Staging insults and mobilizing categorizations in a multiethnic peer group

Abstract

This study explores how pre-adolescent boys of immigrant and working-class backgrounds stage insults and, as part of this process, mobilize categorizations. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of video records from peer interactions in an elementary school in Sweden. It was found that the boys deploy multiple resources (of syntactic and phonetic shapes) provided by the talk of the prior speaker and the turn structure of different activities (i.e. games, ridiculing, gossiping) and transform this talk (shifting emphasis, substituting insult terms and pronouns, recycling arguments, repeating striking parts, code-crossing) to collaboratively stage a counter to insults. A variety of negative characteristics (concerning linguistic, social and economic standards) are invoked and negotiated in the boys’ insult talk, which both colludes with and transgresses local norms of conduct and institutional discourses. Overall, this study demonstrates the political character of pre-adolescent children's everyday talk in terms of its orientation towards dominant language ideologies and the place that gender, ethnicity and social class occupy within it.