“Getting personal with you”: Affect and authenticity in confessional videos of YouTube lifestyle and beauty influencers

Droz-dit-Busset, Olivia and Spilioti, Tereza ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2768-3043 2024. “Getting personal with you”: Affect and authenticity in confessional videos of YouTube lifestyle and beauty influencers. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar and Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, eds. Influencer Discourse: Affective relations and identities, Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, vol. 349. John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 284-308. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Since the Middle Ages, confession has been one of the 'most highly valued techniques for producing truth' (Foucault 1978). While confessional monologues have been researched in reality TV discourse (Lorenzo-Dus 2009; Tolson 2006), the communicative potential of confessional talk for Social Media Influencers has been largely underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring confession as a distinct genre in the communicative repertoire of lifestyle and beauty YouTubers. In this regard, we first map this genre in terms of its key themes, formal features and media production choices. Drawing on Giaxoglou’s (2021) notion of affective positioning, we also examine how the influencers and their audiences are affectively positioned in the discourse of confessional videos through the deployment of verbal, non-verbal, as well as other material (camera) and graphic (emojis) resources. We conclude this chapter by demonstrating how this type of positioning intersects with the production of an authentic selfhood on YouTube.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher:	John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN:	9789027246431
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	1 July 2024
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2024 10:16
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170148

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