Taboo metaphtonymy, gender, and impoliteness: how male and female Arab cartoonists think and draw

ABSTRACT

The debate about whether the sexes communicate and behave differently continues. The stereotype that women are not funny or that their language or behavior is more “ladylike” is very widespread and has been current for decades, if not centuries. Gender differences in politeness and humor were also frequently reported by early anthropologists, sociolinguists, and cognitivists, but many modern linguists are far from convinced by such findings. Examining multimodal communication, a development phase within many fields, may help us find evidence to support or undermine a sociocognitive hypothesis such as women are more polite or are naturally less funny than men. Using a corpus of political cartoons, this study identifies whether there are gender differences in the use of taboo language and humor, putting special emphasis on impolite metaphor and metonymy. The results of this research show no differences between male and female cartoonists in the use of taboo or impolite metaphors and metonymies. Rather, individual variations are reported. This analysis, then, offers a new window on an age-old question about how men and women think, communicate, and behave.

KEYWORDS:

• Tabooness
• intercultural impoliteness
• taboo metaphtonymy
• humor
• male and female cartoonists

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In fact, the prestige associated with a language is spatiotemporally variable. As noted by Bassiouney (2009), the Arab world has only one standard and yet each of its countries has its own most prestigious variety (e.g. Cairene Arabic in Egypt, Damascene Arabic in Syria, etc.).

2 Visit, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bsRJy5MKHA, last accessed 16 August 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen and a part-time lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. His articles (30 in total) have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Social Semiotics, Language Sciences, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Discourse and Society, Discourse and Communication, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics. He is author of the monograph Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study (2019, Routledge). He serves on the board of journals such as Discourse and Society and Multimodality and Society and acts as a reviewer for many other journals, including Text and Talk, Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, and Cross-Cultural Research.