AAA Panel CFP on Language Variation and Masculinities in Publics

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Dear Colleagues,

Please see the CFP below for the double panel proposal and forward to  
others who may be interested.

Best,

Nate

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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 5th 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