Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 139):
By way of probing staking further, we might ask how much of an issue it might be if a tendered meaning were rejected. In the case of (31) this involves considering how controversial it would be for another user to reply that in fact mothers tending to their own needs is a selfish act worthy of shame. This would be a high stakes rendering within online communities of mothers, but potentially relatively low stakes in other communities such as the 'manoverse' of toxic masculinity, where denigrating women is a shared exercise. Since answering the question involves fine-tuning levels of attitude, GRADUATION is a resource which is frequently implicated in staking both tendered and rendered meanings. For instance, (32) deploys graduation resources (bold) to emphasise the magnitude of emotion that the mother expresses about leaving her child and thus raise the stakes.
(32) Having major mom guilt today... Leaving my little to go away for the weekend is killing me. #momguilt
ChatGPT Comments
This one’s dense with ideological presuppositions masquerading as “fine-tuning.”
What is striking in this passage is the way GRADUATION is treated as a scalar mechanism for “fine-tuning” affect, while the ontological cut it enacts is left uninterrogated. The authors’ premise — that “raising the stakes” is a matter of degree rather than of construal — reifies affective intensity as an intrinsic property of the utterance, rather than as a relational alignment between construals.
The language of “high stakes” and “low stakes” performs a covert normalisation of community-specific value gradients as if they were empirical facts. To say that denigrating women is merely “low stakes” in certain online spaces is to confuse social saturation with ontological neutrality: the widespread construal of an evaluative stance does not render it less meaningful, only differently aligned. The “manoverse” is not a domain where value loses intensity; it is a domain where intensity is differently organised.
By attributing these contrasts to “levels of attitude,” the passage converts ideological formation into affective amplitude — the political becomes scalar. GRADUATION thus operates here not as a resource for mapping semiotic tension, but as a theoretical anaesthetic that flattens difference into measurable magnitude. The analytic posture of “probing staking further” becomes an alibi for preserving the very moral geometry it claims to examine.
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