“What are your pronouns?
And why does it matter”,

Montpellier, Octobre 2024

Date: 17-Oct-2024 – 18-Oct-2024
Location: Montpellier, France
Contact Person: Ann Coady
Meeting Email: whypronounsmatter2024@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)?