Speaker
Description
Street names are powerful instruments in the linguistic production of symbolic space, encoding hierarchies of recognition, authority, and belonging into the urban landscape. Previous research has shown that commemorative toponymy overwhelmingly privileges male historical figures, yet most studies rely on single-city analyses and limited descriptive evidence. This paper provides a nationwide, multi-level examination of gendered street nomenclature based on the complete dataset of street names in all Romanian cities and towns (N ≈ 50,000). It tests five hypotheses concerning the determinants of gender inequality in urban commemorative naming, focusing on the effects of historical regions, ethnic composition and local ethnopolitical dynamics, urban hierarchy, and intra-urban differentiation of the road network. The analysis also considers the impact of recent institutional and political transformations on naming practices. Findings show that gender disparities in street nomenclature are systematic rather than incidental, reflecting historically entrenched power relations, territorial politics, and institutional arrangements that shape symbolic inclusion and exclusion. Street naming emerges as a form of linguistic governance through which symbolic space is gendered and hierarchically ordered. By combining comprehensive national-level data with multi-level modelling, the study contributes to debates on language, memory, and the reproduction of gender inequality in urban symbolic landscapes.
| Presenting author | Mihai S. Rusu |
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