Affects of verbal hygiene: the impact of language activism at a Swedish high school

This paper explores youths’ language activism at a Swedish senior high school. Following Cameron (Verbal hygiene, Routledge, Florence, 1995), this paper investigates language activism as ‘verbal hygiene’, with a focus on the social dimension of students’ attempts to change how language is used at the school. To capture how the politically motivated language activism came to produce political subjectivities and delineation between social groups, and also to impact the distribution of agency and voice in the local discursive regime, I combine Cameron’s (Verbal hygiene, Routledge, Florence, 1995) notion of verbal hygiene with recent theorizing on affect (Ahmed in The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2004; Sedgwick in Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003; Wetherell in Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding, Sage, London, 2012). Inspired by studies of semiotic landscapes (Jaworski and Thurlow in Semiotic landscapes: language, image, space, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2011), the data includes posters and other signage in the high school, as well as recordings of naturally occurring interaction and interviews. The analysis shows how shame is pivotal in the processes of language activism at the school and how this activism, being an emancipatory project, both produces political subjectivities as well as new linguistic normativities and hierarchies.