My dissertation, titled “Language Use and Global Media Circulation Among Argentine Fans of English-Language Mass Media”, explores the links between globalization, media/pop culture, and language through a study of Argentine fans of massive English language media and pop cultural franchises. I look at how Argentine fans of franchises like Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Supernatural orient to English as a semiotic resource made available through these texts—and how engagement with globally-circulating media fandoms offers a venue for working out local ideas of class status and Argentina’s position within global cultural flows (Appadurai 1996).
Page 99 (which is the PDF page 99 and the “real” page 99—I purposefully arranged my pagination in this way to avoid potential mis-matches like that) bridges two data excerpts that I use to give ethnographic detail about how orientations to subtitling vs. dubbing relate to Argentine notions of socioeconomic status. (For clarity’s sake, I’ll include the data that appears on page 98; for length’s sake I’ll leave out Excerpt 17, which essentially makes the same point as Excerpt 16).
Excerpt 15. “Las voces originales”
| 1 | me gusta el sonido original (.) las voces originales (.) | I like the original sound (.) the original voices (.) |
| 2 | el tratamiento de sonidos (.) como te dije yo había | the way the sounds are (.) like I said before I’ve |
| 3 | estudiado antes (.) sé que se pierde algo pasando al | studied [English] before (.) I know you lose things |
| 4 | castellano y no (.) prefiero ir no sé ir a otro cine pero | translating to Spanish and no (.) I’d rather I |
| 5 | (.) ver los subtítulos (.) sí | dunno go to another theatre but (.) to see the |
| 6 | subtitles (.) yeah |
This comment frames a preference for subtitled English-language media as a result of advanced instruction in English (lines 2-3). And indeed, as I have mentioned before, most of my participants have exceptional proficiency in English, largely due to self- teaching efforts rather than a particularly strong English-language education program in Argentina’s public schools. Pointing also to discourses of “maturity” that were mentioned earlier, these statements frame preference for subtitles as a stance held by people who “know better”.
Of course, what these comments elide are the fact that access to high-quality English language education in Argentina is class-stratified. As discussed throughout this section, English language classrooms in public schools leave much to be desired, so unless one’s family has enough disposable income to pay for attendance at an instituto, there are limited resources for developing the kind of linguistic proficiency that is presumed necessary to “prefer” subtitling to dubbing. Still, commentary that explicitly invokes the role of class in preferences for linguistic mode of media consumption did come up. See, for instance, these two comments from online surveys in Excerpts 16 and 17.
Excerpt 16. “Una disposición estatal”
| 1 | Hace un par de años las producciones originalmente | A few years ago productions originally in English |
| 2 | en inglés solían subtitularse, ahora suelen consumirse | tended to be subtitled, now they tend more to be |
| 3 | más dobladas en la televisión por cable o abierta, | consumed dubbed on cable or public broadcast tv, |
| 4 | dado a una disposición estatal que buscaba el | because of a government program to develop the |
| 5 | desarrollo de la industria del doblaje y favorecer | dubbing industry and favor Spanish-language |
| 6 | contenido en español. Por lo general, los doblajes son | content. In general, the dubs are good and faithful |
| 7 | buenos y fieles al material original, prefiero las | to the original material, I prefer the subtitled |
| 8 | versiones subtituladas dado que considero que a | versions because I think that sometimes certain |
| 9 | veces ciertos significados originales pueden perderse | meanings can get lost in translation. Subtitles tend |
| 10 | en la traducción. La subtitulación suele preferirse en | to be preferred in higher socio-economic classes |
| 11 | estratos socio-económicos más altos (los que llegado | (even among those who can understand without |
| 12 | al caso incluso pueden entender sin la necesidad de | subtitles, depending on their competency in |
| 13 | requerir subtítulos, dependiendo de su competencia | English), in contrast to dubbing. |
| 14 | con el inglés) al contrario del doblaje. |
Because the chapter this page appears in is focused on tracing the major ideological frameworks through which Argentineans think about the role of “English” in their country, it doesn’t capture how this plays out in the way Argentine fans of these media franchises construct their identities as fans (that’s Chapter 4), or how fans will creatively reinterpret/recontextualize/remix globally-circulating media texts in a way that feels iconically “Argentine” (that’s Chapter 5). But by and large I do feel that this section nicely represents some of the major themes of my dissertation.
One such theme is the balancing of binaristic tensions—educated vs. uneducated, monolingual vs. bilingual, local vs. global—and how these get worked out through the perception and use of language. Another key theme of my dissertation highlighted here is how media and pop culture are used to make sense of people’s everyday life experiences. The speakers in Excerpts 15 and 16 have constructed cultural narratives that legitimize or justify certain modes of media consumption as indicative of particular class or educational backgrounds—and in the case of Excerpt 16, how such narratives are perpetuated by the state! At least in a superficial way, page 99 shows a glimmer of how English-language pop culture is made (linguistically) relevant to Argentineans’ every day lives.
Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn. 2019. “Language Use and Global Media Circulation Among Argentine Fans of English-Language Mass Media”. University of Arizona, Ph.D. Dissertation.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson, Ph.D is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. Her work focuses on the social circulation of language, pop culture, fandom, and social media. Find her work at mcvalentinsson.com or on Twitter @DrMCV.
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