Linguistic Categories of Gender Norms (on the Material of the Queer Poetry Collection ‘Under One Cover’)

Resumen

The structure of the Russian language is characterised as androcentric, as masculine words are used to denote social and professional status. Despite active discussion of gender equality in modern society, the use of feminitives in Russian remains relatively limited. However, the active use of feminitives in media, social networks, and the press indicates a growing need to create words that specifically to denote the social statuses of women. This article analyses the collection of queer poetry ‘Under One Cover’, published in Kazakhstan in 2018, which represents a significant literary phenomenon in Central Asia. The collection presents poems by 21 authors from different countries, united by the themes of criticism of patriarchal culture, gender coercion and violence. The study pays particular attention to the “About the authors” section, where the poets' self-presentations demonstrate various strategies of self-identification. The authors of the article observe that some poets use feminitives to denote their professional activities, status and gender identity, including both traditional forms and neologisms. Other authors prefer masculine forms or avoid gendered vocabulary altogether, using action verbs. The analysis has shown that the use of feminitives in the collection raises important social themes, reflects a desire to overcome linguistic resistance and fixes the coexistence of common and new social phenomena, demonstrates linguistic innovations in the sphere of gender self-identification of the authors. The mixing of feminitives and masculinitives, as well as the use of prefixation, is seen as a means of expanding linguistic possibilities for self-expression.