Ilbury, Christian

English

Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., &lt;dallyn&gt; darling, &lt;gawjus&gt; gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, babe, u ok hun?), and characterological tropes (e.g., the life motto ‘live, love, laugh’) as indexical representations of a particular type of classed, gendered, and ethnic identity in a corpus of Instagram memes. I demonstrate that these features have become enregistered as a characterological figure of a British working-class White woman—the Hun—that is stylistically deployed as a digital commodity register. Concluding, I emphasise the need for research to engage more fully with stylisation and commodification in social and digital media interaction

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U Ok Hun?:The digital commodification of white woman style

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files/265336457/IlburyJOS2022UOkHun.pdf

U Ok Hun?:The digital commodification of white woman style

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