Textu(r)alities: Semiotics, Bodies, Texts (Special Issue of Multimodality & Society) (Special Issue of Multimodality & Society )
N/A
Event: Special Issue of Multimodality & Society
In the last couple of decades, our embodied actions with others have become increasingly more ?uid and disentangled from ?xed/static contexts so much so that the materiality of social life has been ?ltered through texts produced in a variety of semiotic resources that bind people together while keeping them apart. By further blurring online/of?ine boundaries, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the long-lasting mediatization of social life leading to a reconceptualization of phenomena such as corporeality and matter and their relationship with both virtual and physical environments.
As a result, the multimodal dimension of meaning-making, to which linguists have started to pay attention to since the turn of the century, has become even more prominent. One could hardly make sense of people’s daily doings without taking into account the various modes that come juxtaposed in situated interactions with other embodied beings and the texts they produce and (in)form their being embodied. Considering that the way we make sense of the information we receive through our embodied interaction with our surroundings is not only shaped by a bodily memory of certain stimuli but also by the way we culturally and socially contextualize those experiences (Di Benedetto, 2010:71–72) through various modes of meaning-making and the affordances they provide this special issue proposal intends to explore and rethink the ways individuals phenomenologically and semiotically experience their surroundings through various texts while producing new social and (inter)subjective textures along the way.
For the purposes of this special issue, this double bind is captured by the notion of “textu(r)alities” whereby the idea of texture as something that can be apprehended through the senses also recalls the capacity to create texts and narratives in order to make sense, literally, of that experience. Tellingly, the English verb “to apprehend” means “to seize, either physically or mentally” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2024) therefore highlighting the interconnectedness of thought and touch through the idea of grasping with the mind or the hand. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the terms ‘text’ and ‘texture’ derive from the Latin stem texere (for ‘to weave’), suggesting the concept (and action) of weaving together individual threads to form larger units that take the form of a network, a patchwork, or a structure. In Linguistics, for example, the term ‘texture’ is used to indicate the linguistic (or multimodal) features that make a text a semantic unit by giving it cohesion and coherence (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 326). This texture then, not only structures discourse in its different forms – e.g., narratives, prayers, sonnets, operating instructions, news, formal correspondence, conversation, ?lms, etc. – but originates from and is the re?ection of contextualized and embodied experiences. Through the co-articulation of their discreet components, text and body shape meaning-making practices enabling us to think about texture as something stemming out of our phenomenological interaction with our surroundings, of our body’s interaction with other bodies or in general with other objects, and through different modes whereby meaning is negotiated. In other words, texts help moor bodies to their surroundings that, in turn, (in) form both bodies and texts; the somatic becomes semantic, and vice versa. This phenomenological experience is emblematically re?ected in Ahmed’s (2014) queer analysis of emotions and the way certain bodies (e.g., the queer body, the Black body, the nonconforming body) are made to feel out of place in certain hegemonic contexts: an out-ofplace-ness and estrangement that involves “an acute awareness of the surface of one’s body, which appears as surface, when we cannot inhabit the social skin, which is shaped by some bodies, and not others” (148). If, on the one hand, being comfortable means being able to ?t in the environment so much that it becomes hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins, Ahmed suggests that pain and discomfort, on the other hand, return one’s attention to the surface of the body, which appears as surface, its multimodal texture made ever so present through instances of material and discursive violence alike.
Starting from these premises and considering how tethering bodies to their surroundings is inherently a phenomenological and semiotic process, this special issue proposal for Multimodality and Society aims to explore the different articulations of texture as a concept of both analysis and experience. By examining the interconnections between emotions, bodies, and texts produced in a number of semiotic resources, this special issue aims to critically re?ect on how deep affective connections, otherwise of dif?cult articulation through language alone, can be brought to the surface and used to challenge hegemonic conceptions historically strati?ed in different societies. Aiming at registering the reverberations of these re?ections across discourses and disciplines (anthropology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, and so on) with a focus on multimodal approaches, possible – but not exclusive – topics of enquiry are:
- Beyond language / the limitations of linguistic theories on language
- Corporeality and texture
- Decolonial textures / decolonizing textures
- Food narratives and texture
- Gendered textures
- Intersectionality and texture
- Linguistic texture and embodiment
- Narration and texture
- Queer/ying texture
- Race and texture
- Texture and emotions
- Texture and new materialism
- Texture in environmental discourse
- Textures in the archive
- Texture in translation
- Textures of sound
- Translating bodies
Submissions can be in one of three different format types: Original research papers, with a theoretical, methodological and/or empirical focus (6–8000 words); Multimodal sensations, short innovative multimodal pieces which extend the notion of the visual essays (4–8 pages); or Practitioner re?ections which engage with the ideas, practices and concerns of practitioners (e.g., designers, activists, artists, educators, performers) working in ?elds where multimodal tools and practices are central (1–2000 words). Initial expressions of interest in the form of an abstract of 250–500 words and a short author bio should be sent to emilio.amideo@uniparthenope.it and rodrigoborba@letras.ufrj.br by 24th January 2025. Papers will initially be reviewed by the editor of the special issue together with other editors of Multimodality & Society, and if accepted for review, they will go through double blind peer-review. Author guidance is available on the journal information page of the Multimodality & Society Web site https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/MAS.
References
Ahmed S (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Di Benedetto S (2010) The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. New York, NY:Routledge.
Halliday MAK and Hasan R (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Author biographies
Emilio Amideo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Naples “Parthenope”. His research interests include Ecocriticism, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and Affect
Theory. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies.
Rodrigo Borba is Associate Professor of Socio/Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research interests include queer linguistics, linguistic landscapes, health communication, sex work, and discourse analysis with an activist-academic focus on the relations between discourse, gender, and sexuality. He is co-editor of the journal Gender & Language.
emilio.amideo@uniparthenope.it
Emilio Amideo