‘The Shade of It All’: Queering Academia via Twitter

The following investigation examines the linguistic choices and communicative practices used in and by the Twitter account Scholarly Queen to perform and display queer academic identities. As platforms such as Twitter are increasingly being used to give a voice to specific communities of practice (Swales 1990, 2004; Wenger 1998), the language informing these Social Networking Systems becomes a means through which gender identities are performed (Papacharissi 2013). In a society which is basically structured on heteronormative and binary categories, creative text-internal and text-external resources take on a seminal role in constructing minority gender identities by allowing users to engage with creative practices as a way through which unrepresented identities and discourses come to be defined. The analysis can be positioned in the theoretical framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (KhosraviNik and Zia 2014; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016; KhosraviNik 2017, 2018), while Multimodal Prosody (Balirano 2017a, 2017b) and ambient affiliation/identity (Zappavigna 2012, 2013) operate as the methodological tools. The former will be applied to analyse the numerous images discursively brought into play to perform this queer academic identity, while the latter will be employed to retrace the language connoting the representation of the ʽin-group’ in Scholarly Queen.