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.
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.
. AntConc (Version 3.5.7). Tokyo: Waseda University 2018.
Baker, Paul
2010Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2013 “Domestic Violence and Public Participation in the Media: The Case of Citizen Journalism.” Gender and Language 7 (3): 275–302.
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2019#MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dunn, Jennifer L.
2005 “ ‘Victims’ and ‘Survivors’: Emerging Vocabularies of Motive for ‘Battered Women Who Stay’.” Sociological Inquiry 751: 1–30.
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.
Hardaker, Claire, and Mark McGlashan
2016 “ ‘Real Men don’t Hate Women’: Twitter Rape Threats and Group Identity.” Journal of Pragmatics 911: 80–93.
Herring, Susan C.
1999 “The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment On-Line.” The Information Society 151: 151–167.
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.
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.
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.
Jaki, Sylvia, Tom De Smedt, Maja Gwóźdź, Rudresh Panchal, Alexander Rossa, and Guy De Pauw
(ed.)2005Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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.
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.
Martin, Jim R., and Peter R. R. White
2005The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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.
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.
Morikawa, Nora
2019 “#Yesallwomen’s Language: Women’s Style Shifting in Feminist Discourse on Twitter.” Discourse, Context & Media 281: 112–120.
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.
Plant, Sadie
2000 “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. by Barbara M. Kennedy, and David Bell, 325–336. London: Routledge.
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.
2019 “Sexual Violence – ‘Victim’ or ‘Survivor: News Images Affect Explicit and Implicit Judgments of Blame.” Violence Against Women 25 (12): 1491–1509.
Smith, Merril D.
(ed.)2018Encyclopedia of Rape and Sexual Violence. California: ABC-CLIO.
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.
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.
Tagg, Caroline
2015Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action. London: Routledge.
Thompson, Geoff, and Susan Hunston
2000Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2011 “Appraisal.” In Discursive Pragmatics, ed. by Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jeff Verschueren, 14–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilding, Faith
1998 “Where Is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” N. Paradoxa 21: 1–11.
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.
Zappavigna, Michele
2012Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London and New York: Continuum.
Zappavigna, Michele
2014 “Enacting Identity in Microblogging through Ambient Affiliation.” Discourse & Communication 8 (8): 209–228.
Zappavigna, Michele
2017 “Evaluation.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 435–458. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Zhu, Hongqiang
2016 “Searchable Talk as Discourse Practice on the Internet: The Case of “#bindersfullofwomen”. Discourse, Context & Media 121: 87–98.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2021. Evaluation, Conflict and Prescriptive Metapragmatic Comments: (Re)constructing Transmedia Stories. In Analyzing Digital Discourses, ► pp. 189 ff.
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.
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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. 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.