Abstract This article investigates the discursive construction of gendered ageism in Instagram user-generated comments responding to Madonna’s public denunciation of ageism and misogyny. Applying mainstream models of impoliteness ( Culpeper 2011 , 2016 ) and conceptualisations of violence against women facilitated by digital technology ( Esposito and Zollo 2021 ), the study analyses a corpus of 1,930 English-language comments using a mixed-methods, discursive-pragmatic approach. The findings reveal that Madonna is pathologised through routinised forms of body shaming, gender stereotyping, and moral degradation. Pathologisation mediates between micro-level discursive actions and macro-level ideological formations: body shaming, pseudo-diagnostic insults, condescending questions, disgust emojis, and intensified textese are the pragmatic means through which gendered ageism is normalised. The root of this misogynistic abuse seems to be ageist and sexist sociocultural beliefs, which are manifested through specific discursive actions. By foregrounding the discursive realisation of gendered ageism, this study advances discursive-pragmatic research on digital violence against women.
Abstract In this study, we examine the online stories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers curated by UK-based charity organisations. Through a mixed-methods approach, we focus on the online emergence of a positive storytelling canon that privileges certain affective positions over others. These positions feed into a problematic sense-making about migration in the UK that celebrates the stories of those migrants who incur positive (affective) changes in their lives, at the expense of potentially marginalizing others. Using a critical storytelling perspective that draws on the frameworks of affective positioning and small stories, we take one representative story as our focus to illustrate the affective participation frameworks made available to migrants. We discuss the linguistic and multimodal configuration of the story online, and the implications of the affective positions created for migrants for wider discourses about migration in the UK. Finally, we show how certain exemplary stories are static and affect-centred and do not seem to capitalise on dialogic and interactive participatory formats, unlike other forms of online storytelling. We argue that they contribute to a positive migrant storytelling canon that is well established in advocacy contexts and may have overtly empowering but covertly disempowering effects.
In this study, we examine the online stories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers curated by UK-based charity organisations. Through a mixed-methods approach, we focus on the online emergence of a positive storytelling canon that privileges certain affective positions over others. These positions feed into a problematic sense-making about migration in the UK that celebrates the stories of those migrants who incur positive (affective) changes in their lives, at the expense of potentially marginalizing others. Using a critical storytelling perspective that draws on the frameworks of affective positioning and small stories, we take one representative story as our focus to illustrate the affective participation frameworks made available to migrants. We discuss the linguistic and multimodal configuration of the story online, and the implications of the affective positions created for migrants for wider discourses about migration in the UK. Finally, we show how certain exemplary stories are static and affect-centred and do not seem to capitalise on dialogic and interactive participatory formats, unlike other forms of online storytelling. We argue that they contribute to a positive migrant storytelling canon that is well established in advocacy contexts and may have overtly empowering but covertly disempowering effects.
