ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how people vocally display bodily strain. While strain sounds can be a “leakage” of an individual bodily effort, they can also be performed without tension beyond what is necessary for their production, and acted upon by co-present others. The study re-specifies the pioneering but impressionistic account of response cries by Goffman (1978) through analyzing the minute mutual temporalities of vocal and bodily strain in the recordings of naturally occurring strain grunts during physical work and body instruction. The chapter argues that strain grunts are regularly produced alongside bodily effort, with variable phonetic characteristics, with outbreaths reflecting tension release, and at moments when the success of the effort is at risk. This leads to local (re)configuration of embodied participation in the task at hand and the emergence of strain displays as having been informative.
