Find that thing that weighs more than drugs
YouTube as logotherapeutic placemaking for academic disruption and authentic expression
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.21527Keywords:
linguistic landscape, YouTube, placemaking, gender, authenticity, Cape Town, drug abuseAbstract
Creating a space for bodies to count as corporeal linguistic landscapes or ‘skinscapes’ is an avenue that speaks to the growing interest of bodies-in-place and placemaking in the physical landscape. In this essay, I extend skinscapes and placemaking to that of the digital space, specifically Amiena Inspired, my YouTube channel. A frank autoethnography detailing my formative drug abuse, postnatal depression and logotherapeutic escape from the bounds of religion, motherhood and womanhood in academia serves as a disruptive narrative to the hegemonic hypermasculine prisoner narrative currently proliferated. I argue that I traded my social status and expectations of a ‘good woman/mother/Muslim/academic/wife’ for authenticity-in-place, with my gender serving as marked materiality of the growing purview of drug abuse in Cape Town.
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