Language and Identity
I understand language as a key component of our social reality which demands an approach mindful of its complexity: language is one of the parts of social life where we manage the intersubjective arena; thus, it is susceptible to political action (del Valle, 2014; Voloshinov, 2009). Language is a semiotic system and, when it comes to identity, according to Bucholtz and Hall: (2004) “among the symbolic resources available for the cultural production of identity, language is the most flexible and pervasive” (p.369).
Language is a social semiotic action, thus identity is not an internal characteristic: “identity [is] an outcome of cultural semiotics that is accomplished through the production of contextually relevant sociopolitical relations of similarity and difference, authenticity and inauthenticity, and legitimacy and illegitimacy” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p.382). According to Bulcholtz & Hall (2004), identities are dynamic and they are attributes of situations, not of people. They are created within the action, which implies a non-essentialist approach: “…identities may shift and recombine to meet new circumstances” (p.376). Identities are not uniform and they do not depend on psychological states or social categories. Identification is a political and social process, where agency and power are central. It happens via processes such as establishing sameness and differentiation, where difference usually implies hierarchy and the identity of more power is masked. Identities are not homogeneous, on the contrary, “the interconnections between language and identity are multiple, complex, and contextually specific” (Bulcholtz & Hall, 2004, p.375).
Following the developments in linguistic anthropology, Bulcholtz & Hall (2004) propose a working model of identity. It includes four interrelated and overlapping semiotic processes of identification and three pairs labeled “tactics of intersubjectivity”. The semiotic processes of identificatio are the mechanisms used to produce identities. They identify practice, indexicality, ideology (which includes erasure, iconization, and fractal recursivity), and performance.
The semiotic processes of identification are the mechanisms used to produce identities. They identify practice, indexicality, ideology (which includes erasure, iconization, and fractal recursivity), and performance. The information is organized in the chart below.
Semiotic processes of identification | ||
Practice | Habitual social daily activities. Embodied repetition of actions on an everyday social basis. | |
Indexicality | Semiotic operation “whereby one entity or event points to another” (p.378). In this process of semiotic association, social stereotypes are created and these stereotypes are highly politized. | |
Ideology: A process that “organizes and enables all cultural beliefs and practices as well as the power relations that result from these” (p.379). Model developed by Irvine and Gal (2000). | erasure | “elimination of details that are inconsistent with a given ideological position” (p.380) |
iconization | Ideological process of essentialization of associating an ideological representation to a group via a linguistic feature. | |
fractal recursivity | Replication of oppositions (like those created by iconization) at various levels of social structure, which produces multiple identity positions at once. | |
Performance | “Performances are marked speech events that are more or less sharply differentiated from more mundane interaction” (p.380) in our daily life and that are characterized as hypervisible: highly deliberate and self-aware social display. “the type of display that performance refers to involves an aesthetic component that is available for the evaluation by an audience” (p.380). In this case, the ideological aspect depends on the recognizability and legitimation of a sign to be understood by others. | |
Based on Bucholtz & Hall, 2004. | ||
The pairs of tactics of intersubjectivity may operate single or in tandem in a semiotic process and are interrelated to three concepts central to identity, which are markness, essentialism, and institutional power. The pairs of tactics are adequation vs. distinction, authentication vs. denaturalization, and authorization vs. illegitimation. In their understanding, the tactics of intersubjectivity are “the relations that are created through identity work” (Bulchotz & Hall, 2004, p.382). The pairs are organized below.
Tactics of intersubjectivity | ||
Pair 1. Markedness | Adequation | Process of pursuing socially recognized sameness by setting aside potential differences, according to what is more relevant to a situation. |
Distinction | Mechanism to produce salient partially or sufficient difference and deploy it for social ends. It usually operates by establishing dichotomies (binaries) between identities. | |
Pair 2. Essentialism | Authentication (not authenticity, to highlight agentivity) | Concerns the construction of a credible or genuine identity. “as [used] in this model, refers to how speakers activate […] essentialist readings in the articulation of identity” (p.386). |
Denaturalization | Process of production of an identity that is not credible or non-genuine, generally by highlighting the artificiality and non-essentialism of identity. It can be used to “destabilize the essentialist claims enacted by authentication” (p.386). | |
Pair 3. Institutional power | Authorization | It is the “attempt to legitimate an identity through an institutional or other authority” (p.386). It is not only a top-down practice: “Despite hegemonic structures, then, authorization is also a local practice that can contest as well as confirm dominant forms of power” (p.387). |
Illegitimation | It is the process (or effort) to remove or deny power by withdrawing or withholding authorization. It can take place to support or undermine the hegemonic authority. However, “illegitimation may in turn result in a new set of authorizing practices” (p.387) | |
Based on Bucholtz & Hall, 2004. | ||
Geosemiotics: indexicality and identity in place
Understanding language as semiotic action gives room to approach meaning and identity beyond words: “semiotics investigates the association created between social or natural objects and the meanings they bear” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p.377). Communicative artifacts or events are multimodal, which means that they combine different semiotic modes; each mode is the systematic use of a semiotic resource, that is, every kind of resource that can be used to produce meaning (van Leeuwen, 2005).
From the multimodal perspective, we can move to the specific lenses of geosemiotics that we adopt in this framework. Geosemiotics include place semiotics in the analysis, centering on the semiotic resources found in the material universe; it studies the interaction of these resources along with visual semiotic, the interaction order (a concept the authors take from Goffman), the social actors, and “…it goes beyond the ‘social situatedness’ of social interaction research to a kind of geo-situatedness” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, pp-19-20). It emphasizes that “indexicality, action, and identity are all anchored in the physical spaces and real times of our material world” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.14).
Indexicality is at the core of this perspective because; when we consider the role of place in the construction of meaning, not only indexes but also icons and symbols are indexical (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). In this line, it is important to differentiate that icons are those signs that resemble an object, such as the icon of a train that we can find on social media apps or in a train station; a symbol is a sign that is only associated conventionally or arbitrarily with its object or meaning, for example, the circle with the diagonal line that we interpret as “prohibition” (🚫); and an index is a sign that points to or is attached to an object, such as an arrow that shows what direction we should follow. These three types of signs usually come in combinations. For example, if we are not allowed to turn to the right at a corner, we would have a sign that includes an arrow meaning turning to the right, overlapped by the prohibition sign. For geosemiotics, “there is a major aspect of its meaning that is produced only through the placement of that sign in the real world in continuity with other objects in that world” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.30). For example, the “do not turn right” sign will only make sense in locations where this prohibition indexes the possible action of turning right, such as the corner of a street, and in that place, the sign will be indexing the transit regulations of the territorial administrative unit where it is located.
From this perspective, there is a relationship between action and identity, as well as action and indexicality. Following Goftman, for Scollon & Scollon (2003) the interaction order is a complex set of performances in which our actions are embedded, and they position us in relationship to other social actors. This idea connects to the semiotic processes of identification & tactics of intersubjectivity exposed by Bulchotz & Hall (2004). If we situate the processes and tactics on that complex set of performances it is clear that the different processes are happening simultaneously in the interaction as people participate in semiotic activities in which they not only give signs voluntarily but are also giving off expressions at all times that can be taken on as signs, which is an important distinction that Scollon & Scollon (2003) bring from Goffman.
Scollon & Scollon propose three principles for geosemiotics: 1) Indexicality, which implies that all signs acquire a significant part of their meaning according to how they are placed in the world; 2) dialogicality, which means that signs are indexical to their meaning by their placement in the world, but also in their dynamic, intersemiotic, and interdiscursive relationship to other signs; 3) selection, which takes into consideration that, in their actions, social actor’s select signs that are brought to attention (foregrounded), while they background others. As geosemiotics pay attention to different semiotic systems that interact in creating meaning, we develop each of them separately below.
Language a.k.a verbal mode
The verbal mode includes written and oral utterances. When it comes to indexicality in language, the main systems studied are personal pronouns, demonstratives, deictic adverbials, and tense (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). In Spanish (a “pro-drop” or pronoun-dropping language), there is indexicality to persons in the verbal morphemes used to mark the doer of an action, so the verbal morphology is another deictic element on the sentence, and in the verb, it works along with clitic pronouns.
Interaction order a.k.a body as a mode
For the interaction order, Scollon and Scollon (2003) center on the human body as our anchor to the material world, which allows us to accomplish our face-to-face interactions. It includes the possible ways of being together with others in the world: “Every utterance places us in some implied grouping of the interaction order at the same time that it places the rest of the world either to be included in that grouping or to be excluded from it” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.45). This closely relates to the tactics of intersubjectivity exposed by Bulchotz and Hall (2004).
The concept of interaction order comes from Goftman, who centers particularly on social co-presence and classifies 11 kinds of interactions: single (a person by themself), with (groups of two or more people), files and processions, queues, contacts, service encounters, conversational encounters, meetings, people-processing encounters, platform events, celebrative occasions (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). Events and public places can be complex and defy a single category. Of most importance is that these ways of co-presence index different social interactions. According to Scollon & Scollon (2003):
Discourses in place take their meaning in no small part of the physical co-presence of others in that same place. The embodied actions of any social actor are produced not only out of internal and personal motivations and meanings but also in reference to and in conjunction with the actions of others within the same space. (p.59)
In these interactions we could say that the body is a semiotic mode, because in the relationship of the bodies we build up sense: “a person is also a unified physical body moving in the physical world. Whether or not he or she intends to do so, as we have just noted, this body ‘gives off’ expression to anybody who is within view” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.15). We are interested in the way in which bodies are used as a semiotic resource presented systematically to build meaning.
As part of our approach to the body, we will consider dress/clothing, which includes all human adornments on the body and it is a common practice across cultures (Entwistle, 2023). The reason to locate clothing connected to the body is due to the importance of this everyday praxis: as a semiotic system, clothing makes us culturally visible (Paulicelli, 2009) as we live in societies where the act of human adornment is not only a central practice (Entwistle, 2023) but maybe even a compulsory action. We could think of garments as almost mandatory within the dress semiotic system for everyday socialization, particularly in those societies where nakedness is appraised in particular forms and could even have had or still have legal consequences.
To study clothing semiotics, I will depart from the proposal of Owyong (2009). The author divides the clothing semiotics into units. First the overall attire, then the apparel, the element, and finally the accessory. In overall attire, we can think of the functionality of the clothes (e.g. protection, sports, etc.), role distinction, ideological affiliation, formality, or if it is for a specific event. The apparel includes upper-body articles, lower-body articles, or one-piece outfits. The elements are clothing details and can be functional or decorative (e.g. pockets, buttons, zippers, etc.). Finally, we have the accessory, which can also be functional or decorative. Accessories include add-ons to garments, such as ties, belts, and brooches; headpieces, such as a headscarf or a hat; facial adornments, which include glasses and piercing; arm pieces, such as watches; body adornments, such as tattoos, belly-button ring or piercings in other areas different than the face; footwear, such as shoes and socks. We will also add tattoos, painting, and makeup to the facial adornments. As semiotic resources, both clothing and makeup also index social relationships and communities (e.g. Mendoza-Denton, 2008). They have a role in the semiotic processes of identification and contribute to the tactics of intersubjectivity (proposed by Bulchotz & Hall, 2004), especially as we think of clothing as becoming part of the semiotic resources for the bodies in co-presence.
As the communicative event of this project is a video, what we have is a represented interaction order, thus to analyze the interaction we also have to complete the framework with the visual semiotics: the interaction can be between the bodies in the video or of those bodies with the viewer. Here it is important to consider the general actions that the bodies of the representation are performing. The body and clothing as semiotic modes can even be highlighted, because, in the case of the video the body, the co-presences, the interactions, the clothes, and the makeup are planned by the creators.
Dress/clothing. The reason to include both dress and clothing in my definition in this section is that there have been different terms for the human act of adornment. Entwistle (2023) mentions how it has been a problem “to define an appropriately universal and all-inclusive term to describe all the things people do to put onto their bodies” (p.43). I prefer not to use a single definition and alternate the words, in line with Vasallo (2021), who points out the problem of trying to land on a term as part of our current capitalist formation. However, I also acknowledge the limitation of these terms as both “dress” and “clothes” organize the act of human adorning in a hierarchy where the act gets its name based on the garments that cover the body. From my perspective, this hierarchy can be understood as a colonial legacy: in the narratives of colonization of the Americas, the dress of the local communities was equated to nakedness, and nakedness was equated to savage or uncivilized (Retana, 2009).
On nakedness. Here, nakedness means not being dressed in garments that cover the upper and lower parts of the body, as how much they should cover has changed in time and place. The notion of nakedness or who is naked varies (Levine, 2008) and relates to the colonial narratives of civilization and cultural superiority (Levine, 2008; Retana, 2009). This can be seen, for example, in how Western perspectives have drawn distinctions between being naked and being nude to talk about visual arts (Ableman, 1984). Due to these characteristics, if we thought of dressing as a way to enunciate (Mizrahi, 2011), we could think of the ilocutory force and perlocutionary effect of nakedness when feminists are topless in protests to defy a system that regulates their bodies.
Nakedness can be regulated in different ways. For example, Scollon & Scollon (2003) mention the example of signals with legal clarifications on California nudist beaches. Howevere, the legality or illegality of nudity can be a topic of confusion even for police (Friedman & Grossman, 2013).
Clothing as a semiotic obligation. In this theory section, I write on the idea of clothing/dressing as “an obligatory semiotic system” situating myself as a member of a colonized Western society that responds to the ideas of nakedness expressed above.
Visual semiotics a.k.a visual mode
Within the visual forms of communication we find still and moving images; they could be two-dimensional (paintings, videos) or three-dimensional works (sculptures, architecture, product design, stage or window design) (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). We center here on two-dimensional moving images. Moving images are composed of a sequence of images in time, that is, we see one image after the other in the same frame so we can see movement; the technologies to create moving images allow us to include elements such as audio, as in the case of a music video.
In line with geosemiotics and its focus on the interaction order, from the number of possible elements of the images, we center on the participants and interactions. For Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), images have represented participants and interactive participants. The first group includes people, places, and things depicted in the image. The second group includes the participants producing and making sense of them, that is, the producers and the viewers. In terms of the interactions, the authors propose three kinds: between represented participants, between interactive and represented participants, and between interactive participants (through the images). The relationship between represented participants can be described using the interaction order described above. For the relationship between the interactive and represented participants, we will focus on the possible interactive meaning proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006).
According to these authors, the possible interactive meanings in images are contact, social distance, and attitude (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). They depend on how those producing the images decide to place the viewer concerning the image. Contact, which includes two realizations: 1) demand, in which the represented participants interact with their gaze with the viewer as demanding their attention or addressing them directly, as a visual “you”, and 2) offer, in which the viewer is addressed indirectly, with the role of an invisible onlooker. The represented social distance represents the interpersonal distance in our interactions and depends on the size of the frame, which can be close-up, medium shot, or long shot; respectively, the distance would have three realizations 1) intimate/personal, 2) social, or 3) impersonal. In addition to other participants, we can also be represented as closer to or further from objects or places. Finally, the other interaction meaning is related to the attitude, which is created by the producer by selecting an angle or point of view from where the viewer will see the represented participants. By doing so they express a socially determined attitude that is seen or encoded as subjective, unique, and individual and has to do with how the viewer will perceive the represented participant.
Attitude has two types of realizations, 1) subjectivity and 2) objectivity; and each of them has other subtypes of realizations. 1) Subjectivity can be constructed in the image on the horizontal or the vertical angle. First, the horizontal angle allows the producer to represent two realizations: a) involvement, which happens when we see the participant from the front in a way that the viewer can align with the represented participants; b) detachment, which comes when we see the represented participants from an oblique line or the side. The authors problematize positions in the horizontal angle, such as seeing someone from behind. In the vertical angle, subjectivity relates to power and has three possible realizations: a) viewer power, b) equality, or c) represented participant power. In the viewer power, the viewer is represented from a higher angle concerning the represented participant; in the equality, the represented participant is at the eye-level angle with the viewer; for represented participant power, the picture is taken from a low angle so the represented participant is seen as superior. Now we move to 2) objectivity, which is a category for scientific and technical pictures, and we find two realizations: a) action orientation in the frontal angle, and b) knowledge orientation in the top-down angle.
In addition to the participants and the interaction, other elements of the visual mode will be considered when they work as salient indexes, icons, or symbols related to people or places.
Place Semiotics
For Scollon and Scollon (2003), place semiotics include 1) code preference, 2) inscription, and 3) emplacement. For code preference, the authors make reference to the language(s) that appears in the signs and, for multilingual signs, they revise which language appears first. While they suggest certain methods to study the signs, they say that for understanding the decisions and possible ideologies of a community there should be ethnographic research (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.122). Inscription would be the typography or characteristics of the handwriting as a way to materialize language, it could be understood as fonts, material (e.g. durability, quality, medium), layering, and state changes (in the case of interactive signs). An inscription can be denied if the sign is covered or hidden.
Emplacement is “the most fundamental issue of geosemiotics – where in the physical world is the sign or image located?” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.142). In the case of a video, we can also question where in the material world are the represented participants and places located. There are three semiotic practices (or realizations) according to whether or not the discourse in place is socioculturally authorized: 1) decontextualized semiotics, 2) transgressive semiotics, and 3) situated semiotics.
Decontextualized semiotics “include all the forms of signs, pictures, and texts which may appear in multiple contexts but always in the same form” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.145) as they don’t make references to a particular place. Examples of this are brand names and logos, religious signs, the logo of the Red Cross or similar entities, and national flags. These signs can appear in multiple places or different formats.
Transgressive semiotics include signs that are located out of their expected place. They include signs that are in unauthorized places, such as graffiti (that can be even legally prohibited), and signs that are in the ‘wrong’ place by mistake, such as a tag felt on a sidewalk (which is not for sale!). It includes signs that are in place, but that place is somehow unauthorized for them to be, or the appearance of the sign in the place is unexpected by the viewer.
Finally, situated semiotics are all signs that are in their “authorized” place: “What we mean by situated semiotics is any aspect of the meaning that is predicated on the placement of the sign in the material world. This is, of course, the heart of geosemiotics” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.146). For Scollon & Scollon, situated semiotics can present exophoric and situated indexicality (‘feng-shui’). Exophoric indexicality relates the sign to its external emplacement; for example, at a shop called “Modern Bread and Bagel” (located in New York City) the sign would be read as “This is Modern Bread and Bagel”. The situated indexicality, according to the authors, appears in a context where the sign includes text vectors in relationship to the space, so the text could be written in different directions according to the relationship with the space, identifying parts of the space. For this type of situated indexicality, Scollon & Scollon present examples of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese that can be written in different ways. An example for Chinese is how the bus is labeled with a right-to-left vector (front to back) and people suggest it is to facilitate reading when the bus passes. Maybe the closest example for English could be the front sign of the ambulances where the vector is right to left. While it can also be thought of as “this is an ambulance” what makes it different is that only the front has the vector in that direction as it is written to be read by a specific reader in a specific position: the driver of the front car through their mirror.
- Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira. (2004). Language and identity. A companion to linguistic anthropology, 1, 369-394.
- del Valle, José. (2014). La política del lenguaje y los límites de la política lingüística panhispánica. Boletín de Filología 49(2), 87-122 1: 17-39
- Entwistle, Joanne. (2023). The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Polity
- Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd edition). Routledge.
- Mendoza-Denton, Norma. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. New Directions in Ethnography 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
- Owyong, Yuet See Monica. “Clothing Semiotics and the Social Construction of Power Relations.” Social Semiotics 19, no. 2 (June 2009): 191–211.
- Paulicelli, Eugenia. (2009). Framing the Self, staging identity. Clothing and Italian style in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1950-1964). In author & Hazel Clark. The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization. Routledge: New York.
- Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suzie Wong. (2003). Discourses in Place. Language in the material world. New York: Routledge
- van Leeuwen, Theo. (2005). Introducing Social Semiotics. New York: Routledge
- Vasallo, Brigitte. (2021). Lenguaje inclusivo y exclusión de clase. Barcelona: Larousse Editorial.
- Voloshinov, Valentín Nikoláievich. (2009). El marxismo y la filosofía del lenguaje. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot.
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.