Background
This study presents a quantitative intraspeaker variation analysis among men who participate in feminist discourse on Twitter. Recent work (Author, 2017) found that when participating in Twitter discourse about gender equality, female Twitter users showed significant variation in features of stereotypical “women’s” or “powerless” language (Lakoff, 1975; O’Barr & Atkins, 1980). Specifically, when posting tweets tagged with “#yesallwomen”, 140 women displayed higher frequencies of profanity and significantly lower frequencies of hedges, politeness markers, and stable nonstandard variants as compared to their Twitter posts on other topics, suggesting preference for an empowered and authoritative style when contributing to feminist discourses in this medium. It was predicted that men would display accommodation strategies (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), converging toward the women’s linguistic style in female-dominated virtual spaces (Herring, 1996).
Methods
Two corpora authored by the same 15 men were collected: a “feminist tweet” corpus (N=2438 tweets) consisting of tweets tagged with overtly feminist hashtags, including “#yesallwomen”, and a control corpus of the same men’s tweets on any topic (N= 28,209 tweets). Frequencies of the features described above were compared between the corpora using paired-sample t-tests.
Results
The men’s paired corpora showed no significant intraspeaker variation across any of the four variables studied between the feminist-hashtagged tweets and the non-feminist tweets, although the direction of change mirrored the women’s in three of the four dimensions. The one main difference was in the use of profanity. The men appeared to temper their use of profanity when participating in feminist discourse where women increased theirs, contrary to the hypothesis that men would converge toward the linguistic style of female majority. This divergence suggests opposing effects of the space and imagined audience (Marwick & Boyd, 2011) for the two groups of discourse participants. I argue that for women, in construction of online feminist identities, profanity contributes to an “empowered” linguistic style that holds symbolic value in this context but is not available to men if they wish to respect the gender politics underlying feminist discourses. As a result, men’s online feminist identities are constructed through different linguistic choices.
