms for women while others contest such stereotypes. On the other hand, when confronted with the need to take on childcare and other domestic duties traditionally ascribed to women, while at the same time being under considerable pressure to live up to accepted masculine ideals of their home countries, male migrants experience a loss of identity as family provider, leading to a redefinition and reproduction of a 'new' patriarchal position within the household based on remembered significance.