Performing the Self: Language, Persona, and Cultural Identity
Description
From the sharp-tongued salon epigrams of Oscar Wilde to the dazzling televised interviews of Billy Porter, public figures have long crafted language as part of a deliberate performance of self. Whether through aphorism, irony, coded speech, or lyrical flourish, language can operate not just as communication but as an act—a way of fashioning identity, queering social norms, or asserting cultural difference.
This seminar invites papers that explore how individuals across history and cultures have spoken themselves into being. We are interested in the linguistic and performative strategies by which authors, artists, activists, and other public figures create distinct personae, negotiate belonging, and resist conformity. Approaches may include, but are not limited to:
- Historical and literary case studies of figures who use language to construct identity (e.g., dandies, political orators, salonnières, avant-garde writers).
- Gender and queer performativity, examining how speech acts destabilize or reimagine norms.
- Intersections of the verbal and the visual, from fashion and gesture to stagecraft and media persona.
- The materiality or fetishization of language—words treated as crafted objects of aesthetic value.
- Cross-cultural and multilingual performances of self, including code-switching, linguistic play, and translation as self-fashioning.
We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives drawing from literary studies, cultural theory, gender and queer studies, linguistics, and performance studies. By foregrounding language as both medium and act, this seminar seeks to explore the power of words to make, unmake, and remake the self in public life.
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract via the ACLA portal.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Liane Michelle Kelly is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton, ON. Her research focuses on 20th Century North American Literature, exploring the subversions of linguistic and cultural hegemony within Jack Kerouac’s posthumously published Franco-American Joual writings.
Speaker Bio
Ben De Witte holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and presently teaches as a Lecturer of Dutch at Columbia University. His research on queer visibility in modernist drama has appeared in Theatre Research International and Modern Drama. He has also published essays and reviews in the areas of literary modernism, intercultural performance, translation, and women’s writing.
Speaker Bio
I work across the fields of (socio)linguistics and queer, trans, and feminist theories. I've conducted research on New York City English, language attitudes and ideologies in the French press, and non-binary Romance languages. My dissertation project applies the lenses of queer theory and transfeminism alongside methods of linguistic ethnography to examine the language practices and linguistic attitudes and ideologies within francophone queer, trans, and non-binary communities in Montreal.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Louise Sampagnay has been a junior lecturer at the Sorbonne Nouvelle since 2023 and is finishing her PhD in Comparative Literature, Oneself as a Language: Multilingual Autobiographers and their Dissembled German (Soi-même comme une langue, following Ricoeur, 1994). She is the author of several articles and has co-edited 3 special issues (of which 1 ongoing, in the Journal of Literary Multilingualism, Brill/De Gruyter) as well as an edited volume, L’Enfant plurilingue en littérature (EAC, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Dr. Dany Jacob is an Assistant Professor of French at UWL. He earned his Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from SUNY Buffalo. His research include dandyism, queer masculinities, performativity in literature and media, and the fluidity of cultural identities. Recent works include rearticulating Gatsby’s dandyism in meme culture and a book chapter on masculinity in The Night Manager. His current projects focus on transnational dandyism, affect of readership and disruptive aesthetics.