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Abstract
This dissertation offers an ethnographically grounded account of how young adults in Iași, Romania use language to navigate identity, community, and desire in a context shaped by both marginalization and transnational queer imaginaries. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork and a multi-method approach—including participant observation, acoustic analysis, social network analysis, and discourse-centered ethnography—the project advances a model of identity not as a static demographic category, but as an aspirational, socially mediated, and future-oriented project of self-making. Positioned at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, variationist sociolinguistics, and queer studies, this dissertation intervenes in several conversations. First, it addresses a long-standing gap in sociophonetic research, which has largely centered gay men and overwhelmingly Anglophone contexts. By focusing on queer women and gender nonconforming people in Eastern Europe, this project amplifies voices that remain underrepresented in both sociolinguistic and queer theoretical scholarship (Podesva 2002, Podesva & Kajino 2014, Podesva 2016, Bouavichith 2019, Zimman 2013, Calder 2019). Second, the dissertation challenges sociophonetic accounts that treat social meanings of gender variables as arising primarily through rhematization (Gal & Irvine 2019) and ideological associations with bodies (Podesva 2007). Instead, it shows how the social meaning of features like /s/ emerges through circulation, aspiration, and intertextual alignment with transnational queer semiotic forms—particularly those mediated through American queer media. Acoustic analysis of over 12,539 /s/ tokens shows that higher center of gravity (CoG) is not reducible to gender identity or presentation but instead functions as an index of mediated cosmopolitan queer alignment, especially among speakers oriented toward Anglophone queer cultural production. Through close analysis of three emergent personae—Gossips, Ambivalents, and Flexers—the dissertation theorizes how local queer figures take shape through patterned alignments of language, social network positioning, and semiotic resources of the body. It draws on theories of bricolage (Hebdige 1984, Levi-Strauss 1962, Eckert 2008), persona (Agha 2005, Eckert 2008), and indexical fields, to trace how these personae mobilize different linguistic and stylistic resources, constructing queerness in ways that are always socially situated, affectively charged, and future-oriented. The final chapter turns to the politics of desire, exploring how queer longings—for intimacy, safety, recognition, and social change—are discursively organized and constrained across multiple scales (Carr & Lempert 2016, Gal 2016): from peer-group interaction to Romanian national politics to the transnational circulation of LGBTQ+ media and activist discourses. Drawing on ethnographic vignettes, I show how these desires are often shaped by forms of cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), as speakers orient toward imagined futures that remain structurally unattainable or unevenly distributed. Moments of uptake misfire—where speakers’ attempts to style themselves or claim recognition fail to land as intended—reveal how the same semiotic moves speakers make as part of (often queer) aspirational projects bear the burden of misrecognition (in their own queer community). By centering queer women and gender nonconforming people in Eastern Europe, this dissertation challenges universalizing models of both queer identity and gendered phonetic variation. It offers new theoretical tools for understanding how social meaning emerges not only through indexical links to embodiment but also through aspirational engagements with globally circulating semiotic forms. More broadly, it advances a shift in how sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology conceptualize identity—not simply as a static category or an emergent stance, but as an aspirational project. In contexts like Iași, where available queer futures feel precarious or remote, speakers often use semiotic resources not to index who they are now, but to signal who they hope to become.