Dr Brian King | People | School of English | Faculty of Arts

PROFILE

Dr. Brian W. King is a critical sociolinguist who researches the discursive performance of identities and embodiments at the intersection of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. His work on these themes sits within sexuality education, healthcare communication, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of space/place. Methodologically he draws on a number of traditions, including interactional sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse studies. Brian leads the Communicating Sex Variation Research Cluster (CSV) in the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (RIICH) an interdisciplinary, international collaboration housed in HKU's Faculty of Arts (https://www.hkuriich.org). He is a member of the board of trustees of Intersex Trust Aotearoa New Zealand (ITANZ), which strives to advocate dignity, diversity and choice for people born with intersex traits (http://www.ianz.org.nz). Additionally, he is on the Editorial Board of Gender & Language journal and the Journal of Language and Sexuality, and is the Reviews Editor for the journal Language in Society. His teaching career has spanned more than 20 years across three continents and multiple sectors, with time spent teaching in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Korea, and Canada. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of attainment against the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and learning support in higher education.

PUBLICATIONS

2026. Sex, gender, sexuality and orientation in biomedical research articles on intersex variations: A diachronic corpus analysis. Culture, Health & Sexuality, Advance Online Publication. (with Carmen Dayrell and Virginia Zorzi)

2026. Abnormal deceivers? Biopower in clinician accounts of embodiment and life for people with intersex variations. Applied Linguistics, Advance Online Publication.

2026. Language, gender and biopolitics: Meaning-making and intersex variations in healthcare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2026. Risk and danger on the rise: Representation of intersex variations of innate sex characteristics in biomedical research. Social Science & Medicine, 389(118808), 1-11. (with Carmen Dayrell and Virginia Zorzi)

2023. The future of pronouns in the online/offline nexus. In Laura Paterson (Ed.), Routledge handbook of pronouns (Chapter 6). Abingdon: Routledge. (with Archie Crowley)

2023. Communicating health knowledges across clinic and community: The case of sex characteristics in plurilingual Hong Kong. In O. Zayts-Spence, & S.M. Bridges (Eds.), Language, health and culture: Problematising the centres and peripheries of healthcare communication research (pp. 101-118). Abingdon: Routledge.

2023. Merging mobilities: Querying knowledges, actions, and chronotopes in discourses of transcultural relationships from a North/South queer contact zone. Critical Discourse Studies, 20(2), 111-127. (with Benedict Rowlett)

2022. Epilogue: Geopolitical lenses (and mirrors) in workplace language and gender research. In L. Mullany, & S. Schnurr (Eds.), Globalisation, geopolitics, and gender in professional communication (pp. 213-223). Abingdon: Routledge.

2022. Biopolitics and intersex human rights: A role for Applied Linguistics. In C.W. Chun (Ed.), Applied Linguistics and Politics. London: Bloomsbury.

2021. Engaging peers and future parents, creating future turbulence: Activist biocitizenship practices and intersex transgression in the classroom. Sex Education 21(5).

2019. Communities of Practice in Language Research. London: Routledge.

2019. Language and embodied sexuality. In K. Hall and R. Barrett (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.

2018. Hip Hop headz in sex ed: Gender, agency and styling in New Zealand. Language in Society 47(4).

2017. Language, sexuality and place: The view from cyberspace. In T. M. Milani (Ed.), Queering Language, Gender and Sexuality (pp. 256-280). New York: Equinox.

2017. Communities of practice. In B. Vine (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace (pp. 101-111). New York: Routledge.

2017. Querying heteronormativity among transnational Pasifika teenagers in New Zealand: An Oceanic approach to language and masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(3), 442-464.

2017. Gender and sociopragmatics. In A. Barron, Y. Gu, & G. Steen (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 121-138). London: Routledge. (with Janet Holmes)

2017. Traversing the erotic oasis: Online chatting and the space/time continuum. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(3), 475-499.

2016. Becoming the intelligible other: speaking intersex bodies against the grain. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(4), 359-378.

2016. Language education, gender, and sexuality. In T. McCarty, & S. May (Eds.), Language policy and political issues in education (3rd ed., pp. 85-97). (Encyclopedia of language and education). New York: Springer. (with Benedict Rowlett)

2015. Wikipedia writing as praxis: Computer-mediated socialization of second-language writers. Language Learning and Technology, 19(3), 106-123.

2015. Online writing as a discovery process: Synchronous collaboration. In M. Pennington, T. Costley, & A. Chick (Eds.), Creativity and Discovery in the University Writing Class (pp. 321-345). New York: Equinox.

2015. Language and sexuality in education. In Patricia Whelehan, & Anne Bolin (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality (pp. 649-719). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

2015. Investigating digital sex talk practices: A reflection on corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik, & Christoph A. Hafner (Eds.), Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age (pp. 130-143). London: Routledge.

2014. Reclaiming masculinity in an account of lived intersex experience: Language, desire, and embodied knowledge. In T. M. Milani (Ed.), Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations (pp. 220-242). London: Routledge.

2014. Gender and pragmatics. In Carol A. Chapelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics New York: John Wiley & Sons. (with Janet Holmes)

2014. Inverting virginity, abstinence, and conquest: Sexual agency and subjectivity in classroom conversation. Sexualities, 17(3), 310-328.

2014. Tracing the emergence of a community of practice: Beyond presupposition in sociolinguistic research. Language in Society, 43(1), 61-81.

2014. Trivial, mundane or revealing? Food as a lens on ethnic norms in workplace talk. Language and Communication, 34(1), 46-55. (with Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes)

2013. How permeable is the formal-informal boundary at work? An ethnographic account of the role of food in workplace discourse. In C. Gerhardt, M. Frobenius, & S. Ley (Eds.), Culinary Linguistics: The Chef's Special (pp. 191-209). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing (with Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra)

2012. Location, Iore and language: An erotic triangle. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 1(1), 106-125.

2011. Language, sexuality and place: The view from cyberspace. Gender and Language, 5(1), 1-30.

2010. “All us girls were like euuh!”: Conversational work of be like in New Zealand adolescent talk. New Zealand English Journal, 24(1), 17-36.

2009. Building and analysing corpora of computer-mediated communication. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary Corpus Linguistics (pp. 301-320). London: Continuum.

2008. “Being gay guy, that is the advantage”: Queer Korean language learning and identity construction. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 7(3-4), 230-252.

RESEARCH GRANTS

POSSIBLE PHD SUPERVISION TOPICS