Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource

Abstract

Abstract Combining raciolinguistics and social semiotics, I explore a snapshot of socio-politically and historically contextualized multimodal digital activity in social networking site Tumblr involving American entertainer Beyoncé. I examine a set of 41 Tumblr posts, gathered in 2016 during Beyoncé’s heightened social and political salience, in which users expressed counterhegemonic stances. I first demonstrate how Tumblr users employ images and references of Beyoncé in ways that resist visual and linguistic hegemonic discourses and realize and index issues of race and gender. I show how Tumblr users resemiotize and reentextualize Beyoncé in decolonizing stances, including those that challenge White gazes, prioritize non-White subjectivity, and destabilize Whiteness. I conclude that Beyoncé’s use as a semiotic resource adds to her indexicalities as she is deployed in various stances. I assert that a raciolinguistic perspective elucidates intersectionally racialized and gendered ideological changes to Beyoncé’s multimodal indexical field and that attention to digital semiotics increases the multimodal and intersectional perspectives of raciolinguistic analyses.

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