Date of Award
5-2024
Degree Type
Honors College Thesis
Academic Program
Computer Science BS
Department
Computing
First Advisor
Laurence Paul Strait, Ph.D.
Advisor Department
Communication Studies
Abstract
In recent times, online internet hate speech has received more and more attention due to its adaptive and mutative nature, emerging not in a vacuum but instead sprouting from the seeds of social inequity. A specific form of queerphobic hate speech known as groomer discourse or predation libel has taken new form in online spaces. This recent development, targeted almost exclusively towards the queer community and their allies, is uniquely situated at the intersection of transgender rights and sexual education in the United States. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, this study expands Spallaccia’s gender-sensitive critical discourse analysis (CDA) into a transgender-sensitive CDA, utilizing concepts adapted from Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive CDA. The research process resulted with a symbolic map of queerphobic hate speech centered around predation libel, created from a dataset of 557 tweets and 64 audiovisual files. Some of the most frequent codes found in tandem with predation libel included deliberate misgendering (of a transgender person), clinicalization (founded on the belief that transgender people are deluded), and reinforcing gender binaries through biological determinism and gender essentialism. Some less common but still interesting codes included the comparison of transness to blackface, ideology, and religion. Nearly every device used in these online hate speech crusades reflect existing social power dynamics between the in-group (straight and cisgender people) and out-group (queer people), drawing similar conclusions with scholars who have performed research detailing the androcentric dynamic between men and women. These findings and the methods used to reach them serve as a spearhead for launching future transgender sensitive CDA research and performing CDA on social media sites.
Copyright
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Recommended Citation
Evans, William, "Groomer Discourse: A Transgender-sensitive Critical Discourse Analysis of Queerphobic Hate Speech on Twitter" (2024). Honors Theses. 966.
https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/966