37.2379, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Gendered Language Practices: Between Convergence and Polarization (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2379. Thu Jul 16 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2379, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Gendered Language Practices: Between Convergence and Polarization (Finland)

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Date: 14-Jul-2026
From: Renata Enghels [renata.enghels at ugent.be]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Gendered Language Practices: Between Convergence and Polarization


Panel at IPC20 - Gendered Language Practices: Between Convergence and
Polarization
Short Title: IPrA2027
Theme: Gendered language practices: Between convergence and
polarization

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Renata Enghels
Contact Email: renata.enghels at ugent.be
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics;
Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

We invite colleagues interested in participating in the panel
“Gendered Language Practices: Between Convergence and Polarization” to
send an expression of interest, together with a provisional title and,
if possible, an abstract, to Renata Enghels (renata.enghels at ugent.be)
and Marlies Jansegers (marlies.jansegers at ugent.be) by 30 September
2026.
Participants will then be asked to submit their abstract through the
official IPrA 2027 submission platform by 15 October 2026
Gendered language practices: between convergence and polarization
Organizers: Renata Enghels & Marlies Jansegers, Ghent University
Long-standing debates on gender and language have often oscillated
between two poles: the search for stable differences between women’s
and men’s linguistic behaviour, and the critique of such differences
as context-dependent, ideologically loaded or empirically overstated
(Lakoff 1975; Tannen 1990; Coates 2015; Newman et al. 2008).
Large-scale corpus-based work has shown that gender differences in
language use may be small but systematic, while also emphasizing the
importance of context, communicative goals and social relations
(Newman et al. 2008). At the same time, recent social and digital
developments suggest that gendered identities are once again becoming
highly polarized. Online environments in particular have fostered new
or renewed forms of masculinist self-positioning, anti-feminist
discourse, re-traditionalized femininity and gender-based antagonism.
Recent studies on the manosphere, manfluencers and tradwife
influencers show how gender ideologies circulate through mainstream
platforms such as Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, where they are
embedded in practices of self-help, authenticity, affect, mockery,
advice-giving and ideological positioning (Krendel 2022; Lott et al.
2025; Pilyarchuk and Graf 2026).
Rather than treating gendered discourse only as discourse about women,
men or other gendered groups, this panel focuses on how speakers and
users perform gendered identities through concrete linguistic
resources. We invite contributions that examine gendered pragmatic
practices across interactional, political and digital contexts.
Relevant phenomena include, but are not limited to:
 - speech acts such as apologies, compliments, requests, directives,
advice-giving, accusations, complaints and insults;
 - practices of facework, relational work and (im)politeness;
 - stance-taking, affect and evaluation;
 - intensification and mitigation;
 - humor, mockery and irony;
 - vocatives, pragmatic markers and other intersubjective resources.
The panel is particularly interested in studies that connect
micro-level pragmatic choices to broader processes of social change,
convergence or divergence between female and male speech, and
polarization. We welcome corpus-based, qualitative, quantitative,
experimental, multimodal, cross-linguistic and microdiachronic
approaches, as well as contributions that explore intercultural
variation or compare offline and online interactional settings.
Likewise, we welcome a wide range of possible data: case studies may
address everyday conversations, political discourse, social media
practices, manosphere and tradwife content, feminist
counter-discourses, or other contexts in which gendered identities are
interactionally salient.
Relevant contributions regarding all languages from different
frameworks are welcome.
By bringing together research on gender, pragmatics, sociolinguistics,
discourse analysis and digital communication, the panel aims to build
bridges between empirical traditions that have often remained
separate, such as variationist work on gendered language use,
pragmatic research on interactional practices and critical approaches
to contemporary gender polarization.
References:
Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman’s Place. Harper & Row.
Tannen, D. (1990). You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in
Conversation. William Morrow.
Coates, J. (2015). Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account
of Gender Differences in Language (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Newman, M. L., Groom, C. J., Handelman, L. D., & Pennebaker, J. W.
(2008). Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text
samples. Discourse Processes, 45(3), 211–236.
Krendel, A., McGlashan, M., & Koller, V. (2022). The representation of
gendered social actors across five manosphere communities on Reddit.
Corpora, 17(2), 291–321.
Lott, K., Murumaa-Mengel, M. & Marling, R. (2025). Mainstreaming the
manosphere: discourses of contemporary masculinity among Estonian
manfluencers. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1),
1–11.
Pilyarchuk, K., & Graf, E.-M. (2026). From “I’ve always wanted to be a
homemaker” to “Feminism is cancer”: Performing tradwife identity in
Instagram Reels. Discourse, Context & Media, 70.



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