Conversational Performance and the Poetic Construction of an Ideology

This study places conversational performance, or speakers’ attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse.