Part of: Queer Media
Abstract:
This paper explores anti-transgender multimodal discourse in the context of the 2024 American presidential election. On September 20, 2024, the Donald Trump presidential campaign released an anti-transgender attack ad targeting the Kamala Harris campaign for Harris’ previous pro-transgender stances. In the weeks after the airing of this ad, Joe Scarborough, a conservative political commentator on the morning talk show Morning Joe, claimed that the Harris campaign’s lack of response to this ad and Democratic trans-inclusive policy stances would cost the campaign the crucial demographic of multicultural and working-class male voters in swing states. This paper demonstrates that Scarborough utilizes prosodic and gestural linguistic practices within enactments of confused liberal campaign strategists, and trans-inclusive liberals more generally, to frame trans-inclusive policies as beyond common sense, fomenting transgender (dis)belonging within the United States. I show that a growing group of trans-agnostic reactionary liberals (TARLs) (Chu, 2024), described as liberals who disagree with trans-inclusivity in progressive politics, frame anti-transgender messaging through verbal and embodied discursive practices.
In this paper, I perform a multimodal discourse analysis of Scarborough’s discourses from October to November 2024 about the Trump campaign’s anti-trans attack ad against Harris. I demonstrate that Scarborough’s depictions imagine (i) a prototypical multiracial and working-class swing-state male voter who becomes disgusted by Harris’ pro-transgender stances, while enacting (ii) a confused Harris campaign staffer who ignores what Scarborough calls “common sense” stances on transgender issues. The data show that anti-transgender enactments incorporate prosodic and gestural stance-making to ridicularize pro-transgender politicians and index transgender inclusivity as beyond common sense. This work builds on linguistic anthropological research on enactments (Hall et al., 2016; Sidnell, 2006; Streeck, 2008) to illuminate these communicative practices and link anti-transgender multimodal discourse to transgender (dis)belonging in the United States.
References:
Chu, A. L. (2024, March 11). Freedom of sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender- judith-butler.html
Hall, K., Goldstein, D. M., & Ingram, M. B. (2016). The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(2), 71–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.009
Sidnell, J. (2006). Coordinating gesture, talk, and gaze in reenactments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 39(4), 377–409.
Streeck, J. (2008). Gesture in political communication: A case study of the Democratic presidential candidates during the 2004 primary campaign. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(2), 154–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810802028662
