Language practices of a digital Black feminist community on French Twitter: Gender, race, and sociopolitical discourse

Because of interlinked linguistic, gendered, and racial ideologies, the ‘ideal French speaker’ has, since the 16th century, been constructed universally as a white man (Vigouroux, 2017) – which continues to erase the experiences of many speakers of French. There are, however, spaces where these restrictive ideologies are challenged. Social media platforms such as Twitter are a productive space for such contentious conversations, especially for afroféministes, francophone Black women whose feminism caters to Black women fighting racism, sexism, misogynoir, islamophobia, queerphobia, and other forms of oppression (Mwasi, 2018; Othieno & Davis, 2019). The sociopolitical discourses of afroféministes often directly counter the universalist and colorblind hegemonic discourse of the government and public debates on the topics of race, gender, and language. This dissertation analyzes what happens with – and through – language when discourses of afroféministes challenge the norms stemming from sexist and racist language ideologies on Twitter in the current French sociopolitical context. This work follows an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 2019) by simultaneously attending to two socio-politically controversial, and interrelated, aspects of language, which historically have been studied separately in the French context: race and gender. Using Discourse-Centered Online Ethnography (DCOE) (Androutsopoulos, 2008) and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) (Lazar, 2007), this work analyzes two linguistic practices: gender-inclusive language (GIL) and racial labeling of white people. GIL is a practice rendering the feminine grammatical gender more visible through orthographic manipulations of written text and also offers trans-inclusive and non-binary grammatical options (Abbou, 2011). This work illustrates how these practices allow francophone Black feminists on Twitter to redefine who is allowed to innovate in terms of language and who, consequently, can be an ideal speaker of French in the current sociopolitical discourse.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Prieu, Charlotte Camille

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fagyal, Zsuzsanna
• Smalls, Krystal
• Koven, Michele
• Davis, Jenny

• Digital ethnography
• feminism
• Afrofeminism
• Gender-inclusive language
• figure of personhood
• French

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Charlotte Prieu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116214

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116214