Self-Praise Themes among Male and Female English and Iraqi Celebrities: A Discourse-Based Study
Subject Areas :Majid Saleh Khalaf 1 , Nafiseh Hosseinpour 2 , Oudah Kadhim Abed 3 , Fatemeh Karimi 4
1 - Department of English, Isf.C., Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
2 - Department of English, Isf.C., Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
3 - Department of English, College of Education for Human Sciences, Al Muthanna University, Samawah, Iraq
4 - Islamic Azad University
Keywords: Self-praise, celebrity discourse, cultural norms, gender differences, social media,
Abstract :
This study examines the employment of self-praise in online celebrity culture, with a focused comparative lens on self-presentation strategies deployed by male and female celebrities from English-speaking (e.g., U.S., U.K.) and Iraqi backgrounds, grounded in Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory of self-presentation, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, and recent sociopragmatic reconceptualizations of self-praise to investigate how celebrities strategically use self-praise to construct, maintain, and recalibrate their public personas in digitally mediated spaces; drawing on a purposive sample of 24 high-profile celebrities (12 English: 6 male, 6 female; 12 Iraqi: 6 male, 6 female), the research analyzes authentic, publicly available posts across Instagram, Twitter (X), and Weibo over a 12-month period, identifying three dominant self-praise strategies—explicit (direct assertions of achievement), adapted (e.g., pseudo-modest framing, humblebragging, third-person attribution), and implicit (indirect signaling via visuals, affiliations, or audience co-construction)—while attending to how platform-specific affordances shape expression: Instagram’s visual–textual synergy enables multimodal self-praise (e.g., award photos with celebratory captions), Twitter’s character constraints foster brevity and irony-laden formulations, and Weibo’s integrated comment-reply system facilitates iterative, interactional self-praise; crucially, cultural norms significantly modulate strategy selection, with English-speaking celebrities—operating in individualistic contexts—more frequently deploying explicit, achievement-oriented self-praise, whereas Iraqi celebrities, navigating collectivist expectations of modesty and group harmony, favor adapted and implicit forms, often deflecting credit to family, team, or divine favor; gender further intersects with culture, as female English celebrities balance empowerment narratives with likability concerns using humor and solidarity markers, while female Iraqi celebrities more consistently invoke religious and familial framing to legitimize success within socioreligious norms, and although male celebrities in both contexts exhibit greater directness, Iraqi males more regularly anchor praise in national or communal pride; quantitative coding confirmed statistically significant differences in strategy frequency by culture (χ² = 28.74, p < .001) and a significant gender–culture interaction (p = .007), affirming that self-praise on social media is neither universal nor neutral but a culturally situated, platform-mediated performance; as global celebrity branding converges on digital platforms, self-praise functions as a pivotal tool for social validation and market differentiation—yet remains deeply anchored in local ideologies of face, gender, and prestige; thus, the study advances digital pragmatics by integrating cross-cultural sociolinguistics, gender studies, and media theory into a unified analytic framework, offering empirically grounded and theoretically robust insights into how power, identity, and discourse co-evolve in the attention economy of contemporary social media.
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