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Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 9:1 (2019) ► pp.32–58

Gesturing the source domain

The role of co-speech gesture in the metaphorical models of gender transition

| San Francisco State University

Gesture is aptly described as a “backdoor” to cognition (Sweetser, 2007, p. 203). Co-speech gesture has been shown to aid in the representation of abstract concepts (Parrill & Sweetser, 2004) and, specifically, encode metaphorical source domains (Cienki, 1998). This paper examines how co-speech gesture aligns with spoken and written narrative to support a spatially based representation of gender identity. Repeated gestural patterns include inward facing palms used to mime fictive category boundaries, gestural mapping of motion across metaphorical gender regions, manual deictic reference to interior and exterior self, and distancing from past gender assignment signaled through emblematic scare quotes. The data examined in this paper confirm the important role gesture plays in supplementing the instantiation of the metaphorical models that organize transgender speakers’ experience with and discussion of gender and transition.

Keywords: co-speech gesture, conceptual metaphor, gender transition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The coming-out story as a narrative genre
    • 1.2Metaphorical gesture
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Binary categories
    • 3.2 transition is a journey
    • 3.3The self divided
    • 3.4Gender as a contested category – the use of scare quotes
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Multifunctionality
    • 4.2Category order
    • 4.3Gesture and gender identity
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 20 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17016.led
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