AAA Panel CFP on Language Variation and Masculinities in Publics-DEADLINE EXTENDED

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Dear Colleagues,

I hope all is well. We still have a few slots open in this double  
panel, so if any of you have an abstract you would like us to  
consider, please send it to ndumas at linguistics.ucsb.edu as soon as  
possible, preferably by March 25th. You can also email me directly in  
case you have something you would like us to consider but can't meet  
the March 25th deadline.

Best,
Nate


>
> ------
>
> Troubling the Masculine Voice of Publics:  Language Variation as a  
> Semiotic Resource for Competing Masculinities
>
> Co-Organizers: Nathaniel W. Dumas (University of California, Santa  
> Barbara) and Qiuana Lopez (University of California, Santa Barbara)
> Discussants: Asif Agha (University of Pennsylvania) and Scott F.  
> Kiesling (University of Pittsburgh)
>
> Ethnographic studies of publics from sociocultural and linguistic  
> anthropologists have demonstrated the complex nature in which  
> publics are ongoingly experienced, constructed, and deployed as  
> powerful mechanisms for recruiting (dis)identification with  
> particular subjectivities (e.g., Amrute 2010; Briggs 2005; Gal and  
> Woolard 2001; Subijanto 2011). From the beginning, scholars  
> underscored the idea that publics are racialized, sexualized, and  
> engendered in diverse and conflicting ways, particularly around the  
> question of male hegemony. At the same time, sociolinguists and  
> linguistic anthropologists of variation have reconsidered  
> masculinity as a metapragmatic label that does not always refer to  
> communicative practices exclusively done by men (e.g., Kiesling  
> 2005, 2011; Milani 2011; see also Halberstam 1998). Masculinity has  
> come to be seen as a social accomplishment by social actors through  
> culturally recognized performatives, including variation, that  
> competes with other masculinities for dominance in communicative  
> contexts. However, most of this work privileges the language  
> ideology of the vernacular as a private and authentic site for  
> researching the construction of masculinity, with little detail to  
> the leaky boundaries between public and private (Hill 2001) for the  
> construction of identity.
>
> In this vein, this panel brings understandings of variation as  
> indexing multiple masculinities in conversation with research on the  
> complex dynamics of publics. In particular, we seek to bring  
> together scholars that continue to complexify the heuristic of  
> “publics” by shifting the discussion away from publics as male- 
> dominated to a focus on publics as arenas of competing performatives  
> of masculinities, particularly voicing via variation and its  
> combination with other semiotic resources by social actors within  
> and beyond conventional gender dichotomies. Possible paper topics  
> may include but are not limited to:
>
> •      How do social actors use sociolinguistic variation, as an  
> indexical field (Eckert 2008), for constructing multiple and, at  
> times, conflicting masculinities within publics?
> •      In what ways do social actors and institutions draw on  
> discourses of metapragmatic regimentation (Silverstein 1993) for  
> legitimizing and delegitimizing (non)acceptable masculinities in  
> publics?
> •      How do publics restrict different masculinities from being  
> displayed through discourses on variation that seem to be gender-less?
> •      In what ways do publics differentially value racial, sexual,  
> and class masculinities performed by men, women, and transgendered  
> persons through variation and other semiotic resources?
> •      How do social actors negotiate and/or contest the leaky  
> boundaries between publics and private space (Hill 2001) while doing  
> various masculinities via variation?
>
> Please send a 200-word abstract by March 25th to ndumas at linguistics.ucsb.edu 
>  for consideration. If you have any further questions, email me at  
> the address.
>
> Nathaniel Dumas
> Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher
> Department of Linguistics
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> http://ucsb.academia.edu/NathanielDumas/About
>
>

Nathaniel Dumas
Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://ucsb.academia.edu/NathanielDumas/About