Giuseppe Balirano, PhD in English Linguistics, is Professor of English Language, Translation and Linguistics at the University of Naples L'Orientale. His research interests and publications lie in the fields of multimodal critical discourse analysis, humour, masculinity and queer studies, the discursive representation of organised crime and audio-visual translation. He is the President of the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA). He is the BeTwiXt series director, publishing original works in the field of linguistics and communication studies. Address: Naples, Campania, Italy
Balirano, G. 2017. GARDAÍ & BADFELLAS: The Discursive Construction of Organised Crime in the Irish Media. Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica, punto org Book Series. ISBN: 978-88-9391-164-1., 2017
The representation of the so-called 'organised crime syndicate' in the various Irish media outlet... more The representation of the so-called 'organised crime syndicate' in the various Irish media outlets has been the subject of intense debate amongst numerous scholars with an interest in media, crime and cultural studies. The perceived danger of this form of criminality has prompted significant policy and legislative action, and consequently , social change resulting in the creation of new agencies and processes. In particular, in the Republic of Ireland where people do not normally have any direct knowledge of globalised crime syndicates, media representations of crime may have important implications for the public perception of both the 'offenders' and the 'victims' as the 'active' and 'passive' social actors involved in criminal deeds. This book ambitiously aims to analyse linguistic and semiotic instantiations of both fictitious and actual constructions of the so-called 'Irish organised crime syndicate', as portrayed in the discursive representation of the most important Irish quality papers such as the Irish Independent and The Irish Times, and reinforced by other media outlets, such as TV and cinema productions. The discursive analysis of Irish organised crime may help laypersons understand its many slippery aspects, and allow them to participate in the debate about public attitudes regarding the prevention, effective punishment, reintegration of offenders, and national and international legal reforms capable of dealing with multi-faceted, transnational criminal activities. In the light of these issues, this volume concerns Irish criminal organisations and the principal actors involved in crime, through the lens of different media genres where criminal actors and their public antagonists are discursively displayed. The leading research thread is twofold: on the one hand, it examines the multifaceted and evolving nature of Irish criminal actors and, on the other, and most centrally here, it unpacks the meaning-making processes that represent them in the different media. The latter objective is achieved by identifying and analysing the discursive strategies adopted by the Irish press to represent criminal actors. In order to do so, contrary to merely focusing on discourse surrounding criminal subcultures, the focus here is rather on the mediatised public opinion concerning the real existence of an Irish organised crime syndicate. By considering language as an empirical tool, in other words as something we believe to be an essential pointer for the interpretation and the construction of our everyday lives, in this volume I have implemented a hybrid linguistic methodology for thereby describing the several discourses about Irish organised crime as crafted in the media. I do hope that my brief linguistic foray into uncharted territories peopled by insalubrious characters may also serve to convince sceptical readers that topics such as organised crime and gang-land warfare can also be pertinently and exhaustively analysed by linguists.
Balirano, G. 2014. Masculinity and Representation: A Multimodal Critical Approach to Male Identity Constructions. Napoli: Paolo Loffredo Iniziative Editoriali. ISBN: 978-88-9400-379-6., 2014
This book is a brief attempt to discuss some emerging ways of representing ‘masculinities’ in con... more This book is a brief attempt to discuss some emerging ways of representing ‘masculinities’ in contemporary media discourses. The confluence of diverse discourses on gender, men, and hegemony has often resulted in the creation of a general and rather fuzzy category that scholars frequently refer to as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This arbitrary phrase has been misapplied for over 60 years, and surprisingly, it still carries considerable weight today. On the one hand, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ tends to anchor the extensive field of men’s studies, also known as masculinity studies (the critical studies of men) within feminist accounts of patriarchy and sociological models of gender. On the other hand, and this is the main acceptation in this book, the expression is often held accountable for the dissemination of popular anxieties about men as social actors.
Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework, this book outlines how masculine identities interact with the consumption of products, desires, and passions in consumer cultures. Representations of the male body are seen as discursive ‘ploys’ construed at the intersection of consumption and marketing across cultures in multimodal discourses. The book analyses a small corpus, the MALEcorpus, comprising 10 print covers from the British edition of the well-known and bestseller magazine Men’s Health. In view of this, the book investigates how masculinity is constructed, both verbally and visually, on ten covers of the British men’s magazine.
Balirano, G. 2007. The Perception of Diasporic Humour: Indian English on TV. Catania: AG Edizioni. ISBN: 978-888-994-2376., 2007
Humour is a cognitive quality every human being innately owns, and since it is obviously equally ... more Humour is a cognitive quality every human being innately owns, and since it is obviously equally distributed in society, everyone who is considered humourless is downgraded to a socially de-humanizing position. However, when the East laughs, and it does not very often happen on non-Western mainstream screens, it creates a new opening; an unusual place similar to what Bhabha defines an in-between territory. Humour and laughter on the face of Indian people in diaspora may become a political and social instrument in the hands of the migrants. This kind of humour, identified in this book as Diasporic Humour, de-stereotypes the practice of imagining communities, and instead of generating isolation by turning audiences into lonely, self-entertaining atoms, otherizes communities subverting the Western balance of power. The BBC TV series Goodness Gracious Me constitutes a particularly interesting paradigm since it is the result of a cultural blend between English and Indian ethnicities. The study shows that Diasporic Humour succeeds in reversing stereotypes by playing on two levels of humour: a surface level, based on universal or ethnic scripts, and a deeper level, resulting from the new blend of scripts between two very distant cultures. Within this framework of reference, the present reading of Goodness Gracious Me and its hilarious forms of multicultural narration aims to detect the existence of hybrid scripts, which, unlike Raskin’s definition of ethnic jokes, purport a unique combination between diasporic and English subjects, undermining the typical British sense of humour on which Goodness Gracious Me inevitably draws.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Mackenzie, Jai / Zottola, Angela (eds) 2024. The Discursive Construction of Contemporary Family Types. de genere – Journal of literary, postcolonial and gender studies 10 [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2465-2415. , 2024
The Special Issue aims to continue to refine and develop scholarly understanding of the social no... more The Special Issue aims to continue to refine and develop scholarly understanding of the social norms, structures and practices that shape conceptions of family, parenthood, and means of family formation. By examining, through a linguistic lens, media constructions of contemporary family types, both within and beyond the heteronormative ideal, all the articles in this issue seek to chart the current discursive landscape for families, parents and intended parents.
Balirano, G. / Borba, R. (eds) 2021. Re-defining Gender, Sexuality, and Discourse in the Global Rise of Right-wing Extremism. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2035-8504., 2021
It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of... more It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of Anglistica AION pursues its aims. The contributions all contend a common denominator: the need to remain vigilant and steadfast when dealing with the far-right crusade against gender equality. In all the case studies in this issue, the essence of far-right resistance is embodied by a political agenda that aims to preserve heterocisnormative family ethics, traditional gender values, and the naturalised hierarchies of the conventional roles of men and women. It is against this background that the scholars whose work makes up this edited publication have approached the far-right centrality of gendered arguments and gendered policies. Through various well-established approaches in sociolinguistics (such as Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology to name but a few), each contribution analyses the importance of gender within far-right rhetoric, yielding subject matter that is both insightful and original.
Balirano, G. / Brondi, M. / Fruttaldo, A. (eds) 2021. Idee Cinematografiche Differenti: Il soggetto cinematografico come strumento di declinazione della diversità. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore. ISBN: 978-88-32193-56-5., 2021
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2020. Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives. ContactZone 2 [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2723-8881., 2020
The current issue of ContactZone deals with the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivi... more The current issue of ContactZone deals with the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivity, slowly gives way to inclusive narratives, giving life to new characters that naturally inhabit the scenarios of contemporary science fiction through unstable roles and completely ‘de-generated’ narrations of identity. An important contribution to the cultural turn in sexual inclusiveness through the staging of ‘non-binary’ characters in the genre was first given by the special issue On Science Fiction and Queer Theory (Science-Fiction Studies, March 1999) and later by the collected essays Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon in 2008, both opening and tracing an innovative and stimulating critical discourse. As the editors state in their introduction (Pearson et al. 2008: 5): "If we then take as the central task of queer theory the work of imagining a world in which all lives are liveable we understand queer theory as being both utopian and science fictional, in the sense of imagining a future which opens out, rather than forecloses possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world". As the papers included in this issue explore the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in science fiction narratives, understanding the construction of such discourses necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach, which ranges from literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, gender studies, corpus linguistics to sociolinguistics. In order to develop a comprehensive perspective on the topic investigated, four essays are devoted to fiction (both novels and short stories), one to plays, and one to a canonical TV series such as Star Trek. While ContactZone is aimed at an international community of scholars and well-informed readers, we do not want to forget our being rooted in the Italian academic context; at least three full-length volumes devoted to Anglo-American science fiction by women should be mentioned: Oriana Palusci, Terra di lei. L’immaginario femminile tra utopia e fantascienza (1990), Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea (2015) and Anna Pasolini and Nicoletta Vallorani, Corpi magici: Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza (2020). This is the reason why all six papers are written by Italian scholars, who are willing to measure their competence against a vast and expanding international critical body.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. (eds) 2020. Homing in on Hate: Critical Discourse Studies of Hate Speech, Discrimination and Inequality in the Digital Age. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore. ISBN: 978-88-3219-359-6, 2020
A shared definition of ‘hate speech online’ is in a constant flux due to the supranational charac... more A shared definition of ‘hate speech online’ is in a constant flux due to the supranational character of the internet, the slippery nature of online harassment, and the porous relationship between actual violence and discriminatory speech. Besides the hateful messages propagated across social networking platforms and micro-blogging sites, the recent rise of live-streamed hate has also captured public attention forcing governments and internet providers to contend with the issue of how to prevent and punish such online activities. As the contributors highlight throughout this volume, the term ‘hate’ itself is extremely difficult to define, stemming as it does from the extremes of socio-psychopathic impulses, an inability to regulate emotions adequately, or merely from a lack of empathy. In some cases, the denigrators do not even hate their victims, they are merely pliable individuals who feel the need to emulate the sentiments of a strong cohort of denigrators in order to gain ‘insider’ status. Such individuals, however, are no less to blame than the hate mongers themselves, since they actively contribute to an echo chamber which serves to amplify and reinforce the hatred deployed. Whether they truly detest their targets or merely emulate the apparently dominant group, the aim of haters, be they online or offline, is to relegate the victims to a generic category of ‘others’, and in hate speech the other is always the enemy. The differences between the ‘us’ belonging to the dominant grouping, and the ‘them’ banished to the out-group are magnified in hate speech: the insiders are safe, legitimate, normal and rational, the outsiders are dangerous, different, threatening, and antagonistic. Although the focus of this volume concerns, in the main, the digital environment, the editors and contributors are all well aware that ‘hate speech online’ does not occur in a virtual vacuum, its effects are dramatically real for those individuals who are on the receiving end. Cyberbullying and hate speech impinge upon the lives of individuals from social, economic, professional and psychological backgrounds, and increase the sense of fear and vulnerability of entire communities. The ever-encroaching discourse of online hate has, to date, only been partially mapped, and available studies have mostly focused on forms of misogynous attacks in the male-dominated online tech and gamer communities or against feminist activists. Additionally, there seems to be a tendency to forget that ongoing, low-level hate speech is far more common than the dramatically violent hate crimes that capture public imagination. Whether by investigating the ripple effect triggered by a single controversial tweet, the manipulation of gender ideologies in ethnic radio discourse, or the re-semiotization of the ‘city’ as a nurturing space for Jihadist hate narratives, this book intends to address, from a wide and comprehensive multimodal perspective, the prevailing gaps in research literature and the dire need to contend with rampant vitriolic discourses today.
Balirano, G. / Guzzo, S. (eds) 2019. Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-030-11152-6., 2019
The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addres... more The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addressing food and food practices in cross-cultural contact, more specifically looking at changes brought about by diasporic circumstances. All contributions in the volume approach food and its discourse realization indeed as a way to investigate an understudied area of linguistics, that is, the relationship between language and migration, or diaspora, specifically through discourses on food. Taking as a given the significance of food practices, their psychologically and socially fundamental role in shaping one’s cultural and/or individual identities, just as that of one’s first language, the volume presents various linguistic and cultural readings of food as an instrument to explore diasporic identities. From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are: 1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other? 2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2018. Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-5275-1096-8., 2018
This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic a... more This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of current debates about gender non-conforming people and diverse ways of ‘doing’ masculinities.
It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness.
The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.
Balirano, G. / Baker, P. (eds) 2018. Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan., 2018
‘By exploring the entire gamut of the representation of masculinity in both old and new media and... more ‘By exploring the entire gamut of the representation of masculinity in both old and new media and across a wide range of disciplines, Baker and Balirano get readers really thinking about what it means to be a man in today’s liquid society. Guaranteed to raise awareness about the diverse ways of being and performing masculinity, the book provides a novel contribution to an exciting new field opening up new avenues for other researchers.’ —Delia Chiaro, Professor of English Linguistics and Translation, University of Bologna, Italy, and President of the International Society of Humor Studies
‘Exploring the interface of queer studies with the fields of linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, literary and film studies, the articles in this collection draw a multifaceted picture of the discursive construction and representation of queer masculinities in a range of text genres and contexts. They engage in fascinating analyses of various aspects of queer masculinities, including issues such as consumer culture, representation in TV series, films, literature and art, intersectionality with trans and racial identities, homophobic discourse and subordination through hegemonic masculinity.’ —Heiko Motschenbacher, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen
Balirano, G. / Sicca, L.M. / Valerio, P. (eds) 2018. Self-Narratives in Organizations: Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Experiences. puntOorg International Journal 3(1-2) [Special Issues]. ISSN: 2499-1333., 2018
This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that conta... more This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that contain, on the one hand, original multidisciplinary research offering a range of critical perspectives on different representations of gender in the context of recent and old conflicting discourses about transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people. On the other hand, the issue collects self-narratives from TGNC individuals who narrate their stories about working in organizations or businesses as transgender or gender non-conforming people, including (but not limited to) issues around transitioning and discrimination.
Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. / Sambre, P. (eds) 2017. The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures. I-LanD International Journal 1(1) [Special Issue]. DOI: 10.26379/1002. ISSN: 2532-6368., 2017
In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new in... more In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new insight into academic research on the representation of organised crime in different media outlets. This volume touches upon different criminal organisations and activities, taking into account genres and media where criminal actors and their public antagonists are discursively displayed. The guest editors’ original idea was to take explicitly into account, on the one hand, the multifaceted and evolving nature of crime groups and, on the other, the meaning-making processes that represent them through the media. Contrary to the discourse surrounding the subculture of criminals, the focus here is on the global public debate about organised crime syndicates and the social response to their wide array of criminal activities.
Balirano, G. / Chiaro, D. (eds) 2016. Humousexually Speaking: Laughter at the Intersections of Gender. de genere Journal 1(2) [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2465-2415., 2016
Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function... more Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function of humour produced in, against and about gender variant communities of speakers, in both verbal and multimodal forms. The editors’ leading idea was to ignite an academic discussion on the several and often hidden ways through which humour succeeds in constantly strengthening and/or re-interpreting, but also dismantling, the social dimension of language. One of the possible results of such a political and social act is the fostering of the cultural exclusion of some gendered, or rather de-generated – as some discriminated groups tend to be commonly alleged to be – minority communities. Additionally, since humour may also work to signify the recurring upsetting of pre-established social beliefs through the systematic threatening of the familiar, the normative, and what is universally deemed as socially acceptable or “normal”, debates on any form of humorous self-representation of gendered identities were also vivid in the editors’ minds. In particular, it seemed fascinating to encouraging a discussion on the way LGBTI communities, just like other marginalised groups, would employ humour to support and reinforce their own in-group sense of community, by mocking typically stereotyped representations of gender variant people who laugh at and with themselves. Although LGBTI humour is still a very hot topic in our western world, one reason for the lack of a real academic confrontation on its social and political mechanisms resides in the very difficult challenge of defining it. Specifically, despite a convincing semantic linguistic theory of humour introduced by Raskin (1985) and later developed by Attardo (1994; 2001), the cultural mechanisms underlying some jokes laughing about human relationships by queering the scene, for instance, are still an unexplored topic.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Nisco, Maria Cristina (eds) 2015. Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 9781443871228., 2015
Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for another book in th... more Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for another book in the field of linguistics, but what does it actually mean? By choosing to speak of Languaging Diversity and not just of difference, otherness, varieties, multiplicity, hybridity or alterity, the editors cover the whole range of meanings in the entire field of diversity. They do not wish to limit themselves by using such specific words with increasingly specialised connotations as Alterity or Other, but rather to allow an eclectic range of perspectives and issues to come to the fore. This volume brings together some of the manifold discourses emerging as bearers of the values of alterity, by exploring the thorny relationship between Language and Diversity. Drawing on the crucial assumption that speakers identities are dynamically negotiated as discourse unfolds, Languaging Diversity explores the wide theme of identity in discourse, an area of investigation which has become increasingly popular in recent years.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Nisco, Maria Cristina (eds) 2015. Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture. Napoli: Liguori Editore. ISBN: 978-88-207-6605-4., 2015
This book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpre... more This book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpretation of texts in diverse contexts of English. By investigating an array of different discourses, we aim to bring to the fore a variety of social and cultural representations and to illustrate the way in which represented participants are generally embedded in social, political, and cultural practices through and in the language. A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
Balirano, G. / Bamford, J. / Vincent, J. (eds) 2012. Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16(1-2) [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2035-8504., 2012
This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of persp... more This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of perspectives and methodological approaches mainly from within sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The empirically oriented papers analyse a range of different types of field-gathered authentic data and corpora, covering intra- and inter-language, intra- and inter-speaker variation, variously involving register, genre, stylistic, diaphasic, diatopical, diastratic and diachronic types of variation. The issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on language variation and its implications, highlighting its dynamic social and socio-psychological functions and meanings as well as some taxonomic and terminological issues.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. 2023. The Rainbow Conspiracy: A Corpus-Based Social Media Analysis of Anti-LGBTIQ+ Rhetoric in Digital Landscapes. In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation, pp. 306-324. London/New York: Routledge., 2023
This chapter explores online anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and the resulting claim that sexual diversit... more This chapter explores online anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and the resulting claim that sexual diversity runs counter to most mainstream, traditional, or religious values. Such narratives feed into the theory underlying an alleged disinformation crusade enacted across most social networking sites (see Balirano & Hughes 2020), whereby a secret, large-scale gay lobby, akin to the proverbial Trojan horse, is progressively infiltrating traditional family values with an aim to defile the entire human race. By investigating a corpus of online conspiracy-evoking texts collected from Twitter, this study offers a corpus-based social-media critical discourse approach to online fake news that serves to cast a conspiratorial shadow upon LGBTIQ+ communities. We posit that such dangerous anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses originating from manipulated news feeds and subsequently woven together across social networking sites may progressively lead to the construction of an LGBTIQ+ conspiracy theory wreaking damage upon a sorely tried minority.
In Balirano, G. / Brondi, M. / Fruttaldo, A. (eds) 2021. Idee Cinematografiche Differenti: Il soggetto cinematografico come strumento di declinazione della diversità. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore, pp. 7-12, 2021
Il seguente volume vuole essere un diario sotto forma di raccolta dei frutti dell’esperienza arti... more Il seguente volume vuole essere un diario sotto forma di raccolta dei frutti dell’esperienza artistica e di formazione nata dalla convenzione stipulata fra il Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario I-LanD e la Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE) per la progettazione e lo sviluppo di Idee Cinematografiche Differenti, residenza artistica proposta dal Centro di Ricerca vincitrice del bando “Per Chi Crea”, finanziato dalla SIAE e il Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali.
Balirano, G. 2017. GARDAÍ & BADFELLAS: The Discursive Construction of Organised Crime in the Irish Media. Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica, punto org Book Series. ISBN: 978-88-9391-164-1., 2017
The representation of the so-called 'organised crime syndicate' in the various Irish media outlet... more The representation of the so-called 'organised crime syndicate' in the various Irish media outlets has been the subject of intense debate amongst numerous scholars with an interest in media, crime and cultural studies. The perceived danger of this form of criminality has prompted significant policy and legislative action, and consequently , social change resulting in the creation of new agencies and processes. In particular, in the Republic of Ireland where people do not normally have any direct knowledge of globalised crime syndicates, media representations of crime may have important implications for the public perception of both the 'offenders' and the 'victims' as the 'active' and 'passive' social actors involved in criminal deeds. This book ambitiously aims to analyse linguistic and semiotic instantiations of both fictitious and actual constructions of the so-called 'Irish organised crime syndicate', as portrayed in the discursive representation of the most important Irish quality papers such as the Irish Independent and The Irish Times, and reinforced by other media outlets, such as TV and cinema productions. The discursive analysis of Irish organised crime may help laypersons understand its many slippery aspects, and allow them to participate in the debate about public attitudes regarding the prevention, effective punishment, reintegration of offenders, and national and international legal reforms capable of dealing with multi-faceted, transnational criminal activities. In the light of these issues, this volume concerns Irish criminal organisations and the principal actors involved in crime, through the lens of different media genres where criminal actors and their public antagonists are discursively displayed. The leading research thread is twofold: on the one hand, it examines the multifaceted and evolving nature of Irish criminal actors and, on the other, and most centrally here, it unpacks the meaning-making processes that represent them in the different media. The latter objective is achieved by identifying and analysing the discursive strategies adopted by the Irish press to represent criminal actors. In order to do so, contrary to merely focusing on discourse surrounding criminal subcultures, the focus here is rather on the mediatised public opinion concerning the real existence of an Irish organised crime syndicate. By considering language as an empirical tool, in other words as something we believe to be an essential pointer for the interpretation and the construction of our everyday lives, in this volume I have implemented a hybrid linguistic methodology for thereby describing the several discourses about Irish organised crime as crafted in the media. I do hope that my brief linguistic foray into uncharted territories peopled by insalubrious characters may also serve to convince sceptical readers that topics such as organised crime and gang-land warfare can also be pertinently and exhaustively analysed by linguists.
Balirano, G. 2014. Masculinity and Representation: A Multimodal Critical Approach to Male Identity Constructions. Napoli: Paolo Loffredo Iniziative Editoriali. ISBN: 978-88-9400-379-6., 2014
This book is a brief attempt to discuss some emerging ways of representing ‘masculinities’ in con... more This book is a brief attempt to discuss some emerging ways of representing ‘masculinities’ in contemporary media discourses. The confluence of diverse discourses on gender, men, and hegemony has often resulted in the creation of a general and rather fuzzy category that scholars frequently refer to as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This arbitrary phrase has been misapplied for over 60 years, and surprisingly, it still carries considerable weight today. On the one hand, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ tends to anchor the extensive field of men’s studies, also known as masculinity studies (the critical studies of men) within feminist accounts of patriarchy and sociological models of gender. On the other hand, and this is the main acceptation in this book, the expression is often held accountable for the dissemination of popular anxieties about men as social actors.
Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework, this book outlines how masculine identities interact with the consumption of products, desires, and passions in consumer cultures. Representations of the male body are seen as discursive ‘ploys’ construed at the intersection of consumption and marketing across cultures in multimodal discourses. The book analyses a small corpus, the MALEcorpus, comprising 10 print covers from the British edition of the well-known and bestseller magazine Men’s Health. In view of this, the book investigates how masculinity is constructed, both verbally and visually, on ten covers of the British men’s magazine.
Balirano, G. 2007. The Perception of Diasporic Humour: Indian English on TV. Catania: AG Edizioni. ISBN: 978-888-994-2376., 2007
Humour is a cognitive quality every human being innately owns, and since it is obviously equally ... more Humour is a cognitive quality every human being innately owns, and since it is obviously equally distributed in society, everyone who is considered humourless is downgraded to a socially de-humanizing position. However, when the East laughs, and it does not very often happen on non-Western mainstream screens, it creates a new opening; an unusual place similar to what Bhabha defines an in-between territory. Humour and laughter on the face of Indian people in diaspora may become a political and social instrument in the hands of the migrants. This kind of humour, identified in this book as Diasporic Humour, de-stereotypes the practice of imagining communities, and instead of generating isolation by turning audiences into lonely, self-entertaining atoms, otherizes communities subverting the Western balance of power. The BBC TV series Goodness Gracious Me constitutes a particularly interesting paradigm since it is the result of a cultural blend between English and Indian ethnicities. The study shows that Diasporic Humour succeeds in reversing stereotypes by playing on two levels of humour: a surface level, based on universal or ethnic scripts, and a deeper level, resulting from the new blend of scripts between two very distant cultures. Within this framework of reference, the present reading of Goodness Gracious Me and its hilarious forms of multicultural narration aims to detect the existence of hybrid scripts, which, unlike Raskin’s definition of ethnic jokes, purport a unique combination between diasporic and English subjects, undermining the typical British sense of humour on which Goodness Gracious Me inevitably draws.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Mackenzie, Jai / Zottola, Angela (eds) 2024. The Discursive Construction of Contemporary Family Types. de genere – Journal of literary, postcolonial and gender studies 10 [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2465-2415. , 2024
The Special Issue aims to continue to refine and develop scholarly understanding of the social no... more The Special Issue aims to continue to refine and develop scholarly understanding of the social norms, structures and practices that shape conceptions of family, parenthood, and means of family formation. By examining, through a linguistic lens, media constructions of contemporary family types, both within and beyond the heteronormative ideal, all the articles in this issue seek to chart the current discursive landscape for families, parents and intended parents.
Balirano, G. / Borba, R. (eds) 2021. Re-defining Gender, Sexuality, and Discourse in the Global Rise of Right-wing Extremism. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2035-8504., 2021
It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of... more It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of Anglistica AION pursues its aims. The contributions all contend a common denominator: the need to remain vigilant and steadfast when dealing with the far-right crusade against gender equality. In all the case studies in this issue, the essence of far-right resistance is embodied by a political agenda that aims to preserve heterocisnormative family ethics, traditional gender values, and the naturalised hierarchies of the conventional roles of men and women. It is against this background that the scholars whose work makes up this edited publication have approached the far-right centrality of gendered arguments and gendered policies. Through various well-established approaches in sociolinguistics (such as Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology to name but a few), each contribution analyses the importance of gender within far-right rhetoric, yielding subject matter that is both insightful and original.
Balirano, G. / Brondi, M. / Fruttaldo, A. (eds) 2021. Idee Cinematografiche Differenti: Il soggetto cinematografico come strumento di declinazione della diversità. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore. ISBN: 978-88-32193-56-5., 2021
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2020. Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives. ContactZone 2 [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2723-8881., 2020
The current issue of ContactZone deals with the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivi... more The current issue of ContactZone deals with the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivity, slowly gives way to inclusive narratives, giving life to new characters that naturally inhabit the scenarios of contemporary science fiction through unstable roles and completely ‘de-generated’ narrations of identity. An important contribution to the cultural turn in sexual inclusiveness through the staging of ‘non-binary’ characters in the genre was first given by the special issue On Science Fiction and Queer Theory (Science-Fiction Studies, March 1999) and later by the collected essays Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon in 2008, both opening and tracing an innovative and stimulating critical discourse. As the editors state in their introduction (Pearson et al. 2008: 5): "If we then take as the central task of queer theory the work of imagining a world in which all lives are liveable we understand queer theory as being both utopian and science fictional, in the sense of imagining a future which opens out, rather than forecloses possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world". As the papers included in this issue explore the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in science fiction narratives, understanding the construction of such discourses necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach, which ranges from literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, gender studies, corpus linguistics to sociolinguistics. In order to develop a comprehensive perspective on the topic investigated, four essays are devoted to fiction (both novels and short stories), one to plays, and one to a canonical TV series such as Star Trek. While ContactZone is aimed at an international community of scholars and well-informed readers, we do not want to forget our being rooted in the Italian academic context; at least three full-length volumes devoted to Anglo-American science fiction by women should be mentioned: Oriana Palusci, Terra di lei. L’immaginario femminile tra utopia e fantascienza (1990), Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea (2015) and Anna Pasolini and Nicoletta Vallorani, Corpi magici: Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza (2020). This is the reason why all six papers are written by Italian scholars, who are willing to measure their competence against a vast and expanding international critical body.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. (eds) 2020. Homing in on Hate: Critical Discourse Studies of Hate Speech, Discrimination and Inequality in the Digital Age. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore. ISBN: 978-88-3219-359-6, 2020
A shared definition of ‘hate speech online’ is in a constant flux due to the supranational charac... more A shared definition of ‘hate speech online’ is in a constant flux due to the supranational character of the internet, the slippery nature of online harassment, and the porous relationship between actual violence and discriminatory speech. Besides the hateful messages propagated across social networking platforms and micro-blogging sites, the recent rise of live-streamed hate has also captured public attention forcing governments and internet providers to contend with the issue of how to prevent and punish such online activities. As the contributors highlight throughout this volume, the term ‘hate’ itself is extremely difficult to define, stemming as it does from the extremes of socio-psychopathic impulses, an inability to regulate emotions adequately, or merely from a lack of empathy. In some cases, the denigrators do not even hate their victims, they are merely pliable individuals who feel the need to emulate the sentiments of a strong cohort of denigrators in order to gain ‘insider’ status. Such individuals, however, are no less to blame than the hate mongers themselves, since they actively contribute to an echo chamber which serves to amplify and reinforce the hatred deployed. Whether they truly detest their targets or merely emulate the apparently dominant group, the aim of haters, be they online or offline, is to relegate the victims to a generic category of ‘others’, and in hate speech the other is always the enemy. The differences between the ‘us’ belonging to the dominant grouping, and the ‘them’ banished to the out-group are magnified in hate speech: the insiders are safe, legitimate, normal and rational, the outsiders are dangerous, different, threatening, and antagonistic. Although the focus of this volume concerns, in the main, the digital environment, the editors and contributors are all well aware that ‘hate speech online’ does not occur in a virtual vacuum, its effects are dramatically real for those individuals who are on the receiving end. Cyberbullying and hate speech impinge upon the lives of individuals from social, economic, professional and psychological backgrounds, and increase the sense of fear and vulnerability of entire communities. The ever-encroaching discourse of online hate has, to date, only been partially mapped, and available studies have mostly focused on forms of misogynous attacks in the male-dominated online tech and gamer communities or against feminist activists. Additionally, there seems to be a tendency to forget that ongoing, low-level hate speech is far more common than the dramatically violent hate crimes that capture public imagination. Whether by investigating the ripple effect triggered by a single controversial tweet, the manipulation of gender ideologies in ethnic radio discourse, or the re-semiotization of the ‘city’ as a nurturing space for Jihadist hate narratives, this book intends to address, from a wide and comprehensive multimodal perspective, the prevailing gaps in research literature and the dire need to contend with rampant vitriolic discourses today.
Balirano, G. / Guzzo, S. (eds) 2019. Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-030-11152-6., 2019
The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addres... more The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addressing food and food practices in cross-cultural contact, more specifically looking at changes brought about by diasporic circumstances. All contributions in the volume approach food and its discourse realization indeed as a way to investigate an understudied area of linguistics, that is, the relationship between language and migration, or diaspora, specifically through discourses on food. Taking as a given the significance of food practices, their psychologically and socially fundamental role in shaping one’s cultural and/or individual identities, just as that of one’s first language, the volume presents various linguistic and cultural readings of food as an instrument to explore diasporic identities. From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are: 1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other? 2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2018. Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-5275-1096-8., 2018
This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic a... more This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of current debates about gender non-conforming people and diverse ways of ‘doing’ masculinities.
It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness.
The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.
Balirano, G. / Baker, P. (eds) 2018. Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan., 2018
‘By exploring the entire gamut of the representation of masculinity in both old and new media and... more ‘By exploring the entire gamut of the representation of masculinity in both old and new media and across a wide range of disciplines, Baker and Balirano get readers really thinking about what it means to be a man in today’s liquid society. Guaranteed to raise awareness about the diverse ways of being and performing masculinity, the book provides a novel contribution to an exciting new field opening up new avenues for other researchers.’ —Delia Chiaro, Professor of English Linguistics and Translation, University of Bologna, Italy, and President of the International Society of Humor Studies
‘Exploring the interface of queer studies with the fields of linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, literary and film studies, the articles in this collection draw a multifaceted picture of the discursive construction and representation of queer masculinities in a range of text genres and contexts. They engage in fascinating analyses of various aspects of queer masculinities, including issues such as consumer culture, representation in TV series, films, literature and art, intersectionality with trans and racial identities, homophobic discourse and subordination through hegemonic masculinity.’ —Heiko Motschenbacher, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen
Balirano, G. / Sicca, L.M. / Valerio, P. (eds) 2018. Self-Narratives in Organizations: Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Experiences. puntOorg International Journal 3(1-2) [Special Issues]. ISSN: 2499-1333., 2018
This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that conta... more This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that contain, on the one hand, original multidisciplinary research offering a range of critical perspectives on different representations of gender in the context of recent and old conflicting discourses about transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people. On the other hand, the issue collects self-narratives from TGNC individuals who narrate their stories about working in organizations or businesses as transgender or gender non-conforming people, including (but not limited to) issues around transitioning and discrimination.
Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. / Sambre, P. (eds) 2017. The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures. I-LanD International Journal 1(1) [Special Issue]. DOI: 10.26379/1002. ISSN: 2532-6368., 2017
In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new in... more In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new insight into academic research on the representation of organised crime in different media outlets. This volume touches upon different criminal organisations and activities, taking into account genres and media where criminal actors and their public antagonists are discursively displayed. The guest editors’ original idea was to take explicitly into account, on the one hand, the multifaceted and evolving nature of crime groups and, on the other, the meaning-making processes that represent them through the media. Contrary to the discourse surrounding the subculture of criminals, the focus here is on the global public debate about organised crime syndicates and the social response to their wide array of criminal activities.
Balirano, G. / Chiaro, D. (eds) 2016. Humousexually Speaking: Laughter at the Intersections of Gender. de genere Journal 1(2) [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2465-2415., 2016
Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function... more Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function of humour produced in, against and about gender variant communities of speakers, in both verbal and multimodal forms. The editors’ leading idea was to ignite an academic discussion on the several and often hidden ways through which humour succeeds in constantly strengthening and/or re-interpreting, but also dismantling, the social dimension of language. One of the possible results of such a political and social act is the fostering of the cultural exclusion of some gendered, or rather de-generated – as some discriminated groups tend to be commonly alleged to be – minority communities. Additionally, since humour may also work to signify the recurring upsetting of pre-established social beliefs through the systematic threatening of the familiar, the normative, and what is universally deemed as socially acceptable or “normal”, debates on any form of humorous self-representation of gendered identities were also vivid in the editors’ minds. In particular, it seemed fascinating to encouraging a discussion on the way LGBTI communities, just like other marginalised groups, would employ humour to support and reinforce their own in-group sense of community, by mocking typically stereotyped representations of gender variant people who laugh at and with themselves. Although LGBTI humour is still a very hot topic in our western world, one reason for the lack of a real academic confrontation on its social and political mechanisms resides in the very difficult challenge of defining it. Specifically, despite a convincing semantic linguistic theory of humour introduced by Raskin (1985) and later developed by Attardo (1994; 2001), the cultural mechanisms underlying some jokes laughing about human relationships by queering the scene, for instance, are still an unexplored topic.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Nisco, Maria Cristina (eds) 2015. Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 9781443871228., 2015
Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for another book in th... more Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for another book in the field of linguistics, but what does it actually mean? By choosing to speak of Languaging Diversity and not just of difference, otherness, varieties, multiplicity, hybridity or alterity, the editors cover the whole range of meanings in the entire field of diversity. They do not wish to limit themselves by using such specific words with increasingly specialised connotations as Alterity or Other, but rather to allow an eclectic range of perspectives and issues to come to the fore. This volume brings together some of the manifold discourses emerging as bearers of the values of alterity, by exploring the thorny relationship between Language and Diversity. Drawing on the crucial assumption that speakers identities are dynamically negotiated as discourse unfolds, Languaging Diversity explores the wide theme of identity in discourse, an area of investigation which has become increasingly popular in recent years.
Balirano, Giuseppe / Nisco, Maria Cristina (eds) 2015. Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture. Napoli: Liguori Editore. ISBN: 978-88-207-6605-4., 2015
This book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpre... more This book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpretation of texts in diverse contexts of English. By investigating an array of different discourses, we aim to bring to the fore a variety of social and cultural representations and to illustrate the way in which represented participants are generally embedded in social, political, and cultural practices through and in the language. A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
Balirano, G. / Bamford, J. / Vincent, J. (eds) 2012. Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16(1-2) [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2035-8504., 2012
This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of persp... more This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of perspectives and methodological approaches mainly from within sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The empirically oriented papers analyse a range of different types of field-gathered authentic data and corpora, covering intra- and inter-language, intra- and inter-speaker variation, variously involving register, genre, stylistic, diaphasic, diatopical, diastratic and diachronic types of variation. The issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on language variation and its implications, highlighting its dynamic social and socio-psychological functions and meanings as well as some taxonomic and terminological issues.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. 2023. The Rainbow Conspiracy: A Corpus-Based Social Media Analysis of Anti-LGBTIQ+ Rhetoric in Digital Landscapes. In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation, pp. 306-324. London/New York: Routledge., 2023
This chapter explores online anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and the resulting claim that sexual diversit... more This chapter explores online anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and the resulting claim that sexual diversity runs counter to most mainstream, traditional, or religious values. Such narratives feed into the theory underlying an alleged disinformation crusade enacted across most social networking sites (see Balirano & Hughes 2020), whereby a secret, large-scale gay lobby, akin to the proverbial Trojan horse, is progressively infiltrating traditional family values with an aim to defile the entire human race. By investigating a corpus of online conspiracy-evoking texts collected from Twitter, this study offers a corpus-based social-media critical discourse approach to online fake news that serves to cast a conspiratorial shadow upon LGBTIQ+ communities. We posit that such dangerous anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses originating from manipulated news feeds and subsequently woven together across social networking sites may progressively lead to the construction of an LGBTIQ+ conspiracy theory wreaking damage upon a sorely tried minority.
In Balirano, G. / Brondi, M. / Fruttaldo, A. (eds) 2021. Idee Cinematografiche Differenti: Il soggetto cinematografico come strumento di declinazione della diversità. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore, pp. 7-12, 2021
Il seguente volume vuole essere un diario sotto forma di raccolta dei frutti dell’esperienza arti... more Il seguente volume vuole essere un diario sotto forma di raccolta dei frutti dell’esperienza artistica e di formazione nata dalla convenzione stipulata fra il Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario I-LanD e la Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE) per la progettazione e lo sviluppo di Idee Cinematografiche Differenti, residenza artistica proposta dal Centro di Ricerca vincitrice del bando “Per Chi Crea”, finanziato dalla SIAE e il Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. 2020. Fat Chance! Digital Critical Discourse Studies on Discrimination Against Fat People. In Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. (eds), Homing in on Hate: Critical Discourse Studies of Hate Speech, Discrimination and Inequality in the Digital Age. Naples: Paolo Loffredo Editore, 2020
Balirano, G. 2020. Traduire la proxémie masculine dans la représentation du crime organisé napolitain: le ‘rendu’ audiovisuel dans Gomorrah - The Series. In Caliendo, G. / Oster, C. (eds), Traduire la criminalité, pp. 127-151. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion., 2020
Ce chapitre a pour objectif d’étudier la perception à l’étranger des images des hommes de la camo... more Ce chapitre a pour objectif d’étudier la perception à l’étranger des images des hommes de la camorra (membres du syndicat du crime napolitain) qui ont récemment proliféré dans le monde entier grâce à la diffusion de films, de séries et de programmes télévisés et de leurs adaptations audiovisuelles. Notre analyse se concentrera ici sur un corpus multimodal limité : la série télévisée Gomorra (diffusée en Italie en 2014 et 2015), un des exemples les plus récents illustrant la manière dont les médias peuvent contribuer à la construction des connaissances du public. Gomorra met en scène les règles implicites qui régissent la camorra, très différentes des pratiques typiques de la mafia telles qu’elles sont représentées dans des productions américaines antérieures. La série bouscule ainsi la formule hollywoodienne traditionnelle du film de gangsters. Lors de son déplacement vers des contextes étrangers par le biais des sous-titres anglais (les producteurs ont vendu la série à plus de trente pays, dont les États-Unis) ce produit multimodal à fort contenu culturel semble avoir trahi d’importantes entités de sens – également appelées références culturelles spécifiques ou CSR (Culture-Specific References). Les CSR de la camorra sont difficilement transférables en traduction car elles imposent des contraintes extrêmement problématiques aux traducteursadaptateurs audiovisuels, qui doivent faire traverser à ce produit la frontière des langues et des cultures au niveau visuel et verbal (Chiaro 2008 : 156).
Balirano, G. / Rasulo, M. 2019. "'You're only as good as your last tweet...': Academic Self-Branding and Knowledge Dissemination". In Maci, S.M. / Sala, M. (eds), Representing and Redefining Specialised Knowledge: Variety in LSP, pp. 31-62. Bergamo: CERLIS Series., 2019
This study is part of an ongoing investigation into what we would like to identify as a unique, a... more This study is part of an ongoing investigation into what we would like to identify as a unique, and so far underexplored, form of knowledge dissemination by means of online academic bionotes. By focusing on academic online identity construction, we intend to highlight the core discursive mechanisms underlying such a practice as well as differentiate specific features from more familiar ones characterising general social networking public profiles (Fitzpatrick 2015). Although a relatively new convention in the academic workplace, the practice of scholars crafting their own academic identity through online personal branding has been gaining momentum during the past decade. This is mainly due to the rapidly changing world of work and the proliferation of online social networking sites (SNS) which have blurred the boundaries between work and personal lives (Garzone 2015; Duffy/Pooley 2017). With the Web becoming a workplace, where involvement in networking practices and the construction of a social presence are no longer a choice, scholars are now seriously reflecting on the importance of defining personal branding tools for the dual purpose of individual advancement and knowledge dissemination. Consequently, by exploring scholarly knowledge sharing practices occurring on academic SNSs, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the social construction of academic identity overlaps and interdiscursively blends together with previously investigated and more traditional processes of disciplinary knowledge dissemination (KD) (Hyland 2012a, 2015). This study, in fact, is taking a broader approach to KD by using Hyland’s own perspective as a starting point, especially when he argues that: "In pursuing their professional goals and constructing knowledge, academics engage with others, and because of this, discourses carry assumptions about knowledge, relationships and how this should be structured and negotiated" (Hyland 2012a: 175). Hence, our approach explores these renegotiated discourses as enacted by renewed digital knowledge sharing practices such as those occurring in dynamic Web 3.0 environments. To this end, the investigation is based on the analysis of a multimodal corpus comprising a collection of profiles crafted by university scholars and posted on the academic social networking site (ASNS) known as Acadmia.edu. This platform, which is not an educationally affiliated organization, foregrounds the entrepreneurial mission of “accelerating the world’s research”3 as it is essentially designed for academics whose main intention is to share research papers and interests as well as other general information concerning affiliation and academic engagements. Also part of Academia.edu’s mission is to afford scholars the opportunity to monitor the impact of their research through deep analytics (Price 2012) while tracking the work of other academics they choose to follow (Thelwall/Kousha 2014). Established in 2008 in San Francisco by Richard Price as part of the Open Science movement, to date, Academia.edu is reported having nearly 31,000,000 registered account-holders contributing over 20 million papers and attracting nearly 26 million unique visitors a month. Against this backdrop, it is quite evident that data collected from ASNSs are of major interest for linguistic exploration, mainly owing to the impact that the above-mentioned academic social networking practices may have on how language is devised and packaged in order to facilitate knowledge dissemination. For the purpose of shedding light on this still grey area of language innovation, the online profiles collected from the Academia.edu site are the object of this study as they comprise multimodal instantiations of both knowledge dissemination and self-branding resources.
Balirano, G. / Guzzo, S. 2019. “Introduction”. In Balirano, G. / Guzzo, S. (eds), Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes, pp. xvii–xxii. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-030-11152-6., 2019
The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addres... more The present volume explores a variety of takes from linguistic and cultural points of view addressing food and food practices in cross-cultural contact, more specifically looking at changes brought about by diasporic circumstances. All contributions in the volume approach food and its discourse realization indeed as a way to investigate an understudied area of linguistics, that is, the relationship between language and migration, or diaspora, specifically through discourses on food. Taking as a given the significance of food practices, their psychologically and socially fundamental role in shaping one’s cultural and/or individual identities, just as that of one’s first language, the volume presents various linguistic and cultural readings of food as an instrument to explore diasporic identities. From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are: 1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other? 2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. 2018. “Introduction - ‘Miss Man’: Does the Gendered Body Matter?”. In Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds), Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies, pp. vii-xii. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. , 2018
This book draws together chapters that contain original interdisciplinary research and offer a ra... more This book draws together chapters that contain original interdisciplinary research and offer a range of critical perspectives on some linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of recent contrasting debates about gender non-conforming people, including different ways of ‘doing’ masculinity. It may seem surprising that the contributors to this volume are all from Italy, a country with a strong humanistic and philosophic tradition, but also a land of mind-boggling contradictions. It is, indeed, not widely acknowledged that Italy is the country where the first university record booklet for transgender students – which identifies the gender they choose – was issued, long before transgender people were granted legal recognition on official documents by the Government. Yet, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica has recently reported a sad episode about a group of young students bullying a twelve-year-old schoolmate for being gay (Moreno 2017). Ivan, the boy who was repeatedly bullied and cyberbullied, wrote in a beautiful ‘liberating’ school-essay: “Sono diverso, non sbagliato” (‘I am different, not wrong’). Needless to say, Ivan lives in a country where being gay is still a difficult stigma, and where part of the Catholic Church is still convinced that policies of gender create ‘transhuman beings’ (Rodari 2015). Such contradictory practices result from the fact that, at the time of writing, much of the sensitive action, which was won by several liberation movements, is bearing the brunt of a Catholic and right-wing backlash against being ‘politically correct’, or simply human, when addressing gender non-conforming policies. The editors’ original idea was to directly contest the several constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry and (hopefully) social change through discussions relating to gender in linguistic, literary, artistic, and cultural contexts. It is a large and challenging project, and it is one that our contributors have embraced, with somewhat mixed but remarkable results.
Balirano, G. / Baker, P. 2018. “Introduction – Queer Masculinities: By Way of Introduction”. In Balirano, G. / Baker, P. (eds), Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture, pp. 1-17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. , 2018
This collection brings together diverse experiences, views, and studies stemming from original in... more This collection brings together diverse experiences, views, and studies stemming from original interdisciplinary research on different linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in new and old media. It is a timely contribution towards ongoing research on changing representations of men and masculinities in contemporary academic studies. Each of the self-contained chapters in the volume is bound into a specific frame of reference enhancing a series of examinations on the ways that masculinities intersect with queer identities and practices. The diverse authors who contributed to the book have analysed the representation of “queer” social actors from the perspective of gender studies, with the benefit of approaches and insights from masculinity and queer studies, linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics. Queering masculinities aims to promote a range of integrated approaches, particularly those relating to emerging ways of signifying contemporary masculinities and relating constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices within English-speaking contexts by addressing issues concerning gender in linguistic, literary, social, and cultural contexts. Hence, the book entails several analytical approaches spanning from critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis to literary criticism and anthropological and social research.
Balirano, G. 2017. “Who’s Afraid of Conchita Wurst? Drag Performers and the Construction of Multimodal Prosody”. In Sindoni, M.G. / Wildfeuer, J. / O’Halloran, K. (eds), Mapping Multimodal Performance Studies, pp. 154-179. London/New York: Routledge. , 2017
This chapter explores some semiotic modes and resources employed in the live performances of drag... more This chapter explores some semiotic modes and resources employed in the live performances of drag queens with the purpose of decoding those non-linguistic factors that seem to play a major role in the construction of gender queer identities in the media. The media considerably shape social attitudes and learning, specifically recurring images, juxtaposed with positive contexts, on TV screens may boost social change in society. The wide spectrum of nonverbal behavioral cues that gender bender performers display in their live shows, such as body orientation, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, vocalisation, posture, vestemics, etc., can be read as important behavioral indicators. They contribute to help the audience understand and prime, beyond the face value of the words, affective, emotional and in particular social aspects of the interactions the non-binary performers intend to construe. The semiotic investigation of the dominant trope of gender variation in contemporary live performances may shed light to the novel representations and discursive constructions of alternative forms of non-hegemonic gender and heteronormativity in social and cultural contexts. From a methodological viewpoint, this chapter, by exploring the nature of systemic functional representation through Kress and van Leeuwen’s semioticisation of Halliday’s ideational, textual and representational metafunctions, intends to critically analyse contemporary discourses on gender through the analysis of the re-semioticisation of semantic prosody into ‘semiotic prosody’ of minor gendered social actors. The multimodal gendered discourses under scrutiny aim at the deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity through complex semiotic propositions, which, at a first analysis, seem to display ‘live narrative processes’ embedded in highly figurative Reactional processes.
Balirano, G. 2017. "TransAzioni Linguistiche: Le Lingue e il Genere Negato". In Ricci, D. / Da Silva, F.M. (eds), Repensar o Feminino em Contexto Lusófono e Italiano, pp. 215-228. Lisbona: Edizioni CLEPUL/Universidade de Lisboa., 2017
The study of non-binary gender individuals has become a recurring and very fashionable topic with... more The study of non-binary gender individuals has become a recurring and very fashionable topic within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse analysis. Despite the different methodological approaches, all studies seem to aptly underline the importance of two key-concepts: ideology and negotiation practices. Scholars acknowledge that concepts such as sexuality and gender are, indeed, largely informed by the crucial interrelation of power and ideology. Many transgender and gender variant people face problems in daily life because of the lack of negotiation practices and subsequent human rights recognition via European legal procedures. Trans people’s legal documents, for instance, do not reflect their true ‘self’ and this is still today a repeated source of ‘authorised’ harassment based on ideology. However, gender recognition goes beyond being an administrative act: it is vital for many trans people to be able to participate in society and live a life of dignity and respect. This paper, aiming to support trans rights from a translational view point, presents the analysis of a wide multilingual corpus which comprises a series of EU legal recommendations (in several European languages) adopted by the European Parliament to fully endorse gender equality and to undertake the creation of guidelines for gender-neutral language in each of its official languages. Despite the EU’s incredible efforts, the corpus shows that in some European languages, ideology and the total lack of common linguistic practices to be adopted by translators, transgender and gender variant people’s human rights are still in danger.
Balirano, G. / Nisco, M.C. 2016. “A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Refugee in EU Legal Texts”. In Tessuto, G. / Bhatia, V.K. / Garzone, G. / Salvi, R. / Williams, C. (eds), Constructing Legal Discourses and Social Practices, pp. 106-127. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. , 2016
This chapter informs the reader about the significant progress made in EU countries, where a vari... more This chapter informs the reader about the significant progress made in EU countries, where a variety of legislative and non-legislative instruments have been made to ensure fundamental rights and regulate migration flows. Despite these significant inroads, the authors maintain, there seems to be an increasing tension between general human rights and the specific interests of each Member State at a time when the EU is striving to cooperate for the creation of a common asylum system to promote solidarity, provide protection and integration for asylum seekers, and implement and support practical cooperation among all Member States. This scenery allows the authors to narrow down to the specific topic in their case under analysis and to examine the institutionalized language of the EU case-law constructed and used mainly through judgments and opinions, dealing with the intricate issue of EU refugees. Using the methodological framework for corpus-based discourse analysis, this chapter thus looks at the most salient linguistic patterns emerging from the discursive construction of refugees within the chosen texts. While uncovering an unsafe process of social and political transformation with contradictory priorities, power struggles and contrasting ideological influences, the authors argue for such texts to also signal dangerous relations of inclusion and exclusion which foster an authorial and hegemonic type of EU legal discourse.
Balirano, G. 2015. “Framing Identities in Advertising: Multimodal Discourse Analysis”. In Balirano, G. / Nisco, M.C. (eds), Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture, pp. 2-40. Napoli: Liguori Editore. , 2015
This chapter explores the theoretical framework used in social semiotic studies through some anal... more This chapter explores the theoretical framework used in social semiotic studies through some analytical instantiations based on the Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) of issues connected to gender and race in advertising. By means of a discursive/social semiotic perspective, print adverts are here investigated as a global discourse worthy of critical investigation. In particular, the exploitation of the human body, in promotional discourses, is seen as having an important role in the construction of gendered and racial identity representation. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s ground-breaking volume, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), the chapter does not aim, however, to present a complete and exhaustive account or theory of visual grammar. Rather, it simply attempts to introduce some rudimentary visual elements that can be used to classify iconic images and, especially, verifiably detect the visual means adopted in the mediated construction of stereotyped gendered and racial identities. My main aim is to observe and analyse the different types of identities construed in promotional discourse from a diachronic perspective, paying particular attention to the way the representation of the human body is used as a semiotic resource as well as a promotional strategy. After a preliminary methodological overview of the underpinning theories informing this chapter, which briefly range from Halliday’s SFL to recent developments in the field of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, a practical recapitulating grid for establishing some important criteria in the analysis of ‘semiotic metafunctions’ is provided in paragraph 2. The VINCorpus, a diachronic multimodal corpus of magazine and newspaper ads comprising print ads produced from the 40s to the 60s in the Anglophone contexts of Britain, the US and Canada, is introduced and analysed in the third paragraph. The MMDA of three ‘vintage’ print adverts highlights the strict connection between advertising and the way promotional discourses are culturally dependent and able to influence important aspects of social practice. In particular, a diachronic approach to the biased construction of identities in ads proves to be very informative to contemporary society’s understanding of the resilience, whether intentional or not, of gender and racial prejudice still perpetrated in our cultures and societies today. Indeed, if such strict categories of gender and race are still upheld, despite “a kind of stubborn ‘weight’ of history” (Pitcher, 2014: 145), within complex and complicated discourses of injustices and inequalities, power and hegemony, it then becomes compulsory to persistently reiterate how gendered and racial stereotypes keep on construing negative meanings in social representations.
Balirano, G. 2015. “Language, Identity and Diversity”. In Balirano, G. / Nisco, M.C. (eds) 2015. Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses, pp. 325-331. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing., 2015
Our initial aim, when assembling this volume, was to bring a small contribution to the investigat... more Our initial aim, when assembling this volume, was to bring a small contribution to the investigation of the far-reaching concepts of diversity and identity in emerging discourse(s) on Otherness. As we see it, one of the main and most difficult tasks of linguistic research today is to understand and describe the nature of these concepts and the theoretical speculations which gravitate around them. We thus planned to investigate ‘diversity’ and ‘identity’ in discourse and in any form of linguistic and semiotic representation, in other words, we set out to effectively examine the way we 'language’ them. Overall, previous linguistic research in the vast field of diversity, or more recently ‘super-diversity', and identity presents a significant backdrop for tackling multifaceted issues in the area of social justice and injustice, representation and/or discrimination within contemporary societies, institutions and organisations. However, although several discourses on immigration, racism, ethnicity, (post)nationalism and gender are increasingly debated topics in our Western societies and in the academic world, we believe that the wide domain(s) of diversity studies seem to be inevitably informed by contradictory theoretical, political and academic speculations, to the point that the very term diversity often presents diverse acceptations (see Vincent’s Prologue; and Zanca, in this volume). It is also, however, widely employed to variously express an idea, a classification, or a whole apparatus for ‘disciplining’ identities (Ahmed 2012; Foldy 2002; Nkomo and Stewart 2006).
Balirano, G. / Nisco, M.C. 2013. "Identity and the Linguistic Construction of Space and Place in Diasporic Films: the DesiCorpus". In Salvi, R. / Bowker, J. (eds), Space, Time and the Construction of Identity, pp. 143-164. Bern: Peter Lang., 2013
Balirano, G. 2010. “Ponti di Passaggio tra Eredità della Perdita e Eredi della Sconfitta: Kiran Desai in Translazione”. In Palusci, O. (ed.), Traduttrici: Questioni di Gender nelle Letterature in Lingua Inglese, pp. 241-250. Napoli: Liguori., 2010
The Inheritance of Loss (2006) di Kiran Desai, scrittrice alternativa, è un esempio di trans(l)az... more The Inheritance of Loss (2006) di Kiran Desai, scrittrice alternativa, è un esempio di trans(l)azione postcoloniale che nell’evocare la malinconia della perdita traduce i collegamenti invisibili che legano due mondi (e culture): India e Stati Uniti. La trans(l)azione di Desai-figlia rompe il tipico rapporto tra confini-limiti-appartenenze spazio-temporali presentando l’emergere irrompente di voci solitamente escluse dalla storia ufficiale. Il romanzo narra/rappresenta/traduce le diverse identità attraverso tecniche di appropriazione ed abrogazione, atti identitari e resistenza linguistico-culturale con il fine ultimo di ri-allocare, ri-localizzare, ri-radicare la lingua che ospita – l’inglese – che diventa al contempo lingua di partenza e lingua d’arrivo. Questo studio analizza, in particolare, le strategie linguistiche adoperate nella traduzione del romanzo in italiano che costituiscono “un ponte di passaggio su cui trasportare non più di quanto l'armatura ci permetta”.
Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. 2008. “Redrawing the Map of an Enlarged European Id-Entity”. In Di Martino, G. / Polese, V. / Solly, M. (eds), Identity and Culture in English Domain-Specific Discourse, pp. 111-134. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane., 2008
The paper deals with the discursive and multimodal resources employed to construct the EU configu... more The paper deals with the discursive and multimodal resources employed to construct the EU configuration of positions in relationship to ‘Europeanness’. It mainly focuses on the description and examination of the various communicative modalities and practices used by the EU to form and further a pan-European identity. We have paid particular attention to the communicative strategies adopted by the EUROPA website. In many ways, these persuasive and self-legitimating strategies are amongst the most traditional of rhetorical devices, but as so often, the medium is the message: the adoption of new communicative technologies is shown to be both an appropriate and powerful way of creating the new spaces, sets of values and voices on which new identities are necessarily based.
Balirano, G. 2008. “Learning a Foreign Language & the Human Brain: Neuroscience in Language Teaching”. In Pirozzi, M. (ed.), Neuroscience and Foreign Language: A Journey in the Human Brain, pp. 31-39. Caserta: Melogana., 2008
Balirano, G. 2007. “De-Stereotyping Otherness: A Multimodal Script Analysis of Humorous Visual Texts”. In Fairclough, N. / Cortese, G. / Ardizzone, P. (eds), Discourse Analysis and Contemporary Social Change, pp. 487-505. Bern: Peter Lang., 2007
Balirano, G. 2007. "Places of Difference, Spaces for ‘Otherness’: A Humorous Approach to the Construction of Post-National Identities”. In Jottini, L. / Del Luongo, G. / Douthwaite, J. (eds), Cityscapes: Islands of the Self, Linguistic Studies (Vol. 2), pp. 449-465. Cagliari: CUEC., 2007
Balirano, G. / Castaldi, F. 2004. “Blended Learning and TEFL Perspectives in a Multilingual Environment: Towards a Holistic Approach”. In Wilkinson, R. (ed.), Integrating Content and Language, pp. 218-226. Maastricht: Maastricht University Press., 2004
Balirano, G. / Mackenzie, J. / Zottola, A. 2024. The Discursive Construction of Contemporary Family Types: An Introduction. In Balirano, G. / Mackenzie, J. / Zottola, A. (eds), The Discursive Construction of Contemporary Family Types. de genere – Journal of literary, postcolonial and gender studi..., 2024
The traditional nuclear ideal of a cisgender, heterosexual mother and father giving birth to a ch... more The traditional nuclear ideal of a cisgender, heterosexual mother and father giving birth to a child through the fulfilment of marital duties has been central to definitions of family and parenthood for centuries.This view relies on normative discourses that define families according to heteronormative and binary conventions of marriage and procreation. In the last sixty years, social norms and expectations around partnership, family and child rearing have shiftedin many contexts, prompting a number of social, legal and political changes to family formations and practices. For example, in the UK the 2002 Adoption and Children Act meant that unmarried and same-sex couples could adopt children; since the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, same-sex and unmarried couples (including those who conceived via donor conception and/or surrogacy) have been able to apply for a parental order, and the 2014 Marriage (same-sex couples) Act led to state recognition of same-sex marriage. These changes have contributed to a steady rise in single and same-sex family formations (ONS 2022). Likewise in the United States and Canada, there have been notable legal and societal shifts concerning adoption, same-sex relationships, and reproductive rights, though challenges persist in the navigation of differing state and provincial laws. In the United States, many states now allow unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt children, anda 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Similarly, Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, leading to more inclusive adoption policies in many provinces. In both the U.S. and Canada, assisted reproductive technologies are generally accessible to unmarried and same-sex couples, although specific regulations may differ by state or province.
This paper aims to shed light on the impact of 'semiotic violence' on women in politics, emphasiz... more This paper aims to shed light on the impact of 'semiotic violence' on women in politics, emphasizing the importance of using language as a catalyst for positive social change in order to fight gender-based violence in all its manifestations. The study specifically investigates the role of the Manthropocene in perpetuating 'semiotic violence’ against women in politics, with a specific focus on the recent international media use of sexist language when addressing Finland’s first female Prime Minister, Sanna Mirella Marin. The analysis examines how gendered insults, slurs, and derogatory communication techniques are employed to undermine the political authority of the politician, thereby perpetuating discrimination and violence. Given this context, I argue that collective societal action is necessary to challenge and reject sexist attitudes and behaviours, including those facilitated through 'diamesic creativity'.
Balirano, G. 2020. Gender Troubles in Science Fiction TV Productions: The Queer Gaze in Star Trek. ContactZone 2: 103-119., 2020
The identity representation of non-binary and gender non-conforming people seems to have found fe... more The identity representation of non-binary and gender non-conforming people seems to have found fertile ground in TV Science Fiction which, since its early stages of genre development, has widely explored transgressive sexualities, transgender metamorphosis, transvestitism and androgyny. The Anglophone landscape of SF products embodies an ideal narrative tool through which it is not only possible to imagine alternative times and geographies but also the ‘non-place’, à la Augé (1995), where fluid identities of gender variant people, in their process of continuous transformation and reformulation, can be freely recognised as real entities. The SF subject is no longer seen as a coherent and unified being but becomes increasingly inevitably mutant, divided and dislocated and, as such, it freely participates in the process of linguistic change in unsemanticised contexts of use. In opposition to any kind of hateful discrimination leading to contemporary hate speech and the consequent creation of biases, fears and prejudices, trans and/or gender non-conforming people become the fully-fledged protagonists of contemporary SF televised narratives, playing main roles and integrating perfectly into fictional apocalyptic societies. The present paper explores and illustrates how, in the XXI-century Star Trek saga, in particular, the very notion of binary subjectivity, as described by the Cartesian cogito, slowly and timidly gives way to contemporary narratives of inclusion, leading to the creation of new characters who naturally inhabit the apocalyptic scenarios, through their often unstable and ‘de-gendered’ roles.
Balirano, G. 2021. Hinglish Goes Global: Indian Englishes in Diamesic Variation. Polygraphia 3: 45-57, 2021
The present study aims to explore the heterogeneous nature of Indian society with its powerful li... more The present study aims to explore the heterogeneous nature of Indian society with its powerful linguistic and cultural diversity. In particular, the study argues that IndEs, or ‘Indian English varieties’, rather than being the result of an externally imposed model based on previous colonial arrangements, have been primarily shaped by the typically Indian capacity of networking and communicating through media, literature, trade and the resulting adoption of multiple identities. Although ‘World Englishes’ scholars around the globe have paid little attention to the linguistic and cultural diamesic accommodations, these factors have played a fundamental role in the formation of the linguistic and semiotic features of IndEs both in India and in international contexts. Additionally, this paper presents and examines some multimodal modes and resources employed by Indian English speakers in order to communicate with both their fellows and with the rest of the English-speaking world through different media. To this end, the study will investigate the most recent mediascapes that have helped IndEs go viral furthering the complex process of ‘Indianization of English’ via diamesic change strategies.
Balirano, G. / Borba, R. 2021. The (Anti)gender Discourse of the Global Far-right. A Way of Introducing. In Balirano, G. / Borba, R. (eds), Re-defining Gender, Sexuality, and Discourse in the Global Rise of Right-wing Extremism. Anglistica AION 24 (1) [Special Issue]: 1-7, 2021
It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of... more It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of Anglistica AION pursues its aims. The contributions all contend a common denominator: the need to remain vigilant and steadfast when dealing with the far-right crusade against gender equality. In all the case studies in this issue, the essence of far-right resistance is embodied by a political agenda that aims to preserve heterocisnormative family ethics, traditional gender values, and the naturalised hierarchies of the conventional roles of men and women. It is against this background that the scholars whose work makes up this edited publication have approached the far-right centrality of gendered arguments and gendered policies. Through various well-established approaches in sociolinguistics (such as Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology to name but a few), each contribution analyses the importance of gender within far-right rhetoric, yielding subject matter that is both insightful and original.
Balirano, G. / Fruttaldo, A. 2021. The Representation of Camorra Ladies in AVT: Gomorrah – The Series and the Negotiation of Interpersonal Meanings across Cultures. Textus 34(1): 131-154, 2021
On the basis of Adler's (1975) concept of the 'dark side of emancipation' of women, the following... more On the basis of Adler's (1975) concept of the 'dark side of emancipation' of women, the following study reflects on the ideological implications that the shifts of interpersonal meanings in translation may bear on the construction of televised 'Camorra ladies'. Specific attention will be paid to the gender-related discourses of the source Neapolitan culture, and the way they are deliberately and often misleadingly re-crafted and re-stereotyped in AVT according to the target audience's pre-supposed cognitive models. The research uses data from the Gomorrah Project Corpus (GPC) comprising the Italian and English subtitles of the first 3 seasons of Gomorrah – The Series. The corpus, which is part of a larger research project, has been annotated to allow the identification of given linguistic traits that are peculiar to the female characters' idiolects in both the Italian subtitles and their English adaptation. Therefore, the analysis of such data will allow for a better understanding of the cultural repercussions in the translation of specific identity cues that are particularly related to the local criminal context represented in the TV series.
Balirano, G. 2020. Of Rainbow Unicorns: The Role of Bonding Queer Icons in Contemporary LGBTIQ+ Re-Positionings. Ocula 21(22): 46-60., 2020
Over the years, queer icons have in the main displayed a dual yet conflicting function: that of c... more Over the years, queer icons have in the main displayed a dual yet conflicting function: that of cautiously dissimulating reality, while blatantly representing it. This ambiguous play, with its geographical limits and contextual caveats, has provided LGBTIQ+ communities with spaces for the re-appropriation and abrogation of a number of male hegemonic imperatives. This line of action has, however, led to an idiosyncratic positioning since such a political practice may merely represent another marginal stance due to the persisting relation to the hegemonic itself. This paper, while analysing the proliferation of so-called queer iconic objects, will discuss the emerging concept of “bonding icons” and their inscription within an affiliation system as the active community enhancers of the new queer political agenda. The resulting resemiotised discourses seem to re-construct the queer “other” in various ways by reifying it into a similar and relatable “other” whose iconicity is able to provide reassurance and validation while evoking universal empathetic alignment.
Balirano, G. / Sicca, L.M. / Valerio, P. 2018. Editorial Note. In Balirano, G. / Sicca, L.M. / Valerio, P. (eds), Self-Narratives in Organizations: Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Experiences. puntOorg International Journal 3(1-2) [Special Issues]: 1-4., 2018
This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that conta... more This thematic issue of the puntOorg International Journal draws together contributions that contain, on the one hand, original multidisciplinary research offering a range of critical perspectives on different representations of gender in the context of recent and old conflicting discourses about transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people. On the other hand, the issue collects self-narratives from TGNC individuals who narrate their stories about working in organizations or businesses as transgender or gender non-conforming people, including (but not limited to) issues around transitioning and discrimination.
Balirano, G. 2017. De-Queering Proxemics in the Screen Adaptation of Camorra Male Dyads: A Multimodal Prosody Analysis. In Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. / Sambre, P. (eds), The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime. I-LanD Journal 1(1) [Special Issue]: 60-85., 2017
The recent TV screening of the Neapolitan camorra1 seems to be spreading a somewhat incorrect int... more The recent TV screening of the Neapolitan camorra1 seems to be spreading a somewhat incorrect interpretation of ‘queer masculinity’ in dyadic nonverbal interactions occurring between televised camorra mobsters. Such faux constructions of camorristi might result from the fact that cross-cultural differences in non-verbal forms of communication, realised in subtitled texts, are a major constraint for audio-visual translators in their task of adapting a complex multimodal product into other cultures/languages. Despite the significant attention scholars have recently devoted to the effect of TV coverage on viewers, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which male social actors involved in the Neapolitan crime syndicate have been discursively re-semiotised in English-speaking contexts. When non-verbal communication crosses national, cultural and linguistic boundaries via subtitling, some context-bound references and differences on non-verbal behavioural dimensions may prevent the full appreciation of the source text. In particular, the manner in which personal space is interpreted crossculturally, remains an unreadable culture-bound factor for the target audiences. This study seeks to confirm previous anthropological and linguistic research on personal space, an interesting academic field that has remained somewhat silent for a long period, and incorporates some of its insights into the analysis of audiovisual translation. With this in mind, this paper provides a multimodal integrated investigation of the perception of the TV drama series Gomorrah (produced in Italy and subtitled in English) outside the boundaries of Italy, looking at data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The study, which is a theoretical contribution to cross-cultural adaptation, employs “multimodal prosody” analysis in order to disambiguate the interpretation of camorristi proxemics and haptics as a queer representation.
Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. / Sambre, P. 2017. Introduction to the Special Issue. In Balirano, G. / Caliendo, G. / Sambre, P. (eds), The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures. I-LanD International Journal 1(1) [Special Issue]: 6-14., 2017
In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new in... more In this special issue, the guest editors bring together a selection of papers, which offer new insight into academic research on the representation of organised crime in different media outlets. This volume touches upon different criminal organisations and activities, taking into account genres and media where criminal actors and their public antagonists are discursively displayed. The guest editors’ original idea was to take explicitly into account, on the one hand, the multifaceted and evolving nature of crime groups and, on the other, the meaning-making processes that represent them through the media. Contrary to the discourse surrounding the subculture of criminals, the focus here is on the global public debate about organised crime syndicates and the social response to their wide array of criminal activities.
Balirano, G. / Chiaro, D. 2016. Queering Laughter? It Was Just a Joke!. In Balirano, G. / Chiaro, D. (eds), Humousexually Speaking: Laughter at the Intersections of Gender. de genere Journal 1(2) [Special Issue]: 1-9., 2016
Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function... more Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function of humour produced in, against and about gender variant communities of speakers, in both verbal and multimodal forms. The editors’ leading idea was to ignite an academic discussion on the several and often hidden ways through which humour succeeds in constantly strengthening and/or re-interpreting, but also dismantling, the social dimension of language. One of the possible results of such a political and social act is the fostering of the cultural exclusion of some gendered, or rather de-generated – as some discriminated groups tend to be commonly alleged to be – minority communities. Additionally, since humour may also work to signify the recurring upsetting of pre-established social beliefs through the systematic threatening of the familiar, the normative, and what is universally deemed as socially acceptable or “normal”, debates on any form of humorous self-representation of gendered identities were also vivid in the editors’ minds. In particular, it seemed fascinating to encouraging a discussion on the way LGBTI communities, just like other marginalised groups, would employ humour to support and reinforce their own in-group sense of community, by mocking typically stereotyped representations of gender variant people who laugh at and with themselves. Although LGBTI humour is still a very hot topic in our western world, one reason for the lack of a real academic confrontation on its social and political mechanisms resides in the very difficult challenge of defining it. Specifically, despite a convincing semantic linguistic theory of humour introduced by Raskin (1985) and later developed by Attardo (1994; 2001), the cultural mechanisms underlying some jokes laughing about human relationships by queering the scene, for instance, are still an unexplored topic.
Balirano, G. 2013. The Strange Case of the Big Bang Theory and Its Extra-Ordinary Italian audiovisual Translation: A Multimodal Corpus-Based Analysis. In Baños, R. / Bruti, S. / Zanotti, S. (eds), Corpus Linguistics and Audiovisual Translation. PERSPECTIVES 21(4) [Special Issue]: 563-576., 2013
The (ab)use of a highly scientific and quaintly specialised language characterises the American s... more The (ab)use of a highly scientific and quaintly specialised language characterises the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory as a geek-oriented production which, by means of its humorous multimodal discourse, seems to be addressed to a community of speakers who co-share the same lexicon, ideas and habits, i.e. mainly young nerds. However, while in the source text the humorous discourse is primarily construed around some geeky in-jokes, the Italian audiovisual dubbed product seems to completely change the context of situation, thus avoiding any reference to the specificity of the language of the source text. The result is a predictable failure to accommodate the humorous discourse of the American series, preventing the Italian audience a full appreciation of its subtle humour. By means of an integrated multimodal and corpus-based approach, this paper aims to introduce the ‘community factor’ in the analysis of joke typologies staged in AVT artefacts. A multimodal model, which takes into consideration semiotically expressed humour, is introduced here, with the aim of capturing some interesting instantiations of the humorous discourse and specialised language which need to be re-allocated in the target product.
Balirano, G. / Hughes, B. 2012. Identity-Building and Language Variation in AVT. In Balirano, G. / Bamford, J. / Vincent, J. (eds), Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16(1-2) [Special Issue]: 27-39., 2012
This paper addresses the problem of dubbing linguistic variation in general, and ethnically marke... more This paper addresses the problem of dubbing linguistic variation in general, and ethnically marked varieties in particular. The small corpus under scrutiny in the article is the Italian film dubbing of Eat Pray Love (2010), with particular attention paid to how Elizabeth Gilbert’s speech and cultural identity are rendered in the target version. The authors identify diastratic, diatopic and diachronic types of variation in the Italian dubbed version, as well as foreign accents present in the original - completely neutralised in the Italian version - and analyse them in an attempt to identify the connotative implications they present to the different target viewers. By examining what they have termed the “re-routing strategy” employed when an Audio-Visual Translation product presents culture-bound and multilingual constraints, they attempt to illustrate that the original skopos of the source text undergoes considerable modification when ‘crossing over’ to the Italian dubbed version.
Balirano, G. / Bamford, J. / Vincent, J. 2012. Editors’ Introduction. In Balirano, G. / Bamford, J. / Vincent, J. (eds), Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16(1-2) [Special Issue]: 1-7., 2012
This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of persp... more This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of perspectives and methodological approaches mainly from within sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The empirically oriented papers analyse a range of different types of field-gathered authentic data and corpora, covering intra- and inter-language, intra- and inter-speaker variation, variously involving register, genre, stylistic, diaphasic, diatopical, diastratic and diachronic types of variation. The issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on language variation and its implications, highlighting its dynamic social and socio-psychological functions and meanings as well as some taxonomic and terminological issues.
Balirano, G. / Guzzo, S. 2011. The Anglo-Italian Ethnolect as a Means of Identity Formation in Computer Mediated Cross-Communication. RILA: Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 43(1-2): 137-159., 2011
This paper focuses on the impact that some linguistic strategies employed by a specific ethnic gr... more This paper focuses on the impact that some linguistic strategies employed by a specific ethnic group involved in Computer Mediated Discourse (CMD) may have in fostering the process of identity (de)/formation, and/or in the creation of particular speech cyber-communities such as the large Anglo-Italian community on Facebook. Earlier analyses of Anglo-Italian speech in the UK show phonological realisations, especially among the 3rd generation adolescents, highly untypical of Southern England (Guzzo 2007; 2010). These findings led us to question whether other variable features of online English in worldly contexts, such as that of Facebook groups, could reveal similar patterns in the language of Anglo-Italian community members. More specifically, can such a specific context as CMD influence the language use of the Anglophone Italians abroad? Is there a specific ethnolect Italians tend to use on the Internet in order to mould their own cyber-community and/or cyber-identity? Can we identify some specific linguistic variables in the way the cyber-participants Italianise and/or Anglicise the above-mentioned ethnolect? Our multidisciplinary study investigates a specific type of diamesic variation in its social and mediated interaction in asynchronous communication. We posit that the ethnic group involved in any CMD process is led towards the inevitable loss of a more general, (post)national identity while promoting the creation of a cyber-identity in a virtual cross-cultural setting.
Balirano, G. 2009. Towards a Turkish eu.entity: A Semiotic Approach to the Reading of EUROPA’s Website Cyber-Representation of a European Turkey. In Vasta, N. / Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (eds), Identity Construction and Positioning in Discourse and Society. Textus 22(1) [Special Issue]: 179-198., 2009
The purpose of this paper is to investigate some multisemiotic practices of persuasion employed b... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate some multisemiotic practices of persuasion employed by the EUROPA Website1 (EW) to enlarge, shape and reframe the foundations of a European identity. It is argued here that such persuasive practices make use of discursive strategies typical of so-called “self-constituting” discourse (Maingueneau 1999) as a means, in the hands of the architects of an enlarged European Union, to influence the representation of reality in order to create consensus around a European Turkey. Indeed, via the multimodal meaning-making strategies enacted on the EW, the EU seems to foster the construction of a European Turkish identity. In order to identify carefully planned, verbal-visual marks of the EU’s self-constituting discourse, a multimodal analysis will be attempted of the documents contained in the EW’s Enlargement Section, 2 and of its visual representation of Turkey in particular. Moreover, the inherently polysemous nature of visual communication can be seen to be a fundamental factor in discerning the way EU “netizens” are affected by the cyber-representation of Turkey as a candidate country. By exploiting different modalities beyond the purely linguistic system, icons, symbols, and several other visual elements seem to introduce and manipulate different degrees of truth (van Leeuwen 2005: 160-162) which play a key function in the EW’s promotional discourse. Indeed, this type of discourse construes a fabricated EU-entity (Balirano and Caliendo, forthcoming) which includes Turkey as a “European Turkey”. The following analysis will attempt to shed some light on the thorny question of the “cultural compatibility” between Turkey and Europe; the compatibility of social and cultural values should, in fact, be the primary concern of EU identity formation policy. Nevertheless, the EU, by mainly addressing the aspects of “political conditionality”, seems to hide/conceal/avoid the important issue of cultural compatibility which still puzzles, or rather worries, many Europeans when considering the accession of Turkey (Fox Ozkan 2001; Tekin 2008). The EW’s deliberate ambiguity on some aspects of Turkey’s cultural compatibility is subservient to a European-controlled interpretation of the truth by means of documents, images and signs about Turkey cunningly displayed in the official website. In this article I will try to highlight, in particular, how, in a broader intersemiotic sense, institutional manipulation may also be exercised with pictures, photos, and the like (van Leeuwen 2005; for a general discussion of manipulative and deceptive ways, see also Krzyz˙anowski and Oberhuber 2007; Vincent Marrelli 2004; Weiss 2002; van Dijk 1997, 2000a, 2000b; Wodak 2001).
Balirano, G. 2008. Indian Diasporic Aesthetics as a Form of Translation. In Ciocca, R. / Laudando, M. (eds), Indiascapes: Images and Words from Globalised India. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12(2) [Special Issue]: 87-96., 2008
Indian diasporic creativity, although exclusively produced in one “source” language, English, se... more Indian diasporic creativity, although exclusively produced in one “source” language, English, seems to rely on some techniques typically used in translation. Translation studies have indeed recognized that in every act of translation the source text is inevitably transformed. This form of transformation in postcolonial productions is mainly realised by the employment of specific linguistic devices with the aim of representingthe lives and adventures of diasporic characters who, rather than speaking English, are portrayed as dubbed or translated into English. Therefore, new questions are inevitably raised about the original and the adapted version, the source and the target, the text and the context, the content and form of Indian diasporic aesthetics. The paper focuses on some Desi creative features employed to de-colonize culture from both the Western ex-colonizers and the more ‘traditional’, national or even post-national cultures which deny the importance of hybrid productions by marginalizing them. A multimodal analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and its homonymous filmic translation by Mira Nair (2007), is aimed at decoding typical Desi media practices and discourse(s) as new forms of narration in diasporic representations.
Balirano, G. / Corduas, M. 2008. Detecting Semiotically Expressed Humor in Diasporic TV Productions. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21(3): 227-251., 2008
In this article, we suggest a semiotic approach to the study of visual humorous texts. Our method... more In this article, we suggest a semiotic approach to the study of visual humorous texts. Our method is based on the multimodal script analysis, which is a useful tool for examining not only verbal texts but also more complex texts, which combine the presence of images and sounds with verbally expressed humor. The resulting framework highlights how some visual comic mechanisms may enhance a different perception of semiotically expressed humor. Moreover, we present a statistical model in order to detect and measure how the resolution of some incongruities may also be determined by specific variables, which help to establish the existence and the strength with which the appreciation of humor varies according to the ethnic group of origin. In particular, the study analyzes the clip ‘Jodhpur Station, 1947’ from a very popular British Asian sketch-show, Goodness Gracious Me (GGM). The sketch shares some similar features with the narrative strategies typical of joke-tellers and is characterized by a complex humorous apparatus depending on different levels of understanding relating to encyclopedic, cross-cultural, and even diasporic knowledge of the world.
Balirano, G. 2006. Humourless Indians? A Multidisciplinary Approach to ‘Diasporic’ Humour in Ethnic Media Productions. In Vincent, J. / Porcelli, G. (eds), English and Technology. Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10(1-2) [Special Issue]: 293-313., 2006
This paper investigates the possibility of identifying the hybrid concept of ‘diasporic humour’ t... more This paper investigates the possibility of identifying the hybrid concept of ‘diasporic humour’ through the analysis of the Brit-Asian TV series Goodness Gracious Me! (GGM) produced and aired by BBC2 in 1998, which was very favourably received – on a very large scale –by the British public. In order to define Diasporic Humour, I have focused on the multimodal linguistic analysis of a short visual humorous sequence from the sketch-show, attempting to locate some linguistic and, in particular, pragmatic strategies underlining the rationale behind the political and social importance that GGM’s kind of humour achieves in the creation of a post-national, hybrid identity.
Balirano, G. / Corduas, M. 2006. Statistical Methods for the Linguistic Analysis of a Humorous Sketch Show. Quaderni di Statistica, 8: 101-124., 2006
In this article some statistical methods are applied to analyse a humorous TV sketch show, Goodne... more In this article some statistical methods are applied to analyse a humorous TV sketch show, Goodness Gracious Me! The typical text and corpus analysis based on the frequency and distribution of individual words or on recurrent phraseology can only provide a first descriptive insight into a humorous TV product. In addition to text features, two other aspects must be considered: the presence of verbal and visual humorous stances and the way the audience perceive them. The article describes the results from the textual analysis of the show and from a survey study concerning the opinions of viewers on the type of humour which characterizes this particular TV programme.
[Book Review] Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Cristina Nisco (eds), Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture, Napoli, Liguori Editore, 2015; 240 pp., €24.64
Book review of Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Cristina Nisco (eds), Language, Theory & Society: Essa... more Book review of Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Cristina Nisco (eds), Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture, Napoli, Liguori Editore, 2015; 240 pp., €24.64
Balirano, G. 2014. Warning and Information System for Humanitarian Emergency Strategies., 2014
Translation into English of the final report on the design of an information and analysis system ... more Translation into English of the final report on the design of an information and analysis system for assessing the vulnerability of countries and the risk of humanitarian crises. Commissioned and published by 'Save the Children'. London (UK).
Transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals are often on the receiving end of discri... more Transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals are often on the receiving end of discrimination and unfair treatment in the workplace, which can even escalate to violence or complete rejection. Davis (2009), for instance, has highlighted how many TGNC workers feel that their workplace is unsafe or inhospitable. Notwithstanding these difficulties, TGNC people are able to tap into significant personal and collective resources in order to protect themselves from the negative effects of discrimination (Law et al., 2011).In order to better understand the personal and work-related processes linked with being in the workplace as a TGNC individual, it is important to give voice directly to those who live and experience this reality. This is why puntOorg International Journal is collecting self narratives from TGNC individuals who want to tell their stories working in organizations or businesses as transgender or gender non-conforming people, including (but not limited to) issues a...
Call for abstracts Languaging Diversity 2018 (University of Leuven, Antwerp [Belgium]): EXTENDED ... more Call for abstracts Languaging Diversity 2018 (University of Leuven, Antwerp [Belgium]): EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 May 2018 Dear colleagues, Due to several requests, we extended the deadline of the call for papers for the 5th International Conference Languaging Diversity 2018 which will take place at the University of Leuven, Antwerp (Belgium) from Thu 27th September to Sat 29th September 2018. New deadline for abstract submission: 15 May 2018. Following the four successful events hosted by the Universities of Naples (2013), Catania (2014), Macerata (2016) and Cagliari (2017), where topics such as diversity, alterity, power and social class have been explored with reference to gender, ethnicity and culture, we bring the Languaging Diversity Conference series outside the boundaries of Italy. The theme of the conference this year is Discourse and Diversity in the Global City, with a focus on discourse and urban globalisation.
Anglistica AION: An interdisciplinary journal, 2020
Anglistica AION: An interdisciplinary journal
International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for Paper... more Anglistica AION: An interdisciplinary journal International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for Papers for the Special Issue: "Re-Defining Gender, Sexuality, and Discourse in the Global Rise of Right-Wing Extremism"
Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Rodrigo Borba
Description: This forthcoming issue of Anglistica AION (http://bit.ly/37rcesY) aims to present a systematic consideration of the political agenda and discourses of contemporary right-wing extremist movements by looking at the discursive (de)constructions of gender and gender non-conforming developments, in the distant but associated contexts of Europe and Latin America. In particular, the editors are interested in bringing to the fore not only the recurring right-wing extremist discourses on the building of transnational networking but above all the ways and reasons these networks choose their specific victims/targets in an analogous transnational way. The contributors will, therefore, analyse the contemporary right-wing extremist tendencies to redefine and often arrest gender developments in the multimodal discourses such movements craftily construct. This edited volume, in fact, intends to investigate the linguistic and semiotic practices enacted by right-wing extremist groups, politicians, institutions, organizations and movements within a gender-specific perspective. All papers will look at right-wing extremist discourses and counter-discourses on gender and sexuality with a view to understanding their constitution in order to highlight the challenges they pose to democracies. Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to: - The discursive strategies used by right-wing extremists to canvass the population's support against gender equity; - The discursive and semiotic infrastructure of fake news on gender and sexuality and their role constituting disinformation orders and moral panic; - The reconfiguration of what is politically doable and sayable in the public sphere and its relation with processes of de-democratization; - The production of affective polarization through rhetorics of division in which gender and sexuality take centre stage; - The discursive production of concepts such as 'gender ideology', 'gender theory', 'genderism', 'gender lobby' and their material effects on a variety of contexts (e.g., politics, education, foreign affairs, the media, etc.); - The transnational circulation of right-wing extremist discourses and ideologies against gender equity and sexual liberation and how they are localized within specific national borders; - The intersections of racism, xenophobia, sexism, ableism, homophobia and other oppressive discourses within right-wing extremism; - The production of counter-discourses and practices of resistance to right-wing extremist anti-gender and anti-LGBTIQ+ stance; - The repurposing of progressive vocabulary (e.g., gender, freedom of speech, human rights, etc.) in order to advance reactionary worldviews. The global rise of the far-right with its ensuing strategies and political consequences currently stands as a crucial issue that cuts across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. This special issue is particularly interested in the discursive and linguistic dimensions of this phenomenon. Understanding the infrastructure of far-right discourses requires an interdisciplinary spectrum of approaches which includes, but is not limited to, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, political discourse analysis, queer linguistics, among others.
Submission of abstracts: Authors wishing to contribute to this issue are invited to send an abstract of their proposed article of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in MS Word format by 1 April 2020 to Giuseppe Balirano (gbalirano@unior.it) and Rodrigo Borba (rodrigoborba@letras.ufrj.br) [CC anglistica@unior.it].
Important dates: Deadline for abstracts: 1 April 2020 Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2020 Deadline for completed articles: 31 July 2020
ContactZone
Journal of the Italian Association on Science Fiction and the Fantastic
Call for Pa... more ContactZone Journal of the Italian Association on Science Fiction and the Fantastic
Call for Papers for the Special Issue: "Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives"
Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Oriana Palusci
The representation of transgressive sexuality, transgender metamorphosis, transvestite and androgynous characters has been widely explored in the genre of Science Fiction since its early beginnings. This special issue aims at investigating the identity representation of gender, including that of ‘non-binary’ characters, in literary sci-fi, considered as the ideal narrative tool through which it is not only possible to imagine alternative times and geographies, but also those ‘non-places’ where fluid identities of gender non-conforming people, in their ongoing process of transformation and reformulation, can be freely recognised as real and possible entities. Beyond any form of discrimination, disseminated by means of emerging hate discourses that generate stereotypes, fears and prejudices, non-conforming peoples and entities – humans, aliens, cyborgs, androids, replicants – become natural protagonists of contemporary science fiction narratives with pivotal roles that are perfectly integrated into imaginary futuristic societies. Consequently, the represented subject, no longer seen as a coherent and unified being, becomes an inevitable shape-shifter, a mutant divided and displaced and, as such, an individual who freely participates in the process of linguistic change in contexts of use that the writer has semantised. This issue, therefore, intends to explore the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivity, as described by the Cartesian cogito, slowly gives way to contemporary inclusive narratives, giving life to new characters who naturally inhabit the scenarios of contemporary science fiction through unstable roles and completely ‘de-generated’ narrations of identity. The editors are particularly interested in the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in Science Fiction narratives. Understanding the construction of such discourses, necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach which includes, but is not limited to, literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, queer linguistics, among others (see Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds), Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2008).
Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to: - TV and filmic science fiction gender non-conforming characters; - Graphic novels in which gender identity defines the science fiction world; - Sexualities in SF video games and internet-related games; - Novels and short stories featuring gender alternatives; - Science fiction and linguistic inventions on gender performance; - Human, post-humans and gender; - Gender and society: performing non-binary gender; - Sexualities, bodies and society.
Important dates: Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 March 2020 Notification of acceptance: 5 April 2020 Submission of paper: 31 July 2020 Publication of the issue: December 2020
ContactZone is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal.
Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0
The University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ together with... more Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0
The University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ together with the I-LanD Research Centre invites you to attend the International conference on Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0. Nationalistic, xenophobic and mostly right-wing populist discourses can be seen both as a reaction to and a proposal to transform prevailing tropes of democratic and multicultural discourses. The tension between this dual way of construing political discourse has become an important line of investigation in various academic fields. This international conference aims to address the different manifestations of ideology in the international media outlets, with the intention of investigating how these practically relate to the socio-political contexts where they emerge. The current international political arena seems to be a fertile ground for the study of the relationship between language use and ideology, especially as present in different media. Given the thematic scope of this conference, we invite scholars from different fields to present original paper presentations which should adhere to any of the following broad research strands: - Relationships between linguistic ideologies and the socio-political contexts where these emerge; - Argumentative and persuasive strategies underlying linguistic and semiotically-expressed ideologies; - Different linguistic and semiotic ideological construals present in the media More specific topics of discussion are listed below: - Populism in conservative and left-wing tabloid and broadsheet newspapers - Populisms in Europe - Populisms in America (e.g., Canada, United States, Latin America) - Populisms in Asia - Populism and terrorism - Masculinities and populism. Within discourse contexts such as those listed above, we especially welcome papers which re-examine existing frameworks for critical discourse research or which apply new methodologies sourced from anywhere across the humanities, social and cognitive sciences including but without being limited to: - Cognitive Linguistics - Conversation and Discourse Analysis - Corpus Linguistics - Functional Linguistics - Multimodality - Political Science - Pragmatics and Argumentation Theory - Sociolinguistics Abstracts of up to 250 words excluding references should be submitted by 10 December 2017 08:00 CET to popunior3.0@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by 10 January 2018. The conference working languages are: Italian, English, and Spanish
For further information, please visit the conference webpage or write to the local organising committee at popunior3.0@gmail.com
I-LanD Journal – Identity, Language and Diversity
International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for p... more I-LanD Journal – Identity, Language and Diversity International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for papers for the special issue: “The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures”
The first monographic issue of the I-LanD Journal will be centred on the discursive representation of organised crime across languages and cultures and will be edited by Giuseppe Balirano (University of Naples L’Orientale), Giuditta Caliendo (University of Lille - giuditta.caliendo@univ-lille3.fr) and Paul Sambre (KU Leuven). Contributors wishing to submit a paper within this issue should contact the editors by sending their abstract (maximum 300 words, references excluded) as a word document by September, 15th. The attachment should not contain the author’s name and affiliation but should be accompanied by an email including such personal information.
The topics include but are not limited to: - Linguistic dimension of globalised crime syndicates. - Discursive and/or multimodal representation of crime and criminal identity/identitites. - Translation and (possible) harmonisation of legal definitions of Mafia-related crimes across languages, cultures and legal systems. - English as a Lingua Franca in the representation of crime in the Media landscape.
Linguistic Fields include but are not limited to: (Critical) Discourse Analysis, (Critical) Genre Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Specialised Discourse, Translation Studies, Audio-Visual Translation, Multimodality, Multimodal Discourse Analysis.
Important dates:
- Submission of abstracts: September, 15th 2016 - Notification of acceptance/rejection: October, 5th 2016 - Submission of chapters: March, 5th 2017 - Submission of proof to contributors: April 2017 - Publication of the special issue: May 2017
Call for proposals:
Criminal syndicates are part of globalization, as they expand their activities across borders and export criminal models to other countries (Allum 2013). Since globalization entails crossing national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, it necessarily implies a linguistic dimension (Fairclough 2007; Wodak et al. 1999). In this respect, English as a lingua franca plays an important role in the media landscape as it serves as a global platform for world audiences. In spite of this, little attention has been devoted to the way national crime syndicates are discursively represented and recontextualised in English (Allum et al. 2010; Machin and Mayr 2013; Caliendo et al. 2016).
The special issue “The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures” intends to bring together different theoretical orientations inspired by linguistics, (critical) discourse studies, political discourse and translation studies in order to provide corpus-assisted analyses in different types of media, genres and formats (e.g. print media, documentary and feature movies, TV and digital supports). Such genres bring criminal organizations with foreign origins (such as the Italian mafias and South American drug cartels, amongst others) to a global audience in English, raising awareness about their globalizing reach and about the need to harmonise legal definitions of mafia-related crimes across the EU.
The Conference will address a range of critically important issues and themes relating to Food as... more The Conference will address a range of critically important issues and themes relating to Food as a cultural as well as social phenomenon that travels across languages, across cultures and across time and space. Plenary speakers include some of the leading thinkers in these areas, as: Susan Bassnett: Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick. Don Kulick: Distinguished University Professor at the University of Uppsala. David Katan: Full professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Salento. Gerard Steen: Full professor at the Department of Dutch, University of Amsterdam.
We invite original contributions on theoretical reflections, as well as analytical exploration in... more We invite original contributions on theoretical reflections, as well as analytical exploration into the language of jokes, stand-up comedians, internet blogs, films, TV series and other written and/or audiovisual materials connected with the themes identified and produced in English speaking countries. Intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches are most welcome.
We invite submission of abstracts for a panel entitled "Gender at the intersection of Language an... more We invite submission of abstracts for a panel entitled "Gender at the intersection of Language and Law", to be proposed as a part of the fourth International Conference on Law, Language and Communication (www.crill.unina2.it/conference-2016), which will take place at the University of Naples 2 in Italy, 26-28 May 2016.
The International ELT Conference on New Trends in English Language Teaching, Learning and Educati... more The International ELT Conference on New Trends in English Language Teaching, Learning and Education is the first of a series of yearly conferences which will constitute a leading forum for the presentation of new advances, trends and approaches in EFL theory and practice in the post-pandemic era. The Conference is a University of Naples L'Orientale event organised to provide an international platform for ELT educators and practitioners to share their innovative educational and teaching experiences with global experts.
The International Conference on New Trends in English Language Teaching, Learning and Education will take place on site; however, due to the summer school's space restriction, distant participation will also be offered. Submitted abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee. All submissions should report original and previously unpublished research results no matter the type of research paper prospective participants are presenting.
The current debate on the different linguistic and semiotic approaches through which diversity is... more The current debate on the different linguistic and semiotic approaches through which diversity is studied has inevitably become highly interdisciplinary, bridging the gap between Cultural and Queer Studies and Linguistics. A multifaceted approach to the study of diversity and representation, including the thorny relationship between language and gender and/or sexual identity, seems thus to call for integrated analyses of sex and gender in both the fields of Linguistics and Semiotics.
Diversity usually recalls separation, and at times isolation, if analyzed against the shared concept of normality. Looking at a significant multimodal corpus, we would like to disclose and trace what we believe is currently going on as far as social positioning towards diversity, as opposed to normality, is concerned. Our insight is that super-diversity can be read spatially, as an overtaking of prior position, a place where diversity is no longer isolation but a feature among others.
This panel, largely drawing on the seminal studies of de Lauretis and Judith Butler, intends to investigate the difficult relationship between diversity and communicative practices of representation, focusing, in particular, on the impact of diversity on socio-cultural linguistic practices. We posit that since de Lauretis introduced a discursive queer theory defining it as “another way of thinking the sexual“ (1991) and Butler re-shaped the weak boundaries of gender and sex, research on diversity has become extremely interdisciplinary. Therefore, the very concepts of diversity and the construction/negotiation of identities need to integrate new theoretical instruments from Queer Studies triggering a reflection also on the relationship between linguistics and other semiotic resources within those new practices of representation which involve “diverse” communities. As a matter of fact, while Queer Studies have often questioned the representation of Otherness, Linguistics seems to bring to light the Otherness of representation. In particular, this panel will center on a very composite multimodal and linguistic corpus which collects all the short films presented at the challenging homosexual international film festival Omovies from 2007 to 2014 and therefore proposes a real interdisciplinary approach to the study of diversity, combining corpus linguistics with CDA, multimodality, queer theory and cinema studies.
Book of Abstracts of the International Conference "Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0" (U... more Book of Abstracts of the International Conference "Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0" (University of Naples "L'Orientale", February 23-24, 2018)
Multimodal digital communication is the main theme of this conference meant to attract multidisci... more Multimodal digital communication is the main theme of this conference meant to attract multidisciplinary research on a wide range of issues from teaching and learning to analysing multimodal digital data appearing in multiple communication arenas.
Rome, Italy
University of “Tor Vergata”
20 – 22 June 2019
Marina Bondi
Carey Jewitt
Rodney Jones
Gunther Kress and Jeff Bezemer
David Machin
Theo van Leeuwen
_________________________________________________
A-MODE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Elisabetta Adami – University of Leeds, UK
Cristina Arizzi – University of Messina, Italy
Styliani Karatza – National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece, and University of Leeds, UK
Ivana Marenzi – L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
Ilaria Moschini – University of Florence, Italy
Sandra Petroni – University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy
Marc Rocca – Rocca Creative Thinking Limited, UK
Maria Grazia Sindoni – University of Messina, Italy
The international Symposium 'Masculinity and Representation', an initiative of our constituting ... more The international Symposium 'Masculinity and Representation', an initiative of our constituting Study Centre I-LAND (UNIOR), is dedicated to the presentation of original interdisciplinary research on gender and its linguistic representation. In particular, the study of the dynamics of the process of media representation of social actors will be tackled from the perspective of gender studies, with the benefit of approaches and insights from within masculinity studies, linguistics and semiotics, in particular CDA and multimodal analysis.
The Conference aims to gather and promote different and integrated approaches, in particular those relating to the representation of masculinity and its constraints, stereotypes, prejudices, etc. within broad English-speaking contexts. The two-day Symposium will address issues concerning gender issues in educational, social, and cultural contexts, focusing on the processes of discrimination against non-heterosexual communities of practice and the resulting conditions of inequality.
New and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts will also be examined.
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Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework, this book outlines how masculine identities interact with the consumption of products, desires, and passions in consumer cultures. Representations of the male body are seen as discursive ‘ploys’ construed at the intersection of consumption and marketing across cultures in multimodal discourses. The book analyses a small corpus, the MALEcorpus, comprising 10 print covers from the British edition of the well-known and bestseller magazine Men’s Health. In view of this, the book investigates how masculinity is constructed, both verbally and visually, on ten covers of the British men’s magazine.
As the papers included in this issue explore the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in science fiction narratives, understanding the construction of such discourses necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach, which ranges from literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, gender studies, corpus linguistics to sociolinguistics. In order to develop a comprehensive perspective on the topic investigated, four essays are devoted to fiction (both novels and short stories), one to plays, and one to a canonical TV series such as Star Trek. While ContactZone is aimed at an international community of scholars and well-informed readers, we do not want to forget our being rooted in the Italian academic context; at least three full-length volumes devoted to Anglo-American science fiction by women should be mentioned: Oriana Palusci, Terra di lei. L’immaginario femminile tra utopia e fantascienza (1990), Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea (2015) and Anna Pasolini and Nicoletta Vallorani, Corpi magici: Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza (2020). This is the reason why all six papers are written by Italian scholars, who are willing to measure their competence against a vast and expanding international critical body.
As the contributors highlight throughout this volume, the term ‘hate’ itself is extremely difficult to define, stemming as it does from the extremes of socio-psychopathic impulses, an inability to regulate emotions adequately, or merely from a lack of empathy. In some cases, the denigrators do not even hate their victims, they are merely pliable individuals who feel the need to emulate the sentiments of a strong cohort of denigrators in order to gain ‘insider’ status. Such individuals, however, are no less to blame than the hate mongers themselves, since they actively contribute to an echo chamber which serves to amplify and reinforce the hatred deployed. Whether they truly detest their targets or merely emulate the apparently dominant group, the aim of haters, be they online or offline, is to relegate the victims to a generic category of ‘others’, and in hate speech the other is always the enemy. The differences between the ‘us’ belonging to the dominant grouping, and the ‘them’ banished to the out-group are magnified in hate speech: the insiders are safe, legitimate, normal and rational, the outsiders are dangerous, different, threatening, and antagonistic.
Although the focus of this volume concerns, in the main, the digital environment, the editors and contributors are all well aware that ‘hate speech online’ does not occur in a virtual vacuum, its effects are dramatically real for those individuals who are on the receiving end. Cyberbullying and hate speech impinge upon the lives of individuals from social, economic, professional and psychological backgrounds, and increase the sense of fear and vulnerability of entire communities. The ever-encroaching discourse of online hate has, to date, only been partially mapped, and available studies have mostly focused on forms of misogynous attacks in the male-dominated online tech and gamer communities or against feminist activists. Additionally, there seems to be a tendency to forget that ongoing, low-level hate speech is far more common than the dramatically violent hate crimes that capture public imagination.
Whether by investigating the ripple effect triggered by a single controversial tweet, the manipulation of gender ideologies in ethnic radio discourse, or the re-semiotization of the ‘city’ as a nurturing space for Jihadist hate narratives, this book intends to address, from a wide and comprehensive multimodal perspective, the prevailing gaps in research literature and the dire need to contend with rampant vitriolic discourses today.
From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are:
1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other?
2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness.
The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.
—Delia Chiaro, Professor of English Linguistics and Translation, University of Bologna, Italy, and President of the International Society of Humor Studies
‘Exploring the interface of queer studies with the fields of linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, literary and film studies, the articles in this collection draw a multifaceted picture of the discursive construction and representation of queer masculinities in a range of text genres and contexts. They engage in fascinating analyses of various aspects of queer masculinities, including issues such as consumer culture, representation in TV series, films, literature and art, intersectionality with trans and racial identities, homophobic discourse and subordination through hegemonic masculinity.’
—Heiko Motschenbacher, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen
A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework, this book outlines how masculine identities interact with the consumption of products, desires, and passions in consumer cultures. Representations of the male body are seen as discursive ‘ploys’ construed at the intersection of consumption and marketing across cultures in multimodal discourses. The book analyses a small corpus, the MALEcorpus, comprising 10 print covers from the British edition of the well-known and bestseller magazine Men’s Health. In view of this, the book investigates how masculinity is constructed, both verbally and visually, on ten covers of the British men’s magazine.
As the papers included in this issue explore the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in science fiction narratives, understanding the construction of such discourses necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach, which ranges from literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, gender studies, corpus linguistics to sociolinguistics. In order to develop a comprehensive perspective on the topic investigated, four essays are devoted to fiction (both novels and short stories), one to plays, and one to a canonical TV series such as Star Trek. While ContactZone is aimed at an international community of scholars and well-informed readers, we do not want to forget our being rooted in the Italian academic context; at least three full-length volumes devoted to Anglo-American science fiction by women should be mentioned: Oriana Palusci, Terra di lei. L’immaginario femminile tra utopia e fantascienza (1990), Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea (2015) and Anna Pasolini and Nicoletta Vallorani, Corpi magici: Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza (2020). This is the reason why all six papers are written by Italian scholars, who are willing to measure their competence against a vast and expanding international critical body.
As the contributors highlight throughout this volume, the term ‘hate’ itself is extremely difficult to define, stemming as it does from the extremes of socio-psychopathic impulses, an inability to regulate emotions adequately, or merely from a lack of empathy. In some cases, the denigrators do not even hate their victims, they are merely pliable individuals who feel the need to emulate the sentiments of a strong cohort of denigrators in order to gain ‘insider’ status. Such individuals, however, are no less to blame than the hate mongers themselves, since they actively contribute to an echo chamber which serves to amplify and reinforce the hatred deployed. Whether they truly detest their targets or merely emulate the apparently dominant group, the aim of haters, be they online or offline, is to relegate the victims to a generic category of ‘others’, and in hate speech the other is always the enemy. The differences between the ‘us’ belonging to the dominant grouping, and the ‘them’ banished to the out-group are magnified in hate speech: the insiders are safe, legitimate, normal and rational, the outsiders are dangerous, different, threatening, and antagonistic.
Although the focus of this volume concerns, in the main, the digital environment, the editors and contributors are all well aware that ‘hate speech online’ does not occur in a virtual vacuum, its effects are dramatically real for those individuals who are on the receiving end. Cyberbullying and hate speech impinge upon the lives of individuals from social, economic, professional and psychological backgrounds, and increase the sense of fear and vulnerability of entire communities. The ever-encroaching discourse of online hate has, to date, only been partially mapped, and available studies have mostly focused on forms of misogynous attacks in the male-dominated online tech and gamer communities or against feminist activists. Additionally, there seems to be a tendency to forget that ongoing, low-level hate speech is far more common than the dramatically violent hate crimes that capture public imagination.
Whether by investigating the ripple effect triggered by a single controversial tweet, the manipulation of gender ideologies in ethnic radio discourse, or the re-semiotization of the ‘city’ as a nurturing space for Jihadist hate narratives, this book intends to address, from a wide and comprehensive multimodal perspective, the prevailing gaps in research literature and the dire need to contend with rampant vitriolic discourses today.
From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are:
1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other?
2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness.
The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.
—Delia Chiaro, Professor of English Linguistics and Translation, University of Bologna, Italy, and President of the International Society of Humor Studies
‘Exploring the interface of queer studies with the fields of linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, literary and film studies, the articles in this collection draw a multifaceted picture of the discursive construction and representation of queer masculinities in a range of text genres and contexts. They engage in fascinating analyses of various aspects of queer masculinities, including issues such as consumer culture, representation in TV series, films, literature and art, intersectionality with trans and racial identities, homophobic discourse and subordination through hegemonic masculinity.’
—Heiko Motschenbacher, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen
A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
Consequently, by exploring scholarly knowledge sharing practices occurring on academic SNSs, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the social construction of academic identity overlaps and interdiscursively blends together with previously investigated and more traditional processes of disciplinary knowledge dissemination (KD) (Hyland 2012a, 2015). This study, in fact, is taking a broader approach to KD by using Hyland’s own perspective as a starting point, especially when he argues that: "In pursuing their professional goals and constructing knowledge, academics engage with others, and because of this, discourses carry assumptions about knowledge, relationships and how this should be structured and negotiated" (Hyland 2012a: 175).
Hence, our approach explores these renegotiated discourses as enacted by renewed digital knowledge sharing practices such as those occurring in dynamic Web 3.0 environments. To this end, the investigation is based on the analysis of a multimodal corpus comprising a collection of profiles crafted by university scholars and posted on the academic social networking site (ASNS) known as Acadmia.edu. This platform, which is not an educationally affiliated organization, foregrounds the entrepreneurial mission of “accelerating the world’s research”3 as it is essentially designed for academics whose main intention is to share research papers and interests as well as other general information concerning affiliation and academic engagements. Also part of Academia.edu’s mission is to afford scholars the opportunity to monitor the impact of their research through deep analytics (Price 2012) while tracking the work of other academics they choose to follow (Thelwall/Kousha 2014). Established in 2008 in San Francisco by Richard Price as part of the Open Science movement, to date, Academia.edu is reported having nearly 31,000,000 registered account-holders contributing over 20 million papers and attracting nearly 26 million unique visitors a month.
Against this backdrop, it is quite evident that data collected from ASNSs are of major interest for linguistic exploration, mainly owing to the impact that the above-mentioned academic social networking practices may have on how language is devised and packaged in order to facilitate knowledge dissemination. For the purpose of shedding light on this still grey area of language innovation, the online profiles collected from the Academia.edu site are the object of this study as they comprise multimodal instantiations of both knowledge dissemination and self-branding resources.
From a methodological viewpoint, Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes promotes different integrated approaches relating to socio-linguistic investigation, to translation and multimodal semiotic analysis. In particular, the authors in the volume investigate how socio-linguistic approaches applied to food practices can help identify (self- and/or other-) social and cultural constructions in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The main two questions the volume addresses are:
1. If food has the symbolic power to transform transnational identities from a conceptual idea into a concrete reality, is it also possible for diasporic communities to maintain their cultural authenticity when encountering the Other?
2. What role does language play in helping migrants to maintain and/or creolize their traditional tastes in their new homes?
From a methodological viewpoint, this chapter, by exploring the nature of systemic functional representation through Kress and van Leeuwen’s semioticisation of Halliday’s ideational, textual and representational metafunctions, intends to critically analyse contemporary discourses on gender through the analysis of the re-semioticisation of semantic prosody into ‘semiotic prosody’ of minor gendered social actors. The multimodal gendered discourses under scrutiny aim at the deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity through complex semiotic propositions, which, at a first analysis, seem to display ‘live narrative processes’ embedded in highly figurative Reactional processes.
With this in mind, this paper provides a multimodal integrated investigation of the perception of the TV drama series Gomorrah (produced in Italy and subtitled in English) outside the boundaries of Italy, looking at data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The study, which is a theoretical contribution to cross-cultural adaptation, employs “multimodal prosody”
analysis in order to disambiguate the interpretation of camorristi proxemics and haptics as a queer representation.
The paper focuses on some Desi creative features employed to de-colonize culture from both the Western ex-colonizers and the more ‘traditional’, national or even post-national cultures which deny the importance of hybrid productions by marginalizing them. A multimodal analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and its homonymous filmic translation by Mira Nair (2007), is aimed at decoding typical Desi media practices and discourse(s) as new forms of narration in diasporic representations.
International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for Papers for the Special Issue: "Re-Defining Gender, Sexuality, and Discourse in the Global Rise of Right-Wing Extremism"
Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Rodrigo Borba
Description:
This forthcoming issue of Anglistica AION (http://bit.ly/37rcesY) aims to present a systematic consideration of the political agenda and discourses of contemporary right-wing extremist movements by looking at the discursive (de)constructions of gender and gender non-conforming developments, in the distant but associated contexts of Europe and Latin America. In particular, the editors are interested in bringing to the fore not only the recurring right-wing extremist discourses on the building of transnational networking but above all the ways and reasons these networks choose their specific victims/targets in an analogous transnational way. The contributors will, therefore, analyse the contemporary right-wing extremist tendencies to redefine and often arrest gender developments in the multimodal discourses such movements craftily construct. This edited volume, in fact, intends to investigate the linguistic and semiotic practices enacted by right-wing extremist groups, politicians, institutions, organizations and movements within a gender-specific perspective. All papers will look at right-wing extremist discourses and counter-discourses on gender and sexuality with a view to understanding their constitution in order to highlight the challenges they pose to democracies.
Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
- The discursive strategies used by right-wing extremists to canvass the population's support against gender equity;
- The discursive and semiotic infrastructure of fake news on gender and sexuality and their role constituting disinformation orders and moral panic;
- The reconfiguration of what is politically doable and sayable in the public sphere and its relation with processes of de-democratization;
- The production of affective polarization through rhetorics of division in which gender and sexuality take centre stage;
- The discursive production of concepts such as 'gender ideology', 'gender theory', 'genderism', 'gender lobby' and their material effects on a variety of contexts (e.g., politics, education, foreign affairs, the media, etc.);
- The transnational circulation of right-wing extremist discourses and ideologies against gender equity and sexual liberation and how they are localized within specific national borders;
- The intersections of racism, xenophobia, sexism, ableism, homophobia and other oppressive discourses within right-wing extremism;
- The production of counter-discourses and practices of resistance to right-wing extremist anti-gender and anti-LGBTIQ+ stance;
- The repurposing of progressive vocabulary (e.g., gender, freedom of speech, human rights, etc.) in order to advance reactionary worldviews.
The global rise of the far-right with its ensuing strategies and political consequences currently stands as a crucial issue that cuts across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. This special issue is particularly interested in the discursive and linguistic dimensions of this phenomenon. Understanding the infrastructure of far-right discourses requires an interdisciplinary spectrum of approaches which includes, but is not limited to, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, political discourse analysis, queer linguistics, among others.
Submission of abstracts:
Authors wishing to contribute to this issue are invited to send an abstract of their proposed article of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in MS Word format by 1 April 2020 to Giuseppe Balirano (gbalirano@unior.it) and Rodrigo Borba (rodrigoborba@letras.ufrj.br) [CC anglistica@unior.it].
Important dates:
Deadline for abstracts: 1 April 2020
Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2020
Deadline for completed articles: 31 July 2020
Journal of the Italian Association on Science Fiction and the Fantastic
Call for Papers for the Special Issue: "Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives"
Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Oriana Palusci
The representation of transgressive sexuality, transgender metamorphosis, transvestite and androgynous characters has been widely explored in the genre of Science Fiction since its early beginnings. This special issue aims at investigating the identity representation of gender, including that of ‘non-binary’ characters, in literary sci-fi, considered as the ideal narrative tool through which it is not only possible to imagine alternative times and geographies, but also those ‘non-places’ where fluid identities of gender non-conforming people, in their ongoing process of transformation and reformulation, can be freely recognised as real and possible entities. Beyond any form of discrimination, disseminated by means of emerging hate discourses that generate stereotypes, fears and prejudices, non-conforming peoples and entities – humans, aliens, cyborgs, androids, replicants – become natural protagonists of contemporary science fiction narratives with pivotal roles that are perfectly integrated into imaginary futuristic societies. Consequently, the represented subject, no longer seen as a coherent and unified being, becomes an inevitable shape-shifter, a mutant divided and displaced and, as such, an individual who freely participates in the process of linguistic change in contexts of use that the writer has semantised.
This issue, therefore, intends to explore the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivity, as described by the Cartesian cogito, slowly gives way to contemporary inclusive narratives, giving life to new characters who naturally inhabit the scenarios of contemporary science fiction through unstable roles and completely ‘de-generated’ narrations of identity. The editors are particularly interested in the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in Science Fiction narratives. Understanding the construction of such discourses, necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach which includes, but is not limited to, literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, queer linguistics, among others (see Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds), Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2008).
Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
- TV and filmic science fiction gender non-conforming characters;
- Graphic novels in which gender identity defines the science fiction world;
- Sexualities in SF video games and internet-related games;
- Novels and short stories featuring gender alternatives;
- Science fiction and linguistic inventions on gender performance;
- Human, post-humans and gender;
- Gender and society: performing non-binary gender;
- Sexualities, bodies and society.
Submission of abstracts:
Please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio-note to gbalirano@unior.it and aisff.starfiction@gmail.com
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 March 2020
Notification of acceptance: 5 April 2020
Submission of paper: 31 July 2020
Publication of the issue: December 2020
ContactZone is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal.
The University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ together with the I-LanD Research Centre invites you to attend the International conference on Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0.
Nationalistic, xenophobic and mostly right-wing populist discourses can be seen both as a reaction to and a proposal to transform prevailing tropes of democratic and multicultural discourses. The tension between this dual way of construing political discourse has become an important line of investigation in various academic fields. This international conference aims to address the different manifestations of ideology in the international media outlets, with the intention of investigating how these practically relate to the socio-political contexts where they emerge. The current international political arena seems to be a fertile ground for the study of the relationship between language use and ideology, especially as present in different media.
Given the thematic scope of this conference, we invite scholars from different fields to present original paper presentations which should adhere to any of the following broad research strands:
- Relationships between linguistic ideologies and the socio-political contexts where these emerge;
- Argumentative and persuasive strategies underlying linguistic and semiotically-expressed ideologies;
- Different linguistic and semiotic ideological construals present in the media
More specific topics of discussion are listed below:
- Populism in conservative and left-wing tabloid and broadsheet newspapers
- Populisms in Europe
- Populisms in America (e.g., Canada, United States, Latin America)
- Populisms in Asia
- Populism and terrorism
- Masculinities and populism.
Within discourse contexts such as those listed above, we especially welcome papers which re-examine existing frameworks for critical discourse research or which apply new methodologies sourced from anywhere across the humanities, social and cognitive sciences including but without being limited to:
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Conversation and Discourse Analysis
- Corpus Linguistics
- Functional Linguistics
- Multimodality
- Political Science
- Pragmatics and Argumentation Theory
- Sociolinguistics
Abstracts of up to 250 words excluding references should be submitted by 10 December 2017 08:00 CET to popunior3.0@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by 10 January 2018.
The conference working languages are:
Italian, English, and Spanish
For further information, please visit the conference webpage or write to the local organising committee at popunior3.0@gmail.com
International Peer-Reviewed Journal
Call for papers for the special issue: “The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures”
The first monographic issue of the I-LanD Journal will be centred on the discursive representation of organised crime across languages and cultures and will be edited by Giuseppe Balirano (University of Naples L’Orientale), Giuditta Caliendo (University of Lille - giuditta.caliendo@univ-lille3.fr) and Paul Sambre (KU Leuven). Contributors wishing to submit a paper within this issue should contact the editors by sending their abstract (maximum 300 words, references excluded) as a word document by September, 15th. The attachment should not contain the author’s name and affiliation but should be accompanied by an email including such personal information.
The topics include but are not limited to:
- Linguistic dimension of globalised crime syndicates.
- Discursive and/or multimodal representation of crime and criminal identity/identitites.
- Translation and (possible) harmonisation of legal definitions of Mafia-related crimes across languages, cultures and legal systems.
- English as a Lingua Franca in the representation of crime in the Media landscape.
Linguistic Fields include but are not limited to: (Critical) Discourse Analysis, (Critical) Genre Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Specialised Discourse, Translation Studies, Audio-Visual Translation, Multimodality, Multimodal Discourse Analysis.
Important dates:
- Submission of abstracts: September, 15th 2016
- Notification of acceptance/rejection: October, 5th 2016
- Submission of chapters: March, 5th 2017
- Submission of proof to contributors: April 2017
- Publication of the special issue: May 2017
Call for proposals:
Criminal syndicates are part of globalization, as they expand their activities across borders and export criminal models to other countries (Allum 2013). Since globalization entails crossing national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, it necessarily implies a linguistic dimension (Fairclough 2007; Wodak et al. 1999). In this respect, English as a lingua franca plays an important role in the media landscape as it serves as a global platform for world audiences. In spite of this, little attention has been devoted to the way national crime syndicates are discursively represented and recontextualised in English (Allum et al. 2010; Machin and Mayr 2013; Caliendo et al. 2016).
The special issue “The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures” intends to bring together different theoretical orientations inspired by linguistics, (critical) discourse studies, political discourse and translation studies in order to provide corpus-assisted analyses in different types of media, genres and formats (e.g. print media, documentary and feature movies, TV and digital supports). Such genres bring criminal organizations with foreign origins (such as the Italian mafias and South American drug cartels, amongst others) to a global audience in English, raising awareness about their globalizing reach and about the need to harmonise legal definitions of mafia-related crimes across the EU.
Susan Bassnett: Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick.
Don Kulick: Distinguished University Professor at the University of Uppsala.
David Katan: Full professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Salento.
Gerard Steen: Full professor at the Department of Dutch, University of Amsterdam.
The International Conference on New Trends in English Language Teaching, Learning and Education will take place on site; however, due to the summer school's space restriction, distant participation will also be offered. Submitted abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee. All submissions should report original and previously unpublished research results no matter the type of research paper prospective participants are presenting.
Please, submit your abstracts via emailing: ELTconference2022@gmail.com
For more information about the conference, you are welcome to contact the organizing committee directly via emailing: claor.self@unior.it
Conference dates:
- Abstract submission deadline: 31 July 2022
- Notification of acceptance: 30 August 2022
- Registration deadline: 15 September 2022
- Conference dates: 26-27 September 2022
More information on the conference can also be found online at https://www.unior.it/ateneo/31221/1/international-elt-conference-new-trends-in-english-language-teaching-learning-and-education.html
Diversity usually recalls separation, and at times isolation, if analyzed against the shared concept of normality. Looking at a significant multimodal corpus, we would like to disclose and trace what we believe is currently going on as far as social positioning towards diversity, as opposed to normality, is concerned. Our insight is that super-diversity can be read spatially, as an overtaking of prior position, a place where diversity is no longer isolation but a feature among others.
This panel, largely drawing on the seminal studies of de Lauretis and Judith Butler, intends to investigate the difficult relationship between diversity and communicative practices of representation, focusing, in particular, on the impact of diversity on socio-cultural linguistic practices. We posit that since de Lauretis introduced a discursive queer theory defining it as “another way of thinking the sexual“ (1991) and Butler re-shaped the weak boundaries of gender and sex, research on diversity has become extremely interdisciplinary. Therefore, the very concepts of diversity and the construction/negotiation of identities need to integrate new theoretical instruments from Queer Studies triggering a reflection also on the relationship between linguistics and other semiotic resources within those new practices of representation which involve “diverse” communities. As a matter of fact, while Queer Studies have often questioned the representation of Otherness, Linguistics seems to bring to light the Otherness of representation. In particular, this panel will center on a very composite multimodal and linguistic corpus which collects all the short films presented at the challenging homosexual international film festival Omovies from 2007 to 2014 and therefore proposes a real interdisciplinary approach to the study of diversity, combining corpus linguistics with CDA, multimodality, queer theory and cinema studies.
Rome, Italy
University of “Tor Vergata”
20 – 22 June 2019
a-mode.eumade4ll.eu
_________________________________________________
Keynote speakers:
Marina Bondi
Carey Jewitt
Rodney Jones
Gunther Kress and Jeff Bezemer
David Machin
Theo van Leeuwen
_________________________________________________
A-MODE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Elisabetta Adami – University of Leeds, UK
Cristina Arizzi – University of Messina, Italy
Styliani Karatza – National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece, and University of Leeds, UK
Ivana Marenzi – L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
Ilaria Moschini – University of Florence, Italy
Sandra Petroni – University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy
Marc Rocca – Rocca Creative Thinking Limited, UK
Maria Grazia Sindoni – University of Messina, Italy
The Conference aims to gather and promote different and integrated approaches, in particular those relating to the representation of masculinity and its constraints, stereotypes, prejudices, etc. within broad English-speaking contexts. The two-day Symposium will address issues concerning gender issues in educational, social, and cultural contexts, focusing on the processes of discrimination against non-heterosexual communities of practice and the resulting conditions of inequality.
New and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts will also be examined.