Impoliteness, Gender, and Power: A Philosophical Pragmatics Perspective

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly and public attention to hate speech and, more generally, to the ways in which language can harm individuals and groups. At the same time, there is a widespread perception that linguistically violent behavior has become increasingly pervasive in both online and offline interaction and, in some contexts, progressively normalized as an acceptable mode of discourse. Against this background, this article develops a philosophical–pragmatic account of impoliteness that foregrounds its ethical and political dimensions. Building on Sbisà (2021)’s proposal to understand impoliteness as a partial or total denial of the interlocutor’s subjectivity, and on Labinaz (2024)’s non-ideal, continuum-based model connecting impoliteness and linguistic violence, the paper argues that impoliteness should not be understood exclusively as a negative or oppressive practice. Rather, impoliteness is analyzed as an exercise of communicative power that can function both to maintain and to subvert existing power relations. Particular attention is paid to gender dynamics and to cases in which impoliteness operates as a form of motivated counterspeech. The article concludes by proposing a multidimensional model of impoliteness that integrates denial and affirmation of subjectivity, speaker and target vulnerability, and the directionality of power.