[IGALA] CfP "Gender-Neutral/Fair/Inclusive/Nonbinary/Non-sexist languages and their dis/contents" Conference
Rodrigo Borba
rodrigoborba at letras.ufrj.br
Thu Mar 2 11:59:53 UTC 2023
Dear All,
Please find – below and in the attachment – a call for contributions for a
conference about "Gender-Neutral/Fair/Inclusive/Nonbinary/Non-sexist
languages and their dis/contents", to be held in *Paris, October 16/17 2023*
.
We will be happy to receive proposals regarding any contexts and languages.
Deadline for abstract: *April 30th*.
Please, help us circulate the call widely and wildly.
All the best,
Julie, Rodrigo and Heather
***
Gender-Neutral/Fair/Inclusive/Nonbinary/Non-sexist languages and their
dis/contents
Conference 16/17 October 2023
University of Chicago Center in Paris
6 rue Thomas Mann, 75013 Paris France
The role of language in including, excluding and (mis)representing certain
groups has been foundational for the field of language and gender since the
1970s. In fact, some of the most notable contributions of this academic
field to the public sphere had to do with how to represent women more
equally in texts through changes in the lexicon (e.g., Ms., flight
attendant, firefighter, etc.) and syntax (e.g., he and she, etc.) in what
became known as non-sexist language. Attention to sexist and androcentric
linguistic structures dominated the field for two decades and may be viewed
as indexing the zeitgeist of the times, to different extents responding to
the cultural revolution of May 68 and the political change of second-wave
feminism. However, the relative institutional success of non-sexist
language reforms and the discursive turn the field witnessed in the 1990s
caused the public and academic attention to linguistic sexism to wane.
This scenario has been drastically changed recently. In several corners of
the world, renewed interest in how linguistic structures exclude and/or
misrepresent certain groups has followed in the wake of academic and
political changes. As trans and nonbinary groups gain more public
visibility and propose their own theories and concepts, demands for less
transphobic and cisgender-centric language have arisen. Trans and nonbinary
linguistic reforms are tributary of earlier feminist critiques of language
and share some of their basic tenets, but several points of divergence
exist. While a large range of non-sexist language practices aims for equal
representation of women and men, they still keep the gender binary
unscathed. Other feminist and queer linguistic practices take issue with
the social and grammatical bi-categorization as the core of their critical
concerns, with some of them aligning with non-binary practices. For
languages with robust grammatical gender such as Portuguese, Spanish,
French, German, Italian, Slovenian, Romanian, Polish, Czech, etc. the aim
is to curb grammatical gender binarism by way of adding nonbinary
morphemes. Because of the challenges they pose to linguistic structures and
to commonly held beliefs about language, gender, and power relations, such
innovations do not go unquestioned by linguists and laypeople alike who
engage in heated public debates about their grammatical legitimacy,
linguistic productivity, and political usefulness. The transnational
resurgence of such debates at this moment is representative of the current
political zeitgeist. On the one hand, following a long tradition on the
antifeminist left, these practices have been viewed by some as an outcome
of the “identity turn” within the left, fragmenting the field and diverting
the attention from structural problems. On the other hand, they have been
used by the right as a sign of increasing radicalization and detachment
from real-world issues or, its opposite: as a threat to the social order.
Within feminist, queer, non-binary, and trans communities, debates have
also arisen about what language can and cannot do and what the political
and social meanings of the various propositions are. These debates are made
more convoluted by the tensions between descriptivism and prescriptivism,
between what people do with language and what they think language should be
like, and between people’s sociolinguistic reality and purists’
idealizations.
These metalinguistic and metapragmatic rationalizations about language
highlight that “gender, understood as a grammatical category, [cannot] be
thought of as independent from its cultural context” (Abbou and Baider
2016:5). With the multiplication of
gender-neutral/gender-fair/inclusive/nonbinary/non-sexist language forms,
contexts of use and social actors using them, talk about such language has
also multiplied and received renewed attention in the public sphere. Such
metadiscourses offer a fruitful analytical entry-point to understand not
only these practices but also, and perhaps most centrally, the social,
cultural, political, and ideological contexts in which they arise. At this
juncture, this conference aims to gather researchers who are interested in
metadiscourse about
gender-neutral/gender-fair/inclusive/nonbinary/non-sexist languages and
what such metacommentary says about the actors/institutions that issue
them. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
-
- National and transnational contexts of emergence, circulation,
appropriation, and contestation (how unique are local instantiations of the
phenomenon? How and to what extent are they informed by transnational flows
of actors, discourses, and militancy practices? Etc.)
-
- Multilingualism and translanguaging (what is the role of
gender-neutral, gender- fair, inclusive, nonbinary, non-sexist language in
multilingual societies? How do different languages inform one another? How
do multilingual speakers speak of the various resources at their disposal?
Is there a semiotic market of gender- neutral, gender-fair, inclusive,
nonbinary, non-sexist practices according to different languages? Etc.)
-
- Genealogies and memories of the debates and how they overlap and/or
contest each other (what is the local history of the phenomenon? Who gets
to tell it? Are there alternative genealogies/memories? How do these
stories and erasures crisscross with social and intellectual movements?
Etc.)
-
- Political cross-fertilizations, encompassments, and fragmentations
(how is gender-neutral, gender-fair, inclusive, nonbinary, non-sexist
language framed within local political contexts? How does it feed political
coherence and disaggregation? How is it co-opted by conspiracy theories?
Etc.)
-
- Convergences and divergences in metadiscourses against such reforms
(what do linguists, the media, politicians, citizens say about the
phenomenon? How different/similar are their metacommentary? How do these
views circulate nationally and transnationally? Etc.)
-
- Convergences and divergences in metadiscourses for such reforms (what
do feminists, trans, queer, and nonbinary people say about these reforms?
How do their positions differ? How do they overlap? Etc.)
-
- Naming practices and how they frame the phenomenon and the
controversies around it (i.e., do gender-neutral, gender-fair, inclusive,
nonbinary, non-sexist language refer to different instantiations of the
same/different phenomena? What affordances and limits do speakers ascribe
to each label? Are there conflicts about the naming of the controversy
itself? Etc.)
-
- Uses and abuses of such innovations in the public sphere (how are
gender- neutral, gender-fair, inclusive, nonbinary, non-sexist taken up by
the media, governments, companies? How are these uses seen by different
stakeholders? How do institutionalized uses reflect and/or disrupt
grassroots uses? Etc.)
-
- Renewal of and challenges to experts systems about gender-neutral,
gender-fair, inclusive, nonbinary, non-sexist language (What are the
trajectories, experiences, actors or institutions functioning as
acknowledgement processes to produce experts in this field? What previous
and contemporary gender-neutral, gender-fair, inclusive, nonbinary,
non-sexist language does to prescriptivism and discourse about
prescriptivism? Etc.)
The conference aims to show that what is said about gender-neutral,
gender-fair, inclusive, nonbinary, non-sexist language can add analytical
nuance to our understanding of language and social life. Indeed, gender is
a crucial node to approach this articulation, both because of its intrinsic
sociolinguistic nature and because it is becoming an inevitable marker in
ideological distribution. By bringing together different social, political,
and linguistic contexts, the workshop will shed light on the complexity
that surrounds linguistic practices at a time of global political
reconfigurations.
500-word abstracts must be sent by April 30th, to
-
● Julie Abbou: julie.abbou at unito.it
-
● Rodrigo Borba: rodrigoborba at letras.ufrj.br
-
● Heather Burnett: heather.burnett at u-paris.fr
Notification of acceptance/rejection will be sent out by May 30th.
The workshop will be held on the 16th and 17th October 2023. There are no
registration fees for the conference.
This event has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC)
under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
(grant agreement N° 850539).
*Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Borba*
PPG Interdisciplinar em Linguística Aplicada
<http://www.poslaplicada.letras.ufrj.br/pt/>
Co-editor Gender & Language <https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/GL>
Núcleo de Estudos em Discursos e Sociedade - NUDES
<http://www.nudes.letras.ufrj.br/>
Publicações <https://ufrj.academia.edu/RBorba>
Currículo Lattes <http://lattes.cnpq.br/4245787890844219>
Orcid <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4348-1812>
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