"Have you had the surgery?"
A study on politeness in conversation with trans people
Politeness appears to decline in conversation with minorities. This observation motivated the study for my BA thesis, which more specifically looks at the question "Have you had the surgery?" posed to trans people. This question is often inferred to mean "What do your genitals look like?" by the minority in question, which is an obviously rude question, so why do people ask? How does it affect the recipient? Does it threaten face, and if so, which one and how? In this talk, I will attempt to tackle those questions.
This talk is based on the study I conducted for my BA thesis in linguistics at the University of Oslo. While marked as sociolinguistics, it also contains pragmatics and some semantics.
Politeness theory as created by Brown and Levinson is the very core of the analysis. I use it to examine whether the question is a face threatening action, and if so, whether it threatens positive or negative face the most. If you're familiar with sociolinguists discussing face, you might be confused as to why I'm not using Arundale's Face Constituting Theory instead. Don't worry, I will justify this choice. And if you'd like to see someone be a professional hater of a theoretical framework for a moment: this is the talk for you.