The Making of a Border State Society: James McGready, the Great Revival, and the Prosecution of Profanity in Kentucky
1994; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2167769
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoHISTORIANS HAVE PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to the complicated interconnections between gender, language, culture, and politics. Many recognize that political leaders have long rallied support with language laced with cultural symbolism, but few have examined the cultural and social underpinnings of such elite expression. While can be an amorphous concept, language offers a window on nonelite discourse, a way to look at grass-roots society, which understood culturally defined language not as a system of proscriptive values but as a medium for argument over ethical restraints and licenses. Such controversy often included discourse over the meaning of masculinity as well. This becomes clearer when looking at the peculiar convergence of revivalism and culture in Kentucky, where evidence from the nineteenth-century criminal justice system documents the deep concern Kentuckians had about the gendered meaning of profane swearing. Some contended that profane swearing served as a proxy for courage and assertiveness, promoting masculine honor, whereas their ethical competitors denied the propriety of such manliness. In the early national period, language-especially profane language-carried great weight in the world of small politics that most Americans inhabited.' Illiterate and almost illiterate men used words to sting their enemies and define themselves. They saw language not as a rigid structure but as a contest for meanings in which they could challenge the dominant culture while struggling to define virtue, honor, and even manhood.2 Paradoxically, such conflict was a
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