Call for Papers for AAA 2011 Panel

[Heidi Swank]

Co-Organizers/Co-Chairs: Heidi Swank and Angela Lewis, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Gossip, Confession, and Innuendo: Family Resemblances, Social Processes, and Interstitial Linguistic Practices 

This panel explores how language use in “the nooks and crannies of everyday life” (Besnier, 2009:11) can be used to build relationships, create collusion, and engender exclusion. We build upon Niko Besnier’s work on gossip as a less than hidden linguistic practice, expanding its scope to a variety of understudied language activities, such as confession and innuendo, that are often thought of as related. However, it is not the hidden nature of these linguistic activities that creates their coherence. For, as has been pointed out by Besnier as well as Gal (1995) and others, gossip and other hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990) often do not remain neatly tucked away. Thus, the aim of this panel is to take seriously Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances” whereby a collection of similar linguistic or social actions are linked not by a single fundamental shared property but through a chain or series of overlapping similarities. In order to explore and flesh out such resemblances, we delve into the ways in which language in these nooks and crannies is both similarly and differentially organized to create openings for participation in terms of connection, collusion, and/or exclusion. In doing so, we attend to the microscopic aspects of linguistic exchanges, while simultaneously placing these activities within the larger social processes through which each is mutually constituted. We suggest that it is in Besnier’s emphasis on the nexus of these dual foci (i.e. the microscopic and macroscopic) that we can best examine the resemblances among gossip, confession, innuendo and the like. Thus, this panel seeks to further our understanding of such interstitial language activities not only by following Besnier’s linking of the microscopic and macroscopic, but also through bringing together scholars of these language activities to better understand their distinctions and correspondences across the globe. 

If you are interested in our panel please submit a 250 word abstract by March 1 to Angela Lewis at lewisa14 at unlv.nevada.edu. Decisions on abstracts will be made by March 5.