Reading trajectories and the dialogic production of meanings about body, gender, and sexuality

Abstract

In this article, excerpted from a broader research project, we propose a reflection on the contributions of reading to the life trajectories of individuals belonging to LGBTQIAPN+ groups. Broadly speaking, our interest lies in problematizing how the dialogic practice of reading offers them a space to position themselves responsively in relation to normative hegemonic discourses, thereby constructing meanings about themselves, who they are, and what happens to them in the world as people who do not identify with the binary and heterosexual matrix. This discussion is grounded in the theoretical assumptions of the Bakhtin Circle (Bakhtin, 2011; 2013; 2015; 2016; 2017; Volóchinov, 2018), particularly considering the notions of language from a dialogic perspective, concrete utterance, and social voices. Furthermore, based on the bakhtinian worldview, we adopted an active-dialogic approach to the analytical treatment of the data, which, in other words, means acknowledging as co-authors of all knowledge produced herein the voices of the subjects who experience the social practices addressed in our object of study. In this sense, the work aligns with the ethically and politically engaged dimension of Applied Linguistics, insofar as it is committed to reflecting on problems of social life, giving relevance to the words of those who experience them (Moita Lopes, 2006; Rajagopalan, 2006). In addition, it fosters debate on the relationship between language and identities. Methodologically, this is a qualitative-interpretative study, guided by the evidential paradigm (Ginzburg, 1989), whose corpus comprises excerpts of dialogues from three participants, generated through interviews. Our results indicate that, to some extent, the participants’ reading practices helped them to be better prepared to face the discursive disputes surrounding body, gender, and sexuality. Moreover, they reveal that narratives about reading trajectories constitute an important source of data for understanding processes of constructing ideological-identity positions.