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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 497

Part of Session 128: Sociofuckinglinguistics (Other abstracts in this session)

Policing and Performing the “Unmentionable” in the News

Authors: Thurlow, Crispin (1); Moshin, Jamie (2)
Submitted by: Thurlow, Crispin (University of Washington, United States of America)

This presentation is concerned with the apparent absence of language in media discourse. In particular, we examine the often euphemistic depiction of taboo language through a range of typographic and other metalinguistic devices deployed in news reports about, for example, high profile swearing or sexualized body parts. We are particularly interested in the ways these language ideological choices are structured by local institutional norms (e.g. evidenced in newspaper style guides) and by a wider sociocultural politics of privilege and inequality (see Thurlow, 2010). What emerges from our analysis of several hundred print media reports is a kind of “double repression” that occurs when newsmakers are caught trying to describe the (supposedly) unmentionable while also making events newsworthy and/or balancing their self-proclaimed quest for “civil” discourse with their commitment to reporting the truth. (In the USA, this tension is complicated in interesting ways by the constitutional protection of “free speech”.) Invariably, we find newsmakers caught in the act of prudishly policing moral standards as self-imposed arbiters of “decency” while also pruriently delighting in the frisson of language play. Through these performances of the not-so-unmentionable-after-all, newsmakers reinscribe not only specific language taboos but also the notion of taboo itself. Our analysis is framed with the help of several existing accounts of “linguistic repression” such as Mary Douglas’ (1966) well known observations about the demarcation of symbolic practices into “clean”/“unclean” and “acceptable”/ “unacceptable”; Mike Billig’s (1997) notions of the “dialogic repression” and discursive immorality; as well as Michel Foucault’s (1978) well-known repressive hypothesis which reveals how the supposed censorship of discourse inevitably provokes its incitement.

References:

Billig, Michael. (1997). The dialogic unconscious: Psychoanalysis, discursive psychology and the nature of repression. British Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 139-159.

Douglas, Mary. (1991 [1966]). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London/New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

Thurlow, Crispin. (2011). Speaking of difference: Language, inequality and interculturality. In R. Halualani & T. Nakayama (eds). Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication (pp. 227-247). Oxford: Blackwell.