Papers by Matt Bruce Ingram
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Oct 7, 2016
Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s tran... more Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Poststructuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.
Published Articles by Matt Bruce Ingram
Mediation Theory and Practice, 2017
This article analyses a highly acrimonious conflict mediation session between a previous romantic... more This article analyses a highly acrimonious conflict mediation session between a previous romantic couple in order to illustrate how one listening disputant's embodied stances influence the trajectory of another disputant's unfolding narrative. For example, even without speaking, the listener's facial expression and postures serve to refuse the other speaker's participant framework. In order to unpack the complexity of this interaction, we drew on both conversation analytic and dialogic notions of stance. We found that to analyse embodied stances in our data requires an understanding of both the local sequential analysis of the unfolding orientations of the participants as embodied stances are being deployed, as well as the larger interactional patterns that occur across the entire mediation session. This case study illustrates the challenge, to mediators and researchers alike, posed by unequal access to the disputant's shared background knowledge.
Somatechnics , 2019
The distribution and consumption of transgender time-lapse videos on YouTube have increased over ... more The distribution and consumption of transgender time-lapse videos on YouTube have increased over the last few decades, providing trans communities with a valuable resource for self-making. On YouTube, vloggers can present images and videos of their bodies as they document their gender transitions through several practices that rely on temporality and time-space compression. As a genre, time-lapse videos comprise creative worldmaking practices where users document their gender transformations using hundreds to thousands of still photos or video segments which show their social, somatic, and biochemical changes. Although scholars have discussed different worldmaking and community organising practices that take place as trans vloggers display their gendered subjectivities online, there is sparse scholarship studying the recurrent patterns of behaviour on the comment space below these videos. In this article, I draw on critical discourse analytic studies of new media and stance-taking as I review and analyse discriminatory strategies-principally misgendering and ungendering-that YouTubers used to denigrate the self-identified gender of a given vlogger. Stance-taking enables us to identify and track reoccurring attitudes steeped in cisgenderism. At the same time, capturing how vloggers and trans allies respond to (intentional or unintentional) text-based forms of prejudice, can create teachable moments for YouTube spectators. While misgendering stances aim to pressure their targets into certain kinds of gender and sex embodiments, insurrectionary stance-acts co-opt and call out the language of discrimination, lending legitimacy and authority to trans vloggers to create, enact, and live their own genders.
The hands of Donald Trump Entertainment, gesture, spectacle
Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s tran... more Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Poststructuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty first century politics that is celebrity driven.
Book Chapters by Matt Bruce Ingram
Language in the Trump Era, 2020
Adapted from Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram (2016) for a volume on language in the Trump era, this c... more Adapted from Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram (2016) for a volume on language in the Trump era, this chapter attributes the success of Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary to its value as comedic entertainment. The chapter builds on Mikhail Bakhtin's (1984) notion of the "grotesque body" to examine the ways that Trump's unconventional political style, particularly his use of humor and gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. By reducing a target perceived as an opponent to an essentialized action of the body, Trump's bodily parodies and pantomimes deliver the message that he rejects progressive social expectations regarding how minority groups should be represented. Five highly mediatized caricatures are analyzed in detail (two of which did not appear in the original publication): the Wrist-Flailing Reporter, the Food-Shoveling Governor, the Border-Crossing Mexican, the Choking Presidential Candidate, and the Wobbling Democratic Nominee. Across these depictions, Trump displays his antagonism to political correctness (and hence to the political establishment) by embodying discourses of disability, class, immigration, race, and gender.
Dissertation by Matt Bruce Ingram
Texas Scholar Works , 2018
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Papers by Matt Bruce Ingram
Published Articles by Matt Bruce Ingram
Book Chapters by Matt Bruce Ingram
Dissertation by Matt Bruce Ingram