Speech-act meets genre meets identity meets alliance

Identity performance - there is an isomorphism between genre and group membership.

The grace of a performance is a clue to the "authenticity" of the identity, and thus, the trust someone else can put into the performer. For instance, if he *really* does act like a redneck, then he can be trusted in that respect. Genre leads to trust and trust leads to belonging. There are obviously other ways in which a person's redneck-ness would be evaluated, tests of personal and family history etc.

But a weird thing is that there is such polysemy in everything we say that we can get confused. We perform identities with words that say things besides that we belong - they might say things like "I vote for George Bush" when what they mean is "I value a life lived in terms of morality and obligation, and want to be recognized and socially placed as such, especially by my fellows". There is other polysemy in discourse as well -- generally a text serves the whole range of Jakobson's eight functions, with social effects from the unmarked as well as the marked functions being satisfied. But when speech acts get deployed for identity performance, the effect on the society can be extreme.