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.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Jones, Lucy
2023. Language, gender and sexuality in 2022. Gender and Language 17:2 ► pp. 1 ff.
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.
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2021. Evaluation, Conflict and Prescriptive Metapragmatic Comments: (Re)constructing Transmedia Stories. In Analyzing Digital Discourses, ► pp. 189 ff.
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.
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