FromSissytoSickening:The Indexical Landscape of /s/ in SoMa, San Francisco

This paper explores the relation between the linguistic and the visual in indexing social meaning and performing gender, focusing on fronted /s/ among a community of drag queens in SoMa, San Francisco. I argue that as orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) are established, linguistic features like fronted /s/ become linked with visual bodies. These body‐language links can impose top‐down restrictions on the uptake of gender performances. Non‐normatively gendered individuals like the SoMa queens embody cross‐modal figures of personhood (see Agha 2003, 2004) like the fierce queen that forge higher indexical orders and widen the range of performative agency.