Item Details

Discourse in f(r)iction. Production and reception of gender roles discourse in an audio-visual text about piropos

Issue: Vol 10 No. 4 (2016) Space, bodies and boundaries: Piropos and other forms of flirtatious street talk as contested discursive practices

Journal: Sociolinguistic Studies

Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/sols.26736

Abstract:

This paper studies the constraints the audience – and also producers – find when attempting to deconstruct a traditional gendered practice (piropos) in a recent fictional clip that depicts this practice in an unconventional way, with women as the performers. The production of the clip is analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis tools to explore how the audiovisual text (re)produces specific gender(ed) meanings at the interplay of several semiotic resources. The reception of the clip is analyzed with the aid of the appraisal model, to study how participants in three focus groups (female, male and mixed) interactively co-construct meanings to evaluate the clip, the producers, the narrative and even the piropos depicted. The discussion centers on three aspects evaluated by participants: the genre/purpose of the text, its open ending or the lack of an explicit moral, and the mismatch between fiction and social reality.

Author: Germán Canale

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