Flaming as a surface manifestation of sexism. A linguistic perspective

Abstract

Toxic practices on the Internet began when the shift toward Web 2.0—e.g., information sharing, user-centred designs, interactions between users and content creators—took place. Due to the vast amount of information shared in the online sphere, toxic practices began to emerge. One of these practices is flaming. Due to the various meanings that flaming has taken on over the years, academics such as Lange (2008) decided that studying flaming was not worthwhile. Nevertheless, we have decided to focus this paper on the relationship between flaming and sexism by analysing comments targeting content female creators. Previous work on flaming has approached chiefly the topic from a sociological perspective. As the research problem revolves around flaming as a surface manifestation of sexism, it has been decided to develop the paper inside the branch of Forensic Linguistics. Forensic Linguistics is a branch of Applied Linguistics involving examining language evidence in a criminal or civil matter. In light of this, we decided to approach the research problem from a perspective combining Critical Discourse Analysis—CDA—(van Dijk, 2001) and Gender Studies. A micro-analysis which comprises two types of analyses—(1) qualitative and (2) quantitative—has been performed in this paper. For the qualitative analysis, Speech Act theory (Searle, Kiefer, & Bierwisch, 1980; Austin, 1962) and (Im)politeness theory (Bousfield, 2008) will be employed as linguistic tools. On the other hand, for the quantitative analysis, the computational tool AntConc will be used. Thanks to these tools, it has been possible to determine whether flaming is related to sexism or not.