U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style

Abstract

Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., <dallyn> darling, <gawjus> gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, babe, u ok hun?), and characterological tropes (e.g., the life motto ‘live, love, laugh’) as indexical representations of a particular type of classed, gendered, and ethnic identity in a corpus of Instagram memes. I demonstrate that these features have become enregistered as a characterological figure of a British working-class White woman—the Hun—that is stylistically deployed as a digital commodity register. Concluding, I emphasise the need for research to engage more fully with stylisation and commodification in social and digital media interaction.