The Construction, Maintenance, Weaponization, and Defence of Migrant Identities on Social Media

• In Event: Labelling and Interactionalist Perspectives

Abstract

Online spaces, with the inevitable lack of prosodic features and physical feedback, provide opportune arenas for the creation, maintenance, and weaponization of identity work. Particularly with those spaces more conducive to anonymity (such as Reddit, 4chan, X/Twitter) identities are created in situ, designed for the moment, and deployed both in the explicit and the implied.

In a post-Brexit, post-Trump era, discourse around migration propels political and popular speech. Anonymised, temporally collapsed, and physically distant online spaces provide ground for interactants to create, label, categorise, and hierarchise presumed migrants, as well as themselves. Anti-migrant online speakers are able to illustrate their normative status in opposition to the othered subject they denigrate. This in turn creates an identity, and a motivation tied to that identity, for both the legitimised ingroup and the other, with a great deal of illocutionary power. Similarly, online activists who seek to protect and defend migrant identities from the stereotyping and slander are able to manipulate and re-orient the identities projected in novel ways, tailored by the constraints of the platforms they inhabit.

This paper will utilise the interactionist lenses of Goffman (1959, 1967), Cooley (1902), Blumer (1986), and Mead (1934) to interrogate threads of online “tweets” to elucidate the ways in which online speakers create and weaponize identity. It will unpick the ways in which speakers use “directive speech” (Hernández and Mendoza, 2002) to project an identity onto the viewers of anti-migrant speech and the inference rich categories (Sacks, 1995) deployed to create a totalising account of the othered group. Additionally, this paper will explore the invocation of gestalt structures of knowledge as an intertextual means to construct a weaponised identity. These work to inform an alternative, combative self-identity created and maintained for the assumed audience, ingratiating them into the ingroup, and against the designed outgroup.

Author

• Luke Roach, Bath Spa University