posting for "Call for Papers"

[Don Kulick (by way of Richard J Senghas)]

REPLY TO Don.Kulick at man.ac.uk

 CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AAA 2001 ON ìLANGUAGE & DESIREî

 Dear colleagues,

 Deborah Cameron (U of London), and I are preparing a panel for this yearís
AAA on the topic of ìLanguage and Desireî, and we would welcome submissions
from interested anthropologists and linguists.

 In the panel, we are interested in exploring a dimension of performative
theory that, to date, has not received much empirical attention; namely,
how the saying of something, in important ways, is structured by what
remains unsaid, or unsayable. Our own desire to explore this topic arises
from our engagement with literature on language and gender and on language
and sexuality, and our concern that much of that literature only engages
with ìperformanceî (what is seen and explicitly said), as opposed to
ìperformativityî, which highlights the processes through which
subjectivities are generated and made possible.

 Touchstones for the kind of investigation we envisage can be found in
Deborah Cameronís paper in the book Language & Masculinity (Johnson &
Meinhof, eds. 1997), my own paper on ìGay and lesbian languageî in the
Annual Review of Anthropology (2000), Michael Billigís recent book Freudian
Repression (1999), Kira Hallís paper ìLip service on the fantasy linesî (in
Hall & Bucholtz 1995), and the edited volume Language & Desire (Harvey and
Shalom 1997). Most of that work focuses on erotic desire. While this is of
great interest, erotic desire is not the only kind of desire that exists,
and we also welcome contributions that discuss other modalities of desire
as well. One issue that contributors might want to explore is how various
kinds of desire become bound up with, or separated from, erotic desire.

 We are most interested in papers that tackle the problem of how we can
actually identify and examine desire in talk or in mediated expressive
forms, such as the Internet. However, we also welcome theoretical
contributions, and papers that investigate the ways in which desire is
generated, structured, and disseminated in a variety of social and cultural
discourses.

 Potential topics include:
 - language and intimacy
 - the linguistic evocation of public/private distinctions
 - the language socialization of desire
 - language and ritual/religious desire
 - ìpassingî as an expression of desire to be, or be seen as, a particular
kind of person
 - desire in the peer-interactions of children and adolescents
 - how various ideologies (heteronormative, patriarchal, colonial) are
maintained through the construction of particular silences in discourse
 - a discussion of different theories of desire and their relevance for
linguistic anthropological investigations

 Please address all queries and expressions of interest to
Don.Kulick at man.ac.uk by 29 February 2001.

 Sincerely,
 Don Kulick
 Professor
 University of Manchester