Since #Metoo and the creation in 2019 of the Instagram account @heterocringe and the subreddit r/AreTheStraightsOk?, social media has seen an increase in critical and humorous discourses about heteronormativity and heterosexuality. Indeed, both pages, focus on displaying and highlighting the behaviors of heterosexual people considered to be embarrassing and toxic, and ultimately seek to resignify and decenter the assumption that heterosexuality is the standard and normal sexual orientation.
Using discourse analysis and the premise that discourse is not a mirror of reality but already participates in creating it (Krieg-Planque, 2017), as well as the proposition laid out in this call for papers of looking at how "queer theoretical concepts can be translated into the everyday world experiences"[1], we propose to examine the multimodal discursive strategies through which the discourses we presented adapt queer theories in order to shift representations about heterosexuality and heteronormativity on Twitter and Instagram. Moreover, we want to examine the interactional dynamics between the communities involved to gain insight into the functions these discourses ultimately fulfill beyond the resignification of heterosexuality.
To answer this question, we base our analysis on a multimodal and multilingual corpus in English, German and French, from Instagram and Twitter, which consists of 2807 Instagram posts taken from two accounts that focus on heterocringe content and 163 819 tweets collected using the keywords "the straights", "straight people" and "les hétéros". Due to the size of the corpus, we performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis focused on word frequency, n-grams, key words and key n-grams in order to give us an initial insight into the data. We also looked closely at the collocations of certain morphosyntactical constructions such as "the straights are X". Our qualitative analysis will be rooted in a Queer Linguistics approach (Motschenbacher & Stegu, 2013) and will focus on the place of metadiscourse (Authier-Revuz, 2020) and how the digital platforms themselves influence these practices using Yu's work on Internet pragmatics (2011).
Our preliminary analyses show how these types of discourses are implicitly and explicitly permeated by queer and heteronormative ideologies expressed through various types of implicit and explicit metadiscourse such as interdiscourse, subversion and reported speech. We also note that although these practices may provide an educational function that presents new representations of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, they serve primarily to empower specific communities of practice. (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992).
Authier-Revuz, J. (2020). La Représentation du Discours Autre : Principes pour une description. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641226
Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community- Based Practice. 21, 461‑490.
Krieg-Planque, A. (2017). Analyser les discours institutionnels. Armand Colin.
Motschenbacher, H., & Stegu, M. (2013). Queer Linguistic approaches to discourse. Discourse & Society, 24(5), 519‑535. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926513486069
Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. John Benjamins Pub. Co.
[1] Stegu, M. 2022. Call for Paper, AILA 2023.
