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The paper explores the interplay of offence, (de)normalization and moral conflict triggered by media racism. The paper is premised on the assumption that public interventions to moral transgressions occasion moral conflicts in which transgressions can be (de)normalized through impoliteness, more specifically the acts of offence taking and causing. A YouTube video discussing the racist media coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis was analyzed along with a sizable amount of related user-generated comments. The analysis showed that offence taking and offence causing have morally restorative and (de)normalizing functions in moral conflict. This highlights the fact that the relationship between morality and impoliteness is much more complex than is usually theorized, wherein impoliteness is often perceived as a morally norm-disruptive behavior or a negatively valenced evaluation thereof. Not only can impoliteness be morally justified in moral conflicts, it can also be a necessary form of restorative public intervention. This necessitates greater attention to (de)normalization in (im)politeness theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyse letters of complaint about instances of comic discourse where the humour is regarded as overstepping the mark and causing offence. We are particularly interested in how this sense of offence is registered and how complainants articulate the offence for which they seek some form of redress. In pursuing this interest, we seek to bring together two distinctive modes of analysis: linguistic discourse analysis and symbolic cultural analysis. This is methodologically appropriate to the discourse involved because of the ways in which epistolary complaints use forms of linguistic framing for offsetting potential objections to what they want to say, and because of the highly figurative language which is employed in voicing the substantive complaint and the censure of the humour that is entailed in this. Our focus overall is on the underlying ambivalence involved in negotiations between ethical and comic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]