[IGALA] Call for proposals: conference “What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?” Montpellier, France, 17th-18th Oct 2024

[ann coady]

Dear all,


Please find below a call for proposals for the i*nternational
interdisciplinary conference: "What are your pronouns? And why does it
matter?", to be held at Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier
3, 17th-18th October 2024.*


Please note that the language of the conference is English. Comparative
approaches are welcome, as long as the focus is on English.


Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to
whypronounsmatter2024 at gmail.com before
15th February 2024.


All the best,

Ann Coady and Sandrine Sorlin.



*CALL FOR PROPOSALS*

It is almost a platitude today to say that pronouns are political.
Recently, however, they seem to have become more political than ever.
Putting pronouns on a social network bio, in an email signature, on badges
at conferences, or disclosing them during a pronoun round, i.e.,
introducing oneself with the formula “Hi my name is X and my pronouns
are *she/her,
he/him, they/them*…” is more than simply stating a fact, it is an
intrinsically political act. These practices reveal much more than
someone’s gender, they also indicate their stance on gender politics, and
potentially much wider political issues.


However, as these pronoun sharing practices have gained momentum and become
more popular, they have also provoked backlash from certain quarters:
in March 2023 Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, signed a new state law
against what he dubbed “the pronoun olympics”. It is now illegal in K12
educational institutions in Florida to refer to someone, or to ask to be
referred to, with a pronoun that does not correspond to the sex assigned at
birth, demonstrating just how politically charged pronouns have become.


This two-day hybrid interdisciplinary conference will focus on these recent
pronoun sharing practices, covering all forms of disclosing one’s pronouns
including name badges, the pronoun round, putting pronouns in an email
signature, Zoom profile, etc. What theories, methodologies and approaches
can be mobilised to explain these new phenomena, as well as the backlash
against them? What is the genealogy of these practices: how do they fit in
with, or diverge from previous debates about pronouns?


Some argue (Baron 2020; Cameron 2016) that debates over pronouns in the
1960s and 70s focused on *reducing* the relevance of gender and imagining a
world *without* gender. However, today gender is envisaged by many as a
vital part of one’s identity. If second wave feminists conceptualised
gender as a system of oppression, could asking, expecting or even
obliging (Thomas-Hébert 2022) people to disclose their pronouns be
considered “just another way queer people are being pushed to perform their
queerness” (De Freitas 2021), a compulsory “pronominal coming out”? Even if
the objective of these practices is to question the stability,
universality, and binarity of gender (Thomas-Hébert 2022), is there
nonetheless an inherent paradox in wanting to question gender binaries,
wanting to avoid pigeonholing people, and yet at the same time asking them
to put a label on themselves? Have these practices unwittingly amplified
gender binaries, simply creating a new gender binary of
transgender/cisgender, rather than challenging the binary system per
se (Manion 2018)? What light can feminist and/or Queer theory shed on these
issues?


>From a sociolinguistics perspective, *who* is using these new practices and
*why*? The practice of disclosing one’s pronouns originated in trans
communities as a way to inform others about how to refer to them
appropriately, but quickly spread to the mainstream. If the risk of being
misgendered is much less present for cis people, why do they do it? Do
these pronoun sharing practices mean different things for different people?
Thomas-Hébert (2022) found that cis women declared their pronouns more
often that cis men and Tucker and Jones (2023) found that the most widely
used pronouns on Twitter were *she/her*. What does this indicate? That cis
women are more likely to be allies than cis men? That more trans women
disclose their pronouns than trans men? How do we explain these differences?


Alternatively, these practices are perhaps not to be associated with
*categories* of people (trans, cis, non-binary, gender non-conforming,
etc.), so much as with the *stances* that they index (Eckert 2008). Are
they a way for cis people to show allyship, a way of indicating their
stance and alignment (Du Bois 2007; Kiesling 2022) on trans issues, or even
a way of signalling wider political allegiances? If so, what are these
stances and how have these new pronoun sharing practices changed the
indexical value of pronouns over recent years? Stating one’s pronouns seems
to be increasingly tied to, not only gender issues, but a liberal/left-wing
ideological position.


What does it mean when the practice is taken up by high profile politicians
like Elizabeth Warren (Democrat Senator for Massachusetts) and Kamala
Harris (Democrat Vice President of the USA) (King and Crowley 2023)? What
stance is being taken in these cases? Is this real allyship or simply
“virtue-signalling”, a *performance* of transgender inclusion that does
little to advance transgender rights (Manion 2018)?


Equally, how far can these pronoun sharing practices be considered a form
of “gender-washing” that companies and universities exploit in order to
appear ethically irreproachable? In this context, do these new pronoun
sharing practices risk losing their political potential and simply becoming
a conformist ritual of political correctness (Jones 2022)? To what extent
does pronoun sharing fit into the “political correctness” debate, if at all?


>From a pragmatics perspective, what seems specific to these pronoun sharing
practices is the detour taken via the 3rd person, which is not used in the
*I-you* dyad. These practices thus seem to be a social ritual as well as an
exchange of information, fulfilling a socio-pragmatic function, or as
Cameron (2016) argues, “a symbolic affirmation of the parties’ intention to
conduct their subsequent dealings in good faith and with mutual respect.”
How then, do current practices fit into previous research on pronouns? Is
disclosing one’s pronouns (for a cis person) a politeness strategy (Conrod
2020; Brown and Levinson 1987), an act of solidarity/allyship, part of an
ethics of care towards non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans
people (Conrod 2022; Zimman 2017)?


This interdisciplinary conference welcomes proposals from a variety of
disciplines including (but not restricted to) sociolinguistics, pragmatics,
Critical Discourse Analysis, philosophy, cultural, civilisation or literary
studies that shed light on how these new pronoun sharing practices matter.
Communications can exploit various data (ethnographic data, interviews,
surveys, online corpora, press articles, autobiographies, novels, TV
series, films…) from any critical perspective. Comparative linguistics
approaches are welcome, as long as the focus is on English.


The conference aims to answer some of (but not exclusively) the following
questions:


   - Who employs these new pronoun sharing practices and why?
   - What do these practices index about a speaker? How does this practice
   relate to other political stances?
   - How have these new practices changed the indexical value of pronouns
   over recent years?
   - Do people choose different pronouns depending on the context (e.g.,
   professional email signature, bio on dating sites, pronoun rounds…)? If so,
   why?
   - Apart from *he/him*, *she/her* and *they/them*, what other pronouns
   are used and why?
   - What are people’s attitudes to these new practices? How are they
   perceived?
   - If these new practices are the heir to past struggles for
   gender-neutral pronouns, to what extent are they the continuation of these
   struggles? In what ways is the debate about pronouns today different from
   that of the 1960s and 70s? How does the use of non-binary singular
*they* impact
   the use and perception of singular *they* as a generic gender-neutral
   pronoun (“somebody called but *they* didn’t leave a message”)?
   - How can we explain the backlash against these practices? What role do
   these practices play in the current climate of the culture wars and moral
   panic about gender?
   - To what extent do these practices open up a positive space for those
   questioning gender norms? Is the invitation to become pronominally visible,
   and therefore to make public what might be private, a source of liberation
   or alternatively a source of potential anxiety? Does it generate
   opportunities for gender fluidity or simply reify gender divisions and
   therefore gender hierarchies?
   - How does this phenomenon play out in different languages compared to
   English, or in different varieties of English?
   - What is the future of this new phenomenon? Will it become widespread,
   partly also because it helps recipients of an email to identify the gender
   of someone whose first name might not be marked for gender?


A selection of papers will be considered for publication.

Call for Papers: What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?

Venue: University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

Date: 17-18 October 2024

Research lab: EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone)

Conference organisers: Ann Coady & Sandrine Sorlin

Website: https://pronouns.sciencesconf.org/

Deadline for submission: 15th February 2024

Notification of acceptance: 15th April 2024

Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to whypronounsmatter2024 at gmail.com

Language of the conference: English

Registration fees: 60€, free for students.



Guest speakers

   - Laura Paterson, The Open University, UK
   - Claudine Raynaud, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France
   - Lal Zimman, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA


Scientific committee

   - Julie Abbou, Università di Torino, Italy
   - Dennis Baron, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
   - Rodrigo Borba, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
   - Daniel Elmiger, Université de Genève, Switzerland
   - Laure Gardelle, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
   - Brian King, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
   - Andrea Macrae, Oxford Brookes university, UK
   - Éric Mélac, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France
   - Laura Paterson, The Open University, UK
   - Charlotte Thomas-Hébert, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
   - Lal Zimman, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA



References

Baron, Dennis E. 2020. *What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He & She*. New York:
Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. *Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Usage*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cameron, Deborah. 2016. ‘The Pronominal Is Political’. *Language: A
Feminist Guide* (blog). 2016.
https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/the-pronominal-is-political/.

Conrod, Kirby. 2020. ‘Pronouns and Gender in Language’. In *The Oxford
Handbook of Language and Sexuality*, edited by Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.63.

———. 2022. ‘Variation in English Gendered Pronouns: Analysis and
Recommendations for Ethics in Linguistics’. *Journal of Language and
Sexuality* 11 (2): 141–64. https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.20026.con.

De Freitas, Sophie. 2021. ‘Putting Your Pronouns in Your Bio Is Not the
Revolutionary Step You Think It Is’. *The Journal*, 28 June 2021.
https://www.queensjournal.ca/putting-your-pronouns-in-your-bio-is-not-the-revolutionary-step-you-think-it-is/
.

Du Bois, John, W. 2007. ‘The Stance Triangle’. In *Stancetaking in
Discourse*, edited by Robert Englebretson, 139–82. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. ‘Variation and the Indexical Field’. *Journal of
Sociolinguistics* 12 (4): 453–76.

Jones, Morgan. 2022. ‘Pronouns in Bio’. *Renewal: A Journal of Social
Democracy*, 13 April 2022. https://renewal.org.uk/pronouns-in-bio/.

Kiesling, Scott F. 2022. ‘Stance and Stancetaking’. *Annual Review of
Linguistics* 8 (1): 409–26.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-121256.

King, Brian, and Archie Crowley. 2023. ‘The Future of Pronouns in the
Online/Offline Nexus’. In *The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns*, edited by
Laura Louise Paterson. London: Routledge.

Manion, Jen. 2018. ‘The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The Pronoun
Go-Round and the New Gender Binary’. *Public Seminar*, 2018.
https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-performance-of-transgender-inclusion/.

Paterson, Laura Louise. 2014. *British Pronoun Use, Prescription and
Processing*. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Rose, Ell, Max Winig, Jasper Nash, Kyra Roepke, and Kirby Conrod. 2023.
‘Variation in Acceptability of Neologistic English Pronouns’. *Proceedings
of the Linguistic Society of America* 8 (1): 5526.
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5526.

Thomas-Hébert, Charlotte. 2022. ‘Énonciation Des Pronoms et Subjectivités
Militantes Dans l’activisme Étatsunien Contemporain :’ *Revue Française
d’études Américaines* N° 172 (3): 122–35.
https://doi.org/10.3917/rfea.172.0122.

Tucker, Liam, and Jason Jones. 2023. ‘Pronoun Lists in Profile Bios Display
Increased Prevalence, Systematic Co-Presence With Other Keywords and
Network Tie Clustering Among US Twitter Users 2015-2022’. *Journal of
Quantitative Description: Digital Media* 1: 1–35.

Zimman, Lal. 2017. ‘Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and
Strategies for Promoting Tran-Affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language’. *Journal
of Language and Discrimination* 1 (1): 84–105.
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