“Signature Habits” and “Strict Rules”: Positioning Candidates as Mothers of Color in US Mayoral Debates

This study examines the interactional negotiation of potentially racist, sexist, and classist discourse in the 2021 Boston mayoral election, which featured two immigrant-background women of color as final candidates. We use positioning theory to examine question-answer sequences in “rapid-fire” rounds of 5 hour-long public debates, examining how moderators position the candidates as various types of “others” in their questions and how the candidates take up or challenge possible -isms in their responses. We find that candidates strategically orient to select elements of moderators’ questions and use a variety of evasion strategies to provide answers that maintain a cooperative façade and construct rapport with a diverse electorate. Specific strategies include shifting deictics, using verbal and multimodal mitigation devices, providing more information than the question required, and affirming more inclusive ethnocultural identities than those presupposed in questions. This study contributes to our understanding of language and discrimination by examining the subtle ways that political candidates from groups that were historically excluded from public leadership resist potentially prejudicial positioning and construct intersectional identities in public discourse.