Unmarked Category Research Articles

Doing being an average teenager: Deploying ordinariness as subversive disability performance in presentational media

Abstract Scholars have shown how speakers are inclined to discursively position themselves as ‘ordinary’ in order to claim and benefit from membership in a socially unmarked category, and that the effect of ‘being ordinary’ is an effortful communicative achievement (e.g. Sacks 1984). This study re-examines and extends such insight by focusing on socially marked individuals—people with disabilities—and considers the effect of inhabiting a nonnormative body has on the semiotic production of self as ordinary. The multimodal self-presentation of Nikki Lilly, a popular disabled YouTuber, showcases the tension between inhabiting a physically anomalous body and projecting ‘an average teenager’ persona. The analysis of the vlogger's YouTube and Instagram posts shows that resignifying the nonnormative body and self as symbolically unmarked hinges on recruiting hypernormative gendered resources. I argue that by exaggerating normality, Nikki Lilly's recognized ‘ordinary’ self-presentation enunciates normalcy as an illusory imperative and materializes as subversive the performance of disability. (Nikki Lilly, embodiment, multimodality, presentational media, disability, ordinariness, normativity)*

Between Remembering and Forgetting: Reckoning with Racialized Transmissions

ABSTRACT The backdrop for this paper has been the ongoing COVID pandemic and the author’s personal response to the murder of George Floyd and the enduring destructiveness of racism and white supremacy that resides here in the US In writing this paper, the author argues that currently we are witnessing and living with the formidable trans-generationally transmitted return of inherited racial hatred that had been more repressed, denied, and refused. The challenge for the author, and for psychoanalysis in general, is to consider in what ways our theories and praxis keep in place whiteness as the unmarked category, a standard benefitting itself. As a result, the legacy of embedded racism continues to be reproduced. Transgenerational transmissions of racial trauma and the rupturing of attachments are examined within the author’s background and in a clinical case with a white patient.

“Women Became Free!” Activism, Feminism, Race, and Political Poetry of the Second Degree in Henrika Ringboms Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968-1974

ABSTRACT Author Henrika Ringbom’s collection of poems entitled Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974. Prosadikter (2009) is a rare piece of Finland-Swedish literature. Rewriting news from a Finland-Swedish evening press paper during the 1960s and 1970s, it offers a view on the colonial mind-set of the Nordic countries. The poems not only depict political events from various parts of a global world, they also open up an unmarked category in Nordic literature, that of race and whiteness. An essential part of Finland-Swede’s self-understanding goes back to its status as a minority. This applies even to Finland-Swedish literature. It also has a notable tradition of female feminist writing that runs through the 20th century. Finland-Swedish literature, however, belongs also to a majority when it comes to Western ideas of race and whiteness in a Nordic context. In my analysis, I show how Ringbom scrutinizes events from a phase Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström (2014) call the “white solidarity” (1968–2001), characterized by antiracism, anti-apartheid, social justice and gender equality, but also of color-blindness. I show how Ringbom contributes to the current discussions of political Nordic literature with a rich, complex, ambivalent and defamiliarizing way. The poems actively remind us how both political events and political poetry are complex and contradictory. Rather than offering a clear-cut poetic activism, Rinbom writes political poetry of the second degree, one that examines and reflects upon the conditions of politics, popular media, and political poetry.

Serial migrant mothers and permanent temporariness in Dubai

Abstract Based on a five-year urban ethnography, this article explores the subjectivities of permanent temporariness that characterize the experience of serial migrant mothers in Dubai. By going beyond approaches that select middle class participants based on fixed category classifications such as ethnicity or citizenship, this article uses a processual lens and sheds light on a sociologically unmarked category of migrants in the city whose experiences of mothering and work have been shaped by shifting intersectionality in the context of multinational migration. Through detailed biographies of four serial migrants, this article offers an illustration of the subjectivities of permanent temporariness and shows how they are reproduced through three mothering practices: propagating roots, reflexive selving, and normalizing movement. Examining serial migrant motherhood practices challenges methodological nationalism and illustrates how the flow and friction of multinational migration gets reconstituted into family and work lives.

Intellectual (Neo-) Imperialism: The Examples of “Islam[ism(s)]” and “Jihad[ism(s)

In any scientific endeavour, or considered as such, methodology and epistemology are paramount, not to mention ontology: what is the nature of the reality that we are studying? What is the nature of the knowledge that is being produced and its rationality? What are the methods applied to the field of study? However, when it to comes to “Islam”, the “Middle East”, or the “Orient”, the starting points are assumptions and truisms, particularly in “scientific” fields such as Political Science or International Relations, especially when the subject is the relation between politics and religion. In the last few decades, Islam has become a central point of reference for a wide range of political activities, arguments and opposition movements. The term “political Islam”, or “Islamism”, has been adopted by many scholars in order to identify this seemingly unprecedented irruption of Islamic religion into the secular domain of politics and thus to distinguish these practices from the forms of personal piety, belief, and ritual conventionally subsumed in Western scholarship under the unmarked category “Islam”. There have been tremendous, innumerable websites, voluminous publications and many projects on “Islamism(s)” and “Post-Islamism(s)”, the idea that political Islam had failed. However, when reality did not confirm that prediction, a new term was coined: “neo-Islamism”. This paper aims to explore the thesis that, as in other fields, these labels are nothing more than an attempt by Area Studies within Western academia to mould reality according to preconceived ideas and according to policy-oriented circles and funded by governmental organizations, and that, when dealing with “Islam” and “politics”, we are urgently in need of a different epistemology.

Loves Me or Loves Me Not? Passing through the Forest of Love Symbols and Unveiling Its Social Nature

This article unveils how love, as a signified, can be constituted by the artificially constructed symbolic signs (“signifiers”) represented in our everyday life. Only when we regard love as a symbolic system and try to decipher its meanings can we understand how love is transmitted through sociomental patterns. This article attempts to provide examples from language, symbolic materials, the imprinted body, the code of temporality, and the spatial aspect to interpret the general elements that commonly form the forest of love symbols. Moreover, this article introduces cognitive sociology as a significant analytic approach to examining love. On the one hand, taking the “semantic square” proposed by Zerubavel, I articulate that when we want to understand the meanings of symbols, we usually have to embed them into their symbolic context. On the other hand, based on the distinction between marked and unmarked social categories proposed by Brekhus, I explain that more often than not, we can shed light on the marked love types even when we focus on love issues. Last, this article reminds us that the symbols of love are not fixed and constant but change according to the transformations of context.

Making and Marking Maleness and Valorizing Violence

The unmarked category of man and claims of innate violence have been tightly linked in the public imagination and in much scholarly work, both in views of the past and the present and in how those ...

Racist Encounters: A Pragmatist Semiotic Analysis of Interaction

Complementing discourse-analytic approaches, we develop C. S. Peirce’s semiotic theory to analyze how racism is enacted and countered in everyday interactions. We examine how the semiotic structure of racist encounters depends on acts of signification that can be deflected and that take shape in the ways actors negotiate interactions in situ. After outlining the semiotic apparatus Peirce pioneered, we trace the dynamic processes of generalization and specification in recorded racist encounters as specific forms of semiotic upshifting and downshifting. We demonstrate how attending to racist encounters and engaging the sociology of race sharpen key assumptions that pragmatist semiotics makes about the structure of signification, as it forces one to examine the interplay of marked and unmarked categories and identities in interaction, and to take the differential power to signify into account in shaping the potential effects of semiotic strategies.

Thinking Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean

The article makes a case for Europe as a creolized space, or Europe Otherwise. It argues that, in order to account for both the transregional entanglements and the internal hierarchies that European colonialism and imperialism have produced since at least the sixteenth century, we need to unlearn received notions of Europe as an unmarked category; and that theoretical and empirical lessons from the Caribbean are central to relearning Europe differently. To conceive of Europe as a creolized space thus means to draw attention to the decisive shifts that its colonial possessions operate in both its historical legacies and its present borders when consistently taken into account. Such reconceptualization entails a simultaneous creolization of theory so as to reinscribe into sociological thought the experiences of peoples and regions racialized as non-European, non-Western, and non-White alongside the multiple entanglements between Europe and its colonies. Drawing on Caribbean perspectives on creolization, I first discuss how creolizing Europe contributes to countering the definition power of ahistorical and unmarked categories. Subsequently, I propose to rethink Europe as a political, cultural, economic, and discursive formation from its current colonial borders in South America and the Caribbean Sea. Finally, I argue that focusing on Europe’s colonial possessions in the Caribbean today and their corresponding geographical referent, Caribbean Europe, is one way to effectively creolize established understandings of Europe’s colonial history as a thing of the past, of a white Western European identity as the norm, and of the European Union as confined to continental Europe. Recent crises in the Caribbean – from the 2017 hurricanes to Brexit – are used as a magnifying glass in order to make Europe’s ongoing colonial entanglements theoretically and politically visible.

Was Milton White?

ABSTRACT This article argues that Milton scholarship in an age of emboldened white supremacy needs to take account of Milton's own whiteness and especially his role in the historical development of white identity. Based on a close reading of the Hamitic curse, as retold by Michael in book 12 of Paradise Lost, it argues that Milton translated the racial hierarchies of his own day into the split structure of an emergent racial liberalism. Milton remade white identity into the racially unmarked category of universal liberal personhood while carving out an exception for racially marked but strategically unspecified others who may be enslaved with “no wrong, / But justice.”

Embodying history: Casting and cultural memory in 1776 and Hamilton

Both Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and recent all-female productions of Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 dramatize historical events of the American Revolution with women and people of colour in the roles of white ‘founding fathers’. This article juxtaposes the casting and reception of these history musicals to theorize the ways their non-traditional casting opens up new possibilities for cultural memory of that revered era in US history. Underlying the seemingly progressive embodied performance, the written texts of both 1776 and Hamilton perpetuate founders chic and rehearse traditional versions of the nation’s founding story. Thus they expose but do not subvert the construction of whiteness and masculinity as unmarked categories that have always dominated US culture. The process of upholding the old version while blending it with the new exemplifies the incremental process of cultural memory as it shapes national identity.

Predictability of meaning in grammatical encoding: Optional plural marking

The markedness principle plays a central role in linguistic theory: marked grammatical categories (like plural) tend to receive more linguistic encoding (e.g., morphological marking), while unmarked categories (like singular) tend to receive less linguistic encoding. What precisely makes a grammatical category or meaning marked, however, remains unclear. One prominent proposal attributes markedness to the frequency or predictability of meanings: infrequent or less predictable meanings are more likely to receive extra linguistic encoding than frequent or more predictable meanings. Existing support for the predictability account is limited to correlational evidence, leaving open whether meaning predictability can cause markedness patterns. We present two miniature language learning experiments that directly assess effects of predictability on morphological plural marking. We find that learners preferentially produce plural marking on nouns that are less probable to occur with plural meaning—despite the fact that no such pattern was present in learners’ input. This suggests that meaning predictability can cause the markedness patterns like those that are cross-linguistically observed.

Somatic Lexemes in the Kartvelian Linguistic Space

Comparative-historical study of languages makes it possible to represent the diachronic process of structuring the world and forming the corresponding concepts. The abovementioned process is inherently integral and reflected in such socio-cultural areas of human life as language, art, religion, farming, ethno-traditional customs, culture (in its broadest sense), etc. The proto-language reconstructed as a result of the comparative-historical study and the picture of its diachronic development provide some information about the genetic relations between the people speaking the corresponding related languages, about their original homeland and the directions of their historical migrations, about their knowledge, ideas and representations. This time we have analyzed the semantic field of the lexemes denoting the human body parts, which are reconstructed at the Proto-Kartvelian language and exist in the contemporary Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Megrelian, Laz, and Svan) and some dialects (notably, Gurian, Rachian, Xevsurian, and Kiziqian). Our goal is to reveal the semantic structure of the mentioned field, to analyze the respective concepts as well as to outline processes of the development and the establishment of corresponding tokens (resp. lexemes). Vocabulary denoting a human body (resp. Somatic lexemes), its parts and inner organs is a constituent part of the basic core vocabulary of a language and presumably ought to be fixed in the ancient times’ reflecting data. Analysis of the lexical units, which have been reconstructed either at the Common-Kartvelian or Georgian-Zan level on the basis of regular sound correspondences between the Kartvelian languages, allows us to highlight the main course of forming and developing the linguistic units we are concerned with; namely, the accumulation of “knowledge” had been carried out due to the process of differentiation and detailed elaboration of the human body anatomy and respectively, the corresponding semantic field, somatic vocabulary, had been underway to be enriched based on the relation of cognitively interpreted markedness. Language changes and development, formation of new categories and concepts, and consequently, creation of new linguistic units is mainly carried out as the result of detailed elaboration, further specification and partition of unmarked categories: an unmarked category undergoes the division-differentiation on the basis of formally marked oppositions that leads to the formation of new linguistic units and structures and reflects the dynamic picture of enhancement of linguistic cognition of the universe. Dialectic material enriches the semantic space even more and specifies and fills the meanings of lexemes to be studied.

Aspects of the Morphophonology of the Verb in Latin and in German and English

Aspects of the Morphophonology of the Verb in Latin and in German and English

Ideofones do Changana e o Princípio da Marcação

O trabalho objetiva descrever os ideofones da língua Changana tendo em conta o Princípio da Marcação, apontando para três características apresentadas por Givón (2001 e 1995): 1) Princípio meta-icônico da marcação que postula que as categorias estruturalmente mais marcadas, tendem, igualmente, a serem funcionalmente mais complexas; 2) Frequência: a categoria não marcada é mais frequente em relação à marcada; 3) Dependência do contexto, que tem a ver, segundo Givón (1995, 2001) com o fato de que a marcação não diz respeito apenas a categorias linguísticas, mas também a categorias comunicativas em que elas ocorrem. Como referencial teórico, tivemos como base os autores Bybee (2010), Cardoso (2015), Givón (2001, 1999), entre outros. Os dados usados foram extraídos de dois instrumentos lexicográficos: o primeiro é uma base de dados constituída durante a pesquisa de Nhampoca (2010) e o segundo é o Dicionário Changana-Português de Sitoe (1996). Desses instrumentos, selecionamos 05 ideofones que possuem um verbo correspondente na língua em questão. A análise mostrou que o Princípio de Marcação é relevante para o estudo de ideofones do Changana e auxilia na distinção dos ideofones dos verbos, uma vez que verificamos que os ideofones são predicadores marcados e os verbos predicadores não marcados.

Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

Deixis In Taglines: A Socio-Cultural Semiotic Analysis

The research aims at analyzing the socio-cultural semiotic that characterize the deixis in taglines. Such types of deixis are analyzed qualitatively by examining the socio-cultural functions using “Sign Mapping of Roland Barthes”. The analysis focuses in describing the signifier and signified as well as the meaning of denotative and connotative characterized the deixis in taglines of various advertisements. Findings have shown that the signifiers and signified concepts function to inform, to challenge, to emphasize, and to persuade, of the consumers as the addressee. The types of deixis occur into such types of pronominals deixis (she, you, I, me), nominal deixis (girl, age, the city), verbal (blow, drive, come, follow, let, change), adverbial (in her face, anywhere, Marlboro country, when you can fly), and grammatical deixis (imperative, statement, interrogative). The denotative meaning is reflected from the use of signifiers that serves the real of sense of the product referred to, i.e., the commercial product that is divided into categories, man’s category, woman’s category, and unmarked category. The connotative meaning relates to some cultural values, such as pleasure, masculinity, feminity, passion, luck, beauty, freedom, and the sense of belonging. Key words: Socio-cultural semiotic analysis, deixis, tagline

What happens in translation? A comparison of original and translated texts containing verbs meaning SIT, STAND and LIE in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC)<sup>1</sup>

This article studies translation effects by comparing the use of verbs meaning SIT, STAND and LIE in original and translated texts in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). Effects on both the frequency of use and the use of lexical and structural translation shifts are studied. Postural verbs have a much higher frequency overall in Swedish than in English. In Swedish translated texts, postural verbs are significantly under-represented in comparison to original texts, whereas postural verbs are significantly over-represented in English translations. At a more fine-grained level, it is possible to show that various categories are treated differently, in particular the types of subjects. The effect on frequency is stronger for Human subjects, which represent an unmarked category, than it is for Inanimate subjects, which are more marked. However, the pattern of over- and under-representation presupposes a functional overlap across languages. Writing as subject, which is a category that is unique to Swedish in relation to English, follows a different pattern. (This type of subject appears in examples such as: Nyheten star i tidningen ‘The news is (literally: stands) in the paper’). The result is discussed both from the point of view of the research methodology used in contrastive studies based on translation corpora and from a theoretical point of view. For methodology, the conclusion is that frequencies can be considerably skewed, whereas a language remains true to its system of basic semantic contrasts in professional translations. Theoretically, the result can be related to theories of language contact and studies of second language acquisition and bilingual development.

Whither Realis marking

The verb paradigms of declarative clauses in Unua (an Oceanic language of Malakula, Vanuatu) have a distinct Irrealis prefixb-contrasting with zero marking for the Realis. In relative clauses, however, the Irrealisb-contrasts with a prefixm-encoding realis interpretations. On the basis of comparative evidence, the synchronicm-prefix is a remnant of an earlier Realis *mw- that has become specialized for use in relative clauses. The diachronic loss of overt morphology in unmarked categories is not unusual. What is unusual in the Unua case is the retention and specialization of the morphology for the unmarked category in a sub-class of constructions, relative clauses. This paper sketches out the likely significant factors in the historical changes giving rise to the synchronic state. These include conditioned phonological weakening and effects of the salience of them-prefix in the cross-construction noun modification functional role.

Percival Everett’s Speculative Realities

MATTHEW DISCHINGER Georgia Institute of Technology Percival Everett’s Speculative Realities SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF HIS DEBUT NOVEL, SUDER (1983), PERCIVAL Everett’s staggering artistic output has provided critics with a literary corpus nearly unmatched by his contemporaries: to date, Everett has published thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. One common thread through nearly all of Everett’s wide-ranging work is its anticipation and subversion of its own critical reception. His novel Erasure (2001), for instance, takes to task the literary marketplace that privileges specific strands of literature as authentic portraits of black life at the expense of others. The novel tells the story of Thelonious Monk Ellison, a black writer who, after being told by editors that his writing is not “black enough,” writes a blistering satire of stereotypical black life (2). That novel is hailed as a masterpiece, however, revealing what Margaret Russell calls the “nouveau-racism” of the publishing industry (358). Likewise, Everett’s public statements reveal his trademark suspicion of critical categories that shape both academic discourse and reading publics. In a 1991 essay on the future of black writing and black readership, Everett argues that both readers and critics pigeonhole contemporary black writing: Simply put, our readers are white. . . . We are at the economic mercy of a market which seeks to affirm its beliefs about African-Americans. An army of liberal book-readers marches into stores and feeds on fad and trend and reads, but not too deeply, and so does to our work what the movies seek to do. . . . Even our scholars often read for the mere promotion of a theory (and therefore their careers) instead of a true pursuit of meaning and understanding outside the realm of their scholastic backyards. . . . We must consider whether we should be relying at all on scholars or the present book-buying public as tools of validation for books by African-American writers. (“Signing to the Blind” 10-11) While Everett is rarely so direct in his critiques of critical approaches to his writing today, he made similar remarks about the relationship between literature and criticism in an interview published in Virginia QuarterlyReview.Whenaskedaboutcriticsinterpretinghisexploration of broad philosophical questions as an interrogation of blackness—and, 416 Matthew Dischinger thus, fencing his work into one of many “scholastic backyards”—he responded in similarly direct fashion: See, that has less to do with my work than it does with the people who are discussing it. And that’s interesting to me. If they are aware of that, then it becomes even more interesting. The critical work of any work of art has to understand that the work itself is seldom the only source of the criticism. The criticism necessarily is criticism not only of the work that it portends to be, but also of the mission of the critics. And so, in that way, any work constructs, as another level of art, the critic that is criticizing it. (Dischinger 264) Despite the many differences between his 1991 essay and his more recent public statements, both target the critic who continues to argue that nonwhite writers must write about their nonwhiteness. His statement begs the question: what kind of criticism does his work construct? Everett’s fiction often exists in the liminal spaces between meeting expectations and rejecting them outright: it centralizes the expectations of readers and critics yet again only to disturb and deconstruct them. One effect of his work, then, is that we are left to ponder what our expectations have foreclosed. If black writers must write about their nonwhiteness, then whiteness, in this formulation, becomes an invisible, unmarked category for both the critic and the writer. This essay will neither argue that Everett’s twenty-first-century writing is no longer interested in American conceptions of race nor merely offer the familiar critical refrain that his work shifts our understanding of blackness—which of course, it does. Instead, I will examine a few of Everett’s white characters, who have received almost no critical comment at all. This omission is understandable given the current state of whiteness studies as a field. As Robyn Wiegman argues, it has largely disintegrated because of its inability to “bridge the gap...