Conspiracy as Genre

From anti-vaccine politics to aliens, this volume explores diverse critical approaches to conspiracy narratives representing them as playful stories with serious ideologies and effects.

It examines conspiracy in relation to social power and authority, moving beyond either disinformation or revelation. In addition, it looks at how the genre of conspiracy is the performance of questioning authority to produce new forms of expertise which frequently stabilize existing power hierarchies.

Across three parts, the book theorizes how conspiracy narratives are told, what they do in the social world, and how they circulate these social meanings. Part One offers semiotic and narrative analyses of the language of conspiracy as a genre. Part Two examines the social effects of these narratives, arguing that elite conspiracy is a means to stabilize social power, looking in particular at gender-related conspiracies around feminism, abortion and trans rights. Part Three considers the circulation of conspiracies and the ideologies they narrate, using unique mixed methods approaches to look at multilingual data in sites and communities in Brazil, Germany, and the USA.