LGBTQI+ icons between resistance and normalization: looking for mediatization of emotions in hashtags

ABSTRACT

The mediatization of emotions emerges as an affordance of social media, the study of which involves paying attention to digital practices and to the construction and expression of public affection. This happens both for the great events and for the daily demonstrations of support or its denial. In this article we work on the phenomenon of the mediatization of emotions linked to two LGBTQI+ icons and expressed in hashtags on Twitter. Placing it in a specific context – the one of well-known television characters who have declared their homosexual orientation or transgender identity. The objective is to understand if the cloud of feelings they have created on Twitter is to be attributed to a true globally mediatized emotional exchange, or just an expression of emotions on the social media, and discover which emotional dynamics, linked to the LGBTQI+ world, they express.

KEYWORDS:

• Process of heterosexualization
• heteronormativity
• mediatization of emotions
• hashtags
• multimodal content analysis

Acknowledgement

The authors worked together to write the article. However, sections 3, 4, 4.1, 4.2 are to be attributed to Gevisa La Rocca; sections 2 and 5 to Cirus Rinaldi; the introduction (paragraph 1) was written together. First publication 2020-01-13.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gevisa La Rocca, is a Ph.D. in Sociology. She is an associate professor at Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Enna “Kore” where she teaches Sociology of communication, Sociology of culture and Risk communication. Her main research areas cover collectives behavior technologically mediated, mediatization of emotions, risk communication, qualitative data analysis. She is the coordinator of the international research group Rischio, comunicazione e società/Riesgo, comunicación y sociedad.

Cirus Rinaldi, is a Ph.D. in Sociology. He is a researcher in the Department of Cultures and Societies, University of Palermo where he teaches Genders, Sexualities and Violence and Masculinities, Crime and Criminal Justice and coordinates the Lab on ‘Bodies, Rights and Conflicts’. His main research areas cover theories of deviance, LGBT issues and discrimination, male sex work, support and intervention.

ORCID

Gevisa La Rocca http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2548-5473

Cirus Rinaldi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4047-9234

Notes

1 We prefer to leave the identity of the chosen characters anonymous. We therefore indicate the hashtags such as #namea and #nameb, and the protagonists as Character A and Character B.

2 A similar procedure was used in Boccia Artieri and La Rocca (2019). In the article the authors also present the limits of this approach and attempt to overcome them.

3 For each category the total number of words and percentage frequency (f%): activism 780 words and f% 11.20; character 330 words and f% 4,74; gender 1920 words and f% 27.57; hate speech 120 words and f% 1.72; politics 100 words and f% 1.44; private life 3.400 words and f% 48.22.

4 For each category the total number of words and percentage frequency (f%): character words 5,040 and f% 30.43; ironic discourse 1,728 words and f% 10.43; private life 1,728 words and f% 10.43; T.V. program 4,860 and f% 29.30; world of music 3,150 words and f% 19.02.

5 It is a reasoning through which, starting from some facts that you want to explain (premises), you try to identify a possible hypothesis that explains them (conclusion).

6 The theoretical framework: hashtag as a speech act is better developed in La Rocca (in press).