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Article published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 12:3 (2022) ► pp.383–406

In dialogue with non-humans or how women are silenced in incels’ discourse

| “Maria Curie-Skłodowskaˮ University in Lublin
Dialogue plays a most important role in interpersonal relations creating and strengthening social cohesion. Conversely, the lack of dialogue – and more tellingly a deliberate resistance to it – leads to social friction and animosity. In this paper I focus on a strategy used to intentionally disable a possibility of a meaningful dialogue and to deny any voice to the “other”. Dehumanising the “other” by linguistically representing them as animals or machines exempts the perpetrator from any obligation towards the “other”, including the obligation to respect their rights. I adopt Haslam’s model of dehumanisation (2006) which shows how, by means of metaphorical language, women are dehumanised and denied the possibility to participate in a meaningful dialogue in the so called manosphere.
Keywords: dehumanising language, animalistic and mechanistic dehumanisation, conceptual metaphor, cognitive semantics, incels
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Dehumanising metaphor in the light of conceptual metaphor research
    • 2.2Dehumanising metaphors: Animalistic and mechanistic
  • 3.Materials and methods
  • 4.Discussion and results
    • 4.1Blending animalistic and mechanistic elements
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00119.pra
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