Talk: Internet slang in sexist statements: a comparative analysis of Russia and the United States

Term paper

The study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of sexist statements in Russia and the United States to identify linguistic differences. To achieve the goal it was necessary to, first of all, consider the evolution of Internet slang. Hence, to consider the specifics of sexism in the Internet. Then, analyze sexist statements in Russia and the USA on the materials of the Facebook. Finally, compare the attitude of Russian and American users to sexist statements.
The Theoretical Framework of the study is based on publications devoted to gender studies of Kirsti Cole, Julie Woodzicka, devoted to the study of Internet slang, youth slang, linguistic gender studies, sociocultural studies, as well as studies aimed at studying the problem of sexism in general A. Kuznetzov, M. LaFrance.
The practical part of the term paper includes quantitative analysis of the audience and qualitative analysis of the content of users of the social network Facebook, aimed at identifying sexism in them, as well as a comparative analysis of sexist comments by Russian and American users. For the analysis of sexist comments discourse analysis (Teun Van Dijk) is taken as a basis.
The analysis showed egocentrism among Russian commentators and commonality among American commentators.
The study may be of interest to feminist organizations, media researchers, and representatives of social media support services, for instance, based on such statements on the Internet, one can teach neural networks to indicate comments as "sexism" and therefore restrict access to this content.

Of particular interest, when studying the problem of interaction between language and gender, is the study due to the specifics of the speech behavior of men and women. Such features can be identified by studying the differences at language levels: phonetics, morphology, semantics, and syntax. The study considers (is) the time period from 2015 to 2019, it is also important to indicate that the Internet space means the social network Facebook, which is one of the five most visited websites in the world. Facebook's population is 42 percent male and 58 percent female. Moreover, active users of the site are from 25 to 34 years old - 35 percent, from 35 to 44 years old hovers around 32 percent. While the number of users under 24 has the lowest rate, which is 6.1 percent. Consequently, the portrait of a Facebook user is an individual between the ages of 25 and 44, with higher education, a resident of a capital or a large city, who holds a prestigious position or has his own business, and, importantly, has an active life position in the social network, aimed at networking and business. communication, and the expression of their position, for example, civic or social (here: activism). In the course of studying this issue, it was revealed that sexist humor is an example of symbolic violence against a woman. Moreover, it turned out that women often receive comments from men containing insults or threats of violence (rape), using emoji, abbreviation "LOL", as well as similar markers of humor and jokes. It is through these markers that the pressure is supposedly smoothed out and the threat becomes "harmless." Also, I put forward a theory about a kind of "Spiral of Silence", in which a woman who has faced oppression, sexual harassment in her life comes to the Internet to express herself there, she is supported by the same victims, as a consequence, the culprit is punished. One such example is a story accompanied by the hashtag #MeToo, which was partially mentioned and considered in the theoretical part of the study.

Info

Day: 2020-11-20
Start time: 15:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: Clotilde Tambroni
Track: Sociolinguistics
Language: en

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