Part of: Queer Inclusion and Exclusion I
Abstract:
Criticizing or mocking heteronormativity has always served to foster bonding and belonging in the queer community and helped in defining a queer identity (Greco, 2012). Because they bring people together, social media platforms are also an essential tool for the development of queer communities and queer identities nowadays (Zottola, 2024). While the criticism of heteronormativity and straight people is not a new phenomenon neither offline nor online (Cavalcante, 2019), 2019 seemed to mark the development of online discursive practices dedicated to this topic, perhaps as a product of a post-MeToo culture and the increase of feminist and queer counterdiscourses online. That year saw the creation in February of the Instagram account @heterocringe and, in October, of the subreddit r/AreTheStraightsOk, which functioned as spaces where excessively heteronormative or discriminatory internet content can be shared, sometimes for entertainment purposes to elicit a feeling of “cringe” in users. These discourses rapidly expanded to other platforms such as Twitter (now X), where the expression “are the straights ok?” began to be used as a formulaic meme phrase, and YouTube, which saw the emergence of “react” videos by queer creators reacting to heterocringe TikTok content.
Following the perspective of queer linguistics (Motschenbacher & Stegu, 2013), the goal of this paper is to reflect on how criticizing or mocking heteronormativity and straight people foster queer belonging and participate in reinforcing queer identity on social media. More specifically, this paper aims to analyze how this sentiment of belonging appears linguistically in discourse. This work is based on the study of a multilingual corpus in English, French and German comprising two sub-corpora from X and Instagram collected between 2020 and 2021. The Twitter subcorpus comprises 163,818 and was collected using the noun phrases “the straights”, “straight people”, and “les hétéros”. The Instagram subcorpus originates from two heterocringe humor accounts, the former @heterocringe and @german_hetero_cringe and is made up of 2807 posts. The research questions are explored through the qualitative discursive analysis of a data sample focusing on several micro and macro categories, such as markers of subjectivity, the denomination and address of social actors, markers of counterdiscursive positioning and also through the analysis of the role of humor and implicit discourses.
This analysis allowed for the observation of several discursive strategies that participate in the construction of queer belonging through the discursive practices observed. Among some of the most noteworthy is metadiscourse that formulate mocking straight people as a conscious and stated goal around which certain queer social media users gather. The presence of an “us” versus “them” dichotomy cultivated through the performative othering of straight people and the reversal of “cognitive hegemony” (Zerubavel, 2018) also appears as a central strategy that participates in promoting a sense of queer belonging. Finally, this sentiment also seems to rely on expected shared knowledge of queer users as a key to understanding wit and humor.
Cavalcante, A. (2019). Tumbling into queer utopias and vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ social media users on Tumblr. Journal of Homosexuality, 66(12), 1715–1735. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1511131
Greco, L. (2012). Production, circulation and deconstruction of gender norms in LGBTQ speech practices. Discourse Studies, 14(5), 567–585. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612452229
Motschenbacher, H., & Stegu, M. (2013). Queer linguistic approaches to discourse. Discourse & Society, 24(5), 519–535. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926513486069
Zerubavel, E. (2018). Taken for granted: The remarkable power of the unremarkable. Princeton University Press.
Zottola, A. (2024). LGBTQ+ and feminist digital activism: A linguistic perspective. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009122962
