Dr Youtube: Multilingualism and Multimodality in Gender Transition Narratives on Polish Social Media
Date: Thursday, April 27th, 2023, 3:00 PM
Location: Frey Hall, Room 205
Watch: Dr Youtube (Multilingualism and Multimodality in Gender Transition Narratives
on Polish Social Media)
Lecture Abstract
“Trans YouTube” is a valuable performative and discursive space, allowing young trans
creators to maintain, present and communicate a desired sense of self. Distinct genres
of trans narratives have been established, including transitional videos, “DIY gender”
(advice videos) or anti-bullying videos (O’Neill 2014). Social media genres often
originate in English and eventually spread to other languages, such as Polish, where
they retain not only linguistic (terminologies borrowed/translated from English) but
also discursive/ideological influence (for example, Anglo-American cultural understandings
of gender and sexuality). In my current project, I explore multilingual practices
on Polish trans social media as an illustration of negotiations between the global
LGBTQ+ sociolect and the local socio-cultural context. Looking at them in conjunction
with innovative multimodal performances they are embedded in allows me to trace the
process of trans-creating the new language of the Polish trans community, a language
that emphasizes their agency and better expresses their individualized and localized
gender transition experiences.
About the Speaker: Joanna Chojnicka
Joanna is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Cardiff University, Wales, working on her project concerned with multilingual practices and gender and sexuality discourses in Polish transition narratives. She received her PhD in linguistics in 2012 at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. After that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of Konstanz and Bremen, Germany, exploring gender discourses and attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in Central and Eastern Europe. She is interested in the relationship between language, gender and sexuality; in discourses of argumentation, manipulation and resistance, as well as in multilingual, translanguaging and translation practices.