Abstract
This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the contested, dynamic, and creative construction of partisan identities in the contemporary United States.
Highlights
This article analyses the public negotiation of support for Donald Trump among American conservatives during the 2016 US presidential election
President Trump’s election was a result that few commentators predicted and was viewed by many as an unimaginable outcome (Martin and Krause-Jensen 2017). His election has created a new drive to scrutinise the content and articulation of American conservative identity amongst scholars of American politics, as this relates to matters of race, gender, geography, and religion (Hanson et al 2019; Kreiss et al 2017)
I have argued that recontextualisation provides a powerful conceptual framework for examining the role of audience agency in thearticulation of politicised collective identities in a hybridised outrage media ecology
Summary
This article analyses the public negotiation of support for Donald Trump among American conservatives during the 2016 US presidential election In so doing, it conceptualises online political talk as a mode of political performance. President Trump’s election was a result that few commentators predicted and was viewed by many as an unimaginable outcome (Martin and Krause-Jensen 2017) His election has created a new drive to scrutinise the content and articulation of American conservative identity amongst scholars of American politics, as this relates to matters of race, gender, geography, and religion (Hanson et al 2019; Kreiss et al 2017). My contention here is that the public negotiation of Trump support in 2016 offers a compelling case study in how American conservative identities have been contested within a hybridised outrage media ecology. I problematise this definition in terms of the contemporary prevalence of online user-generated discourse
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