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This article explores how language represented in a YouTube video came to be interpreted as the speech of tfhe stereotypical Southern redneck. Specifically, it examines how viewers drew on three strategies of contextualization, over the course of 502 comments, that allowed them to define specific utterances as exemplifying instances of white, working-class, racist language. First, viewers provided timestamps and quotations as discourse flags, marking specific stretches of discourse within the video as culturally relevant signs. Second, viewers engaged in discourse evaluations, whether through the explicit evaluative description of speakers or through implicit affective stance markers. Third, viewers' comments highlighted indexical juxtapositions between the words of Southern speakers and their accompanying signs, including the Confederate flag and nonstandard features, presupposing that these signs jointly and consistently emblematized Southern redneck racism. The author argues that the ideological significance of media representations of Southern language, even while guided by content producers' particular mediatizations, ultimately became shaped by the ways in which listeners--collaboratively and cumulatively--engaged in public acts of listening, contextualizing specific linguistic moments as relevant and assigning them with recognizable sociocultural value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how fans of K-pop, a mediatized musical genre from South Korea, negotiated the tugs of competing language norms within the transnational context of YouTube. The analysis focuses on interactions that emerged over thirty-three months and across eleven ‘reaction videos’ posted by two English-speaking fans. I analyze the semiotic process by which these two speakers’ utterances of Korean names came to be heard as hybrid by their viewers, how viewers invoked various ideological frames when evaluating these hybridities, and how local language practices and interpretations were shaped as a result. Specifically, I show how a purist ideology of linguistic absolutism, which idealized the ‘correct’ pronunciation of words, was overwhelmingly dominant and how K-pop fans’ contextualizations of forms as hybrid, or their hybridizations, triggered a discursive trajectory: once language was recognized as hybrid, it entered a pathway toward purification, or the contextualization of language as pure. (Hybridity, metalanguage, ideology, new media, mediatization, Korean popular culture)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the cultural significance of cross-racial embodiments of linguistic signs that may be legible as ‘black’ within mainstream US discourses but, in YouTube’s transnational space, may be subject to alternative interpretations. It specifically explores ideologies of race, gender, and authenticity that underlie signs stereotypically linked to symbolic blackness and embodied by a young Chinese American YouTube star named Kevin Wu, whose performance is further complicated by his ironic footing. I argue that although Wu’s stance recognizes certain contradictory values of his racialized performance, his humor never challenges stereotypes of black hypermasculinity. At the same time, my examination of how viewers collaboratively interpret Wu suggests that although they may largely reproduce widely circulating ideologies of race, gender, and linguistic authenticity in the USA, their collaborative praise participates in the reshaping of widely circulating imagery of Asian masculinity in transnational space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]