Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

Lutzky, Ursula and Lawson, Robert (2019) Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter. Social Media + Society, 5 (3). pp. 1-12. ISSN 2056-3051

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Abstract

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

Item Type: Article
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119861807
Dates:
DateEvent
1 July 2019Published
1 April 2019Accepted
1 January 2019Submitted
Subjects: CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics
CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific)
Divisions: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > Birmingham Institute of Media and English > School of English
Depositing User: Robert Lawson
Date Deposited: 29 Aug 2019 08:24
Last Modified: 12 Jan 2022 16:26
URI: https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/7899

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