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International Journal of Language Studies
Volume 16, Number 4, October 2022, pp. 17-42
ISSN: 2157-4898; EISSN: 2157-4901
© 2022 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.
“Her leg didn’t fully load in”: A digitally-mediated social-semiotic critical
discourse analysis of disability hate speech on TikTok
Annalisa RAFFONE, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy
Hate Speech Online (HSO) seems to be the result of the degeneration of
the ’freedom of expression’ into the ‘freedom for discrimination’ that
finds its major amplification on social media where some people use
anonymity as a tool to exercise power and dominance over other
people. Drawing on a digitally-mediated Social-Semiotic Critical
Discourse Analysis, this study investigates a specific, under-researched
form of HSO, namely Disability Hate Speech (DHS) by analysing a corpus
of comments retrieved from a video of a famous amputee TikToker
spreading awareness on disability. The results unveil and explain that
people’s discriminatory practices and intolerant attitudes towards
people with impairments are based on deep-rooted mental models and
beliefs that contribute to increasing the stigmatisation against them,
thus paving the way to intersectional hateful discourses that create
disability through the process of ‘othering’ by naming what is normal/
abnormal according to the dichotomy able-bodiedness/disability.
Accordingly, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature of
studies on disability discourse with a specific perspective on DHS.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis; Disability Discourse; Disability Hate
Speech; Hate Speech Online; Social Media Studies; Social-Semiotic
Approach; TikTok
1. Introduction
It is a universally acknowledged truth that technology and the internet have
provided a breakthrough in how people communicate and interact, and the
increasing rise of new social media has turned users from passive to active
agents allowing them to create new content, express their opinions and
contribute to what has been defined as cyberculture (Sacrista n et al., 2013).
Nevertheless, more frequently, the ‘freedom of expression’ results in the
‘freedom for discrimination’ leading to varied forms of Hate Speech Online
(HSO) (Balirano & Hughes, 2020).
Controversies exist about the definition of HS(O). However, it is regarded as
any act of denigration, vilification, stigmatisation, and a series of other
threatening actions perpetrated (online) against people based on gender, sex,
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18 A. Raffone
race, colour, religion, disability, and similar features (Council of Europe, 2016).
The construction of hatred seems to primarily affect these groupings and
amplify on social media where some people use anonymity as a tool to
exercise power and dominance over other people (Nisco, 2020). Among the
various forms of discrimination, Disability Hate Speech (DHS) represents one
of the most under-researched areas in discourse-focused studies since it was
conceptualised as a ‘social problem’ towards the end of the 20th Century
(Garland, 2011).
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2022), over 1 billion
people among the global population currently experience some forms of
disability, an amount destined to increase due to the growing number of
diseases emerging in today’s world. People with disabilities are regarded
among the most marginalised communities in Western cultures due to
specific embedded mental models that are hard to be erase (Agmon et al.,
2016) and that internet-based interactions contribute to strengthening.
Considering the number of people using social media every day, this research
starts from the assumption that people freely express their thoughts when
they are online, thus unveiling underlying assumptions, culturally-based
beliefs, and mental models through language use. Diverse Social Media Sites
(SMSs) (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) have been discursively investigated to analyse
specific forms of HSO (e.g., gender, race, politics) (Balirano & Hughes, 2020;
KhosraviNik & Esposito, 2018). Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no
study has been conducted so far on DHS on today’s most utilised social media
platform, namely TikTok.
Against this backdrop, this paper will address a digitally-mediated Social- Semiotic Critical Discourse Analysis of DHS on the aforementioned social
network, in the attempt to provide valuable insights on the way people use
language to construct hateful intersectional discourses around disability on a
daily basis and discursively create power relationships to distance themselves
from ‘Others’ and exert dominance over them.
2. Background
2.1. The social stigmatisation of a medical condition
Four-hundred and thirty years have passed from the publication of
Shakespeare’s tragedies Richard III (1988/2010) and Henry VI (1999) in
which the Bard of Avon depicts the cruel and ruthless Yorkist Duke of
Gloucester as stigmatic to describe his physical deformity, giving rise to the
idea of ‘disability’ as a metaphor for ‘moral evil’ upon which a cultural
discourse on the meaning of the terms ‘disability’ and ‘disabled’ has arisen.
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International Journal of Language Studies, 16(4), 17-42 19
Nevertheless, despite the Lancastrian narration of Richard’s physical nature
directly sent by God as a sign of his evil soul, what the Duke highlights in his
soliloquies within both plays is that he is a villain due to the fact that he is
“rudely stamp’d . . ., deform’d, unfinish’d, . . . lamely and unfashionable” which
leads him to weave plots and dangerous traps since “[he] cannot prove a
lover” (Shakespeare, 1988/2010, pp. 6-9). In this way, Shakespeare chooses a
dramatic strategy to transform the social meaning associated to deformity—
an ‘abnormal’ nature that contrasts the ‘normal’ one—and satirises it by
showing that morality is not linked to biology and that Richards’ words do not
make any sense since his evilness can only be ascribed to his narcissism,
perversion, and craziness that he tries to justify through his deformity.
The modern discursive construction of disability stands in between the so- called ‘medical’ and ‘social’ models: the former, also called ‘old model’ (Mitra,
2006)—starting from the premise of the authority of the field in defining
illnesses and their cures—connects disability to biology, conceiving it as a
medical issue, i.e., the result of the inability of body parts and functions to
work normally (Brittain, 2004; Forhan, 2009; Haegele & Hodge, 2016); the
latter—that includes different models of disability discourse (Mitra, 2006)—
draws a distinction between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’, thus considering
impairment as a body disfunction and disability as a social construct, i.e., a
disadvantage created by society to people with impairments which excludes
them from social life (Barney, 2012; Goodley, 2001; Roush & Sharby, 2011).
Therefore, the social model suggests that to remove socio-cultural barriers to
disability, changes should primarily address society rather than the individual
(Bingham et al., 2013; Fisher & Purcal, 2016; Ha stbacka et al., 2016).
To this end, the Council of Europe (2017) has released the so-called Council of
Europe Disability Strategy 2017-2023 with the overall aim of helping people
with disabilities achieve equal opportunities and be treated with dignity at
both national and local levels. The main goal of the strategy is to grant
disabled people the opportunity to take part in the social life of their
communities, thus avoiding and overcoming any type of discriminatory acts.
Nevertheless, with the growing spreading of user-friendly technologies and
applications, stopping hate crimes towards minority groups seems more and
more challenging. In particular, communication through SMSs can take both
positive and negative aspects, namely by enhancing interpersonal
relationships or enacting a war against ‘Others’ discursively constructing
them as “distant, alien, deviant” people (Coupland, 1999, p. 5).
2.2. Social media sites: TikTok
Originally born in China under the name of Douyin in 2016, TikTok is an SMS
for the creation, editing, and sharing of short (personal) videos usually
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accompanied by the latest music trends. It was officially launched in 2017
and, in a few months, it became one of the fastest-growing apps worldwide
reaching nearly 83 million active users in 2021 (Statista, 2022). It is
considered to be a Gen Z app1 even though people of all ages have started to
use it for multiple purposes. TikTok allows for the publishing of varied types
of content covering diverse fields of interest such as beauty and make-up,
education, sports, politics, cooking, culture, history, and so forth.
Nevertheless, it is also used to spread awareness on important social topics.
The app is mostly based on trends: this means that a particular video
containing a hashtag (e.g., #popculture), a song, or a dance goes viral, and it
starts to be used, ‘dueted’,2 or reproduced in the app (usually for some weeks
or even months) by other people who personalise it by adding, for instance,
new elements.
The personal page of each TikTok account is divided into two sections:
‘Following’ (i.e., showing the videos of people you follow); ‘For You’ (i.e.,
recommended videos selected by the algorithm according to the user’s
interests). It is usually through the ‘For You’ page that common people who
had never previously experienced the status of social media influencer/star
start to be heavily followed (Anderson, 2020).
A TikTok user can also search for videos or people by using the searching bar
on the top of the app. Interaction with other TikTokers and videos is allowed
through a series of buttons placed at the right side of any video in a
descending order: the symbol +, placed below the user’s profile picture,
allows following/unfollowing people; the heart icon means ‘like’ (when
tapping it, its colour changes from white to red); the comment icon serves the
purpose of posting comments; finally, the arrow icon means ‘direct share’ the
content to someone on TikTok or through other SMSs.
According to the TikTok Community Guidelines (TikTok, 2022a), the mission
of the app is to create a global, creative, inclusive, and happy community
where diversity of any type is respected and hateful behaviour not allowed
and removed. They (TikTok, 2022a) define hate speech as “content that
attacks, threatens, incites violence against, or otherwise dehumanises an
individual or a group on the basis of . . . race, ethnicity, national origin,
religion, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, serious disease,
disability, immigration status”. Nevertheless, even though the Community
Guidelines have been updated to further enhance safety and security and,
according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report (TikTok, 2022b),
published on February 8th, 2022, more than 91 million videos have been
removed for violating them, hateful and discriminatory content continues to
be published on the platform.
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International Journal of Language Studies, 16(4), 17-42 21
3. Method
3.1. Theoretical framework
This study mainly draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)—in particular,
Van Dijk’s (2014) Socio-Cognitive Approach and the Social-Semiotic model
developed by Logi and Zappavigna (2021) for the analysis of digital messages.
Van Dijk (1996) claims that there exists an inextricable relationship between
discourse, cognition, and society according to which “discourse structures
express structures of mental models, which are related to more permanent
social representations such as knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, which in
turn are the shared ways groups and cultures represent their goals, interests,
concerns, structures or institutions” (p. 122). The linguist also states that a
specific aspect of ideologies is their polarisation between an in-group and out- group, namely that they manifest themselves through discourse structures
that emphasise “Our good things . . . and Their bad things” (Van Dijk, 2014, p.
100). Nevertheless, discourse is not only oral and written but also
multimodal, in the sense that it can be expressed through semiotic resources
(e.g., images, sounds, pictograms, etc.) that represent the semiotics of
discourse (Van Dijk, 2014). Van Leuween (2005) considers a semiotic
resource as a tool for meaning-making and defines multimodality as the
mixing of language and other semiotic resources in a communicative event.
Emojis are semiotic resources able to both convey attitudinal meaning and
play a pragmatic function within texts (Logi & Zappavigna, 2021). Accordingly,
the Social-Semiotic approach offers a framework based on the different levels
of discourse semantics for analysing intermodal semiosis and unfolding the
role played by emojis in construing discourses.
3.2. Corpus design: The DisabiliTok corpus
3.2.1. Participants
The DisabiliTok Corpus (as defined by the author) was retrieved from the
TikTok platform. Specifically, the whole dataset belongs to a video posted by a
famous amputee TikToker (@lil_fin_brooklynn is her TikTok handle where
she has 164.3k followers), aged 18, and born with a rare defect called
Proximal Focal Femoral Deficiency (PFFD) on her left side. The shortening of
her femur, caused by the lack of a hip joint, made her knees of different
lengths. Consequently, she underwent a rotationplasty surgery that made her
left leg rotate 180 degrees, adjusting the length of her femur by creating a hip
joint, while her foot now works as a base for her prosthetic. This surgery
helped the girl perform activities she never did before, like running, walking
up and down stairs, and playing soccer.
Her video was chosen for investigation among others because, at the time of
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data collection, it showed the highest number of hearts and comments under
the hashtag #disabilityawareness the researcher investigated through the
searching bar.
The video, uploaded in October 2021, portrays the girl doing the so-called
‘Little Lad Dance’, a famous trend on TikTok at that time, derived from a series
of Starburst3 commercials, featuring a character called ‘The Little Lad’ who, in
one of the commercials,4 explains that when he was younger, and wanted
berries and cream, his mother made him do the ‘Little Lad Dance’.
The TikToker’s video is evidently ironic and made with the purpose of raising
awareness on disability issues, with the girl performing the dance without the
prosthetic leg and a voluntary serious face, and her dog intruding in the room.
The girl’s profile is full of ironic TikToks on her condition, and there also are
some videos telling her medical story. Indeed, on her bio, she describes
herself as ‘1 1⁄2 out of 2 legs are available ’, by using emojis as
illocutionary force of the sentence they accompany, thus conveying what she
really means: a strong (Flexed Biceps, ) girl who likes acting positive and
having fun (Zany Face, ) no matter the difficulties.
On the contrary, no demographic information could be gained from the
writers of the hateful comments since, as already mentioned, haters tend to
remain anonymous by using fake accounts and photos for their (often private)
profiles.
3.2.2. Data collection
The data were collected from October to November 2021, constituting a total
amount of 8,500 comments. Then, to make the data set ready for text
processing, the researcher manually cleaned it by deleting those comments
only mentioning a tag5 (i.e., @blueflower). The outcome of this procedure is a
multimodal corpus of a total amount of 4,032 comments (24,057 tokens)
formed by: (a) text only, (b) text and emojis/emoticons, and (c) emojis only.
3.2.3. Data analysis
The corpus was then uploaded on ATLAS.ti 22 to build a coding frame.
ATLAS.ti is a Computer-Assisted Qualitative Content Analysis (CAQCAS)
software that allows to graphically draw complex relations between data
segments through coding. Qualitative data analysis requires skills and
expertise being often a laborious process, especially when dealing with a large
amount of data (Smith & Short, 2001). Accordingly, parents and child nodes
were created while reading the content line-by-line through the bottom-up
approach of inductive coding. This procedure for CAQCAS was chosen to
provide a systematic, rigorous, and transparent analysis of data.
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International Journal of Language Studies, 16(4), 17-42 23
Through the coding analysis, the researcher created and developed the
following axes of categories along which the author recognises DHS to move
along in the DisabiliTok Corpus: (a) Dehumanisation, (b) Fauxapologies, (c)
Gender interconnections and sexist-based issues, (d) Parental and religious
stigmatisation, and (e) Comments about physical appearance. Apart from
these, very few positive comments were coded under the category (f)
Appreciation and similar stories.
During the coding process, the researcher took into account that the whole
data set also comprises emoji-based comments. As a result, they were
categorised according to the communicative purpose of the specific emoji
based on the categories previously created.
After the identification of the themes, a CDA based on Van Dijk’s Socio- Cognitive Discourse Studies (SCDA) (2014) was performed to analyse the
linguistic and discursive structures that help highlight people’s socio- culturally based assumptions, mental models, and ideologies towards
disability displayed through the HSO directed to the TikToker. Moreover, Van
Dijk’s methodology was combined with basic corpus linguistics tools (e.g.,
word lists) (Baker et al., 2008) by using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc
(Anthony, 2005) and a Socio-Semiotic analysis of emojis drawing on Systemic
Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and Multimodal
Discourse Analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) as proposed by Logi and
Zappavigna (2021).
4. Results and discussion
4.1. Dehumanisation
The majority of the hateful comments coded in ATLAS.ti are directed to the
dehumanisation of the girl by metaphorically comparing her to diverse
material and non-material elements. In particular, under the parent node
‘dehumanisation’, specific child nodes have been recognised that correspond
to epithets haters used to refer to the TikToker, that is, ‘t-rex’ (n = 1),
‘flamingo’ (n = 1), ‘Deadpool’ (n = 27), ‘chicken heels/Royale High’6 (n = 39),
‘korblox (n = 293)/roblox (n = 136)’, ‘lepecorn’ (n = 1), ‘Lucifer’ (n = 1), ‘Titan’
(n = 1), ‘kickstand’ (n = 3), ‘tea pot’ (n = 1), as in the following excerpts:
1. Lil lepercon
2. My little tea pot. Short and stout
3. She identifies as a flamingo. I thought i was away from berries and
cream, but since a video brought me back im happy its this one. thank
you. :)
4. half formed Titan things
5. hail lucifer
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6. when you they spliced genes with a trex (jk)
7. It’s a kickstand
8. Deadpool after Juggernaut ripped off his legs.
9. Looks like Deadpool with baby legs when his legs were trying to grow
back
10. Totally gotta be half Deadpool
11. are you Deadpool?
12. The chicken heels from royal high?
13. Chicken heels in rh be like:
14. Chicken heels
15. Real life korblox
16. nice korblox!
17. Korblox
18. We love the korblox
19. dont worry, she just has korblox
20. Korblox 2.0
Even though some of these terms pertain to a negative semantic domain (e.g.,
Lucifer), others (e.g., flamingo, teapot) acquire a bad connotation according to
their usage which unveil ascribed adverse features based on several
stereotypes and representations. Accordingly, the general way in which haters
employ them reflects the idea of the disabled person as an object to ridicule
and make fun of, a still existing stereotype dating back to the 16th and 17th
Centuries, especially during the Elizabethan era, when jestbooks were full of
people with impairments portrayed as ‘idiots’ helpful to entertain the
aristocracy (Korhonen, 2014).
The choice of words like ‘teapot’, ‘kickstand’, and ‘chicken heels from Royale
High’ has the clear intention of degrading the girl by reducing her to an object
without feelings while criticising her physical appearance: she is derogatorily
defined as ‘short and stout’ like a teapot, her left feet compared to a kickstand
through an exophoric reference with the pronoun ‘it’ (7), and her leg to a
character customisation7 that does not have a knee joint so that when walking
the legs resemble the ones of a chicken.
The use of zoomorphic metaphors—a cognitive feature through which the
image of an animal and its traits are assigned to a human being—such as
‘chicken heels’, ‘flamingo’, and ‘t-rex’ reflects the connection between
discourse, cognition, and society as they reinforce biases towards people who
do not conform to the characteristics recognised as ‘the normative’: in this
case, the dichotomy able-bodiedness/dis-abled represented through the thick
legs of the animals. Indeed, the dominant ideology of our societies draws on
the idea that human beings are superior to animals. Consequently, the
comparison between the two acquires negative connotations, thus increasing
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International Journal of Language Studies, 16(4), 17-42 25
through language (i.e., animal metaphors) the gap between the in-group and
the oppressed Other (Coviello & Borgerson, 1999).
Furthermore, in (3) the expressive speech act ‘thank you :)’ does not serve the
purpose of positive greeting; instead, the smiley contributes to conveying a
sarcastic attitudinal connotation (Logi & Zappavigna, 2021), whereas in (6)
the writer uses the urban acronym ‘jk’ (i.e., just kidding) as a discourse
structure to diminish the pragmatic force of the previous utterance, namely to
mitigate its negative humour (Grant, 2011).
Apart from animals, another association enhancing and reinforcing the
stigmatisation of disabled people is the connection to teratology, the study of
the abnormal development of organisms. Indeed, since Greek and Roman
times—when the standard of beauty was founded—people born with
deformities were regarded as monsters (gr. τέ ρατα). For instance, Aristotle
(1882) created a human/dwarf opposition considering dwarfs as creatures
deviating from the extraordinary natural ‘ability’ of human beings and so
perceived as inferior. This culturally-based assumption can be observed in the
corpus through the association of the TikToker to a ‘lil lepercorn’ (1)
(mythological short creatures resembling elves) or a ‘half formed Titan’ (4) by
making reference to a deformed dreadful Manga character and reinforcing the
idea of ‘otherness’ by adding the noun ‘things’, thus annihilating her human
dignity.
Other references to abnormal creatures are ‘korblox’8 from ‘roblox’,9 a
magical, monstrous warrior whose right leg is artificial, and ‘Deadpool’ by
indicating the homonym superhero designed by Marvel Comics alluding to the
specific scene in which Deadpool’s legs regenerate as ‘baby legs’10 after having
been destroyed by another character.
The word ‘korblox’ shows the highest number of occurrences compared to the
other child nodes, and it is often used in the corpus with an ironic tone by
adding modifiers like ‘real life’ or creating oxymorons such as ‘nice korblox’.
As Logi and Zappavigna (2021) suggest, the use of semiotic resources like
emojis often contributes to unfolding the meaning of the discourse: indeed,
they enact at the same time “an ideational function of construing experience,
an interpersonal function of enacting relationships and a textual function of
organising discourse into a coherent text” (p. 6). In (17), the ‘Flushed Face’
and ‘Pleading Face’ encode interpersonal meaning through the discourse
semantic system of ‘attitude’ by which evaluative meaning is displayed: the
tone of the utterance is sarcastic and it is conveyed through the convergence
of emojis and language where the two emojis show a positive appreciation for
the ideational target ‘korblox’.
This sarcastic appreciation is also exhibited in (18) by using the first-person
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plural pronoun ‘We’ as a way to express identity (Fairclough, 1989) and create
an opposition between in-groups and out-groups (i.e., We vs. Them) (Van Dijk,
2014). Throughout the corpus, speakers use the pronoun ‘We’ to create
consensus, approval, and agreement with other users while distancing the
target object (e.g., ‘Can we see you with jeans on?’). Indeed, the discursive ‘We’
serves the double purpose of identifying the speaker with a specific
community (e.g., the able-bodied) and contemporarily creating an identity for
others (i.e., ‘normal people’) by excluding the target of the message (i.e., the
disabled girl). In (18), by associating the able-bodied community (‘We’) with a
verb pertaining to a positive semantic domain (‘love’), the speaker mitigates
the offense of comparing the girl to a ‘korblox’. At the same time, the other
users show consensus for this verbiage by hearting11 the post and
commenting on it with the internet slang expression ‘LMFAO’ (literally,
Laughing My Fucking Ass Off)—meaning that they laughed so hard at the
comment that their ‘ass’ fell off—to convey the highest degree of approval.
Thus, the inclusive ‘We’ is employed to minimise the speaker’s responsibility
by pretending to be collaborating with the target of the message (Mu hlha usler
& Harre , 1990). This use of pronouns reinforces stereotypes regarding the
disabled person as different, lesser, and Other than Us.
The idea of the disabled as an evil creature and a villain is largely antecedent
the Shakespearian portrayal of Richard III, and deeply rooted in the Mediaeval
era when people with disabilities were subject of superstition and
persecution. An utterance like ‘hail lucifer’ (5) can be understood only by
placing it in the socio-cognitive dimension of the disabled as a Satan’s product
(an idea spread by the treatise Malleus Maleficarum in 1486), the evident
proof of his existence, and a punishment from God for having sinned, which
made them the recipient of feelings of guilt and shame (Vincent-Connolly,
2021). Similar hateful utterances might still enact these types of emotions,
especially if directed to vulnerable people with disabilities for not conforming
to the standards of society.
4.2. Fauxapologies
Another discursive feature through which the author recognises HSO to unveil
in the corpus is represented by fauxapologies or non-apologies or negative
apologies. They are expressive speech acts presented as “face threatening for
the speaker and face-saving for the addressee” (Wagner, 2004, p. 23), namely
that even though they are constructed as apologies, they usually do not
support the speaker’s intentions (Brown & Levinson, 1978; Lee, 2021;
Salmani Nodoushan, 2019), so that they are publicly perceived as insincere
(Kampf, 2008). The TikToker received a high amount of fauxapologies (n =
92), among which:
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reasons. Indeed, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, it is
portrayed as a disease and the result of God’s punishment for having sinned
or transgressed. For instance, in (5) the author of the comment uses the
American-based informal verb ‘nerfed’ (generally associated to objects) to
indicate that God has decided to ‘deprive [the girl] from power’ (thus, making
her dis-abled) ‘for some reason’. The ‘Flushed Face’ emoji is cumulative, being
placed at the end of the utterance after linguistic resources, and it
encompasses an attitudinal connotation, thus conveying interpersonal
meaning. In particular, it does not serve its traditional purpose of realising
positive shyness and timidity (Emojipedia, 2019) but embodies the negative
polarity of shock and ironic embarrassment for the girl, through which the
speaker also implies that she should not have posted a similar video.
Nevertheless, the speaker tries to mitigate the offence by choosing a discourse
marker of probability at the beginning of the utterance (i.e., ‘maybe’) in the
attempt of sounding less direct and rude.
The concept of ‘the perfect body’ has always been prominent in Western
cultures (Negrin, 2008) evoking the image of a free-from-defects, regular,
‘normal’ body. One common view is that our physical bodies are the symbol of
God’s glory and his manifestation through us: “So God created mankind in his
own image | in the image of God he created them” (Genesis 1:27). This
religious-based belief, when used as a hateful strategy, relegates people with
impairments in a subordinate position, as if any type of congenital condition
would denote that something is ‘wrong’ with the person, a God’s mistake
while creating the ‘perfect’ human being. In (6), the American curse word
‘Damn’ is used ironically to emphasise the sarcastic meaning of the utterance
conveyed through the lexical choices ‘paper jam’ and ‘printed’—belonging to
the computer lexicon—to indicate that there must have been a ‘malfunction’
when God created the girl. The cumulative emoji ‘Face with Hand Over Mouth’
signals the attitude of the speaker to mislead the TikToker since it serves the
function of a fauxapology, as it suggests a fake embarrassment mixed with a
laughter.
The same viewpoint of the disabled body as a ‘mistake’ can be found in (3) in
which the writer uses the slang term ‘faded’ to claim that God was so ‘high or
drunk’ that he forgot to give the girl another leg. Also, the repetition of the
‘Face with Tears of Joy’ at the end of the utterance is meant to show the
degree to which the author appreciates its own offensive irony (i.e., it upscales
the written part of the utterance). Also, in (4) the writer uses the IKEA
metaphor with a negative connotation to state that the girl’s body was
constructed by following IKEA instructions, thus meaning that when
‘assembling’ her something was missed. This offensive metaphor can be
understood by making reference to IKEA assembly instructions that are
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International Journal of Language Studies, 16(4), 17-42 33
perpetuating their infantilisation, increasing the viewpoint of the disabled as
always deserving pity. The act of addressing the audience instead of the target
of the message (14) represents another strategy of assuming the person with
impairments having a lower cognitive development than the able-bodied.
Also, the representative speech act in (15) expresses the view of the disabled
as an incapable being. The writer employs the semi-modal need with the aim
of mitigating the necessity for the girl to rely upon a ‘caregiver’. This
derogatory comment unveils the attitude of conceiving people with
impairments as unable to take care for themselves and in the need of a
continuous assistance which usually leads to exclusion and lack of access to
social activities.
4.6. Appreciation and similar stories
During the analysis of the corpus, a surprising aspect was the incredibly high
number of people sharing the same hateful attitudes and low number of
comments supporting and/or appreciating the TikToker, thus understanding
her primary aim of using a funny trend to raise awareness on disability issues:
1. Good on you being confident enough!! This is awesome! I hope you
raise awareness!!
2. You have way way more confidence than me!! I got the same surgery
in 2018!!
3. I respect you so much for this
4. You’re beautiful
5. Much love
6. I love that u can laugh and make light of ur situation. I’m an amputee
and I’m the same way. PPl can’t take themselves so seriously all the
time
7. You win this trend!!!
8. I love your vibe
Some people—e.g., those having the same impairment—compliment her for
the ‘courage’ of being so confident to show herself in front of a wide audience
with her disability. Indeed, they thank her for the attempt of raising
awareness on the matter and describe her choice using positive adjectival
expressions such as ‘This is awesome’ or ‘Good on you’, stative verbs of
feelings and emotions like ‘love’, and lexical items belonging to the semantic
domain of positive attitude as ‘respect’ and ‘win’.
Despite their small occurrence rate in the corpus, these positive emotional
responses to the TikToker’s video contrast the discriminatory counterpart
directly supporting the girl (e.g., 7 and 8) without the need of answering to,
attacking, and degrading the authors of the hateful comments, thus playing a