“I wanna be a toy”

Abstract

The paradigmatic transgender woman is often negatively oversexualised, pornographised and fetishised in mainstream conceptualisations and discourses. However, self-sexualisation by transgender individuals is often portrayed as a (sex-)positive social phenomenon. Little research has been conducted that analyses the self-sexualisation strategies of the multiple instantiations of gender-variant identity, including transmasculine and non-binary social actors. This paper uses a corpus-informed socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies to identify differences between the self-sexualisation strategies and underpinning cognitive models of different gender-variant user-groups on Twitter. 2,565 users are coded into five categories: (1) transfeminine; (2) transmasculine; (3) transsexual; (4) transvestite; (5) non-binary. Findings show that transvestite- and transsexual-identifying users most closely fit the pornographised and fetishised conceptualisation, whilst non-binary users are the least self-sexualising user-group.

“Erase/rewind”: How transgender Twitter discourses challenge and (re)politicize lesbian identities

“…Transgender self-identification was determined by specific linguistic identifiers indexing gender-variance (see Table 1). Following previous research, which indicates that users with different transgender identities engage in markedly different behaviors, the corpus is also divided into six sub-corpora according to users' gender-similarity based on the identifiers used in the biography (see Webster, 2018a). This distinction between groups of users may serve to illuminate potential explanations for competing understandings of genderand sex-based identities that characterize the conflict over transgender-inclusion in the social categorization of lesbianism.…”

“…Van Dijk, 2015). These topics and themes are constrained by the local discourse context of transgender discourse, accounting for a contextualized understanding of the cognitive models at work that take into account individuals' subjectivities and social positioning (see Webster, 2018a). This sociocognitive approach illuminates the "cognitive interface" that "[influences] social structures" (Van Dijk, 2015, p. 64), offering an initial foundation for an explanatory critique of the relations held between the social categorizations of transgender and lesbian in an age of antagonism over their interrelatedness.…”

“…The latter suggests there is an alternative use of butch* among transgender Twitter users that is not necessarily associated with sexuality, in much the same ways as femme* has been used in transgender discourses (cf. Webster, 2018a). Indeed, this is perhaps reflective of a re-appropriation of historically lesbian identity markers by transgender users.…”

“…Indeed, there is specifically indicated a shared cognitive model of contiguity between multiple non-heterosexual identities (and transgender identities), which mirrors the wider hegemonic collectivization of identities under umbrella concepts of non-normativity (cf. Webster, 2018a). This consistent frequent collocation could arguably be seen to either reject or obscure the specificities and uniqueness of lesbian experience by equating it to gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer experience.…”

“…Contrastively, Shane-Simpson et al (2018) found that U.S. college students use Facebook more for private social bonding with other users also known in the offline context and Twitter for more public self-disclosure. Research on transgender users' Twitter behaviors indicate similar practices, including both public self-disclosures of sexualized identities and practices (Webster, 2018a) and users sharing opinions about civil rights and personal employment issues (Webster, 2018b).…”