Abstract
While political communication usually focuses on the said, there is also value in paying attention to what is unsaid in discourse. Such silences serve as resources as speakers and hearers collaborate in (not) speaking about troubling, toxic or taboo topics, achieving political communication that is nuanced, shifting and vital. Drawing on Michael Billig’s notion of dialogic repression, this chapter examines interviews with white domestic labour employers to notice how talk can be simultaneously expressive and repressive. The notion of “the Madam”—a crystallisation of stereotypes about whites—is discursively attended to by participants as they avoid being implicated as a stereotypical apartheid-era white in a post-apartheid South Africa.
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Murray, A.J. (2020). The Unsaid as Expressive and Repressive Political Communication: Examining Slippery Talk About Paid Domestic Labour in Post-apartheid South Africa. In: Demasi, M.A., Burke, S., Tileagă, C. (eds) Political Communication. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60223-9_11
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