Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 986

Part of Session 182: Gender ideologies in public discourses (Other abstracts in this session)

Metadiscourse of the gender perturbation in French in anarchist pamphlets: challenging the experts’ voice.

Authors: Abbou, Julie
Submitted by: Abbou, Julie (LPL (Speech and Language Laboratory, Aix-en-Provence, France) / Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong), Hong Kong S.A.R. (China))

This communication aims to examine the arguments of some speakers about the way they disturb gender in language in order to trouble gender’s semantic categorization. Such a linguistic intervention, occurring in French since 2000, is present in the anarchist literature and consequently is made in the name of political purposes: the deconstruction or abolition of gender as part of the struggle against domination.

Following a short presentation of the linguistic forms of this perturbation, this work focuses first on the nature of anarchist pamphlets as a specific media. Indeed, the anarchist literature implies a discursive materiality (Courtine 1982) that is necessary heterogeneous. Some particular features distinguish it from an established order of discourse, such as, for example, philosophy (Garcia, forthcoming). The pamphlets are also, historically as well as nowadays, a subversive tool for the non-instituted discourses, with very few formal constraints. All these characteristics make the anarchist pamphlet an open space for the disturbance of gender.

Second, this work focuses on the metadiscourses of these speakers justifying their linguistic action. In order to link gender, politics and language, they seize tools usually utilized by linguists. Through heterogeneous discourses, they set out the repartition of values on which their gender perturbation is based. By highlighting the premises of these speakers’ discourses, the rhetorical landscape of the disturbance becomes apparent: the rejection of gender institution, an anti-essentialist stance, a necessary relationship between means and aims, and an emancipatory will to question power in an incidental reading of politics – i.e. a politics of values. However, each of these premises contradicts those of another project of language modification, that of standard feminization in French. This planning aims to complete the language system in order to make women visible (Pauwels 2010). By contrast and within a totally different political culture (Gordon 2008), the perturbation proponents attempt to question the generic categorization as a place of power, and as such, to question how we categorize the world in order to make it significant. These discourses challenge the voices of experts, empowering the modification of language from the margins (Hariman 1999, bell hooks 1984). They disturb by this way—in the feminist tradition—the public/private boundary by bringing an autonomous voice to the public scene.

bell hooks, 1984. Feminist Theory. From margin to center. Boston: South End Press.

COURTINE Jean-Jacques, 1982. Définition d’orientations théoriques et construction de procédures en analyse du discours. Philosophiques 9(2): 239-264.

GARCÍA Vivien, forthcoming. Des discours théoriques de l'anarchisme et de la philosophie. In Langage et Action, Anna Krol (ed.)

GORDON Uri, 2008. Anarchy Alive. London: Pluto Press

HARIMANRobert, 1999.Status, Marginality and Rhetorical Theory. In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: 35-51. John Louis Lucaites & al. (ed.). New York : Guilford Press.

PAUWELS Anne, 2010. Socially Motivated Language Reform in a Global Lingua Franca: The Case of Gender Reform in English In Language in its socio-cultural Context: 21-33. Markus Bieswanger, Heiko Motschenbacher & Susanne Mühleisen (eds.). Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Metadiscourse of the gender perturbation in French in anarchist pamphlets: challenging the experts’ voice.