Expressivity, Bodies and Language in the 21 century (international interdisciplinary conference )
20-21 Novembre 2025
Salle des colloques 1, bâtiment Saint-Charles 1, Campus Saint-Charles, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, rue du Pr Henri Serre, Montpellier
Organisatrices:
Sandrine Sorlin, Université de Montpellier - Paul Valéry / IUF, EMMA
Julie Neveux, Sorbonne Université, CELISO
Conférenciers invités:
Laura Alba-Juez (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain)
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo (Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science, Spain)
Christopher Hart (Lancaster University, UK)
Site web dédié au colloque : https://expressivity.sciencesconf.org/
That language can affect bodies is nothing new. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin theorized “perlocution” as the effects generated by the act of saying something. Perlocutionary acts do imply the presence of the body. But the nature of these bodily effects has never been thoroughly analysed, remaining at an abstract level that made it difficult to think both the corporal impact of language and the corporality of language itself. The language of emotions and emotions in language, in their representational and expressive dimensions, have begun to attract the attention of linguists (Wierzbicka 1999, Fenigsen et al 2000, Majid 2012, Lüdtke 2015, Gutzmann 2019, Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019, Trotzke and Villalba 2021, Rett 2021, Cotte 2023) literary scholars and stylisticians who have embarked on the ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ turn (Keen 2007, Burke 2010, Hogan et al. 2022) and, more recently, pragmaticists (Wharton and Saussure 2023, Alba-Juez & Haugh in press). But the concrete effects of emotions and expressive language on bodies – which can be immediate or long-lasting, have lingered in the shadows of analysis.
Grounded in a post-dualist approach, this conference aims to center the body in order to shed light on how language and bodies interact and “interaffect” beyond the mere perlocutionary act of language. One of the goals is to investigate the effects of insulting, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or transphobic discourse on its targets’ bodies (as well as those of the locutors). The Black-American novelist, Claudia Rankine, poignantly evokes the body fatigue provoked by implicitly racist remarks, making the “sigh” in Citizen, An American Lyric (2014) the mode of expression of an asphyxiated and powerless body in the face of invisible microaggressions. The impact of misgendering on gender non-conforming people, of certain discourses on neurodiverse people also deserves recognition from their own embodied perspective. A cultural politics of bodily affects from a linguistic point of view is overdue to uncover how emotions affect our bodies and language and what emotions make us do and say – a continuation of the work brilliantly engaged by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014).
