Programme Information

Organised by Annamária Fábián (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg) Liane Ströbel (RWTH Aachen University)

Language plays a significant role in women’s empowerment (eg. McElhinny 2003; Ehrlich et al. 2003, 2014; Güntner et al. 2012), since it can influence the power women have in relation to colleagues, partners, and other people in society. Language also reflects to individual and collective emotions of women and men in gender activism and gender discourses.

Hashtags are an adequate tool for women to create a space to exchange knowledge and information about their rights, to find supporters in their fight for gender equality and also to share their experiences and to report violence.

Especially hashtags have proven potential for mobilizing worldwide attention and accountability to women’s rights by increasing the visibility of several issues that are commonly under-reported. The use of hashtags has helped tremendously to bring several issues that negatively affect women to the forefront of political agendas.

The interaction of language, women´s empowerment and geopolitical features is an emerging field of research (e.g. Fábián 2019; Gnau & Wyss 2019).

The focus of our panel is therefore on

• analyzing the role and geopolitical features of language used in women´s empowerment, gender activism and gender discourses within social media
• highlighting language specific variations of the following hashtag, such as #metoo, #50/50by2020, #womenempowerment, #GaiaeMatilde, #genderequality or #heforshe, etc.
• studying communicative patterns and strategies used in gender activism, gender discourses and women´s empowerment.

Organised by Federica Formato (University of Brighton) & Brian W. King (The University of Hong Kong)

This panel explores the geopolitics of knowledge production in the field of language, gender and sexuality from the point of view of corpus linguistics. It is now a well-established notion in Sociolinguistics (indeed more broadly) that there is an imbalance of theory that favours the metropole (Milani & Lazar 2017) as well as an acknowledged tendency to mostly focus on languages from those same regions (Abbou & Baider 2016; Stanford 2016). To expand the view, the individual contributions to this panel broaden beyond a focus on theory to encompass how corpus-linguistic methods, and the implications of what is found, can be subject to ‘epistemological imbalances and normative erasures’ (Milani & Lazar 2017) that end up having a marginalizing effect. Furthermore, the development of feminist geopolitics challenges the predominant thinking that places geopolitics at the scale of the nation-state, instead focusing on less traditional sites and scales. It is necessary, in a feminist critique of geopolitics “...to consider reconfigured scales, abstracted wars, and the removal of the nation-state” (Massaro & Williams 2013: 574). Aligning to this insight, the panel broadens its scope beyond the metropole-periphery binary (though inclusive of it) to a more encompassing look at ‘the margins’, one that includes digital scales and spaces that exist independently of political borders. In this way the panel can shed light on less visible entry points for corpus study such as ‘dark’ online spaces (Paper 7), queer social media spaces (Paper 1), and news media spaces (Paper 5) that might normally exist ‘under the radar’ when using a South-North set of lenses. Throughout, the focus of the panel will remain primarily on the challenges these various scales bring to corpus linguistics techniques and epistemologies.

In terms of methodological challenges, corpus tools developed for working with alphabetic orthographies might struggle to deal with logographic scripts or with varieties that have rich morphological inflection such as Serbian (Paper 1). Such orthographic and structural differences can confound corpus software developed in the metropole. Additionally, semantic and grammatical taggers might lag behind in being adapted to other varieties (Paper 2, Paper 3), including even outer circle Englishes such as in Singapore (Paper 4). These challenges can be further compounded by a scarcity of reference corpora in languages such as German (Paper 2) and Italian (Paper 3). In terms of challenges to the implications of research and circulation of findings, these processes can be complicated by geopolitics even when methods are relatively unproblematic. For instance, concepts emerging from the metropole such as ‘political correctness’ can have unstable analytic purchase in other linguistic settings like Italy (Paper 6), and this incongruence can create complications for comparative corpus-linguistic studies. Finally, the panel will reflect on the affordances and constraints of conducting corpus linguistic research on gender and sexuality while viewing them from a geopolitical standpoint, asking what anxieties are revealed by a preoccupation with objectivity (Paper 7) and what a feminist, transnational geopolitics of language, gender and sexuality should look like (Paper 8), and how corpus linguistic studies can contribute to such a feminist project.

Organised by Nancy Hawker and Claire Savina

Nawal El Saadawi’s The hidden face of Eve (in Arabic, al-wajh al-ʿāri li-l-marʾa al-ʿarabīyya ‘the naked face of the Arab woman’, 1977 [in English Beacon Press, Boston: 1982]) was categorical in its combination of emancipatory feminism and anti-colonial nationalism, in the name of pursuing Arab modernity. Forty years later, and veering on the contrary towards cultural relativism, Joseph Massad published Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007). Massad applied Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism to the cultural history of same-sex relationships, reclaiming some of the Arab knowledge, beyond modernity, that did not operate within gay/straight binaries. These milestones created waves in literary and political studies, and the language sciences are pushing on the door to enter the debate.

It is now seventeen years since the publication of Fatima Sadiqi’s Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Brill, Leiden/Boston: 2003), one of the first major studies of language and gender in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). She wrote: “The patriarchal system is built on the exclusion of women from spaces of public power and by the sanction of all forms of physical and moral violence against them […]. Women’s freedom is seen as a challenge to the patriarchal social fabric and to men’s status quo. It is in the family that women are initiated into their role of guardians of social organisation. This initiation is channelled through a rigid system of kinship relations, a battery of traditions and rituals, and taboo. This channelling is largely achieved through the use of language.” (p. 54). Many of the systems that Sadiqi described and opposed are still reinforced, reinvented and redeployed, even after the political changes of the last eight years, since the Arab Spring. The MENA context now seems to demand less categorical analyses, but the ethics of protest and protection also require critical thinking that cannot accept relativism.

The aim of this panel is to research the uses of varieties, modes, and registers of Arabic in their different adaptations to past, already changing, and future imagined, realities of gender. Using methods of linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis, the panel is preoccupied with power, namely the connections and tensions between discursive power and material power. Could the right words be said in speech acts that would claim recognition and therefore, somehow, protect from violence? What is the power of stereotypes and unconscious bias, expressed in language, to sideline certain forms of gendered existence, such as gays who do not conform to nationalist stereotypes, victims of gender-based violence, or women who sell sex? How are these stereotypes contested and utilised in their subjects’ own favour? And, above all, where does Arabic discourse fit in the social and international dimensions of powerful producers of knowledge? The four papers address gay rights protests in Palestine, feminist writing in Egypt, testimonies of Tunisian women, and communications in the trans-regional sex trade. A new generation of scholars of gender and Arabic has emerged: it is entering the political and cultural debates, equipped with language sciences.

Organised by Rodrigo Borba (Federal University of Rio  de Janeiro) and Sonia Corrêa (Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinar de Aids)

Disparate political actors, civil society groups and institutions around the globe have recently mobilised against gender equity and pro-LGBTIQ legislation. These different but strangely entwined phenomena have forged a moral crusade that attempts to strengthen modern (seemingly outdated) ideals such as the nuclear family and the nation. Interestingly, these mobilisations repeat formula, contents, slogans and tropes that seem to travel transnationally but are, nonetheless, locally adapted within national borders. In Colombia, the peace referendum of 2016 was rejected and negotiations with the FARC were hampered on the grounds that these changes would lead to a flexibilization of gender norms. The Brazilian ultraconservative far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro became president due to his vitriolic speeches against women and homosexuals so much so that he singled out the fight against “gender ideology” as a political platform in his inauguration speech. In Hungary, gender studies programmes have been dismantled. In France, Spain, Slovenia and Italy, self-identified guardians of good morals (Strazarji, Sentinelle in Piedi, les Sentinelles) have publicly demonstrated their dissatisfaction at progressive laws on same-sex marriage and abortion. On Women’s Day 2018, the Turkish Family Assembly rallied for the repeal of Act n^o 6284 which prevents violence against women based on the argument that “the terrorism of gender equality and homosexuality is a crime against humanity”, echoing anti-gender slogans used elsewhere. Such examples evince how gender has become an enemy (Borba,2019) that holds a weighty role in the current global conservative backlash and its dynamics of de-democratization (Prado and Corrêa, 2018). These campaigns are loosely linked by what is called “gender ideology”, “gender theory”, “genderism”, “the gender lobby” – floating signifiers that encompass anything from LGBTIQ rights, to abortion, progressive school curriculums, feminism, communism, cultural Marxism, globalism to the political left (Corrêa 2018). Paternotte and Kuhar (2018) explain that these concepts serve as (1) a discourse, (2) a political strategy harnessing support for far-right populist groups, and (3) a transnational phenomenon with deleterious national effects. While the two latter dimensions have been scrutinized by analysists who discuss the historical, macrosociological and political effects of anti-gender campaigns, the former (i.e. discourse) is still under-investigated. Hence, this panel aims to bring the (trans)national circulation of anti-gender discourses into the remit of sociolinguistic inquiry. The papers address these questions:

• What are the linguistic, semiotic, discursive and multimodal strategies used to distort progressive views of gender and transform them into a public enemy?
• What are the discursive mechanisms which allow the national and transnational circulation of these discourses?
• How are these discourses re/de/entextualized and what are their effects in harnessing public support for anti-gender campaigns?
• How does language and other semiotic resources produce points of convergence and divergence within different anti-gender mobilizations?

This panel aims to demonstrate that analysing the linguistic and discursive strategies used by anti-gender mobilisations may limn the current geopolitics of gender. It may also foment a discussion on how to speak back to the conservative reconfiguration of what is politically doable and sayable in the public sphere, providing the means to counter-argue.

Organised by Louise Mullany (University of Nottingham) and Stephanie Schnurr (University of Warwick)

In this panel we will explore the linguistics of globalisation, migration and workplace cultures from a gendered perspective. Drawing on the contemporary empirical work of a range of contributors from multiple geographical regions, including Australasia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America and South-East Asia, this panel will examine issues of gendered language, perceptions and representations of sexuality and the role of gendered stereotyping and cultural myths in global workplaces. In particular, we will focus upon a range of salient political issues which have global applicability, but which are also subject to often significant socio-cultural variation depending upon geographical location. This will include key issues of contemporary concern for language, gender and workplace researchers as we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, including: the enduring global applicability of the stereotype “think leader, think male”; gender discrimination and bias from an intersectional perspective, considering language at the interface of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion and social class; sexual harassment in the workplace and gender-based stereotyping, including how language plays a significant role in reifying harmful stereotypes and myths of what it means to be effective, productive and credible professionals.

A range of different workplaces will be focused upon, enabling a variety of professions to be examined from both rural and urban environments globally. This will also include women who are breaking into previously male-dominated environments in different geographical spaces, as well as men entering traditionally female professions. We will present research data from market women entrepreneurs, engineers, healthcare professionals, lawyers, politicians, teachers, political leaders, managers. Additionally, we also broaden out our focus to include on underpaid migrant domestic workers supporting women leaders in different workplaces and homes. Data collected from a range of methods will be focused on, including spoken and written workplace interactions, online media and narrative, elicited through focus groups and interview data. We will also broaden out our focus from the language that takes place within workplaces as geopolitical spaces to focus upon broader issues of gender relating to the globalised workplace, including issues of migration and the sociolinguistics of family and work.

Panel participants will take a range of different sociolinguistic approaches to explore language and the geopolitics of gender in the globalised workplace. New empirical data from a range of different sources will be drawn upon, including spoken, written and digital texts. By employing a range of different analytical approaches, including linguistic pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics, participants will pay particular attention to identifying recurring themes around navigating gender stereotypes and discrimination in a range of different cultural, linguistic and geographical contexts. Findings will be critically discussed against the backdrop of largely positive ‘Discourses of globalisation’, and will feed back into discussions of geopolitical dimensions of language, gender and sexuality scholarship.

Organised by Lynnette Arnold (University Massachusetts), and Kristine Køhler Mortensen (University of Gothenburg)

Human mobility is a crucial geopolitical concern in our world today. Rising political economic inequality and the effects of climate change spur increasing mobility, even as rampant xenophobia and surging nativism produce aggressive efforts to control such movement. Public rhetoric about migration and asylum has thus become a site of increasing struggle, serving to produce contested understandings of who can belong to the nation – and who is excluded (Dick 2018; Perrino and Wortham 2018). At the same time, language is an important resource whereby migrant and refugee communities navigate experiences of mobility (Baynham and De Fina 2005; Strycharz-Banaś 2018). This panel contends that by placing considerations of human mobility more centrally in the heart of our field, language, gender, and sexuality studies can make important contributions to understanding this pressing global issue.

While a great deal of scholarship has demonstrated how experiences of human mobility are shaped by gender and sexuality, this panel suggests that attending to language reveals how understandings of gender and sexuality become refracted through the lens of mobility (cf. Besnier 2007; Piller & Takahashi 2010). We ask: what does it mean for categories of gender and sexuality to be to be put in motion – to cross borders – in an era of increased border control? Migration discourse mobilizes gender and sexuality to create depictions of those who move, while also rendering accounts of motivations for migration. Migrants and refugees are represented as a particular kind of gendered, sexualized and racialized Others, thereby justifying particular policy responses. The mobilizations of gender and sexuality produced by dominant state institutions may clash with the understandings of those caught up in processes of mobility.

This panel brings together scholars working with migrant and refugee communities in Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Hong Kong, the United States, El Salvador, Denmark, Holland, Austria and the United Kingdom. Utilizing various methodological and analytical tools such as ethnography, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis, we trace how understandings of human mobility and of gender and sexuality become co-constitutive. Ultimately, the panel demonstrates that attention to language can provide important perspectives on how experiences of mobility are shaped by discourses of gender and sexuality.