LGBTQ+

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:42:36 +0000

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols Rachel Sauer Mon, 02/16/2026 - 10:42

Cody DeBos

С�� Boulder linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity

In 2019, Washington, D.C.’s Pride celebrations became a flashpoint—but not just for the usual political tensions. Organizers of the annual Dyke March barred participants from carrying the Jewish Pride flag, sparking a wider debate about symbols and the meanings they carry.

Organizers claimed the flag too closely resembled the Israeli flag and could be insensitive to pro-Palestinian participants. Jewish LGBTQ+ activists, many of whom had marched in the event for years, were stunned.

“I was actually living in Washington, D.C., at the time,” says Kate Arnold-Murray, a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I was out of town at the time, so I was looking at things involving the march on Facebook and saw all these arguments going on. I wanted to get to the root of what people were upset about—what people who presumably should be on the same page were arguing about.”

С�� Boulder scholar Kate Arnold-Murray has studied how the six-pointed Star of David became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

What began as curiosity while browsing turned into years of research for Arnold-Murray, culminating in her recent publication in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Her study looks at how a single symbol—the six-pointed Star of David—became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

Bridging language and politics

In her doctoral work at С�� Boulder, Arnold-Murray focuses on how language produces and reflects political identity in America.

“Most of my work involves language and politics on the left in the United States. This piece ties into that work because these are presumably mostly political actors on the left in arguments with each other,” she says.

In her paper, Arnold-Murray examines a trove of public Facebook comments from individuals and organizations reacting to the 2019 Dyke March decision.

“As a member of both the Washington, D.C., queer community and the Washington, D.C., Jewish community, it was like my two sides were fighting, and I wanted to understand why,” she says.

The problem of misrecognition

The controversy centered on the Jewish Pride flag: a rainbow background with a white Star of David in the middle. For some, the star was a proud symbol of Jewish identity that dates back thousands of years. For others, it was too reminiscent of the Israeli flag—and thus a political statement they opposed.

To understand the disagreement, Arnold-Murray turned to the concept of indexicality, or the connection between a sign and its social meaning.

“Indexical misrecognition is accounting for the possibility that we might have misunderstandings based on our lived experiences shaping how we interpret signs like a symbol or word,” she explains.

In other words, what one person sees as an expression of faith or cultural belonging, another may see as a symbol of state violence or exclusion.

“In this instance, each group came with a different notion of what the Star of David means based on their lived experiences—and that’s where we get that misrecognition.”

Arnold-Murray’s paper takes it further. She argues that not only do symbols connect with personal and cultural identities, but they can lead to conflict because their meanings are not fixed. That’s especially true when it comes to symbols like the Star of David, whose associations stretch across religion, nationalism, ethnicity and more.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity. But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings,” says С�� Boulder linguistics scholar Kate Arnold-Murray. (Photo: Tom Morris/Wikimedia Commons)

“Another example is the phrase ‘Are you a friend of Dorothy?’ which has been used within the queer community to indicate that someone is queer. But to someone who is not queer, they might not share that same meaning and they might say, ‘Dorothy who?’” Arnold-Murray says.

One flag, many meanings

Arnold-Murray also uses the term bricolage to describe the Jewish Pride flag. In the art world, bricolage refers to a construction created from layers of different materials.

“Here, we have the Jewish Pride flag as a construction of bricolage, where there are the meaningful horizontal rainbow stripes of the queer pride flag and then the white Star of David, which can indicate Judaism or potentially Israel, depending on one’s reading,” she says.

The ambiguity of meaning in signs consisting of multiple parts is what often leads to misrecognition. Since the Jewish Pride flag combines two strong identity symbols, any interpretation is bound to stir deep emotions, Arnold-Murray explains.

“It’s when we have these signs that are so tied up with our identity and who we are that we get these big conflicts among, presumably, a queer community where a lot of people agree on political issues overall.”

For many Jewish participants in the 2019 Dyke March, banning the flag was more than a debate over a symbol.

“A lot of the commenters who were against the ban of the Jewish pride flag were claiming that the ban was anti-Semitic and against them as Jews and that they felt excluded from the march,” Arnold-Murray says.

For organizers, allowing the flag could have been seen as endorsing a political stance they didn’t share. It was a lose-lose situation made worse by how personal it felt for everyone involved.

What’s at stake

Arnold-Murray is careful to warn that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to symbolic conflict. But she does suggest that understanding how symbols work, and why layered meanings can spark conflict, can lead to more empathetic conversations.

“I think the stakes are huge. When we have these signs that are tied to identity, it can feel like a personal attack to be contesting what they mean,” she says.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity,” she adds. “But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings.”

In a political landscape increasingly fractured by culture wars and identity debates, that goal may feel out of reach. But for Arnold-Murray, it all comes back to understanding.

“Meaning isn’t fixed. When it comes to situations like this, what’s really important is listening, being willing to apologize, and being willing to move forward while being as inclusive as possible,” she says. “Understanding that meanings come from lived experiences is a good starting point.”

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С�� Boulder linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity.

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Professor aims to comfort, protect students in wake of Club Q killings

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 22:58:04 +0000

Professor aims to comfort, protect students in wake of Club Q killings Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/14/2023 - 15:58

Orla McGrath

Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the LGBTQ Certificate Program, outlines resources, safe spaces and people’s varying experience of grief

On Nov. 19, 2022, five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs died in a mass shooting, renewing debate about the gun-violence epidemic and domestic terrorism, but there was another dimension to this shooting: Club Q is a well-established and beloved LGBTQ+ club in the Colorado Springs area.

Many members of the LGBTQ+ community have been left feeling scarred, fearful and violated, and with a lack of protections in place for this community, some wonder how LGBTQ+ students on campus process the event and find helpful resources and safe spaces.

Though the question has no simple, definitive answer, Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the С�� Boulder LGBTQ Certificate Program, hopes to start an open conversation on the campus about LGBTQ+ violence and provide students with support networks in a time of great pain.

“Most importantly, there is no correct way to feel after Club Q. You should feel you have space to cry, scream and get angry,” Soares added. “Emotions can’t be processed in a right or wrong way.”

Assistant Professor Kristie Soares is working on an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of disco and dance music in 1970s New York.

Soares focuses their work in queer Latinx media and queer of color critique, specifically media representations.

“It’s interesting to examine not only negative stereotypes in media, but also how unintentional representation can become something radical, like when a character is written as cisgendered but becomes a queer character within the fanbase of a piece of media,” Soares said.

The LGBTQ+ Studies certificate program is interdisciplinary, meaning that students can take classes outside of the department to meet requirements, which opens up a wide range of courses and topics to study.

“As long as the course has more than 50% LGBTQ+ content, we approve that for the certificate. This includes classes with a large independent project component if you choose to do a project about LGBTQ+ issues,” Soares said.

The program is approaching its 30-year anniversary in 2025, but Soares said interest in the certificate has spiked in recent years.

“We’re in a really exciting and scary time for queer and trans people, and in some ways these very negative issues have reinvigorated people’s interest in studying the LGBTQ+ community and taking that with them into government and public-policy jobs,” Soares said.

Soares is working on a manuscript titled Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media and is passionate about “the ways that joy can be a response to severe trauma and state-sanctioned violence in marginalized communities.”

“There’s something very queer about joy,” Soares said. “We have a strong history of queer and trans people connecting joy to politics—Stonewall was an uprising, but it was also a bar where people were dancing and enjoying themselves.” (The Stonewall uprisings were a series of protests in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in response to police crackdowns on gay and lesbian bars.)

Reflecting on the reactions to the Club Q murders on campus, Soares said joy and fear naturally go hand in hand, and there is room for all emotions.

“Recognize that this is a violation, and we don't currently have the protections that we need to guarantee that this won’t happen again—it is not unreasonable to be out in LGBTQ+ spaces and be scared.”

Soares emphasizes that there is no one correct way to grieve in these moments: “There are normative systems put in place related to grieving that just don’t fit for marginalized communities—when trauma is not the exception anymore, that grieving process is going to be more constant.”

“Despite this reality, there are many ways on campus to find safe spaces to feel emotions and talk to one another,” Soares said. She believes community spaces are the key to this; such spaces can be nightclubs but also knitting circles, book clubs or text chains.

“The great thing about these spaces is the joy that comes with them—it’s OK to laugh at something funny on a text chain or watch silly movies even though we are in a world in some ways defined by homophobia, transphobia and the trauma that comes with it—that’s a part of the experience of being queer and trans,” Soares said.

Queer Asterisk, a group of queer mental health professionals in Boulder, is a great place to start when accessing resources, she said. The group offers free digital support groups to process emotions and build connections and can connect students with free therapy.

On campus, students can find an array of resources and communities. “We have the Pride Office, which is a student services focused center, and the academically focused certificate program. These are all great options for returning students, students new to Boulder and students who may not have spent a lot of time on campus due to the pandemic and are still searching for their community here,” Soares said.

That’s the great thing about the С�� community—there is faculty you can reach out to who are working on these issues but also identify as part of the community."

“We also have clubs like the Gay Student Alliance and Queer People of Color; both great places to make friends and find the joy that is so important in these times.”

Clubs and centers will individually host events, and there is also a TRANSforming Gender Conference on March 18-19, which will draw people from around the country and include discussions and workshops. Faculty gathered last year to do a panel discussion on their experiences as trans/non-binary folk in higher education, Soares said.

“That’s the great thing about the С�� community—there is faculty you can reach out to who are working on these issues but also identify as part of the community. This can be really helpful, too,” Soares adds.

Grief is an ongoing process, one without a straightforward path. “When our day-to-day safe spaces are violated, that can be devastating. In those moments, it is even more important to find community,” Soares said.

“You do not need to go through this, or any other traumatic events, alone.”

A full list of resources can be found on the LGBTQ+ resource website.

Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the LGBTQ Certificate Program, outlines resources, safe spaces and people’s varying experience of grief.