Humor, Learning, and Multimodal Choreographies of Political Possibility on YouTube

• In Event: Disrupting Power and Dreaming Liberatory Worlds Through Multimodalities

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines how transgender and gender-expansive youth of color disrupt dominant ideologies and gesture liberatory worlds by taking up and transforming the multimodal choreographies in a YouTube video (Gee, 2015; Hall, 1996; Muñoz, 2009). I approach multimodal choreographies as the patterned ways of combining communicative modes, including embodied movements, in social interaction and performance. I conduct a multimodal interaction analysis of teens watching a video by a popular LGBTQ+ YouTuber to explore two questions: How did trans and gender-expansive youth of color take up and transform the multimodal choreographies of meaning-making in a YouTube video that comically resists dominant ideologies? What did the multimodalities in youth reactions interactionally accomplish?

Theoretical Framing: This study is framed by sociocultural learning theories that hold learning takes place in purpose-driven activities mediated by social relationships and cultural artifacts (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991). I also draw on framings in corporeality (Cruz, 2001) and performance studies (Muñoz, 1999; Recollet, 2016, Rivera-Servera, 2012) to understand embodied movements as cultural artifacts. Through attunement to multimodal choreographies in digitally mediated activities, I follow how teens come to enact resistance to power and dream liberatory worlds through embodied modes (Rivera-Servera, 2012).

Methods, Techniques, Data Sources: This analysis emerges from a 16-month qualitative study of critical digital literacy, learning, and desired worlds on social media with 21 transgender and gender-expansive teens, most of whom also identify with LGBQ+ sexualities (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). For this paper, data sources are episodes from video-taped media reactions, in which 16 focal participants watch and respond to a YouTube video clip. After analytically logging 19 hours of video data (Marin & Bang, 2018), I selected episodes from three participants: Helia, a 15-year-old Indigenous Latinx pansexual trans woman; Eric, a 17-year-old Latinx gay trans man; and Adrian, a 17-year-old biracial gay trans man. I analyze video episodes with multimodal interaction analysis, attending to talk, interaction with the video, embodied movements, and non-verbal expressions (e.g., laughter) (Norris, 2004; Tulbert & Goodwin, 2011).

Results: As youth interacted with a YouTube video in the video-taped media reaction, they employed multimodal choreographies seen in the video, drawing together humorous talk, laughter, and embodied movements from the video to speak to their experiences. In the YouTube video, a creator, who self-identifies as a Black gay man, comedically reacts to anti-Black (Dumas & ross, 2016) and heteronormative (Warner, 1991) media clips. In interaction with the video, youth reactions resisted these interlocking ideologies and gestured towards desired futures built on other grounds. Together, I see youth reactions as multimodal choreographies of political possibility, or patterned multimodal gestures toward collective transformation and liberation.

Scholarly Significance: In tracing how a video mediates multimodal choreographies of resistance and desired worlds, this paper will attune literacies scholarship to the ways youth make and transform meaning and social worlds with multimodalities developed on social media platforms (New London Group, 1996; Haddix & Sealey-Ruiz, 2012). The analysis will attune research and teachers to the role of embodied modalities and laughter in critical digital literacies and performing liberatory futures (Ávila & Pandya, 2013).

Author

• Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University