Full Title: UEBER CRINGE. Ambivalent Affects and Everyday Aesthetics

Date: 07-Jul-2025 - 09-Jul-2025
Location: Heidelberg University, Germany
Contact Person: Theresa Heyd
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://uebercringe.de/call-for-papers-ueber-cringe/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Cringe is an impulse and a phenomenon that we encounter every day, and particularly in mediatized and digitized contexts – through genres of popular culture such as cringe comedy, through metalinguistic reactions in digital linguistic practice, through self-descriptions and the framings of others. Cringe has been described as an ambivalent affect that draws its effects from the simultaneity of pleasure and discomfort, of „painful laughter“ (Schwanebeck 2021) or „squirm comedy“ (Duncan 2017). In a similar vein, cringe often oscillates between light and humorist stances on the one hand, and denigrating or marginalizing discursive practices on the other hand, for example through the ostracizing practices of cringe culture. This affective ambivalence often plays out along social axes of differentiation, including but not limited to age, gender and belonging.

In this sense, cringe has commonalities with other Ugly Feelings (Ngai 2004) and ambivalent practices of affect, some of which have become staples of our everyday routines of (post-)digital consumption: we engage in guilty pleasures, we take ugly selfies (Page 2019), we have sensory experiences that are oddly satisfying, we hate-read or hate-watch material that we find pleasurably unbearable. And we encounter these ambivalent affects – which often tap into affective repertoires of shame and enjoyment, discomfort and enthusiasm – in aestheticized contexts ranging from literary and artistic practice to the everyday aesthetics of popular culture and vernacular styles.

Series such as Fleabag (Two Brothers Pictures, 2016-2019), Sexuell verfügbar (Majestic Filmproduktion, 2024) and the growing tradition of mockumentaries set in offices, supermarkets and other locations, as well as films by Miranda July or Maren Ade, are each marked in different ways by ambivalent cringe moments. In contemporary literature, cringe can be observed both as a form of writing between shame avoidance and provocation as well as a phenomenon of reception, be it in comic emphasis as in the works of Stefanie Sargnagel or in Barbi Marković’s Minihorror (2023) or as a gesture of embarrassing self-observation as in Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastell (2021).

Linguistics has in recent years engaged with ambivalent affects and their verbalization, which are conceptually close to cringe, as they concern the complex facework around affirmation, distinction and the expression of taste judgments. Sociophonetic studies, for example, have looked at the embodied performance of emotional constellations such as having chill (Pratt 2023) or being fierce (Calder 2017); discursive approaches have examined forms of strategic self-deprecation (Page 2019) or the digital shaming of social figures (Ilbury 2022, Heyd 2022). Ambivalent affects and their everyday aesthetics (Meyerhoff and Mendoza-Denton 2022) provide a linguistic framework for interpreting cringe phenomena.

Call for Papers:

In our conference, we seek to bring together different perspectives on cringe and its neighboring ambivalent affects and everyday aesthetics. We welcome contributions from the broad vantage points of literary studies and linguistics, as well as other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Our core interest lies in contributions that engage with one or more of these axes of analysis:

1) cringe as performed with and around language, intensified through highly mediated and digitized publics as found in popular culture and social media;
2) cringe as a perception or affect of irritation, provocation or trouble;
3) cringe discourse as distinction, used to do boundary work, harnessing categories of age, class or gender;
4) cringe as a mitigation of taste(lessness), encapsulating aesthetic reflex and its metalinguistic reflection.

We invite abstracts of +-300 words for talks of 20-30 minutes that engage with the topics sketched above. The conference languages are English and German.

Please submit your abstract by November 15, 2024 to the following email address: [email protected].

For inquiries, please feel free to get in touch with us: [email protected] or [email protected].

The conference takes place from July 7 to July 9, 2025 at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg: https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/einrichtungen/iwh/ We will cover accommodation and catering as well as a travel allowance for accepted participants.

The conference is organized by Theresa Heyd and Iris Bencsik (Heidelberg University) and Heide Volkening and Johanna Daether (Greifswald University) as part of the joint research project Cringe: Ästhetik und diskursive Praxis der Schamlust www.uebercringe.de, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.