Mukbang is a Korean livestream where a host eats while interacting with viewers. The eater ‘speaks’ to the viewers while eating and the viewers ‘type’ to each other and to the eater through a live chat room. Using interactional sociolinguistics along with insights from conversation analysis (CA) studies, the present study examines how sociable eating is jointly and multimodally achieved in mukbang. Analyzing sixty-seven mukbang clips, I find that mukbang participants coordinate their actions through speech, written text, and embodied acts, and that this coordination creates involvement and, by extension, establishes both community and social agency. Specifically, recruitments are the basic joint action of eating, as participants, who are taking turns, assume footings of the recruit and the recruiter. The host embodies viewers’ text recruitments through embodied animating and puppeteering. As in street performance, the viewers often offer voluntary donations, and the host shows entertaining gratitude in response. (Mukbang, footing, recruitments, agency, involvement, constructed action, multimodal interaction, computer-mediated discourse)*
This case study investigates how people ‘listen’ and act as ‘listeners’ in instant messages. Little research has been done on listenership and listeners in text-based digital discourse; to address this gap, I analyze a group instant message conversation among five Korean young women via KakaoTalk, a free instant messaging application. Demonstrating previous studies on listenership and listeners in spoken discourse and defining ‘listenership’ as the act of giving feedback on prior messages, I identify and explicate four ways of showing listenership in instant message interaction: (1) minimal responses, (2) machine gun listenership, (3) laughing and (4) sticker reaction. My analysis illuminates how verbal and non-verbal forms of listenership are adapted to typed-based online contexts as well as how listenership contributes to the construction of talk in typed-based digital environments.
Bringing together “identity as agency” (Schiffrin, 1996; De Fina, 2003), Bamberg’s (1997) three-level
positioning, and Tannen’s (2008) narrative types, I analyze three interview narratives
of Korean women coerced into the Japanese military’s sexual slavery during World War II, commonly known as “comfort women”.
Through an eye toward “others” – e.g., Japanese soldiers, “comfort station” managers, interviewers, and sociocultural and
sociopolitical forces – I investigate the manipulation of the women’s agency with their identities positioned as victims, rather
than survivors. Meaning-making strategies, such as “constructed dialogue” (Tannen,
2007[1989]), repetition, deixis, and third turns, present the ways in which various others objectify and marginalize
the women as well as control their stories. These illuminate how the women’s identities are granted and defined by others. This
other-granted identity work reinforces aspects of language ideologies and ideologies of being silenced.
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