”So what?”, “there, I said it!”, “I confess”: discursive strategies of qualification and disqualification of taste and distinction

Abstract

In our article, we intend to discuss the use of discursive strategies to justify certain practices of cultural consumption that tend to be delegitimized by the dominant status in terms of what we is understood as “good taste”. We have elected key categories, “So what?”, “I confess” and “There, I said it”, as sliding discursive operators that allow the affirmation of a deviant taste, which, ambiguously, also end up reinforcing fixed places of distinction and discrimination. To perform the analysis of the use of such categories, we have focused our reflections on pinched examples of the digital universe, particularly discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles and communities based on shared tastes on Orkut.