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The Object of Subordination Is Immaterial: Discursive Constructions of Masculinity in a Far-Right Online Forum

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Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality ((PSLGS))

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Abstract

This chapter analyses responses to a mass shooting in which a 29-year-old male security guard, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack/hate crime inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States, by members of a white supremacist online forum called Stormfront. Texts related to the killings were collected and analysed using a methodological approach which combines corpus linguistics with CDA. The study entailed the use of frequency, keyword, and concordance analyses in order to investigate language patterns and discursive constructions within the texts. It is argued that hegemonic masculinity sustains itself through subordination and that white supremacist forum members employ subordination of various out-groups as a performance which constructs their own identity, thus merging the theories of gender performance (Butler, Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, Masculinities. University of California Press, 1995).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    White Homicide Worldwide: Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide (Retrieved 16/09/2016).

  2. 2.

    http://www.webcitation.org/5cKwkrbTe (Retrieved 16/09/2016).

  3. 3.

    The reference corpus used in this study was enTenTen12, a 12 billion word, web crawled corpus of English texts.

  4. 4.

    Although a large number of the victims were Latino, reference to this ethnic group was not among the most frequent words or keywords.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied English, St. John’s University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

    Andrew Brindle

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  1. Andrew Brindle
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancashire, United Kingdom

    Paul Baker

  2. Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy

    Giuseppe Balirano

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Brindle, A. (2018). The Object of Subordination Is Immaterial: Discursive Constructions of Masculinity in a Far-Right Online Forum. In: Baker, P., Balirano, G. (eds) Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95327-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95327-1_12

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95326-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95327-1

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