In this talk I examine how the concept of social distance is constructed in sectarian multimodal discourse on Youtube. Social distance has been a key concept in sociological and anthroplogical traditions in recent times, and it offers a means to understand the relationship between Self and Other in multimodal discourse. Following previous work in social semiotic and music studies which examine how visual composition, music and the voice have constructed social distance or expressions of intimacy, I introduce the concept of tonal gravity which extends the spatial metaphors in previous work (Machin 2007; Van Leeuwen 1999; Zbikowski 2009) to account for a fuller understanding of how tonality helps narrate the embodied sonic Self and Other. This is introduced via a close multimodal analysis of ‘Rule Britannia’ as a Rangers Football fan video which is only transformed into a sectarian text through its multimodal meanings that act together to produce a dominant Self actively prejudiced against a low Other.

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