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Humanities Faculty

Chair of English Linguistics

  1.  University of bamberg
  2. Faculties
  3. Humanities
  4. Institutes
  5. English and American Studies
  6. Chair of English Linguistics
  7. Conferences
  8. Sociolinguistics of Pop Culture
  9. Plenary speakers

Plenary Speakers

Picture of Robin Queen

Robin Queen

Robin Queen is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Linguistics, German and English, and currently serves as the chair of the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, USA. Her research focuses on different strands of sociolinguistics, including language and identities, language contact, and language as social action. Her 2015 book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media (Wiley-Blackwell), explores the many ways that language variation proves integral to the unfolding of fictional audiovisual media. When not acting as an academic, she lives on a small farm with her spouse and a lively band of critters large and small.

 

The performance and performativity of taboo language in fictional audiovisual media

In this talk, I focus on the fluidity between the regulation and the occurrence of taboo language within the fictional audiovisual media in the United States and show that tabooed lexical items in the fictional media are simultaneously performative and performed. First, I illustrate a range of functions fulfilled by taboo terms in the fictional media, including their various grammatical functions and their place within the narrative flow. Second, I show how the regulation of taboo usage highlights an interative, dialectic tension between performance and performativity. This tension is uniquely visible in the fictional media because, on the one hand, regulation occurs within the fictional material itself (e.g. a character admonishes another character with “that’s a bad word”) and, on the other, formal regulation occurs through external institutions (such as, in the United States, the Federal Communication Commission or the Motion Picture Association of America). Finally, I discuss specific cases involving disputes between producers/broadcasters and the institutions that sanction taboo language. These disputes show how regulation is framed primarily as ideological protection for children and engages the dialectic between performance and performativity by implicating cult