Keevallik & Wiggins ICCA23: Sounds of disgust

As part of the panel on Exploring food practices: Body, materiality, and sociality, Keevallik & Wiggins will present —

Sounds of disgust: Young children’s non-lexical orientations to food during shared mealtimes. International Conference on Conversation Analysis, 2023. Brisbane, Australia.

Abstract:

Sharing a meal involves eating the same foods not only in a material sense but also as a social commodity; how we assess and handle the food carries moral implications. This is particularly the case when the food is treated as something disgusting or distasteful, since by association our fellow diners are implicated in the negative assessments. While such occasions may be relatively rare, they are known to occur when young children are sharing a family meal (Wiggins, 2013, 2014) or during preschool lunches with other children and teachers. In this paper, we focus on episodes in which food is oriented to by children as being disgusting or distasteful. Data are drawn from a large corpus of video-recorded meals within family homes in Scotland and preschool lunches within Sweden. The analysis uses multimodal interaction analysis and discursive psychology to examine episodes in which lexical items and/or non-lexical vocalisations related to disgust or distaste–what might be referred to as disgust sounds such as ‘ugh’–are produced during the shared meals. Of particular interest is the coordination of disgust sounds with the activities of handling food, bodily orientations, and conversational contributions. The analysis focuses on the affordances of the disgust sounds as blurring the distinction between subject (eater) and object (food), and a means of enacting a bodily response that is individually produced but has social implications. For example, an ‘ugh’ produced in response to food can implicate not only a disgusting item but also a disgusted person, in contrast to lexical formulations that might distinguish more clearly between the two. A temporal analysis of disgust sounds also demonstrates the coordination of vocal, facial, and embodied gestures into multimodal displays. Building on work on other non-lexical vocalisations that might also be considered as evidence of a ‘leaking’ body, such as strain grunts (Keevallik, in press) or pain cries (Weatherall et al., 2021), this work demonstrates how disgust sounds emerge in interactionally relevant ways. They typically feature when eating is imminent or has recently taken place, and while non-response-relevant, they can be treated by adults as inappropriate or invalid food assessments. The paper thus contributes to understandings of how the body is not only made relevant through non-lexical sounds but also how these sounds carry implications for the food and other dining companions.

References

Keevallik, Leelo (in press). Vocal displays of strain: Between body and action. In L. Mondada, A. Peräkylä (eds.) New Perspectives on Goffman in Language and Interaction. Routledge.

Weatherall, A., Keevallik, L., La, J., Dowell, T., & Stubbe, M. (2021). The multimodality and temporality of pain displays. Language & Communication, 80, 56-70.

Wiggins, S. (2013). The social life of ‘eugh’: Disgust as assessment in family mealtimes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52(3), 489-509.

Wiggins, S. (2014). Family mealtimes, yuckiness and the socialization of disgust responses by preschool children. Language and food: Verbal and nonverbal experiences, 211-232.