Linguistic discourse ethnography as an approach to the practical field of queer worship

Abstract

German-Speaking Discourse Linguistics has long been concerned with the analysis of primarily textual data. Thus, other approaches to discourse building up on ideas from qualitative social research have often been neglected. Following Phillip Dreesen (2018), I am going to argue in this paper that ethnographic research strategies are a useful complement to traditional text-analytical approaches. Accordingly, I will illustrate what I mean by Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography and how it can connect to the already existing interdisciplinary research within Discourse Studies. In order to illustrate my arguments, I am going to investigate the phenomenon of hermeneutic speechlessness and how queer church-services help actors to resolve it. Eventually, I will argue that one of the major strengths of Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography is that it can give insight into process of subjectification i.e. that it can illustrate how actors use hegemonic linguistic resources to reconceptualize ways of becoming a subject in discourse.