Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump's transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump's unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.
The distribution and consumption of transgender time-lapse videos on YouTube have increased over the last few decades, providing trans communities with a valuable resource for self-making. On YouTube, vloggers can present images and videos of their bodies as they document their gender transitions through several practices that rely on temporality and time-space compression. As a genre, time-lapse videos comprise creative worldmaking practices where users document their gender transformations using hundreds to thousands of still photos or video segments which show their social, somatic, and biochemical changes. Although scholars have discussed different worldmaking and community organising practices that take place as trans vloggers display their gendered subjectivities online, there is sparse scholarship studying the recurrent patterns of behaviour on the comment space below these videos. In this article, I draw on critical discourse analytic studies of new media and stance-taking as I review and analyse discriminatory strategies – principally misgendering and ungendering – that YouTubers used to denigrate the self-identified gender of a given vlogger. Stance-taking enables us to identify and track reoccurring attitudes steeped in cisgenderism. At the same time, capturing how vloggers and trans allies respond to (intentional or unintentional) text-based forms of prejudice, can create teachable moments for YouTube spectators. While misgendering stances aim to pressure their targets into certain kinds of gender and sex embodiments, insurrectionary stance-acts co-opt and call out the language of discrimination, lending legitimacy and authority to trans vloggers to create, enact, and live their own genders.
This article analyses a highly acrimonious conflict mediation session between a previous romantic couple in order to illustrate how one listening disputant’s embodied stances influence the trajectory of another disputant’s unfolding narrative. For example, even without speaking, the listener’s facial expression and postures serve to refuse the other speaker’s participant framework. In order to unpack the complexity of this interaction, we drew on both conversation analytic and dialogic notions of stance. We found that to analyse embodied stances in our data requires an understanding of both the local sequential analysis of the unfolding orientations of the participants as embodied stances are being deployed, as well as the larger interactional patterns that occur across the entire mediation session. This case study illustrates the challenge, to mediators and researchers alike, posed by unequal access to the disputant’s shared background knowledge.
This article expands on previous scholarship on the choreographic practice of marking by studying two disparate communities—community-based dance makers and arborists—who collaborate to create a large-scale, public dance performance. With the dance company's goal being to bring public awareness to the embodied skillfulness of the city's urban forestry department and the impacts these city workers have on the community green spaces they service, the dancers for the performance are the foresters themselves who enact dancerly versions of their professional movements. We analyzed 21 h of videotaped data of dance rehearsals, proffering up an interaction-based approach to the study of marking, analyzing the moment-to-moment way, both groups mark out dance phrases for a sub-section of the final performance: the brush truck routine. In doing so, we develop the term marking together to denote how dance ideas are built, transformed, and enacted through group idea formation and revision. Ultimately, we provide insights into how to study dance marking in its full, interactional complexity.
This paper examines mediator reformulations when mediations seem close to falling apart. Our embodied approach to interaction analysis uses video-recorded cases and shows how reformulations (summaries, paraphrases, reframings) are negotiated rather than offered as finished products. When mediators reformulate disputants' talk, their professional vision shapes how mediations progress, and disputants' uptake (or the lack of it) guides the directions they take. Whether it is bracketing off a touchy subject or disrupting a troublesome behavior loop, mediators' reformulation practices tell us about these mediators' professional vision through the story of observable practices.
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