“I knew then, in that moment, that she’d taken it seriously”: Masculinity and Pragmatic Ambiguity in Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer

Set in 2010s London, Netflix’s miniseries Baby Reindeer (2024), based on Richard Gadd’s one- man show, offers notable insights on the role of hegemonic masculinity’s crisis (Morgan 2006) in the alteration of language and perception in contemporary autofiction. In the series, linguistic ambiguity serves indeed a central function in blurring the boundaries between complicity and victimhood. The story’s protagonist, Donny, revealing his discomfort with confronting his vulnerability and lack of assertiveness – intensified by a traumatic experience of abuse – often relies on jokes and conversational implicatures that lead to pragmatic ambiguity, resulting in the validation of his female stalker’s thoughts and actions. In this perspective, masculinity is a relevant aspect of the narrative: the crucial (communicative) events that provide the endorsement of the stalker’s intentions are consistently linked to the presence of stereotypically male characters that influence Donny’s behaviour. In effect, the stalker persistently clings to the protagonist’s linguistic equivocality, making her presence inescapable. By proposing a sample of jokes and communicative exchanges taken from the dialogues between the two main characters, and considering Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory (1962; 1969), the purpose of this study is to investigate the modalities through which pragmatic ambiguity occurs in the miniseries. Carried out in the light of gender studies and pragmatics, this study seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the protagonist’s linguistic choices are influenced by the crisis of his masculinity, in a narrative that operates into broader cultural anxieties about manliness and vulnerability.