Semiotic Disruption and Negotiations of Authenticity among Argentine Fans of Anglophone Media

Abstract

This paper investigates how subtitling and dubbing of foreign language media can be interpreted as cases of semiotic disruption, and how this interpretive frame comes to index a cosmopolitan identity among Argentine fans of Anglophone pop culture. The naturalization of voice/body/language assemblages allows fans to frame preferences for subtitles as an obvious consequence of “authentic” fan identity. Discourses of liberal inclusivity and literacy allow them to simultaneously explain others’ preferences for dubbing as consequences of class, education, and maturity. I argue that these stance‐taking strategies are ways of mitigating the economic precarity of being Argentinean in a global/izing world.

A Linguistic Anthropology of Images

“…A burgeoning literature has expanded on these insights to look at the role of image-based media (film, television, photography, social media) in processes of speech enregisterment and their contestation: of dialect (Hillewaert 2015), class (Valentinsson 2022), indigeneity and primitiveness (Meek 2006(Meek , 2020Swinehart 2012;Peterson 2017;Graham 2020), and race (Bucholtz 2011, Bucholtz & Lopez 2011, Wirtz 2014, Reyes 2017, Calhoun 2019, Canut 2019, Smalls 2020, Delfino 2021, Telep 2021.…”