"Who’s Afraid of Conchita Wurst? Drag Performers and the Construction of Multimodal Prosody"

This study explores some semiotic modes and resources employed in the live performances of drag queens with the purpose of decoding those non-linguistic factors that seem to play a major role in the construction of gender queer identities in the media. The media considerably shape social attitudes and learning, specifically recurring images, juxtaposed with positive contexts, on TV screens may boost social change in society. The wide spectrum of nonverbal behavioral cues that gender bender performers display in their live shows, such as body orientation, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, vocalisation, posture, vestemics, etc., can be read as important behavioral indicators. They contribute to help the audience understand and prime, beyond the face value of the words, affective, emotional and in particular social aspects of the interactions the non-binary performers intend to construe. The semiotic investigation of the dominant trope of gender variation in contemporary live performances may shed light to the novel representations and discursive constructions of alternative forms of non-hegemonic gender and heteronormativity in social and cultural contexts.
From a methodological viewpoint, this chapter, by exploring the nature of systemic functional representation through Kress and van Leeuwen’s semioticisation of Halliday’s ideational, textual and representational metafunctions, intends to critically analyse contemporary discourses on gender through the analysis of the re-semioticisation of semantic prosody into ‘semiotic prosody’ of minor gendered social actors. The multimodal gendered discourses under scrutiny aim at the deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity through complex semiotic propositions, which, at a first analysis, seem to display ‘live narrative processes’ embedded in highly figurative Reactional processes.