Discursive stickiness: Affective institutional texts and activist resistance

Abstract

Pushing the bounds of public relations theory and research, we explore how institutional texts have produced and reified stigmas around gender transgression and how these texts are bound up in moments of activism and resistance. We considered how different discursive and material functions get “stuck” together by way of texts and how this sticking depends on a history of association and institutionalization. Activism presents opportunities to challenge institutional and structural stickiness, and we argue that public relations can challenge the affective assemblages that comprise and perpetuate these systems, unsettling the historical discourses that have governed institutions by establishing new communicative possibilities.