Cover not available
Article published In:
Young researchers in action
Edited by Angeliki Tzanne
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 10:1] 2022
► pp. 140–168

Feminist activism on Twitter

The discursive construction of sexual violence and victim-survivors in #WhyIDidntReport

| Universitat de València , Spain

The emergence of digital platforms has allowed feminists to employ new methods to fight gender inequality and break the silence which surrounds gender-based aggression. This paper aims to examine evaluative discourses employed by Twitter users to construct and denounce sexual violence in a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. This hashtag was created in 2018 as a response to Donald Trump’s tweets in which he questioned Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s decision not to report her case of sexual assault when it occurred. As a result, victim-survivors adopted the hashtag to explain why they did not report their own cases. The present study adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach and draws on Appraisal Theory to examine ideological discourses of (sexually) violent acts and victim-survivors. Results show the presence of discourses of violence and emotional suffering employed to bond around shared experiences and publicly denounce oppressive patriarchal practices and a lack of support from institutions and authorities.

Keywords: Twitter, hashtag feminism, sexual violence, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, Appraisal Theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hashtag feminism
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Appraisal Theory
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Frequency analysis
    • 4.2Collocation analysis
    • 4.3Concordance analysis
      • 4.3.1Discourse of violence and crime
      • 4.3.2Discourse of victimization
      • 4.3.3Discourse of male victimization and hate speech
      • 4.3.4Discourse of trauma and emotional suffering
      • 4.3.5Discourse of empowerment
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00049.pal
References
Aloy Mayo, María, and Maire Taboada
2017 “Evaluation in Political Discourse Addressed to Women: Appraisal Analysis of Cosmopolitan’s Online Coverage of the 2014 Us Midterm Elections.” Discourse, Context & Media 181: 40–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Kristin L., and Jill Cermele
2014 “Public/Private Language Aggression against Women: Tweeting Rage and Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (2): 274–293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anthony, Laurence
. AntConc (Version 3.5.7). Tokyo: Waseda University 2018.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul
2010 Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid Khosravinik, Michal Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak
2008 “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse & Society 19 (3): 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, and Tony McEnery
2015 “Who Benefits When Discourse Gets Democratised? Analysing a Twitter Corpus around the British Benefits Street Debate.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora, ed. by Paul Baker, and Tony McEnery, 244–265. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barker-Plummer, Bernadette, and David Barker-Plummer
2017 “Twitter as a Feminist Resource: #YesAllWomen, Digital Platforms, and Discursive Social Change.” In Social Movements and Media, ed. by Jennifer Earl, and Deana A. Rholinger, 91–118. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monica, and Helen Caple
2014 “Why do News Values Matter? Towards a New Methodological Framework for Analysing News Discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and Beyond.” Discourse & Society 25 (2): 135–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, Katie
2018 “bell hooks and Consciousness-Raising: Argument for a Fourth Wave of Feminism.” In Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment, ed. by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, and Tracy Everbach, 91–108. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillian. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2013 “Domestic Violence and Public Participation in the Media: The Case of Citizen Journalism.” Gender and Language 7 (3): 275–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2014 “Gender Ideology and Social Identity Processes in Online Language Aggression against Women.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (2): 226–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyle, Karen
2019 #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chiluwa, Innocent, and Presley Ifukor
2015 “ ‘War against our Children’: Stance and Evaluation in #Bringbackourgirls Campaign Discourse on Twitter and Facebook.” Discourse & Society 26 (3), 267–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark-Parsons, Rosemary
2019 “ ‘I SEE YOU, I BELIEVE YOU, I STAND WITH YOU’: #Metoo and the Performance of Networked Feminist Visibility.” Feminist Media Studies. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Darics, Erika, and Veronika Koller
2019 “Social Actors ‘to Go’: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication.” Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82 (2): 214–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cock, Barbara, and Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
2018 “From Expressing Solidarity to Mocking on Twitter: Pragmatic Functions of Hashtags Starting with #Jesuis across Languages.” Language in Society 471: 197–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dibbell, Julian
1993 “A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society.” Village Voice 231: 36–42.Google Scholar
Dunn, Jennifer L.
2005 “ ‘Victims’ and ‘Survivors’: Emerging Vocabularies of Motive for ‘Battered Women Who Stay’.” Sociological Inquiry 751: 1–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Formato, Federica
2014 “Language Use and Gender in the Italian Parliament.” Ph.D. Diss., Lancaster University. [URL]
Hall, Kira
1996 “Cyberfeminism.” In Computer-mediated Communication, ed. by Susan C. Herring, 147–170. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hardaker, Claire, and Mark McGlashan
2016 “ ‘Real Men don’t Hate Women’: Twitter Rape Threats and Group Identity.” Journal of Pragmatics 911: 80–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan C.
1999 “The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment On-Line.” The Information Society 151: 151–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Sally
2015 “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora, ed. by Paul Baker, and Tony McEnery, 266–284. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ison, Jessica
2019 “ ‘It’s not Just Men and Women’: LGBTQIA People and #MeToo.” In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, ed. by Bianca Flieborn, and Rachel Loney-Howes, 151–167. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Sarah J., and Sonia Banaszczyk
2016 “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 40 (4): 391–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaki, Sylvia, Tom De Smedt, Maja Gwóźdź, Rudresh Panchal, Alexander Rossa, and Guy De Pauw
2019 “Online Hatred of Women in the Incels.me Forum: Linguistic Analysis and Automatic Detection.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7 (2): 240–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jane, Emma A.
2017 “Feminist Digilante Responses to a Slut-shaming on Facebook.” Social Media + Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keller, Jessalynn, Kaitlynn Mendes, and Jessica Ringrose
2018 “Speaking ‘unspeakable things:’ Documenting Digital Feminist Responses to Rape Culture.” Journal of Gender Studies 27 (1): 22–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirkup, Gill, and Laurie Smith Keller
1992 Inventing Women: Science, Technology and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Kreis, Ramona
2017 “#refugeesnotwelcome: Anti-Refugee Discourse on Twitter.” Discourse & Communication 11 (5): 498–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kumar, Ritesh
2020 “#shutdownjnu vs #standwithjnu: A Study of Aggression and Conflict in Political Debates on Social Media in India.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 8 (1): 29–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lazar, Michelle
(ed.) 2005 Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lazar, Michelle M.
2018 “Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by John Flowerdew, and John E. Richardson, 372–387. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Loney-Howes, Rachel
2018 “Shifting the Rape Script: “Coming Out” Online as a Rape Victim.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 39 (2): 26–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, Jim R., and Peter R. R. White
2005 The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller
2018 “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2): 236–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose
2019 “Digitized Narratives of Sexual Violence: Making Sexual Violence Felt and Known through Digital Disclosures.” New Media & Society 21 (6): 1290–1310. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morikawa, Nora
2019 “#Yesallwomen’s Language: Women’s Style Shifting in Feminist Discourse on Twitter.” Discourse, Context & Media 281: 112–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Palomino-Manjón, Patricia
2018 “ ‘Great to See Ur Staff Are Doing Their Job properly’: Customer (Dis)Affiliation on Corporate Facebook Pages.” International Journal of English Studies 18 (2): 77–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plant, Sadie
2000 “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. by Barbara M. Kennedy, and David Bell, 325–336. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso
2017 “Corpus-Driven Insights into the Discourse of Women Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence.” Quaderns de Filologia: Estudis Lingüístics 221: 215–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Santaemilia, José, and Sergio Maruenda
2014 “The Linguistic Representation of Gender Violence in (Written) Media Discourse: The Term ‘Woman’ in Spanish Contemporary Newspapers.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (2): 250–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwark, Sandra, and Gerd Bohner
2019 “Sexual Violence – ‘Victim’ or ‘Survivor: News Images Affect Explicit and Implicit Judgments of Blame.” Violence Against Women 25 (12): 1491–1509. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Merril D.
(ed.) 2018 Encyclopedia of Rape and Sexual Violence. California: ABC-CLIO.Google Scholar
Spry, Tami
1995 “In the Absence of Word and Body: Hegemonic Implications of ‘Victim’ and ‘Survivor’ in Women’s Narratives of Sexual Violence.” Women and Language. WL: Urbana. 13 (2): 27–40.Google Scholar
Stubbs-Richardson, Megan, Nicole E. Rader, and Arthur G. Cosby
2018 “Tweeting Rape Culture: Examining Portrayals of Victim Blaming in Discussions of Sexual Assault Cases on Twitter.” Feminism & Psychology 28 (1): 90–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagg, Caroline
2015 Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Geoff, and Susan Hunston
2000 Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Trinch, Shona L.
2014 “De-Authorizing Rape Narrators: Stance, Taboo and Privatizing the Public Secret.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (2): 204–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, Peter R. R.
2011 “Appraisal.” In Discursive Pragmatics, ed. by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jeff Verschueren, 14–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilding, Faith
1998 “Where Is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” N. Paradoxa 21: 1–11.Google Scholar
Williamson, Jessica, and Kelly Serna
2018 “Reconsidering Forced Labels: Outcomes of Sexual Assault Survivors Versus Victims (and Those Who Choose Neither).” Violence Against Women 24 (6): 668–683. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele
2012 Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
2014 “Enacting Identity in Microblogging through Ambient Affiliation.” Discourse & Communication 8 (8): 209–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Evaluation.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 435–458. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhu, Hongqiang
2016 “Searchable Talk as Discourse Practice on the Internet: The Case of “#bindersfullofwomen”. Discourse, Context & Media 121: 87–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Bou-Franch, Patricia
2021. Evaluation, Conflict and Prescriptive Metapragmatic Comments: (Re)constructing Transmedia Stories. In Analyzing Digital Discourses, ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
Jones, Lucy, Małgorzata Chałupnik, Jai Mackenzie & Louise Mullany
2022. ‘STFU and start listening to how scared we are’: Resisting misogyny on Twitter via #NotAllMen. Discourse, Context & Media 47 ► pp. 100596 ff. DOI logo
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso
2021. From the uncertainty of violence to life after abuse: Discursive transitions among female survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in online contexts. Research in Corpus Linguistics 9:2 ► pp. 152 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.