Sexual learning in the multilingual margins: A case study of language socialization across time and space

In this talk I set out to account for the analytical purchase that second language socialization perspectives can offer us when exploring learning about sex and sexualities in informal settings at peripheral intersections of the global North and South. Specifically, this is via an empirical focus on the learning trajectories of a young man, whose encounters in the multilingual, queer contact zones (hotels, bars, saunas) of a tourist city in Cambodia have afforded him actionable knowledges related to how sexualities intersect with a social practice of economic support formed between tourists and locals in these spaces. In doing so, I bring into question the central tenets of second language socialization research paradigms that have continued to foreground normative notions of (sexual) identity and community in socialization processes. This is by shifting the focus to how this man may, in contrast, be socialized into this sexualized practice through the ongoing semiotic production of time and place. In this way, the analysis attends to how the sexual learning he describes is impacted across multiple time/space scales, from the microsocial encounters with tourists and colleagues in hotels and bars to the macrosocial time/space scales of histories and cultural ideologies. The analysis therefore seeks to demonstrate how various global/local meanings invested in interrelated time/spaces are seen to converge in his talk to account for the language socialization processes that mediate and legitimize sexual knowledges informing social action in the multilingual margins.