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“Pronoun sharing and stancetaking: political and cultural (dis)alignment”, Ann Coady, Université Paul-Valéry, France
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Descriptif
People sharing their pronouns has led to a growing metalinguistic discussions about pronouns and what it means to share one’s pronouns (King and Crowley, 2024). It perhaps began as a way of telling people which pronoun to use in the 3rd person, but it has come to index much more than gender over the past few years. People share their pronouns for many different reasons, the most obvious one being to avoid being misgendered. However, this risk is generally much less present for cis people, in which case, why do they do it? Pronoun sharing is not simply to indicate one’s gender, it has become a kind of shibboleth, often indexing not only one’s stance on gender issues, but also one’s general political alignment. Stating one’s pronouns seems to be increasingly tied to, not only gender issues, but a liberal/left-wing ideological position, often instrumentalised by the right wing as evidence of “political correctness gone mad” and “woke nonsense”.
I begin my presentation by putting current pronoun-sharing practices in political and theoretical context, briefly discussing the current political debate surrounding these practices and comparing them to previous work on pronouns. The rest of the presentation focuses on the results of an online survey about pronoun sharing, conducted with over 800 respondents in 2024. The main questions I would like to explore are why the respondents share, or don’t share, their pronouns, the stances they are attempting to index and the kinds of identities that are linked to pronoun sharing. I also explore some of the language ideologies that underpin attitudes towards this practice.
My analysis is based on the conceptual frameworks of the sociolinguistics of stancetaking (Jaffe, 2009; Kiesling, 2022b), indexical order (Silverstein, 2003), and indexical field (Eckert, 2008). I also draw upon concepts from the field of Language Ideology (Silverstein, 1979) to explain some of the attitudes towards pronoun sharing that respondents describe in the survey.
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