Crystal Gong

I am a sociocultural linguist who with research interests in Japanese, gender and sexuality, and identity, sociophonetics, discourse analysis, trans linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. As a trans and queer scholar, my main interests revolve around investigating transnational queer positionalities and how language is used to construct shifting sociopolitical understandings of queerness as it shaped by movement. My PhD research revolves around the construction of prototypically gendered sentence-final particle "wa" and its deployment among trans speakers. 

Coming from an interdisciplinary background, I believe that linguistics is inherently tied to social justice work and aim to dismantle systems of hegemonic powers through the work I do, particularly as a trans Asian-American scholar myself. 

In my spare time I hang out with cats, travel, and boulder!