What We Mean When We Talk About Vegan(ism): Polysemy, Identity, and Stancetaking on YouTube

The digital media landscape allows content creators to center their identities in their content. On YouTube, creators employ curated representations of self to foster parasocial relationships and position themselves in relation to a particular topic, making identity a salient factor in stancetaking online. This project analyzes the ways that creators on YouTube engage with the polysemy of veganism in their stancetaking strategies and the role of intertextuality and identity in online communication. This topic is explored through three substudies: The first examines how a YouTuber builds epistemic stance using a conversion narrative framework to presuppose an ex-vegan identity and gain membership to the carnivore diet community. The second examines an asynchronous, multimodal debate between two vegan content creators regarding intersectionality and identity politics in the vegan community, who negotiate in-group boundaries and the purview of veganism, while leveraging intertextuality and YouTube’s affordances to bolster their epistemic stance. The third looks at looks at how perceptions of veganism are deployed in stancetaking in public conversations with a street activist and the ways in which the comment section responds to those stances. This project shows how the stances taken on veganism contribute to its polysemy and argues that stasis theory is a useful tool for unraveling the polysemy of a term. Understanding how people approach conversations about polysemous topics can shed light on how prior text associations inform one’s understanding of a topic and, therefore, the stances that they take.