In this paper, I revisit a cultural studies understanding of difference mediated through genre and intertextuality to advance an approach to stancetaking that foregrounds embodied alignments and disalignments in the encountering of Others. I define difference as the embodied performance of relationality in difference, that is to say, difference will be taken to be a notion that reveals how multilingual speakers embody relations of difference as in difference, arrived at out of conjecture, determination and contradictions of language in performance. Based on a large qualitative youth multilingual project, I draw on virtual interactional data to illustrate how in difference through stancetaking is entextualized in the embodied performance of parody by an emerging R&B and pop group in Cape Town. This embodied performance, body pop, is a type of the transgressive embodiment of language that challenges the endurance and injury of discourses of difference. I focus on body pop, an (en)genre(ing) of embodied performance, in order to demonstrate the various evaluative, affective and epistemic stancetaking effects the embodied performance had on the audience/readers. In the conclusion, I provide a few threads to follow in the further study of difference.
