[IGALA] CFP special issue of GLAD! Journal: "Feminist Linguistics"

Julie Abbou julie.abbou at no-log.org
Thu Apr 6 08:03:15 UTC 2023 

<https://www.revue-glad.org/>

https://www.revue-glad.org/

Call for papers

Feminist Linguistics Today
Politics, Ideologies, Materialism, Queer

GLAD! will publish in December 2023 a multilingual issue dedicated to 
feminist linguistics worldwide. We accept contributions in English, 
Romanian, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Portuguese, and French. If 
you are interested in contributing to this issue, please send a proposal 
(3,000 to 6,000 characters) by May 15 to revue.glad at gmail.com. More 
information about submissions is provided at the end of this document 
and in attachment.

Established in 2016, GLAD! is a francophone journal dedicated to works 
that articulate gender, sexualities, and language. At a time when the 
journal is paying increasing attention to feminist issues of translation 
and circulation of knowledge, we would like, in this issue, to work 
across languages and spaces, and to publish texts written in various 
languages - in translation or not - in order to provoke intellectual 
encounters in an internationalist approach.

This issue aims at examining the relationship between linguistics and 
feminism, from the reflections of the pioneers who have invested the 
field to its current reconfigurations. This project proposes several 
axes of reflection:

● the place of politics (for researchers and speakers as well as in the 
discourses, objects of study, and theories),

● the epistemological dimension of a feminist approach to language and 
linguistics as well as a linguistic approach to gender and sexuality 
issues,

● and, finally, the new perspectives opened in linguistics by the 
contemporary reconfiguration of feminist questions, notably between 
materialism and queer.

Beyond the questions of inclusive writing, which are not at the heart of 
this issue, the first dimension that interests us is the political 
aspect of the relationship between feminism and linguistics. In France, 
in the 1980s, when the pioneers brought feminist issues into linguistic 
research, the status of politics within research in the humanities and 
social sciences was different from what it is today, and was more 
clearly affirmed. However, since the 1960s, the encounter between 
Marxism and structuralism had produced a linguistic turn for a certain 
number of disciplines in the humanities. In linguistics, it was not 
about embracing structuralism, which was already there, but about 
combining to it Marxism as "a philosophy of

language" (Bakhtine/Voloshinov [1929] 1977). Reading texts written in 
the 1970s and 1980s is striking in this respect: there is no doubt that 
language is political, as the works of the French school of discourse 
analysis show.

However, when reading the pioneers of feminist linguistics, one can feel 
the resistance that the field opposes to gender issues, and thus to 
feminist issues. In other words, feminism meets the same oppositions in 
linguistics as in other political spaces: priority is given to class 
struggle. In the last three decades, linguistics as a whole has 
discarded assumed political approaches (with the exception of certain 
critical approaches in sociolinguistics or discourse analysis). If 
sociolinguistics is interested in politics, it is only as an object and 
rarely as an epistemic “anchor”. Interestingly, in this context, 
feminist research has resurfaced in linguistics, reinjecting the 
political issue into the linguistic agenda.

With this issue, we would like to propose a transnational reflection and 
discussion on the links between research and feminism. What are they 
like today in various countries and languages?

What can we do today with this political dimension in research? Does it 
allow us to see things differently? Does it uncover new objects and new 
relationships? What does the political aspect allow us to think that we 
could not think about otherwise? Moreover, do feminism and queer 
theories bring a specific approach to the political, compared to 
critical approaches as a whole? What are the current epistemic stakes in 
articulating a feminist thought, which is necessarily political, to 
research in linguistics, in which the political question seems to have 
been largely ignored in the face of the increasingly hegemonic claims of 
the principles of "neutrality"? Is it possible to tell a political 
history of linguistics, especially in its relationship to feminism? Is 
there a feminist linguistics today? What is the place of 
interdisciplinarity in current feminist linguistic research, in the 
sense of putting into relation knowledge built according to different 
procedures and different relationships to the construction of truth?

Moreover, how can we interpret the current hostile reactions to feminism 
that some linguists have? What is the political agenda (or agendas) of 
linguistics? Is linguistics capable of assuming a political agenda? 
Isn't this the battle that is currently being fought?
This leads to a broader question about the gender ideologies of 
linguists. Can we analyze the discourses of reactionary/conservative 
linguistics? How? And what position can we adopt? Are these discourses 
an object of study that needs to be museumized, or are they an emerging 
phenomenon that is epistemologically urgent to counteract?

The latest debates around inclusive writing, which have taken place 
perhaps more in the media than in scientific editorial spaces, show that 
theoretical positions in linguistics can sometimes be considered as 
hiding behind political readings of the contemporary world. Indeed, 
these debates are dictated by a media agenda and are willingly linked to 
issues that no one, apart from a few sociolinguists, has been concerned 
with in linguistics for the past 30 years: equality, citizenship, the 
fight against discrimination, secularism, etc. It is therefore difficult 
not to read in these reactions, whether reactionary or progressive, a 
political struggle for a vision of the world, but also a struggle about 
what linguistics should be.

It is good news that, willy-nilly, linguistics is back in the social 
arena. However, the recourse to arguments of objectivity and neutrality 
to claim greater scientificity prevents linguists from assuming 
political positions. Should we then, with Haraway (2007), defend the 
idea that clear

political positions allow for the production of better science? Or 
should we assume that linguists produce, or perhaps must sometimes 
produce, something other than science, namely taking part publicly and 
in their own right in debates and decisions on what society should be?

On the other hand, we can wonder about the links between linguistics and 
the different feminist currents. Feminist linguistics - at least in 
France - has historically been rooted in materialist feminism (Michard 
1999, Violi 1987). So, can we speak of materialist linguistics? If so, 
is it a linguistics that is concerned with meaning in relation to the 
material conditions of existence? Is it a linguistics that considers the 
matter of language as a vector of ideologies (of gender)? Queer 
linguistics has grown in the United States and in Germany 
(Motschenbacher 2010, Motschenbacher & Stegu 2013, Hornscheidt 2007, 
Leap [2011] 2018, Milani 2018, etc.), but this perspective is still rare 
in France. What could be its principles? There is also a recent attempt 
to articulate materialist and queer currents within feminist theories. 
How can linguistics seize these new relationships and what can they 
bring? Finally, how can we respond to the new materialist feminism, 
which is based on an opposition to the consideration of linguistic 
questions?

>From a theoretical and disciplinary standpoint, we can also ask what is 
the place of linguistics within feminist thought. Indeed, feminist 
humanities and social sciences have taken up language a lot. This has 
allowed for major conceptual contributions (performativity as redefined 
by Butler 2004, 2005, for example), but it has sometimes been at the 
cost of a lack of precision in the analyses and use of theories (see 
Ahmed 2019, for example). Is linguistics just a tool that serves 
feminist social science? Or can we think of a strong contribution of a 
feminist linguistics that would illuminate issues of gender and 
sexuality in a discipline-specific way?

Finally, we can question the contributions of feminist perspectives on 
the theories and methods of linguistics. Feminist theories would then be 
a "contributory epistemology" (Paveau 2018) to linguistics, which would 
move away from the consideration of gender as a mere object of research. 
While linguistics has so far kept feminist theory on the margins, it can 
be seen, conversely, as allowing for a fresh revisiting of some central 
questions in linguistics, like the opposition between language and 
discourse, or the tension between structuralism and post- structuralism. 
While structuralism is no longer claimed, nor even discussed, in the 
majority of contemporary works worldwide, is linguistics - including its 
new paradigms - still part of structuralism? How can different 
structuralisms, in their different declinations (materialism, Saussurean 
structuralism, Prague structuralism, anthropological structuralism, 
psychoanalysis, etc.), on the one hand, be articulated, and on the other 
hand, help us to think together the relations of domination and the 
resistances / dynamics of emancipation? What other paradigms would allow 
us to think these relations in their linguistic dimension?

In other words, are the various contributions of feminism to the 
articulation between the singular and the category able to inform 
linguistic theorizations? While feminist linguistics has shown how 
deeply gender and sexualities are shaped by languages and discourses, it 
has also shown how issues of gender and sexualities impact discourse and 
language, or at least theories of discourse and language (see the first 
issue of the journal GLAD!: Abbou & al. 2016) While social approaches to 
language have often stuck to a Bourdieusian reading of the social, 
feminist theories have proposed a multitude of ways to think about 
domination and power.

What theoretical and epistemological contributions of feminism are 
transferable to social approaches to language? How does it allow us to 
revisit classical notions of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis?

References

Abbou, Julie, Candea, Maria, Coutant, Alice, Gérardin-Laverge, Mona, 
Katsiki, Stavroula, Marignier, Noémie, Michel, Lucy et Thevenet, 
Charlotte. 2016. « GLAD! revue féministe et indisciplinée » GLAD! 01 
http://journals.openedition.org/glad/260 
<http://journals.openedition.org/glad/260>
Ahmed, Sara. 2019. « Le langage de la diversité » GLAD! 07 
http://journals.openedition.org/glad/1647 
<http://journals.openedition.org/glad/1647>

Butler, Judith. 2004. Le Pouvoir des mots. Paris : Amsterdam
____. [1990] 2005. Trouble dans le genre : pour un féminisme de la 
subversion. Paris : La Découverte.
Haraway, Donna. 2007. Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais. Paris : Exils 
Editeur. Hornscheidt, Lann. 2007. “Sprachliche Kategorisierung als 
Grundlage und Problem des Redens über Interdependenzen. Aspekte 
sprachlicher Normalisierung und Privilegierung.” dans Katharina 
Walgenbach, Gabriele Dietze, Lann Hornscheidt, Kerstin Palm eds. Gender 
als interdependente Kategorie. Opladen: Budrich, 65-106.
Leap, William L. [2011] 2018. « Linguistique queer, sexualité et analyse 
du discours », GLAD! 05 http://journals.openedition.org/glad/1244 
<http://journals.openedition.org/glad/1244>
Michard, Claire. 1999. « Humain/femelle : deux poids deux mesures dans 
la catégorisation de sexe en français ». Nouvelles Questions Féministes 
20(1) : 53-95.
Milani Tommaso. 2018. Queering Language, Gender and Sexuality. Sheffield 
: Equinox Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010. Language, Gender and Sexual 
Identity. Poststructuralist Perspective. Amsterdam, Philadelphia : John 
Benjamins.
Motschenbacher, Heiko & Stegu, Martin. 2013. « Queer Linguistic 
Approaches to discourse ». Discourse & Society 24(5) : 519-535
Paveau, Marie-Anne. 2018. « Le genre : une épistémologie contributive 
pour l’analyse du discours», dans Husson A.-C. et al. dir., Le(s) 
genre(s). Définitions, modèles, épistémologie, Lyon : ENS Éditions : 79-95.
Violi, Patrizia. 1987. « Les origines du genre grammatical ». Langages 
85 : 15-34. Voloshinov, Valentin. [1929] 1977. Le Marxisme et la 
philosophie du langage. Paris : Minuit.

Submission details

If you are interested in contributing to the issue, please send a 
proposal (3,000 to 6,000 characters) to revue.glad at gmail.com by May 15, 
2023.

The file will contain:

  *

    ●  the proposed title

  *

    ●  the name of the author(s)

  *

    ●  their possible institutional affiliation

  *

    ●  the e-mail address of the author responsible for the correspondence

  *

    ●  the abstract

  *

    ●  up to 6 bibliographic references

  *

    ●  the type of article envisaged: research note or critical review
    (25 000 characters),

    standard article (50 000 characters)
    The accepted formats are: .doc ; .docx ; .rtf ; .odt

Abstracts may be submitted in the following languages: English, 
Romanian, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Portuguese, French

The contributors will be informed by e-mail of the acceptance or refusal 
of their abstract by the editorial committee in charge of the selection. 
The acceptance of the abstract is not a commitment to publication but is 
an encouragement. The answer may be accompanied by remarks.

Authors whose proposals have been accepted will be invited to send their 
complete article, which will follow the editorial norms of the journal, 
available at the following address: 
https://journals.openedition.org/glad/5325 
<https://journals.openedition.org/glad/5325> (an English translation 
will be provided to authors).

Important dates

  *

    ●  Deadline for proposals: May 15, 2023

  *

    ●  Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2023

  *

    ●  Full papers deadline: September 1, 2023

  *

    ●  Anonymous reviews sent by: October 30, 2023

  *

    ●  Estimated publication date: December 15
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