Scott Burnett
Biographic Data
| ID | 216511 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Scott Burnett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Scott |
| FAMILY NAME | Burnett |
| SIGNATURE | BURNETT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1497-9099 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction—Heroes and Hard Truths: Gender, Sexuality, and the Sociolinguistics of the Far Right
In his May 2024 commencement address to Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas, American football player Harrison Butker positioned his Christian faith as "countercultural" and threatened by "the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion." 1 He claimed that Catholics "fear speaking truth, because . . .truth is in the minority."He offered an example to prove his case: "Congress just passed a bill where stating s…
Hailing, Voicing, and Masturbation Abstention: NoFap’s Role in Socializing Young Men into the Right-Wing Politics of Ressentiment
Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-femi…
The Science of Desire: Beauty, Masculinity, and Ideology on the Far Right
Scores of male right-wing influencers offer advice to young men online on fitness, diet, and bodybuilding. Representations of the “right” kind of man draw attention to rippling muscles, square jaws, and beautifully symmetrical faces as evidence of racial superiority. This contemporary resurgence of “body fascism” in the hypersemiotized online spaces of the far right, however, remains underexamined. In this article, we analyze Man’s World magazine…
Foreigner(?) in a Foreign Land: Multimethod Exploration of the First Decorative Dental Inlay Identified in a Pre-Hispanic Peruvian Context
This work documents the first unambiguous case of a pre-Hispanic Peruvian with dental inlays—an adult bearing two labially drilled maxillary canines, one of which retains an electrum inlay in situ. Intentional dental modification, occurring in a wide variety of forms, is a geographically and temporally wide-ranging cultural practice. Most commonly identified in Mesoamerica, intentional dental modification has also been reported both ethnohistoric…
Race, vulnerability, and aging in post-apartheid South Africa
Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints’ Robert Lawson (2023)
Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, ConstraintsRobert Lawson (2023)Oxford University Press, 344pp
Visions of degeneracy
Previous research on discourses of gender, sexuality and race in role-playing games (RPGs) finds that they favour a white, heterosexual, cis-male perspective, (re)producing stereotypes that are misogynist, homophobic and racist. This article uses feminist critical discourse analysis to examine a game with a reputation for challenging conventions of the genre and the medium, the fantasy RPG Exalted (2001–). An analysis of 31 sourcebooks shows how …
Indigenous resurgence, collective ‘reminding’, and insidious binaries: A response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’
This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, w…
Without white people, the animals will go: Covid-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation
This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural …
GaysForTrump: Coming out” as Republican on Twitter
This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of #GaysForTrump on Twitter as a discursive formation within Trumpism with distinct subject positions connected to specific acts of identification, libidinal investments, and a homonationalist allegiance to the United States, constructed as a homotopia for cisgender, white gay men. Trumpism is a political formation with its own discursive and structural dynamics that we argue have bre…
White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa
White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa deepens ongoing critical deconstruction of the role of whiteness in maintaining racial order. Scott Burnett , argues that the protection of white entitlement and cultural connection to the land are intimately interwoven, using detailed discourse analysis of campaigns aimed at preventing rhino poaching, stopping fracking in the Karoo, and advocating for the existence of a po…
A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district
In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and envi…
The Battle for 'NoFap: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention
Critical masculinities scholarship has identified a number of ways in which abstention from sex, pornography, and masturbation works to repair and reproduce hybrid and hegemonic masculinities. Though the mercurial and plural nature of contemporary online masculinities is investigated on a number of fronts, analysis to date has often pinned down abstention to a particular subject position, often understood predominantly in its gendered dimensions.…
‘The Great Youtube Purge of Wrongthink’: Altright Adaptations in a Changing Platform Ecology
Social media platforms are under increasing pressure to counter racist and other extremist discourses online. The perceived "independence" of platforms such as YouTube has attracted AltRight "micro-celebrities" (Lewis, 2020) that build alternative networks of influence. This paper examines how the discourses of one online AltRight "manfluencer" responds to tightening controls over allowable speech. We present analysis of the YouTube channel of th…
Queer counterpoints: Making ‘mistakes’ in loveLife’s ‘Make Your Move’
Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-normative individuals in South African townships. We unveil contrapuntally the pushes and pulls betw…
Voicing ambiguities in the Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba co-creator collective
This article considers youth co-production in the context of Global Challenges Research funded project, Changing the Story. The participatory project conceives of ‘voice' as research data, turn of phrase, and character by engaging with the work produced by South African co-creator collective Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba, who contribute to voicing issues related to land, stewardship and futures. Developing Linda Tuhiwai Smith's five dimensions of dec…
Breeders for race and nation’: Gender, sexuality and fecundity in post-war British fascist discourse
Burnett and Richardson’s paper has two related aims. First, it develops a model of how gender is articulated within fascist and other far-right discourses based on a review of the relevant scholarship. This model is presented in the first section. Researchers have in the past suggested a gap, or even a wilful ignorance, of gender in studies of the far right, and claimed that the topic is ‘neglected’ and ‘under-researched’. This gap is to some ext…
Constructing white autochthony in South Africa’s “soul country”: Intersections of race and land
Unemployed youth: ‘Time Bombs’ or Engines for Growth
While popular narratives about success in South Africa focus on individual effort, accidents of birth continue to determine life prospects. Inequalities in early childhood development, health, and education narrow the range of possibilities that young people have available to them, and this impacts on their risk appetite, including, through the workings of the maturing brain, a propensity to violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sex. New technolo…
Precolumbian Settlements on Carriacou, West Indies
The first systematic archaeological investigation of Precolumbian sites on the island of Carriacou in the West Indies provides a rich source of information regarding Amerindian settlement in the southern Caribbean. Herein, we report results from an island-wide survey and subsequent excavation at two large village sites—Grand Bay and Sabazan—that provide evidence for an intensive late Ceramic Age occupation dating between CAL. A.D. 400–1200. Resul…
The Battle for 'NoFap: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention
Critical masculinities scholarship has identified a number of ways in which abstention from sex, pornography, and masturbation works to repair and reproduce hybrid and hegemonic masculinities. Though the mercurial and plural nature of contemporary online masculinities is investigated on a number of fronts, analysis to date has often pinned down abstention to a particular subject position, often understood predominantly in its gendered dimensions.…
Breeders for race and nation’: Gender, sexuality and fecundity in post-war British fascist discourse
Burnett and Richardson’s paper has two related aims. First, it develops a model of how gender is articulated within fascist and other far-right discourses based on a review of the relevant scholarship. This model is presented in the first section. Researchers have in the past suggested a gap, or even a wilful ignorance, of gender in studies of the far right, and claimed that the topic is ‘neglected’ and ‘under-researched’. This gap is to some ext…
A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district
In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and envi…
Precolumbian Settlements on Carriacou, West Indies
The first systematic archaeological investigation of Precolumbian sites on the island of Carriacou in the West Indies provides a rich source of information regarding Amerindian settlement in the southern Caribbean. Herein, we report results from an island-wide survey and subsequent excavation at two large village sites—Grand Bay and Sabazan—that provide evidence for an intensive late Ceramic Age occupation dating between CAL. A.D. 400–1200. Resul…
GaysForTrump: Coming out” as Republican on Twitter
This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of #GaysForTrump on Twitter as a discursive formation within Trumpism with distinct subject positions connected to specific acts of identification, libidinal investments, and a homonationalist allegiance to the United States, constructed as a homotopia for cisgender, white gay men. Trumpism is a political formation with its own discursive and structural dynamics that we argue have bre…
Constructing white autochthony in South Africa’s “soul country”: Intersections of race and land
Indigenous resurgence, collective ‘reminding’, and insidious binaries: A response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’
This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, w…
Without white people, the animals will go: Covid-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation
This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural …
Unemployed youth: ‘Time Bombs’ or Engines for Growth
While popular narratives about success in South Africa focus on individual effort, accidents of birth continue to determine life prospects. Inequalities in early childhood development, health, and education narrow the range of possibilities that young people have available to them, and this impacts on their risk appetite, including, through the workings of the maturing brain, a propensity to violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sex. New technolo…
Precolumbian Settlements on Carriacou, West Indies
The first systematic archaeological investigation of Precolumbian sites on the island of Carriacou in the West Indies provides a rich source of information regarding Amerindian settlement in the southern Caribbean. Herein, we report results from an island-wide survey and subsequent excavation at two large village sites—Grand Bay and Sabazan—that provide evidence for an intensive late Ceramic Age occupation dating between CAL. A.D. 400–1200. Resul…
Unemployed youth: ‘Time Bombs’ or Engines for Growth
While popular narratives about success in South Africa focus on individual effort, accidents of birth continue to determine life prospects. Inequalities in early childhood development, health, and education narrow the range of possibilities that young people have available to them, and this impacts on their risk appetite, including, through the workings of the maturing brain, a propensity to violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sex. New technolo…
Constructing white autochthony in South Africa’s “soul country”: Intersections of race and land
‘The Great Youtube Purge of Wrongthink’: Altright Adaptations in a Changing Platform Ecology
Social media platforms are under increasing pressure to counter racist and other extremist discourses online. The perceived "independence" of platforms such as YouTube has attracted AltRight "micro-celebrities" (Lewis, 2020) that build alternative networks of influence. This paper examines how the discourses of one online AltRight "manfluencer" responds to tightening controls over allowable speech. We present analysis of the YouTube channel of th…
Queer counterpoints: Making ‘mistakes’ in loveLife’s ‘Make Your Move’
Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-normative individuals in South African townships. We unveil contrapuntally the pushes and pulls betw…
Voicing ambiguities in the Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba co-creator collective
This article considers youth co-production in the context of Global Challenges Research funded project, Changing the Story. The participatory project conceives of ‘voice' as research data, turn of phrase, and character by engaging with the work produced by South African co-creator collective Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba, who contribute to voicing issues related to land, stewardship and futures. Developing Linda Tuhiwai Smith's five dimensions of dec…
Breeders for race and nation’: Gender, sexuality and fecundity in post-war British fascist discourse
Burnett and Richardson’s paper has two related aims. First, it develops a model of how gender is articulated within fascist and other far-right discourses based on a review of the relevant scholarship. This model is presented in the first section. Researchers have in the past suggested a gap, or even a wilful ignorance, of gender in studies of the far right, and claimed that the topic is ‘neglected’ and ‘under-researched’. This gap is to some ext…
White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa
White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa deepens ongoing critical deconstruction of the role of whiteness in maintaining racial order. Scott Burnett , argues that the protection of white entitlement and cultural connection to the land are intimately interwoven, using detailed discourse analysis of campaigns aimed at preventing rhino poaching, stopping fracking in the Karoo, and advocating for the existence of a po…
A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district
In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and envi…
The Battle for 'NoFap: Myths, Masculinity, and the Meaning of Masturbation Abstention
Critical masculinities scholarship has identified a number of ways in which abstention from sex, pornography, and masturbation works to repair and reproduce hybrid and hegemonic masculinities. Though the mercurial and plural nature of contemporary online masculinities is investigated on a number of fronts, analysis to date has often pinned down abstention to a particular subject position, often understood predominantly in its gendered dimensions.…
Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints’ Robert Lawson (2023)
Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, ConstraintsRobert Lawson (2023)Oxford University Press, 344pp
Visions of degeneracy
Previous research on discourses of gender, sexuality and race in role-playing games (RPGs) finds that they favour a white, heterosexual, cis-male perspective, (re)producing stereotypes that are misogynist, homophobic and racist. This article uses feminist critical discourse analysis to examine a game with a reputation for challenging conventions of the genre and the medium, the fantasy RPG Exalted (2001–). An analysis of 31 sourcebooks shows how …
Indigenous resurgence, collective ‘reminding’, and insidious binaries: A response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’
This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, w…
Without white people, the animals will go: Covid-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation
This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural …
GaysForTrump: Coming out” as Republican on Twitter
This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of #GaysForTrump on Twitter as a discursive formation within Trumpism with distinct subject positions connected to specific acts of identification, libidinal investments, and a homonationalist allegiance to the United States, constructed as a homotopia for cisgender, white gay men. Trumpism is a political formation with its own discursive and structural dynamics that we argue have bre…
Introduction—Heroes and Hard Truths: Gender, Sexuality, and the Sociolinguistics of the Far Right
In his May 2024 commencement address to Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas, American football player Harrison Butker positioned his Christian faith as "countercultural" and threatened by "the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion." 1 He claimed that Catholics "fear speaking truth, because . . .truth is in the minority."He offered an example to prove his case: "Congress just passed a bill where stating s…
Hailing, Voicing, and Masturbation Abstention: NoFap’s Role in Socializing Young Men into the Right-Wing Politics of Ressentiment
Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-femi…
The Science of Desire: Beauty, Masculinity, and Ideology on the Far Right
Scores of male right-wing influencers offer advice to young men online on fitness, diet, and bodybuilding. Representations of the “right” kind of man draw attention to rippling muscles, square jaws, and beautifully symmetrical faces as evidence of racial superiority. This contemporary resurgence of “body fascism” in the hypersemiotized online spaces of the far right, however, remains underexamined. In this article, we analyze Man’s World magazine…
Foreigner(?) in a Foreign Land: Multimethod Exploration of the First Decorative Dental Inlay Identified in a Pre-Hispanic Peruvian Context
This work documents the first unambiguous case of a pre-Hispanic Peruvian with dental inlays—an adult bearing two labially drilled maxillary canines, one of which retains an electrum inlay in situ. Intentional dental modification, occurring in a wide variety of forms, is a geographically and temporally wide-ranging cultural practice. Most commonly identified in Mesoamerica, intentional dental modification has also been reported both ethnohistoric…
Race, vulnerability, and aging in post-apartheid South Africa
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (6 works)