France

This study investigates the use of gender-inclusive language among Italian non-binary individuals. In English-speaking countries, the epicene pronoun ‘they’ and neo-pronouns such as ‘xe’ and ‘zim’ have been adopted by non-binary individuals and LGBTQA+ allies alike. In this debate, Romance languages are a very interesting case, since they are inflectional languages characterised by gender markers for all variable parts of speech. In Italy, activists are trying to spread language awareness to dismantle gender discrimination conveyed through language. Projects such as ‘Italiano Inclusivo’, ‘Progetto Genderqueer’, and scholars such as Gheno (2019a and 2019b) are involved in the analysis and promotion of inclusive language, while one of the most important research institutions, the Accademia della Crusca (2020), refuses to accept any alternative. It is against this background that this study analyses the state of the use of inclusive language among the Italian non-binary community. Through a survey submitted to several Italian LGBTQA+ online groups, the study investigates non-binary individuals’ preferred pronouns, their selection of suffixes when writing or speaking about themselves or other non-binary individuals, how they refer to a group of mixed binary and non-binary people, and further proposals of inclusive forms. Gender-inclusive language is more than a matter of political correctness. Understanding the mechanisms behind its use is important because interpersonal communication contributes to gender stereotyping and misgendering. 

Languaging Diversity 2021

Gender-inclusive language among Italian non-binary individuals: a survey

gender-neutral language; italian; non-binary gender; inflectional languages; gender-marking suffixes

## **The Linguistic Construction of Emotional Challenges in a Changing Society**


**Languaging Diversity** is the itinerating conference of the [I-Land Interuniversity Research Centre](https://www.unior.it/index2.php?content_id=14038&content_id_start=1&titolo=i-land-research-centre&parLingua=ENG), an international independent and interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities with a focus on the key notions of identity and diversity, from a linguistic, cultural, and gender studies perspective, in and across cultures. 

Following the six successful events hosted by the Universities of Naples (2013), Catania (2014), Macerata (2016), Cagliari (2017), Antwerp (2018) and Teruel (2019), the seventh edition of the Languaging Diversity Conference (LD2021) will be organized by the University of Lille, France. Due to the COVID-19 ongoing pandemic, the event will be held exclusively online via the virtual conference management platform [Underline](https://underline.io/).


**Focus **

The 7th edition of the Languaging Diversity Conference (LD2021) focuses on the emotional challenges that result from the social innovations of the last two decades, and on the way such experiences are expressed in discourse. Conference convenors invite papers and posters that investigate the intersection of emotion, communication and social change, also within the framework of digital communication. The contributions presented at the LD2021 conference will explore the expression of emotion(s) at the different levels of linguistic description (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic, discursive), and in texts and contexts related to traditional and digital genres in different domains, including (but not restricted to) health, medicine and science, media, politics, the law, academia, the world of corporate and institutional work, education and learning. 


**Conference convenors**

* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France

 
**Scientific Committee**

* Giuseppe Balirano, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, Italy
* Henry Hernandez Bayter, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Stéphanie Caët, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Bert Cappelle, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Paola Catenaccio, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
* Emmanuelle Canut, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Stefania D’Avanzo, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy
* Ilse Depraetere, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Emilia Di Martino, Università degli Studi ‘Suor Orsola Benincasa’, Italy
* Antonio Fruttaldo, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, Italy
* Dariusz Galasiński, Uniwersytet Wrocławski, Poland
* Kim Grego, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
* Siria Guzzo, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy
* Geert Jacobs, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
* Samantha Laporte, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Jeannette Littlemore, University of Birmingham, UK
* Julien Longhi, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France
* Corinne Oster, Université de Lille & CECILLE, France
* Paolo Mairano, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Antonella Napolitano, Università del Sannio, Italy
* Maria Cristina Nisco, Università degli studi di Napoli ‘Parthenope’, Italy
* Annick Rivens Mompean, Université de Lille & STL, France 
* Margaret Rasulo, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy
* Catherine Ruchon,Université Sorbonne Paris Nord -Pléiade, France
* Hans-Jörg Schmid, LMU München, Germany
* Jerome Tessuto, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy


[**Organizing Committee**](https://ld2021.sciencesconf.org/)

* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Justin Duquesnoy, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Océane Foubert, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Lola Marinato, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Sayf-Eddine Mohamed, Université de Lille & STL, France

**Keynote Speakers**

**Maïa Ponsonnet**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crQUbGV6Kgz" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

**Jeannette Littlemore**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cr6i2TVX2d0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

**Andrea Scarantino**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crQUbEV6KgI" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

To access the **Languaging Diversity 2021** conference, please remember to [register.](https://ld2021.sciencesconf.org/registration) 

Languaging Diversity  is the itinerating conference of the I-Land Interuniversity Research Centre, an international independent and interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities with a focus on the key notions of identity and diversity, from a linguistic, cultural, and gender studies perspective, in and across cultures. 

technical paper

COVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT, Karakaya, 2020) has rightfully been described as “an unprecedented challenge in university teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2020), requiring lecturers wordlwide to adapt or devise entirely new syllabi and testing methods in a very short period of time (Bryson & Andres, 2020; Major, 2020), and for a length of time that has already exceeded the most conservative estimates (d’Orville, 2020).  
 
This study investigates a relatively unexplored area of ERT, i.e. interactive problem solving in the  online  and  blended  academic  classroom,  with  specific  reference  to  (1)  positive  and corrective  feedback  by  the  teacher;  (2)  student  live  feedback  through  open  microphone questions  asked  during  class;  (3)  face-saving  and  other  repair  strategies  by  both  teacher  and students. We concentrate specifically on pragmatic accidents directly associated with technological gaps or failures (i.e. connection speed or lack thereof; digital divide in terms of both computer/ network access and skills) and strategies used to bridge them.   
 
To  achieve  this  aim,  we  consider  an  intensive  introductory  course  of  English  Language  and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna (Italy) by the author of this study, and addressed to freshmen of the BA degree courses in Foreign Languages  and Literatures and Languages, Cultures  and  Markets  of  Asia  and  Mediterranean  Africa  between  September  and  November 2020, for a total of 30 academic hours. Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19  laws  in  force  at  the  end  of  2020,  the  first  half  of  the  course  was  taught  full  distance, 
synchronically on Microsoft Teams, while the second part was administered “live”, with part of the audience present in the physical classroom, and the rest connected online from home on the  same  videoconferencing  platform.  Lessons  were  videorecorded  and  transcribed  using Microsoft  Stream,  and  subsequently  stored  on  the  Sketch  Engine  (Kilgarriff  et  al.,  2014)  to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatized corpus in English, with some occasional instances of code-switching and code-mixing in Italian.  
  
The results show that the level of interactivity is higher (Luporini, 2020) than it was the case prepandemically in a very popular course (i.e.  about 400 students/annum) like the one under analysis (Fusari, 2021), as students tend to take and keep the floor, either by speaking on-record, or by writing in the Microsoft Teams chat, on average 11.3 times for each 90 minutes lecture. Feedback is overwhelmingly more positive than corrective on the teacher’s part, and most repair strategies hinge on self-deprecating humour or discourse situational irony, sometimes eliciting spontaneous laughter in the “live” classroom, and heart-shaped emoticons in the remote one. This may leave the analyst under the impression that students enjoyed this learning experience significantly  more  than  the  traditional  academic  lecture.  However,  on  a  closer  look,  all  that glitters is not gold: the data also betray a high level of anxiety on the part of all participants, as testified  by  the  remarkable  frequency  of  hesitations,  apologies,  repetitions,  false  starts,  and other expressions of uncertainty and doubt. To conclude, some hypotheses are advanced about the challenges and opportunities of ERT in academic settings.

References

Bryson, J. & Andres L. (2020). Covid-19 and rapid adoption and improvisation of online teaching: curating resources for extensive  versus  intensive  online  learning  experiences.  Journal  of  Geography  in  Higher  Education  44(4),  608-623.  
  
d’Orville, H. (2020). COVID‑19 causes unprecedented educational disruption: Is there  a road towards a  new  normal?. Prospects 49, 11-15.  
  
Fusari, S. (2021, forthcoming). Student-teacher e-mail interaction as asynchronous dialogue in an academic setting. In L. Caronia  (ed).  Language  and  interaction  at  home  and  school  (pp.  355-381).  Amsterdam  &  Philadelphia:  John Benjamins Publishing Company.  
 
Karakaya, K. (2020).  Design considerations in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: a human-centered approach. Educational Technology Research and Development 65, 125-145.
  
Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý,  P.  &  Suchomel,  V.  (2014).  The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. Lexicography 1(1), 7-36.  
  
Luporini, A. (2020). Implementing an online English linguistics course during the Covid-19 emergency in Italy: Teacher’s and students’ perspectives. ASp 78, 75-88. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/asp/6682 . 
 
Major, C. (2020). Innovations in teaching and learning during a time of crisis. Innovative Higher Education 45, 265–266.  
  
Nuere, S. & de Miguel L. (2020). The digital/ technological connection with COVID‑19: An unprecedented challenge in university teaching.  Technology, Knowledge  and Learning.  Retrieved from  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-
09454-6 .

Problem solving in the COVID-19 ERT university classroom

This paper explores the meaning of really polar questions and wh-the hell questions in TED talks as compared with MICASE. The meaning of questions is generally defined in relation to their answers. Questions are assumed to request information in conversation exchange (Sadock and Zwicky 1985). An answer is supposed to fill an epistemic gap. The paper investigates the role of questions in a discourse context where no information can be obtained from the addressee. The nature of responses is analysed. 
Epistemic really in a positive polar question triggers an epistemic bias of opposite polarity. As a verum operator, really adds the negative implicature that the speaker expected the negative answer to be true. The speaker ""asks for conclusive evidence for p"" (Romero and Han 2004), so as to get a confirmation of their original belief. This confirmation cannot be obtained in TED talks. We show that really questions serve to dispel commonly held beliefs by allowing the speaker to introduce conclusive evidence for not-p in the subsequent discourse and to steer the common ground to a new knowledge state. This discursive function of really polar questions is salient in TED talks as opposed to MICASE.
In content questions, the the hell phrase also conveys a negative implicature, i.e. ""the speaker's negative attitude toward the content of the question"" (den Dikken and Giannakidou 2002). The hell conveys two types of expressivity (Celle, Jugnet, and Lansari 2021) that derive from intensification. Emotional expressivity correlates with the speaker's attitude to p, which may rank high either along a scale of ignorance or incongruity. Iconic expressivity enacts emotion when a scale of performativity is involved. It is mostly associated with storytelling sequences inserted in the narrative. Both types of expressivity are attested in TED talks.
 In sum, really questions and wh-the hell questions contribute to achieving joint attention (Battich & Geurts (2020) in the knowledge-sharing process based  by arousing the addressee's interest. The disconfirmation of prior expectations is intended to create an anticipation on the part of the addressee.

Negative bias in questions in TED talks

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa directed a movie entitled “Rashomon”, depicting contradicting viewpoints of a single death event. In this study we argue that the Rashomon effect hypothesis can increase our understanding of the role emotions play in knowledge-building communication. Our goal is to understand the gaps between emotional intentions and the emotional interpretations of other participants, and their relation to civic conversations. Additionally, we explore the intersubjective ways in which recognition of expressions of emotions are made in digital, written, contentious conversations. Findings from this study offer new insights into the emotional components, expressive, and interpretive practice in such conversations and reemphasize the value and challenges of understanding emotional presence in digital discussions on civic issues.

Emotion recognition in digital discussions and civic learning processes

As is known, “[t]he word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos (“return home”) and ἄλγος, álgos (“longing”) (Boym, 2001). The word was invented in the 17th century by Johannes Hofer and soon it became very popular.
Nostalgia is an ambiguous phenomenon: it could be seen negatively, as it “fuelled populism and nationalist identity politics” (Menke, Schwarzenegger, 2016: 2), or “as a creative and progressive resource, a tool for commodification, or an agent for identity and community building to articulate cultural or generational belonging” (ibid., p. 2). Nostalgia may be seen also as an emotion. According to Havlena and Holak (1991: 323), it refers back to an earlier period in the individual's life and draws on biased or selective recall of past experiences. Nostalgia may be described as ""a painful yearning to return home” and it is broadly used in advertising, marketing and PR.
It is not only a manipulative technique, which is popular among PR specialists, politicians, journalists, etc. Nostalgia is also a means of overcoming the psychological consequences of the isolation, anxiety and trauma during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in Bulgaria since March 2020 because of its potential to bond with others (Niemeyer, Wentz, 2014: 129), to increase optimism and to mobilise people for action (FioRito and Routledge, 2020).
The aim of the study is to present nostalgia as a strategy for dealing with the state of emergency at the time of the first lockdown in Bulgaria during the COVID-19 crisis when nostalgic winds, memories of the past and literary reminiscences proved to be a successful strategy for dealing with physical isolation. The research questions include 1) a presentation of the nostalgic modes in Facebook and Twitter and a thematic classification of the initiatives, communication strategies and topics in the public space, oriented towards the past; 2) a quantitative analysis within the classified groups aiming to reveal the most frequent model; 3) revealing the reasons for their success as communicative and social messages through their meaning in social media during the emergency situation.
In order to achieve the above goals, a set of methods and approaches is used in the analysis and classification, as well as in the explanation of the reasons for the nostalgic convertibility in the public space, especially intensified during the COVID-19 crisis. Such a complicated phenomenon insists on using an interdisciplinary approach, especially the apparatuses of discourse analysis and content analysis. To investigate the cultural shaping of the nostalgic posts, to explain their social use in an emergency situation and to conceptualize the research data the multimodal analysis theories are also applied (Jovanovic, van Leeuwen, 2018, Ben Moussa et al., 2020, etc.).
The data includes public posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter), published in the period from 15.03.2020, when the state of emergency in connection with COVID-19 was declared in Bulgaria, until 13.05.2020, when it was terminated. We have collected multimodal posts with a nostalgic nuance, representing the longing for the previous lifestyle. We divide them into thematic groups, including historical memories, personal memories, nostalgic games, literary reminiscences, etc. A quantitative analysis within the groups is made aiming to reveal the most frequent model. As the combinations between different groups have been observed they are also presented.  We discuss as well the linguistic and visual characteristics of these messages to find the reasons for their popularity.
The results so far indicate that nostalgia through its diverse manifestation on social media manages to unite people in the presence of physical isolation, to remind them of past experiences and thus to save them from emotional stress which the COVID-19 constrictions and fears may cause. Social media and modern technologies make it possible to create new products based on old, forgotten stories or memories that live a new meaningful life in the specific COVID-19 situation.

References: 
Ben Moussa, M., Benmessaoud, S., Douai, A. (2020) Internet memes as “tactical” social action: A multimodal critical discourse analysis approach. International Journal of Communication, 14, 5920–5940. 
Boym, Sv. (2001) Adoptation and elaboration from Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, NY 2001. Retrieved July 15, 2021, from: http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html
FioRito, TA, Routledge, C. (2020) Is nostalgia a past or future-oriented experience? Affective, behavioral, social cognitive, and neuroscientific evidence. Front. Psychol, 11, 1133. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01133
Havlena, W., Holak, S. (1991) “The Good Old Days”: Observations on nostalgia and its role in consumer behavior. In R. Holman, M. Solomon, (eds.). NA - Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 18, pp.323–329). Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. 
Jovanovic, D., van Leeuwen, T. (2018) Multimodal dialogue on social media, Social Semiotics, 28:5, 683–699, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2018.1504732
Menke, M., Schwarzenegger, C. (2016) Media, communication and nostalgia. Finding a better tomorrow in the yesterday? Editorial. Medien & Zeit, 4, 2–5.
Niemeyer, K., Wentz, D. (2014) Nostalgia is not what it used to be: serial nostalgia and nostalgic television series. In: Niemeyer, K. (ed). Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, the Present and the Future (pp. 129–138). London: Palgrave McMillan.


Nostalgia as a means of dealing with emotional challenges during the first part of the COVID-19 crisis in Bulgaria Cultural Studies

If countless researchers in the most disparate fields have been investigating Covid-19 from different perspectives, that is because it brought about one of the biggest societal revolution of the 21st century. Through lockdown restrictions, curfews and social distancing, not only it compromised our daily lives, but also the economy and communication sectors at large. In order to contribute to the understanding of this global phenomenon, this research tries to analyse how Covid impacted the advertising industry in the UK by analysing from a multimodal and social semiotic perspective the #StayHomeHeroes digital ad and hashtag created by Iris and the Heroes charity to economically support the NHS in the fight against Covid-19. This presentation raises three points: how both Covid and the media revolution changed societies and communication; the emotional challenges that Covid brought about and the linguistic and semiotic manifestations of this sensitive time, all through a focus on advertising.

#StayHomeHeroes: Hilarious yet bonding print advertising strategies to fight against COVID-19

Numerous studies have been conducted to bolster the role that wink face emoticon (; )) and tongue face emoticon (: P) play in indicating ironic intention in computer-mediated communication (CMC). By contrast, meagre research has been channeled in the direction of emoji-based ironic markers, particularly in cultures other than English, such as Chinese culture. The present study attempts to explore emoji-based comments in WeChat app among Chinese teenagers from both the perspectives of language production and language comprehension. Two experiments are carried out in order to look at what emojis are ironic in signaling speaker’s intention and to what extent these ironic markers will affect the perceived sarcasm as well as the emotional impact of the comments respectively. The first experiment conducts a free response task among 238 native Chinese high school students in order to sort out the emojis that can indicate ironic intention. The results show that wink face emoji and tongue face emoji are less preferable for Chinese teenagers in emoji-based CMC, nor do the two emojis show any significant effect on marking ironic intention; instead, smile face emoji and tears-of-joy emoji  are more likely to be included in sarcastic comments to indicate ironic intention among Chinese teens. Experiment 2 is a rating task set among a new sample of 253 high school students for the purpose of detecting the role the two emojis play in the comprehension and emotional impact of sarcastic and literal comments, for both praise and criticism conditions. The results reveal that 1) emojis are not only compensatory to ironic meaning when accompany the text, but contributory to the conversation in CMC as well, revealing that a stand-alone emoji could function as a response sentence on its own and work out the intended meaning of the recipient; and 2) The emojis exert influence on both the comprehension and emotional impact depending on the surrounding text they appear in. For the degree of sarcasm of the two emojis, both smile face emoji and tear-of- joy emoji exert significant influence on literal texts, making the literal comments more sarcastic in meaning; as for the influences on sarcastic texts, smile face makes sarcastic comments more sarcastic in meaning, whereas tear-of-joy emoji relieves text’s degree of sarcasm and makes sarcastic comments less sarcastic. In regard to the positivity of the two emojis, smile face emoji makes all literal utterances and sarcastic criticism texts less positive but makes sarcastic praise more positive; while tear-of-joy emoji makes all types of texts more positive but makes literal praise less positive. Overall, our findings reveal that different from Western cultures in which positive emoticons ( ; ), : P ; (EMO+) ) tend to be clues for irony, negatively labelled smile face emoji and neutral tear-of-joy emoji are indicators of ironic intention among Chinese teenagers. Compared with emoticons, Emojis are nuanced and visually-detailed graphics that may be more open to interpretation.


What emojis are ironic markers? A survey on Chinese teenagers in WeChat app

This talk investigates the intersection of emotion, communication, and social change in the artistic work and biography of Karima 2G, a cross-cultural identity voicing social exclusion, discrimination, and inequality in contemporary Italy. A second-generation migrant whose language is “feelingfully harnessed” in the task of questioning a white-only view of Italianness. 
From a methodological point of view, the focus is primarily the social and discursive construction of emotion in Karima’s songs and the pragmatic meaning of this ‘emotion talk’. We will not, however, be evaluating Karima’s artistic output; instead, we will use and collect Karima’s biographical data so that her songs make sense within her personal life story. Our investigation relies on an “anthropology of the person” that focuses on the subject rather than on socio/anthropological categories, classes, and ethnicities.

Emotion, communication and social change in Italian second-generation migrants: Karima 2G

Migration and languaging emotions

This paper takes shape from the debate on the role of human rights in maternity care, following several emerging cases of obstetric violence and aggressive and intolerant treatment permeating care during labour and delivery (Freedman et al. 2014). In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement directed at preventing and eliminating disrespectful, non-dignified and abusive behaviour by health professionals during childbirth, highlighting a physical as well as emotional and psychological violence. Early in 2019, a UN report warned against obstetric violence as being still widespread and systematic in nature, acknowledging it has not been fully addressed from a human rights perspective so far.
Despite the fact that the phenomenon is gaining increasing recognition worldwide and at institutional level, there seems to be a lack of theoretical engagement on the issue (Dixon 2015). This study, therefore, explores how women’s experiences are discursively construed, specifically taking into account the stories shared on social media in English-speaking contexts (Canada, the US, the UK)—more specifically, on the websites of charities and advocacy groups, such as the Obstetric Justice Project, Birth Monopoly, Birth Trauma Association, working to expose obstetric violence and raise awareness on the issue. Indeed, social media are being increasingly used as a platform for exchanging views, writing testimonies, thus creating a (safe) site for the production of meanings. In contrast with the current little academic and scientific attention, birth stories have become increasingly common on the Internet, providing detailed descriptions of emotions, psychological states, decisions, relationships. Especially after traumatic experiences, mothers/parents seek healing by speaking up, writing, telling their stories, for a wide range of complex motivations: as a way to re-work the trauma, disrupt and resist against surveillance and abuse of their choices and bodies, re-negotiate power after a disempowering medical experience, unburden themselves, find relief. While projecting the image of suffering bodies in labour facing abuse, humiliation and unconsented medical procedures in what should be, instead, an intimate and joyful moment, these narratives allow a critical thought on practices of discrimination which heavily affect women’s agency and act like a prism reflecting dominant dynamics in society. As some critics have noted (Wolf 2013; Cohen Shabot 2016), obstetric violence is different from other forms of medical violence because labouring/birthing bodies are suffering, unruly and noisy, but they are not ill. They face a structural kind of gender violence, a form of subtler normative oppression aiming at a diminishment of women’s agency, which forces them in the cycle of silence and shame precluding social change and political action.
The stories shared online (and collected over a time-span raging from 2018 to 2020) are analysed following Halliday’s (1981, 1985, 2001) systemic functional approach to discourse, which theorises language as a systemic resource for meaning-making, in combination with a feminist post-structuralist theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault’s work (Foucault 1977, 1980, 1989; Butler 1990; Grosz 1994; Allen 2014). Additionally drawing on a discourse analysis perspective, the article investigates emerging and recurrent patterns and themes in women’s narratives, questioning not merely power dynamics in the health-care system during childbirth but also existing power relations in society. In particular, the article addresses three research questions: 1) how women’s emotion patterns and states are discursively construed; 2) what are the most recurrent plot units or topics through which the phenomenon of obstetric violence is framed; 3) what are the underlying questions of power and gender relations and to what extent these dynamics of abuse convey covert forms of subjugation enacting practices of discrimination which represent the expression of historical, social and cultural values that are buried and disguised in the naturalised order of things. 

Bibliographic references

Allen, Amy. “Feminist Perspectives on Power.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phylosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 2014. plato.stanford.edu/entries/feministpower/.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Cohen Shabot, Sara. “Making Loud Bodies ‘Feminine’: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence.” Human Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-17.
Dixon, Lydia. “Obstetrics in a Time of Violence.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 29, 2015, pp. 437-454.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Penguin Books, 1977.
---. “Body/Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, Pantheon, 1980, pp. 55-62.
---. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1989.
Freedman, Lynn, et al. “Defining Disrespect and Abuse of Women in Childbirth.” Bulletin of World Health Organization, no. 92, 2014, pp. 915-17.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana UP, 1994.
Halliday, M.A.K. Explorations in the Function of Language. Edward Arnold, 1981.
---. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, 1985.
---. “On the Grammatical Foundations of Discourse.” Grammar and Discourse: Proceedings of the International Conference on Discourse Analysis, edited by Ren Shaozeng et al., University of Macau Publication Centre, 2001, pp. 47-57.
Wolf, Allison B. “Metaphysical Violence and Medicalised Childbirth.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 27, no.1, 2013, pp. 101-11.

Voicing labouring bodies: women's narratives and gender violence

The purpose of this paper is to study how and through which strategies individuals defend their ‘personas’ in discourse from online communication of hate.
I studied, in particular, the case of the Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr. in relation to his controversial blackface role in the action comedy Tropic Thunder (2009) and how he defended his ‘persona’ from the backlash that his role caused. In movie, in fact, Robert Downey Jr. plays an extravagant and pretentious Australian actor who decides to undergo a controversial pigmentation alteration surgery to darken his skin in order to play an African American character.
Although the movie was intended to be a metanarrative satire of the Hollywood cinema, the audience accused Robert Downey Jr. of blackface.
I studied, through a sociolinguistic analysis, how Robert Downey Jr. defended himself from such accusations of racism. The analysis was conducted on a corpus of four manually transcribed interviews, to which the American actor participated between 2008 and 2009 (for the release of the movie) and again in 2020 when the he is being asked if he “could do Tropic Thunder today”. I noticed how, in all interviews, the actor used three main strategies to protect his persona from the racist backlash:
• Abundant use of narration: the actor talks about both his private life and 'cinematic life' in order to create his own personal identity through narration [This strategy refers to Gergen's theory of a ‘Narrative Approach to Personal Identity’, according to which the sense of who we are is related to the ability to create a coherent story about ourselves];
• Use of direct speech to quote friends and relatives who had defended his role in blackface, in order to make his speech sound more authentic and sincere. [This strategy can be traced back to Davies and Harré's 'Positioning Theory', according to which individuals have the
power to place - metaphorically - themselves and others within 'positions' (or social roles) in
everyday conversations depending on the context].
• Abundant use of the first person singular, in order to clarify his own point of view,
thus minimizing any possible political intent of his blackface.
Right after the 2020 interview, the actor was criticised on Twitter and further became a victim of ‘cancel culture’ (the act of publicly humiliating individuals who acted a cancellable offence, typified by racist, sexist or homophobic remarks): photos of the actor in blackface appeared on all socia media, angering thousands of users from all over the world: as a result, the hashtag #Cancelrdj appeared in the global trends of Twitter.
Robert Downey Jr. did not respond to the attempted cancellation of his persona on Twitter: the 2020 interview remains his last and definitive statement on his participation in Tropic Thunder.

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