Discourse Context & Media最新文献

Guided by Discourse and Ideology theory, this paper focuses on how authors of the YouTube comments on Chimamanda Adichie’s talk ‘We should all be feminists’ use pejoratives or insults to reinforce or challenge certain gender ideologies and practices. Since feminism is already a thorny issue, Chimamanda’s call for all to be feminists is seen as controversial and, thus, a recipe for inflammatory language use. Under the protection of social media anonymity, some participants therefore attack her, gender groups (or characteristics) or individuals who oppose their views. Emerging themes include perceiving feminism as toxic and women’s success as a potential threat to male ego, among others. The paper concludes that reducing the discussion of such important social issues to insults does not only reify the dichotomy between men and women, which feminism seeks to bridge, but it also waters down the value and relevance of the socio-cultural issues being discussed.

This article conceptualizes the Sensitive Word Culture as a new theoretical lens for understanding how Chinese netizens interact with Internet censorship systems. Through the use of 22 in-depth interviews of Chinese Weibo users and netnography as empirical material, eight types of word recoding practices are identified and mapped into two discourse strategies, namely “evading detection” and “expanding interpretability.” Drawing on the concepts of everyday resistance and everyday politics, we analyze the power relations behind these discourse strategies, and also identify the apolitical aspects and scope of the Sensitive Word Culture. One notable finding is that the Sensitive Word Culture is becoming a part of China's digital cultural production, influencing the development of slang and memes. This research offers insights into how censorship from artificial intelligence and human intelligence influences the online discourses on Chinese social media.

This paper examines how Chinese Ambassador to the UK has employed Othering offensive to construct China-US trade war when publishing opinion pieces in the British press to promote China’s image and seek partenership. It draws on Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Studies. The analysis demonstrates how the Ambassador has used strategies, such as nomination, predication and argumentation, to construct the US as a negative Other to delegitimize its trade policies and actions. Meanwhile, Othering serves as a foil for indirectly constructing a positive Chinese Self as a responsible major country and a positive ‘We-group’ between China and the US European allies. It sheds some light on understanding the workings of Chinese diplomatic discourse in legitimating China’s worldview on ‘rules-based international order’. It also contributes to understanding the interplay between the media logic of British/Western press and the soft-power efforts of Chinese/non-Western government. The role of British/Western press in Chinese/counterhegemonic diplomats’ mediated soft-power practice is both enabling and constraining.

As the first edition of the Olympics including transgender sportswomen, Tokyo 2020 brought trans-rights debates to the forefront of global sports spectatorship during the summer of 2021. In this article, we adopt a dialectical-relational approach to address how anti-trans sentiments unfold in male Chinese sports fans’ social-mediated communication. Based on textual analysis of posts retrieved from Hupu, the research reveals that anti-trans sentiments are largely informed by an essentialist notion of sex, which considers it to be a purely biological construct that is paramount in policymaking, being perpetuated in the process of China’s modernisation. Anti-trans discourses manifest in the sampled postings tend to converge with China’s official nationalist rhetoric, projecting critical voices against liberal-progressive values and Western-style democracy. The research findings shed new light on the dialectical relations between nationalist politics and anti-trans sentiments and, by extension, queerphobic views in China’s sports fandom, pointing towards the heteronormative monopoly of public discourses in sport and beyond.

Recognizing the immense popularity of TikTok among the over 200,000 Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, this paper examines the translingual practices of these migrants from the Global South on a social media platform known for its act out memes, dance and lip-synch videos. Drawing on data from interviews and the multimodal discourse analysis of TikTok profiles, videos and captions, it pays particular attention to how recognizing these practices not as exotic or creative transgressions but as ordinary or normative (Agha, 2007) can enable a critical understanding of the lived experiences of these transnationals. Findings show that as they move across social media platforms and make linguistic and semiotic choices involving practical and material considerations, they perform moments of interaction or “small things” (Blommaert, 2019) online that are not unlike their mundane, offline counterparts. Moving across languages online is a way for users to negotiate multiple identities, position others, address diverse audiences, and signal group affiliations. By examining translingual interactions on social media as normative but negotiated across different orders of indexicality, this paper asserts that such reframing can draw attention to historical and material inequalities and modes of exclusion online.

As the visibility of trans movements has increased in recent years, so too has the antagonism between trans rights supporters and some sections of the feminist and lesbian communities (Phipps, 2016; Hines, 2017, Pearce et al., 2020). This antagonism is especially pronounced in digital spaces, where online discussions have fuelled an increasing polarisation of the debate (Hines, 2017). This paper examines the representation of trans identities on Autostraddle: a popular entertainment, news and lifestyle website for lesbian and bisexual women. It focuses on the longest and most controversial comment thread in the 2-million-word Queer Women’s Advice Corpus. The thread is a response to a guide to dating trans women for cis women. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis, sociocultural linguistics and corpus linguistics, I unpack the argumentation strategies (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) that commenters use to construct stances on the inclusion of trans women in the queer women’s online space. The major strategies include persuasive definitions of lesbian, imaginaries about trans women’s hypothetical bodies and the illegitimation of trans-exclusionary commenters as bad feminists and community outsiders. I find that that trans inclusion is successfully negotiated on a community level, but that trans women are still problematised on an intimate level due to their (imagined) genitalia. Trans women are ‘hyperembodied’ in the data, with the presence or absence of a penis acting as the focal point for inclusion and desirability.

This paper will explore the multi-modal semiotic properties of a selection of key public health information posters issued by the UK Westminster government on the use of masks and face coverings during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using multi-modal critical discourse analysis, we show how the posters featuring masks sustained consistent government-led branding, while drawing upon what we describe as “synthetic personalisation” to manage the orientation of the crisis as the pandemic progressed. Through this analysis, the article will highlight the possible contribution of these posters to an environment characterised by political confusion and enabling of a relatively widespread rejection of mask-wearing as a public health responsibility. Examining this within a broader decline in trust in government, we suggest the various attempts to produce a positive message about mask-wearing contributed instead to the appropriation of masks as symbols of individual alignment within a contested political field.

Social media have facilitated the development of a new wanghong profession and the burgeoning social commerce in China, where young women capitalize on their femininity to promote beauty products. Against this background, this study aims to investigate how Chinese wanghong women craft their identities in their self-branding videos on the leading social commerce platform of TikTok. A framework is developed to model their projected identities as evaluative attributes and to elucidate how the identities are constructed using verbal and visual resources. A multimodal content analysis of a corpus of 1258 videos posted by 6 top-ranked wanghong women on TikTok shows that their identities are defined in terms of three marketable attributes: (1) the celebrity self, in which they highlight their glamorous appearance, aspirational lifestyle, and social responsibility, (2) the entrepreneur self, which includes their accentuation of their professionalism and self-empowerment, and (3) the ordinary woman self, in which they emphasize their intimate relationship with their consumer-audience on the one hand, and construct a cheerful and amiable self-image on the other. The multi-faceted identities shed new light on the evolving Chinese femininity shaped by the entangled forces of the development of the neoliberal social commerce and wanghong economy in China on the one hand, and the unique socio-political context on the other hand.

Following della Porta and Pavan (2017), progressive social movements act as laboratories of innovation and knowledge creation in their pursuit to reform or resist societal structures. Simultaneously, movements are increasingly dependent upon digital tools and platforms, including social media, in their effort to organize, diffuse and saturate their agendas. Through an analysis of Rethinking Economics’ internet memes from 2019, the article investigates how internet memes contribute to a construction of the movement’s collective self. Memes characterize a relatively new form of online culture that offers affordable venues of expression, engagement and participation especially apt for bottom-up initiatives with limited funds. My focus is on the internet memes’ potential for deliberation and knowledge exchange; essentially their potential as supplementary knowledge practice. The article analyzes the narratives and legitimation strategies embedded in Rethinking Economics’ internet memes by using Van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework. The study suggests that internet memes’ distilled communicative qualities qualify them as informal venues for confrontation and learning, in which local movement identification and positionality are both developed, sustained and evaluated.