Car bumper stickers in Jordan as a site of carnivalesque transgression and degradation

Abstract The present study investigates how car bumper stickers in Jordan are exploited as public texts and spaces to communicate transgressive messages about the self and the other. Using Bakhtin’s notions of the carnival and the carnivalesque, eighty-four ethnographically collected bumper stickers were analyzed. The analysis of data shows that this public form of communication is exploited by Jordanian drivers and car owners as a site of carnivalesque transgression and degradation in three discursive spheres: (i) castigating female materiality, calling into question female attainment of rationality, and stressing ‘female infidelity’; (ii) complaining about one’s suffering, burdens, and cares through a plaintive image of ritual lamentation and self-degradation; and (iii) creating a Bakhtinian ‘reversible world’ that attempts to reverse values, hierarchies, and power relationships, and in which the lowly is valorized, and the social discourse of the community is inverted. Like carnival and the carnivalesque, these bumper stickers provide a licensed space of transgression and degradation and reflect a special type of communication that is impossible in everyday life as such communication constitutes a form of carnivalesque ‘marketplace speech’ that is devoid of the norms of etiquette and decency. The present study contributes to research on transgressive language and popular culture in public spaces.