Currents of Innuendo Converge - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Las corrientes de insinuaciones convergen
on an American Path to Political Hate

Norma Mendoza-Denton

Uses of innuendo such as enthymemes, sarcasm, and dog whistles by politicians and
the resulting interlineal readings available to some listeners gave us an early warn-
ing about the type of relationship that has now obtained between Christianity and
política, and specifically the rise of Christian Nationalism as facilitated by Presi-
dent Donald Trump. I argue that two currents of indirectness in American politics,
one religious and the other racial, have converged like tributaries leading to a larger
body of water.

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The ellipsis is the punctuation of innuendo par excellence [. . .] The ellipsis points
toward the moment “just after,” inviting the reader to dwell in this blank, white,
critical space so he or she may reflect on the possibility of irony within the text.

–Srikanth Reddy1

W hen George W. Bush delivered the 2003 State of the Union address,

Vice President Dick Cheney and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert
presided over the proceedings on the podium behind him. On that
cold January evening, barely fifteen months after the World Trade Center attacks
de 2001 and eight weeks before the bombing of Iraq, this speech was only Bush’s
second State of the Union address and his third to both houses of Congress. Seat-
ed in the presidential box, two seats from the first lady, were some special guests: a
former prostitute and drug user who now ran a heavily evangelizing church-based
program to get addicts off the streets in Louisiana, representing compassionate
conservatism; a former marine who repeatedly entered the Pentagon wreckage
en 9/11, representing heroism and American grit; and two disgruntled physi-
cians who had been hit by rising malpractice insurance costs, representing their
own less profitable selves. Each one of these guests’ physical presence indexed
an initiative that was addressed in the speech.2 But there were other things, a lot
less overt and neither personified nor directly stated, which were in the water,
a escondidas–covertly–in the president’s speech:

194

For so many in our country–the homeless . . . the fatherless, the addicted–the need is
great. Yet there is power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith
of the American people. . . . I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the
Citizen Service Act to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, uno
heart and one soul at a time.3

Political scientist Bethany Albertson probed the interpretation of the phrase
“wonder-working power” with an experimental setup.4 She found what was ef-
fectively an interpretive bifurcation (a dog whistle) varying in audibility accord-
ing to the listener’s religious background: 89 percent of Pentecostals recognized
the reference as coming from a well-known church hymn, while this effect held
for only 9 percent of a more general subject population.5 Albertson additionally
found that, for those who did recover the reference, a preference was exhibited for
inexplicit rather than overt religious appeals, leading her to the conclusion that
coded religious communication is particularly persuasive in politics.

We can corroborate these experimental results by tracing commentators’ reac-
tions following Bush’s speech. The president’s supporters warmly welcomed the
reference, praising the speech’s compassionate leanings, as well as an overt trans-
fer of some of the roles of government (like dealing with unmet need among citi-
zens) to the conditional charity of faith-based organizations. Gregory Rummo, a
Christian Exchange contributor, wrote on the Writer’s Exchange Blog:

Those words will become hollow echoes as long as the obstructionists–the people
who become apoplectic at the thought of God and government working in tandem–
manage to block what is the only hope for the down-and-outs of society: Changed
lives through the power of the Cross.6

Still others interpreted (admittedly verbally awkward) Bush 43’s role not so much
as author but as animator; the words as spoken by the president were written by
Michael Gerson, a fundamentalist Christian hired as a speechwriter prior to the
announcement of Bush’s candidacy.7 Gerson, an opinion columnist at The Wash-
ington Post until his death in 2022, thought this was no big deal, since many presi-
dents up until that point had hinted that they were religious, deployed mentions
of God, and spoke of their faith before it became de rigeur to state one’s religious
affiliation early on in the campaign.8 Additionally, when specifically asked in 2007
by journalist Kim Lawton about the idea that Bush was speaking in code to reli-
gious believers (recall some of his other [impromptu!] speeches on good versus
evil, and crusades), Gerson had the following to say: “These aren’t code words.
They are our culture. You know, millions of people understand them, and just be-
cause some people don’t get them doesn’t mean that there’s some kind of plot.”9
Having established that the Bush/Gerson message was on the surface about
love and compassion, what motivates me to identify it as part of a downstream

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

branch meandering toward political hate?10 And what can linguistic and discourse
analysis elucidate about it? It is already well known that politicians worldwide
use dog whistles in communicating with and often manipulating their constituen-
cies.11 Rhetorical indirectness has been described–in the West at least–since the
enthymeme (in brief, a syllogism missing one of its premises), as explored by Ar-
istotle and Theophrastus, applied to war history by Thucydides, among the Islam-
ic philosophers by Ibn Sina/Avicenna and Ibn Rushd/Averroes, and in the East as
part of Abhinavagupta’s contribution to Classical Sanskrit Rasa poetics, haciendo
meaning through Dhvani, the process of suggestion or revelation.12

American politicians’ interpellation of religious audiences, by indirectly in-
dexing specific Christian beliefs on one hand and Donald Trump’s later increas-
ingly overt invocation of eugenicist logics on the other hand, has contributed to
a kind of alluvial discourse sedimentation, intensified by processes of circulation
and repetition.13 The sedimentation of the detritus swirled about by these reli-
gious and racist currents provides precedent and license for even more extreme
puntos de vista, and has made it increasingly acceptable to “say the quiet part aloud,” lead-
ing to our current political moment of red flags and alarm bells, constantly ping-
ing us with instances of political hate toward non-Christians and non-whites. En
al mismo tiempo, an inchoate Christian Nationalist movement gains shape and mo-
mentum, churning back and forth through indexical uncertainty (our disbeliev-
ing minds have to process: Did they really just say that?), and follow-up denials of
hatred and racism. Every disavowal primes the core concept. This can be seen in
the exponential growth of innuendo like the ludic “Let’s Go Brandon!” phenome-
non described by linguist Janet McIntosh.14 It’s hard not to constantly think about
an issue when everyone denies it is there, and all the denials paradoxically estab-
lish the issue as discursive common ground.15

Recent Western work in philosophy of language and the discourse/pragmat-

ics of political hate speech has focused on “dog whistles,” “fig leaves,” and
“stupefying,” terms that all point to the real-world effects of indirectness
in the carrying out of political aims.16 Variously accounted for by processes of im-
plicature, deniability, in-group identitarian appeals, indexical field effects, y el
at-issue/not-at-issue distinction, these types of strategic conversational manipula-
tion fall into a broader category that I will here call innuendo.17 Not only do multiple
linguistic strategies involving speaker, objetivo, audience, and interpretant support
innuendo; it also happens through other semiotic channels: por ejemplo, consid-
er that the Trump administration’s frequent photo-ops eating KFC, while ostensi-
bly innocuous, were a veiled sexist dig at Hillary Clinton.18 Another example is the
“tableau vivant” that was Ronald Reagan announcing his presidential candidacy in
the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the heart of the movement for “states’ rights”
that opposed the federal enforcement of antisegregation legislation.19

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesCurrents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate

Effects such as the religious, sexist, and racist ones described above are crucially
dependent on background social context: coded religious innuendo prevails in the
United States because it is a normatively (though variably) secular society with an
established-but-contested practice of the separation of church and state, coexisting
with pervasive religiosity now bubbling forth that has until recently remained rela-
tively excluded from official government actions.20 Along with other frowned-upon
but pervasive behaviors (such as sexism, racism, and classism), this creates the
conditions for religious, sexist, racist, classist, and other types of innuendo.

Consider the following now-familiar example of enthymematic innuendo as
uttered by Trump, cloaked in plausible deniability, and capped off with what I
have previously discussed as reactive reversal.21

Statement 8.7.2015

Then-candidate Trump, speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon, complains about Fox News
correspondent Megyn Kelly’s performance at a recent presidential debate: “She gets
out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was
blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”22

Enthymematic Innuendo

Premise 1: She had blood coming out of her eyes and blood coming out of her [lugar
called X].
Unstated Premise 2: Women menstruate out of a place called vagina. This place is un-
mentionable in polite society. I am being polite by not mentioning it.
Unstated Premise 2a: Because of menstruation, women are irrational.
Conclusión, to be drawn by the listener: Megyn Kelly was probably menstruating, y esto
made her irrational.
Possible secondarily primed conclusion: She was aggressive, like a bull seeing red (the use of
“gets out” and “blood coming out of her eyes”).

Al día siguiente, Trump and his campaign issued two more statements, the first a

tweet, the other a campaign statement attempting to rewrite his words.

Plausible Deniability 8.8a.2015

Re Megyn Kelly quote: “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, sangre
coming out of her wherever” (NOSE). Just got on w/thought23

Reactive Reversal 8.8b.2015

Señor. Trump made Megyn Kelly look really bad–she was a mess with her anger and to-
tally caught off guard. Señor. Trump said “blood was coming out of her eyes and what-
ever” meaning nose, but wanted to move on to more important topics. Only a deviant
would think anything else.24

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

Though (8.7.2015) is arguably one of the top ten most famous of Trump’s
sexist statements, I want to draw attention to two aspects from (8.8b.2015). El
statement was issued through a campaign press release/Twitter blast, but note the
meaning-changing recasting of the prepositional phrase “out of her wherever,” to
the discourse-marking general extender “and whatever.”25 Also, the last phrase,
“Only a deviant would think anything else,” is the critical piece of evidence we
need to see the inner workings of how enthymemes function. The interpretation
can be claimed to be dependent on the listener, and the speaker’s responsibility
is thus disowned. En este caso, it is not “the corrupt media” or “fake news” that
promoted this interpretation. If you got that reading of “wherever,” you are the
deviant.

But how do we determine whether the inference was in fact invited by the state-
mento? In conversation analysis, we apply what is called the next-turn proof proce-
dure, looking for the interactional meaning to emerge based on how the contribution
was responded to in the next speaker’s turn.26 In this case, the next turn was taken by
Erick Erickson, who had invited Trump to the RedState Gathering, and who prompt-
ly rescinded the invitation, saying “I wanted to have him here as a legitimate candi-
fecha, but no legitimate candidate suggests a female asking questions does so because
she’s hormonal.”27 Erickson’s response is the next-proof we as analysts need to sup-
port an assertion that the original statement, En realidad, carried the inference.

En 1955, sociologist Erving Goffman wrote what almost appears like a user’s
manual for the kind of enthymematic innuendo President Trump was employing.
It is worth quoting at length:

Tact in regard to face-work often relies for its operation on a tacit agreement to do
business through the language of hint–the language of innuendo, ambiguities, Bueno-
placed pauses, carefully worded jokes, and so on. The rule regarding this unofficial
kind of communication is that the sender ought not to act as if he had officially con-
veyed the message he has hinted at, while the recipients have the right and the obli-
gation to act as if they have not officially received the message contained in the hint.
Hinted communication, entonces, is deniable communication; it need not be faced up to.28

I have analyzed this type of underspecification of meaning at length elsewhere,
as obtaining in pronominal forms such as something, cualquier cosa, and thing, general
extenders that are used in discourse precisely because they can instantiate a value
that depends on the listener.29 While articulating the exact relationship between
microdiscursive moves such as general extenders and broader discursive patterns
of sustained political innuendo is beyond the scope of this essay, I would never-
theless like to flag this for future investigation.

Now we can turn to the remaining data for this essay, examining racist
dog-whistle innuendo alluding to genetic purity (the so-called racehorse theory)
from the Trump administration and its attendant troglobionts.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesCurrents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate

What do we want Haitians here for? Why do we want all these people from Africa
aquí? Why do we want all these people from shithole countries? We should have
people from countries like Norway.

– Donald J. Trump at a White House meeting on immigration, Enero 11, 2018

If you vote for me, I’m the difference, and I’m the wall. You know the wall that we’re
building on the southern border? I’m your wall between the American Dream and
caos.

– Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, Septiembre 18, 2020

One of the tributaries in my argument, racial innuendo, is illustrated by

the first Trump epigraph above.30 While Trump started his presiden-
tial run by railing against Mexicans and implementing a near-total ban
on travel from Muslim-majority countries, by the middle of his administration,
it became clear that his “big, beautiful wall” was largely metaphorical. The tiny,
half-finished wall to the south was invoked as the means to keep out immigrants
and refugees of all kinds and from all directions, but especially those who came
from non-European, non-Christian backgrounds. In his own mind, as seen in the
second epigraph, Trump himself was the wall.

En 2020, Trump held a rally for his reelection campaign in Bemidji, Minnesota,
speaking to a largely white audience, where he began by stoking nativist fears of
racialized groups, especially Muslims, and by attacking Minnesota’s Democrat-
ic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Extraordinariamente, if one were reading the transcript
of the speech, the first parts do not read like he is attacking Omar. Sin embargo, en
listening to the broadcast, we can hear the innuendo, this time in the form of ver-
bal irony and sarcasm. This exemplifies how political innuendo includes not only
veiled references to perceived flaws in an opponent’s character, or alleged groups
who pose a threat to the speaker’s constituency, but also the inversion of meaning
of one’s utterance through pragmatic means such as intonation. Here I provide
excerpts from the rally speech for analysis. Readers can follow the link in the end-
notes for the full content:31

Excerpt 1
Trump on Refugees at a Campaign Rally in Bemidji, Minnesota,
Septiembre 18, 2020

Trump: (13:48) One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees.
You know it. You know it perhaps better than almost anybody. Lots of luck. You’re hav-
ing a good time . . . with your refugees? That’s good. We want to have . . . [turns to someone
screaming in the audience]

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

Audience: Ilhan Omar!

Trump: Omar! He said Omar.

Aud: Boooo! Boooo!

Trump: That’s a beauty.

Aud: Boooo . . .

Trump: How the hell did SHE win the election? How did she WIN?

Aud: Boooo . . .

Trump: It’s unbelievable. Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe
Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, de
places all over the planet.

Aud: Boooo!

Trump: Well, that’s what’s happened, and you like Omar a lot, don’t you, huh?

Aud: Noooo . . .

Trump: Biden has promised a 700-percent increase [ . . . ] in the importation of refu-
gees from the most dangerous places in the world, including Yemen, Syria, and So-
malía. Congratulations, Minnesota. A 700-percent increase. Good luck, Minnesota. Enjoy
yourselves, because if I’m not here, if I don’t win [ . . . ] Your state will be overrun and
destroyed [ . . . ]

In Excerpt 1, I have inserted italics to highlight Trump’s uses of verbal irony,
another type of innuendo. As devices for meaning inversion, many have described
both irony and the more specific sarcasm as features of Trump’s rally delivery.32
Their commonality in part stems from a high degree of deniability. But how can
we tell the utterances in question are ironic? Trump uses many rhetorical devices
to signal that he means the opposite of what he is saying. He uses sarcasm (“Good
luck, Minnesota”) and rhetorical questions (“You’re having a good time with your
refugees?"). Another way of generating implicatures is through the use of unex-
pected intonational focus.33 In Figure 1, I use the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI)
system of intonational phonology transcription to describe the intonational pat-
terns used by Trump to render a “sarcastic tone” in his Minnesota speech.34 I’ve
extracted two examples below.35

1a. You’re having a good time

1b. with your refugees? . . . That’s good.

Example 1a has a high pitch accent H* on “good” and a low intonational phrase
and high boundary tone L-H% on “time” at the end of the phrase. This type of in-
tonational contour is used to signal a continuation rise, and can be heard as a type
of ellipsis. Although a transcription hardly captures it (which is why I have includ-
ed the formant frequency track), this type of level high tone (see the flat visible

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesCurrents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate

Cifra 1
Trump’s Waveform and Visible Pitch Contour with Text Transcription and
Annotation for Tones and Breaks Indices for Examples 1a and 1b

Fuente: Track generated from examples 1a and 1b using Praat pitch software (developed by
linguists Paul Boersma and David J. METRO. Weenink, 1992).

pitch above the word “time”) invites the listener to respond, and indeed some in
the audience say, "No!"

A diferencia de, Example 1b, which features a yes/no question, would normally be ex-
pected to have a high intermediate tone and high boundary tone, H-H%, signaling a
pregunta. En cambio, Trump has delivered this line with audible pauses between “ref-
u-gees,” and an unexpected low pitch accent (L*) at the end of “that’s good.” Lin-
guists Joseph Tepperman, David Traum, and Shrikanth Narayanan have identified
the narrow range and low pitch (approximately 75hz) seen in “that’s good” as reli-
ably signaling sarcasm in speech recognition.36 The multiple violations of listeners’
intonational expectations here are a strong clue that the message mustn’t be taken at
face value, and that the listener must look to other, hidden dimensions of meaning.

1C. That’s a beauty.

1d. How the hell did SHE win the election?

1mi. How did she WIN?

As seen in Figure 2, example 1c (That’s a beauty. H* L-L%) differs from what one
would expect from a nonironic example. By putting the intonational focus on the
word “that,” and lowering the pitch for the rest of the utterance, Trump lets his
listeners know that he is communicating the opposite of what he is saying. Su
audience responds in alignment with him by loudly booing the mention of Omar.

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

Cifra 2
Trump’s Waveform and Visible Pitch Contour with Text Transcription and
Annotation for Tones and Breaks Indices for Examples 1c, 1d, and 1e

Fuente: Track generated from examples 1c, 1d, and 1e using Praat pitch software (developed by
linguists Paul Boersma and David J. METRO. Weenink, 1992).

Contrast these unexpected occurrences (1a, 1b, 1C) with the focus given to high
pitch peak accents in Examples 1d and 1e, where Trump expresses doubt about
Omar having won her election.

Examples 1d and 1e occur immediately after 1c, and before each utterance,
Trump resets his pitch, as is normal in English.37 He starts each intonational
phrase and then produces a contrastive high pitch accent, first on “she” and then
on “win.” Both of these utterances are instances of the rise-fall-rise (RFR) intona-
tion contour: H* is the rise at sentence stress, and the low part of the utterance is
the phrase tone (L-), followed by another rise at the boundary tone (H%).

The RFR contour’s meaning has been much discussed in the literature.38 Lin-
guists Daniel Goodhue, Lyana Harrison, Yuen Tung Clémentine Siu, y miguel
Wagner posit its meaning as “tak[En g] a proposition p as input, and return[En g] pag
as output while insinuating alternatives to p.”39 Thus, examples 1d and 1e, con-
in the standard interpretations of American English intonation, yield alternative
possibilities: in 1d, for other candidates to win the election; and in 1e, for Omar
to lose the election. In the case of 1e, we get an incredulity reading which could be
paraphrased as: She couldn’t have possibly won the election.

Trump’s alternations between observing and violating the expectations of our
shared intonational grammar is part of what makes his innuendo interesting to
hear for the audience, and part of what makes him a dynamic speaker. His speech
is full of twists and turns, of sarcasm, innuendo, ellipsis, incredulity, and insinua-

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ciones, of what sounds like in-jokes and invitations to continue his line of thought,
and surely would motivate some in the audience to regard the messages as part of
what sociolinguist Janet McIntosh calls alt-signaling.40

T he last excerpt I will analyze reveals another device used by Trump: el

dog whistle, which I define by expanding Ian Haney-López’s foundation-
al work from “coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility
toward nonwhites” to also include antagonism and violence against other mar-
ginalized groups (such as discourse that encourages sexism, homophobia, anti-
Semitism, and Islamophobia).

Excerpt 2
Trump on “Pioneers” and “Genes” at a Campaign Rally in Bemidji, Minnesota,
Septiembre 18, 2020

Trump: (01:55:16) From St. Paul to St. Cloud, from Rochester to Duluth, and from
Mineápolis, thank God we still have Minneapolis, to right here, right here with all
of you great people, this state was pioneered by men and women who braved the wilder-
ness and the winters to build a better life for themselves and for their families. Ellos
were tough and they were strong. You have good genes. You know that, bien? You have good
genes. A lot of it’s about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we
are so different? You have good genes in Minnesota. They didn’t have a lot of money. Ellos
didn’t have a lot of luxury, but they had grit, they had faith, and they had each other.
[. . .] They were miners and lumberjacks, fishermen and farmers, shipbuilders and
shopkeepers. But they all had one thing in common. They loved their families, they loved
their countries, and they loved their God.41

Contrasting my analysis of “refugees” in Example 1b with “pioneers” in this
excerpt, Trump details what he thinks must have been the qualities of the ances-
tors of Minnesotans assembled there, qualities stemming from the genes of their
presumed European pioneer forebears. I have italicized the parts of the speech I
will focus on with my discussion. In the beginning of the excerpt, Trump erases the
precolonization history of the state of Minnesota and of the Native peoples who
live there and focuses only on the “pioneers who braved the wilderness.” While
praising pioneers’ toughness and strength, he juxtaposes the claim that the current
audience has good genes, creating a causal link between the two through parataxis
(they braved the wilderness; you have good genes). Próximo, he introduces the “race-
horse theory” in what sounds like a parenthetical aside. Finalmente, he returns to his
ongoing thought and asserts that despite all their diversity of occupation, the pio-
neers had one thing in common (and this part he leaves unsaid): their genes.

After this rally footage aired, outlets all across the country wrote articles and
religious organizations sent protests and gave interviews alerting the public to the

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

dangers of the overt eugenics espoused by Trump.42 The Huffington Post even com-
piled footage of Trump bragging about his great genes on camera. Trump biogra-
pher Michael D’Antonio shared the following observation with PBS Frontline: "El
[Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development [. . .] ellos
believe that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man,
you get superior offspring.”43 And while the mention of racehorse theory is an eas-
ily decipherable dog whistle, more sinister is the pervasiveness of Trump’s lifelong
obsession with both family bloodlines and supposedly high IQ. This obsession re-
sults in his constant name-checking of his uncle who was an MIT professor, y
results in absurdly challenging others to IQ tests, in boasting about his vocabulary,
in bragging about his progeny’s schools, etcétera. Trump’s racialized and ableist
view of intelligence is in line with the reasoning for his ongoing attacks on every-
one from Maxine Waters to Black athletes, and his insistence that Black people live
in hell/war zones.44 Many of Trump’s callous actions against immigrants (como
family separation), musulmanes, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asians
(like calling COVID-19 the “China virus”) all follow a pattern of fomenting hate to-
ward non-whites and other targets of eugenicist movements.45

It is important to understand Trump as participating in the history of these
deep-rooted racial logics. Many of the terms Trump uses descend from the legacy
of John Tanton’s “Latin Onslaught” papers in the 1980s (Tanton was the founder
of the Federation of American Immigration Reform), and at least “anchor baby”
was at one point considered hate speech.46 Now it is commonplace in Trump’s
speech and has even been normalized in the media.

Innuendo, whether through dog whistles, sarcasm, irony, or enthymemes, no
only avoids accountability but manages to bring epistemic information into the
common ground in discourse (this is why a term like “anchor baby” can become
normalized). By couching divisive statements in innuendo, politicians like Trump
can dodge scrutiny while still delivering sexist, racist, and xenophobic messages.
The different long-running discourse tributaries I have discussed gather speed
and force to meet up at a metaphorical watershed. In just the past few months,
far-right religious political figures such as Republican Congresswomen Lauren
Boebert (Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) have proudly declared
themselves to be Christian Nationalists, again to the dismay of many leaders at
civil rights organizations.47 These bald declarations of religious affiliation and
pro-white evangelical bias would not be possible without the discourse prec-
edent, much of it in innuendo, set forth in comments from President Trump.
Christian Nationalism not only threatens the separation of church and state but
has resonance with the actual Nazi-sympathizer history of the American Chris-
tian Nationalist Party, which nominated Gerald L. k. Smith in 1948, an anti-
Semitic, anti-Black, pro-deportation presidential candidate with an “America
First” platform.48

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Ironically, even as they protest Christianity’s ascendancy in politics, it seems
difficult for American observers and media to disentangle their own Islamophobic
leanings from their effort to repel racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic statements. Lau-
ren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene have both been accused of being Ameri-
can Taliban by then–fellow GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger (Illinois), y el
members of the Supreme Court who recently overturned Roe v. Wade were round-
ly mocked as “American Taliban” by media commentators, while high-profile
social media accounts circulated memes of a picture altered to have most of the
male judges appear to be wearing turbans and long beards, two signifiers com-
monly associated with devout Islamic faith, and Judge Amy Coney Barrett wear-
ing a burka, a garment that some Muslim women wear because it covers their face
and body.49 It seems even after the Trump presidency, Americans process home-
grown extremism through a projection of the Other, and dog whistling once more
against Muslims in the process.50

While most of the semantic and pragmatic literature I have cited aims to ex-
amine dog whistles and other types of innuendo at the level of single utterances, I
argue that studying them as a historically unfolding system uncovers greater reg-
ularities and coordinated acts in messaging, as well as elucidating their support
among followers and connecting individual speech acts to normalization trends
and what becomes acceptable to say. I see the study of innuendo, including dog
whistles, enthymemes, and sarcastic intonation, as an investigation into the prag-
matics of what remains unsaid, and the recoverability of innuendo as of utmost
importance for the understanding of political hate. We are all implicated, and im-
plicated in complicity, in the making of innuendo.

Working hand in hand with other semiotic indices, understanding innuendo
gives us a chance to describe the broader aesthetics of our current political mo-
mento. I hope this essay provides some tools to recognize and subvert the authority
emerging from these powerful strategies while attenuating their stranglehold on
discursive practices.51

nota del autor

Thanks to Jill Anderson, Aomar Boum, Sandro Duranti, Janet McIntosh, David
miers, Nomi Stoltzenberg, Edna Andrews, Aaron Colston, Laurie Hart, and Mag-
gie Boum-Mendoza for inspiration and fruitful discussions. Parts of this material
were presented at a colloquium jointly sponsored by the University of Chicago and
University of Colorado Boulder, where I presented along with Janet McIntosh in
2021. A different version entitled “Hate and Innuendo” was presented at Duke Uni-
versity in 2022. Flaws in this work are all my own.

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

Sobre el Autor

Norma Mendoza-Denton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cal-
ifornia, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on youth language, migration, política,
and identity. She is the author of Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practices Among Lati-
na Youth Gangs (2000) and editor of Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies
(with Janet McIntosh, 2020).

notas finales

1 Srikanth Reddy, “‘As He Starts the Human Tale’: Strategies of Closure in Wallace

stevens,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 24 (1) (2000): 13.

2 David Firestone, “State of the Union: The Audience; Guests Put A Human Face On
The President’s Ideas,” The New York Times, Enero 29, 2003, https://www.nytimes
.com/2003/01/29/us/state-of-the-union-the-audience-guests-put-a-human-face-on
-the-president-s-ideas.html.

3 George W. Arbusto, “President Delivers ‘State of the Union,’” January 28, 2003, https://
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html.
4 Bethany L. Albertson, “Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Reli-
gious Appeals,” Political Behavior 37 (1) (2015): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109
-013-9265-X.

5 Ian Haney López’s classic work defines dog whistles as “coded racial appeals that carefully
manipulate hostility toward nonwhites.” I have chosen to focus on the broader concept
of innuendo partly because I want to broaden the scope beyond racism to encompass
sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitic, and anti-Islamic discourse. See Ian Haney López,
Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle
Clase (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2013), 21. See also Lewis E. Jones’s hymn
“Power in the Blood," 1899: “Would you be free from the burden of sin? // There is
pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r // In the precious blood of the Lamb.”

6 Gregory J. Rummo, “Power, Wonder Working Power,” Writer’s Exchange Blog, http://
writers-voice.com/FGHIJ/G/Gregory_J_Rummo_power_wonder_working_power
.htm (accessed August 5, 2022).

7 Erving Goffman, “Footing,” Semiotica 25 (1–2) (1979): 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1515

/semi.1979.25.1-2.1.

8 Pew Research Center, “Religion, Rhetoric, and the Presidency: A Conversation with
Michael Gerson,” December 6, 2004, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2004/12
/06/religion-rhetoric-and-the-presidency-a-conversation-with-michael-gerson.

9 Reaction to the mention of crusades is documented in Peter Waldman and Hugh Pope,
“‘Crusade’ Reference Reinforces Fears War on Terrorism Is Against Muslims,"
The Wall Street Journal, Septiembre 21, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10010
20294332922160. Here is part of the text of the speech in question: “[W.]e need to
be alert to the fact that these evil-doers still exist. We haven’t seen this kind of barba-
rism in a long period of time. No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bomb-
ers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their air-
craft–fly U.S. aircraft into buildings full of innocent people–and show no remorse.
This is a new kind of–a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American peo-

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ple are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a
mientras. And the American people must be patient.” Emphasis added. George W. Arbusto,
“Remarks by the President upon Arrival on the South Lawn,” September 16, 2001,
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2
.html. Gerson’s quote is from an episode of Religion & Ethics: “Michael Gerson,” Religion
& Ethics, Noviembre 2, 2007, Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/wnet
/religionandethics/2007/11/02/november-2-2007-michael-gerson/3101.

10 I will resist jumping into the topic of hate speech, for which legal status and definition vary
by jurisdiction. Hate speech is neither illegal nor exhaustively defined in laws across
the United States, although harassment and hate crimes are both illegal. Alexander
Brown and Adriana Sinclair, The Politics of Hate Speech Laws (Abington-on-Thames, En-
gland: Routledge, 2019), 67.

11 Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational
Política, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2017);
Samuel Gyasi Obeng, “Language and Politics: Indirectness in Political Discourse,"
Discurso & Sociedad 8 (1) (1997): 49–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926597008001004;
Joyojeet Pal, Priyank Chandra, Padma Chirumamilla, et al., “Mediatized Populisms
Innuendo as Outreach: @narendramodi and the Use of Political Irony on Twitter,"
International Journal of Communication 11 (22) (2017): 4197–4218, https://ijoc.org/index
.php/ijoc/article/view/6705; Alex Massie, “Another Day, Another UKIP Dog Whis-
tle. Fancy That!” The Spectator, Febrero 3, 2015, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article
/another-day-another-ukip-dog-whistle-fancy-that-; and Mathilda Åkerlund, “Dog
Whistling Far-Right Code Words: The Case of ‘Culture Enricher’ on the Swedish
Web,” Information, Comunicación & Sociedad 25 (12) (2021): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080
/1369118X.2021.1889639.

12 Aristotle’s somewhat vague definition of enthymeme: “but when, certain things be-
ing the case, something different results beside them by virtue of their being the
caso, either universally or for the most part, it is called deduction here (in dialectic) and en-
thymeme there (in rhetoric).” Aristotle, Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumen 1: The Re-
vised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Princeton University
Prensa, 1984), lines 1356ba15–1356ba17. Although Aristotle referred to the enthymeme
as “the substance of rhetorical persuasion,” his underspecification as to the definition
of it has left much room for scholarly argument; see Lloyd F. Bitzer, “Aristotle’s En-
thymeme Revisited,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (4) (1959): 399–408, https://doi
.org/10.1080/00335635909382374. Other scholars such as James H. McBurney have de-
fined the enthymeme “as a syllogism, drawn from probable causes, signs (certain and
fallible) and examples. As a syllogism drawn from these materials . . . the enthymeme
starts from probable premises (probable in a material sense) and lacks formal validity in
certain of the types explained”; “It is not essential to speak at length and with precision
on everything, but some things should be left also for the listener–to be understood and
sorted out by himself–so that, in coming to understand that which has been left by you
for him, he will become not just your listener but also your witness, and a witness quite
well disposed as well. For he will think himself a man of understanding because you
have afforded him an occasion for showing his capacity for understanding. By the same
simbólico, whoever tells his listener everything accuses him of being mindless.” See James
h. McBurney, “The Place of the Enthymeme in Rhetorical Theory,” Speech Monographs 3
(1) (1936): 67–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637753609374841. See also Theophrastus of
Eresus: Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence, ed. and trans. William W. Forten-
baugh, Pamela M. Huby, Robert W. Sharples, and Dimitri Gutas (Leiden: Rodaballo, 1992);

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

Paul A. Rahe, “Thucydides’ Critique of Realpolitik,” Estudios de Seguridad 5 (2) (1995): 105–
141, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419508429264; Allan Bäck, “Avicenna’s Hermeneu-
tics,” Vivarium 49 (1–3) (2011): 9–25, https://doi.org/10.1163%2F156853411x590417;
V. k. Chari, “The Indian Theory of Suggestion (Dhvani),” Philosophy East and West 27
(4) (1977): 391–399, https://doi.org/10.2307/1397981; and Lalita Pandit “Dhvani and
the ‘Full Word:’ Suggestion and Signification from Abhinavagupta to Jacques Lacan,"
College Literature 23 (1) (1996): 142–163.

13 Elinor Ochs, “Narrative,” in Discourse as Structure and Process: Discourse Studies: A Multidisci-
plinary Introduction Volume 1, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, Cª,
1997), 185–207.

14 Janet McIntosh, “‘Let’s Go Brandon’: On the Mutable Power of Semiotic Peekaboo,"
Anthropology News 63 (4) (2022), https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/lets
-go-brandon.

15 Craige Roberts, “Speech Acts in Discourse Context,” in New Work on Speech Acts, ed.
Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. harris, and Matt Moss (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford,
2018), 317–359.

16 Quentin Dénigot and Heather Burnett, “Dogwhistles as Identity-Based Interpretative Vari-
ación,” in Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020) (Gothenburg,
Suecia: Asociación de Lingüística Computacional, 2020), 17–25; Robert Henderson
and Elin McCready, “Dogwhistles, Trust and Ideology,” in Proceedings of the 22nd Amster-
dam Colloquium, ed. Julian J. Schlöder, Dean McHugh, and Floris Roelofsen (Amster-
dam: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, 2019), 152–160; Jennifer Saul,
“Racist and Sexist Figleaves,” in The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy
of Language, ed. Justin Khoo and Rachel Katharine Sterken (Abington-on-Thames, En-
gland: Routledge, 2021), 161–178; and Mike Deigan, “Stupefying,” Philosophers’ Imprint
22 (5) (2022), https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.2117.

17 My own definition of innuendo is closest to Elisabeth Camp’s: “the communication of
creencias, requests, and other attitudes ‘off-record’, so that the speaker’s main communi-
cative point remains unstated.” Elisabeth Camp, “Insinuation, Common Ground, y
the Conversational Record,” in New Work on Speech Acts, ed. Fogal, harris, and Moss, 42.
For the purposes of this essay, I consider innuendo to be the superordinate category
that includes dog whistles, sarcasm, and other kinds of strategic indirectness.

18 Sarah Muller, “Sexist ‘KFC’ Hillary Clinton Buttons at GOP Event," Octubre 7, 2013,
MSNBC, https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/sexist-anti-clinton-buttons-gop-event
-msna178021.

19 Michael Silverstein, “Message, Myopia, Dystopia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7

(1) (2017): 407–413, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.027.

20 Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists: The Final Letter, as Sent, Enero 1,
1802, The Library of Congress Archives, https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre
.html (accessed August 5, 2022); Justice Samuel Alito, “U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Samuel Alito Delivers Keynote Address at 2022 Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit
in Rome,” Notre Dame Law School, Julio 28, 2022, https://law.nd.edu/news-events/
news/2022-religious-liberty-summit-rome-justice-samuel-alito-keynote.

21 Goffman, “Footing”; Adam Hodges, “Plausible Deniability,” in Language in the Trump Era:
Scandals and Emergencies, ed. Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (Cambridge:
Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2020); and Norma Mendoza-Denton, “The Show Must

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Go On: Hyperbole and Falsehood in Trump’s Performance,” in Language in the Trump
Era, ed. McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton.

22 “Trump on Kelly: Blood Was Coming Out of Her Eyes,” Don Lemon Tonight, CNN, Agosto 8,
2015, https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/08/08/donald-trump-megyn-kelly-blood
-lemon-intv-ctn.cnn.

23 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Tweet, Agosto 8, 2015, 08:46 a.m., https://twitter

.com/realDonaldTrump/status/629997060830425088.

24 Zeke A. Molinero, “Donald Trump Fires Back after Outrage over Megyn Kelly Remarks,"
Time, Agosto 8, 2015, https://time.com/3989656/donald-trump-redstate-gathering.
25 Maryann Overstreet, Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English

Discurso (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1999).

26 Emanuel A. Schegloff, “Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense
of Intersubjectivity in Conversation,” American Journal of Sociology 97 (5) (1992): 1295–
1345, https://doi.org/10.1086/229903.

27 Molinero, “Donald Trump Fires Back after Outrage over Megyn Kelly Remarks.”
28 Erving Goffman, “On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction,"

Psiquiatría 18 (3) (1955): 224, https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1955.11023008.

29 Norma Mendoza-Denton, Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth

Gangs (Hoboken, NUEVA JERSEY.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

30 Quentin Williams, “Rejoinders from the Shithole,” in Language in the Trump Era, ed. Mc-

Intosh and Mendoza-Denton.

31 For a video and transcription of the speech, see “President Donald Trump in Bemidji,
Minnesota,” Rev.com, Septiembre 18, 2020, https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared
/OuUlx06wA_o7MUtpY8up9pqgvx-PPTW4O6MTUCh1FsyY9t9Ka2cii5UIv1eQPGqbzPH
yP8eoTObT2rExr1H2rvKTZwM?loadFrom=PastedDeeplink&ts=828.38.

32 Stéphanie Bonnefille, “Confrontational Rhetoric: President Trump Goes Off-Script
on the Green New Deal,” Études de Stylistique Anglaise 15 (1) (2019), https://doi.org
/10.4000/esa.3890; Abbas Degan Darweesh and Nesaem Mehdi Abdullah, “A Critical
Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s Sexist Ideology,” Journal of Education and Practice
7 (30) (2016): 87–95, https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JEP/article/view/33622
/34566; and Noor Falah Hassan Akbar and Nawal Fadhil Abbas, “Negative Other-
Repre sentation in American Political Speeches,” International Journal of English Linguistics
9 (2) (2019): 113–127, https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v9n2p113.

33 For focus, see David I. Beaver and Brady Z. clark, Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines
Significado (Hoboken, NUEVA JERSEY.: wiley, 2009). For implicature, see H. PAG. Grice, “Logic and
Conversation,” Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. morgan (Leiden, Ámsterdam:
Rodaballo, 1975), 41–58.

34 The ToBI (Tones and Breaks Indices) system is an interpolation-based phonological sys-
tem of annotation for intonation. ToBI was developed in recognition of the role that
intonation plays in both phonological meaning and speech recognition, and taking into
account that, on their own, absolute pitch values yield neither consistent percepts nor
cross-speaker meaning units. The ToBI system allows for the transcription of an into-
national sequence given a recording of speech and an associated spectrogram or for-
mant record. The interpolation occurs between perceptually prominent events that can
be categorized as high (and annotated H* “high-star”) or low (L*) and are known as

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton

pitch accents. Además, ToBI allows for compositionally derived intonational con-
tours, such as L+H* (“low plus high-star,” a low-leading tone followed by a high pitch
acento) or H*+L (a high pitch accent followed by a low trailing tone). The most widely
used conventions cover four tiers, arranged and stacked like a musical score, and la-
beled from top to bottom: 1. Orthographic: for orthographic words, with segmented
boundaries lining up temporally with word intervals; 2. Tone: for the edges of high and
low phrase tones (H-, L-) and boundary tones (H%, L%), and time values of points indi-
cating the pitch accents, the points over which we interpolate; 3. Break- índice: for per-
ceived juncture/pauses; y 4. Miscellaneous: used to note disfluencies. By generating
a ToBI transcription, we can abstract away from the specific details of absolute pitch
valor (as might result from speaker size) and temporal characteristics of talk (spoken
quickly or slowly) to arrive at something more like an intonational “signature” for a
specific pitch contour, yielding a stable of pragmatic meanings within a specific vari-
ety. The ToBI system has been used to transcribe the intonation of numerous languag-
es, including varieties of English, Español, Francés, Chino, and Japanese, among oth-
ers. Here I describe it only briefly: please consult annotation guides for fuller accounts;
see Mary E. Beckman and Gayle Ayers Elam, “Guidelines for ToBI Labelling, Version 3”
(Columbus: The Ohio State University Research Foundation, 1997); and Mary E. Arroyo-
hombre, Julia Hirschberg, and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, “The Original ToBI System and
the Evolution of the ToBI Framework,” in Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation
and Phrasing, ed. Sun-Ah Jun (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2005), 9–54.

35 Although examples 1a and 1b split a grammatical sentence into two parts, they are divided
into two examples because each one takes place across a “break,” that is, a perceptual
juncture. We consider them as separate utterances and analyze them as such in this essay.
36 Joseph Tepperman, David Traum, and Shrikanth Narayanan, “‘Yeah Right’: Sarcasm
Recognition for Spoken Dialogue Systems,” Proceedings of lnterspeech ICSLP (pittsburgh:
International Conference on Spoken Language, 2006), 1838–1841.

37 Hubert Truckenbrodt, “The Interface of Semantics with Phonology and Morphology: Se-
mantics of Intonation,” in Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Mean-
En g: Volumen 3, ed. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner (Berlina:
De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 2039–2069.

38 Gregory Ward and Julia Hirschberg, “Implicating Uncertainty: The Pragmatics of Fall-
rise Intonation,” Language 61 (4) (1995): 747–776, https://doi.org/10.2307/414489;
and Noah Constant, “English Rise-Fall-Rise: A Study in the Semantics and Pragmat-
ics of Intonation,” Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (2012): 407–442, https://doi.org/10.1007
/s10988-012-9121-1.

39 Daniel Goodhue, Lyana Harrison, Yuen Tung Clémentine Siu, and Michael Wagner, “To-
ward a Bestiary of English Intonational Contours,” The Proceedings of the 46th Conference
of the North Eastern Linguistics Society (NELS), ed. Christopher Hammerly and Brandon
Prickett (Montréal: The North East Linguistic Society, 2016), 314.

40 Janet McIntosh, “Alt-Signaling: White Violence, Military Fantasies, and Racial Stock in
Trump’s America” (lecture jointly delivered with Norma Mendoza-Denton as part of
“Talking Politics,” a colloquium delivered to and organized by University of Chicago’s
Center for the Study of Communication and Society, and University of Colorado Boul-
der’s Culture, Idioma, and Social Practice, October–November, 2021.

41 “President Donald Trump in Bemidji, MN.”

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42 Tim Dickinson, “Trump Preached White Supremacy in Minnesota, America Barely
Noticed,” Rolling Stone, Septiembre 22, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics
/politics-news/trump-white-supremacy-racehorse-theory-1064928; Seema Mehta,
“Trump’s Touting of ‘Racehorse Theory’ Tied to Eugenics and Nazis Alarms Jewish
Leaders," Octubre 5, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-05/trump
-debate-white-supremacy-racehorse-theory.

43 Michael Kirk, dir., Frontline, Season 2016, Episode 1, “The Choice,” aired September 27,

2016, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/the-choice-2016.

44 Susan Currell, “‘This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes’: Eu-
genic Populism and the American Body Politic,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 64 (2)
(2019): 291–302, https://doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2019/2/9.

45 Samuel R. Bagenstos, “The New Eugenics,” Syracuse Law Review 71 (3) (2021): 751–763.
46 “John Tanton,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting

-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton (accessed July 11, 2022).

47 Elizabeth Dias, “The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Em-
boldened,’” The New York Times, Julio 8, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/us
/christian-nationalism-politicians.html.

48 Special to The New York Times, “GLK Nominated: Christian Nationalist Party Asks Wide
Deportations,” August 22, 1948, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine
/1948/08/22/86906662.pdf.

49 Josephine Harvey, “GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger Suggests Lauren Boebert’s Views Akin To
‘Christian Taliban,’” Huffington Post, Junio 29, 2022, https://www.huffpost.com/entry
/adam-kinzinger-lauren-boebert-christian-taliban_n_62bd03dce4b00a9334e3a102; Jason
Lemon, “Adam Kinzinger Blasts Marjorie Taylor Greene as the ‘American Taliban,’”
Newsweek, Julio 29, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/adam-kinzinger-blasts-marjorie
-taylor-greene-american-taliban-1729116; Ruth Cutler, “The American Taliban Rules
on Roe,” Connecticut Mirror, Junio 27, 2022, https://ctmirror.org/2022/06/27/roe-v
-wade-and-the-american-taliban; and Bette Midler, Tweet, Julio 5, 2022, https://twitter
.com/BetteMidler/status/1544409932883181569.

50 Ariana Afshar, “Stop Comparing Leaked ‘Roe’ Reversal to Sharia Law and Taliban’s
Rules,” Truthout, Puede 14, 2022, https://truthout.org/articles/stop-comparing-leaked
-roe-reversal-to-sharia-law-and-talibans-rules.

51 Miriam Meyerhoff and Norma Mendoza-Denton, “Aesthetics and Styles in Variation:
A Fresh Flavor,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 51 (2022): 103–120, https://doi.org
/10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110056.

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152 (3) Summer 2023Norma Mendoza-Denton Currents of Innuendo Converge image

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