[Linganth] CALL FOR PAPERS - Special Issue: Gender and Language in Eastern and Central Europe

[Kira Hall]

Special Issue: Gender and Language in Eastern and Central Europe
Journal: Gender and Language
Special Issue Editor: Ksenija Bogetić

The area of Eastern and Central Europe is progressively cementing its reputation as the main hub of ‘anti-gender’ hostility, resurfacing in debates on abortion, removal of gender from curricula, as well as the policies around sexuality that are becoming centrepiece in many parties’ pandemic-time campaigns. In all these moves, language has remained a fundamental symbolic knot of contention. We witness this in increasingly interrelated academic and popular discourses, from debates on gender asymmetries in morphologically complex languages, to the competing linguistic  framings of the entire conversation around gender — including the very meaning of ‘gender’ as transformed through the pejorative collocation of ‘gender ideology’.

Gender and Language will dedicate a special issue to the Slavic-speaking societies of Eastern and Central Europe, which despite the hype continue to be among the least explored in the field. Empirical insights from this region are seen as critical to push local debates in more productive directions, but also to complicate some Anglophone-dominated frameworks in the discipline more broadly. In particular, the complexity of discourses in the post-socialist, post-‘transition’ societies promises good grounds for going beyond the growingly individualising and de-contextualising framings of gendered social problems, by demanding more intersectional analyses of social inequality.

The journal now invites proposals in the form of extended abstracts, for articles dealing with any Central and Eastern European, Slavic-language context. We leave the scope of themes open, ranging from gender marking and reform, through discursive analyses of gender concepts as (re)-constructed in private, public, media, educational and other settings, to discourses of anti-gender movements and resistance to ‘gender ideology’. Still, we particularly welcome work that situates these phenomena within the specificities of their local geo-political contexts, such as the politics and policies of gender, or the conflicting discourses on language, in between communist conceptions of gender equality, EU equality and human rights discourses, ethno-nationalist populisms, and/or the current local women’s rights and queer movements.

Approaches may include (but are not limited to): applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, conversation analysis, cognitive linguistics, argumentation theory.

Abstracts should be between 800 and 1,000 words in length and should contain the following information: (i) title; (ii) authors’ names and correspondence details; (iii) article aims; (iv) setting, data and methods of analysis; (v) (provisional) findings; (vi) (provisional) conclusions and implications. Please submit abstracts by email to Ksenija Bogetić (ksenija at zrc-sazu.si<mailto:ksenija at zrc-sazu.si>).

The deadline for submission of abstracts is January 28th, 2021; decisions and further instructions will be sent out to authors within two weeks after the deadline.

Gender and Language is the single major academic journal dedicated to the intersections of gender studies and linguistics. It showcases research on gender in discourse domains that include institutions, media, politics and everyday interaction. Most critically, the journal aims to bring together a pan-global, interdisciplinary consortium of scholars whose work collectively challenges established disciplinary boundaries and incorporates multiple geopolitical axes of academic interpretation. Part of Equinox Linguistics Journals https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/journals/linguistics/.

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