Aesthetic Slurs

Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied languages, invites you to the fourth talk of the 2025-2026 academic year. The invited speaker is Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University), who will give a talk entitled "Aesthetic Slurs" (see the abstract below). The event will take place online on Monday, JANUARY 19, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program here: https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

I present a novel account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of ‘controlling images’, I delineate images which behave in much the same way as linguistic slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Makode Linde's controversial artwork Painful Cake (2012).