Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire (Web)

Proposels due: 01.03.2023

This issue of Clio wishes to historicize the gender of speech in interaction with varying social spaces, from the most intimate to the most political. The ambition is less to question the gender of language as a whole (feminist and queer research has analyzed language as both an object of power relations and the means of producing, transmitting and naturalizing symbolic domination, as well as a space and a tool for action). Instead, the editors would like to address the gender of speech and of the people involved in communication, without focusing on the specific dimension of the voice. The editors are interested in contributions that dialogue with linguistic research on gender, with the renewal of the historiography of speech, with scholarship on the ethnography of conversation. Proposals that take into account the widespread multilingualism of present and past societies are also welcome.
Religious contexts through the ages provide multiple examples of the spoken word that merit exploration. Historians of religion and spirituality have shown how speech and gender interact: whose voice do mystics hear? What language(s) do they speak? Other terrains of investigation include the glossolalia (ability to invent and speak a language in a trance state) of the American Shakers or the xenoglossia (ability to speak an existing language without having learned it) displayed by saints in the Middle Ages and the spiritualists of the nineteenth century. Were these words a gift from God, a message from a beloved departed being, or the trace of an evil action? How does gender play into these understandings?
In other contexts, the word has been invoked as a guarantee of truth. In law, beyond the performative function of certain speech acts, it validates written acts within ritualized processes. Legal anthropology has studied, for example, the oral oath to tell the truth, the reading aloud of the death warrant at the place of execution, or even the vernacular speech of litigants, which serves as proof within written legal procedures. How does attention to gender nuance our understanding of these acts? A ritual dimension characterizes more generally the „public“ word, whether pronounced in the family, the street or within an institution, individually or collectively. The public word is part of the ordinary and professional „theatricality“ of communication expressed, for example, in the performing arts, at the pulpit or in … read more and source (Web).