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Influencer Discourse: Affective relations and identities
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349] 2024
► pp. 278–301

Chapter 11
“Getting personal with you”

Affect and authenticity in confessional videos of YouTube lifestyle and beauty influencers

| Pedagogical College Bern
| Cardiff University
Since the Middle Ages, confession has been one of the ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’ (Foucault 1978). While confessional monologues have been researched in reality TV discourse (Lorenzo-Dus 2009; Tolson 2006), the communicative potential of confessional talk for Social Media Influencers has been largely underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring confession as a distinct genre in the communicative repertoire of lifestyle and beauty YouTubers. In this regard, we first map this genre in terms of its key themes, formal features and media production choices. Drawing on Giaxoglou’s (2021) notion of affective positioning, we also examine how the influencers and their audiences are affectively positioned in the discourse of confessional videos through the deployment of verbal, non-verbal, as well as other material (camera) and graphic (emojis) resources. We conclude this chapter by demonstrating how this type of positioning intersects with the production of an authentic selfhood on YouTube.
Keywords: confession, affect, authenticity, YouTube, (affective) positioning, intimacy, vulnerability, multimodality, lifestyle and beauty influencers, social media influencers, content creators
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Confessional talk, emotion and authenticity
  • 3.Collecting and analysing confessional videos
  • 4.Confessional videos as a genre
  • 5.Getting personal with you
    • 5.1Conflicting characters: Vulnerable Amy vs. Exploitative Amy
    • 5.2Affective tellers and supportive listeners
    • 5.3Affective reactions from benevolent confessors
  • 6.I’m burnt out
    • 6.1Conflicting characters: Professional/Fake Amy vs. Personal/True Amy
    • 6.2Affective/authentic tellers and intimate listeners
    • 6.3Ventriloquising the confessor’s affective reactions
  • 7.The affective self and “self authenticity”
  • 8.Conclusion: Displaying affect in pursuit of authenticity
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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