Maid of memory: the discursive pathways of scripts of servitude

Lorente, Beatriz (October 2017). Maid of memory: the discursive pathways of scripts of servitude. In: Fall School, Institute of Multilingualism. University of Fribourg, Muntelier, Morat, Switzerland.

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Scripts of servitude are templates of language practices that index being a domestic worker. As a form of “conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1982), these templates link particular personhoods, relationships between speakers and interlocutors, and social practices to moral questions of what constitutes good, virtuous, appropriate and responsible conduct. This process produces consequential imaginaries of racialized and gendered Others estranged from a moral order and subject to containment, linguistic and otherwise. This lecture examines and compares artifacts of such scripts of servitude, namely texts that prescribe the linguistic practices of domestic workers and their employers. By tracing the discursive pathways of such scripts, this lecture looks at how durable ideologies of morality differentiating ‘sahibs’ from ‘servants’ and ‘madams’ from ‘maids’, and distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ domestic workers and employers, can be tracked across time and space.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > Modern English Linguistics
UniBE Contributor:	Lorente, Beatriz
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages 400 Language > 410 Linguistics
Language:	English
Submitter:	Beatriz Lorente
Date Deposited:	10 Apr 2018 08:45
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:08
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/107762