Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

Greensplaining environmental justice: A narrative of race, ethnicity, and justice in urban greenspace development

“…We deploy the term greensplaining to analyze the rhetorical and material practices of environmentalists, conservationists, and municipal leaders. As illustrated in the narrative through Connor, greensplaining may align closely with terms like mansplaining and Whitesplaining to indicate the sociocultural silencing of supposedly subordinate identities through "proper" (Lutzky & Lawson, 2019) discourse that is commonly associated with maleness and Whiteness, respectively (Thomas et al, 2017). While such pejorative terms are unstable and deployed unevenly (Bridges, 2017), they nonetheless connote processes of power-laden dominance, while the person speaking simultaneously being seemingly unaware of power imbalances or the social silencing taking place.…”

Explaining "-splain" in digital discourse

“…While there have been hundreds of editorial pieces dedicated to splain terms, they have received very little scholarly attention. Only a small number of academic studies have explored mansplain (Bridges, 2017;Dular, 2021;Lutzky & Lawson, 2019) or other splain variants (Bridges, 2019;Bridges & Vásquez, under review). Still, several noteworthy points are made in this handful of studies.…”

“…This signifies the meta-meta-pragmatic -or "doubly-metapragmatic" (Bridges, 2017, p. 94) possibilities of splain words for discussing language -and language about language. Using corpus linguistics to analyze the words mansplaining, manterruption, and manspreading on Twitter, Lutzky and Lawson (2019) show how gender is appropriated and resemiotized as a variable for indexing ideas "about 'proper' gendered behavior" (p. 1). Going beyond discussions of the splain words themselves, what the language described as splaining does at the interactional level is deconstructed in Dular (2021) as a form of epistemic injustice, and in Bridges and Vásquez (under review), whitesplain provokes moral discussions on race-centered discourse.…”

Mansplaining as Epistemic Injustice

“…3 The exception is an extremely brief mention of the mechanics of mansplaining by Luzzi (2016). Academic but nonphilosophical works on mansplaining are Bridges (2017) and Lutzky and Lawson (2019). Johnson's (2020) article on mansplaining has appeared after this paper was written; still, the account she favors of mansplaining as a type of silencing is discussed and ultimately rejected in section 4.…”