Abstract
While facemasks have now become a common sight and an emblem of Covid-19, six months ago, they were a familiar trope in discriminatory discourse and even the target of racist attacks, when the virus was referred to a ‘Chinese virus’, which later was also expanded to include other pan-Asian ethnicities. This paper explores to what extent two bilingual YouTube celebrities have participated in this reversal of public perception of facemasks by promoting their use in everyday activities. ‘Teacher Mike’ (American) has 642K subscribers, with content focusing on ESL, with occasional glimpses into his personal life; British teenager ‘Max’ has 95.3K subscribers, with content mainly about British culture and everyday life. What they have in common are their bilingual content and transnational trajectories (both lived in China for many years), and both uploaded videos in April 2020 promoting the use of facemasks.
Based on multimodal transcription and analysis (Ho, 2021) of the videos, we identify three moments from each as key ‘sites of engagement’ (Scollon & Scollon 2004), where facemasks were employed by the social actors to perform everyday activities, such as grocery shopping and family brunch. We then examine the interactional stances (Dubois 2007) taken by the actors towards facemasks through language and other semiotic resources, while also attending to the embedding of the interactional frame (Goffman 1974) of everyday activity within the social media frame of a YouTube video.
This leads us to argue that the two YouTubers’ knowledge of Chinese language and culture provided them with the authority on the necessity of facemasks, and at the same time, not wearing a facemask and its associated ‘magical thinking’ have become materials for cultural consumption. We conclude the paper by reflecting on whether these transnational social media personalities reduced or increased the gap in cross-cultural understandings of Covid-19.
Based on multimodal transcription and analysis (Ho, 2021) of the videos, we identify three moments from each as key ‘sites of engagement’ (Scollon & Scollon 2004), where facemasks were employed by the social actors to perform everyday activities, such as grocery shopping and family brunch. We then examine the interactional stances (Dubois 2007) taken by the actors towards facemasks through language and other semiotic resources, while also attending to the embedding of the interactional frame (Goffman 1974) of everyday activity within the social media frame of a YouTube video.
This leads us to argue that the two YouTubers’ knowledge of Chinese language and culture provided them with the authority on the necessity of facemasks, and at the same time, not wearing a facemask and its associated ‘magical thinking’ have become materials for cultural consumption. We conclude the paper by reflecting on whether these transnational social media personalities reduced or increased the gap in cross-cultural understandings of Covid-19.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
| Event | 17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 2021) - Online, Winterthur, Switzerland Duration: 27 Jun 2021 → 2 Jul 2021 https://pragmatics.international/page/Program2021 https://cdn.ymaws.com/pragmatics.international/resource/collection/3960B891-EE4B-4DB1-A7F5-47C668E86C8D/Abstracts_book_-_Winterthur_IPrA2021.pdf https://cdn.ymaws.com/pragmatics.international/resource/collection/3960B891-EE4B-4DB1-A7F5-47C668E86C8D/Program_book_-_Winterthur_IPrA2021.pdf |
Conference
| Conference | 17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 2021) |
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| Place | Switzerland |
| City | Winterthur |
| Period | 27/06/21 → 2/07/21 |
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