Emotional specifics of verbal and nonverbal behavior when discussing body positivity (based on interviews with informants from Russia)

The article focuses on the problem of describing the specifics of verbal and nonverbal behavior of Russian-speaking respondents in oral discourse on body positivity as a topical social issue. The relevance of the problem is determined by: 1) the growing interest of scientists in the study of emotional processes in language and speech; 2) the lack of scientific papers describing the national and cultural specifics of the emotional behavior of Russophones; 3) its interdisciplinarity. The aim is to describe the emotional specifics of verbal and nonverbal behavior of Russian-speaking informants in the discourse about body positivity and, by identifying emotional markers, to describe the attitude of Russophones to the movement of radical body positivity. The leading research method is multimodal analysis implemented using ELAN software. During the experiment, it was found that, on the one hand, through language cliches, phraseological units, obscene vocabulary and borrowings from the English language, the proposition ‘you need to accept yourself as you are’ is verbalized; on the other hand, there is an ironic attitude toward the supporters of body positivity, embodied in the genre of parody. To comply with generally accepted norms of acceptability, respondents resort to self-correction, verbalized by tolerance markers. The gender aspect of body positivity is manifested in the actualization of the propositions ‘body positivity is about the female body’ and ‘the male is the earner’. References to pop culture are used for emotional reinforcement, which is also realized through nonverbal manifestations of emotions, including nonverbal markers of bewilderment, embarrassment, doubt, approval (a smirk, frown, facial expressions, laughter, smile, squinting). In addition, there are limiter gestures used to indicate a conditional separation of two objects, to visualize a ‘shield’ or show a frame, as well as a gesture visualizing quotation marks to normalize what has been said and emphasize disagreement.