30 Sep “His Belly Dancer”: How Stance Bridges Identity and Ideology Among College Sorority Women Within a Normative Christian Community
Shawn Warner-Garcia (Dept. of Linguistics, UCSB)
Friday, September 30 / 1:30 PM
1205 Education
This paper explores how the concepts of identity and ideology are linked on an interactional level through stance-taking (Du Bois 2007). Specifically, I demonstrate how stance bridges identity and ideology through an analysis of gender identities and ideologies in talk among female friends. The data are taken from a video recording of four college women who attend Baylor University, a private Baptist institution in central Texas. In the examples analyzed, I show how the participants playfully negotiate the identities of two non-present third parties – a boy they know and his ex-girlfriend who is a belly dancer – by drawing on existing ideologies of sexual morality and gender expectations. I argue that speakers negotiate identities by maintaining, instantiating, and/or transforming ideologies using the interactional resources of stance-taking such as evaluation, positioning, and alignment. Thus stance-taking has real consequences for participants, as it is the means by which both the local and enduring aspects of culture are constructed.
This event is sponsored by the IHC’s LISO RFG.