The desire for identity and the identity of desire: language, gender and sexuality in the Greek context

This paper focuses on three recent studies investigating the discursive construction of sexuality in Modern Greek - in contexts as diverse as same-sex online personals, the performance of heterosexuality in a mixed-sex conversation and coming out narratives - arguing that critical approaches to heteronormativity, the hallmark of queer linguistics, can hardly be dissociated from issues of 'identity' and 'desire' in language, since heteronormativity specifically aims at regulating their correlation vis-a-vis gender norms. These studies investigate the indexical relation between language, gender and sexuality as experienced by socially positioned agents whose subjectivity is constructed with reference to their desires and whose desires allude to intelligible (and eroticisable) subjectivities. Therefore, any attempt at reductive theorising based on an exclusivist platform, inspired by either identity or desire alone, fails to capture crucial aspects of sexually relevant language.