Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-k8lnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T02:01:27.695Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Generic intertextuality in online social activism: The case of the It Gets Better project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2015

Rodney H. Jones
Rodney H. Jones*
Affiliation:
City University of Hong Kong, Department of English, 8/F Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kongenrodney@cityu.edu.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions. (Activism, digital media, genre, LGBT discourse, narrative, positioning)*

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , June 2015 , pp. 317 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Alexander, Bryan, & Levine, Alan (2008). Web 2.0 storytelling: Emergence of a new genre. Educause Review 43:40–48.Google Scholar
Augustine, Saint (1961). Confessions. Trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Trans. by Emerson, Caryl. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Trans. by McGee, Vern W.. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bamberg, Michael (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:335–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, Michael (2007). Introductory remarks. In Bamberg, Michael (ed.), Narrative: State of the art, 1–5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1986). Story, performance, and event: Contextual studies of oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Allan (1984). Language style as audience design. Langauge in Society 13:145–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Boltanski, Luc (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyd, Danah (2014). It's complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Brabham, Daren C. (2010). The potential of vernacular video for queer youth. Flow 13. Online: http://flowtv.org/2010/10/vernacular-video-for-queer-youth/; accessed July 12, 2013.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles L., & Bauman, Richard (1992). Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2:131–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burgess, Jean (2006). Hearing ordinary voices: Cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 20:201–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohler, Bertram J., & Hammack, Phillip L. (2006). Making a gay identity: Life story and the construction of a coherent self. In McAdams, Dan P., Josselson, Ruthella, & Lieblich, Amia (eds.), Identity and story: Creating self in narrative, 151–72. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copeland, Charlton C. (2012). Creation stories: Stanley Hauerwas, same-sex marriage, and narrative in law and theology. Law and Contemporary Problems 75:86–113.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques (1980). The law of genre. Critical Inquiry 7:55–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dingwall, Robert (1977). ‘Atrocity stories’ and professional relationships. Work and Occupations 4:371–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubrow, Heather (1982). Genre. London: Methuen & Co.Google Scholar
Eggins, Susan, & Slade, Diana (2005). Analysing casual conversation. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Fagerjord, Anders (2003). Rhetorical convergence: Studying web media. In Liestøl, Gunnar, Morrison, Andrew, & Rasmussen, Terje (eds.), Digital media revisited, 293–325. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Femmephane (2010). Why I don't like Dan Savage's ‘It Gets Better’ project as a response to bullying. Online: http://tempcontretemps.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/why-i-dont-like-dan-savages-it-gets-better-project-as-a-response-to-bullying/; accessed July 14, 2014.Google Scholar
Fivush, Robyn (2004). Voice and silence: A feminist model of autobiographical memory. In Lucariello, Joan M., Hudson, Judith A., Fivush, Robyn, & Bauer, Patricia J. (eds.), The development of the mediated mind: Sociocultural context and cognitive development, 79–99. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1990). The history of sexuality, vol. 1: An introduction. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Frobenius, Maximiliane (2014). Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers. Journal of Pragmatics. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.008CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fung, Heidi (1999). Becoming a moral child: The socialization of shame among young Chinese children. Ethos 27:180–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genette, Gérard (1992). The architext: An introduction. Trans. by Lewin, Jane E.. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goltz, Dustin B. (2013). It gets better: Queer futures, critical frustrations, and radical potentials. Critical Studies in Media Communication 30:135–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Günther, Suzanne (2005). Narrative reconstruction of past experiences: Adjustments and modifications in the process of recontextualizing a past experience. In Quasthoff, Uta M. & Becker, Tabea (eds.), Narrative interaction, 285–301. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1987). Discourse genres in a theory of practice. American Ethnologist 14:668–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1989). Text and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18:95–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jauss, Hans R. (1974). Toward an aesthetics of reception. Trans. by Bahti, Timothy. Brighton: Harvester Press.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara (1990). Stories, community, and place: Narratives from middle America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Rodney H. (2007). Imagined comrades and imaginary protections: Identity, community and sexual risk among men who have sex with men in China. Journal of Homosexuality 53:83–115.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kapchan, Deborah (1996). Gender on the market: Moroccan women and the revoicing of tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kraus, Wolfgang (2007). The narrative negotiation of identity and belonging. In Bamberg, Michael (ed.), Narrative: State of the art, 123–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (1972). Language in the inner city. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William, & Waletzky, Joshua (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, June (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Liang, A. C. (1997). The creation of coherence in coming-out stories. In Livia, Anna & Hall, Kira (eds.) Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality, 287–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, Timothy E. (1999). Social norms and judicial decisionmaking: Examining the role of narratives in same-sex adoption cases. Columbia Law Review 99:739–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, Simon (2012). Collective coping through networked narratives: YouTube responses to the Virginia Tech shooting. Studies in Media and Communications 7:279–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longacre, Robert E. (1968). Discourse, paragraph and sentence structure in selected Philippine languages. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Lyons, John D. (2006). Exemplum. In Sloane, Thomas O. (ed.), Encyclopedia of rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). The postmodern condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, James R., & Plum, Guenter (1997). Construing experience: Some story genres. In Bamberg, Michael (ed.), Oral versions of personal experience: Three decades of narrative analysis. Special issue of Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1–4):299–308.Google Scholar
McLagan, Meg (2006). Introduction: Making human rights claims public. American Anthropologist 108:191–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLean, Kate C. (2008). The emergence of narrative identity. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2(4):1685–1702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaels, Sarah (1991). The dismantling of narrative. In McCabe, Allyssa & Peterson, Carole (eds.), Developing narrative structure, 303–51. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mumby, Dennis K. (1987). The political function of narrative in organizations. Communication Monographs 54:113–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Ruth (2010). Re-examining narrativity: Small stories in status updates. Text & Talk 30:423–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, Eric E., & Langellier, Kristin M. (2007). The performance turn in narrative studies. In Bamberg, Michael (ed.), Narrative: State of the art, 205–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, Livia (1985). Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational storytelling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Plummer, Ken (1995). Telling sexual stories: Power, change and social worlds. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Propp, Vladimir (1968). Morphology of the folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1992). Confessions. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In Bobrow, D. G. & Collins, A. (eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science, 185–210. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Savage, Dan, & Miller, Terry (2011). It gets better: Coming out, overcoming bullying, and creating a life worth living. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Schely-Newman, Esther (1999). ‘I hear from people who read Torah …’: Reported speech, genres and gender relations in personal narrative. Narrative Inquiry 9:49–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1997). The transformation of experience, identity and context. In Baugh, John, Feagin, Crawford, Guy, Gregory, & Schiffrin, Deborah (eds.), Toward a social science of language, 41–55. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuman, Amy (1986). Storytelling rights: The uses of oral and written texts by urban adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuman, Amy (1993). Gender and genre. In Hollis, Susan T., Pershing, Linda, & Young, M. Jane (eds.), Feminist theory and the study of folklore, 71–78. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Shuman, Amy (2007). Entitlement and empathy in personal narrative. In Bamberg, Michael (ed.) Narrative: State of the art, 175–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1993). What's in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Framing in discourse, 14–56. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Toolan, Michael J. (1988). Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tseng, Jason (2010). Does it really get better? A conscientious critique. The Bikerco Project. Online: http://www.bilerico.com/2010/10/does_it_really_get_better.php; accessed July 14, 2014.Google Scholar
van Langenhove, Luc, & Harré, Rom (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In Harré, Rom & van Langenhove, Luc (eds.), Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action, 14–30. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Walters, Suzanna D. (2014). The tolerance trap: How God, genes, and good intentions are sabotaging gay equality. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton (2000). Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction. Narrative Inquiry 10:157–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar