LGBTQ+ and Feminist Digital Activism. A Linguistic Perspective

This Element focuses on the linguistic and discursive practices employed by digital citizens to promote their causes on social media, that is, to engage in digital activism, drawing attention to the growing importance of this phenomenon in relation to gender identity and sexuality issues. The Element proposes that the label LGBTQ+ digital activism join the already existing one, feminist digital activism, and argues that, while these have been areas of interest from sociology and communication specialists, digital activism is still to be embraced as a field of research by applied linguists. It points out a number of linguistic and discursive features that are popular among digital activists and supports this through the analysis of the use of the hashtag #wontbeerased, combining Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. The Element suggests that further research is needed to explore how language is used to propagate and popularize emancipatory discourses online.