As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Foucault 1978, Butler 1997). The more intense the interdiction, the more power seems to accrue to the transgressive act.