This study proposes an integrated framework to elucidate the process of socially constructing reality by examining how Facebook commenters argue over two same-sex marriage (SSM) bills in Taiwan. Through stance-taking, which involves evaluating, positioning and aligning with others, some commenters contest while others defend SSM by referencing the referendums and the laws. The analysis shows that (dis)alignments facilitate multiple ‘team performances’, that is, cooperative interactions that project competing definitions of the situation, or ‘frames’, within which events are interpreted differently: one bill is criticized as undemocratic while the other contradictory. This bottom-up approach emphasizes participants’ agentive role in shaping the public discourse. The discourse analysis of online comments illustrates reality as constituted by negotiation over taken-for-granted concepts in the digital age, while highlighting the intersubjectivity in large-scale platforms like Facebook and how online commenting is used to (re)frame issues.
From a social constructionist perspective, this study examines three gay Indian immigrants’ coming-out narratives
as the locus of the discursive construction of both one’s physical and social location within the changing context. It advocates
reconceptualizing “coming out” as dynamic and situated in interaction. Also, it investigates the intersection and construction of
identities by analyzing coming-out narratives in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Washington, DC. Drawing on Bamberg’s
three levels of positioning (1997), the analysis highlights how narrators bring about
their identities as they contrast the social constructs in India, i.e., the absence of such concept, and in the US, e.g., the
acceptance of homosexuality, by reenacting dialogue before and after migration. This study adds to positioning theory and
contributes to the cross-cultural dimension of research on coming-out narratives. The qualitative analysis also provides a
linguistic perspective that views narrating coming out as an interactive process for constructing intersected identities.
This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*
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