Cekaite2020c

Cekaite2020c
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Cekaite2020c
Author(s)	Asta Cekaite
Title	Subversive compliance and embodiment in remedial interchanges
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, emotions-in-interaction, affective stance
Publisher
Year	2020
Language	English
City
Month
Journal	Text & Talk
Volume	40
Number	5
Pages	669–693
URL	Link
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-2078
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This study examines normativity of affect and the affective embeddedness of normativity, instantiated as verbal and embodied stances taken by the participants in adult-child remedial interchanges. The data are based on one year of video fieldwork in a first-grade class at a Swedish primary school. An ethnographically informed analysis of talk and multimodal action is adopted. The findings show that the children’s affective and normative transgressions provided discursive spaces for adult moral instructions and socialization. However, the children’s compliant responses were resistant and subversive. They were designed as embodied double-voiced acts that indexed incongruent affective and moral stances. The findings further revealed several ways of configuring embodied double-voiced responses. The children juxtaposed multiple modalities and exploited the expectations of what constitutes appropriate temporal duration, timing, and shape of nonverbal responses. They (i) combined up-scaled verbal and embodied hyperbolic rhetoric when the teachers’ talk required but minimal responses, and (ii) configured antithetical affect displays, e.g., crying and smiling, or overlaid bodily displays of moral emotion (sadness, seriousness, and smiling) with aligning but exaggerated gestures and movements. Subversive, embodied double-voiced responses simultaneously acquiesced with and deflected the responsibility and effectively derailed a successful closure of remedial interchange.

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