ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some semiotic modes and resources employed in the television performances of drag queens with the purpose of decoding those non-linguistic factors that seem to play a major role in the construction of non-conforming gender identities in the media. The general idea is that such performing activities may foster a more inclusive representation of queer subjects on television screens. The chapter is organized as follows: The first section introduces the multimodal corpus under scrutiny by also focusing on drag queen performances; the second section presents the novel concept of ‘multimodal prosody,’ a tentative re-semiotization of the linguistic notion of semantic prosody; the third section is an attempt to measure the effects of ‘multimodal prosody’ on a small group of Italian respondents by means of a stochastic paradigm; in the fourth section, the multimodal corpus is analyzed with a view to identifying, at macro-and micro level of texts and their semiotic descriptions, the effects of the multimodal prosody enacted by televised drag performers. Finally, in the last section, some preliminary concluding remarks are discussed.
