Meowmy, Pawrents and Menschenwelpen ‘human puppies’: Linguistic practices of Doing Interspecies Families on German Instagram

IF 2.3 2区 文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION Discourse Context & Media Pub Date : 2024-08-01 DOI:10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100800
Miriam Lind
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Abstract

Looking at cute animal images and videos has become a popular online pastime and animals themselves increasingly appear as actors in social media who have their own accounts and profiles from which they ‘speak’ to and ‘interact’ with us. This development goes hand in hand with a change in human-animal relations in most of Western cultures, where pets – especially cats and dogs – are more and more often seen and treated as family members while the animals we eat are rendered invisible in factory farms that are spatially detached from everyday human life. The familial relationships between humans and their pet companions are constructed by a variety of sociocultural means, one of which is language. By talking about pets as babies and children and oneself as cat or dog moms, the connection between the human and the pet is discursively established as one of kinship and intimacy rather than one of ownership and obedience. Social media have become a prolific space for performing “interspecies families” (Owens, 2015), where self-acclaimed pet parents can interact with each other and build communities of practice in which pet accounts post and engage with each other from an imagined pet perspective. This article uses a quantitative corpus-based approach to study the discursive construction of interspecies families on German-speaking Instagram. By analysing more than 20,000 posts from dog and cat accounts offering first person narratives, the article provides insights into the ways human pet owners speak about themselves and their relations with their pets from an imagined pet perspective. The analysis shows that the caption texts accompanying the posted pictures and videos are highly anthropocentric: at the centre of these short texts stands the – usually female – human pet owner. Using family terminology for both humans and other animals in these posts serves the linguistic construction of interspecies families in which pets and their human companions are held together by love and kinship ties rather than ownership.

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Meowmy、Pawrents 和 Menschenwelpen "人类小狗":在德国 Instagram 上组建跨物种家庭的语言实践
观看可爱的动物图片和视频已成为一种流行的网络消遣方式,动物本身也越来越多地出现在社交媒体上,它们拥有自己的账户和个人资料,通过这些账户和个人资料与我们 "对话 "和 "互动"。在大多数西方文化中,宠物(尤其是猫和狗)越来越多地被视为家庭成员,而我们食用的动物则被隔离在工厂化养殖场之外,与人类的日常生活隔绝。人类与宠物伙伴之间的家庭关系是通过各种社会文化手段构建的,语言就是其中之一。通过将宠物称为 和 ,将自己称为 或 ,人类与宠物之间的联系在话语上被确立为亲缘关系和亲密关系,而非所有权和服从关系。社交媒体已成为表演 "物种间家庭"(Owens,2015 年)的一个多产空间,自称为宠物父母的人可以在这里相互交流,并建立实践社区,在社区中,宠物账户从想象中的宠物角度发布信息并相互交流。本文采用基于语料库的定量方法,研究德语 Instagram 上跨物种家庭的话语建构。通过分析来自猫狗账户的 20,000 多条以第一人称叙述的帖子,文章深入探讨了人类宠物主人从想象中的宠物视角谈论自己及其与宠物关系的方式。分析表明,所发布图片和视频的说明文字高度以人类为中心:这些短文的中心是人类宠物主人--通常是女性。在这些帖子中,人类和其他动物都使用了家庭术语,这有助于在语言上构建跨物种家庭,在这种家庭中,宠物和它们的人类同伴是通过爱和亲情纽带而不是所有权维系在一起的。
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来源期刊
Discourse Context & Media
Discourse Context & Media COMMUNICATION-
CiteScore
5.00
自引率
10.00%
发文量
46
审稿时长
55 days
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