This Friday, October 3, 2025, the Center for Language Acquisition will host Ashely Moore for the Invited Speaker Series. This event will begin at 2:30p.m. in 158 Willard Building. See the hyperlinked flyer and the information below for more details about the event.

Invited Speaker FA25 Ashley Moore

Title:

“I didn’t see being gay as an experience that could unfold in Arabic”: Homophobia, linguacultural ideologies, and coloniality in the emergence of linguistic dissociation among some queer plurilinguals

Abstract: 

Linguistic dissociation is an intersubjective process through which language users distance themselves from previously acquired linguistic resources because those resources have become entangled with, and subsequently come to connote, contrasubjectivity—the experience of significant conflict between one’s sense of self and one’s social environment (Moore, 2023). As linguistic resources become associated with contrasubjective experiences, I theorize that a particular kind of affect, undesire, adheres to them. The mirror image of desire (Motha & Lin, 2014), undesire is characterized as an excess, “a surplus of something that we can no longer bear to keep within our bodily horizon because of the contrasubjectivity it connotes” (Moore, 2023, p. 1165).

In this presentation, I will use data from my own studies (Moore, 2013, 2022, 2025a, 2025b) and other scientific and literary accounts (e.g., Al-Solaylee, 2021; Espín, 1999; Harrison, 2011) to show how, for some queer plurilinguals, L1-mediated societal homophobia acts as a source of contrasubjectivity generating sufficient undesire to compel them to distance themselves from their L1. However, while acknowledging the reality of the homophobia they have experienced, I also argue that their accounts often bear traces of linguacultural ideologies that can be seen to further condition their affective relationships with the named languages in their repertoires, e.g., believing queerness and Arabic to be fundamentally incompatible. In some cases, these linguacultural ideologies are rooted in and perpetuate (neo)colonial logics and, from a critical realist perspective, I contend that we might interrogate their veracity. Arguing that undesire and linguistic dissociation can also be powerful drivers of foreign/second language learning, I conclude by discussing the implications of the foregoing for language education.

Bio: 

Ashley R. Moore is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. His research program includes strands on linguistic dissociation, queer/trans issues in language education, and critical realism. His recent work has been published in Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.