This presentation will focus on examining "what happens when speakers come from a space where they are familiar with the social rules and the language practices, and enter a space where this is not the case ?" (Busch 2015). The talk will focus on a student mobility from Canada to the United States and how women's bodies became metaphors and sites of discourses for Frenchness/Whiteness in the social construct of transnational Acadianness in the 1960's.
Colonization continues to shape Canadian citizenship and perpetuate ideologies of race, language and gender. In the 1960s, women's bodies were mobilized as metaphors of the nation through forms of pageantry that also informed emerging transnational discourses on Acadianness. In this paper, I will examine familiar/ unfamiliar aspects of language repertoires for Acadian women moving from Canada to Louisiana in 1969. More specifically, I will examine what happens when French speaking subjects come from a familiar space of illegitimacy to a space where the social rules and languages practices are different, but where their legitimacy as speakers of French is positioned differently in official discourses. How will they experience and embody their language repertoire and unpack their linguistic baggage in a space where they are seen and heard differently as speakers ? This paper argues that biography intersects with histories of bodies as sites of transnationalism.
