This July, Emily Duggan (MA Linguistics 2025) successfully defended her thesis “Lesbian vs. Dyke: An examination of the differences in social meaning between two queer identity terms”. Emily was advised by Prof. Suzanne Wagner, and her committee included Suzanne, Betsy Sneller, and Karthik Durvasula.
The thesis is currently available on ProQuest and will later become available on the MSU Library’s thesis archive.
Congratulations, Emily!
Abstract
This thesis constitutes a two-part, descriptive research study investigating perceived differences in indexical meaning between the identity terms lesbian and dyke for members of the L1 English-speaking LGBTQ+ community in the United States. The study tested the hypothesis that the meanings of lesbian and dyke have become more similar over time. Results from an initial survey eliciting free associations with the target words suggest that the primary zones of indexical difference between lesbian and dyke for this community are gender identity and expression of the referent. One of the association categories most commonly evoked by lesbian was ‘woman/non-man,’ while one of the association categories most commonly evoked by dyke was ‘masculine/butch/gender non-conforming.’ These indexical mappings and others were confirmed in a second survey, in which respondents rated the strength of association between a subset of elicited descriptors (including ‘woman,’ ‘woman and/or nonbinary,’ ‘femininity,’ and ‘masculinity’) and the identity terms lesbian and dyke. However, contrary to the above hypothesis, the youngest generation of participants were found to report the highest degree of difference between lesbian and dyke for many descriptors. This thesis serves as a model for future studies investigating the nuances of identity language and examines how the phenomenon of semantic change might be viewed through a sociolinguistic lens.