34.2860, Calls: What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2860. Mon Oct 02 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2860, Calls: What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?

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Date: 02-Oct-2023
From: Ann Coady [ann.coady at univ-montp3.fr]
Subject: What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?


Full Title: What are your pronouns? And why does it matter?

Date: 17-Oct-2024 - 18-Oct-2024
Location: Montpellier, France
Contact Person: Ann Coady
Meeting Email: whypronounsmatter2024 at gmail.com
Web Site: https://pronouns.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics;
Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2024

Meeting Description:

This two-day hybrid interdisciplinary conference will focus on the
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?

We welcome 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.

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

Call for Papers:

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.

>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. 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)?



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