Political Vulgarity and the Limits of Uncivil Contestation

Recent debates on the politics of civility have explored the contestatory potential of uncivil action in the fight for social change. For defenders of uncivil forms of resistance, one key benefit of such actions comes from their capacity to express dissent in rhetorically effective ways. To this end, the practices of movements such as Pussy Riot and PETA are thought hold strategic and communicative value beyond that found in law-breaking alone. That such practices tend to shock and offend means, according to defenders, that they are more likely to capture the attention of the media, thereby influencing public debate on key political and social issues. In this paper, I take seriously the claims made by such activists that so-called ‘political vulgarity’ is an important and ethically acceptable method of mainstreaming marginalized social issues. However, I challenge the idea that good public opinion can be de-prioritised in favour of having one’s voice heard. I justify this claim on the basis that, while what are considered ‘vulgar’ methods of protest do often draw significant attention, it is uncertain that such attention effectively translates as the kind of ethical claim that protestors aim to make upon the wider community. For methods of contestation that employ political vulgarity to effectively communicate claims towards the wider public, they need to be guided by a set of shared social and moral norms and habits that allow the claims made by protestors to be understood as a form of moral address. Such a virtuous form of political vulgarity requires that protestors take seriously the range of affective and cognitive responses that a vulgar form of protest might evoke in their audience, employing those responses to effectively communicate their claims upon them.