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““Mein Name ist Lena und meine Pronomen sind she/her”: Exploring Indexicalities of Pronoun Sharing Practices in English and German”, Hannah Sawall, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany
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Descriptif
Practices of pronoun sharing are present in online contexts but also especially in queer offline-spaces. People often share which third-person singular pronouns they want others to use in nominative and accusative case (e.g. she/her). However, the motivations for people’s pronoun choices and form of sharing them remain unexplored. In German specifically, some people use language-crossovers as they share English pronouns in otherwise German speech/texts (see also Minning 2004). Since pronoun sharing has been associated with different political stances from virtue signaling to trans liberation (see e.g. Manion 2018; de Freitas 2021; King & Crowley 2024), it is clear that they transport more information than simply how a person asks to be referred to. My study therefore explores indexicalities (Silverstein, 2003; Eckert, 2008) of pronoun sharing practices of English and German speakers.
I use triangulation of English and German data sources including (online) ethnography to cover different contexts in which pronouns are made relevant. While some social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Reddit) allow users to share pronouns and can thereby influence pronoun sharing choices, they are also home to metalinguistic discussions. Additionally, ethnographic interviews survey people’s experiences with and thoughts on as well as their own reasons for (or against) pronoun sharing.
Preliminary results suggest a complex indexical link between pronouns and gender, where sometimes pronoun sharing can be used as an additional modality of gender expression (see Kotthoff 2003). Furthermore, choices about whether/how pronouns are shared are influenced by other factors like globality/internationality (see e.g. Jenkins, 2014; Vriesendorp & Rutten, 2017) and participants’ personal experiences. Understanding those connections will improve our understanding of how people (try to) manage the perception of their identities in both on- and offline contexts and can, in turn, make pronoun sharing practices more gender-affirming — especially for trans people.
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