Sexuality vs. sensuality: The multimodal construction of affective stance in Chinese ASMR performances*

Abstract

Online communities have recently developed a novel genre of performance aimed at triggering Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a tingling sensation prompted by soft voices and other stimuli. In China, these performances were banned in 2018 due to a rise in sexually charged videos purporting to be ASMR. Through acoustic and content analysis, this study argues that, rather than ASMR being a vehicle for sexual content, conventional and sexual Chinese ASMR performances constitute two separate genres. While all performers index intimate affective stances, conventional ASMR performers construct the persona of a calm, gentle professional, while sexual performers evoke the childish, amateur camgirl and sajiao (“whining”) persona. These performances illustrate Chinese content creators’ juxtaposition of local and non‐local semiotic resources as they participate in transnational online communities. The phenomenon of ASMR also highlights the sensual nature of the voice and underscores the necessity of incorporating sensuality into theorizations of sociolinguistic meaning.

Linguistic constraint, social meaning, and multi-modal stylistic construction: Case studies from Mandarin pop songs

“…A major finding of the third-wave literature is that linguistic and non-linguistic stylistic practices work in tandem in the process of constructing a persona style (Eckert 2008). While much of the existing work consists of ethnographic investigations on everyday linguistic practices (Mendoza-Denton 2014; Drager 2015, but see also Starr 2015; Starr, Wang, & Go 2020), the present study extends this literature by examining the multimodal stylization in high performance (Coupland 2007), which refers to marked occasions where ‘participants would readily acknowledge and classify as “performance” ’ (Bell & Gibson 2011:556). Specifically, we focus on popular music, a type of performance that puts on display a style initiated by an individual or a small group, and (actively) engages the audience in the interpretation and circulation of the style.…”

YouTube, the Attention Economy and Digital Audience Interest in Sponsored ASMR Videos

“…Besides marketing, ASMR studies have seen a growing interest among other academic fields such as Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Neurosciences, and Sonology. Recent work in the Media Studies field includes Maddox (2021aMaddox ( , 2021b, Klausen (2021), Zappavigna (2020Zappavigna ( , 2021, Holmowaia & Danzis (2020), Starr et al (2020), Łapińska (2020), Waldron (2017) and Gallagher (2016). Examples of Psychology research on the subject can be seen in Swart et al (2021), Morales et al (2021), Roberts et al (2018Roberts et al ( , 2020Roberts et al ( , 2021, Janik & Osborne-Ford (2020), Cash et al (2018), as well as Fredborg et al (2017Fredborg et al ( , 2021.…”

Tourism and symbolic power: Leveraging social media with the stance of disavowal

“…Jaffe (2009, p. 5) describes such evaluative stances as articulating moral and social orders, which index a speaker's social identity and community affiliation. Recent sociolinguistic studies have focused on the use of stance in ideological and language ideological evaluations (Morgan, 2017; Slobe, 2018), on how stancetaking is a contingency of culture and class (Martín Rojo & Molina, 2017; Noy & Hamo, 2019; Snell, 2018), and on the construction of stance in mediated and online settings (Laurier, 2017; Starr et al., 2020; Valentinsson, 2018). Much as Du Bois (2007, p. 173) notes that when assuming a stance, an individual invokes “presupposed systems of sociocultural value … contributing to the enactment and reproduction of those systems,” stance is a particularly rich framework for conceptualizing the parameters of this elite tourist habitus and the symbolic values it encodes.…”