Metasexting: On the linguistics of dickpics

Images of genitals are a very special gift: often rather offered as unsolicited parts of text messages, they elicit a form of discourse that may become as transgressive and offensive as the pictures themselves seem to be. Both... [ view full abstract ]

Images of genitals are a very special gift: often rather offered as unsolicited parts of text messages, they elicit a form of discourse that may become as transgressive and offensive as the pictures themselves seem to be. Both direct comments in social media as well as the public discourse on sexting are often extreme in their refusal and critique concerning practices such as ‘dickpic’ transmissions. This talk is concerned with precisely this: the metapragmatic aspects of such seeming violations of norms and taboos. However, we argue that even though sexting and metasexting appear to be globalized practices, there are particular sociolinguistic phenomena that require a different take on language than that offered by academic (European-American) linguistics. These phenomena include the creative production, performative transmission and discursive evaluation of images in African social media contexts and those from the African Diaspora that differ from mainstream dickpics with regards of their composition and design, and which are conceptualized as a very transcendental and agentive type of text rather than a form of sexist intrusion. Such images are accompanied by other forms of text that seems to represent an equally powerful form of language practice, which is conceptualized through metapragmatic comments. These reflect language ideologies that focus on language as a means to change reality, for example through the power of particular words or specific codes. At the same time, alternative (‘southern’, non-Eurocentric) concepts of the image as something that does not so much depict reality, but transforms it come into play. The talk argues that only through the careful consideration of alternative metalinguistic concepts, language theories and iconographic practices it is possible to come to an analysis that reaches beyond assumed globalized semiotics. By doing this, we intend to show that it is precisely through turning the gaze to marginalized communicative practices and to the ‘difficult gifts’ we now seem to realize that an understanding of different possibilities in sociolinguistics can be gained: there are other linguistic epistemes that exist beneath ours, and they, too, seem to make sense.