The literary field of queer cultural production in contemporary India: considering popular queer texts via Bourdieu

In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts forward the idea that culture is discursively produced and that the field that informs, constitutes, and problematizes cultural production is crucial towards understanding how cultural transactions, dynamics, and politics work. Since literature is a key marker of society’s outlook on and reception of sensitive subjects like non-heteronormativity, this article focuses on the queer literary field – LGBTQ+-related texts and publication – in/of contemporary India. To this end, I look into trends in publication of Indian queer literary texts in English since 1976 through Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural production of the field of queer literature and consider popular texts like Shikhandi: And Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You; Our Impossible Love; She Swiped Right into my Heart, and read them vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s theorization, in order to conceptualize an idea about how texts and contexts interact with each other towards (re-)producing and (re-)constructing contemporary queer culture(s) in the Indian context.

Invektive Affordanzen der Kommunikationsform Flugschrift

This paper deals with the so-called ‘Flugschrift’ (i. e. pamphlet) as a specific medial arrangement resp. form of communication in early modern age, which not only allowed a wide and rapid spread of popular texts, but also provided increased opportunities for follow-on communications and interactive debate. Interactivity is an essential dimension of invective communication. It is argued that the ‘Flugschriften’ afforded the escalative dynamics of invective, which shaped the early modern public sphere. These dynamics entailed furthermore distinctive connections and transformations of visual and rhetorical genres and practices in pamphlet literature. These correlations will be demonstrated by the examples of the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn debate and Luthers invectives against the papal bull ‘Exsurge Domine’.

Days of our ‘quarantined’ lives

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many users around the world exploited internet memes as a digital source of humour to cope with the negative psychological effects of quarantining. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this study investigates a set of COVID-19 internet memes to explore the quarantine activities and routines to understand ordinary people’s mindsets, anxieties and emotional narratives surrounding self-isolation as well as the pragmatically generated humorous meanings relying on verbal and visual components of memes. The findings revealed that quarantine humour is centred around themes including quarantine day comparisons focusing on the perceived effects of home quarantines on physical and mental well-being, quarantine routines, and physical appearance predictions at the end of quarantine. Intertextuality was a productive resource establishing connections between quarantine practices and popular texts. In addition, humorous meanings were created through anomalous juxtapositions of different texts and incongruity resolution is largely dependent on the combined meanings of verbal and visual components.

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age

Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the country, casual paupers and loafers lingered in the city, and vagabonds and beachcombers roved the colonial frontiers. Uncovering the rich Victorian taxonomy of nineteenth-century vagrancy for the first time, this interdisciplinary study examines how assumptions about class, gender, race and environment shaped a series of distinct vagrant types. At the same time it broaches new ground by demonstrating that rural and urban conceptions of vagrancy were repurposed in colonial contexts. Representational strategies circulated globally as well as locally, and were used to articulate shifting fantasies and anxieties about mobility, poverty and homelessness. These are traced through an extensive corpus of canonical, ephemeral and popular texts as well as a variety of visual forms.

“The bloodiness and horror of it”

In this work, I explore pain descriptions by women who live with the life-altering gynaecological disease of endometriosis. This condition causes incapacitating pain, which tends to be dismissed and normalised as part of the female condition (Cumberbatch, 2019). My aim is to explore the general patterns of pain conceptualisation by women with endometriosis and outline how an in-depth examination of salient elements of narrative scenarios may contribute towards providing a comprehensive understanding of the pain experience. I first examine patterns of metaphorical pain collocates from a corpus generated from online forum contributions. Following this, I explore metaphorical scenarios of pain, focusing on stories that reference popular texts or genres from a conceptual integration perspective. I argue that the combination of metaphor analysis of naturally-occurring data and conceptual intertextuality and interdiscursivity analysis in the metaphorical scenarios of elicited data constitute a methodological niche that allows a holistic assessment of the pain that can potentially be used in consultations and may help tackle the alarming diagnosis delay of endometriosis, which is currently 7.5 years.

Evidentiality in science from specialization to popularization: A case study of COVID-19 texts

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, medical texts on the pandemic have enjoyed wide popularity, and one of the key issues has always been the accuracy and dependability of the information they contain. The use of evidentiality, a linguistic system which functions to indicate the source and credibility of information, is thus worth exploring in COVID-19 texts. Adopting a synthesized framework within the overall model of systemic functional linguistics, this paper sets out to investigate the lexicogrammar and semantics of evidentiality on the basis of data collected in the form of both specialized and popular texts on COVID-19. Evidentiality in these texts is explored along four dimensions: (i) evidential taxonomy, where specialized texts favor reporting, while popular texts favor belief and inferring; (ii) information source, where specialized texts highlight the voices of authorship, original research, and patients, whereas popular texts highlight the voices of scientists, institutions, countries, and laypeople; (iii) modalization, where specialized texts typically indicate a higher degree of modal responsibility than their popular counterparts; and (iv) engagement, where specialized texts favor dialogic expansion and popular texts favor contraction. It is hoped that these findings will shed light on linguistic variation according to different contextual configurations, as well as clarifying rhetorical conventions in discourse communities of science.

‘How it all turned out alright’: Autofiction as Memory Form in Irena Dousková’s Novels about Childhood and Youth in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia

Autofictions and memoirs about growing up in late socialism have proliferated in Czech as well as in other postsocialist Eastern European literatures. These retrospective texts are often tinged with nostalgia and infused with irony and humour. Two of the most popular texts of this genre in the Czech Republic are Irena Dousková’s autofictional books Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] and Oněgin byl Rusák [Onegin Was a Rusky]. The Czech author writes about growing-up in a non-conformist family dealing with everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia. After discussing Dousková’s books as autofiction the article will take a closer look at the poetics of childhood autofictions and their contribution to cultures of remembering socialism in comparison to autobiographies. It will discuss the ways how writing about childhood creates a specific socialist identity through scarcity, ingenuity, and working with/against restraints and the way humour is used to transmit difficult memories.

Inviting the Infinifat Voice to the Fatshion Conversation: An Exploration into Infinifat Identity Construction, Performance and Activism

This thesis explores how self-identified “infinifat” people, defined as those larger than a US woman’s dress size 32, access commercially available fashion and how their lack of access to clothing shapes the performance of their fat identity. Through semi-structured interviews with infinifat subjects and a secondary discourse analysis of “superfat” narratives in popular texts, this research finds that a lack of clothing options reinforces the stigma and discrimination experienced by those at the largest end of the fat spectrum. Particularly, the lack of clothing available to superfat and infinifat people restricts access to social spaces and economic opportunities. While this research draws attention to ways in which my infinifat participants are “hacking” fashion to suit their needs and using social media to advocate for inclusion, the fashion industry’s unwillingness to create clothing options for superfat and infinifat people, supports the perception that being really fat is really bad.

Inviting the Infinifat Voice to the Fatshion Conversation: An Exploration into Infinifat Identity Construction, Performance and Activism

This thesis explores how self-identified “infinifat” people, defined as those larger than a US woman’s dress size 32, access commercially available fashion and how their lack of access to clothing shapes the performance of their fat identity. Through semi-structured interviews with infinifat subjects and a secondary discourse analysis of “superfat” narratives in popular texts, this research finds that a lack of clothing options reinforces the stigma and discrimination experienced by those at the largest end of the fat spectrum. Particularly, the lack of clothing available to superfat and infinifat people restricts access to social spaces and economic opportunities. While this research draws attention to ways in which my infinifat participants are “hacking” fashion to suit their needs and using social media to advocate for inclusion, the fashion industry’s unwillingness to create clothing options for superfat and infinifat people, supports the perception that being really fat is really bad.