The bluestocking in the Polish press (1830s-1890s) : Othering women through code-switching, borrowing and loan translations

This paper studies Polish periodicals published in the nineteenth century with the aim of identifying representations of intellectual women. The following questions are addressed: 1) How were intellectual women evaluated? 2) What linguistic means were used and to what extent were code-switches, borrowings and loan translations sites of othering? 3) Which genres in the newspaper conglomerate featured such representations most frequently? The paper combines the frameworks of evaluation, sociopragmatics of code-switching, and discursive othering. This exploratory case-study focuses on the lexeme bluestocking ‘educated, intellectual woman’ and its French (bas bleu) and German counterparts (Blaustrumpf), and the Polish loan translations (niebieska/błękitna pończocha/pończoszka). The analysis shows that the terms entailed ambiguous evaluations, while the negative ones tended to be enhanced by foreignness effects of the loans from French, German, and English.