Profanity: redefining the limits

Call for papers

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The 2025 international conference on the f-word is now open for submissions. It aims at exploring the manifold nature and uses of ‘fuck’—‘the most important and powerful word in the English language’ (Sheidlower 2009)—from the viewpoints of linguistics, translation studies and culture.

As an object of formal linguistics, ‘fuck’ is itself polymorphous: while as an autonomous lexeme it may be a noun, a verb or an interjection (Oxford English Dictionary 2024; Green’s Dictionary of Slang), it also shares morphological, syntactic and phonological traits with a variety of other linguistic objects (such as affixes or clitics) used in constructions equally challenging for analytical frameworks, where the freedom imparted by expressivity (in the sense developed by Guillaume 1991) takes over conventional morphosyntax.

This slipperiness lends the ‘f-word’ a plasticity which in turn invites reflection along sociolinguistic and pragmatic lines: as a salient contributor to the triad of taboo topics (religion, excretion and sex), ‘fuck’ bears the status of a totemic item whose symbolism simultaneously borrows from and extends beyond its literal meaning, turning its use, but also its avoidance, into flexible instruments of identification, belonging and social positioning. Beyond its transgressive role in social interactions, ‘fuck’ may then aptly serve as a pragmatic lens exposing how relational work is structured along the lines of various power dynamics: the committee encourages proposals exploring how these questions may indeed prolong or depart from the classical perspective of ‘facework’ (Goffman 1955) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) in general.

The conference will also welcome studies of the concrete translation challenges that the f-word poses in relation to other languages: its nimbleness and close relationship with orality indeed often lead to compensation, or even to partial or non-translations in localization. Such choices when translating profanity combine or collide with many others which affect characterization and tone in the context of fiction for example, and which need to be examined. This also serves as a reminder that translation practices remain medium-dependent, as in the way the written form of subtitles trigger different reactions to on-screen profanity compared with dubbing for example (Rollo 2017). From the more global perspective of cultural transfer, taboos and ‘bad language’ also testify to the socially and politically charged process that translation is, prompting reflection on matters of positionality, reception and censorship, and which translation often crystallizes.

All those points of interest coalesce in the intense emotional and transgressive, sometimes playful dimension that ‘fuck’ retains in artistic and cultural expression in the Anglosphere. With its inescapable political content, notably as part of a form of ‘them-and-us’ polarising rhetoric, it is a weapon of choice for anti-establishment aesthetic practices—a ‘four-letter assault on authority’ (McEnery 2004), whether in music (punk and rap in particular), cinema, or literature, but also on social media where it naturally flourishes (Morris 2022). As a metonymy of obscenity and transgression, the f-word could be seen as a barometer of how cultural scenarios of marginality, revolt and censorship reformulate themselves throughout the ages and the arts, and on which we invite discussion – whether it directs our attention to certain processes of self-marginalisation within reclaim practices for example, or to a society’s own relation to a puritanism which may obscure certain social realities in return.

We welcome proposals drawing on a variety of methods and corpora to tackle the following, non-exhaustive list of topics:

‘Fuck’ and its diachrony: origins, real or imagined; morphological, semantic and syntactic evolution
Versatility and derivation: idiomaticity, degrees of frozenness, avoidance strategies and euphemisms / minced oaths
Morphosyntactic challenges posed to linguistic analysis
Phonology: what may set ‘fuck’ and its derivatives (including infixes), apart from the flow of ordinary speech
Sociolinguistic considerations: diastratic and/or diatopic boundaries and contrasts (Americanness of ‘fuck’?); comparison with other slang lexemes and four-letter words
Pragmatic perspectives: from political discourse to social media, use (and abuse?) of ‘fuck’ as hyperbolic intensifier; its behaviour, past or present, within the paradigm of politeness; its role in identity and community building
Transgression and civility in translation; translation of sociolects including ‘fuck’
Semantic bleaching of ‘fuck’, the repurposing/adaptation strategies it calls for
Historical, cultural and linguistic dynamics of censorship within the relation between source/target cultures
Medium-specific constraints, notably in audiovisual translation (rhythm, prosody chronology)
Semiotic explorations; ‘fuck’ within the media landscape (transgressive, subversive, assimilated, comedic?)
Artistic expressions dramatizing swearing vs. civility; imaginaries of resistance and/or maintenance of social order in fiction
Editorial practices in diachrony – from censorship to valorisation?
Aesthetic and physical pleasure of sounds and articulation: ‘when [one uses] it for the first time, that F and the U bang so deliciously against the hard K, ripping through the lips, it’s as if a caged animal has been unleashed’ (Sheidlower 2009)

Works referenced:

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1955. ‘On Face-Work’. Psychiatry, August. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1955.11023008.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang. n.d. ‘Fuck, n.’ In Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Accessed 5 November 2024. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/3yrhsey.

Guillaume, Gustave. 1991. Leçons de linguistique de Gustave Guillaume. 10 : 1943 - 1944: Série A, Esquisse d’une grammaire descriptive de la langue française ; 2. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval.

McEnery, Tony. 2004. Swearing in English. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203501443.

Morris, Colin. 2022. ‘Compound Pejoratives on Reddit – from Buttface to Wankpuffin’. 28 June 2022. http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/compound-curse-words.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2024. ‘Fuck, v.’ In Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. https://doi-org.ezproxy.univ-artois.fr/10.1093/OED/5908316955.

Rollo, Alessandra. 2017. ‘Sous-titrer le langage sexuel et vulgaire. Enjeux traductifs entre censure et expressivité’. Lingue e Linguaggi, no. 23. https://doi.org/10.1285/I22390359V23P229.

Sheidlower, Jesse, ed. 2009. The F-Word. 3rd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Modalities for submission

Abstracts in English of max. 500 words, along with a short biographical notice (as a separate file), should be submitted on this website (https://wtf.sciencesconf.org/submission/submit?lang=en). You will need to login to your sciencesconf account, or create an account if you do not already have one.
Submission deadline: 15 January 2025
Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2025
The language of the conference is English. Presentations will be 25 minutes long, followed by a 10-minute Q&A session.

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