Conservative mobilizations and discursive constraints: emergence, understanding, adaptation – MOCONDI

Social and legal constraints weigh on the militant expression of protagonists involved in demands for equality in terms of sexual and reproductive rights, and delimit the boundaries between what can be said and what cannot be said. The concept of homophobia is an obvious constraint in the production of discourses emanating from these struggles, constraints that we will henceforth call ‘discursive constraints’. On the basis of this constant, this project, based on critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, aims to pursue the study of 21st-century conservative mobilisations around issues of gender, sex and sexuality, and in particular the articulation between militant expression and discursive constraints from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Based on ethnographic and archival data, the aims of this project are 1) to understand the conditions and processes by which the discursive constraints surrounding conservative activist expression have been established over the last twenty years, 2) to analyse their nature (real or imagined), their evolution and, with them, the reconfiguration of the discursive space (dicible, unspeakable) around these conflicting citizen deliberations, 3) to question the effects of these discursive constraints on conservative discourse. In line with these objectives, this project aims to take a broader look at the processes by which dictability is constructed, both the dynamics of its transformation and regulation, and those of its stabilisation in the early 21st century around sexual democracy.