The Semiotic Hitchhiker's Guide to Creaky Voice: Circulation and Gendered Hardcore in a Chicana/o Gang Persona

This paper aims to build on some of Jane Hill's contributions to the understanding of indexicality and the creation of an intertextual media series (Hill 2005), as well as to elucidate the varying levels of awareness that speakers have of linguistic features in the circulation of a stereotype....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of linguistic anthropology Vol. 21; no. 2; pp. 261 - 280
Main Author: Mendoza-Denton, Norma
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Malden, USA Blackwell Publishing Inc 01.12.2011
Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects:
Artists
California
Chicano
Code Switching
Comorbidity
Computer & video games
Cultural anthropology
Cultural Identity
Deixis
Discourse
Discourse markers
Frost
Games
Gangs
Glottalization
Grammatical gender
Hill, Jane
Hip hop culture
Hip hop music
Hispanic Americans
Intertextuality
Latin American Cultural Groups
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic Identity
Linguistics
Mass media
Mexican Americans
Narratives
Persona
Phonation
Phonetics
Phonology
Programming (Broadcast)
Semiotics
Songs
Stereotypes
Theft
Tone of voice
Tutorials
Videotape Recordings
Voice quality
Northern California
United States > US
ISSN:1055-1360, 1548-1395
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:This paper aims to build on some of Jane Hill's contributions to the understanding of indexicality and the creation of an intertextual media series (Hill 2005), as well as to elucidate the varying levels of awareness that speakers have of linguistic features in the circulation of a stereotype. I show how creaky voice, a type of nonmodal phonation, becomes enregistered within an early narrative context, and is then catapulted by centrifugal media forces, taken as part of a constellation of features that cluster around the persona of ''hardcore Chicano gangster." The data presented come from four separate but intricately related sources. One is a narrative of a Chicana girl from Northern California, collected in the 1990s when she was involved in gangs. I also analyze a media-based data set that includes songs about cholos by a Chicano hip hop artist, web-based text and video tutorials on how to act like a cholo, and a representation of a Chicano gangster in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I explain a mechanism through which a metapragmatically less-than-salient feature can become a semiotic hitchhiker, co-occurring with more overtly ideologized and stereotyped phenomena such as codeswitching and the usage of specific discourse markers.
Bibliography:istex:D3F75370A5BEBAEBF4071504237DE4345299E7A2
ark:/67375/WNG-C4STFLZX-F
ArticleID:JOLA1110
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ISSN:1055-1360
1548-1395
DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1395.2011.01110.x