‘I’m just imitating the idiot’

Abstract

This study examines how exclusionary acts of status degradation are performed through embodied stances and pejorative category ascriptions in the midst of a situated game activity where two boys align in mockful stances and stylized enactments towards a targeted boy. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach to stance and membership categorization combined with sociolinguistic work on indexicality and identity, it shows how the cumulative patterning of derogatory stances index a deviant gender identity for the targeted boy. While the target is repeatedly cast as ‘abnormal’ and an ‘outsider’ by attributing (non-)boyhood features as ‘incompetence’ and ‘cowardness’, the two boys’ elevate own positions and display shared commitments to themselves as ‘real (warrior) boys’.