TheDiscursive Ecology of Homophobia: Unraveling Anti-LGBTQ Speech on the European Far Right 9781788923460

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The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

ENCOUNTERS Series Editors: Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Ben Rampton, Kings College London, UK, Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA, Sirpa  Leppänen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and James Collins, University at Albany/SUNY, USA The Encounters series sets out to explore diversity in language from a theoretical and an applied perspective. So the focus is both on the linguistic encounters, inequalities and struggles that characterise post-modern societies and on the development, within sociocultural linguistics, of theoretical instruments to explain them. The series welcomes work dealing with such topics as heterogeneity, mixing, creolization, bricolage, crossover phenomena, polylingual and polycultural practices. Another highpriority area of study is the investigation of processes through which linguistic resources are negotiated, appropriated and controlled, and the mechanisms leading to the creation and maintenance of sociocultural differences. The series welcomes ethnographically oriented work in which contexts of communication are investigated rather than assumed, as well as research that shows a clear commitment to close analysis of local meaning making processes and the semiotic organisation of texts. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

ENCOUNTERS: 16

The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia Unraveling Anti-LGBTQ Speech on the European Far Right

Eric Louis Russell

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/RUSSEL3453 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Russell, Eric Louis - author. Title: The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia: Unraveling Anti-LGBTQ Speech on the European Far Right/Eric Louis Russell. Description: Bristol; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2019. | Series: Encounters: 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055797| ISBN 9781788923453 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788923446 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788923484 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Hate speech—Europe. | Homophobia—Europe. Classification: LCC P120.H66 R87 2019 | DDC 306.76/6014—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055797 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-345-3 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-344-6 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​multi​lingu​almat​ters Blog: www.c​hanne​lview​publi​catio​ns.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m Copyright © 2019 Eric Louis Russell. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

All author royalties for this book will be donated to ILGA-Europe. ILGA-Europe brings together more than 500 organizations from 54 countries across the region, works to advocate for human rights and equality for LGBTI people at the European level, and strengthens the LGBTI movement in Europe and Central Asia by providing training and support to activists. To find out more, please visit www.ilga-europe.org.

Contents

Figuresxi Acknowledgmentsxiii Prefacexv 1 Hate and Language, Hate in Language: (Re)Considering Homophobic Discourse 1.1 Why Homophobia? 1.2 Why Language? 1.3 Why Linguistics? 1.4 The Study of Hate Speech 1.4.1 Approaches to hate and/in language 1.4.2 Toward a linguistic approach to hate speech 1.5 Populism, Social Media and Homophobia

1 4 6 9 11 11 17 20

2 The Ecology of Homophobic Speech: Unraveling Discourse Practice26 2.1 Ecology and Language 28 2.2 Description: The Linguistic Substance of Discourse Practice34 2.2.1 Participant reference: The forms of homophobia 35 2.2.2 Participant relations: The structures of homophobia37 2.2.3 Visual pragmatics 41 2.3 Interpretation: Language, Cognition and Culture 43 2.3.1 Discourse as context 44 2.3.2 Discourse as culture 49 2.4 Discourse Ecology 52

vii

viii Contents

3 Les Hommen: ‘Muscled Resistance’ and Misogynistic Homophobia57 3.1 Background 58 3.1.1 Corpus 61 3.1.2 Style and Hommen discourse practice 62 3.2 Participants: Referencing Homophobia 65 3.2.1 Referential taxonomies 66 3.2.2 Deixis 72 3.3 Participant Relations: Homophobia, Misogyny and the Clause 73 3.3.1 Processes and participant roles 80 3.4 The Linguo-Visual Projection of Homophobia 85 3.5 Analysis 92 3.5.1 Homophobia in contemporary France 94 3.5.2 Positioning and repositioning 99 3.5.3 Framing 102 3.5.4 Mapping the Hommen discursive ecology 105 3.6 Summary 107 4 Le Sentinelle in Piedi: Naturalizing and Denying Homophobia111 4.1 Background 112 4.1.1 Language of the silent vigil 113 4.1.2 Corpus 115 4.2 Participants: Referencing Homophobia 116 4.2.1 Referential taxonomies 117 4.2.2 Deixis, pronominalization and pro-drop 133 4.3 Participant Relations: Homophobia, Nature and the Clause 135 4.3.1 The clause as exchange 135 4.3.2 The clause as message 147 4.3.3 The clause as representation 157 4.4 Analysis 162 4.4.1 Homosexuality in modern Italy 162 4.4.2 Positioning 166 4.4.3 Framing 170 4.4.4 Mapping the Sentinelle discursive ecology 175 4.5 Summary 176

Contents 

5 Filip Dewinter: Pinkwashing, Populism and Nativism 5.1 Background 5.1.1 The Dewinter corpus 5.2 Participants: Referencing Homo- and Islamophobias 5.2.1 Participant referentiality 5.2.2 Pronominalization and deixis 5.3 Participant Relations: Homophobia, Islamophobia and the Clause 5.3.1 The clause as exchange 5.3.2 The clause as message 5.3.3 The clause as representation 5.4 Analysis 5.4.1 Flemish populism: Nativism in a modern world 5.4.2 Positioning 5.4.3 Framing (and erasure) 5.4.4 Mapping Dewinter’s discursive ecology: Pinkwashing revisited 5.5 Summary

ix

182 183 185 186 187 202 204 205 217 225 232 232 242 247 250 254

Conclusion261 References272 Index283

Figures

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6

Distribution of pronominal antecedence by semantic person Participant grammatical roles Participants and processes Material process and participant roles Verbal process and participant roles Participant agency

72 74 81 83 84 85

Figure 3.7a&b The death of liberté, Hommen action Figure 3.8 Hommen banner Figure 3.9 Dictators Figure 3.10a&b Comparison of dictators Figure 3.11a&b Hommen enslaved Figure 3.12 Hommen and his bride Figure 3.13 Marianne, liberated? Figure 3.14 Anti-Femen protest Figure 3.15 Harming children For Figures 3.7–3.15 please go to https://deh.ucdavis.edu/images Figure 3.16 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6

The ecology of Hommen action and reaction 105 Grammatical subjects: Pro-drop and referential NP 134 Participant grammatical roles 136 Frequency of passive by participant 148 Passive construction types (andare, essere, venire) by participant 149 Frequency of impersonal VP by participant complement 152 Conditional, conjunctive and future frequency by participant 153 xi

xii Figures

Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8 Figure 5.9

Participants and processes Material process and participant roles Verbal process and participant roles Mental process and participant roles Participant agency Ecological map Deixis and participant antecedence Participant pronominalization Participant grammatical roles Participant constituent order Participants and processes Material process and participant roles Verbal process and participant roles Participant agency Ecological model of pinkwashing

156 157 159 160 161 174 202 203 205 220 225 226 229 230 252

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without a number of colleagues to whom I am deeply grateful: Vai Ramanathan for encouragement and mentoring over cups of tea; my present and past department chairs, Noah Guynn and Julia Simon, for guidance through various stages and hurdles; Claire Goldstein, for her generosity of time and supportive feedback; and Bob Bayley, Maxine Craig, Jeff Fort, Margherita Heyer-Caput, Rana Jaleel, Michael Subialka and Toby Warner, for conversations about matters small and large. Lavender Language and Linguistics conference attendees have offered helpful feedback on earlier versions of the case studies: among many I wish to thank are Adi Bharat, Lucy Jones, Brian King, Kris Knisely-Southerland, William Leap, David Peterson and Denis Provencher. I am especially in debt to Tommaso Milani for his thoughtful and thorough critique of earlier manuscripts. Bedankt, grazie and merci to Giulia Bulzoni, Dario Castellano, Emeline Diolot, Francesca Peretto, Laure-Marie Pinteaux, Colclough Sanders-Gomez and Elise Verbon for lending crosslinguistic perspectives. Anthony Drown and the hard-working staff of Sproul-IT have been lifesavers with technical assistance. And I am immensely appreciative of Anna Roderick and her team at Multilingual Matters for their patience and confidence. No less importantly, my thoughts would likely never have seen the page were it not for the support of family, notably my sister and staunchest ally Heidi, and friends: especially to Allison, Daniel, Doug and José, a heartful thanks. Lastly, for my husband Sam, there is no linguistic form or structure that can capture my gratitude: he has stood by my side throughout this journey and never failed to make me laugh along the way.

xiii

Preface

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use. Louise Glück, ‘October (5)’

I suspect that, like myself, the vast majority of readers have been confronted by pronouncements along the lines of, ‘it’s not that I have anything against gay people’, perhaps delivered in a manner meant to be reassuring, ‘it’s just that what you do in your own bedroom is no one else’s business’. Typically uttered by someone who objects to a political or cultural project that would bring non-heterosexual and non-cisgender people into the broader social fold, this stock rejoinder or one of its many variants is neither particularly uncommon nor particularly original – although it is certainly very maddening. Such statements and their performance are part of widely shared discourses, understood in either the Foucauldian (1971) or the Lacanian (viz. Milner, 1995) senses, i.e. as systems of meaning and knowledge creation or as structures of power. In the broadest manner, these frame and are framed by shared notions of privacy, personal or public morality, citizenship and democracy, as well as the intersections between these and other ideational constructs. Interactional moments like the generic citation above seem to pass by without notice for the many, inevitable as a light breeze, whereas for the few, they are as damaging and painful as a tornado, manifestations of forces that are to be feared and countenanced. I am among the latter group, which may explain my tendency to respond in kind, frequently with a flippant, ‘I don’t care what you do in your bedroom, either, but that’s not the point’ (more often than not inserting an expletive for good measure). Recent decades have seen compelling work taking homophobic discourses to task, accomplishing this from a number of angles, from the xv

xvi Preface

political to the artistic, the academic to the economic. Underlying each is the presumption that these communicative events are representative of a retrograde conceptualization of community life, are imbued with bias and run counter to a collective sense of fairness and equality. However, this presumption begs a question that is rarely fully attended to: if such speech is homophobic, what in particular makes it so? Imagine that the hypothetical speaker of the above lines denies he holds animus, perhaps adding ‘hey, you live your life, I’ll live mine’ or ‘some of my best friends are gay’? What if he were to insist that he is merely expressing a personal opinion, a sacrosanct right in most contemporary democracies? Would it still be possible to describe this communicative act as rooted in hostility, or would it be necessarily understood as an uncomfortable, if ill-formed, point of view, one opinion among many, the forbearance of which is demanded by the very civil society it offends? We who seek to create a more balanced, more inclusive, more just society are faced with a dilemma when it comes to the subtle daily biases given form by language practices such as these. Peeling back the layers of communication and looking at underlying messages offers one means of countering them, hopefully also suggesting another way of being in the world and in relation to each other. Responding to such allegedly reasonable opinions, we can point out their foundational heteronormativity (the choices of heterosexual and cisgender people are celebrated, institutionalized and protected) or reduction (as if the only thing that mattered about a person’s orientation and identity were the sexual acts he or she engages in). We may also demonstrate their effect on our fellow citizens, especially when spoken or written by someone with social capital and power, and list any number of alarming statistics, e.g. frighteningly high rates of suicide among young people who don’t identify with sexual and gender norms or the socioeconomically disadvantaged position in which many same-sex families find themselves. We should do this more frequently, not to mention more boldly, and certainly demand that persons in power do the same. But is this all that can be done? When it comes to confronting prejudice, are we limited to pointing out the logical flaws and underlying biases of others? Given that it is very likely the majority of discourse is realized in and through language, I believe it imperative that we scrutinize the means by which discourses are practiced and examine the mechanics of their actuation, i.e. the ways they are made tangible. After all, the devil, not to mention his mercenaries, is more often than not found in the details. This is where the linguist can step in, and where my scholarly journey in teasing apart homophobic language began (as a gay man, my personal experiences

Preface xvii

with the subject go back more years than I care to reveal). Any linguistic examination would require the close description and analysis of forms and structures that are shared by speakers of a cultural community and that are deployed in its formation, transmission and reception. Obviously, this enterprise is of interest to scholars whose work touches upon language: I believe that it should also be significant to everyone who confronts or is confronted by acts of communicative homophobia, which is to say virtually anyone who lives within a community that has conceptualized sexual orientation and gender identity along such lines. It was in fact a moment of confrontation that served as impetus for the present book. This occurred several years ago during a social event in Italy, where I was one of several guests: at some point, I became entangled in a discussion with friends of a friend concerning (then only hypothetical) civil unions. One of them, a man in his 30s whom I knew somewhat distantly from academic circles, expressed his discomfort with the public nature of what he considered private sexuality. As we chatted, mostly amicably, over aperitivi, I became increasingly intrigued at the means by which he articulated his point of view: on the one hand, he explicitly claimed a position of non-homophobia, enumerating his friendliness and civility toward openly lesbian and gay individuals (presumably he included me in this number); on the other, his stance against possible civil unions erased the equally sexual (or equally non-sexual) nature of heterosexual matrimony, as if its institutions and structures operated apart from politics and culture. (A similar discursive logic is examined in Chapter 4, focusing on the Sentinelle in Piedi, although I have no reason to believe my interlocutor was a member of that group.) Days later, having had time to reflect, I recall being struck by the similarities between this conversation and others I have been a part of, in other languages that I use on a regular basis: I also recall being curious about any differences arising from cultural anchors and their manifestation in language forms and structures. Indeed, the claims of ‘non-homophobia’ and objections to sociocultural change made in Italian by one member of this speech community were both different and similar to what I have experienced in Dutch, English and French. From this moment, the specifics of which have been largely lost to the imprecisions of memory, arose a belief that the careful dissection of linguistic data may offer a richer understanding of homophobic language and discourses. This conviction – along with, I freely admit, the frustration I felt in that and similar moments – have guided this project from its initial conceptualization, to its problematization (a process that will likely never be complete), to the publication of these pages.

xviii Preface

All of this is well and good, of course, but many will wonder what such linguistic exploration would look like, let alone what it might accomplish. Reconsidering the banal ‘it’s okay what you do in your bedroom, but please don’t make it a public matter’ statement introduced above, investigation could consider several factors, e.g. the alternation between first- and generic second-person forms and the verbal semantics associated with them – the former with negated mental states (‘I don’t have anything against’) and the latter with positive activity (‘what you do’). Also interesting is the use of adverbial modifiers, such as the negation of the first clause and the restrictive just of the second, as well as pragmatic components whose interpretation implicates individual and shared knowledge of how to put an utterance together, direct it toward an audience of collocutors and expect that it will be received in the manner that is intended. Speech acts such as this one do not emerge out of thin air: they are thought out, consciously or subconsciously, in accordance with a logical, generative harmonic (obviously linguistic, but also cultural, ethical and so forth), and are born into the world of verbal communication through a complex, interwoven series of forms and structures that reflect this. Carefully describing and interpreting these facts offers tremendous power – to understand, to countenance and to disrupt. As can be seen by this admittedly simplistic account, any serious attempt to rigorously re-examine the linguistic construction of discourses requires a good deal of intellectual baggage and methodological practice, especially if it aims to supersede descriptive simplicity. Imagining the token was uttered by an English speaker residing in California (if only because this is where I currently live and work), anyone who wishes to rigorously examine such a discourse practice would have to know a thing or two about North American English lexical forms, morphosyntactic structures and semantics, not to mention the ways members of this speech community use these patterns for pragmatic ends. Language is a complicated beast, a structured symbolic system that the vast majority will study only superficially, if at all (linguists being among the notable exceptions). This, however, is hardly a real impediment: complicated systems are widely studied, even if only by a minority. Our physical bodies are complicated systems, for which a majority has only the most basic understanding, even if we know ourselves to be physical creatures whose very existence depends on biological factors. We don’t think about metabolism when we eat or the pathways of infection when we cut our finger: we consume food following culturally transmitted habits and bandage a wound because this is what we’ve learned to do. If things get worse, say if we suffer from stomach pains or our finger begins to swell,

Preface xix

we consult a medical professional, from whom we expect more advanced expertise and treatment surpassing anecdotal knowledge. How curious, then, that we don’t react similarly when language is the source of concern or cause of injury. Just as we are embodied beings, so are we enlanguaged. We may not reflect often or at all on the means by which language and experience interact, but we cannot deny that this has a primary, if not fundamental role in our existence. When it comes to homophobic language, which we know has harmful, often devastating effects on our fellow citizens, why is there so little interest on the part of linguists? Why is so much of the most important and compelling work done on homophobic discourses ignorant – if not downright dismissive – of the forms, functions and pathways of language, those things that linguists view as akin to organs, chemical processes and metabolic pathways? There are some notable exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, we appear to have something more comparable to a premodern medical awareness when it comes to homophobic speech. For scholars like myself, this state of affairs is far from ideal. Hence this book, which attempts to bring linguistic postures (i.e. ways of thinking about and questioning language), theories and methods to bear on the study of homophobic discourses and to ground the interpretation of such practices in observable data. Recognizing that the stuff of language is intricate, I have made no attempt to simplify or gloss over the density and weight of this task, even if I have at moments chosen to concentrate on the evidence that I believe to be more relevant. I do not pretend to have a definite answer, be able to access hidden truths or hold a superpower that would allow me to infer another’s mental state. However, I do possess expertise that can be applied to the evidence before me, facilitating stronger and better-grounded inferences and arguments. Of course, the analyses I propose are not the only ones that can or should be made: I don’t subscribe to and certainly don’t wish to be thought of as promoting a myopically dogmatic stance vis-à-vis the complexity and importance of the subject at hand. Beyond this, the topics of case studies in Chapters 3 through 5 – populist groups operative in French, Italian and Flemish Belgian speech communities, respectively – can rightly be considered too occidental or Euro-centric. To this I can only reply that my personal preference and intellectual bias is to involve myself in data for which I have intuitions and experience (a stance taken up in Chapter 2). I also believe that the investigation of related, but at times profoundly distinct speech communities stands to challenge some of the implicit biases we all inevitably hold and which alltoo-frequently calque the expectations of one linguo-cultural milieu onto

xx Preface

another. Beyond language, some readers might say that this work doesn’t give enough attention to the lives affected by homophobia, that I don’t take a strong enough stance in condemnation of the authors of specific acts or that by building my analyses on lexical, grammatical, pragmatic and semantic foundations, I am reiterating the power of these praxes. These are fair and perhaps inevitable critiques. Rather than argue against them, I can only acknowledge them and reply that, in the end, I am attempting to balance intellectual scales and fuel counter-discourses. In so doing, I wish to increase the space available for disruption and cast greater light on the phenomena of homophobic communication, itself. I hope that, for all its density and complexity, this book encourages us all to reconsider the power we give language in our activism and scholarship, as well as in our private lives, while also reminding the community of linguists that language is not only the stuff of abstract theorization, but one of the constitutive fibers of social and civic life.

1 Hate and Language, Hate in Language: (Re)Considering Homophobic Discourse

When it comes to racism, we pay too much attention to language […] and we give language a power that I don’t believe it actually has. Eula Biss1 I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot’. C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean. Ann Coulter2

Very often, public reaction to offensive speech focuses on a set of recognizably derogatory words or expressions, or on statements clearly seated in discrimination and bias. This is understandable, especially on the part of those whose work does not delve into the minutia of language form and structure – after all, people are called unpleasant names and are subject to invective statements, leaving them angry and wanting to respond. However, as might be inferred from Eula Biss’ above-cited statement concerning racism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to simply point out the obvious when it comes to combatting the potential social and psychological harms of communicative acts: if all that were required to combat racism, for instance, were the prohibition of ugly epithets and the avoidance of statements denigrating ethnic minorities, a more egalitarian world would be relatively easy to achieve. All but the most naïve understand that this isn’t the case, of course, and recognize that animus is often concealed within utterances that on the surface appear to be anything but hostile or injurious. Later in the interview from which this citation is drawn, Professor Biss admits as much, adding that there is much policing of language, because ‘we aren’t sure how to address the real problems’, further commenting that racism is, in her view, largely seated in complex 1

2  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

patterns that underlie our physical, political, economic and communicative interactions. No doubt similar statements can and have been made about homophobic speech. Derogatory language directed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ3) individuals and groups is not limited to a list of taboo words or overt declarations of prejudice. Censoring words such as faggot, pédé (French), checca (Italian), maricon (Mexican Spanish) or Tunte (German) would do little to eradicate communicative bias against sexual minorities, even if it might eliminate some particularly painful moments in the lives of many. This fact is made acutely clear in the quote attributed to Ann Coulter, a public figure who can hardly be considered favorable to LGBTQ rights and equality: she deploys one of the most recognized forms indexing homophobia among North American Anglophones (fag), concurrently asserting that her statement has nothing to do with homosexuality per se (after all, then-candidate Edwards was openly and incontrovertibly heterosexual). Similarly, homophobic speech cannot be reduced to statements of anti-LGBTQ exclusion or derision, such as the well-known slogans ‘homosexuality is an abomination’ or ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!’. All but the most inexperienced – or perhaps willfully ingenuous – members of a speech community are aware that animus far surpasses such clichés. However, it can be maddeningly difficult to pin down what constitutes homophobic communicative behavior, let alone those elements within a given speech act that actuate or advocate the harm and exclusion of LGBTQ citizens. Our ability to discern and combat communicative prejudice is often seated in our hearts and not in our minds; it is often felt in our emotional viscera, but eludes our eyes and ears. The dual imperative emerging from these considerations – the need to transcend the facile and delve into the messiness of homophobic language – frames this book and all that is hoped will come from it. This work endeavors to look past surface forms and easily understood messages, asking how homophobia is integrated within and arises from the very linguistic substance of discourse practices, with the goal of demonstrating that homophobia is not only seated in words and affect, but is also projected through all levels of linguistic and cultural competence and emerges from interwoven layers of linguistic and cultural performance. Undertaken in the following chapters is a simultaneously broad and deep examination of the complex, frequently overlooked linguistic patterns that produce and propagate the homophobic worldview, transmitted in language, and an explanation of these that is socioculturally connected

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  3

and informed: this approach is subsequently applied to three populist groups active within French, Italian and Flemish speech communities. From the very first steps of description, to the elucidation of linguistic patterns, to their analysis, the approach taken here rests on a fundamental presumption: the actuation of discourses is not accidental, but is driven by choices, conscious or subconscious, on the part of discourse authors. Some of these are lexico-semantic, e.g. referring to a person as gay versus homosexual (or eventually as fag, sodomite, pervert, etc.); many more are anchored within grammatical and semantic choices, from the morphological, to the syntactic, to the pragmatic, as well as in meanings emerging at the intersection of these. This approach is founded upon three derived assumptions: firstly, that homophobic discourses are manifest through structured linguistic performances constrained by language-specific parameters; secondly, that these performances are circuitously interleaved with linguistic competence; and lastly, that all such linguistic activity is inseparable from wider sociocultural competence. The last point is particularly significant to this book, as it recognizes that language does not exist in a vacuum. Language is a human phenomenon that subsists parasitically in individuals and cultural collectives. While a description of particular discursive acts depends largely on linguistic methodologies, their interpretation and the assertion of specific analyses are grounded in a broader sociocultural frame. This reflects many of the core tenets of cultural linguistics, specifically that ‘there are many reasons to believe that the “language system” on the one hand, and “belief and behavior” on the other, cannot be separated in any principled way’ (Enfield, 2000: 149).4 In other words, the convenient lines distinguishing langue from parole, competence from performance, idiosyncratic from shared and I- from E-language must be concurrently troubled and blurred. Before launching into the heart of the matter, however, it is beneficial to inquire about the usefulness of the intellectual enterprise at hand. In the following sections, and with admitted brevity, I attend to three questions, the responses to which serve to justify the scope, content and goals of this book. These questions concern the interest and importance of homophobia as a sociocultural phenomenon, the particularity of homophobic language within this frame and the need for a properly linguistic approach to homophobic discourse practices. Also addressed are questions pertaining to the foci of particular case studies that constitute the bulk of this book, notably the interest of social media corpora and

4  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

the selection of data from Flemish, French and Italian sources. Subsequent sections review previous studies of hate speech and homophobic language and set the stage for all following chapters. These serve to highlight not only the important work that has inspired this book, but also to complexify them. Far from imagining that there is a simple, one-sizefits-all approach to homophobic discourse analysis, this discussion lays the foundations for a multipronged approach to linguistic description, discursive interpolation and culturally situated explanation. Collectively, this introductory chapter serves to anchor the ecological heuristic fleshed out in Chapter 2, while also anticipating a series of case studies in Chapters 3 through 5. 1.1 Why Homophobia?

A first question that may be asked of this work cuts to its very premise: why is it important to study homophobia? Especially in democratic societies, it can be tempting to believe (or at least hope) that anti-LGBTQ animus is on the wane. Taking stock of political and social advances, as well as the relegation of blatant manifestations of homophobia to the impolite extremes of public life, homophobia might be seen as less salient or significant a topic. In a world in which more and more countries extend same-sex marriage, civil unions and other protections to LGBTQ citizens, in which openly gay and lesbian individuals are celebrated as entertainers, athletes and politicians, and in which transgender visibility is apparently ever-increasing, does homophobia still matter? Although I am wary of trivializing strides toward fuller equality and inclusion, my answer to the preceding question is unequivocal: homophobia and its careful examination matter tremendously, perhaps now more than ever.5 This response is predicated on the observation that, alongside cultural, legal and political changes that have made life easier for some LGBTQ persons, especially those who are relatively more affluent and those living in relatively more progressive polities, homophobia has not disappeared, even if it has evolved in substance and practice. Indeed, it may be the case that the easy-to-identify homophobic acts are becoming less frequent or ‘going underground’ in some settings, even as more complex, deeply rooted manifestations of animus become more prevalent and normalized elsewhere. A term lacking universally agreed-upon denotation, homophobia is defined in most dictionaries and clinical texts as the irrational fear of or aversion to persons whose identities, orientations and/or social characteristics somehow represent a violation of mainstream heterosexual

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  5

normativity. To cite but one example, the European Union describes homophobia in its working policies as ‘an irrational fear of and aversion to homosexuality and to [LGBTQ] people based on prejudice and similar to racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism’, further stating that this may be manifest ‘in the private and public spheres in different forms, such as hate speech and incitement to discrimination, ridicule and verbal, psychological and physical violence, persecution and murder, discrimination in violation of the principle of equality and unjustified and unreasonable limitations of rights’.6 Accordingly, homophobia is not just a conscious reaction predicated on fear, but can be understood as any adverse or discriminatory act targeting perceived sexual and gender minorities. Debate about such political formulations notwithstanding, it is interesting to note that the term ‘homophobia’ has also attained a much more general, sometimes even vague meaning in daily life, often describing a broad range of activities and opinions rooted in anti-LGBTQ bias. Few would argue that physical violence or political discrimination are homophobic, but many would also claim that jocular stereotypes, the subtle exclusion of preference and persistent cultural invisibility are also demonstrative of homophobia, even if any fear of homosexuals and homosexuality underlying these is readily masked by a veneer of civility. This broader understanding of homophobia is much more in line with what Warner (1991) refers to as heteronormativity, building upon the sociocultural conceptualization of compulsory heterosexuality, whereby any challenge to the normative (i.e. straight, heterosexual, cisgender) social matrix is considered an affront (see also Rich, 1980; Rubin, 1984). Accordingly, it is not merely an animus toward, but the dispreference for that not normatively heterosexual that can be viewed as homophobic. Used as a working term throughout this book, homophobia should be understood as any expression of disdain or diminution, exclusion or negation, derision or reduction targeting non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender persons, be this physical, political, economic or social. This type of homophobia is a fact of daily life even in the most progressive of communities and the most inclusive of societies, despite – and perhaps as a byproduct of – increased visibility and acceptance. However real and important legal and political strides toward inclusion and equality may be, these have not eradicated the reality and omnipresence of homophobia: LGBTQ citizens continue to be the target of subtle and not-so-subtle antagonism and prejudice, as well as outright violence, the description and study of which far exceeds the scope, let alone the space of any one work.

6  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

In Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, it is quite possible that homophobia has not qualitatively or quantitatively decreased, but has merely changed its form and mechanism of action. While easily identifiable events such as gay bashing may be recognized as social ills and overt anti-LGBTQ haranguing is no longer considered appropriate for public consumption, hidden and deeply entrenched forms of homophobia persist and are permitted to thrive in sociocultural shadows. The danger of physical violence certainly continues to be a reality for some, but the threat of social violence is perhaps all the more so for all, very frequently in ways that are difficult to discern and more often than not pass by unacknowledged. 1.2 Why Language?

A second question that may be raised concerns this work’s focus on language: why study homophobic language and not consider other manifestations of animus? Response to this question is necessarily more nuanced, admitting that, while all acts of homophobia are certainly worthy of serious examination, homophobic language and discursive practices are distinct in important ways, and are thus deserving of specific and careful attention.7 Over the past decades, increasing – and increasingly diverse – voices within and beyond LGBTQ communities have demanded fuller inclusion in society, including the recognition and extension of the rights and protections that most heteronormative persons take for granted: the right to equal treatment in employment and housing; access to legal and social institutions; protection from physical violence based on identity; and the right to recourse in cases of proven discrimination, to name but a few. Somewhat simplistically, all of these might be reduced to the right be included within the scope of that which is considered to be culturally normal (if not normative), permissible, and ‘non-unexpected’, i.e. the right to be just like everyone else, engage in the things that anyone else would and be subject to restrictions equivalent to those applied to any other member of society, regardless of sexuality or gender identity, whatever this might mean and in whatever form this might take. The long and at times painfully slow march toward greater equality has been met with fierce opposition that, even when not endeavoring to legislate against or not committing acts of violence upon LGBTQ citizens, continues to retain other, equally harmful arms at its disposal.8 Foremost among these is language, structured acts of communication deploying combinative, iterative, arbitrary and meaningful signs, in turn interpolated within grammatical systems operating on a number of interconnected levels.

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  7

Unlike acts of physical violence or political exclusion, very few acts of linguistic homophobia are subject to legal sanction. In fact, only a handful of jurisdictions (e.g. the Netherlands, Sweden) have laws specifically punishing anti-LGBTQ speech. Even then, legal proscription is restrictively applicable, mostly targeting public speech that can be reasonably associated with an actionable threat or injury, or communication by state officials. The difficulty in policing verbal as opposed to physical acts arises in part from the nature of linguistic communication. Unlike a fistfight, speech is far more difficult to qualify as specifically harmful and is frequently citational in nature, making its policing and prosecution a Sisyphean undertaking in all but the most blatant cases (viz. Butler, 1997). After all, it is relatively easy to determine both the injury and the injurer in the case of gay-bashing; it is, however, rather difficult to determine injury, let alone ascribe legal culpability, in most instances of homophobic speech. Although the mundane, daily acts of linguistic homophobia do not usually garner as much attention as reactionary political strategies or physical violence (which nearly invariably co-occur with linguistic acts, it should be noted), it is hardly a frivolous assumption that the most frequent and pervasive manifestations of homophobia involve language in some form. Many linguistic acts of homophobia are overt and easily recognized, e.g. derogatory epithets. Probably more frequent, however, are the nuanced acts of hostility that are easily discerned but explained with difficulty: it is these which permeate LGBTQ experience. Especially interesting in this regard are linguistic acts that do not deploy derogatory forms and that do not openly advocate violence or harm, but which nevertheless give life to conceptualizations and shared messages in and through which the inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the fuller community of citizens, i.e. that which Butler subsumes under the ‘livable life’ is obviated, if not abnegated or entirely annihilated (see especially Butler, 1997: xxii–xxv). In such cases, tidy understandings of homophobia begin to break apart and the clinical definition of psychology manuals fade into a complex relativism. Certainly, and as many opponents of same-sex marriage have argued, stating that one believes the institution of marriage to be the exclusive domain of heterosexual couples is not a priori a statement about homosexuals, nor are assertions that a person’s identity as male or female is solely manifest through biological characteristics a priori derogatory of transgender individuals. And yet, such discourses have a similar effect as overt slurs: they set one group apart, often through a Laconian non dit, deem its members somehow ‘less than’, often by determining one group to be a hegemonic and/or naturalistic ‘more than’, thereby reducing the sociocultural, if not physical space of LGBTQ livable life. These types of

8  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

communication can be particularly problematic, as any homophobic bias can be denied by their authors, while those who understand them to be expressions of animus are confronted with the difficult task of ‘pointing to the homophobia’ in the absence of a recognizable smoking gun, such as a specific word or expression (forms which may be reappropriated for inclusive or positive finalities, in any event).9 Like racism, which may no longer be communicated through derogatory names for or invocations to inflict harm on ethnic minorities (at least, not in polite society), but is still very much part and parcel of the discursive life of citizens around the world, homophobic language is not simply more phenomenologically complex than many other communicative acts, it is also more insidious than is commonly acknowledged. Beyond this, and acknowledging that homophobic language is perhaps less microscopically injurious than is explicit physical or psychological violence, such discursive practices might well be considered more harmful on a macroscopic level due to their additive weight, their omnipresence and their opacity, often going unrecognized by both victim and perpetrator. Although physical violence does not affect the corporal existence of every LGBTQ citizen, language and discursive practices do, as Tin quite ably noted: [Homophobic speech] is more a group of scattered fragments of conversation, phrases and formulas that are completely heterogeneous, spoken here and there, in all settings, beyond all social divisions, by everyone in general and no one in particular, and sometimes even, without thinking, by people who really are not homophobes or who do not think they are. (Tin, 2003: 358, see also Provencher, 2010)

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find an LGBTQ individual who has not experienced homophobic speech in one or another form, often on a daily basis and, perhaps more frequently, without having conscious knowledge of its effect.10 In light of the above, not to mention the persistent salience and power of sociocultural and sociopolitical heteronormativity, I argue that these are propitious times in which to rigorously reconsider homophobia as it is actuated in and through language, especially the complex discursive structures that play out in the background of our lives and permeate our existence. This is not to say that such linguistic practices are unique or distinct from those targeting other marginalized persons and communities. Unfortunately, animus is a fact of communicative existence, although its objects vary widely within sociocultural, socioeconomic and

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  9

sociopolitical spaces: in one place and time, it may target religious affiliation, in another ethnicity and in another gender expression (far too often, it is a combination of these). Indeed, the approach outlined and applied in the subsequent chapters could be used to describe and analyze any number of communicative contexts and products, including those fitting into salient -isms (e.g. racism, sexism) and -phobias (e.g. Islamophobia, xenophobia). It could also be used to better understand the communicative world in which any identity is brought forth and lived out (one need only consider the discursive construction of masculinity to arrive at an interesting example). Importantly, through the investigation of specific discursive practices within bounded corpora, the descriptions, analyses and interpretations advanced in this book offer compelling evidence that homophobia does not play out in a singular manner, and doesn’t always limit itself to the sexual citizen, but coexists alongside and interacts with other ideational forces, such as xenophobia and misogyny. This, in effect, strengthens the need for a closer, more linguistically grounded examination of discursive practices, as it demonstrates how homophobia is not simply injurious to LGBTQ individuals, but to society at large. 1.3 Why Linguistics?

A third question to be confronted concerns the need for a specifically linguistic approach to homophobic language, i.e. one that is framed by and grounded in linguistic methods and theories.11 There has been a fair amount of scholarship looking at exclusionary language and hate speech, often justifiably lumping anti-LGBTQ messages together with those targeting racial or ethnic communities, women and religious minorities. Is there truly a need to bring linguistics, with its formalisms and terminology, its propensity to objectify and abstract and its often-ponderous constructs to bear on the topic of homophobic language? Here again, my response is unequivocally affirmative: the adoption of linguistic intellectual postures and the deployment of linguistic theories and methods stand to offer compelling insight into how homophobia operates both overtly and, perhaps more importantly, covertly, while also holding space for the role of sociocultural competences in understanding the ways in which these patterns are interpreted and circuitously constructed. Although it is far beyond this book to fully attend to the scope and foundations of the discipline, linguistics can be summarized as having at its core the rigorous description, evaluation, analysis and explanation of language as both an observable performance, with temporal substance and form, and inferable epistemological structure, deriving from

10  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

anachronous and idiosyncratic, albeit ontologically and culturally shared competence. Linguists are interested in what people do with language; what is possible and impossible within a given semiotic system; how language is produced, received and processed by members of a speech community; and how competences and performances change in time and space, as well as a possibly infinite series of questions situated somewhere in between these waypoints. Linguists are not just concerned with the form of communicative acts, but with understanding the abstract structures that putatively underlie all such acts and which are developed via exposure to such productions. That linguistics should attend to homophobic language would appear self-evident: after all, all things having to do with language should be interesting to (at least some) linguistic practitioners, be susceptible to pass under (at least some sort of) a linguistic microscope and be compatible with (at least some of) the discipline’s theories and methods. The field has, however, been hesitant to fully take on the world of mortal women and men using messy, uncomfortable, culturally laden messages to injure each other, although sociolinguists have certainly taken a different tack (see below and Chapter 2). As a discipline, modern linguistics only rarely dares to move beyond questions pertaining to formalizable competence and look squarely at the effects the actuation of this competence has on the world of real human beings, not only those outside of a sexual norm, but those beyond a norm defined as white, straight, middle-class, educated and male with shocking regularity and alarming insouciance (pace the typical criticism of Chomsky [1965] and his conception of the idealized native speaker, cf. e.g. Labov [1969]). Accordingly, and unfortunately, homophobic language and most other communicative acts of animosity, violence or discrimination have remained at a disciplinary arm’s length. This work thus represents an important attempt to bridge a longstanding gap. I propose that the time is right for an innovative, if not entirely distinct approach to the description and analysis of homophobic language and discursive practice, one that concurrently troubles the facile associability of content to quality and complexifies the very notion of homophobia, itself. It begins with the premise that it is not descriptively, let alone explanatorily sufficient to afford the quality of ‘homophobic’ to any communicative action or behavior that does not align with a prevailing ideology or sociocultural agenda: determining that a person’s or group’s speech is homophobic simply because it doesn’t support a particular issue, e.g. same-sex marriage, is perhaps sufficient to mark this as a subject for further inquiry, but is hardly a fair or profound assessment,

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  11

at least on the part of linguists and others in the humanities and social sciences, whose scholarship is purportedly grounded in an intellectual Weltanschauung greater than personal sentiment. It is also scarcely sufficient to look only at the words and semiotic forms used to convey a message, or at the receptive interpretation of this message, to qualify it as homophobic. As can be inferred from the opening paragraphs of this chapter, speakers quite easily avoid facile markers of animus, while still achieving pejorative and injurious communicative ends. Rather, if a particular discursive practice or linguistic act is to be described as homophobic, it is important to offer evidence for this judgement, be it through the establishment of deleterious referential taxonomies, the foreclosure of positive agency (or the ascription of negative agency) or the antagonistic positioning of LGBTQ participants vis-à-vis other cultural concepts, accomplished through linguo-cultural mechanisms. In effect, it is crucial to look at the entire linguistic system that is called upon to (re)produce and (re)project suspected homophobia in order to understand the form, content, structure and effect of communicative acts. Such an intellectual enterprise is entirely within the scope of linguistics. After all, what discipline is better situated to offer compelling insight into how homophobic discourses are formed and function, as well as into how these might be disrupted? 1.4 The Study of Hate Speech

Before responding to the above questions, it is important to anchor the linguistic approach proposed here within a broader intellectual framework. In this section, attention is turned to work on anti-LGBTQ language and congruous forms of injurious language, especially racist and sexist speech. The objective of this section is to critique antecedent treatments of homophobic discourse and language practices, and to set the stage for a more holistic approach to the description and analysis of these. 1.4.1 Approaches to hate and/in language

In a seminal body of scholarship addressing hate speech, Matsuda et al. (1993) consider the legal status and ramifications, as well as possible remedies to these acts, with particular focus on language targeting race, sexuality and gender (inter alia) on US university campuses. This collection of six essays, whose echoes are seen in Langton (1993) and MacKinnon (1993), bring legal scholarship and critical race theory into dialogue, advocating the sanctioning of specific language forms, e.g. racial epithets.

12  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

These are argued to be injurious not only to the psychological state of their targets, but also to their social, economic and political status. Predicated on the promise of equality and inclusion afforded all citizens of the United States in its constitution and laws, Matsuda et al. contend that linguistic forms and actions having the distal, additive result of promoting inequality and exclusion should be treated differently than others: they should be, in effect, censored. Although the authors do not contend with more than surface lexical forms, whose denotative and connotative content are also largely unproblematized, these represent an important step in more serious engagement with hate speech, particularly in the United States and taking into account American ideologies of free speech, equal treatment before the law and individual liberty. The volume Hate Speech, edited by Whillock and Slayden (1995), represents another important moment in the scholarly study of animus in language. This collection of nine works examines topics from a broad range of perspectives, from discourse analysis to rhetorical deconstruction, applied to topics ranging from rape to racism and includes Moritz’s (1995) critical examination of anti-gay speech in media outlets, largely focusing on Western, and particularly North American sociocultural praxes and communities. Collectively and individually, these works represent one of the first attempts to seriously inquire about how language is used to affect harmful ends and, perhaps more importantly, how language animus may be combatted. As with MacKinnon, Matsuda et  al. and Langton, however, analysis is almost entirely given to surface forms and their receptive effect, i.e. the end-state message: the constituent components of these messages and the complex internal dynamics of their construction are largely unattended to. An important development, and equally important challenge is seen in Butler (1997). In what is, effectively, a refutation of calls for language censorship (especially MacKinnon, 1993), the question of linguistic injury – or the notion that language can inflict harm – is at the core of Butler’s work. A foundation for this is Austin (1962), who distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary language acts. The former accomplish a state or finality via their instantiation, e.g. ‘I sentence you to a year of prison’ pronounced by a judge: here, the communicative act produces effects that are in turn supported by linguistic and social conventions. By contrast, the latter produce or initiate effects that operate consequently and distinctly from speech, e.g. ‘you there’ uttered by a police agent on the street, which only has an effect when or if the vocative object responds. Such perlocutionary acts are not without weight or import, but are pre-actuarial in substance and depend on reaction to

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  13

have any effect. Butler (1997: 12) is skeptical of the notion that language can be an illocutionary agent of injury, asserting that ‘[t]he notion that speech wounds appears to rely on this inseparable and incongruous relation between body and speech, but also, consequently, between speech and its effects’. Bolstering her refutation of MacKinnon and similar views of communicative injury, Butler revisits and refines Althusser’s understanding of the interpellative function of speech, by which a linguistic act realizes, but precedes the subject in question, i.e. as the ‘voice that brings subject into being’ (Butler, 1997: 25), as the heart of the ‘what it means “to be” in language’ (Butler, 1997: 28). Somewhat summarily, rather than contend that injurious language is the agent of harm, Butler asserts that so-called hate speech is part of subjection (assujetissement), itself deriving from the operation of interpellation, i.e. the casting of a person into the object role (see Althusser, 1965). Language does not harm per se, but actuates a subjection that achieves harm, often through the iterative or citational reactuation of subjections that precede the utterance itself. As such, offensive terms such as faggot or dyke ‘mark out a discursive place of violation’ that precede and occasion the utterance by which they are enacted (Butler, 1997: 27). However, and crucially for the present work, Butler does not attempt to dissect the structure or form of the message itself, i.e. she does not entertain the question of how competent speaker-users accomplish subjection or what linguistic patterns of language (save particular words) might be deployed to that end. Turning to the particularities of homophobic language praxes, Speer and Potter (2000) look foremost at heterosexist discourse and its management, which they define as a social stigmatization of or dispreference for that which is not heterosexual.12 Their analysis applies a discourse psychology approach, which treats text and speech as social practice and is concerned with constantly fluctuating attitudes that perform (linguistic) action, as evaluative practices played out in specific situations. Through an examination of non-gender-conforming discourses about sports (e.g. men in ballet, women in rugby), they qualify the linguistic mechanisms called on by speakers when they ‘do’ heterosexism. These include foremost words, but also implicate semantic taxonomies established by lexical forms: they argue that homophobia is not an intrinsic property of particular forms, but is actuated through the use of these in particular contexts and circumstances. Thus, heterosexism requires linguistic competence, which is intimately tied into broader cultural conceptualizations and frames. However, questions as to the form and substance of more complex linguistic signs, such as syntagmata or propositional semantics, are left largely unexplored.

14  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

In a similar vein, Baker (2004) describes the UK House of Lords debate concerning proposals to equalize age-of-consent regulation. His analysis involved the tagging of keywords and the tracking of collocations, as well as the identification of regularities involving these, which led to the description of discourses associated with the two sides of the debate. On the one hand, tolerance or pro-reform advocates made frequent reference to rights, medical and clinical statuses and to the negation of their opponents’ arguments, establishing associations between sexuality, identity, legal rights and fairness. On the other hand, anti-reformers deployed a discourse of acts (as opposed to identity), framed by keywords such as ‘commit’ (e.g. ‘commit buggery’, ‘commit an act’), while also contributing to discourses of danger or ruin, especially when it concerns children and sex, and of unnaturalness or abnormality. His results are supported by Findlay (2017), who follows a generally similar methodology, looking instead to the debate around the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom in 2013. These and similar corpus linguistic works largely focus on words and expressions in situ, i.e. in their immediate context, which offer insight into the collocation of lexical forms, but again leave questions of more complex signifiers, themselves constructed in ways that might escape traditional corpus methodologies, untouched, largely because this type of fine-grained, syntagmatic object is not as readily amenable to such approaches. Additional models for the empirically grounded study of discourse practices come from a variety of sources. While not directly investigating homophobic language, Lillian (2007) examines sexist language, arguing that this should be considered hate speech. Building upon a study of the writing of Canadian neo-conservative author William Gairdner (see also Lillian, 2005), she identifies a series of lexical processes (e.g. word choices that are overwhelmingly negative or have negative connotations), recitative metaphors (e.g. the strict father, the moral authority of men over women) and patterns of semantic transitivity. Based upon Whillock (1995), for whom hate speech is indirectly but highly transitive in its effect on its object (here, women), Lillian asserts that sexist speech acts constitute a symbolic code for violence, the goals of which are to inflame the emotions of followers, denigrate an out-class, inflict permanent and irreparable harm and ultimately conquer this class and its members. As such, hate speech, realized through the lexical choices of its authors, is highly teleological. A similar approach, albeit with a distinct target and involving fewer notions of transitivity, is taken by Josey (2010), who examines the speech of a white supremacist radio host, focusing upon indexed values and references that activate racial stereotypes. Josey notes that register

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  15

shifts having the effect of degrading racialized minorities are primarily accomplished through semantic patterns, e.g. by evoking specific referents that putatively activate connotations or associations of a certain type of person or a contextual field. Josey’s analysis is compelling, as it demonstrates that racism in language is accomplished in a more sophisticated way than is usually acknowledged, in effect looking past simple epithets and the more salient racial slurs to the series of lexical and rhetorical choices that have a combinatory effect of exclusion and derision. As with Lillian, these works show that it is possible to consider more fine-grained linguistic material and the role of complex signifiers, as well as their constituent parts, in the construction and propagation of animus. Stewart (2008) is one of very few analyses of homophobic language integrating sociocognitive frameworks, similar to those advocated in Chapter  2. In this work examining four advertisements from so-called ex-gay advocates in the United States, Stewart (2008: 66) stresses that any cognitive contextual analysis of injurious discourse must account for the speech community and speech authors’ knowledge and beliefs, as well as any attitudes held by these persons vis-à-vis targeted persons or groups. For Stewart, this cognitive context of discourse comprises the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs in the minds of language users, i.e. conceptualizations compatible with the abstractions of Sharifian (2011). For example, Stewart (2008: 67) shows that negative and hostile attitudes about LGBTQ people and groups arise from the belief that these individuals are in control of their actions (notably, sexual ones) and that these actions are somehow negative. Specific description and analysis of discourses employs an Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, itself reminiscent of Butler’s theory of performativity, the basic insight of which ‘is that the features of a persuasive message that will tend to be rhetorically effective depend on the audience’s ability and motivation to engage in elaborative cognitive processing of the message’ (Stewart, 2008: 69). Couched within the narrative framework elaborated by Labov and Waletsky (1997) and Johnstone (2001), Stewart demonstrates how a wider textual practice contributes to a persuasive message and how, in turn, this persuasive message can be used to affect or augment homophobic ends, specifically the assertion of sexual conversion therapies as not only possible and positive (i.e. correcting a defective condition or state), but also as evidence against the extension of rights and the opening of social institutions to LGBTQ persons. Importantly, language is the outward display of an internal reality, reflecting the performance– competence dialectic, and this reality is partially inferable from complex linguistic structures.

16  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

Distinct in both analytical approach and objective are a series of seminal works by Peterson, who is among very few to incorporate a specifically linguistic model of competence, in this instance Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1994; Halliday & ­Matthiessen, 2004). In Peterson (2010), he considers data from the US-based Family Research Council and the place of homophobic order of discourse within these, defined following Pharr (1988) as the systematic display of heterosexism. His analysis suggests that these are conveyed through text-making strategies (e.g. hybridizing, co-opting social science), stylistic strategies (lexical choice, modality, assertions) and discursive strategies (e.g. the use of hyponymy and synonymy to create taxonomies). In Peterson (2011), he considers the structural dimensions of homophobia in neoliberal discourse, which are often covert and/or based on assumptions that may not appear a priori homophobic. Following Leap (2010b), he claims that homophobic communication relies on broad discursive elements (social practices that govern and enable discourse, while also framing its reception), as well as the social structures that evoke and legitimize discourses and practices. Through this, Peterson argues that neoliberalism manifests homophobia through techniques of disarticulation and rearticulation of citizenship, by which the privatization and asserted responsibility of citizenship is maintained through self-management and self-­regulation. In effect, citizenship is earned as a privilege of being responsible and, as homosexuality is a priori irresponsible and demonstrative of a lack of self-regulation, it should be excluded from the domain of democratic protections. Later works, focusing again on the textual practices of American right-wing religious groups, take up the role of phoricity, notably patterns of anaphora and cataphoresis that serve to promote the broader anti-LGBTQ message (Peterson, 2016). As can be noted in the case studies of Chapters 3 through 5, Peterson’s approach is particularly informative to analyses grounded in linguistic evidence, specifically those components of it that look to propositional relations and representations formalized along SFL lines. A particularly prescient approach to homophobic speech is seen in Chojnicka (2015), which is notable as much for its focus, the renascent democracies of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, as it is for the analysis contained in it. She proposes a sociopolitical and sociocultural framework for understanding the apparent spike in homophobia after the fall of the Soviet Union, situating this in opposition to mainstream European models of inclusion and tolerance. According to her, homophobic discourses establish gays as the new enemy, a foreign or ‘allochthonous other’ acting counter to the interests of the state, similar to discursive embodiments of

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  17

past communist regimes. However, anti-LGBT speech is actuated differently than hostility was to the latter. Crucial to her analysis is the notion of floating signifiers, forms that can be used to mean different things and that have variant referential indexicality, e.g. the use of ‘sexuality’ in Polish to be clinical, as well as the argument structures that are deployed by anti-LGBT forces in public life, notably religious institutions and leaders. She argues that these and other language choices amount to variable strategies of homophobia, ones that render non-heterosexual citizens insignificant and external to the ‘true’ nation and community, and ultimately obviate the principles underlying the extension of rights through retorsio argumenti, i.e. a reversal of roles whereby the oppressed emerges as an oppressor. A distinct, although not altogether unrelated form of this is noted in Chapter 4, where the conceptualization of homophobia is effectively perverted in an example of Italian neo-populist discourse practice. 1.4.2 Toward a linguistic approach to hate speech

Necessarily brief, the preceding paragraphs provide a snapshot of scholarly work on derogatory and injurious language practices, particularly those cogent to homophobia. As noted above, these display a number of systemic blindsides. While all are predicated on the conceptualization of language as a structured communicative medium, the vast majority do not go beyond a surface-level linguistic description: with very few exceptions, the end-state message is the object of study, whereas the mechanics and structure of message creation and transmission are assumed, if not ignored altogether. Because of this, most works have little to say about the syntagmatic, pragmatic and propositional structures from which sociocultural meanings arise, i.e. the linguistic viscera and pathways of discursive actuality. Without denying the interest and importance of antecedent works, it can be argued that such approaches are not holistic in either conceptualization or grounding given two considerations. Firstly, end-state studies are neither founded upon nor do they deploy a theory of language as being both a performance (i.e. that which is done and can be observed) and competence (i.e. the cognitive mechanism predicating behavior and is only distally observable), concentrating nearly exclusively on the former and almost entirely ignoring the latter. Secondly, all of these show a tendency to focus solely on words, expressions and rhetorical constructs, i.e. itemized ingredients of communicative acts, while ignoring other subjacent ingredients that are necessarily and variably implicated in all

18  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

communicative acts: these include grammatical rules and constraints, semantic taxonomies and networks and pragmatic patterns, all of which have important, likely inevitable roles to play in the construction, actuation, transmission and reception of supposed hate speech (as well as all forms of communication). Of course, there are numerous exceptions to this pattern, including many works reviewed above. Combined with the cognitive bent of discourse analysts (e.g. van Dijk, 2008; Wodak, 2006) and the situated, evidentiary-grounded work of cultural linguists (e.g. Palmer, 1996; ­Sharifian, 2011), these demonstrate that it is possible to pierce the shell of surface forms and investigate the deeper, possibly more entrenched patterns through which animus is made tangible. There is, however, a good deal of work to accomplish before a more holistic, properly linguistic approach to hate speech can be taken, in part because of the often-narrow focus of works such as those mentioned above. Indeed, even among those who ground analysis in linguistic evidence, e.g. Motschenbacher’s (2008, 2016) use of ‘grammatical’ to describe the antecedent relation between pronouns and lexical nouns, there is only scant attention paid beyond lexical semantics and semiotic relationships. Likewise Peterson, despite his deployment of functional theory, looks only at one level of clausal projection, specifically process types and their associable participant roles: his analysis offers compelling insights into patterns deriving from the clause as representation, but does not incorporate a more thorough description of the linguistic construction of homophobic speech that might derive from consideration of other phrase-level or morphosyntactic patterns, among much else. It is not my intent to argue that any perspective or body of scholarship should be excluded from discussion or analysis, nor that any contribution to understanding homophobic language is unimportant. Rather, I believe that scholarly practices should be substantially expanded and that more connectionist linguistic methods and analytical postures be brought to bear on homophobic discursive practices. It is not sufficient to look only at words, expressions or rhetorical constructs whose denotative or connotative meanings perjure or negate LGBTQ existence, while failing to attend to the fundamental question of how this pejoration or negation may in fact emerge from higher-level linguistic constructs and emergent signifiers. To do so is to fall into the traps of essentialism (a word or message is homophobic because it is intrinsically or essentially anti-gay), reductionism (homophobic discourse can be reduced to a series of homophobic surface forms or a common rhetoric) and determinism (certain words and expressions are inevitably homophobic, and thus cannot be

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  19

altered or countered). To do so also ignores the predictable complexity of linguistic acts, reducing communicative activity to pro pars toto phenomenology. Moreover, by attributing essential qualities to forms and ignoring the structural, formal and functional vehicles through which complex messages are actuated, and absent any grounded interpretation of these within the wider contexts in which actuation occurs, all have the inevitable, albeit perhaps indirect effect of impugning the communicata and not the communicator, as if words and expressions accomplish homophobia on their own. This lies, I would argue, at the heart of Professor Biss’ criticism of contemporary fixation on racist language cited at the beginning of this chapter: it is not that language is unimportant, it is simply not important in the way it is usually thought to be. The approach to the analysis of homophobic discourse taken in this book is predicated on a very basic, but often overlooked assumption: if language behavior is ascribed a homophobic quality, and if one of the primary vectors of homophobia is the tangible act of discourse practice, attention should be given to all levels of discursive actuation, from fine-grained semantic and morphosyntactic patterns to the complex, qualitatively dense fabric of social meaning and the inferable schemata of distributed cultural concepts. This requires, first and foremost, close, informed description, bringing linguistic theory and methods to bear on the elucidation of language data and patterns: to ignore a linguistic understanding of the substantive reality of discourse practices would, after all, be akin to tackling a physical disease without the assistance of medical scientists. Whereas a physician is best prepared to explain the intricacies of metabolic pathways and their effects on a particular illness, a linguist is best suited to understand the multiplex structure and function of linguistic performances that are predicated on and framed within a very specific type of competence. This is not to say that only linguists should be involved in the study of homophobic language (or, analogously, that physicians are the only persons able to attend to sickness). Language does not exist in a vacuum, but is interwoven in the fabric of cultural, political, economic and even biological life: it is not reducible to a series of grammatical structures or semantic features, although the import of these structures and features cannot be ignored within the wider world of communication, as it is only through such a culturally attained and shared system that communication is possible. Given the above, it is perhaps most useful to ask how pathways and habits of inquiry can be reshaped to better understand the internal mechanics of homophobic language and how, through such work, homophobic discourses may be more effectively disrupted. What if investigation

20  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

were to begin by acknowledging the complexity of all linguistic practice? What if both the regularity and form of linguistic practice and its human hosts and habitat were attended to concomitantly? And what if all levels of analysis acknowledged openly, accepting the messiness and boundless complexity of this statement, that the competence-governed, human language performances underlying discursive acts of homophobia are never instantiated outside of highly variable, often muddy, always intricately interwoven cultural contexts? One of the primary objectives of this book is to provide a response to this query, as well as a template from which other investigation may be pursued. 1.5 Populism, Social Media and Homophobia

In the guise of a conclusion, it is useful to anticipate the structure of this book and address the limitations deriving from its scope and foci. Stepping away from individual corpora and the antecedent treatment of homophobic language, Chapter  2 makes the case for homophobic language activity to be conceptualized as a discursive ecology. In this chapter, I argue that linguistic patterns actuate and propagate homophobia, and demonstrate how their close description is foundational to a holistic understanding of the interleaved mechanics through which anti-LGBTQ discourses are made real and tangible. The approach I outline distinguishes between three investigative steps, each deploying particular concepts and orienting to distinct analytical outcomes. The first involves a description of the lexico-grammatical, semantic and pragmatic properties of bounded corpora, attending to fine-grained forms and structures, as well as their respective roles and functions. The second involves the interpretation of linguistic data, asking how observed patterns can be woven into a cognitive understanding of abstract context (pace van Dijk, 2008). The final level contends with the wider explanation of discourse praxes from speech community-internal worldviews, positioning discourse participants and framing truths through the situated interpretation of linguistic data and contextual abstractions within a broad historico-cultural scaffold. It is at this level that language, cognition and culture most clearly intersect and from which a holistic view of the discursive ecology is advanced. Chapters 3 through 5 comprise case studies illustrating the ecological approach, designed to be useful as stand-alone readings for scholars or students of the languages and anthropological contexts in question, as well as others interested in the issues they raise, while also being integrated into the broader framework of this book. These investigate the

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  21

discursive practices of a group of disgruntled, anonymous young men in France who target LGBTQ and feminist activists with equal fervor; a scarcely disguised, quasi-religious fundamentalist association in Italy that vehemently denies any underlying homophobia in their own stance; and a populist politician whose xenophobia is so candid that he has been excluded de facto, if not always de jure, from the political institutions of Belgian Flanders. The selection of specific cases, as well as the particularities of the data they provide, raise a number of questions deserving of at least passing preliminary attention: why focus on populist manifestations of homophobia, to the exclusion of mainstream political and/or religious ones? Why limit description and analysis to social media-derived corpora? And why consider Western European – specifically French, Italian and Flemish – examples to the exclusion of other, possibly more recognizable cases arising in more populous or more widely accessible settings? The three case studies concern populists who somehow target or implicate LGBTQ groups and issues, although the choice of these foci is not meant to imply that homophobic discourse practices are unique to or are only interesting in such instances, or that populism is somehow a privileged domain of study in this regard. However, these individuals and associations have proven particularly interesting for the type of study I propose: they largely eschew the carefully planned, edited speechifying that is characteristic of mainstream politicians, on the one hand, but proximate themselves to community networks in a way that plausibly co-opts broader, although often-ignored sociocultural ideations, on the other. In effect, populist language tends to be situated somewhere between highly conventionalized practices manufactured for mass consumption and consensus-driven practices characteristic of mainstream institutions and public actors. Coming from the fringe of political and cultural power, but putatively representing the views and desires of an allegedly marginalized ‘common citizen’, the study of populist homophobic language seemed an especially interesting terrain in which to apply the ecological approach outlined in Chapter 2, also facilitating the study of sociocultural conceptualizations uniquely active in different speech communities. The fact that much of this language activity occurs in and through social media, on platforms that lend themselves to ready access and analysis, and certainly fuel the proliferation of their messages, is beneficial to the study of homophobic discourses, even if the harmful nature of these messages has proven both disheartening and impossible to ignore. Indeed, the topic of social media as a site of political and cultural action – for good or for bad – is of increasing interest, in no small part due to the

22  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

aggression and intimidation taking place through such vehicles. Sociolinguists in particular have demonstrated growing interest in communication on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, for instance in the organization of resistance movements (e.g. Chiluwa, 2012; Vessey, 2016), the emergence of ‘cyber-activism’ (e.g. Brindle & ­MacMillan, 2017; Doerr, 2017) or anti-bullying efforts (e.g. Jones, 2015; Zhang & Kramarae, 2014). Beyond this, and given the rise of the neo-fascist ­movements whose activity and organization are accomplished through such technology, the selection of social media-derived texts seems particularly prescient. The nature of social media opened up a number of compelling investigative possibilities, fueling innovative analyses of the construction and propagation of homophobia. In the case of the Hommen (Chapter  3), the use of distinct, co-dependent media platforms allowed for a richer examination of more conventional forms of discursive practice (i.e. text), acknowledging the important role of visuo-linguistic data through which written and pictorial semiotics are merged. In the case of the Sentinelle in Piedi (Chapter  4), social media is the only sanctioned outlet for the group’s message, a fact that facilitated the description and analysis of all group communications over a two-year period. And in the case of Filip Dewinter (Chapter 5), the availability of public and private speeches on his own website facilitated the delimitation of a sub-corpus constructed around all references to a single issue, specifically LGBTQ persons and communities, over the course of a decade, also promoting the description and analysis of wider discursive practices of xenophobic nativism and Islamophobia. Of course, I would be remiss if the sociocultural bias of the case studies to which the ecological heuristic is applied were not acknowledged, as I make no pretense to be exhaustive in focus, nor to have attempted any measure of geographic, political or linguistic balance. All three corpora come from Western European speech communities and involve Indo-European languages (French, Italian and Dutch/Flemish). These foci were not chosen because the rest of the world, or even the rest of the European continent, is uninteresting, but because the analytical approach outlined here, with its purposeful incorporation of cultural competence, demands an emic sensitivity and intellectual position in order to better understand both the specific performances, i.e. the discursive practices and texts, and the competences predicated by these, i.e. language-specific lexico-grammatical, sociocultural and sociolinguistic knowledge. I believe it would be specious, not to mention skirting the edge of intellectual integrity, to examine discourse practices for which

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  23

I have no aperture or intuition, as a speaker of at least quotidian proficiency and a person with real-life experience affording me entry into the fine-grained linguistic ­patterns, as well as the more nebulous cultural categories and schemata that underlie the conceptualizations inferred to be operational within a given corpus. Quite simply, I don’t believe it is possible to approach discourse from a purely etic, outsider’s point of view with any degree of intellectual rigor or cohesion. While the question of who is within and without any definable speech community is far beyond the scope of this work, I maintain that there is advantage in having an anthropological and linguistic understanding of the backdrop within which discourse is actuated: this makes a very conscious nod to the practice of sensitive, careful fieldwork, even that done via a computer screen, and to a depth of understanding that may never be attained through reference materials, translations and summary data. I have been fortunate to be at least tangentially, and often far more closely embedded within the speech communities covered in the three case studies, having lived in all at different times: the selection of these subjects was thus made as much in response to my ethos and interest as it was to my personal trajectory as a language user and cultural participant. I am able to interact with homophobic language data in the three languages without recourse to translation, although glosses are offered for the benefit of a wider audience. As has been argued by the late Umberto Eco (2003: 10) with much more finesse than I could possibly muster, translation may be able to express the same ideas, but is incapable of expressing the same thing, and could never do this in the same manner, the last two being issues of immense importance for any work that hopes to look past prima facie surface analysis. In closing, I must also acknowledge my desire that this book and the case studies included in it challenge and enrich the study of homophobic and other injurious linguistic practices, encouraging scholars of all cloth to broaden what can be at times a parochial academic stance with regard to identity, animosity and community. I hope that it will trouble many prioristic understandings of hate speech and language, demonstrating that homophobia is conceptually distinct and variably manifest across languages and speech communities, even those exhibiting a number of surface similarities. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Chojnicka, 2015; Junge, 2010; Riedel, 2009), the linguistic study of homophobic language practices has been largely dominated by the Anglophone world or has been undertaken through some mechanism of cultural and linguistic rendition (although several of the more recent publications cited in this chapter show that important strides are being made). This is quite

24  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

unfortunate, as only with great difficulty can the case be made that sexualities and genders, as well as the reactions to them, are universally constructed, manifest and lived out. There is certainly a great deal of similarity between the lives of LGBTQ persons and communities across the globe, but there are also notable, substantive and at times misunderstood differences: it would be shocking if the same weren’t true for homophobia and for the form and substance of anti-LGBTQ animus manifest in and through language. Notes (1) On Being with Krista Tippet, ‘Let’s Talk About Whiteness’, 19 January 2017. (2) As reported by CNN (http​://ww​w.cnn​.com/​2007/​POLIT​ICS/0​3/04/​coult​er.ed​wards​/). (3) The terminology referring to non-heteronormative persons and groups, including gay and LGBTQ, as well as their equivalents in various languages, is admittedly simplistic: I use these as much out of convenience, essentially as a sort of conventionalized shorthand, as I do in deference to the forms whereby non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities are referenced within contemporary media, especially in North America and Europe, and how many, but far from all persons who identify as such refer to themselves, both collectively and individually. The reader is cautioned that my use of such terminology is not meant to simplify or reduce, either formally or denotatively, but to efficiently evoke persons and communities commonly denoted (often with unfortunate simplicity and reduction) by the same forms. (4) Agreeing with Enfield (2000: 149), it is my position that the best way to ground analysis is through the close examination of form, viz. ‘Whatever the psychological reality of thought and culture in relation to language, it is only in terms of language and linguistic categories that these can be discussed, analyzed and compared by researchers’. (5) My response would be the same for racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and many other, putatively dormant social ills. Recent social and political events lead me to believe that these are perhaps more alive than ever, albeit distinctly manifest, and are thus equally deserving of continued and careful attention. (6) http:​//www​.euro​parl.​europ​a.eu/​sides​/getD​oc.do​?type​=TA&re​feren​ce=P6​-TA-2​ 006-0​018&fo​rmat=​XML&la​nguag​e=EN.​ (7) I wrote a first draft of this chapter a mere 10 days after a mass shooting at a predominantly gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which claimed the lives of 50 persons. This event might appear extraordinary from a narrow historical perspective, but can also easily be included in a long arc of repeated and repeatedly horrific violence against nonheteronormative persons, from the burning of sodomites in medieval and early modern eras, to their imprisonment throughout the 20th century, to their savage beatings and, even in the present day in some jurisdictions, their execution (cf. Crompton, 2003). (8) Readers are invited to consult the excellent edited volume by Murray (2009), which delves into homophobia from additional perspectives, also describing sociocultural praxes in a number of non-Anglophone, non-Western contexts. (9) Particularly maddening, but prescient examples of this are seen time and again in the political arena. For example, during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016,

Hate and Language, Hate in Language  25

he repeatedly claimed that he was not only not homophobic, but was in fact a friend of LGBTQ Americans (Corasaniti, 2016). This discursive strategy resonates with that of many other populist and right-wing politicians, including Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Filip Dewinter in Belgian Flanders, the subject of Chapter 5. (10) While it is difficult to quantify the extent to which homophobic language is prevalent in various contexts and outlets, there is a startling amount of data testifying to the omnipresence of experiences of homophobic bullying, i.e. the imposition of one individual upon another, with the goal of intimidation or force. To cite just one example, the UK-based LGBT Foundation noted that 95% of Manchester pupils had witnessed homophobic linguistic bullying in school (http​://ww​w.sta​ndupf​ounda​tion-​uk.or​g/201​ 6/06/​16/be​n-coh​en-st​andup​-foun​datio​n-sup​ports​-even​ts-ma​ke-sc​hools​-safe​r-lgb​t-stu​ dents​-staf​f/). (11) Readers entirely new to or unfamiliar with linguistics are directed to Hall (2005), especially the introductory and first chapters, for a useful orientation. (12) Speer and Potter prefer this term over ‘homophobic’, in large part as they ascribe to the latter an underlying implication of pathology and individuality, whereas to the former they associate social and communal connotations.

2 The Ecology of Homophobic Speech: Unraveling Discourse Practice

[G]enerally speaking, linguistic theory and linguistic data are not integrated as well as they should be. Significant theoretical developments are often not used in descriptions, and there is disregard of available data in theoretical formulations, with the result that the theory is unconvincing and the set of data is a raw, unorganized body of materials. Burgoyne (1971: 2f; cited in Eliasson, 2015: 88–89) Si le langage est, comme on dit, instrument de communication, à quoi doit-il cette propriété? La question peut surprendre, comme tout ce qui a l’air de mettre en question de l’évidence, mais il est parfois utile de demander à l’évidence de se justifier […] On ajouterait que le comportement du langage admet une description behavioriste […] d’où l’on conclut au caractère médiat et instrumental du langage. Mais est-ce bien du langage que l’on parle ici? Ne le confond-on pas avec le discours? Benveniste (1966: 258)1

In this chapter, I sketch out an ecological view of discourse practices, grounded in the description, analysis and interpretation of specific textual evidence. The approach and its foundations are neither new nor revolutionary, although this and subsequent chapters reclaim and realign antecedent work to achieve an innovative perspective on the question of homophobic language. As can be inferred from the opening citations, the ideas and concepts outlined in these pages are clearly inspired by some of the most recurrent, if recurrently forgotten ideas in the fields of linguistics and language study: that linguistic substance and discourse are intimately linked, and that this linkage is the emergent byproduct of a complex interleaving of discrete levels of competence and performance, both specific to and superseding language itself. In what follows, I propose that discourses, and specifically the tangible evidence of these referred to as practices, can be understood as complex ideational ecologies. The heuristic developed in the following pages responds to many of the dual 26

The Ecology of Homophobic Speech  27

shortcomings outlined in the previous chapter, specifically that many works addressing hate speech do not fully attend to linguistic substance, whereas much of linguistic theory and its application ignore the wider sociocultural environment in which communicative acts are lived out and from which they emerge. The three-pronged approach advanced below looks to the interplay of form, structure and function, as well as to how the patterns emerging from the description of these may be interpreted, drawing upon both cognitive and cultural frameworks. At the heart of the ecological model I advance is a rapprochement of linguistic and cultural performances and competences, which are considered interconnected, albeit distinguishable. This very statement rests on the presumption that discourses are made real and visible through highly complex acts, predicated by both individual and shared knowledge, given form through idiosyncratic yet culturally inherited patterns of semiotic actuation, the results of which may never be taken solely at face value, even in those instances where the effect of such behavior appears obvious. Summarily, it is assumed that, when it comes to the actuation of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) animus through language, there is always more than meets the eye. A richer and more developed understanding of these environments requires firstly that description and analysis deploy polyvalent methods and pursue connectionist insights, solidly grounded in linguistic data, while also anchoring its interpretations in the cultural context in which discourse is produced, transmitted and consumed. I argue that it is possible to conduct a serious examination of both the fine-grained linguistic substance of discourses and the rhizomic, emergent ideational whole that they constitute. Moreover, I assert that it is possible to account for the convergence of homophobia and other discursive concepts that coexist with, are parasitic upon or emerge from within specific communicative praxes. This intellectual enterprise is thus inseparably linguistic and meta-linguistic, descriptive and interpretive, analytical and critical. The approach sketched out in this chapter is constructed around three steps. The first involves the close, grounded dissection of defined corpora, looking specifically at the forms, structures and emic functions of discourse practices-qua-acts, a task I term ‘unraveling’ in a nod to the deconstruction of other complex performative packages. A second step involves the analysis of patterns emerging from this description within discourse analytic frameworks, relying upon the abstract conceptualization of participant positioning and framing. A final step involves the interpretation of these abstractions within cultural backdrops, through

28  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

which non-linguistic and non-discursive facts and forces are folded into the emerging picture of a discursive ecology. While each step is discrete and conceptually distinct, they are inevitably and intricately interconnected: that I present one before the other is solely a matter of presentational choice. At each stage, the ecological approach deploys a series of methodological and theoretical tools in a manner that is intended to be modular and eclectic, rather than parochial or dogmatic. Importantly, this approach must always and explicitly be understood as contingent, interpretive and open-ended. The very notion of a discursive ecology rests on the assertion that this is one of many ways (hopefully a useful one) to apprehend, understand and ultimately disrupt homophobic language at its source. Thus, the outline provided here is a demonstration of how such description, analysis and explanation may be accomplished, as well as why this might be advantageous in many instances, and not as an argument for how such work must be done. The chapter begins by re-examining the concept of ecology applied to language, overviewing its antecedents and anticipating an extension of this metaphor to discursive data. Section  2.2 outlines the descriptive toolkit deployed in subsequent chapters, sketching out the means by which the lexical, semantic, morphosyntactic or grammatical, and pragmatic facts of a corpus can be accounted for, with particular attention to the representation of participants and the conceptualization of their clause-level interactions. Section 2.3 looks to cognitive models of discourse, while also widening the scope of inquiry to include cultural schemata. Section  2.4 is synthetic, returning to the ecological heuristic and demonstrating how the component parts of this – ­linguistic description, cognitive abstraction and cultural situating – can be woven together to model the complex inner dynamics of discourse practices. 2.1 Ecology and Language

The comparison of the communicative to the physical world by means of one or another ecological metaphor is hardly innovative to the present. Among its most obvious antecedents is the work of Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen (1971, 1972: 325, 1979), whose sweeping conceptualizations establish that ‘language ecology may be defined as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment’, with additional implications outlined for language as concomitantly social, cognitive, historical and cultural. Importantly, among Haugen’s 10 research questions for the ecological analysis of language,

The Ecology of Homophobic Speech  29

many make connections with the sociocultural setting of communicative praxis, e.g. considerations of attitude (his Question  9), distancing his proposal from strict comparison to biological natural selection. In a comprehensive review and critique of Haugen, Eliasson notes that the roots of ecological descriptions and metaphors applied to language date to at least the early 19th century. Similar conceptualizations also saw a brief, if not unimportant period of interest in the immediate postwar era, a time otherwise dominated by structuralism and behaviorism, e.g. in Hawley (1950), who locates the subject of ecological inquiry within the community and society in which humans live (Eliasson, 2015: 80). Eliasson also reviews a somewhat distinct understanding of linguistic ecology provided by Voegelin and Voegelin (1964: 2; cited in Eliasson, 2015: 81), who describe the ecological linguistic concept as ‘a shift of emphasis from a single language in isolation to many languages in contact’, further situating the locus of description and analysis outside of bounded systems, in their words looking within ‘a particular area, not with selective attention to a few languages, but with comprehensive attention to all the languages in the area’. More recently, these considerations have been folded into ecolinguistics, a subfield characterized by Mühlhäusler (2000: 89) as being ‘probably best defined by its refusal to privilege a single perspective and by insisting on the need to employ a wide range of perspectives on language and communication’. This connectionist posture is further characterized by ‘[t]he central concept […] of diversity and functional interrelationships between language and ecology’. The advantage of such approaches is not difficult to apprehend: ecological conceptualizations have as their objective to transcend microscopic foci, be this a singular language or dialect or a singular formal or structural component, and to promote consideration of linguistic systems and their constituent parts within broader, more holistic frameworks, a goal that in many ways resonates with some of the earliest grammarians and scholars of language, e.g. von Humboldt, who tended to have much more eclectic understandings, especially when compared with later – and perhaps still dominant – structuralist epistemes (see e.g. Trabant, 2012; von Humboldt, 1820 [1994]). A particularly apt deployment of Haugen’s concept of ecology is seen in Mufwene (2001), who focuses on creoles and on contexts involving the intense and unequal coalescence of speakers of different languages, themselves frequently enslaved, within which new vernaculars emerged. He argues that the history of a given language and speech community can be understood as following the same principles of mutation, selection and adaptation that characterize biological environments or, following

30  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

the socio-evolutionary metaphor of Haspelmath (1999), sociocultural selection. While it is far beyond the scope of the present to fully attend to his work, it is interesting inasmuch as it provides one of the few specifically multiplex approaches to the study of a complex linguistic question, bringing into the explanatory domain a series of facts and forces that are traditionally situated outside of competence and performance. Rather than argue for the primacy of one or another language (viz. the well-known substratist versus superstratist debate in creole language scholarship) or for the dominant role of internal or external factors in the emergence of a particular contact vernacular, Mufwene makes room for complex dynamics and factorial conspiracies, while implicitly challenging the very duality upon which these dichotomies rest. He also acknowledges that language is parasitic to speakers and that speakers are, in their own right, conceptually parasitic to language: one does not exist without the other and, as such, the human and the linguistic factors involved in the emergence of particular linguistic forms and structures (in his work, historically innovative creoles and pidgins) are inseparable and should thus be taken as such in description and analysis. This understanding has profound consequences for scholarship into language, as it troubles the very premises upon which many explanatory analyses are built, blurring the lines between what is and isn’t the purview of linguistic study, let alone the frontier between language and non-language phenomenology. Analytical approaches such as Mufwene’s have the implicit effect of attenuating the chicken-and-egg cycle of linguistic determinism. From an ecological perspective such as his, it is equally important to attend to form as it is to function, to structure as it is to effect, to possibility as it is to probability, to linguistic as it is to extralinguistic forces and factors. Importantly, all exist within, emerge from and play out in specific contexts, involving physical persons, constituting shared communities and constructing (while also being formed by) embodied cultures bound up in time and space: to understand the emergence of a particular creole, for example, one must consider not only the language background of those who contributed to its inception, but the broader environment in which contact vernaculars emerged and underwent stabilization, taking into account factors such as life expectancy and the form and substance of relations among different locutor groups, as well as a host of other dynamics ranging from climate, to economics, to family structure. The ecological metaphor described by Haugen and adopted by Mufwene shares a distant echo, albeit one perhaps not so readily apparent, with conceptions of communication and linguistic practice that have come to be foundational to discourse analysis. Within this field,

The Ecology of Homophobic Speech  31

alternatively associated with and dissociated from linguistics writ large, discourse is typically understood as a written, spoken or otherwise delimited semiotic, communicative event or series of events that include, but supersede the syntactic or pragmatic utterance. This understanding of the term is distinct in important ways from Foucault (1969, 1971) or Laclau (1993), for whom discourse is much broader and less dependent on specific language events – being in fact almost entirely separated from the physical act of production to the extent that it can be difficult to define or delimit discourse in all but the most imprecise ways (cf. Phillips & Jørgensen, 2002: 12–18). Despite varying denotations associated with the signifier discourse, nearly all can be readily subsumed within an ecological conceptualization: these are abstractions intimately associated with – and perhaps inevitably manifest through – communication, in one or another form, which can only be understood within their human, cultural backdrops. Empirically bounded analyses such as those reviewed in the previous chapter are founded upon this assumption, as they rely on implicational associations, e.g. between word collocation; on the other hand, the associability is reversed for cultural analyses, which must at least acknowledge the actuated semiotic reality of the object of their study. The ecological approach outlined here is predicated on a solidly linguistic foundation, assuming that a given discourse requires lexico-grammatical actuation, even if it is not synonymous with such: there is thus an evidentiary requisite to the description of a discursive ecology, as this must be anchored in tacit, realized linguistic data. This conceptualization follows Fairclough, among the more prominent theoreticians of discourse analysis in the later 20th century, whose practice focused on texts that were considered to be manifestations of discourse, produced and received by proficient members of a speech community, contributing to both the conception and realization of that community, as well as the identities of and relations governing its members (Fairclough, 1992: 73–81; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 271). Fairclough (1992: 86–96) maintains that discourses are both constitutive and constituted, a supposition that underscores the fundamentally circuitous, cultural nature of discursive behavior and patterns, as well as their formal and structural inevitability. Emerging from within a community, brought to life by speakers, discourses subsequently contribute to this community and to these speakers’ understandings of themselves, and cannot be understood outside of the human context in which they are actuated. Thus, discourse is both tangible (i.e. bounded to and by language form, therefore subject to observation and description) and local (i.e. bounded

32  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

to and by cultural praxes, therefore interpretable only within a speech community and its cultural schemata). Given the above, discourse practices may be considered complex and emergent, ideological communicative networks inseparable from competence, manifest through interleaved structures and forms, each having precise, albeit phenomenologically distinct functions that predicate their physical (i.e. observable) actuation. It is precisely this understanding that serves as the foundation for the ecological approach: the understanding that discourse cannot be reduced to any one particular lexico-grammatical shape or pattern, but should be considered from all of them. In so doing, I assert, the connections between forms and truths, between structures and ideologies and between the meanings and the objects of these meanings becomes both more complex and more evident. Returning to Haugen’s (1972: 336) understanding and use of ecology, it is crucial that this be understood as metaphoric, i.e. not held in strict comparison with biological ecologies. Accordingly, the formalization of any sort of discursive ecology should be considered heuristic, rather than specifically constructive or theoretical, i.e. a means by which linguistic data and abstractions can be conceived of as a phenomenological whole, integrated with extralinguistic data and abstractions, notably those affecting and/or deriving from the physical and cultural environments in which language is produced, received and transmitted. For the remainder of this discussion and following Haugen’s original articulation, ecology is not meant to be taken with any degree of biological literalism, but is used to convey a more integrated description and analysis of particular facts of language, as these facts do not exist separated from others. Words and morphemes are intrinsically linked to syntagmata, syntagmata to clauses, clauses to utterances, utterances to broad discourses, discourses to the world of experience and shared understandings, the world of experience to the cultural frames and concepts that bound them: these concepts also contribute inversely to the construction of linguistic competence and its tangible actuation through performance.2 This is a chicken-and-egg dynamic if there ever was one, a consideration that is perhaps frustrating, but need not be a hindrance to serious and informed investigation. The proposal for an ecological understanding of discursive practice aims to bridge the gap between three views of injurious language use, with specific application to the topic at hand: those focused on the message and its reception, i.e. grounded in its perlocutionary effect, as in many reviewed in Chapter  1; cognitive approaches to discourse, which provide that practice is predicated by mental schemata and a local or

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idiosyncratic view of speech context; and cultural linguistics, which formalizes the intersection of linguistic performances (form, structure, function) and cultural conceptualizations (categories, schematizations). Because any linguistic understanding of discursive acts must consider these concrete, tangible performances to be composed of a myriad of grammatical, semantic, lexical and pragmatic patterns whose interaction and actuation are governed by acquired (i.e. situated) competence, the discursive ecology is one that fits within, but is not limited to the domains of traditional linguistic scholarship (e.g. semantics, morphosyntax), while also integrating areas often kept distinct from it (e.g. cultural studies). The species of this ecology – to extend the metaphor – include words and other semiotic forms, of course, but cannot be limited to these: also active within it are the language-specific rules or constraints governing the combination of words and other referential or functional symbolic forms (e.g. verbal morphology), the projection of phrase- or proposition-level semantics (e.g. through modality and tense), the marking of and interaction between different referential forms, semantic taxonomies extending beyond denotation (e.g. involving connotation and association) and the sociocultural specificity of these rules and frames (e.g. the situational potentiality of meaningful utterances and semiotic patterns). The discursive ecological heuristic articulated below considers all observable language forms, as well as their interaction, to be the product of a symbiotic relationship between cultural and linguistic performances on the one hand, i.e. what is done both in terms of the message and the formal reality of that message, and cultural and linguistic competence on the other, i.e. what is known and the content of that knowledge, especially as this relates to the actuation, reception and processing of that message. For example, the Sentinelle in Piedi (Chapter 4) refer to homosexuals as coscienze sopite and fuorvianti (‘appeased’ and ‘deceived consciousness’), frequently situating these and similar noun phrases (NP) in the syntactic complement position or actuating them within processes that cast their referents as material goals. The anti-LGBTQ animus of such constructions and the messages transmitted through them are not difficult to apprehend, even in translation. However, it is important to ground any understanding of putative homophobia within the specific cultural history and present of the Italian speech community, in which homosexuality was – and continues to be for many – considered a malady, but not necessarily one rooted in sin (cf. the roots of much Anglophone homophobia, in which moral failing is more directly implicated, e.g. Brady, 2005; Halperin, 1990). Thus, it is not only the words used to

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instantiate pejoration or the projection of these forms in particular syntactic structures from which homophobic discourse may be thought to emerge, nor is it solely the case that homophobia is the impetus for the selection of the respective forms or structures. It is all of these, discretely and simultaneously, and in a manner that can be unraveled but never fully disentangled: the projection of homosexuality into words, syntagmata and roles derives from and concurrently feeds culturally specific competence vis-à-vis the putative ‘truth’ (pace van Dijk, 2006) of homosexuality, i.e. it reflects, recites and reconstructs a Humboltian Weltansicht. This is but one small part of a discursive ecology of homophobia: a semiotic system in which discrete forms and structures, forces and ideations interact conspiratorally and epiphenomenally to achieve an exclusionary, denigratory and/or abnegatory phenomenological end. 2.2 Description: The Linguistic Substance of Discourse Practice

Taking into account the complexity and variability of the topic at hand, from the linguistic constraints of different languages to the social construction of sexualities and the situation-specific reactions to these, the approach outlined here purposefully avoids positing a singular locus, a common theme or a unique constituent of homophobic language. Nowhere is this clearer than at the level of description, which has as its object the evidentiary substance of temporally and spatially contingent performance. Rather than adopt a theoretically or methodologically strict posture, my approach deploys a modular, eclectic ‘toolkit’, itself drawn from both formal and functional linguistic traditions. This diverges in notable ways from those (admittedly few) approaches having superseded the lexical analysis reviewed in Chapter  1, who frequently rely on a single theory and/or method. Some of the concepts included in the discussion below are relatively straightforward in their content and application, e.g. semantic taxonomies involving participant reference or the morphological projection of verbal mood, whereas others require the deployment of more precise, even controversial theories, terminology and abstractions. In these instances, especially, the proposal and illustrations here do not advocate for or against a particular prise de position, but utilize conceptual tools that have proven to be beneficial. Thus, it should be clear that some methods and theoretical frameworks will be used restrictively (e.g. the pragmatic deployment of language-specific morphological forms), whereas others are expected to be useful, albeit with necessary adaptation, to nearly all description and analysis (e.g. thematic roles and verbal semantics).

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Foundational to linguistic description is a distinction between those emerging from the textual representation of specific persons, groups, ideas or constructs, on the one hand, and those pertinent to the projection of their actions and interactions, states and statuses within the wider conceptual or ideational world of a corpus. For purposes of clarity, discussion here is divided into two sub-parts: one attending to participant reference and another to participant relation. Although these are addressed separately below, it should be readily apparent that any separation between the two is more a matter of presentational economy than of any strict division of labor. 2.2.1 Participant reference: The forms of homophobia

A useful first step in unraveling homophobic discourse practices seeks to describe the persons, groups, personal identities, institutions and ideas active within a defined corpus. Referred to generically as participants,3 these are frequently manifest in NP of varying constituency and complexity, by-and-large having relatively definable semantic referentiality and holding some sort of thematic role, as well as what formal syntax typically defines as either a sentential argument or adjunct (see e.g. Harley, 2010; Jackendoff, 1990). In the analyses that follow, description and discussion of participants conceived in this way are indicated by the use of capitals (e.g. Children), distinguishing between more general references (e.g. children). Participants are, in effect, the physical and/or conceptual things that are somehow active and realized within a discourse practice. Description at this level also considers predicative verb phrases (VP) and attributive adjective phrases (AdjP). While these are formally distinct from NP in many languages, they are similar inasmuch as they instantiate the content, scope and quality of nominal participants: furthermore, in some languages (e.g. French), these categories are both structurally and functionally interrelated, if not entirely overlapping. Description of participant linguistic actuation leads to the proposition of emergent taxonomies of representation. These are lexico-semantic constellations around which a participant is made real in the discursive ecology, also activating a host of other semantic features, including culturally specific, always contingent understandings of connotations, associations and implications. Thus, representational description promotes understanding of not just how a participant is evoked and the content of this evocation, but also of inherent or emergent semantic connections. Depending upon the corpus in question, participants can be relatively strictly

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defined and encompass a singular person or group, e.g. the person of Filip Dewinter or his right-wing populist party the Vlaams Belang (Chapter 5), or they may involve fuzzy, socially shared concepts, e.g. Nature and Gender (both crucial to the analysis put forth in Chapter 4). Importantly, the delimitation and description of participants are corpus dependent and subject to interpretation, i.e. the analyst’s determination of where the frontiers between one and another person, group or concept ends and another begins is not absolute, but should nevertheless be grounded in observation and explicitly defensible vis-à-vis corpus evidence. Describing and situating participant referentiality may also require a close investigation of the use of pronouns, projected into NP and in their sub-syntagmatic forms and/or genitive structures or possessive determiners (e.g. the distinction between the English inclusive our children and indefinite [some] children). This necessarily brings deixis into investigative light and might involve the quantitative and/or qualitative description of deictic patterns in a corpus, e.g. the relative distribution of first- versus third-person forms and their association to participant constellations, which is shown to have important interpretive weight in all of the case studies in subsequent chapters. Deixis refers to contextually bound referentiality of non-denotative forms, such as pronouns and genitive modifiers, and is closely associated with the situational interpretation of anaphoric relationships (see e.g. Levinson, 2006). Importantly, there is a tremendous amount of variability among different linguistic systems with regard to dialectics of inclusion/exclusion, all of which require language-specific knowledge. For example, French on is typically described as a third-person subject pronoun, but is in many instances semantically and pragmatically much more akin to a first-person, proximal or general referent (Chapter 3). Beyond such matters, it is important to acknowledge and quantify the non-instantiation of participants, e.g. the frequency of pro-drop in languages like Italian, where locally active or implicationally evident subject referents need not be – and indeed are only rarely – actuated in an overt NP (Chapter 4). Investigation of lexico-semantic regularities in corpora is perhaps the least innovative task required for a full accounting of the participants in a discourse corpus, having been used with different scope and breadth by numerous studies of homophobic language, as well as other topics (see inter alia Baker, 2004; Lillian, 2005; Speer & Potter, 2000; Tracy, 2011). The investigation of participant referentiality, as well as the taxonomic connotative and associative regularities manifest by participant instantiation is, however, foundational to the ecological model pursued here, especially as it proposes to account for not only references to

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homosexuality and LGBTQ persons, but to all participants active within a particular corpus, as these are interconnected in multiplex, frequently subjacent structures (e.g. Children or Family and their role in the promotion of anti-gay legislation in numerous jurisdictions). Although not sufficient to infer the larger, macro-level organizational patterns of homophobia, the establishment and explanation of micro-level taxonomies make clear one means by which different components of the ecology fit together in this puzzle of homophobic discourse, and the ways in which homophobia and anti-LGBTQ prejudices do not operate in cultural vacuums, but are interleaved within a vast array of positively and negatively connoted values and ideals. 2.2.2 Participant relations: The structures of homophobia

Delimiting participants and describing the means by which they are evoked in a corpus is perhaps the easier task: it is a far more complex undertaking to account for clause-level grammatical, semantic and pragmatic patterns, the description of which requires theory selection. Owing a debt of gratitude to David Peterson, whose work is among the stronger examples of grounded critical discourse analysis (CDA), I find Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to be particularly useful, especially because it is both modular and flexible. This conceptualization of complex (i.e. supra-lexical) meaning also has the distinct advantage of formalizing three levels of clausal expression and interpretation: grammatical, at which the clause is viewed as an exchange; pragmatic, which conceives of the clause as message; and representational, through which the clause is understood as metaphorical projection. It bears reiteration that it would never be ecologically sufficient to focus on any single piece of the puzzle, in part because human language rarely relies on just one formal, functional or structural component. Prior to any application of SFL terminology, although certainly fitting readily within it, description at this level must attend to the semantic taxonomies coalescing around verbal predicates and their relation to participants. Through this, the types of predicative actions, states and statuses within which a participant is actuated can be teased apart and patterns pertinent not only to the content of these, but the relative associability of the participant to its valence role (i.e. as subject, object or adjunct) can be elucidated. This stands to offer compelling insight into the discursive world of a participant’s representational actuation and any positive or negative symbiotic links this participant has with others, not to mention the content of such links: in effect, this type of description serves to show

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what a participant does or experiences, does not do or experience, or what is or is not done to it, and so forth. A valuable illustration of predicate-oriented description is provided by Baider (2012), who examined mainstream press invocations of erstwhile French presidential candidates Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, demonstrating that broadly shared verbal semantic repertoires distinguish between female (more feeling, psychological) and male (more active, transitive). According to her analysis, it is not only the nominal forms used to evoke a particular participant that matter, but the actions and states into which these are projected that contribute to discursive positions and frames: in Baider’s work, which explicitly acknowledges a number of surface similarities vis-à-vis NP referring to Royal and Sarkozy as major party candidates, it is shown that mainstream press outlets were able to actuate or, perhaps, simply reflect long-standing gender prejudices that ascribe agentive and transitive qualities to male grammatical subjects and psychological or emotive qualities to female ones, thereby reinforcing and ultimately reproducing extent maso-centric biases and the cultural schemata they concurrently feed and by which they are fed. Similarly, in any given discursive corpus, consideration may be given to the association of participants to constellations of verbs grouped by denotative similarities, distinguishing between subject and complement valence relations, also highlighting those verbal taxonomies that are explicitly negated. Already at this level of analysis, certain foundational patterns within an ecology can be inferred, e.g. in the Dewinter corpus (Chapter 5) it is shown that the Holebi participant is entirely removed from the propositional structure of verbs having Dewinter or his party as arguments, and are recurrently situated as the grammatical object of a class of verbs having negative and harmful denotative qualities, for which Muslims or Islam are inevitably the grammatical subject. This pattern does much to feed the type of toxic xenophobic pinkwashing that is argued to be at the heart of Dewinter’s discourse practice. Such semantic considerations are unsurprisingly inseparable from all levels of clausal conceptualization in SFL, including that which considers grammatical structures and roles. From an ecological perspective on discourse practice, it is important to describe what different participants are projected as doing or thinking, feeling or being, as well as their actuation as the recipients of actions or the scope of states or feelings. The Hommen of Chapter 3, for example, are shown to be closely associated with a subset of action verbs connoting protection and resistance, for which they serve as grammatical subject, but are synchronously projected as the grammatical complement of other

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action verbs connoting oppression and subjugation. This configuration serves to bolster and nuance observations deriving from nominal and adjectival participant referentiality, contributing to a richer understanding of their position in the discursive ecology, as well as to the counterpositioning of other participants, namely Feminists and LGBTQ activists. Building upon this, consideration may be given to pragmatic patterns, especially as these intersect with grammatical and semantic structures. These are highly subject to language-specific constraints, however, as pragmatic markers and configurations interact with a myriad of forms and structures, including, but not limited to, the clause- and utterance-level construction of information (viz. Lambrecht, 1994, 2000). In languages like French, with its relatively rigid subject–verb–complement (SVC) sentential scaffold, subjects are generally analyzable as pragmatically active and thematic, whereas complements are generally analyzable as not yet active at the moment of enunciation and rhematic (Banks, 2017; Givón, 1983; Lambrecht, 1994). However, French speakers make frequent use of clefts, phrastic extrapositions of arguments (topics or antitopics in pre- or post-sentential positions, respectively), which allow for the reactivation or situational emphasis of a subject whose status has eroded or may be less than categorical, e.g. moi, je suis arrivé à l’heure [literally] ‘me, I arrived on time’, functionally equivalent to the canonical sentence in English with prosodic emphasis on the subject NP, e.g. I arrived on time. Accordingly, it would behoove any analysis of a French corpus to describe and situate such patterns, e.g. participants that are assumed and those that must be continually reactivated, those who appear as theme or rheme at a higher-than-average rate and so forth. It might also prove important to consider any regularities involving the situation of a given participant as subject or complement of a negated VP, e.g. the differences between what Gay Marriage does and what it does not do, or the distinction between what is and is not done to society via the liberalization of traditional institutions such as marriage or parenting. Crucially, the ways in which this is accomplished are language specific: the associability of grammatical and pragmatic structures in French is distinct in both Italian and Flemish, the former frequently relying on morphosyntax, e.g. the use of passive and impersonal constructions, the latter deploying constituent ordering, e.g. variable sentence structure (cf. Banks, 2017; Caffarel, 2006). Beyond the semantic qualities of verbs associated with one or another participant and the nature of this association, a series of grammatical considerations pertinent to the relationship of a participant to its predicate merit investigation. Depending upon the language under study, description

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may attend to active and passive constructions, the use and association of impersonal constructions (e.g. Italian si  +  verb), modality, notably the use of subjunctive/conjunctive and conditional, grammaticalized hypotheticals (e.g. French non-factitive past conditional) and imperatives (e.g. complex VP with moeten in Flemish). Importantly, the subtleties of different morphosyntactic constructions and the language-specific means by which they are deployed and effect textual interpretation must be understood, situated and acknowledged: translation is provided for the reader in each case-study chapter, but this is never the object of description or analysis. Central to the description of participant relations is the relative distribution of these within clausal constructions, sometimes referred to as semantic or thematic roles, as well as the taxonomies emerging from participant associations to verbal predicates, i.e. the meaning-building and -creating relationship established between a given NP and the verb to which it is associated in one or another grammatico-semantic configuration. Foundational to SFL’s representational level is the distinction between three major (material, mental, relational) and three minor (existential, verbal, behavioral) process types (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 211–220). Within any process, participants are describable as occupying one or more specific roles, e.g. as the actor, goal, beneficiary or recipient of a material process; as the sayer, addressee/target or verbiage of a verbal process; or as the behaver of a behavioral process. This complexification of mainstream clausal semantic abstractions attests to an important advantage of SFL, namely that it more richly conceives of semantic representation, defining this concept as a grammatical system achieving ‘a mode of reflection […] imposing order on the endless variation and flow of events’ (Halliday, 1994: 106). This captures with more granularity the interrelation of participants and broadens extra-discursive concepts in a manner more nuanced than would be possible in traditional approaches, which generally only distinguish between agent, patient and theme (see e.g. Dowty, 1991). The usefulness of such considerations is relatively apparent to any analysis of discursive practices. If a particular participant is regularly projected through one or another role, this participant will be situated in a concomitant manner within the ecological heuristic. For example, LGBTQ persons in the Sentinelle corpus are most frequently projected as a goal and only rarely as an actor in material processes. The limitation of this participant’s wider agency, as well as its situation as goal or recipient of others’ actions – notably negative or harmful actions – provides a nuanced understanding of both homosexuality and of

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non-heteronormative persons within the wider ecology established by its authors, reflecting a retorsio argumenti distinct from that seen elsewhere (viz. Chojnicka, 2015). Here, openly LGBTQ persons are seen as harming themselves through the very expression of their identity, while those participants who critique putative social advances in a way that might be labelled homophobic are, in contrast, cast as the ultimate victims of discrimination, a complex dynamic that is taken up in much more detail in Chapter 4. Investigation of the verbal and clause-level structures and their recurrence, as well as their relative associability to one or another participant harks to a richer understanding of transitivity, as advanced e.g. by Simpson (1993; see also Fowler, 1985; Sykes, 1985) and used in Lillian’s (2005, 2007) studies of sexist discourses. Here, transitivity refers to the status of clauses having a semantic agent/actor, an active or action-oriented verb and a clearly definable patient/goal. Transitivity in this regard is more than a simple association with a particular class of verbs, but a consideration that effectively derives from what a participant is able to do and – perhaps equally importantly – to whom it is able to do this. In Chapter 4, the LGBTQ participant is shown to have particularly low transitivity, lacking the ability to do more than inflict harm on the contextually understood self. Significantly, this is distinct from discursive practices in Anglo-American settings, in which LGBTQ persons are frequently explicitly understood as highly agentive and holding exaggerated transitive potential, most often as actors who are poised to undermine family structures and endanger children (viz. Peterson, 2010, 2011). Accordingly, relative transitive potentialities have important consequences for the framing of homosexuality in one or another ecology: it may be understood as a defect and self-injurious in one case, whereas in another it may be dangerous and externally injurious. 2.2.3 Visual pragmatics

In addition to the description of language data as these are normally conceived, it is possible to bring into consideration any visual images (photographs, videos, drawings, etc.) that are co-situated with textual material. These may be understood as parallel symbolic representations that, when interleaved with text, support, augment and/or situate lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic data. While the tools deployed in their description are necessarily less anchored in linguistic theory and methodology, it is feasible to include such material within the scope of properly linguistic analysis, as a sort of inflexion or pragmatic superposition of communicative information.

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Visual data are of particular interest for social media discourse practices, arguably among the most prevalent forms of homophobic communication in our time and the source of data for the case studies included in subsequent chapters. The examination of these media opens up a critical space within which analysis can account for the visual semiotic component of multimodal practices, where text and image are often inseparable. While the technologies of social media are certainly new (and ever-evolving), the idea that language forms and structures are inflected by non-linguistic forms and structures is hardly revolutionary. Like the pragmatic structures of spoken language, which overlay the symbolic segmental components of an utterance and provide numerous cues pertaining to speaker stance and/or status, inter alia, the complex interleaving of visual and textual messages is neither accidental nor without effect on interlocutor-receivers (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; Phillips & Jørgensen, 2002: 61–62). Indeed, many of the same theoretical abstractions used to describe and interpret discursive data, e.g. framing, have been deployed by these and other authors to attend to the ‘reading’ of complex imagery and their semiotic values. In what has become one of the seminal works formalizing an analytical approach to multimodal discourse, Kress and van Leeuwen identify a series of non-hierarchical strata or domains of visual practice within which meaning is constructed and from which meaning emerges: discourse and design, which are conjoined to the content stratum; and production and distribution, subsets of the expressive stratum. Each level presents the advantage of being more-or-less compatible with established discourse analysis methods and theories, as well as with Halliday’s functionalist approach (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001: 4–8). Their discursive stratum is largely congruous to the broad, Foucauldian understanding of socially constructed reality, whereas design captures the actuation or realization of complex visual meanings in context through different material substances and modes. Looking specifically at expression, analogous to the empirical content of textual analysis, Kress and van Leeuwen use production to refer to the material substance of a medium of discourse execution, somewhat akin to the use of discourse practice here and elsewhere, whereas distribution looks to the mechanisms through which discourse practices are transmitted (or eventually reproduced). Because the present work focuses on linguistic performances and competences, it concentrates primarily on design and expression, as these are more readily associable to its descriptive and analytic aims.

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In parallel with patterns that contribute supra-sentential meaning to an utterance (e.g. interrogation, sarcasm or hesitation), visual images situated within or alongside text can serve to nuance, countenance or enrich linguistic messages and their interpretation (they might also be seen to constitute a distinct discursive practice, in their own right, a topic that surpasses the goals of the present work). Like the means by which the supra-sentential content of oral language guides a listener by framing understanding and interpretation of the speech context, content and participants, the visual semiotic field contributes to a receiver’s understanding of textual linguistic acts manifest through non-textual signifiers. A compelling example of visuo-linguistic interaction is seen in Chapter  3, in which images are conspicuously co-situated with text, both of which serve to augment the ecological positioning and framing of different participants, notably the Hommen, as well as Women, Children and French Society. As discussed in more detail in this chapter, visuo-linguistic analysis affords a deeper understanding of reactionary masculinity: while a linguistic analysis alone might not fully grasp the extent to which women are marginalized and non-conforming males are denigrated, inclusion of a series of images imbued with textual language makes this dynamic abundantly clear. Importantly, this observation is tied to both the design of multimodal data, i.e. how different visual cues are used to convey a meaning, as well as to its expression, notably how language and non-language semiotics establish a sort of communicative conspiracy in order to arrive at a discursive end. 2.3 Interpretation: Language, Cognition and Culture

Beyond form and structure, the ecological conceptualization of discourse practices requires linguistic patterns be anchored within extralinguistic reality, implicating a commensurate series of formalisms and abstractions. These are postulated as a means of representing both psychological reality and shared cultural patterns. Foundational to interpretation are several recent works that have shaped the field of CDA and are grounded in cognitive approaches, notably van Dijk (2001a, 2001b, 2006, 2008) and Wodak (2006, see also Wodak & Meyer, 2001), as well as those attending to the culturally seated nature of language forms and uses, particularly Sharifian (2011, 2017). This section is intended to motivate the rapprochement of cognitive and cultural theorizations with linguistic description, setting the stage for a more holistic interpretation of the type pursued in the case-study chapters.

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2.3.1 Discourse as context

Generally speaking, cognitive analyses seek to capture the supposed underlying knowledge of speakers through the postulation of emergent, experientially derived constructs. These abstractions and their involvement in discourse may be likened to established procedural pathways that regulate a person’s experience of reality and, consequently, his or her expression of that reality, while also framing his or her reception and processing of others’ expressions of realities. Cognitive understandings of language provide that mental constructions are foundational to human communication, both individually and, especially, within human societies (see e.g. Lakoff [1987, 2004] and Tomasello [2003] for more comprehensive treatment). Among the most prominent researchers advocating a cognitive approach to discourse analysis is van Dijk. His work, particularly that published in the last few decades, can be seen in many ways as a reaction to the structural approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, instead ‘focus[ing] on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society’, bridging micro (local, specific) and macro (societal, historical) levels of analysis (van Dijk, 2001a: 353, italics in the original). Van Dijk makes explicit connections between discursive power, defined as the ability to control the acts and minds of other persons and groups, extending from physical acts to genre and verbal communication, text type, schemas, categories, form and style, and the assertion of beliefs, knowledge and opinions through these, accomplished in such a way that others adopt and/or accept them as rational, natural, good or otherwise sympathetic. Elsewhere (e.g. Van Dijk, 2001b), he makes the case for a diverse, multidisciplinary CDA as simultaneously linguistic (structural) and non-linguistic (historical, sociopolitical, neurological, etc.), an understanding that has served as a crucial scaffold for the ecological model advanced here. Van Dijk’s (2006) conceptualization of cognitive context represents an important development and is distinct from more traditional uses of this term, being largely unconcerned with factuality and only tangentially associable with the physical realities of an environment, such as place, time and person. According to van Dijk (2006: 163), context should be conceived from the point of view of a discourse maker and his or her understanding of situations, co-participants and the factors and forces involved in this broader, more holistic dynamic, defined as ‘[s]ubjective participant interpretations, constructions or definition of such aspect of the social environment’: this is, essentially, what discourse producers ‘know’, whether or not this knowledge is held to be true or is had

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(using the same understanding) by other participants – or even a more objective observer. Van Dijk argues that context is indirectly observable by its effect on discourse and by the effect of discourse on social conditions, harking to Fairclough’s constitutionality circuit. From this, mental models of a communicative context – themselves abstract bases for understanding discourse – can be inferred as representations of past and present reality in episodic memory: they are subjective and biased, culturally framed and variable epistemes. These mental models reflect and influence any interpretation of communication, i.e. the impetus behind a singular text or specific illocutionary act, continuously and simultaneously controlling discourse production while framing the understanding of both the activity itself and that to which it is directed. Van Dijk’s theory of context is anchored in the study of texts and surface forms. Similarly, and taking an important step toward the insertion of cognition within wider sociocultural frames, Wodak proposes an assessment of CDA and its mediation between discourse and society. She argues for the inclusion of sociocognitive theories in CDA, while noting limits to their applicability, stating that [a]lthough we are all aware that nobody can actually ‘look’ into somebody’s or one’s own brain (‘black-box’), (almost) all of us are convinced that some mental processes must exist which link text production and text comprehension to both explicit utterances, text and talk as well as to social phenomena. (Wodak, 2006: 180)

Wodak proposes that mental representations constitute a conduit for the interpretation of context, in effect linking old or known information to the interpretation of new experience. These cognitive frames support how language users attend to and process that which is novel or previously undetermined. Collectively, her proposal of frames (areas of experience) and schemas (structured patterns of experience and knowledge) are useful as an explicit means of connecting history, social practice and discourse within a formal model. Furthermore, and as attended to below, these serve as an important conceptual pivot between the properly cognitive, i.e. that which is idiosyncratic to a person or group, and the wider, shared and distributed epistemes of cultural schemata. If the fine-grained linguistic patterns emerging from careful description of corpora are viewed as analogous to a description of the environment and its content, their emergent properties applied to the conceptualization of the broader discursive ecology, i.e. of the broader cognitive network

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of truths and facts (pace van Dijk), require the postulation of abstract representations: cognitive conceptualizations, even if predicated on linguistic data, cannot be reduced to them. In this regard, two abstractions frequently called upon in CDA and other discourse analytic approaches prove useful in advancing analysis at this level: positioning and framing. Positioning captures how discourse creators use language to determine and define the substances included in the conceptual world of a speech act, i.e. ‘the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines’ (Davies & Harré [1990: 48], see also Bamberg [1997] who conceives of these in three levels, the first of which is most pertinent here). Within a discourse practice, positioning occurs in the linguistic actuation or ‘enlanguaging’ of persons or concepts, emerging from and applicable to the context in question (see also Seals, 2012). Positioning is especially congruent to the semantic understanding of participant roles, as well as to numerous other formal patterns, e.g. pronominal usage, nominal and verbal taxonomies and grammatical roles. It can also be usefully inferred in the visual processing of discursive acts, especially the means by which different ideational constructs are inserted within a wider sociocultural field of reference. Framing is used here to convey a related, but conceptually distinct phenomenon, and was originally defined by Goffman (1974: 13) as ‘the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives’. The elucidation of frames is meant to capture how language users interpret reality and experience, reflecting a discourse author’s attempt to make his or her audience interpret purported or asserted facts and realities. Within a given discourse practice, framing might be inferred from a number of positive linguistic acts, themselves producing an emergent effect, for example by calling upon previous or presumptively shared assumptions, experiences, values and expectations, building upon communally active meanings and their linguistic construction and actuation, all of which are accomplished via and inescapably bound up in language-particular forms, structures and functions (viz. Wodak, 2006; see also Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012; van der Bom et al., 2015). Similar to positioning, framing abstractly formalizes inferred realities that may or may not correspond to other realities, notably those of interlocutors or observers. Unlike positioning, which implicitly, if not explicitly refers to the interrelation of individual participants and constellations of participants (e.g. if one is positioned as a hero or savior, there must be an anti-hero or villain), framing captures the assertion of implicitly held or explicitly stated truths, e.g. if gay marriage is framed as dangerous or

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defective, it must be a truth – at least for the author of this frame – that gay marriage is hazardous or flawed in some way, be this physical or moral. Thus, if positioning abstractly conveys the sympathetic or antagonistic relations among participants, framing conceptualizes the reality of the environment in which these participants find themselves, including the nature and essence of forces acting upon and being attended to by them. In this respect, and as applied in the case studies in subsequent chapters, framing can be reproached to Bamberg’s (1997) third level of positioning. To continue with the example of Gay Marriage, whereas this is frequently positioned in opposition to a number of other constructs, e.g. the (traditional heterosexual) Family or its historic institutions, it is frequently framed as having a socially corrosive essence, i.e. that may never be anything other than harmful. While not dissociable and certainly acting complementarily within a discursive ecology, the two concepts are phenomenologically distinct. Crucially, both positioning and framing are accomplished through complex and variable linguistic practices: in effect, these abstractions serve to formalize Umberto Eco’s (2018 [1995]: 20) observation that ‘le abitudini linguistiche sono spesso sintomi importanti di sentimenti inespressi’.4 To be sure, these linguistic habits involve lexical forms and their often contested, highly nuanced semantics: this is the basis for much of the existing literature on homophobic and other forms of hate speech, as noted above and in Chapter 1. But semiotic states are not born out in words alone: meaning and perlocutionary potential are created through a host of complex, higher-level combinatory forms and structures, having specific functions within the context of generated propositions that combine to constitute an emergent whole. Meaning is actualized and transmitted through language-specific rules and constraints deriving from morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic domains. Likewise, transitivity derives not from the presence of a particular verb – or not only from this, depending upon one’s conceptualization of the utterance – but from its actuation within complex syntagmata, combinatory structures implicating the co-presence of referential participants. Transitivity and participant agency potential also arise from superposed pragmatic patterns, information structuring and morphologically actuated modality, among much else. The importance of these facts cannot be underestimated, for it is not descriptively adequate to look solely at the words associated with different participants in a corpus. Understanding the semiotic world of a context-cum-corpus demands that description accounts for how such forms are woven together with others to form a complex tapestry of language practice, an act that renders all the more

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necessary a careful dissection of higher-level linguistic structures and forms, as well as their situational functionality. Collectively, the linguistic patterns emerging from the careful description of a corpus contribute to the emergent positioning of participants and to the framing of the sociocultural meaning of cogent issues. For example, in Chapter  3, it is argued that the French Hommen are positioned as a neo-resistance movement by and through a combination of lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic patterns. They are situated as the protectors of ‘good’ (i.e. traditional, heterosexual, heteronormative) society and, especially, children: they are also projected as the reactive antagonizers of those elements that would seek to undermine their hegemony, thereby injuring the objects of the traditional social hierarchy, notably LGBTQ persons and feminists. Part of this positioning is deduced from lexical choices; much more is inferable from a series of grammatical and pragmatic considerations, e.g. through the Hommen’s consistent appearance as agentive subjects of transitive verbs associated with material processes, as well as their syntactico-pragmatic relation to the putative agents of their oppression. They are not only résistants and défenseurs, nominal forms having clear denotative adjacency to imagined French history, they are also explicitly positioned in grammatical and pragmatic structures as the only persons who assert the physical and moral authority to react against gay marriage and protect French democracy and citizenry. Similar investigation is applicable to the assertion of conceptual frames, one example of which is the enlanguaging of homosexuality as a harmful, if naturally damaged state afflicting primarily its own adherents, i.e. homosexuals themselves, by the Sentinelle in Piedi (Chapter 4). Here, there is actually very little overt framing of homosexuality through specific lexical patterns, e.g. there are no instances in the corpus of anti-LGBTQ epithets or blatantly derogatory commentaries, such as those noted in Peterson’s research. In fact, the discourse authors are very careful to claim an expressly non-homophobic – if not exactly homophile – stance, including declarations that acts of physical aggression should be prosecuted, albeit as any other violent crime. However, the corpus reveals a series of far subtler means of framing homosexuality as a defect or moral wound, effectively removing these anti-LGBTQ acts from the sphere of political power and subjectivity. Some, as alluded to above, involve lexical forms activating a semantic taxonomy of illness or malady, but still more are actuated through clause-level verbal semantics, material processes and pragmatically meaningful modalities. The additive effect of homosexuality being projected through these forms

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and structures reverses the expected (and opposed by the Sentinelle) dialectic of homosexual versus homophobe. Accordingly, it is not the purported homophobe (i.e. he or she who wishes to block civil unions and anti-bullying efforts) who is framed as homophobic, but progressives working for civil unions and the same anti-bullying laws, as they are established as the ultimate source of harm to homosexual persons and communities: the pro-LGBTQ activist is, within this ecology, the ultimate homophobic participant. 2.3.2 Discourse as culture

If cognitive approaches to discourse have as their object the internal, mental representations of discourse producers, they, by and large, make only indirect connection to the wider cultural configurations within which such messages emerge and which serve to scaffold their production (viz. Wodak, 2006). This is a shortcoming for the interpretive potentiality of a close, linguistically grounded analysis of discourse practices, given the prima facie presumption that any successful communicative act must necessarily consider and respond to the sociocultural knowledge that shapes and is shaped by the wider environment in which it is actuated. In this regard, cultural linguistics presents a useful vehicle for exploring the means by which abstractions such as positioning and framing may be anchored in the semiotic world lived out by and through a speech community, as well as how cultural facts and patterns may contribute to (and be circuitously born of) the linguistic forms and structures available to its speakers. A relatively new, if not entirely innovative subfield, cultural linguistics focuses on the relationship between linguistic and extralinguistic competences and performances, opening compelling avenues toward understanding the ways in which linguistic knowledge is entangled with culturally transmitted and acquired knowledge. At the heart of cultural linguistics is the exploration of how language shapes and is subsequently shaped by the cultural setting of a speech community, a question that harks back to the earliest decades of the discipline and which is perhaps most commonly associated with the works of Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Whorf (1941/1956). While any postulation of shared cultural knowledge is necessarily cogent to cognitive understandings, if only because the ultimate locus of competence is the individual, cultural linguistics has at its base a broader understanding of both the content and form of knowledge (i.e. of the concepts, schemata, frames, etc.) and of their ontology (i.e. as being explicitly tied to social and shared, rather

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than implicationally personal or idiosyncratic experience). One of the most prominent voices in this subfield is Sharifian, who does not argue for a linguistic relativism akin to a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whereby language would be understood to determine thought or cognition: instead, he proposes that language influences how speakers understand the world and their experiences, and in turn that these understandings interact with linguistic performances, both individually and collectively, contributing to the content of conceptualizations (see especially Sharifian, 2011, 2017). In effect, his work proposes that the linguistic habits thought to reflect cognitive reality (pace Eco) are, themselves, bound up in a circuitous relationship with cultural habits thought to reflect a Weltansicht (pace von Humboldt). Sharifian’s theoretical model bridges several distinct fields and subfields, including cognitive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, intercultural communication, cross-cultural pragmatics and discourse analysis. His understanding of conceptualizations as culturally (anthropologically, socially) emergent formal units of knowledge is built upon schemas and categories, i.e. integrated units of organization for conceptual knowledge that can be thought of as structures and associations of experience and understanding, respectively (Sharifian, 2011: 24–25). Conceptualizations emerge within and through social interaction, and are distributed across a population, a fuzzy abstraction that can, in turn, be defined and bounded by the degree to which it shares a particular cultural conceptualization. Importantly, the congruences or dissonances of conceptual sharing within populations are not binary or absolute: for any sociocultural grouping, a series of conceptualizations will be variably shared, as this is relevant to both schematic and categorical content, as well as to the weight or depth of these, a state of affairs that may engender divergence (see especially discussion in Sharifian, 2011: 4–16). The formalization of collective cognition has important consequences for the ways in which competence is actuated by and reflexively shapes linguistic performance, not only in the domain of words and expressions, whose meanings vary in myriad ways that are frequently an impediment to successful communication, but also in the grammatical and pragmatic structures of languages, and in the interpretation of patterns involving these as they emerge within the tacit reality of discourse practices. In essence, cultural conceptualizations are foundational to categories, structures and forms of all types, from the semantic to the morphological, the lexical to the syntactic, a theoretical stance that is compatible with CDA, in which cultural linguistics finds several echoes. While using distinct formalizations, van Dijk (2001b) distinguishes between different

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knowledge types, including group and cultural knowledge. The former involves models shared across groups, such as businesses and movements, and the latter models are shared by all competent members of a widely delimited culture and which serve as common ground for discursive practices. Van Dijk also provides that socially shared opinions and ideology are basic representational structures of social groups, comprising shared knowledge and attitudes, and featuring principles that organize attitudes shared by these groups. Sharifian represents an important step forward, attending directly to the linguistic forms and structures, as well as emergent patterns involving both, through which opinions and ideologies are actuated. This, in effect, makes an explicit link between cultural and idiosyncratic knowledge, as well as the linguistic substance of both. It is rather straightforward for a linguist to acknowledge that different languages make use of varied forms and structures, but quite another to fully integrate cultural schemata into analysis, in part because formal and theoretical linguists have not proven to be particularly sensitive to the human collectivities within which speakers live and by which communication is actuated. Following Sharifian (2011), I assume that cultural conceptualizations of reality are foundational to the study of all linguistic corpora and must be considered when attending to communicative acts involving such powerful, potentially injurious forces as homophobia. After all, no such concepts may be considered to have absolute denotative substance, but are relative, in and of themselves. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the lexical and structural variability noted between languages, a variability born not of abstract cognitive structures that may be accessed by researchers, but of flesh-and-blood, encultured speakers, is secondary to varying cultural conceptualizations, of which forms and structures are but an emergent byproduct. Thus, culture shapes language as much as, if not more than the reverse. While words of seeming universality such as family and children may be readily translated into another language, the fuller scope of their meaning – their reference, connotations and associations within an anthropological space at present or in the past – is far from identical: all the more variable is the actuation of these ideas in the context of sentences, paragraphs and utterances, involving their imposition within complex structures and forms that manipulate these meanings and their wide-ranging implications. In the chapters that follow, cultural grounding of discursive interpretation occurs at several points. Foremost among these is at the level of linguistic description, for the very act of accounting for formal, structural and functional patterns at any level demands a cultural sensitivity: any

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meaning, after all, is entirely reliant on acquired cultural knowledge, whether this concerns a word, a pragmatic pattern or the use of modal morphology. Cultural grounding also takes place at the level of contextual analysis, for positioning and framing must necessarily account for the broader environment into which these abstractions are cast and the situation-specific nuances that they hold. Indeed, many of the most foundational concepts called upon – from family to sexuality, from the body politic to civic life – are tightly bound up in locally emergent cultural schemata. Finally, the broadest level of abstraction, that in which the discursive ecology is viewed macroscopically, implicates a level of cultural understanding that is often ignored, considering the pertinent historical and present-day structures and dynamics within which the interpolation of positioning and framing may be made. Necessarily contingent and certainly selective in the following chapters, description, analysis and interpretation are inescapably co-grounded in linguistic data and cultural interpretation at all levels, reflecting the ‘chicken-and-egg’ circuit presumptively underlying all communicative reality. 2.4 Discourse Ecology

The present approach to discursive acts of homophobia seeks to build upon the cognitive models advocated by CDA practitioners such as van Dijk and Wodak, while making more explicit connections between the cultural competences that frame these abstractions. The ecological view considers discourse practices to be performative products predicated by three distinct competences: linguistic, i.e. knowledge of the forms, structures and symbolic functions shared by members of a speech community; cognitive, i.e. knowledge of truths, facts and realities held by the authors of discursive acts (whether or not these truths, facts and realities correspond to those shared by others); and cultural, i.e. knowledge of categories and schemata, as well as their content and organization, that is distributed across the community of persons for whom discursive acts are instantiated and to whom they are directed, circuitously and inevitably through the forms, structures and functional symbols of language that contribute to and are deployed to reflect cognitive reality. The ecological landscape is thus an interleaving of formal, structural, functional, cognitive and cultural constituents. This formulation follows from the observation that discursive acts necessarily involve cognitive specificity and ontology (i.e. they are actuated or made real by at least one physical person), emerging from and directed to a cultural environment, and are manifest through the situated, concrete, but highly variable forms and

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structures shared by members of this environment (i.e. they are instantiated within a spatiotemporally situated, shared linguistic system). Like Haugen’s metaphor, the ecological approach should be understood foremost as heuristic rather than theoretical, as illustrative rather than predictive and as locally rather than universally applicable. Importantly, the present proposal does not assert that there is a specific meta-structure that may be imposed upon any discursive corpus or practice, into which all forms may or must fit, or through which all functions may or must be reflected. It also acknowledges the limits of and controversies associated with the term ‘ecology’, readily denying any strict parallel to biological or physical usage. As such, a discursive ecology is as much a descriptive postulate as it is a rhetorical mechanism, predicated on a context-specific analysis of the interaction and interdependence of linguistic, cultural and cognitive forces and factors. Fundamental to the ecological model is what a close, methodological examination of the forms, functions and structures contained in or evidenced through specific practices might contribute to a richer understanding of how a given Weltansicht is manifest in and projected through performance, as well as the means by which this performance is received, interpreted and might eventually be disrupted. The three-pronged approach outlined above highlights an important point concerning the investigative posture that is presumed by an ecological description and analysis: that is, for the researcher to be effective in providing a viable description of the linguistic actuation of homophobia, she or he should proceed from an emic bias to the greatest degree possible. Acknowledging that there is no absolute or essentialist autochthonous perspective, it need hardly be argued that the linguistic performances of one speech community cannot be cast within the frames of another, i.e. language data from a particular space and time must be understood internally, even if these might bear similarity to comparable data from another space and time. To provide but one example, it would be infelicitous to interpret linguistic data from Italian speech communities as being equivalent to those of AngloAmericans. The lexical, semantic, morphosyntactic, pragmatic, cultural and socio-historic realities of Italian speakers diverge in important ways from those of Anglophone Americans: similar forms refer to distinct referents having culturally sensitive connotations and associations (viz. la famiglia versus family); Italian avails itself of distinctly grammaticalized structures to convey mood and agency (one need only consider how the Italian simple future is often used to express hypothesis, an interpretation largely unfamiliar to Anglophones); supra-sentential meanings

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such as hesitation and enthusiasm are actuated with vastly different linguistic tools; and the very cultural schemata activated or manipulated by the communicative message are, for all possible interpretive similarities, divergent between the two cultures, at times to a surprising degree. Consequently, any investigation that departs from the premise that translation is akin to equivalency must be denied ecological adequacy. This assertion is as much an acknowledgment of oft-ignored facts as it is a call for greater analytical integrity, particularly on the part of Anglophone practitioners. After all, any analysis that purports to enfold cultural considerations, but that does not attend to the highly relative, deeply nuanced layers of culturally emergent ideations, whether these take the somewhat straightforward form of lexical denotata or the much more complex ones associated with propositional modality, is doomed to certain failure. Consideration of discursive ecology also affords, if not requires, attention be given to realities and constructs beyond textual data. In order to advance any hypothesis vis-à-vis the position of participants or the framing of concepts, these must be anchored within an understanding that can only emerge in a cultural backdrop. For the type of analysis pursued in the following chapters, it would not be descriptively or analytically sufficient to ignore the present-day and historic issues surrounding masculinity and male hegemony in France, the role of Catholic Church doctrine and its continued assertions of homosexuality as a ‘natural vice’ in Italy or the subtle tightrope that must be walked by a modern nativist in the complex political circus of Belgian Flanders. As such, part of each chapter steps back from the usual matters of linguistic study, introducing into description and analysis facts and interpretations normally situated outside the bounds of the discipline, including those ordinarily excluded from mainstream sociolinguistics. While this is necessarily condensed, if only for matters of presentational economy, the inclusion of extralinguistic foundations in the unraveling of defined homophobic discourses responds to the implicationally intersectional nature of this endeavor. Only by breaking down these traditional disciplinary walls, those that for too long have isolated the study of language from that of speakers, the study of speakers from that of sociocultural dynamics and the study of sociocultural dynamics from that of the linguistic reality that serves as a primary vehicle through which communities coalesce and replicate, may we make strides forward, not only in understanding the mechanics of homophobic communicative acts, as well as other linguistic biases and prejudices, but in establishing a more solid foundation from which to counter these.

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Finally, and reflecting van Dijk, I believe that the description and analysis of any discursive ecology must maintain as its ultimate goal to understand the practice-internal world of truths and perspectives, regardless of the degree to which any truth stands up to objective scrutiny or any perspective is shared or scorned. This holds whether or not one believes the Hommen (Chapter  3) to be a resistance movement or simply a group of angry young men; whether one agrees with the Sentinelle (Chapter  4) concerning the reflexively harmful nature of homosexuality or believes this to be little more than veiled dogmatism; or whether Dewinter (Chapter 5) may be truly considered a friend of LGBTQ persons or should be considered an opportunistic political hack. I do not believe that investigation can or should be blind or reflexive, but that any critical analysis must make room for the uncomfortable possibility that the authors of these and other discourse practices truly believe that they are doing what is good or right, moral or justified, even if the basis for such beliefs is one that I and many others find lacking. Indeed, the critical unraveling of discourse practices can be seen as an act of intellectual empathy and vulnerability, one that is sometimes awkward and, all too often, deeply disconcerting. However, I do not believe that accepting that there may be an internal logic to another’s cognitive context is tantamount to accepting this as just or good: it merely asks the researcher to acknowledge that such worldviews exist and that others believe them to be justified or right, a stance that renders it worthy of careful, rigorous examination. From such intellectual vulnerability and from the postures it engenders, I believe that a better understanding of not only the substance, but also the inner workings of anti-LGBTQ linguistic praxes is possible. While I have had to confront my own deep uneasiness at the messages and ideational worlds I have unraveled in the following chapters, and while I readily acknowledge that my own biases and subjectivity have certainly shaped the proposed ecological mappings and discursive untanglings, I believe that this work stands to help counter their effect and ultimately disorder such homophobic discourse practices at their source. Notes (1) ‘If language is, as they say, an instrument of communication, to what do we owe this property? The question may be surprising, like anything that seems to question the obvious, but it is sometimes useful to ask for evidence to be justified … It should be added that the language activity is open to a behaviorist description […] from which the mediated and instrumental character of language can be deduced. But is this language we are speaking of? Are we not confusing it with discourse?’ (translation mine).

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(2) This is an important caveat, one that resolves many of the criticisms raised by Kravechenko (2016), who, taking a more literalist biological stance, points to several infelicitous overextensions of the ecological metaphor. (3) The conceptualization of the discrete persons or ideals that are under the scope of positioning as ‘participants’ is a fortuitous sharing of both nomenclature and denotation between CDA and SFL (viz. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 220–223, 311–312, 334–336). (4) ‘Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of unexpressed feelings’ (translation mine).

3 Les Hommen: ‘Muscled Resistance’ and Misogynistic Homophobia

‘Radically on the side of children’ (Facebook, 11 July 2013)

‘We are everywhere’ (http://hommen-officiel.tumblr.com) 57

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This chapter examines the discursive practices of les Hommen,1 a group that arose in response to the extension of same-sex marriage and adoption in France. Grounded in the description of linguistic patterns associated with nominal reference, deictic oppositions, clause-level semantics and participant role distribution, it is argued that the Hommen constitute a unique example of homophobia at the intersection of misogyny and male hegemony. This chapter shows how the group and its adherents use particular discourse tactics to establish themselves as the masculine savior of children, while also projecting themselves as reactants against a social order that would undermine the hegemonic position of the French male. Section 3.1 provides a necessarily brief overview of same-sex marriage legislation and reactions to it in the French context, also reviewing the analyzed corpus. Subsequent sections attend to the referential projection of discursive participants and to clause-level interactions among these, as well as phrase-level semantic, pragmatic and grammatical patterns. Distinct from other case studies in this book is the additional description of visuo-linguistic data in the social media corpus, expanding upon purely linguistic components and integrating the analysis of visual signs and symbols present in the social media corpus. Two additional sections step back from descriptive patterns and data analysis, bringing these into dialogue with sociocultural factors. A final section draws description, interpretation and analysis together into a synthetic whole. 3.1 Background

In November 2012, Justice Minister Christiane Taubira presented a bill to the French National Assembly that eventually led to the establishment of same-sex marriage and, by virtue of this, adoption and co-parenting. The eponymous loi Taubira, as it came to be known, should have been neither surprising nor controversial to any proficient observer of French politics. The country had established civil unions, commonly known as PaCS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) in 1999, already granting many legal rights and protections – although, importantly, not adoption – to same-sex couples (see notably Dekeuwer-Défossez, 2003; Paternotte, 2008; Raissiguier, 2002; Robcis, 2004; Stychin, 2001 for a review of political discourses surrounding PaCS). Likewise, same-sex marriage had been an open campaign pledge of newly elected President François Hollande and was supported by solid majorities in public opinion polls, even if enthusiasm for adoption by same-sex couples was less than categorical.2 Perhaps more importantly, several Western European countries had already opened the institution of

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civil marriage to lesbian and gay couples, including France’s neighbors and traditionally Catholic Belgium (2003) and Spain (2005), with little determined or lasting public resistance. Somewhat contrary to expectation, the loi Taubira was met with hostility far more strident than had been seen elsewhere, the climax of which occurred in a series of street protests around the country in late 2012 and early 2013, collectively referred to as le printemps français (‘French spring’), with a clear echo of earlier ‘Arab spring’ uprisings against dictatorships in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. Opposition was certainly expected from the right-leaning liberal party Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, Union for a Popular Movement), whose incumbent presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy had lost to Hollande only months before, closing a decades-long occupation of the Elysée by the UMP and its predecessors.3 Also predictable was the reaction of the far-right and xenophobic Front National (National Front), as well as the Roman Catholic Church and its sociocultural organs, long having located themselves at the frontlines of conservatism in matters of marriage and family policy (see Béraud, 2014; Perreau, 2016). Much more surprising for proponents of the proposed law and media alike was the emergence of non-affiliated, populist protest movements that appeared across France in this period, rapidly harnessing the power of social and traditional media as vehicles for their message. Initially splintered, opposition rapidly coalesced around la Manif’[estation] pour Tous (MPT, ‘Protest for all’), whose message was relatively straightforward, if under-problematized: the loi Taubira was to be opposed not because of animosity to homosexuality or homosexuals, and certainly not in deference to the tenets of the Church, a position that would stand in overt conflict with Republican ideological secularism commonly known as laïcité, but out of concern for the well-being of children and their putative right to a father and a mother, as well as in deference to tradition, filiation and biologically defined gender (see Baruch, 2013; Daly, 2015; Perreau, 2016). It should also be noted that public reaction and hostility might also be attributable in part to the association of the loi Taubira with concomitant proposals concerning in vitro fertilization (procréation médicalement assistée, PMA) and surrogacy (gestation par autrui, GPA), matters far more controversial and issues that were ultimately tabled, with GPA continuing to remain illegal and PMA subject to relatively rigid regulation. Alongside MPT, several more fractious groups emerged, among which two are notable as they were founded by and largely consisted of

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young people, i.e. a generation assumed to be more comfortable with same-sex individuals and to hold less traditional sociosexual mores. These included the Antigones, young women aligning themselves, although always indirectly, with Catholic traditionalism (Béraud, 2014; Perreau, 2014a, 2016), and the Hommen.4 The latter group, more visible and certainly less nuanced in their approach, comprised young, shirtless men in colorful pants and white opera masks, operating with hidden faces, no named leader and no official membership roll. This exclusively male collective and its adherents opposed same-sex marriage, abortion, the integration of gender theory in schooling and other Republican social institutions, feminism and its messengers and all forms of non-traditional or non-normative filiation, especially GPA, PMA and same-sex adoption. The group might appear at first blush to be yet another assemblage of resolute social conservatives were it not for several important distinctions. Quasi-anonymous, as they are largely organized through social media, the group denied partisanship and religious affiliation – both de rigueur positions for any public association in the modern French Republic – while overtly positioning themselves in opposition to established organizations such as Act-Up, Inter-LGBT and Femen, the latter being a target of particular vitriol. Through their actions, from interrupting the 2013 French Open, to staging ‘die-ins’ in the Parisian metro, to a boisterous demonstration in the Senate, the Hommen came to be seen as one of the more extreme opposition movements: curiously, and no doubt due to their typical shirtless appearance, the Hommen were even considered by some to be a manifestation, however cynically, of latent homosexuality.5 Inextricably linked to the group’s presence and activities is a particular use of linguistic and visuo-linguistic mechanisms. As shown in the following pages, these discursive practices are markedly different from those of mainstream French opposition groups, notably MPT, as well as those more familiar to Anglophone readers (e.g. the National Organization for Marriage in the United States, the Coalition for Marriage in the United Kingdom or Rise Up Australia). As such, Hommen practices cannot be considered the translation of anti-gay rhetoric seen elsewhere: the messages activated and the social meanings (re-)invigorated by the group and its members rely on structures and forms that contribute to a particular – and particularly situated – response to sociocultural evolution. Like the more mainstream MPT, the Hommen outwardly situate their opposition to same-sex marriage, adoption and related issues in the best interest of children, viz. the omnipresent slogan ‘Hommen – Protect

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61

Kids’ (in English in the original), examples of which are seen in the images above and in discussion below. Theirs is, however, an explicitly populist, overtly male protest, with little of the expected rhetoric and argumentation seen among conservative political or social organizations (see e.g. Daly, 2015; Paternotte, 2012; Perreau, 2016, for discussion of these). Even cursory reading of Hommen social media reveals little about the specific dangers to children or any deleterious consequences that would arise from the loi Taubira. Their social media presence also largely avoids exhortations to anti-LGBTQ violence or invective, limiting these to repeated calls to block or (after its passage) abrogate the legalization of same-sex marriages. In this regard, the Hommen are yet another example of the type of homophobic discourse authors this book sets its sights on. Yet, there is something unique, or at least highly unusual, about the ways in which the Hommen present their message: it is shown in this chapter that this distinction largely arises from the positioning of the group against not only same-sex marriage and its proponents, but against a form of modernity that would erode traditional male hegemony over society and culture. Like physical cues to masocentrism omnipresent in their protests, there are linguistic cues that point to such male hegemony throughout their discourse practice: these are, however, much less readily visible, and require careful dissection to fully apprehend. 3.1.1 Corpus

Operating quasi-anonymously, the Hommen used social media outlets for nearly all communication, interacting with the mainstream press in very few instances. All material examined in the present study was taken from free access web media, the form and structure of which are distinct from the carefully planned texts that constitute the focus of much discourse analytic literature or the oral corpora analyzed by van der Bom et al. (2015). Unlike other venues, social media are often unedited and unarbitrated, especially in the case of community forums and postings made for immediate dissemination (e.g. Twitter; viz. Brindle & MacMillan, 2017). Furthermore, they are very frequently accompanied by visual images that serve to reinforce, nuance or otherwise enhance textual messages, to which measured attention is given below (it should be noted that, given a number of complications stemming from authorship and copyright issues, treatment here has been necessarily limited). The most important body of data analyzed in this study came from the group’s Facebook portal (https://www.facebook.com/leshommen),

62  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

which included posts beginning on 29 March 2013 and ending on 1 October 2014, when activity ceased. This source yielded a sub-corpus of 7406 words, not including impertinent information (e.g. date stamps, hashtags), links and cross-postings. A second source of data was the group’s proprietary website (http://hommen-officiel.fr), which contained entries from 1 April 2013 to 21 March 2014, after which time it became dormant, as well as a number of non-dated informational pages (e.g. ‘Entrer en résistance’, providing affiliation instructions). Excluding numerous cross-postings to Facebook and Tumblr, the website comprises a sub-corpus of 4082 words. Finally, the group’s Tumblr feed (http:// hommen-officiel.tumblr.com) contains entries dated from 1 April to 30 October 2013. These are typically shorter and more visually dense than other sources, collectively yielding only 1159 words, not including duplicitous postings counted elsewhere. After controlling for repetitions across platforms, a corpus of 12,647 words formed the textual basis for analysis, supplemented by approximately 100 images.6 Constituting a corpus of social media discourse is not without certain challenges and limitations. Foremost among these is the question of where to draw the line concerning what should and should not be admitted into examination, i.e. how to delimit the linguistic archive. In the case of some media, notably the group website, this is readily resolved: included in this study are all and only those communicative acts that the group and/or its redactors saw fit to publish. For more collaborative venues like their Facebook portal, delimitation derives from practical considerations: only initial posts were included, and all commentary and external links, as well as community responses and counter-responses were excluded. While these often-heated exchanges might provide interesting evidence for the very issues under discussion, their source (coming from unknown and likely unaffiliated persons) makes inclusion problematic, as these data may not accurately reflect group opinion or could be the product of social media ‘trolls’.7 By excluding anything that cannot be reasonably attributed to the direction of the group, description and subsequent analysis are presumed to more specifically reflect and rigorously account for the Hommen collectively, rather than any one member or a fringe subgroup. 3.1.2 Style and Hommen discourse practice

The Hommen corpus is relatively straightforward in its textual cohesion, i.e. how different utterances are sequenced and the rhetorical

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63

strategies co-opted to bind parts of the text together (Fairclough, 1992: 75–78). Given the nature of social media entries – the overwhelming majority of sentential units within these are declarative in nature – a de facto cohesion deriving from the media itself may be assumed. After all, these are not venues for an exchange of ideas or for dialogic engagement with persons of differing or even nuanced points of view, but forums in which one group and its members articulate their beliefs, air their grievances and elaborate their worldview. Hence, the textual corpus is dominated by declarations of a putatively factual nature (the veracity of these facts is, of course, a distinct matter, and one for a different research agenda). Additional and closely related textual cohesion derives from repetition of slogans such as ‘on ne lâche rien’ (‘we let go of nothing’) and its variants, as well as the syntagmatic features of the text itself. Aside from these, two marginally observed structures deserve brief attention: interrogatives and imperatives. The social media corpus contained a paucity of true interrogatives, all of which emerged from a single interview that in all probability was staged using Hommen operatives, as it did not appear in any major press outlets. Examples of scripted interrogatives include ‘Mais, vous est-il possible de dresser pour nos lecteurs un portrait type d’HOMMEN?’ (‘But, it is possible for you to paint a picture of a typical Hommen for our readers?’ Web 20 March 2014, capitals in the original), co-opting a journalistic style, likely for the purpose of presenting the group as respectable and in line with more widely shared sociopolitical norms. Otherwise, only a handful of rhetorical questions were noted, especially on Facebook and Tumblr, always directed at group adversaries, e.g. ‘Les pro[-mariage gay] n’ont pas une bite à la place du cerveau?’ (‘Do the pro-gay marriage people have a dick in place of a brain?’ Facebook 5 February 2014). From this it can be inferred that interrogation serves two purposes in the text: in the case of true questions, it serves as a vehicle to provide information pertinent to the group, its actions or its perspectives; in the case of rhetorical interrogatives, they underscore the infelicitous qualities of an antagonist. Importantly, the Hommen never interrogate their adversaries or question the opposition’s ideas or values, let alone the ones that they espouse. Unlike questions, imperatives pepper the corpus and are used to exhort sympathetic interlocutor-readers, e.g. directed at a general public, ‘ne laissons pas le sort de nos familles, de nos enfants dans les mains de ces terroristes anti-filiation’ (‘let’s not leave the fate of our families and children in the hands of these anti-filiation terrorists’, Tumblr 3

64  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

July 2013), or as commands to the opposition, e.g. directed at Femen counter-protesters ‘Rhabillez-vous’ (‘get yourselves dressed [again]’, Facebook 9 October 2013). Mirroring the generalized declarative structure of the corpus and the use of rhetorical questions, imperatives function as a means of calling to and calling out. In the former, imperatives exhort supporters, real or possible, among the wider society, and are implicit declarations: if good French citizens are commanded to not allow children to be influenced by Hommen opponents, it is because these persons are declared to anti-filiation terrorists. In the latter instance, imperatives serve to denounce, effectively reinforcing the declarative nature of the text: in the example above, the feminists’ topless provocation is established as offensive and unwanted. This duality of interaction with other groups and collectives is reflected in the wider structures of the text, a matter taken up in more detail in the following sections. One of the most obvious themes recurrent throughout Hommen’s public communications is that of defiant opposition, exemplified in the following slogan presented on the group website and repeated throughout other social media venues, also provided in the opening of this chapter: (1)  Hommen, self-description Nous sommes partout, dans les villes et les campagnes. Nous sommes la majorité silencieuse qui sort de l'ombre. Nous sommes le peuple qui hurle. Nous sommes la Résistance. Et nous ne lâcherons jamais. CEUX QUI TOUCHERONT AUX ENFANTS NOUS TROUVERONT SUR LEUR ROUTE. TREMBLEZ LES HOMMES DE PAILLE. We are everywhere, in cities and country. We are the silent majority, coming out of the shadows. We are the people crying out. We are the Resistance. And we will never give up. ALL WHO HURT CHILDREN WILL FIND US IN THEIR PATH. SHIVER, YOU STRAW MEN.8

Among the many linguistic choices that can be examined in (1) are those concerning style (the anaphoric repetition of nous sommes), semantic taxonomies (e.g. la majorité, le peuple) and deixis (notably the use of inclusive nous). This passage also evidences structural choices, notably

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65

the imperative in the last lines and the transition from present to future forms, and pragmatic ones, e.g. the negation of lâcher with jamais. Importantly, nowhere in (1) is there an explicitly anti-LGBTQ statement or recognizable epithet. Hommen public discourse practices distinguish themselves from traditional understandings of hate speech (e.g. Speer & Potter, 2000; Tin, 2003), the political homophobia seen in Anglo-Saxon and, especially American, public debates (e.g. Peterson, 2010, 2011, 2016) and the overt declarations of antipathy to ‘politicians and homosexuals’ detailed in Provencher (2010). Rather than addressing gay individuals, institutions or the presumed dangers of these social actors directly, Hommen communicative practices may be best understood as explicitly reactionary, but only obliquely anti-gay. Similar to the implicitly racist speech described in Josey (2010) or the sexist discursive practices analyzed by Lillian (2005, 2007), the Hommen rarely make obvious statements about a distaste for LGBTQ individuals, nor do they openly call upon orders of discourse asserting expertise in matters of social sciences or psychology. This bears some similarity to the implicit or indirect homophobia of mediated exchanges involving different sociopolitical actors, such as the debates around same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom, described by van der Bom et al. (2015; see also Baker, 2004; Findlay, 2017). However, in the corpus examined here, there is no defined interlocutor, nor do the Hommen engage individuals having contrary opinion: they simply react to political events and sociocultural actors. These strategies govern and enable the interlocutors to parse the subjacent message and frame its reception, in turn reifying and reinforcing mental schemata that legitimize the group’s discourses and practices (see Leap, 2011a, 2011b; Morrish, 2010). 3.2 Participants: Referencing Homophobia

As in other case studies, the description of persons, institutions and concepts recurring throughout the corpus was restricted to definable personal or moral participants that were evoked in the text with both sufficient frequency (here, more than 12 times) and regularity (in at least 5 different entries). The relative frequency and distribution of participant instantiation in the corpus is given in (2): (2)  Count and relative distribution of participants Hommen: 257 (39%) Administration: 145 (22%)

66  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

LGBTQ Activists/Organizations: 67 (10%) Society: 53 (8%) Children: 31 (5%) Police: 28 (4%) Republican Institutions: 22 (3%) Gay Marriage: 17 (2.5%) Feminists: 16 (2.5%) Traditional Marriage: 16 (2.5%)

Unsurprisingly, the most recurrent of these are the Hommen, referred to nearly always as a collective.9 The second most frequently noted participant was the Administration, subsuming individuals (Hollande and various ministers), as well as institutions such as the National Assembly. Eight others were identified: personal participants include LGBTQ organizations, Feminists (most often, but not always the Femen), the Police and French Society; conceptual or moral participants include Traditional Marriage and Family, Gay Marriage and French Republican Institutions. 3.2.1 Referential taxonomies

A useful point of descriptive departure concerns formal representations of participants and the semantic fields around which these cohere, including canonical forms such as le gouvernement (‘the administration’) and proper names (e.g. Hollande, les Hommen). More interesting for the present description are noun phrases (NP) that contribute to the emergence of semantic taxonomies. These are complimented by a series of predicative verb phrase (VP) constructions, of which the majority take the form of the copula (être) plus an adjective, NP or verbal participle. These project participant qualities through attributive structures, e.g. by associating an NP subject with an adjectival predicate.10 As the most frequently evoked participant, Hommen is unsurprisingly represented with the greatest number of referential variants. Obviously, foremost among these are the Hommen (sometimes presented in all capitals), with variable number and determiner usage (most frequently un, des and les, in the latter instances with varying use of an orthographic plural –s). As presented in (3), references to the Hommen can be described in coherence around no fewer than three partially overlapping taxonomies of connotation: combative opposition; civility and inclusion; and victimization.

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67

(3) Hommen (a) Combative opposition le/un/notre combat défenseurs {du mariage hommefemme, des enfants} cette/notre détermination en marche joyeux drillés militants promeneurs anti-mariage gay la Résistance [varying capitalization]

a/the/our fight defenders {of male-female marriage, children} this/our determination on the move cheerful sorts activists/militants anti-gay marriage walkers the Resistance

(b) Civility and inclusion des/les bénévoles du côté {des enfants, du bon sens, du peuple} fiers la majorité silencieuse les Marseillais11 un/notre message de bon sens partout le peuple le plus juste

(the) volunteers on the side {of children, common sense, people} proud a silent majority – a/our common sense message everywhere the people the most right/just

(c) Victimization arrêté condamné relâché prisonnier(s) politique(s) victimes les enfants {du divorce en masse, de la gay pride, de l’adultaire en publicité dans les métro}

arrested convicted released political prisoner(s) victims children {of mass divorce, gay pride, commercial adultery in the metro}

68  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

The Hommen’s self-projection as reactant victim permeates the corpus. Taxonomies of oppression and resistance, inclusion and victimhood are closely interwoven with the representation of other participants, as well. Most noteworthy among these are references to Society, as in (4), and Republican Institutions, as in (5). The frequent repetition of predicate attributive clauses, e.g. ‘nous sommes le peuple’ (‘we are the people’), further reinforces their semantic proximity to the Hommen. (4) Society citoyens, concitoyens nos compatriotes contre le mariage gay les Français la majorité la masse le peuple (souverain) l’opinion publique

citizens, fellow citizens our compatriots against gay marriage the French the majority the masses the (sovereign) People public opinion

(5)  Republican Institutions la belle France la démocratie, Democracy12 liberté Marianne13 pour la défense des enfants et de la démocratie

beautiful France – freedom – for the defense of children and democracy

Both participants are unequivocally projected through forms having positive connotations, whether these concern traditional symbols (e.g. Marianne, la liberté) or widely shared expressions of cultural solidarity (e.g. the use of nos compatriotes and nos concitoyens). Already at the level of surface forms, these patterns have the effect of bringing the Hommen into contiguity with shared ideologies of Frenchness and conceptualizations of social power and cohesion. Equally important, if represented with far less variability and nuance, are those participants repeatedly projected as the object of the Hommen’s resistance: Children and the (traditional) Family can be thought of as secondary, albeit important actors within the overall context of Hommen discourse. Although frequently present in the corpus, Children were not the object of a particularly complicated semantic taxonomy, as in (6),

Les Hommen 

69

whereas lexical evocations of the Family were somewhat more nuanced, as in (7). (6) Children les/nos enfants (de la France) les plus vulnérables

(our) children (of France) the most vulnerable

(7) Family le bon sens la cellule souche l’homme et la femme l’ordre naturel universel

common sense the original core man and woman the natural order universal

The relative straightforwardness of these representations is significant: Children are rarely evoked by anything other than enfants; on the other hand, the Family is ascribed essential traits of naturalness and heterosexuality. This has important consequences for any inference of the Hommen worldview and for an understanding of their opposition to Taubira as an expression of reactionary masculinity. Contrastively represented vis-à-vis the Hommen are a series of oppositional participants, the most frequently noted of which is the Administration and its political actors (especially then Prime Minister Ayrault, Interior Minister Valls and Justice Minister Taubira). If the formal references to the Hommen are overwhelming associated with positive states or actions, those referring to President Hollande and his center-left government are overwhelmingly portrayed in a negative light as unjust and hostile to democratic principles, as in (8).14 (8) Administration casseurs condescendence coups de tonfa décideurs publics ennemis de la République une faute hommes de paille nos politiques/politiciens

rioters condescension baton blows public decision makers enemies of the Republic a mistake straw men our politicians [pejorative]

totalitaire

totalitarian

70  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

Similarly, the Police, with whom the Hommen continually clashed in street protests, are repetitively represented by forms associated with repression and political (as opposed to democratic) force, as in (9).15 (9) Police fâchés la loi du plus fort police d’état/politique racailles répression policière soumise

angry (people) law of the strongest (of the jungle) state/political police [pejorative] rabble police repression submissive [to politicians]

Like taxonomies emerging from representations of the Administration and Police, LGBTQ opposition groups are evoked through forms having strongly pejorative connotations. Two patterns are distinguished in this regard, one concerning marginality and sectarianism and another immorality or threat, as in (10). (10) LGBTQ un cadavre ennemis de la famille escroquerie/escrocs ces gens groupes d’agitation lâches libération des mœurs lobby un/votre marche-roi minorité embourgeoisée minorité d’une minorité mouvement activiste professionnels d’agitation (médiatique) ce/votre relativisme terroristes anti-filiation

a cadaver enemies of family swindling/swidlers those people agitation groups wimps, weaklings moral liberation lobby [pejorative] a/your almighty path minority having a middle-class outlook minority of a minority activist movement professional (media) agitators this/your relativism anti-filiation terrorists

In a starkly similar vein, Feminists – notably the Femen – are projected as sectarian and destructive, as in (11), whereas Gay Marriage

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71

is evoked in forms connoting an unwanted and deleterious imposition, as in (12). (11) Feminists une dégradation de la femme une groupuscule extrémiste une insulte à la féminité une provocation honteuse aux yeux des enfants la vie des working-girls

women’s degradation a little extremist group an insult to femininity a shameful provocation in the eyes of children working-girl life

(12)  Gay Marriage une/la dictature des minorités le fruit vénéneux d’un arbre pourri par le mépris du peuple un mauvais souvenir propagande médiatique

a/the minority dictatorship the poisonous fruit of a tree rotted by the people’s distain a bad memory [in the event of abrogation] media propaganda

Interestingly, there are very few occurrences of the forms gay or homosexuel(les) in the text. Of these few, they refer only to the proposed law or its presumptive beneficiaries: the corpus contained a total of seven instantiations of le mariage gay and two of le mariage homo, as well as one of les couples homosexuels. The only proper nouns seen in the text are Act-Up and Inter-LGBT, both well-known activist groups. This referential restriction has the effect of reinforcing oppositional representations and removing these participants from schemata of the wider society: members of the LGBTQ community are not evoked as persons, but are situated solely within the scope of marginalized or negated institutions. From the above, a series of patterns can be observed. On the one hand, the Hommen are evoked in ways that anticipate a positive association with Society and Republican Institutions, and even more importantly as the defenders of Children and Family. On the other, the Administration, LGBTQ groups and Feminists are projected through overwhelmingly negatively connoted forms, which anticipate their antagonism to the aforementioned participants, as well as to the Hommen, themselves.

72  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

3.2.2 Deixis

Deixis refers to the constructive phenomenon of contextually bounded referentiality and implicates use and interpretation of pronouns, as well as the relationships between pronouns and their referents (see e.g. Levinson, 2006). The deictic representations of interest here derive from the textual situation of a locutor/author and one or more other grammatical, distally referential persons. A total of 212 pronouns with clearly repairable antecedence were counted in the corpus. By far, the greatest number of these (102) referred to the Hommen, almost always collectively: significant uses of pronouns were also observed referring to Society, the LGBTQ community and the Administration, whereas there were far fewer referring to Children, the Police and Feminists. Figure 3.1 presents the distributional association of participants to grammatical person: for presentational economy, Society and Republican Institutions are combined (the latter having a single third-person pronominal reference), as are the LGBTQ community and Gay Marriage (the latter having only three third-person references). An opposition between inclusionary and exclusionary pronouns is readily apparent: the former are instantiated with first-person plural pronouns nous and the semantic first-person on, as well as possessive determiners notre/nos, whereas the latter involve second-person tu and vous, as well 100% 90% 80% 70% 60%

3 Person

50%

2 Person

40%

1 Person

30% 20% 10%

s ist in Fe m

m Ad

& Q LG

BT

in

G

ist

ay

ra

M

tio

n

ar

e lic Po

re n hi ld C

& So ci et

y

H

om

m

Re pI ns t

en

0%

Figure 3.1  Distribution of pronominal antecedence by semantic person

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as possessives votre/vos. Situated between these poles are third-person pronouns il/ils/elle/elles, le/la/les, lui/leur and ce, celui/ceux, as well as relatives (e.g. ce que). From the above, opposition between inclusive nous and exclusive vous participants appears almost categorical. Hommen are overwhelmingly and Society almost always situated as proximal and inclusive, whereas the Administration, LGBTQ and Feminist participants are distally projected; Children and Traditional Marriage are most frequently referred to using third-person deictics. Intriguingly, the Police are only rarely pronominalized, and even then, mostly in the third person, possibly reflecting a nuanced position vis-à-vis les forces de l’ordre. It should be noted in the above that the use of second-person pronouns and possessive determiners vous/votre/vos in reference to the Hommen is restricted to one textual source, an interview by an unnamed journalist (who is presumed to be a Hommen operative, if not entirely fictitious), published on 23 March 2013 in a press release disseminated on the Hommen website. Finally, and no less importantly, it should also be noted that there were only two instances of the informal or pragmatically proximal second person, both in the same proposition, ‘tu l’[l’enfant] touches, je [un Hommen] te bouffe’ (‘you touch him, I take you down [lit. ‘eat you’]’, Facebook 13 August 2013). While not enough to establish a wider trend, this is notable as it does not presumptively refer to a particular individual, but to a generic collective, fitting squarely into the marginalization of the LGBTQ community. 3.3 Participant Relations: Homophobia, Misogyny and the Clause

A first level of clausal description concerns the distributional association of participants with traditional grammatical roles (subject, complement, adjunct). From the lexico-semantic patterns above, the nous–vous opposition might reasonably be expected to be reflected in a subject– object dialectic: closer examination reveals that this is not the case, as may be deduced from Figure 3.2.16 In Figure  3.2, distinction may be drawn between participants that almost always appear as grammatical subjects (Hommen, LGBTQ, Administration), those that are rarely subjects (Family, Children, Gay Marriage) and those whose grammatical distribution is somewhat evenly split between the two (Feminists, Republican Institutions, Society). The Police also occupy an intermediate position, chiefly due to a series of recurring passive constructions within which they appear as adjuncts.

74  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Comp

C

hi ld

re

n

ily

Tr ad Fa m

ay M ar G

ty So ci e

pu

bI

ns t

s ist in Fe m

Subject

Re

ic e Po l

. in m Ad

BT Q LG

H om

m

en

0%

Adjunct

Figure 3.2  Participant grammatical roles

Subject and complement positions in French correspond closely to pragmatic and information structure. Given relatively rigid syntactic and prosodic constraints in this language, the grammatical subject position is strongly correlated to that of theme. A grammatical subject is mutatis mutandis also the topic, about which the clause extends information. Conversely, the grammatical complement (direct or indirect object) is closely aligned with the rheme or comment. Grammatical role distributions are furthermore closely aligned with the activation status of clausal participants (Lambrecht, 1994, 2000; see also Eggins, 2004: 300–308; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 88–89, 120–122). Figure 3.2 can thus also be interpreted as the reflection of broad tendencies vis-à-vis participant information projections, i.e. regularities of the clause as message: on the left side of the figure are the more topical, more pragmatically active themes – the Hommen, LGBTQ groups and the Administration; on the right are the less topical, inactive or propositionally activated locus of new information – especially Children and Family. Grammatical roles are inseparable from the semantic qualities of verbs, themselves, as it is through these that participants are related to one another and are inserted within a wider semantic framework (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 134). Description here is organized ­ according to subject participant, also accounting for negation: transitive verbs are presented first, with applicable participant complements,

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followed by intransitive and reflexive (or pronominal) verbs. Predictably, the Hommen are associated with the most frequent and widely varying verbal repertoire. Of the verbs for which the Hommen serve as grammatical subject, a clear majority are active and may be divided into two subclasses: translocative or causative, and militarism/resistance. In the former category are high-frequency verbs that are unsurprisingly associated with most personal participants, e.g. aller (‘go’), arriver (‘arrive’), entrer (‘enter’), faire (‘do/make’), sortir (‘go out’) and venir (‘come’), as well as a handful for which only the Hommen are subject, including agir (‘act’), s’exporter (‘send oneself out’), placer (‘place’) and prendre place (‘take place/happen’). More interesting – and certainly more numerous – are the verbs that coalesce around a semantic taxonomy of active opposition, resistance and combat, as in (13). (13) Hommen Verb abandonner – Neg. abolir appeler s’attaquer à défendre demander dénoncer

Gloss abandon abolish call to attack defend demand denounce

juger laisser – Neg.

judge leave

s’opposer à

oppose

s’en prendre à refuser représenter

attack refuse represent, embody respect save stop (oneself) arrive [fig. ‘show up’] understand

respecter sauver s’arrêter – Neg. arriver comprendre

Complement Children, Society Gay Marriage Society LGBTQ, Feminists Children, Family Administration Administration, Gay Marriage Gay Marriage Children, Rep. Institutions Gay Marriage, Admin., Feminists Feminists LGBTQ Society, Rep. Institutions Rep. Institutions Rep. Institutions

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descendre déployer s’énerver s’exporter frapper gagner guetter hurler s’inquiéter interpeller intervenir lâcher – Neg. lutter se manifester se mobiliser passer à l’action/à l’attaque se porter volontaire rallier rater – Neg. se renforcer tirer veiller

descend, go out [fig. ‘protest’] unleash, deploy become irritated send (onself) out strike win watch (over) scream worry call out intervene give up fight protest mobilize (oneself) move to action/onto the attack volunteer rally fail reinforce (oneself) shoot, take aim watch over

From (13), a number of patterns may be inferred, most importantly the frequent association of the Hommen to active resistance or protest, a taxonomy especially significant in the intransitive verbal repertoire. Among exchanges having a verbal complement, for which direct and indirect objects are conflated, two tendencies are distinguishable: the group is associated with the nous participants via verbs having a protective or associative connotation; and with the vous participants via verbs associated with conflict. These clause-level exchanges have the effect of strengthening Hommen’s proximation to first-person, inclusive participants, for which they serve as defenders, and their distance from exclusive ones, by whom they are oppressed. They also reinforce the formal representation of the group as a resistance movement, expounding upon the nature and target of this self-conceptualization and its projection

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as being active, relentless and directed against the Administration, Gay Marriage, LGBTQ activists and Feminists. Closely associated with the Hommen are Republican Institutions and Society. The former is, in those few instances it occurs as subject, depicted as united with the Hommen, e.g. ‘cette belle République l’a épousé’ (‘this beautiful Republic married him [l’Hommen]’), ‘Marianne s’unissait avec un Hommen’ (‘Marianne was united with a Hommen’) and ‘espérant enfanter la liberté d’expression’ (‘wanting to give birth to freedom of expression’). On the other hand, Society is presented either in opposition to the Administration (transitive verbs) or in protest (intransitives), as seen in (14). (14) Society Verb craindre demander supporter – Neg. déchirer hurler se lever

Gloss fear demand put up with rip apart scream rise up

Complement Administration Administration Administration

Tellingly, the only exchanges involving this participant express affiliation with the Hommen or antagonism toward the Administration: neither Society nor Republican Institutions are evoked as the author of explicit reaction or response, a verbal semantic reserved for the Hommen. This observation is complemented by the paucity of subject instantiations involving the Family and Children, limited to être clauses or similar attributives, e.g. avoir droit à un père et une mère (‘have the right to a father and mother’). Among the distal, vous participants, the Administration appears as the most frequent grammatical subject with a relatively varied verbal repertoire, as in (15). (15) Administration Verb assassiner avoir peur de changer – Neg.

Gloss murder/assassinate fear change

Complement Rep. Institutions Society Society

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déclarer la guerre dénaturer détruire diviser – Neg. emprisonner endoctriner falsifier foutre au panier/ en taule gazer ignorer manipuler menacer plaire à salir s’opposer à refuser

declare war denaturalize destroy divide imprison indoctrinate falsify throw away/ into jail gas ignore manipulate threaten please, appease dirty, stain oppose refuse

ruiner transformer violenter violer

ruin transform do violence to violate, rape

s’agenouiller se cacher s’obstiner oublier perdre se plier sévir trembler tricher

kneel hide (oneself) persist [pejorative] forget lose submit crack down tremble trick, cheat

Society Family Family Hommen Hommen Society Rep. Institutions Society, Rep. Institutions Hommen Society Society Children, Hommen LGBTQ, Feminists Rep. Institutions Society Society, Rep. Institutions Family Children Society, Hommen Society, Children, Rep. Institutions

The data of (15) could hardly be more antonymic to those associated with the Hommen: with few exceptions, the Administration is projected as an agent of harm, in exchange with Society, the Republic, Children and Family, or of oppression, especially in exchange with the Hommen.

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Verbal semantics of the Administration subject are complemented by those of the Police, which is limited to transitives, as in (16). (16) Police Verb arrêter défendre diviser – Neg. obéir à commettre malmener tabasser

Gloss arrest defend divide obey commit rough up beat up

Complement Hommen Administration Hommen Administration Hommen Hommen Hommen

These exchanges further concretize the Hommen-versus-Administration dialectic, establishing the Police as an extension of the latter, albeit only inasmuch as this concerns exchanges with the Administration itself (as obedient protector) or the Hommen (as oppressor). They also bring the Administration directly, and the Police indirectly, into a closer relationship with other forces opposed by the Hommen. Distinctly situated among the vous participants are the LGBTQ and Feminist participants, the verbal repertoires of which are provided in (17) and (18): it should be noted that Gay Marriage appears only as a verbal subject of être predicate VP, although it is frequently the complement of transitive verbs. (17) LGBTQ Verb s’attaquer à attiser changer – Neg. contraindre culpabiliser défendre– Neg. éteindre – Neg. instrumentaliser ingurgiter légitimer œuvrer – Neg.

Gloss attack stir up change constrain blame defend extinguish exploit swallow [fig.] legitimize work on/toward

Complement Children Society Society, Family Rep. Institutions Society Gay Marriage Society Gay Marriage Society Gay Marriage Gay Marriage

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toucher choquer monopoliser pleurnicher se réduire

touch, harm Children shock monopolize whimper reduce, debase (oneself)

(18) Feminists Verb s’exposer à insulter toucher trouver (sur leur route) arriver – Neg. s’offrir se dégrader provoquer se rhabiller – Neg.

Gloss expose oneself to insult harm find (in their path) succeed [fig.] offer (oneself) degrade (oneself) provoke re-clothe (oneself)

Complement Children, Society Society Children Hommen

The semantic content of verbs having vous subjects and their effect on participant exchanges cannot be underestimated: these are grammatical subjects of violer, dégrader and toucher, for which the Family, Children and Society are complements. Reinforcing nominal semantics, the Administration is evoked as a dictatorial force bent on violating the most vulnerable, this despite also being represented as weak and cowardly; LGBTQ activists are projected as agents of harm, even if they are stated to be unable to accomplish such; and Feminists are instantiated as violators of all that is traditionally feminine. In effect, these participants are projected in stark opposition to the Hommen, be it in their actions, inactions or behaviors. 3.3.1 Processes and participant roles

The textual corpus evidenced 661 specifically identifiable processes involving one or more defined participants. Material processes constitute a clear majority of these (371 or 56.2%); much more interesting is the relative predominance of one or another process type associated with different participants, as presented in Figure  3.3, which situates them according to the relative preponderance of material process involvement: existential processes (n = 12) were excluded from the description due to their relative infrequency.

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100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

ia ge

ty ay

m

ar r

So ci e

en m

s H om

ist

Re

p

G

In

Fe m

in

io ut st it

ist in m Ad

Behavioral

ns

n ra tio

BT Q

ic e Po l

ily Fa m

LG

C

hi ld

re

n

0%

Material

Mental

Relational

Verbal

Figure 3.3  Participants and processes

Several observations may be made from the above. Firstly, Children and Family are nearly always associated with a material process. Secondly, Society and Gay Marriage are relatively infrequently implicated in these. This is especially interesting as these very participants are represented in opposing ways through nominal referential patterns, with the former pair being approximated to and the latter pair distanced from the Hommen. Closely connected to both grammatical and semantic roles is the status of passive constructions, which in languages like French and English serve to project the semantic complement (i.e. that NP described as a patient in traditional semantic analyses) into the grammatical subject position, leaving the agent either uninstantiated or expressed as a sentential adjunct, e.g. ‘vous [Hollande] serez trainé dans la boue par le peuple’, (‘you [Hollande] will be dragged through the mud by the people’, Facebook 31 October 2013). In effect, passive constructions serve to reverse the pragmatic sequencing of participants, while maintaining the relatively rigid information structure and phrastic template characteristic of French: instead of a semantic actor-agent being instantiated as the grammatical subject, it appears as an adjunct, if at all, whereas the semantic patient occupies the subject role, thus effectively flipping the topic-subject

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focus-complement association and allowing for the erasure of causal participants in the surface form. Relatively few passives were noted in the textual corpus (n = 43): however, the distribution of these according to participant and semantic function is of particular interest. These data are given in (19), which also expresses the relative frequency of passives as a percentage of all finite VP associated with a given participant, as well as the number of these for which the participant is agentive. (19)  Passive voice by participant Hommen Administration LGBT Society Children Police Rep. Inst.

Total

Total Passive

%

Of which agent

257 145 67 53 31 28 22

18 10 2 2 2 7 2

7.0 6.9 3.0 3.8 6.5 25.0 11.0

2 8 2 1 0 6 0

Two observations may be made of (19). Firstly, as it concerns relative frequency, the police stand out as being much more susceptible to appear in passive constructions than do others: a full quarter of all mentions of the police in the textual corpus appear in passive sentences, unlike the comparatively trivial numbers seen for others. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, the vous participants (Police, Administration and LGBTQ) correspond nearly always to semantic actor-agents, i.e. these would, in active voice equivalents, appear as grammatical subjects, e.g. ‘[vous voulez que] vos enfants soient éduqués par ces gens [LGBTQ]’ (‘[do you want] your children to be raised by those people’, Tumblr 20 June 2013). Semantic agency in passive grammatical construction is, conversely, infrequently assigned to any of the nous participants. This has the effect of positioning the goal-patient as the pragmatic topic and the actor-agent as the focus (cf. Banks, 2017: 56–60). Such observations should be understood as guarded, however, given the relatively low frequency of passive constructions of any type in the corpus. The above considerations highlight the need to describe the specific roles that participants play within clause-level representations, which Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) distinguishes according to process typology. For material processes, the most important roles are actor (that accomplishing an action), goal (that affected by the action), recipient (that receiving the action) and beneficiary (that for which this is

Les Hommen 

83

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

ia ge

ty

p

G

ay

m

ar r

So ci e

en m

s H om

ist in

ns io ut

In

st it

ist Re

in m Ad mat-actor

Fe m

n ra tio

BT Q

ic e Po l

ily Fa m

LG

C

hi ld

re

n

0%

mat-goal

mat-recip

mat-benef

Figure 3.4  Material process and participant roles

accomplished). The relative participant frequency of association to each of these is provided in Figure 3.4. These patterns enrich and nuance observations made above: the frequent appearance of Children and Family in material relations does not generally correspond to their semantic agency, but with their projection as goal, especially of harmful actions undertaken by the Administration and LGBTQ or Feminists, or as beneficiary, always of the protective or defensive actions of the Hommen. At the same time, the entire picture of material relations involving other participants is complexified, with Society, Republican Institutions, Feminists and Gay Marriage realized as goals, i.e. as participants being done to (rather than for), on the one hand, and the Police, Administration, LGBTQ and the Hommen much more frequently situated as the authors of action. Another, albeit far less frequently noted distinction involves verbal processes, of which there were 45 occurrences involving only 6 of the 10 participants. Here again, important distinctions between participants can be seen in the sayer–addressee distinction, as in Figure 3.5. Figure  3.5 distinguishes between the authors of verbal processes (LGBTQ exclusively; Administration, Hommen and Society nearly always) and their object or target (Police and Gay Marriage). From this, a picture emerges of not only which participants accomplish verbal action,

84  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Police

LGBTQ

Administration Hommen verb-sayer

Society

Gay marriage

verb-addressee

Figure 3.5  Verbal process and participant roles

but also which participants occupy communicative space and assert authority over it. A final consideration can be made of the holistic agency of participants, transcending specific processes and roles and taking into account the relative frequency by which each is situated as the author of action. More akin to traditional thematic roles, the combination of material actor, behavioral behaver and verbal sayer shows the relative associability of a participant to transitive potentiality. The relative agency of participants is provided in Figure 3.6, with these expressed on a scale of 0 (no agency) to 1 (high agency). The relative agency scores of participants synthesize many of the above considerations. On the one hand, this reinforces the projection of Family and Children as objects acted upon by others, be this negatively (LGBTQ or Administration) or positively (Hommen) connoted. Gay Marriage also has a low agency, suggesting that it is conceived of as an object, not as a force in its own right. On the other hand, the Administration, LGBTQ groups and the Police are highly agentive, acting upon and only rarely being projected as recipient-patients (for the Police, the only exceptions are as the object of verbal action). Somewhat surprising

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Gay marriage Society Hommen Feminists Rep Institutions Administration LGBTQ Police Family Children 0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

Figure 3.6  Participant agency

is the intermediate position of the Hommen, Republican Institutions, Society and Feminists, whose profiles would seem to be counterintuitive: these participants are both actors and acted-upon, agents and patients, doers and the done-to. That the Hommen, along with the Republic and Society, have intermediate scores reflects the simultaneous position of these, especially the former, as reactive victim, i.e. as one who is oppressed but who also reacts to this oppression. Feminists are distinct in this regard: while they act, they are also acted upon, and with a regularity and strength that far outweighs any reaction having the Administration and LGBTQ as target. Below, it is argued that these data evidence an especially salient feature of Hommen discursive practices, ones reinforced in important ways by visuo-linguistic information. 3.4 The Linguo-Visual Projection of Homophobia

This section presents a necessarily abbreviated examination of a series of images that are co-situated with the properly textual component of the Hommen discourse practice: the images referenced below can be freely viewed at http://deh.ucdavis.edu.17 For the purposes of description and discussion, and with no pretense of being exhaustive, a selection of

86  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

images is considered, focusing on the question of how textual elements are reinforced by visual cues and indices: this description primarily derives from the design level and its interaction with what Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) refer to as discourse, i.e. with socially situated knowledge, although production and dissemination are, naturally, also implicated. Only the images that include traditional textual script are included here, largely responding to the imperatives of space and analytical focus, although it is acknowledged that many others are deserving of greater, and perhaps more methodologically specific attention. Similar to linguistic forms and structures overlaying the purely symbolic material of an utterance, the included images function inseparably within the wider communicative context of Hommen social media: the complex interleaving of visual and textual messages is neither accidental nor without effect on interlocutor-receivers (Doerr, 2017; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Phillips & Jørgensen, 2002: 61–62). Loosely paralleling prosodic patterns that contribute supra-sentential meaning to an utterance (e.g. interrogation, sarcasm or hesitation), the visual image serves to nuance, countenance or enrich textual messages and their interpretation. Like pragmatic markers, the visual field and its co-presence with textual communications contributes to a receiver’s understanding of the discourse practice in substantial and highly nuanced ways: while the Hommen linguistic praxis is primarily actuated by text, it is augmented and strengthened by the insertion of visual information. A particularly illustrative example of the Hommen’s use of imagery is provided in Figure 3.7a and b* (The death of liberté, Hommen action [Website, 19 March 2014]), demonstrating a compelling interaction of textual and visual semiotics. In these images, part of a series of photographs taken at a group ‘die-in’ action in Paris’ Trocadero metro station in March 2014, Hommen supporters staged a scene in which members were positioned on the ground, in a pool of simulated blood, surrounded by chalk cadaver tracings, implicating both the design and the production elements of a visual semiotic: the former derive from the mechanisms whereby the message is actuated, the latter the result of this actuation. Importantly, the images reflect an activity putatively done as much for use in social media as it was to draw the attention of passers-by, being produced for both a spatiotemporally inserted audience and for the static, distal audience of various Hommen sites. To any savvy interlocutor, either in person or online, these visual stimuli cue established discourses of criminality and violence, presupposing both a murdered and a murderer, i.e. the visual correlates to a semantic agent/actor and patient/ goal, as well as their nominal grammatical (subject, object) and material

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process (actor, goal) correlates. Not to be ignored are a series of linguistic messages integrated into the scene, essentially obviating any possible confusion about which participants occupy which role or relation. Bravo Taubira appears on the pieces of paper surrounding the simulated corpse, whereas Solidarité and Liberté (‘solidarity’, ‘freedom’) are written prominently on the bodies of staged cadavers. Visual and linguistic semiotics function synchronously in the production of the disseminated message: without the visual cues to a murder scene, the linguistic message might not be understood as it was presumptively intended – and it certainly wouldn’t garner as much attention; without these written cues, the perceiver might be left uncertain as to who was responsible for the supposed death of the Hommen and what this means for French society. In this instance, the message is clear: the passage of the loi Taubira constitutes a violation not just of the individual and his or her physical person, but of the collective body politic – represented as solidarity and freedom, nouns whose iconicity in the French sociopolitical landscape would be hard to ignore. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that this representation of a criminal act has been made real on the explicitly male, bared torso of a Hommen operative. Another example of linguo-visual interplay can be seen in one of the most frequent Hommen banner images, recurring in numerous Facebook entries, often in field prominence (at the top of a page or link), thus calling attention to not only the design and production elements of the visual field, but also its iterative distributional properties. Also given in the introduction to this chapter, a larger version is provided in Figure  3.8* (Hommen banner [Facebook, 11 July 2013]). Here, the reader-viewer apprehends the image of a shirtless man, identified as a Hommen by the message on his back, handcuffed but defiant, as deduced through his raised arms and clenched fists. Notable is the superposition of text on a red background, a color that is repeatedly displayed in Hommen social media, reading ‘radicalement du côté des enfants’ (‘radically on the side of children’). The specific design choices manifest in this image, from the diagonality (lower right, where the text is also situated, to center left, showing the handcuffed fists of an Hommen) allows the viewer to comprehend what is meant by radicalement and the consequences of being du côté des enfants: the presumptive reality of a young man manacled in his defiant protection of children. The visual message complements that of the denser and more recurrent linguistic elements of the discourse practice, i.e. that Hommen are persecuted due to their acts of resistance. Additional banner examples of visuo-lingual communication, repeated in a manner similar to many of the textual

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slogans noted in the corpus, allow the reader to better understand what is explicitly stated using linguistic form: that the Hommen are simultaneously victims and heroes. Visuo-linguistic praxes are by no means limited to the Hommen in the corpus: indeed, one of the most frequent uses of imagery is directed at the Administration. In Figure  3.9* (Dictators [Facebook, 20 August 2013]), two images have been superimposed into one, again implicating the levels of design and production: one of Adolf Hitler and the other of Manuel Valls, then Interior Minister (and Prime Minister from March 2014 to December 2016), i.e. the governmental figurehead responsible for maintaining law and order during the period of intense anti-Taubira protests. Along with President Hollande and Justice Minister Taubira, Valls is frequently singled out as being a fierce opponent of the Hommen and, by virtue of this, one of the casseurs publics. The visual superposition and rapprochement of Hitler and Valls is only part of the message, however: the viewer-reader is explicitly informed in the text that ‘he [Hitler] is back’ (an allusion to Timur Vermes’ 2012 bestselling novel) and exhorted to ‘stop him’, using the inclusive first-person (nous) imperative. The image has been purposefully designed to place one of the prominent figures of this government within cultural schemata of tyranny, an ideation that is diametrically opposed to other myths of French liberty and historical resistance. Hommen social media are replete with similar visuo-linguistic cues to the dictatorial nature of the Hollande administration and its members, as well as concurrent exhortations to contest these. While the most repeatedly evoked metaphor is that of Hitler, additional visual messages are noted comparing the administration to other infamous despots, including one that casts Hollande, (then Education Minister) Vincent Peillon and Valls in parallel with Stalin, Kadafi and Amin Dada, respectively, as in Figure 3.10a and b* (Comparison of dictators [Tumblr, 4 March 2014]). This juxtaposition of established visual cues associated with documentary style (the original image in Figure  3.10a comes from a documentary film on cable channel Planet Plus) also serves to remind reader-viewers that the ‘dictatorship’ of the current administration is to last five years, i.e. one presidential term. This comparison of the Hollande government to dictators is relatively straightforward in both its content and the activation of anti-Republican tropes. Other examples of visuo-linguistic imagery targeting the Administration rely on subtle and not-so-subtle cues that activate deeply seated cultural schemata of male oppression and crisis. Figure 3.11a and b* (Hommen enslaved [Facebook, 26 January 2014]) are two of a series of images taken from a Hommen action in

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89

Paris in January 2014, i.e. over six months after same-sex marriage and adoption entered into force. Here, over a dozen group members renewed their call to abrogate the loi Taubira, this time in the wake of a tabloid affair involving the person (rather than the politics) of François Hollande. These images, chosen because of the clarity of the textual information present, diverge from others in both design and production values. They are putatively taken in situ and are of a more journalistic nature, being less purposefully composed, although it could hardly be argued that their inclusion in various social media outlets is devoid of specific design characteristics, or that their staging is demonstrative of a lack of production. Notable in the foreground of both images is a man wearing a helmet and accompanied by a scooter: this is intended to represent Hollande, who only months before had been photographed leaving his mistress in similar attire and on a similar vehicle. That he is leading a group of young men in simulated chains is a somewhat blunt message, reinforced by co-situated linguistic cues. Many of the messages on the Hommen’s torsos are familiar from discussion above: police politique, Hollande démissionne (‘Hollande resign’) and répression violente (‘violent repression’) activate notions of oppression and resistance. However, other undercurrents can be inferred from these images: ethnocentrism and misogyny. In the former regard, it cannot be lost on any viewer that the figure putatively engaging in ‘violent repression’ is portrayed entirely in black, despite visual distinctions between this and the photos that led to the revelation of Hollande’s romantic escapade with his then-mistress Julie Gayet. Furthermore, it can also not escape the savvy viewer that Justice Minister Taubira is of Guyanais origin and is often evoked in the French press and in popular nomenclature as noire, i.e. of an ethnicity typically associated with the enslaved and the oppressed, and not the enslaver or oppressor. The former role is reserved in the visual field for the Hommen themselves, i.e. young, white, putatively heterosexual males, constituting a reversal of that which is both currently expected and historically salient. Thus, the viewer-reader is primed to understand both the linguistic and visual content of this protest in a much more intricate scaffold: the passage of the loi Taubira is not simply unwanted because it represents a challenge to traditional family institutions and structures, but because it represents the reversal of long-standing white male privilege, whose members are now enslaved (viz. Perreau, 2016). Moreover, they are enslaved by a non-white female and a president who, despite being white and male, behaves in a decidedly non-masculine way: one need only consider the emasculating and infantilizing inclusion

90  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

of ‘j’aime me balader en scooter’ (‘I like to wander around by scooter’), alluding to Hollande’s much derided choice of vehicle. Mirroring their presence in the textual component of the corpus are a series of representations of women, particularly those that project women in relation to men. Several of these involve a rather obviously designed evocation of the matrimonial links between France discussed above (e.g. épouser, s’unir avec). In Figure 3.12* (Hommen and his bride [Web, 20 April 2013]), this is accomplished via the figure of Marianne, a traditional symbol of the French Republic, in union with her Hommen groom. In this image, Marianne is gagged, presumably by opposition forces and the Hollande government, and standing by the side of a Hommen, whose torso is emblazoned with the slogan – in English – ‘I love my wife’. Facing the couple is another Hommen, here portraying a mayor, symbolic of the French Republic, and further afield is at least one more standing as witness. To any proficient viewer, the design and production of this image points directly to indices of traditional marriage, further reinforcing the linguistic material that brings the male-Hommen into a codified, sanctioned and hierarchical relationship with his female-French Republican bride.18 The image also reinforces the alignment of the Hommen with French Republican values: as in textual declarations, the Hommen is wed to France – an explicitly female France who is silenced, oppressed, but accompanied by her groom. That other Hommen occupy positions of civil witness and Republican officiant further concretizes the union – and submission – of feminized society and democratic institutions to the Hommen, metonymic of the French male. A similar, albeit much more graphic image of Hommen coming to the rescue is seen in Figure 3.13* (Marianne, liberated? [Facebook 12 April 2013]), whose design mirrors that of other images made for social media. It is not difficult to interpret the various design elements of this image and their semiotic values: within the backdrop of a darkened, prison-like cell, Marianne (metonymically representing France) is enchained, but is on the verge of being liberated by a Hommen. Textual cues incite the reader-interlocutor to take up arms in her defense: these exhort sympathetic citizens to ‘Free democracy’ and ‘come to arms’ to defend a clearly battered, possibly violated Marianne. The entire scene is set against a backdrop projected as vérité, the truth of a France ravaged by gay marriage and its proponents, at the mercy of a Hommen savior. In both textual and visual communications, and certainly in the complex interplay of these, women are consistently cast in a subordinate or receptive role: even Marianne, a figure epitomizing the French Republic’s

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triumph over tyranny, is placed in a subservient position to the Hommen, visually below him, with bowed head, lexically his bride, grammatically his complement and object of his transitivity, and semantically the goal of his action. Repeated projections of Marianne stand in contrast to those of Feminists. In the description of linguistic evidence above, it was noted that this participant is presented as sectarian and in opposition to that which is both traditional and desired of women by the Hommen (and, putatively, by other men). These projections are reinforced by a number of visual images, such as Figure  3.14* (Anti-Femen protest [Website, 7 February 2013]), which mirrors the masocentric, if not explicitly misogynistic component of the Hommen discourse practice. The photo presented in Figure 3.14, which accompanied reporting of the group’s action against Femen demonstrators in Angers, is interesting for several reasons. Unlike many other visual statements addressing antagonistic participants (the Administration, LGBTQ), the viewer-receiver is not invited to respond, nor is any information provided about specific injury or harm. It is simply an imperative directed to the archetypal Feminist opponent, the Femen: rhabille-toi ou casse-toi (‘put your clothes back on or get the fuck out’). Feminists are not deemed worthy of more complex communication, just as in the purely textual elements of the corpus. Also interesting is formal and semantic reduction of the imperative: Feminists are a tu, singular and proximal, but also familiar and dismissive. Combined with the imperative, the use of tu bolsters the marginalization of Feminists, their protests and their voice: they are, after all, but a groupuscule extrémiste and minoritaire, a dégradation de la femme whose insistence on equality and participation – not to mention the form of these protests – results in harm to France, her families, her children and, perhaps most of all, her men. Finally, and certainly no less importantly, are those images alluding to the LGBTQ community and Gay Marriage. As with the linguistic component of the corpus, the number of images directly attending to these participants is surprisingly few and structurally simplistic, but highly informative. Numerous images containing the slogan ‘non au mariage gay’ (‘no to gay marriage’) and the like are noted, but one image in particular proves highly revelatory. This is provided in Figure  3.15* (Harming Children [Facebook and Tumblr, 20 November 2013]). In Figure  3.15, the image of a child is framed on the right by text reading, ‘Certains enfants n’ont pas accès à l’eau potable, d’autres à l’instruction. En France, on lui a retiré son droit d’avoir un père et une mère. Tuer les droits de l’enfant, c’est tuer l’enfant’. (‘Some children don’t have access

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to potable water, others to education. In France, their right to have a mother and father has been taken away. Killing children’s rights is killing children.’) On the left is the image of a bullet trailing mariage gay, aimed squarely at the child. Similar to the linguistic component of the corpus, children are transitively objectified by the design of this image: they are the object of harm done by the Administration, LGBTQ and Feminist subjects; they are the object of protection by Hommen; they are compared in this to children who are denied water or instruction, although in this case it is asserted that they are denied a mother and father; and in so doing, they are inserted into a frame of violence and death. Few components of the corpus make as succinct and clear a statement about how the Hommen conceive of gay marriage; fewer still require precious little by way of description or analysis to be understood. 3.5 Analysis

From the interleaved linguistic and visuo-linguistic patterns of the corpus a series of scripted ideational dialectics emerge: resistance and oppression, victimization and villainy, danger and defense. Collectively, these ideational schemata and their linguistic and visuo-linguistic actualizations are produced and consumed by proficient members of the speech community and contribute to both the conception and realization of that community, as well as the identities of and relations governing its members (Fairclough, 1992: 73–81; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 271). Fairclough’s (1992: 86–96) assertion that discourses are both constitutive and constituted underscores the fundamentally cultural nature of these acts: emerging from within a community, brought to life by its speakers, discourses subsequently contribute to this community and to these speakers’ understandings of themselves, and cannot be understood outside of the specific anthropological context in which they are actuated. The discourse of villainy, for example, is constructed around patterns ascribing values to and describing the activities of the Hollande administration as imposed and counter to popular will. This constitutes not only a conception of the governmental actors responsible for proposing and passing the loi Taubira – they are not hommes politiques pursuing a legal objective or even the more nuanced parlementaires or politiciens, but décideurs publics acting outside of democratic norms – it is also constitutive of same-sex marriage and adoption, situating these in the domain of oppression and anti-Republicanism. This likewise projects the Hommen as a defender of those values and institutions under attack. Moreover, the linguistic realization of discourse reflexively contributes to the constitution

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of language, itself. By framing the administration as casseurs and its work as condescendence, the referential content of that which is democratic and undemocratic, just and unjust is framed and formed: one member of the pair is brought into contiguity with the Hommen and their co-situated participants, including le pays réel and nous le peuple, whereas the other is ascribed to oppositional participants – le monde dégueulasse, les groupuscules extrémistes and la minorité embourgeoisée. It would be misleading to assume that these and other discourses originate with the Hommen, although the text in question is certainly demonstrative of innovative contributions to their forms and contemporary propagation: conservative, reactionary forces have long existed in the French political sphere, as have oppositions between that which is and is not considered to be democratic, in the spirit of Republican values, and so forth. The pertinent question for this analysis is thus not the origin of such metadiscourses, but what a close, linguistically grounded examination of these can offer by way of greater understanding of the constitutive enlanguaging of contemporary homophobia. The advantage to approaching any group and its communicative behavior through specific, quantifiable and qualifiable acts is that this allows investigation to transcend an anthropomorphized linguistic entity referred to as language, i.e. la langue, and to focus on behavior evidenced in la parole (viz. Saussure, 1962). This should not be taken to mean that communicative acts are dissociable from wider sociocultural meaning. Rather, it departs from the premise that texts and bounded linguistic acts contain emergent meanings on a number of levels, all of which are interleaved and interactive: utterances are not mere communicative units assembled like building blocks, but are the result of multiplex possibilities and choices – lexical, semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and (for oral language) phonological – having variable effect on the others and their semantic qualities, reflecting in part what Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 140) refer to as a dialectal relationship between lexico-grammatical forms and structures and social meanings. To understand communication as an intentional, rationally cohesive behavior it is not sufficient to look only at what an individual or a group says or writes: one must look beneath the surface and interrogate the component parts of linguistic action. From this, a number of discursive threads or patterns are distinguished. These involve on the most basic level a distinction between inclusive and exclusive forces, groups and individuals. Among the former are distinguished discourses of victimhood, opposition and resistance; among the latter are discourses of oppression, sectarianism and marginality. From a closer examination of

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the content and structure of these, inferences may be made as to the positioning of participants (both personal and conceptual) and the framing of issues from the Hommen perspective, leading to a richer understanding of the mental schemata, cognitive context and dynamic discourse ecology. In what follows, the description of Hommen corpus data serves as a springboard for an ecological understanding, within which the centrality of threatened-but-reactive masculinity is advanced. Prior to doing this, a brief review of the larger sociocultural and sociopolitical situation is warranted. 3.5.1 Homophobia in contemporary France

One of the few scholarly works looking squarely at the social, political and cultural histories of homosexuality in this context, Gunther (2009) represents an important point of departure for better understanding the shared cultural schemata and conceptualizations that subjacently scaffold the discursive practices of the Hommen and other anti-LGBTQ groups in modern France. In this work, which covers the period from 1942 (i.e. after the fall of the Third Republic) to the end of the last century, he identifies four interwoven Republican values as being active in LGBTQ marginalization, as well as in efforts to contest this: laïcité, somewhat poorly translated as secularism, a moray broadly defined as the vacuous religiosity of public space, i.e. religion is private and therefore absent in public forums; universalism, which stipulates that actions in and of the public domain must apply equally and to all; liberalism, from which it follows that for there to be a crime prosecuted by the public, state apparatus, there must be a victim; and a rigorous distinction between public and private, from which it is asserted that for there to be a victim, action and harm must be public, i.e. there are no private crimes. The question of victims and victimization, or the public harm of a communal actor wrought by public action, is central to Gunther’s understanding of the sociocultural backdrop affecting gays and lesbians in post-war France, the origin of which he situates in the catastrophic defeat of the Third Republic in 1940. At this point, and breaking with a long tradition whereby sexuality was viewed as a private matter (although non-normative acts were regularly oppressed through oblique means), the moral and political pundits of the Vichy regime formalized same-sex activity as a public crime, one having specific, if at times vaguely defined victims, notably minors and public order. Liberation and the subsequent re-establishment of democracy in the Fourth Republic did little to counter the public proscription of otherwise private, non-normative sexuality.

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Indeed, overt anti-gay policies continued to be introduced and written into law well into the Fifth Republic, a notable example of which is seen in the loi Mirguet (promulgated in 1960 and abrogated in 1980). This defined homosexuality, alongside prostitution, drug addiction and alcoholism, as a fléau social (‘social scourge’), further specifying homosexual acts to be outrages à la pudeur publique (‘affront to public decency’) and augmenting existing criminal sanctions for acts involving minors (then defined as under 21 years of age; Gunther, 2009: 20–24). Mirguet’s formalization of homosexuality as a public harm is strikingly similar to that evoked by the Hommen: that the harm done to children and to the public is left unspecified and unproblematized in these reactions to the loi Taubira does little to spoil the historical analogy. In the National Assembly’s debates of 1960, largely absent were explicit assertions of how homosexual activity was comparable to social ills like drug addiction and alcoholism, both having uncontroversial – and therefore of unnecessary explanation – health and social consequences. Similarly, the link between homosexual activity and offense to public decency was implicit and presumed: all homosexual acts were considered public, whether they took place behind closed doors or not (it is notable that heterosexual acts, private or public, were ignored by Mirguet). In 1960, these were assertions the veracity of which few questioned: one could simply equate homosexuality as injurious to minors and to society and expect that public opinion would reflexively concur, at least among a majority (see Hocquenghem, 1972: 42–49; Martel, 2008; Merrick & Ragan, 1996). Herein lies a crucial distinction with the present, however: unlike in decades past, the Hommen cannot rely on such prima facie acceptance of the public ill of homosexuality, but must make a broader case against their opponents and against same-sex marriage. To do this, they call upon a number of ideational threads active within the linguistic and cultural spaces of shared Frenchness, specifically the rejection of sectarianism, while also subtly stimulating subjacent schemata of threatened masculinity. Hommen discursive practices thus have long historical antecedence, even if they are newly packaged: it cannot be forgotten that the content of the proposal assumed to be the nexus of harm, i.e. the author of victimization, is the tangible, public institutionalization of homosexual relations and the framing of these as legally equivalent to heterosexual ones. Within Hommen social media practices, linguistic patterns evidence a clear split between inclusive nous participants and exclusive vous participants. Most obviously, the Administration is in the latter category, whereas the Hommen and, importantly, French Society are in the former.

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This has the effect of resituating Hollande, his ministers and those who supported the loi Taubira (a majority in the National Assembly and Senate) as sectarian, i.e. as removed from the public – in this instance, a public that is argued to be in the streets and demanding the opposite of what their government is doing. Schemata of sectarianism are reinforced throughout the text by specific formal proximations, notably by numerous evocations of the Administration as members of the Free Masonry. As it concerns the other major vous participants, LGBTQ and Feminists, lexical evocations of sectarianism are also fairly straightforward: rather than being simply presented as opponents having divergent, if perhaps disagreeable political views, they are denounced as groupuscule minoritaires and extrémistes. They are in the public space, but not of the public body. The actions of two organizations conflated with them, Act-UP and Femen, are also reiterated as being offensive to the putative majority. This is particularly the case for the latter group, whose bare-breasted protests are the object of repeated indignation on the part of the Hommen. That Feminists – especially ones specifically protesting traditional male privilege – and sexually non-conforming males should be the object of the Hommen’s invective cannot be considered accidental, but must be interpreted as a reaction to long-standing conceptualizations of male crisis (viz. Corbin, 2011; Revenin, 2011). Like other European societies (cf. Benadusi, 2005), the notion that culture is or was undergoing an effeminization has long had traction in modern France, having been a constant refrain in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and repeatedly echoed throughout the 20th century (Datta, 2000; Tamagne, 2011). Implicit within any such crisis is a presumption of male hegemony, which Bourdieu expresses as a reaction to the redefinition of man’s superior position in the social order, L’homme (vir) est un être particulier qui se voit comme être universel (homo), qui a le monopole, en fait et en droit, de l’humain, c’est-à-dire de l'universel, qui est socialement autorisé à se sentir porteur de la forme entière de la condition humaine. (Bourdieu, 1990: 7) Man (vir) is a particular being who sees himself as a universal being (homo), which has the monopoly, factually and lawfully, on humanity, that is, on universality, and is socially entitled to believe himself the bearer of the human condition in its entirety.

By extension of the above, linguistic hegemony can be considered the assertion of power through and over discursive acts and communicative

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praxes: it is males who decide what is and is not appropriate, desirable, admitted or normal, as well as the scope and content of these values (see also Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The so-called crisis of French masculinity has been described as a reaction to the erosion of traditional gender roles, lower autochthonous birth rates (as opposed to those of immigrants, especially ones of non-European and non-Christian origin) and the challenges of modernism to traditional male hegemony in both public and private spheres (see e.g. Schor, 2001; Worton, 1998). While it is far beyond the scope of the present study to fully attend to the question of masculine crisis, let alone its sociocultural particularities, it may be noted that the underlying content and impetus of Hommen discursive practices are neither innovative nor without well-documented historical antecedence. The target of these, as well as assertions about this target, are nonetheless distinct: whereas prior generations focused on external enemies (e.g. the German invader of 19th- and 20th-century wars) and other contemporary movements activate ideologies of nation and class (e.g. the frank xenophobia of the French right wing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries), Hommen discursive practices reflect a reaction to crisis that is directed inward, targeting persons who are otherwise incontrovertible members of French society. Thus, through the externalization or marginalization of their enemies – by making the proximal nous into an explicitly distal vous – the Hommen can continue to maintain a veneer of universalité and Republicanism, while directing their rage and actions toward fellow French citizens. Finally, and equally congruous to the question of diminished male hegemony, or at least to the redefinition of de facto male social dominance predicated on a rigorous distinction between male and female roles, are questions of filiation and marriage. Much of the scholarly work examining filiation has been comparative and exploratory in nature, e.g. Fassin (2001), who contrasts reactions to same-sex marriage in the United States and France. Fassin (2009, 2010, 2014) reviews the position of filiation in French legal terms, which he states to be at the heart of hostility to same-sex marriage, as opposed to the United States, where this derives from resistance to expansion beyond traditional heterosexual boundaries. His work asserts that the very notion of filiation, as opposed to progeny, has been subject to a discourse of ‘biologization’, i.e. it has been decoupled from the legality of marriage and put into the framework of citizenship. He argues that this should be understood in the backdrop of anti-immigrant sentiment and the racialization

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of ‘Frenchness’, especially in a time when immigration to France is strongly associated with persons of non-European, non-Christian backgrounds. He hypothesizes that the shift to a biological model is not only meant to deny gay rights, but is part of a move to biologize citizenship and subsume filiation within the social, if not legal scaffold of genetic parentage. Fassin frames the opposition between jus sanguinis and jus solis as deriving from an ethnic crisis, exemplified most famously in measures designed to ensure DNA and biological kinship among those petitioning for reunification migration policies and the legal normalization of family members. Similarly, Borrillo (2009) looks at the definition or redefinition of filiation as biological, rather than civil, and the development of a so-called biological truth (see also Borrillo, 2014). He contrasts the historical roles of father and mother, with the former ascribed the task of ‘accepting’ a child, i.e. of bringing her or him within the scope of legal (e.g. name, nationality) and cultural (e.g. legitimacy, inclusion) structures. According to Borrillo (2009: 365), and harking back to the theme of masculinity in crisis, ‘le destin féminin [s’attache] à la nature… [le] masculin à la culture’ (‘female destiny derives from nature… male from culture’): mothers give birth to children, whereas fathers bear forth citizens. These mores have been increasingly and directly challenged in recent decades. Only recently have mothers been able to establish paternity, even in the absence of a male partner’s desire to assert this (i.e. removing the male privilege of accepting a child), and convey citizenship (i.e. removing the male as arbiter between child and nation). Further undermining traditional male hegemony is a mother’s ability to terminate an unwanted pregnancy without her male partner’s agreement or knowledge, thus giving her a measure of control over nature and expanding her role beyond traditional lines, as her decision to continue a pregnancy amounts to a usurping of the previous male role. In this context of masculinity in crisis and male hegemony under challenge, same-sex marriage can be seen as all the more threatening: this is an institution opening another possibility of non-male cultural filiation, undermining the privileged position of heterosexual males as the brokers of rights and belonging, and adding to the long-established list of insults that the Hommen – and other conservative voices – see in divorce, abortion and contraception. In effect, the rights of women and the rights of homosexual persons (whether gay males or lesbians) are equal in terms of their public challenge to the putatively natural, biological order enjoyed by men for so many centuries.

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3.5.2 Positioning and repositioning

Already faced by the erosion of their traditional hegemonic grip on social institutions and familial structures, groups such as the Hommen must confront a series of additional challenges when inserting themselves into the debate around marriage, family and filiation, and the loi Taubira. Within the context of a laïc, universalisant political framework, they must make the case for gay marriage and its resulting opening of hitherto exclusively heterosexual civil institutions to same-sex couples as being first and foremost a public act, something generally incontrovertible to all sides of the debate. Secondly, and with more difficulty, they must establish this public act as harmful to a definable victim, while accomplishing this in such a way that it is compatible with shared cultural schemata pertaining to Frenchness, Republican values and democracy. One public victim is asserted throughout the corpus: children are continually portrayed as being objects in need of defense, as being harmed by deleterious public acts (i.e. of gay marriage) and as being denied the putative right to (biological) progenitors. With the exception of the last point, itself open to debate given the traditions of French jurisprudence vis-à-vis filiation versus engendrement (Borrillo, 2009, 2014), the assertion of children as victims is assumed and asserted prima facie, with no attempt to define the content or extent of any harm done. Beyond this, an argument of subjacent harm to children might also be made: if filiation and parentage are conflated, and the male’s role is assumed to cultural, rather than simply a provider of biological material, children are cut off from the vital link to citizenship and to full membership in the community (see Perreau [2014b] for in depth discussion of issues surrounding concepts of parenting and parentalité). Beyond Children, three additional victims can be identified in the corpus, although these are neither as blatantly, nor as repetitively asserted: French society in general, Republicanism and the French male. The first participant-victim is claimed to be harmed not by the institution of gay marriage per se, but by the qualities of its introduction and promulgation, i.e. as being forced upon le peuple – or at least those of bon sens – who are purportedly disgusted by the loi Taubira and its passage. The second is situated as a victim, albeit an impersonal one, following a related logic: it is not the law itself that has abandoned democracy, but the mechanics of its implementation and enactment. Finally, and perhaps more obliquely, the corpus establishes the French male as an omnipresent victim. His rights and body are explicitly harmed by an overreaching and dictatorial administration and its police politique,

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while his hegemony is obviated by all those who would question his right to determine cultural morays and shape institutions and conceptualizations. In essence, he is victimized by the realignment of cultural schemata that were in the past understood to ascribe him a preeminent position of agency and transitive capital, not just over women, but over society as a whole. By co-opting shared cultural conceptualizations of oppression and reactivating these through the linguistic patterns of their discursive practice, the Hommen position themselves, and emblematically the French male, as the ultimate victims of the loi Taubira and the changes these policies institutionalize. They are persecuted physically by the Hollande government and its police politique, with their members presented as victimes and gazés, and metaphysically as French citizens – and as expressly male ones, at that – who are the enfants du divorce en masse et de la gay pride (‘children of mass divorce and gay pride’). This position is reinforced on multiple levels: in their projection as a first-person participant and their concurrent proximation to society (viz. nous le peuple); as syntactic objects of an administrative subject; and as the semantic patient-goal of a dictatorial government led by décideurs, casseurs and those who embody le monde dégueulasse. This supposed subjugation of the Hommen, as well as that of Society and of French Republican values, is reinforced by nominal and verbal taxonomies, not to mention the continual linguo-visual representation of (white, French, putatively heterosexual) men as the enslaved or murdered victims of a dictatorial political elite. Most notably, the Hommen are positioned in stark contrast to the Hollande administration, i.e. to the explicit agent of their oppression, and as a counter to LGBTQ groups and Feminists, whom they position at the margins vis-à-vis Society. It cannot be ignored that, within this worldview, Children and Marriage are harmed, as well. The latter are clearly situated as the objects of all agentive participants: they are structured as recipients of action, whether as the patient-goal of material relations connecting them to same-sex marriage or working feminists, or as the receptive benefactor of Hommen resistance. Importantly, the presumptive opponents of the group – LGBTQ a­ctivists and Feminists – are not positioned as the semantic oppressors of the Hommen, a task reserved for the imposing Administration and its Police: LGBTQ and Feminist participants do not target the strong, defiant French male who is épousé [par] la Belle République (‘wed to the Beautiful Republic’). They take only as transitive objects those participants who cannot defend themselves, as they are either too young

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or lacking in physical personhood: Children and the Republic. Thus, even in affording agency and subject-hood to distally positioned participants, the Hommen deny their effectiveness, ascribe them deleterious qualities and emphasize their cowardice and sectarianism (i.e. their dissociation from the civic body). This marginalization is deeply ingrained within the linguistic structures of the textual corpus: while these participants may be agentive, while these serve as grammatical subjects and while they may enjoy transitive relations, they are not positioned as equals. The Hommen are antagonistic to an all-powerful government and police politique; LGBTQ and Feminist groups are antagonistic to the innocent and those institutions presumptively tasked with protecting them. Unlike Society, Republican institutions, Children and the Family, the Hommen alone are able to defy their oppression, repositioning themselves as combatant opponents in their own right or, in their own words, une Résistance, frequently using a capital letter in a clear evocation of historical significance. Thus, they are not only persecuted alongside Children, Family and the Republic; they emerge as the saviors of other, proximally positioned participants. Corpus data are highly suggestive that only the Hommen are positioned as agentive actor-protectors of others – even Society has little agency or grammatical functionality with regard to the presumed victims. Thus, while there are many who are ostensibly wronged by the loi Taubira and its consequences, there is only one participant who repositions himself with sufficient transitivity to defy this oppression. In the first instance, this involves counterpositioning against an immediate oppressor, i.e. the Administration. It also comprises a repositioning directed at those who would attack other, non-agentive, objectified victims. In repositioning themselves, the Hommen cement their dialectal relation with inclusive, proximal participants. They are the protector of children (‘tu l’[l’enfant] touches, je te bouffe’; ‘you touch him, I take you down [lit. eat you]’), traditional conceptions of family and society (‘nous ne lâcherons jamais pour défendre le mariage et l’avenir des enfants’; we will never stop defending marriage and children’s future’) and the French nation (‘nous n’abandonnerons pas la France’; ‘we will not abandon France’) on the one hand. On the other hand, they are a resistance against tyranny (‘nous sauvons la démocratie’; ‘we are saving democracy’) and the LGBTQ community (‘les Hommen s’attaquent à Act-Up’; ‘the Hommen are tackling Act-Up’), unmanly men (‘tremblez les hommes de paille’; ‘tremble, you straw men’) and unfeminine feminists (‘rhabille-toi ou casse-toi’; ‘get dressed or get the fuck out’).

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3.5.3 Framing

If positioning describes the establishment of antagonistic and sympathetic relations among participants, framing describes the assertion and propagation of those truths held by the participant-creators of discourse. In the Hommen corpus, framing concerns marriage and filiation, the nature and principles of French democracy, as well as the institutions implicated in this, crime or those actions that transcend the social contract and the complex relationship between society, the individual and identity. Pertinent to the conceptual content of marriage, family and filiation, the Hommen’s framing of these involves little nuance in the text. Like their counterparts in MPT and other conservative organizations, the Hommen afford no possibility that marriage can be anything other than heterosexual: indeed, all mentions of same-sex marriage are dismissed, e.g. as hypothétique, or are negated, e.g. ‘nous refusons le mariage gay’ (‘we refuse gay marriage’). At the same time, they limit comments on traditional marriage to formulaic declarations about the nature of progenation and child-rearing, e.g. ‘il faut […] un homme et une femme pour l’élever [l’enfant]’ (‘a man and a woman are needed to raise a child’) or ‘il faut un homme et une femme pour faire un enfant’ (‘a man and a woman are needed to make a child’). Importantly, they assert the heterosexual institution of matrimony to be natural and essential, an ordre naturel and the cellule souche de la société, reflecting a more generalized conceptualization of marriage seen in France and elsewhere (viz. Fassin, 2009, 2014; see also Chapter 4). It should come as no surprise then that any attempt to modify these presumptively shared schemata should be consequently framed as both unnatural and injurious, viz. les terroristes anti-filiation (in reference to LGBTQ and Feminists) who are set to ‘ruiner la famille’ (‘ruin the family’), which is in danger of being détruite. In effect, the issue is not simply one of not allowing same-sex couples access to an institution from which they were heretofore excluded, but one of preserving French society and the natural order at its foundation. Similar to the Family, Society and Republican institutions are framed as the extension not of common values or as an institutional manifestation of universalism, but as the expression of popular will so widely shared and unquestioned that it requires no elaboration. Indeed, the conceptualization of wider society and of democracy as being inseparable from a numeric majority can be seen in the most basic nominal representations, notably as le peuple, les français, la masse or une majorité silencieuse. Without attending to the issues of how one might define a majority or to the vagaries of public opinion polling, it is noted that the Hommen make no mention of the democratic process by which the administration they

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consider oppressive came to power, nor of the institutional mechanisms that constrain and canalize that power. Rather, they frame any action or sentiment at odds with their own to be in conflict with the will of the masses. The veracity or size of these masses is, for this analysis at least, of little importance: that democracy is framed entirely as the expression of popular will is certainly at odds with a long history of French political and social thought, and serves to reframe Republican institutions not as guarantors of liberty and inclusion, but as the institutionalized expression of brute political power. Thus, while the Hommen may explicitly activate discourses of resistance, consistently asserting themselves as inheritors of la Résistance of 1940–1945, that which they are defending is framed in a manner very much in line with civil society as promulgated during the Pétain regime, i.e. as an expression of traditionalism, majority rule over minority interest and of an explicitly paternalistic social order (see e.g. Duchen, 2003; Jennings, 1994; Muel-Dreyfus, 1996). These assertions as to the nature of marriage, family, filiation and democracy necessarily engender the circuitous reframing of universalism, notably those public actions that are considered harmful and subject to public control (Gunther, 2009: 14–17). In this respect, framing results in the indictment of the Administration, LGBTQ and Feminist participants whose actions are explicitly public – and intentionally provocative, in the case of Femen – but which might otherwise be considered as lacking a public victim, i.e. as being distasteful or unwelcome to some persons, but not a priori criminal. Within the corpus, however, these actions are asserted to be patently injurious and damaging to all persons and collectives, i.e. to be acts of criminality and proscribable. For instance, the Administration is shown to be not just ignoring popular opinion (e.g. ‘vous foutez au panier une pétition historique de 700 000 signatures’; ‘you throw away [vulgar] an historic petition of 700,000 signatures’), but to engage in public violence (e.g. ‘vous violentez nous le peuple’; ‘you violate [rape] us people’) and suppression (‘il [le gouvernement] emprisonne des opposants au mariage gay’; ‘it [the administration] imprisons the opponents of gay marriage’). At the same time, LGBTQ activists are asserted to dare ‘toucher aux enfants’ (‘molest children’) and ‘s’attaquer aux plus faibles’ (‘take it out on the weakest’), and Feminists to engage in actions violentes and to be une provocation honteuse aux yeux des enfants (‘a shameful provocation in the eyes of children’). Hand in hand with the positioning of these as oppressors of the Hommen, Society, Children and the Family, their actions – and in the case of Feminists, their very existence – are framed as being illicit, violent undertakings that result in specific harm.

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That LGBTQ and feminist activism, not to mention progressive governmental policies should be framed as violent furthermore implicates shared cultural schemata pertaining to French identity and citizenship. In the corpus, the locus of these actions is specifically asserted to be not only in minority identity politics, but also to be co-situated with sectarian particularism, i.e. to be a violation of bedrock Republican values. This is accomplished through the oppositional paradigm of nous versus vous and with conflicting semantic taxonomies, as well as through the explicit association of distal vous participants with entities and structures that can only connote sectarianism. The Administration and its leaders are subsumed within references to Franc-Maçons, particularly the Grand Ordre de France, and asserted to be held hostage to anti-family lobbies and sects, whereas LGBTQ and Feminists are groupuscules, terroristes and extrémistes. In so doing, the Hommen frame administrative policy, as well as minority and feminist demands, as more than just contrary to tradition or bourgeois morays, but as dangerously factional. This abnegates any possible sanctioned disagreement in the political realm, reframing the debate around gay marriage and adoption not as one of opposing, but still democratic or civil views, but as one accepting the bedrock principles of French laïcité and universalité (i.e. the Hommen) against all that defies them. Finally, the Hommen view of the broader social debate surrounding the loi Taubira and its consequences should be understood through the interleaved frames described above. By asserting that same-sex marriage and adoption are not simply unwanted changes to society, but criminal acts with specific victims, and that the origin of these actions derives from anti-French, anti-universalist sectarianism, the Hommen reframe the wider debate as a struggle for both natural and moral orders. In so doing, it should be of no surprise that they are then able to cast the loi Taubira and gay marriage as equivalent to slavery and the death penalty: indeed, the group repeatedly states that ‘nous avons aboli l’esclavage, nous avons aboli la peine de mort, nous allons abolir le mariage gay’ (‘we abolished slavery, we abolished the death penalty, we are going to abolish gay marriage’). They are confronted by un-French, undemocratic elected officials pursuing a particularistic agenda, fueled by the actions of unmanly men and insufficiently feminine females whose objective is to destroy democracy and harm family and children, all of which result in the marginalization of those citizens who are implicationally asserted and explicitly structured as being naturally specified in a hegemonic relation to the wider society and its constituents: the heterosexual French male.

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3.5.4 Mapping the Hommen discursive ecology

Consideration of the means by which the Hommen position themselves and others, alongside the mechanisms through which marriage, family and democracy are reframed and recast is foundational to an ecological understanding of the Hommen discourse practices. This is sketched out in Figure  3.16, a Gedanken conceptualizing the internal

Figure 3.16  The ecology of Hommen action and reaction

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ideational ecology deduced from analysis of the Hommen corpus and emergently established through analysis of participant positioning and issue framing. The widest possible structure in this model is the sphere in which licit and hegemonically sanctioned interactions occur. Within this circle, first-person participants are included and second-person participants are excluded: the latter are those individuals and associations that are cast as sectarian and unwanted, i.e. outside the accepted bounds of French public inclusion, as well as other third-person participants. Along with LGBTQ and Feminists, dictatorial politicians of the Administration are situated as oppositional vous, lacking positive agency or limited to that which has a deleterious effect on the wider contextual participants, whereas at the center of Society are (traditional) Marriage, Family and the French Republic. The male citizens of this Republic are constructed as its bulwark: they are the first victims of any attacks and the reactive defenders of a naturalized status quo. These males are the only ones whose agency and subject-hood involve action, positive and protective assertions, and are scripted as respecting the established frames of democracy and the natural order. The position of participants and the framing of associated issues serve to motivate notions of harm, here indicated by a thick, upward arrow, directed at compositional elements of civil society and, because of this, at the nous social, itself. External participant agency and action, understood as violent and dictatorial, target Children and Family, and tangentially violate Society and the Republic. This is construed as an indirect attack on the very notion of Frenchness and, perhaps more importantly, on the male hegemony heretofore subject to an unquestioned responsibility for its propagation, for the definition of its content and for the elaboration of its institutions. In the face of public acts of aggression against such Frenchness, linguistically manifest as relations and grammatical structures involving different participants, as well as referential taxonomies situating them and framing their existence and activity, only a subset of men – certainly not the hommes de paille or lâches that occupy the Hollande administration – react, repositioning themselves as a resistance to un-French factions acting outside the scope of democracy. Depicted in Figure  3.16 with downward arrows, this reaction has as its target the personal and collective sectarian participants: the Administration, LGBTQ and Feminist participants. This action musclée, militante and déterminée is further associated with the very heart of French mythology: it is simultaneously the bridegroom

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of the Republic and her savior, reinforcing the masculinization of the Résistance, as well as its domination over his bride. France and citizens are attacked, as are the Hommen themselves, but only the latter have sufficient transitive potentiality within the discourse ecology to come to her and their rescue. Far from being a simple collection of statements reflecting objective reality, the linguistic patterns observed in and the cultural schema deduced from the textual and visual corpus are one of reactionary victimization. The Hommen do not inhabit a world in which they are simply the objects of public crimes, but one in which they resist these in order to preserve a societal structure that they consider under attack, presumptively because they are no longer its authors or gatekeepers. As such, it is possible to understand Hommen discursive praxes as reflecting deeply seated and implicitly expressed homophobic misogyny, a claim that would be difficult to dismiss even without closer examination of the structures of this text, as well as a particularly situated manifestation of reactionary masculinity. After all, at the heart of the matter is not a demonstrated, tangible danger to children, society or family, but a threat to the previously unquestioned privilege of the French male that is the object of resistance. From this perspective, the loi Taubira and the ensemble of political and social forces leading to its proposal and passage were not simply promoting same-sex marriage and adoption, they challenged the foundational conception of what it means to be nous le peuple, as well as to be nous and le peuple, and the relation of a specifically male nous to the imaginary community of le peuple. 3.6 Summary

The Hommen are not the first, nor are they likely to be the last group promoting reactionary views of gender, sexuality and family in France or elsewhere. They were certainly not the largest anti-Taubira faction, nor were they widely covered by traditional media outlets. Small comfort indeed may come from the observation that they were continually marginalized and their actions stigmatized in mainstream press coverage. Furthermore, as of late 2014, the group had largely ceased activity, suggesting that they either lack sufficient following or are inadequately organized to enable continued protest. Other conservative movements – especially the MPT – have been much more widely subject to scrutiny and scholarly study, perhaps because of their deft use of mainstream

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rhetoric, incorporating young and old, male and female, progressive and conservative into their public image, carried forward by their leading spokesperson, one-time comedienne Frigide Barjot (see Delahaie, 2015; Lestrade, 2012). Perhaps because of this, studies of conservatism and of reactions to same-sex marriage in France have not been exactly wanting. What then is the interest of a linguistic analysis of this apparently marginal group’s social media messages? How can linguistic investigation into such communicative praxes, emerging from the periphery of conservatism and populism, contribute to our understanding of homophobia, both within and beyond this setting? Any response to these questions must keep in mind the complexity of discourse as actuated language practice, testifying to the dual tension of linguistic communication. Firstly, it cannot be forgotten that language is not sentient: despite the habit of linguists and others who refer to the objects of their study in ways that render them quasi-sentient, and leaving aside the much larger issue of other forms of symbolic communication, none would claim that language can exist without human actors or that linguistic agency arises apart from those who accomplish linguistic activity. In short, language does nothing without humans, although humans might arguably do a great deal without language. At the same time, linguistic systems constrain the ways in which humans communicate, both with themselves and others, although not inevitably: people have choices, but these choices are scaffolded by a myriad of structures and conventions, all of which are born of, projected within and infused by cultural experience. Thus, examination of one body of discursive practice and the means by which it is made real provides a crucial avenue into the understanding – and ultimate disruption – of the mental schemata that are putatively its source and fount. In the case of the Hommen, this discursive practice and the ecology it constitutes, and which is subsequently constituted by it, are not simple or straightforward manifestations of a homophobic stance, i.e. one involving a fear or distaste for homosexuals (attitudes that are no doubt present), but represent the embodiment and enlanguaging of reaction: reaction to being victimized; reaction to the undermining of traditional authority; reaction to the inclusion of groups and persons in a civic body whose definition is the antithesis of this authority. The sort of close, linguistically grounded examination pursued here allows for greater understanding of both the constitutive element of communication – grammatical, semantic and pragmatic structures – and the epiphenomenal nature of the communicated – the emergent discursive whole

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born of these. This type of unraveling of language and the dissection of linguistic evidence implicated by it affords much greater insight into how homophobia plays out, casting light on distinct and insidious forms of anti-LGBTQ animus, and, in so doing, opens greater possibilities for discursive disruption in the future. Notes *

Due to copyright issues Figures 3.7–3.15 could not be published in this book. To view the images please go to https://deh.ucdavis.edu/images. (1) An earlier, abbreviated version of this analysis appears in Gender & Language 13 (1), 94–121. (2) Ifop 2012 (http​://ww​w.ifo​p.fr/​media​/poll​/1956​-1-st​udy_f​i le.p​df), BVA 2012 (http​:// ww​w.bva​.fr/d​ata/s​ondag​e/son​dage_​fiche​/1077​/fich​ier_b​va_ac​tue80​33.pd​f). (3) Not all UMP deputies opposed Taubira: five voted in favor of the final package of legislation, with another five abstaining. (4) ‘Hommen’ has no precise English equivalent, although its derivation from homme ‘man’ is quite clear. The name is calqued on that of the Femen (viz. femme ‘woman’), a group founded in Ukraine in 2008 to protest sex trafficking and tourism, now based in Paris and frequently the object of the group’s scorn (see www.femen.org). The latter are known for ‘sextremist’ protest tactics, including demonstrations with provocative messages written on their exposed torsos, a practice that establishes another parallel between the two groupes militants. (5) See e.g. http:​//www​.buzz​feed.​com/s​karla​n/fra​nces-​extre​mely-​homoe​rotic​-anti​-gay-​ prote​sters​-stri​ke-ag​ai#.u​fwlaK​WOd, http:​//www​.thew​ire.c​om/gl​obal/​2013/​06/ fr​ances​-flam​boyan​t-shi​rtles​s-ant​i-gay​-prot​ester​s-are​-eyei​ng-to​ur-de​-fran​ce/66​172/.​ (6) Initial consultation of media 2 January 2014; the last consultation of sources included in analysis 15 March 2015. Data are referenced throughout according to source (Facebook, Tumblr, Website) and posting date. (7) A person, usually anonymous, who posts offensive or inflammatory content in a public or group forum. (8) Website: all translations in this chapter are of the author. Unless otherwise noted, data are presented in their original form, including any non-standard spellings, uses of capitalization or neologisms. (9) Also noted were a small number of references to Nicolas, a protagonist in the 2013 Roland Garros disruption. (10) In French, these can be similar to passives, using the past participle of transitive verbs for which the grammatical subject is the semantic patient, such as the Hommen being arrêtés (‘arrested’), where the putative semantic agent (the police) is uninstantiated. (11) The Marseillais is the national anthem of France and also refers to the inhabitants of Marseille: use of this in reference to a protest in that city is a very obvious play on words, bringing them into contiguity with Republican institutions. (12) Sporadically in English in the original. (13) The image of Marianne (a young woman) appears on stamps, government seals and public edifices, and is one of the most frequent metonyms associated with the French state.

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(14) The Administration and a number of ranking officials were evoked in association with les Franc-Maçons (‘Free Masons’), the sectarian nature of which reflects LGBTQ and Feminist representations. (15) There was one instantiation of nos amis de la police (‘our friends in the police’), in which the Hommen lauded police inaction during an event; individual personnel are described as bien élevés (‘well-raised/polite’) in one additional instance. (16) Direct and indirect object complements are conflated; reflexive and pronominal verbal constructions, e.g. ‘les Hommen se fâchent’ (‘[lit.] the Hommen anger themselves’), are counted as subjects. (17) Given the anonymous nature of the group and the fact that they have all but entirely disbanded, it was impossible to gain permission for their inclusion in print publication. (18) In France, marriages are officiated by civil authorities, typically mayors or their deputies.

4 Le Sentinelle in Piedi: Naturalizing and Denying Homophobia

Siamo in piazza per il bene anche di chi ha la coscienza addormentata, di chi ci contesta perché vittima cosciente o incosciente dell’ideologia. Vegliamo perché sia tutelata l’essenza dell’uomo, vegliamo per la ragione, vegliamo in silenzio perché emerga la voce della verità presente nel cuore di ciascuno, anche nel tuo. Comunicato stampa, 27 March 2015 Whatever is lacking for a thing’s natural perfection may be called a vice. Augustine (De libero arbitrio, iii)

This chapter examines the public communications of the Sentinelle in Piedi (‘Watchmen Standing’), an Italian populist organization that has come to epitomize non-violent, supposedly moderate opposition to progressive projects pertaining to family and sexuality, notably same-sex unions, non-biological gender identities and non-traditional family configurations. This chapter presents one of few studies of homophobic language in contemporary Italy (cf. Barbagli & Colombo, 2001; Pedote, 2011) and one of even fewer considering the formal and structural foundations of these communicative acts (cf. Accolla, 2015). As with other chapters, what follows may be considered a self-standing work of interest to scholars of modern Italian language and culture, or it may be read within the wider scholarly arc of this book, as a practical application of the ecological approach outlined in Chapter 2. If only cursorily considering the surface form of their public communications, the Sentinelle might at first blush seem familiar to Anglophone readers, having the veneer of civility that has been documented in studies of other groups (see e.g. Peterson, 2010, 2011; Seals, 2012; Speer & Potter, 2000). However, they distinguish themselves in key ways, not least of which is a distinctive conceptualization of homophobia and the assertion of harm deriving from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) visibility. Through a close examination of two years of Sentinelle social media 111

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postings, it is shown that the lexico-grammatical structures through which these discourse practices are actuated de-structure homosexuality and non-biologically determined gender as positive attributes and co-structure or restructure an essentialist, male–female dualism reminiscent of Aquinian doctrine as the foundation of human society and self-understanding. This effectively obviates LGBTQ claims to equality, visibility and inclusion, while also allowing the Sentinelle to deny their homophobic stance. The Sentinelle thus position themselves as arbiters of civility and acceptable familial and social institutions, and in so doing cast their opponents as victims of a flawed identity and damaged psychology, dangerous to themselves, children, the family and civil society. 4.1 Background

The first decades of the current century witnessed a flurry of parliamentary activity concerning Italy’s LGBTQ communities and citizens, some of which were eventually successful and many others of which were not. Among various disegni di legge (DDL, ‘law proposals’), two became conspicuous flashpoints for populist reaction. Ultimately tabled through parliamentary maneuvers, DDL Scalfarotto would have defined and punished acts motivated by homophobia and transphobia, including verbal aggression or invective, and also introduced gender and sexual orientation-related subject matter (e.g. co-parenting) in public school curricula. Ultimately approved in modified form in May 2016, DDL Cirinnà established civil unions, a step that brought Italy in line with nearly all of Western Europe by affording same-sex couples substantive legal recognition, albeit without the totality of the rights and responsibilities included in marriage, an institution that remains restricted to opposite-sex couples.1 To understand the Sentinelle’s discursive practice requires foremost consideration of the historical particularity of Italy, notably the social and political situation of its sexual minorities. Compared to its European neighbors, it would be difficult to classify Italy as gay friendly in word or in deed (viz. Malagreca, 2007; Rossi Barilli, 1999; Winkler & Strazio, 2014). As of the writing of this chapter, and in stark contrast to nearly all other Western European democracies, the country does not recognize same-sex marriage, its laws specifically proscribe co-parent adoption (although several cases have been approved by courts, forming legal precedent) and its criminal code includes no explicit means to address, let alone punish, crimes perpetrated against an individual or group based on perceptions of or hostility to sexual or gender identities. In the face of mounting pressure from within and beyond the country, much was expected from the center-left government of Matteo

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Renzi, Presidente del Consiglio (equivalent to Prime Minister, i.e. head of government) from February 2014 to December 2016. Indeed, one of the primary pledges of Renzi and his ministers was to shepherd through the country’s somewhat Byzantine political machine the already promulgated DDL Scalfarotto and another proposition, eventually emerging as DDL Cirinnà, providing for civil unions modelled on Germany’s Eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft (‘Registered Life Partnerships’). Unsurprisingly, opposition to such prospects was quick to emerge from the official and unofficial organs of the Catholic Church, whose relationship with the nominally secular Italian Republic is one of long-standing tension, complicity and complexity (McCarthy, 2000; Winkler & Strazio, 2014). These notably involved repeated admonitions from Cardinal Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, to avoid the establishment of any institution that would compare same-sex unions to traditional, heterosexual marriage. Other resistance came from organized political factions, especially the reactionary right wing Fratelli d’Italia (‘Brothers of Italy’), whose platform includes overtly xenophobic and neo-fascist pillars. More moderated disapproval was also seen within nearly all established political camps, including the Movimento Cinque Stelle (‘Five-Star Movement’) once headed by former comedian Beppe Grillo, whose somewhat haphazard anti-establishment populism combines elements from across sociopolitical spectra and traditions (and which, along with the hard-right Lega, succeeded in forming a tenuous coalition government in May 2018). Most opposition from established political circles concerned provisions for stepchild or second-parent adoption (ultimately stripped from DDL Cirinnà), whereas others expressed reticence about the lack of moral opt-outs afforded to civil servants, also pressuring parliament to include a formal declaration of the non-equivalency of civil unions and (traditional) marriage. Beyond these issues, the bulk of overt hostility to the recognition of diritti e tutele (‘rights and protections’) of persons based on gender and sexual identity remained at the political fringe. In the public arena, however, populist reaction took on a distinctly different form under the aegis of a new and putatively apolitical laico (‘nonconfessional’) group known as le Sentinelle in Piedi. 4.1.1 Language of the silent vigil

At first blush, the Sentinelle appear conservative, but not homophobic, taking care even to denounce forms of violence directed at LGBTQ persons. However, few can deny that the group is resolutely anti-gay given even the most cursory examination of their communications: while it is difficult to ‘see’ this homophobia through specific word

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or deed, it is not difficult to ‘hear’ the group’s animosity toward the normalization of same-sex relationships, gender equality, transgender rights and a host of related issues. Drawing inspiration from the French Veilleurs, a short-lived association emerging in the wake of the loi Taubira (see Perreau, 2016), the ­Sentinelle are nonetheless different in focus, method and message, presenting a distinct face of opposition to same-sex marriage, civil unions, co-parenting, gender identification and non-traditional means of parenting, most notably in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. Like the Veilleurs, Sentinelle stage their events in piazze, the central squares of larger towns and cities that are closely associated with civic and political life, very frequently physically adjacent to real or symbolic centers of power and authority. Unlike the Veilleurs, who were composed of mostly younger males, the Sentinelle are made up of men and women of all ages and backgrounds, although firsthand observation by this author in several cities and those covered in traditional press outlets suggest that middle-aged and older persons are disproportionately represented. At events organized weeks in advance and widely publicized through social media, individual Sentinelle stand approximately one to two meters apart from one another and read silently as a means of protest against what is announced, via select spokespersons handing out leaflets, to be an immoral and undemocratic infringement on individual morality and civil liberty. Sentinelle are discouraged from speaking to the press and counter-protesters – at least in the name of the organization – and generally follow this protocol: virtually all official communication is controlled by the group organizers and channeled through the group’s website, as well as a limited number of social media venues, notably an official YouTube channel including around a dozen heavily edited videos, most of which recap major gatherings, but add little substance to the debate or message.2 And although there is a group Facebook page, it bears a distinctive, overtly hostile and reactionary tone, mostly consisting of links to other anti-LGBTQ activists in Italy and beyond, journalistic and quasi-journalistic sources of news and non-moderated comments: this portal appears to be beyond the tight control of the group’s leaders or, at the very least, follows a markedly different tactic than the carefully controlled communication characteristic of the linguistic performances analyzed here. For these reasons, Facebook data were not included in the present chapter’s examination. From a number of points of view, the Sentinelle constitute a unique – and uniquely interesting – populist reaction to fuller LGBTQ participation in the civic body. Firstly, they are among the few non-partisan

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groups operating in Italy: while the Fratelli and many Lega affiliates resisted DDL Scalfarotto and Cirinnà (along with all other pro-LGBTQ legislation, for that matter), only the Sentinelle remain at arm’s length from established political parties and blocs, nearly all of whom are splintered between disparate, at times contradictory sub-factions: even the Five Star Movement has transformed itself into a political force whose action was decisive in DDL Cirinnà being stripped of stepchild adoption provisions during its senatorial review in early 2016. At the same time, the Sentinelle overtly distance themselves from the Catholic Church and its dogmas, making concerted efforts to highlight their supposed secularity by including Jewish, Muslim and atheist adherents in videos, brochures and, especially, website content. Like few other populist groups, the Sentinelle concomitantly deny their homophobic stances by taking facile pro-LGBTQ positions, notably calling out acts of violence, while opposing any and all measures that would provide greater protections to and inclusion in public life of LGBTQ citizens. Summarily, the Sentinelle constitute a fascinating example of populist homophobia, as few other organizations combine the social and political ingredients seen in their discourse practice, while also offering insight into the linguistic and cultural particularities of modern Italian speech communities, especially as these are congruous to issues pertaining to sexual and gender identities. 4.1.2 Corpus

The corpus constituted for the present analysis was taken exclusively from the group’s official website (www.sentinelleinpiedi.it, first consulted 25 April 2014, last consulted 6 January 2016): the textual basis for analysis included all postings and entries for the years 2014 and 2015, a period in time that was dominated by discussion leading up to the failure of DDL Scalfarotto and that of the eventual passage, albeit in a watered-down form, of DDL Cirinnà. Similar to the Hommen social media corpus of Chapter 3, this constitutes the near totality of communication that can be reasonably ascribed to the group. Unlike the latter, however, all data stem from a single source – one that is particularly controlled by the group’s directors. The social media postings constituting the corpus consisted of general and presentational pages, e.g. ‘Chi siamo?’ (‘Who are we?’), blog entries, letters from chosen supporters (including Mgr. Camasasca, the Bishop of Reggio Emilia, and persons self-identifying as having homosexual tendencies) and, by far the most numerous, press releases (comunicati stampa), through which the group articulates positions, reacts to opponents and details plans for and the rationale underlying public manifestations.

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The analyzed corpus consists of more than 26,000 words, after correcting for duplicate postings (notably slogans frequently repeated in press releases) and information of a purely informational nature (e.g. times and meeting places for demonstrations). 4.2 Participants: Referencing Homophobia

A first descriptive task considers participant identification and labeling, an undertaking made somewhat cumbersome given the wide range of topics and concepts evoked by the Sentinelle. To this end, a series of cohesive personal (i.e. individuals or groups of physical persons) and moral (i.e. ideations manifest through the actions of or implicationally associated with individuals or groups) participants were identified and references to them tagged, documenting the means by which they were evoked and all levels of proposition or phrastic interaction in which they appeared. After excluding several infrequently appearing participants, specified as fewer than 20 occurrences, a total of 16 were included in description and analysis. Personal participants included the Sentinelle (almost always collectively), Children, the Administration, Opposition groups and Society. Moral participants included Alternative Filiation, Biological Sex, Civil Unions, DDL (both specific and general), Free Speech, Gender (as in gender theory), Homophobia, Homosexuality, Nature, il Pensiero Unico3 and the (traditional) Family. Collectively, the corpus counted 2455 unique participant instantiations, averaging 153 per participant (range 860–27), presented in (1) according to type and frequency. (1)  Corpus: Personal and Moral Participants Personal Participants Sentinelle Opposition Groups Children Administration Society

n

Moral Participants

n

860 229 129 51 38

Homosexuality Nature DDL Family Civil Unions Homophobia Gender Alternative Filiation Biological Sex Free Speech Pensiero Unico

204 192 187 128 112 69 68 65 53 43 27

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  117

A second descriptive task considers the lexical and grammatical forms through which a participant was realized, including nominal and pronominal forms, as well as rates of the non-instantiation of grammatical subjects, and occurrences of predicate adjectival, nominal and verbal constructions. The remainder of this section is dedicated to the description of participant referentiality; a subsequent section attends to clause-level exchanges within which these are cast. 4.2.1 Referential taxonomies

Corpus participants are projected in a number of lexico-grammatical structures: noun phrases (NP) of varying complexity, pronominals and predicate verb phrases (VP) consisting of an auxiliary verb (nearly always essere) and a past participle (e.g. aggredite ‘attacked’), diverse adjective phrases (AdjP) (e.g. bello ‘beautiful’, pacifica e non violenta ‘peaceful and non-violent’) and other syntactic units having specific functions (e.g. locative adverbs, dappertutto ‘everywhere’; attributive prepositional phrases, di tutti ‘of everyone’). It should be noted that, as in other Romance languages, the distinction between Italian nouns, adjectives and verbal participles, as these are canonically defined, derives more from syntax than from morphology, e.g. an adjective such as bello can be nominalized as un bello. Furthermore, it is important for the reader unfamiliar with Italian to recall that nouns are marked for lexical gender, a characteristic frequently dissociated from biological sex or gender identity (e.g. sentinella, a feminine noun, denotes any member of the group, irrespective of her or his gender identity).4 In what follows, discussion first covers the representation of personal participants and secondarily that of moral participants. Unsurprisingly, evocations of the Sentinelle involve forms that are far more numerous and variable than those of other participants. Ignoring the canonical references to the group and/or its members (e.g. le Sentinelle (in Piedi), la/una Sentinella), no fewer than three distinct taxonomies emerge, cohering around numeric importance, inclusiveness and representativeness, uniqueness and inter-/independence and oppression. Of course, these are not fully separable and overlap to varying degrees. The first taxonomy is foundational to the means by which the Sentinelle are represented in the corpus, emerging from numerous allusions to the size of the group and its public protests. The corpus reveals frequently occurring, complex NP referring to the group as being composed of normally diverging cross sections of society, especially those indistinguishable along religious and ideological lines, who are unified as Italian citizens, as can be seen in (2).

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(2)  Sentinelle: Inclusion and representation 10 mila persone cittadini {italiani, di fede cattolica e musulmana} donne, uomini, operai, avvocati, insegnanti, genitori, bambini e anziani, cattolici, musulmani non credenti il milione di persone un popolo la (nostra) presenza numerosa di tutti una realtà unica nel panorama politico italiano la rete uomini e donne di diversa cultura, estrazione sociale, religione, nazionalità e storia

ten thousand people citizens {Italian, of Catholic and Muslim faith} women, men, workers, lawyers, teachers, parents, children and the elderly, Catholics, non-believing Muslims the million people a people (our) numerous presence of everyone/all a singular organism on the Italian political landscape the network men and women of different cultures, social extraction, religion, nationality and histories

Through the deployment of these forms, the Sentinelle assert themselves as heterogeneous and inclusive, accepting of those at the periphery of traditional Italian society (e.g. Muslims) and crossing expected sociocultural divides (e.g. workers and lawyers). At the same time, some of the most repeated means of referential activation of the Sentinelle are those projecting them as individual participants within a cohesive group. In-group solidarity is established by recurrent references to amici (‘friends’) and to the group as un’amicizia (‘a friendship’), while emphasizing the individuality and free will of supporters, as in (3). (3)  Sentinelle: Individuality and identity un’associazione – Neg. assolutamente necessaria bigotti – Neg. chiamati consapevole

an association absolutely necessary bigots called conscious/aware

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legati alla politica – Neg. liberi un movimento – Neg. un partito – Neg. pacifica e non violenta [persone con] il proprio conto, nome, corpo e volto

tied to politics free a movement a [political] party peaceful and non-violent [persons with] his/her own value, name, body, and face

As can be seen above, the Sentinelle are represented as individuals acting together, not a uniform whole or faceless mass; they are united by their vocation and values, not merely as adherents to a larger, anonymous corps. Equally important is what they are not, i.e. what is ascribed to them through negative attributive constructions: these serve to further establish them as simultaneously collective and cohesive, personal and non-partisan. A final referential taxonomy emerges from the Sentinelle’s self-construction within a semantic of concurrent oppression and resoluteness. These forms are often presented in predicate constructions with verbal participles, i.e. in passive constructions, with the semantic agent uninstantiated. Through these, the Sentinelle project their resolution and determined opposition, often in the same frame as their oppression, as in (4). (4)  Sentinelle: Opposition and oppression accusati di omofobia aggrediti una battaglia di civiltà e libertà contestate la contrarietà le coscienze l’esercito una ferma opposizione la forza insultati inarrestabili

accused of homophobia attacked a battle of civility and freedom contested/protested the challenge, adversary consciousnesses the army a firm opposition the force/strength insulted unstoppable

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irriducibile a(d) ogni omologazione e menzogna una lotta malmenati {una, la nostra} mobilitazione presi in giro {una, la, la nostra} resistenza5 vigilanti

irreducible to any homogenization and lie a fight/struggle beaten/roughed up {a, our} mobilization mocked {a, the, our} resistance vigilant, protectors

Quite logically for a group characterized as skirting the limits of civility, the corpus contains numerous evocations of the Opposition, whose adherents are only rarely named. This vagary may be due in large part to the lack of specificity vis-à-vis the constituency of the Sentinelle’s antagonists: unlike other populist anti-LGBTQ movements, including the French la Manif’[estation] pour Tous (MPT, ‘Protest for all’) or the Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families), it is difficult to identify the specific factions standing in opposition to the Sentinelle, perhaps because of their plurality, but also due to their lack of unity and historic cohesion (see below). Despite the absence of proper nominal referentiality, three taxonomies emerge surrounding this participant: sectarianism and marginality; active and passive delusion; and danger. The first establishes a link between the Opposition and LGBTQ activism, further situating the latter as being marginal, dogmatic and insignificant. Indeed, nearly all direct references to gay activism are represented within scare quotes, e.g. as i ‘Lgbt’, or with modifiers undermining this as a tenable identity or trait, a pattern that is readily observed in (5). (5)  Opposition: Marginality anarchici appartenenti a Rifondazione Comunista/a Sel [Sinistra Ecologia Libertà] attivisti chiasso disordinato i cosiddetti gay

anarchists members of the Communist Refoundation Party/Left Ecology Freedom Party activists disorganized racket the so-called gays

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  121

una/la lobby gay una modalità zitella acida piccolo ma potente quei pochi omosessuali le realtà militanti i suoi addetti

a/the gay lobby a bitter old maid’s style small but powerful those few homosexuals militant organizations its [militants’] initiates

Through the representations activated by these forms, it is established that, even among the LGBTQ individuals opposing the Sentinelle, they are a marginal minority: the Opposition is clearly situated as being apart from wider society, in collusion with factional organizations, particularly with an all-powerful lobby (see Battaglia, 2017: 60–66). Moreover, this participant is evoked through forms connoting defect, as in (6). (6)  Opposition: Defect assurdi chi ha gli occhi chiusi la coscienza spenta/sopita disturbati una menzogna un’omologazione rumore caotico strumentalizzati6 utilizzati

absurd/ridiculous who have closed eyes turned off/soothed consciousness disturbed a lie a homogenization a chaotic din exploited used

Accordingly, the Opposition is composed of persons who wish to spread their aberration, ‘chi vuole mostrare una contrapposizione tra “omosessuali” e “eterosessuali”’ (‘who wish to display an opposition between “hetero-” and “homosexuals”’), and whose delusional drive is focused squarely on the Sentinelle or, more obliquely, on wider society, e.g. ‘chi vuole omologarci’ (‘those who wish to homogenize us’). All of this is woven together alongside a taxonomy ascribing dangerous intent. They are, after all, anything but peaceful fellow citizens of moral conviction, but ‘chi vuole smembrare la famiglia e privare le nuove generazioni di radici e identità’ (‘persons who wish to dismember the family and deprive new generations of roots and identity’). This third referential taxonomy brings the Opposition into contiguity

122  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

with imaginaries of Italy’s fascist history, evoking schemata that are clearly associated with general anti-democratic orientations and references, as in (7). (7)  Opposition: Danger cani carnefici una dittatura persone arrabbiate un potere squadristi gay7

dogs executioners/torturers a dictatorship angry people an authority gay ‘squadristi’

Through these forms and the cultural conceptualizations they activate, the Opposition is represented as more than persons holding views diverging from those of the Sentinelle, but as enemies of society, its citizens, institutions, foundations and traditions. It is also especially notable that these evocations involve denigration, viz. frequent allusions to dogs, including un branco di cani arrabbiati (‘a pack of angry dogs’). One of the presumptive targets of the Opposition and of Sentinelle protection are Children, a participant whose importance is masked by the relative straightforwardness of lexical evocations. The vast majority of references in the corpus are normative, although culturally weighty NP such as bambini, figli or ragazzi (all analogous to English ‘children’ or ‘kids’), variably determined by ogni (‘all/every’) or i nostri (‘our’). A handful of other forms explicitly activate shared notions of innocence and fragility, as seen in (8), which also provides examples of negated referentiality, i.e. that which Children are not or should not be considered. (8) Children concepiti creati – Neg. un diritto – Neg. un dono fabbricati – Neg. una minoranza debole e silente un oggetto – Neg. i più piccoli

conceived created a right a gift fabricated a weak and silent minority an object the smallest

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Especially interesting is the distinction between the positive representations of Children as being conceived or given, bringing them into congruence with the Family and Biological Sex, and the denial that they are a right or a creation, distancing them from Alternative Filiation. Based on this and emerging from discussion below, it can be argued that Children are only extant within the scope of Biological Sex, i.e. male–female duality. With a formal representation of similar straightforwardness as Children, that evoking Society is relatively uncomplicated, as in (9). (9) Society il bene di tutti il buon senso i cittadini la maggioranza la (nostra) civiltà ogni società normale il popolo la società

the common good common sense citizens the majority (our) civilization every normal society the people society

These forms activate connotations of sociocultural normativity, antonymic to the antisocial stance and incivility associated with the Opposition. Importantly, the corpus reveals several complex NP establishing common sense, inclusive goodness and numeric majority as societal attributes. In all of these, it is clear that Society is projected as being sympathetic to the Sentinelle and hostile to the Opposition’s message, if not its very existence. Evoked through starkly contrasting forms is the Administration, whose majority coalition promoted the LGBTQ cause during the period covered by this examination. This participant is nearly always instantiated through forms connoting sectarianism or dishonesty, the most important of these are provided in (10). (10) Administration imposizioni menzogne/bugie/bugiardi odiato questa nuova forma di dittatura un vero e proprio regime

orders lies/liars hated this new form of dictatorship a real and true regime

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Noteworthy alongside normative references to il governo (‘the government’), il parlamento (‘the parliament’), la politica (‘politics’) and il potere politico (‘political power’) are the lack of personal references: even the authors of the two DDL particularly targeted by the group – Senator Cirinnà and Deputy (and one-time minister) Scalfarotto – are mentioned by name in only a handful of instances. Far more telling are the numerous attributive constructions noted in the corpus, through which the administration is described as anti-democratic and in direct antagonism to all that the Sentinelle represent and society expects. Among moral participants, the most frequently evoked is Homosexuality, whose canonical lexical representations l’omosessualità and l’orientamento sessuale are nearly always instantiated under morphosyntactic negation, e.g. as ‘una contrapposizione che non esiste’ (‘a juxtaposition that doesn’t exist’), or within the scope of negative factuality, e.g. ‘l’omosessualità non è una pulsione determinante e definitiva della persona e non è una variante del comportamento umano’ (‘homosexuality is not a determined and definitive personal impulse and is not a variation of human behavior’). In fact, there are no occurrences of either omosessuali/ omosessualità or orientamento that are not within the structural valence of a negated verb, a VP modified by a restrictive adverb (e.g. mai ‘never’) or an implicitly depreciatory verbal semantic (e.g. incasellare ‘pigeonhole’), matters taken up in greater detail below. To this is added a series of implicitly oppositive mechanisms, notably the use of scare quotes and adjectives that serve to deny the veracity of non-heterosexuality, e.g. ‘gli omosessuali’ and i cosiddetti gay (‘the so-called gays’). Besides these putatively (but far from effectively) neutral representations, numerous evocations of Homosexuality and of the LGBTQ community cohere around the taxonomy of dishonesty, the most frequent forms of which are seen in (11). (11)  Homosexuality: Dishonesty la bugia/la menzogna una categoria fuorviante un cliché [un termine] costruito ad arte una fregatura la/un’ideologia gay ingannevoli un inganno

lie a misleading category a cliché tailor made [term] a fraud a/the gay ideology scammers a scam

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la prima, vera, grave, ingiusta discriminazione una sfida epocale

the first, true, serious, unjust discrimination an epic challenge

It should be noted that much of (11) partially overlaps the taxonomies associated with the Opposition, in large part because many Sentinelle adversaries are openly identified as LGBTQ, thus are also constituents of a personal participant defying traditional cultural norms. If Homosexuality is represented as dangerous and fraudulent, its social and cultural actualization is evoked as a product of this misleading and reductive path. While there are many acknowledgments of persone con tendenze or attrazioni omosessuali (‘persons with homosexual tendencies [or] attractions’), the realization of these tendencies is clearly projected as injurious, as can be seen in (12) (12)  Homosexuality: damaged/damaging una condizione un disagio emozioni effimere una ferita {dell’anima, identitaria, sessuale} il grido della loro anima incasellato narcisistico persone negate persone ridotte il proprio dolore

a condition a discomfort ephemeral emotions a wound {of the soul, identity, sexual} the cries of their soul pigeonholed narcissistic hopeless people reduced people their own pain

Given the projection of Homosexuality as both deceptive and harmful, it is unsurprising that one of the more frequently occurring lexical representations of LGBTQ persons is as vittime (‘victims’), especially ones who are cosciente o incosciente dell’ideologia (‘conscious or unconscious [victims] of ideology’). Finally, Homosexuality is repeatedly equated to sexual action: in addition to being an attrazione (‘attraction’) and an orientamento (‘orientation’), same-sex desire is cast in reductively active terms, notably as comportamenti (‘behaviors’) and pulsioni (‘impulses’), both with plainly pejorative associations. Such a sexualization of non-heterosexuality further contributes to the pathological connotations that can be inferred

126  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

from (11) and (12). The corpus contains frequent and somewhat oblique references to ogni desiderio (‘every desire’) and quelle pulsioni (‘such/ those impulses’) as being that which leads to the discomfort and pain of LGBTQ persons. Furthermore, il mondo gay (‘the gay world’) is cast as being una sfera pulsionale (‘a sphere of desire’), one defined by il sesso occasionale (‘casual sex’). Importantly, even when same-sex activity is represented as amore (‘love’), it is explicitly stated that this is not a right. Indeed, the phrase, ‘l’amore non è un diritto’ (‘love is not a right’) is repeated throughout the corpus, leaving no doubt that, even if sexual acts are to be allowed, they – and any underlying psychological or personal state determining their target or complement – are not to be protected or celebrated as equivalent to traditional male–female coupling within the institution of heterosexual marriage. Related to but distinct from the projection of Homosexuality, the corpus includes numerous references to Homophobia, perhaps because the Sentinelle have been repeatedly cast as homophobic in mainstream and progressive media. This charge is explicitly contested, notably via representations of Homophobia as an unjust and fictional creation, as may be seen in the forms in (13). (13) Homophobia antidemocratico un concetto manipolabile la manipolazione del linguaggio una micidiale propaganda ideologica una parola di potenza ancora più delegittimante una scusa un termine costruito ad arte un termine studiato a tavolino

undemocratic a malleable concept language manipulation a lethal ideological propaganda a word with even more delegitimizing power an excuse a tailor-made term a term studied under the microscope

Beyond such affirmative representations of Homophobia as an oppressive construct, it is repeatedly and specifically asserted what Homophobia is not, e.g. that it is not a homophobic act to ‘affermare che l’omosessualità non è necessariamente una condizione immutabile’ (‘to affirm that homosexuality is not necessarily an immutable condition’), ‘dire che due omosessuali non possono avere figli’ (‘saying that two homosexuals cannot have children’) or ‘sostenere che la famiglia è fondata sull’unione stabile

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e fedele tra un uomo e una donna’ (‘support that the family is founded on the stable and faithful union of one man and one woman’). Perhaps the least nuanced of all moral participant representations in the corpus are those concerning Gender, a cover term used here to refer to the set of concepts and ideas advanced by Butler (e.g. 1993, 2004) and others (see Marzano [2015] for interpolation within the Italian speech and cultural communities and Dall’Orto [2016] for a critique of the Sentinelle’s deployment of teoria del gender). As in French and many other languages, all references to this use the English form, typically with a definite determiner, i.e. il gender: the Italian genere, canonically denoting ‘type’ or ‘sort’, was never observed. Gender is evoked as an especially oppressive, flawed and damaging construct, as can be noted in the lexical representations of (14). (14) Gender il danno una dittatura una divisione identitaria pericolosa un’ideologia un indottrinamento un male un’offensiva una percezione soggettiva la pericolosa invasione

the harm/damage/offense a dictatorship a dangerous identity division an ideology an indoctrination a sickness an offensive subjective perception the dangerous invasion

Interestingly, and in contrast to other conservative groups, the ­Sentinelle only infrequently refer to la teoria del gender (‘gender theory’, see Bernini, 2017; Dall’Orto, 2016): in those instances, scare quotes are most often used, e.g. questa teoria ‘gender’ (‘this “gender” theory’). This device further underscores the representational suspiciousness of Gender as viable or natural. Rather obviously, another of the more frequently evoked concepts targeted by the Sentinelle are specific DDL, notably Scalfarotto and Cirinnà, as well as the prospect of Civil Unions or, more tentatively, of full marriage equality. Many references to the latter employ widely used, if somewhat awkward turns of phrase, including (in order of frequency) le coppie formate da persone dello stesso sesso (‘couples comprised of persons of the same sex’), le unioni fra/tra persone dello stesso sesso (‘unions between persons of the same sex’) and coppie di fatto (‘de facto couples’), the last having more neutral semantic associations. Despite

128  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

the availability of these expressions, the lexical representation of Civil Unions is only rarely straightforward. In many instances, these are described with negative predicative attributes, e.g. ‘le unioni tra persone dello stesso sesso non sono una famiglia’ (‘unions between same-sex ­persons are not a family’). Far more frequently, they are presented in a way that undermines their possible legitimacy, often through the use of negating adjectives and/or scare quotes, as well as more specifically pejorative attributes, as seen in (15). (15)  Civil Unions un attacco il caos le cosiddette ‘unioni civili’ un danno della società il diritto dei ‘gay’ il falso mito del progresso l’individualismo8 la menzogna per il quieto vivere narcisismo lo pseudo matrimonio

an attack [on the family] chaos so-called ‘civil unions’ a societal damage/harm the rights of ‘gays’ the false myth of progress individualism the lie of the easy life narcissism pseudo-marriage

Closely related to the projection of Civil Unions, various DDL associated with them are represented no less neutrally, invariably as efforts to undermine or harm the natural and cultural orders, as in (16). (16) DDL fortemente liberticida leggi antiumane uno dei più grandi e gravi attacchi al cuore stesso dell’uomo un tentativo di introdurre l’ideologia

strongly damaging to freedom anti-human laws one of the greatest and gravest attacks on the very heart of man an attempt to introduce ideology

Like Homosexuality, these proposti, progetti or testi (‘proposals, projects, texts’) are compared to menzogne (‘lies’) and described as sbagliati (‘mistaken’), ideologici (‘ideological’) and even incostituzionali (‘unconstitutional’).9

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The possibility of legal civil unions is linked to the equally real likelihood of Alternative Filiation, an eventuality frequently evoked through references to cases involving court rulings allowing co-parent adoption and solidifying the rights of cohabiting couples and their children. ­Comparable to Civil Unions, Homosexuality and Gender, Alternative Filiation is unequivocally represented in negative terms, notably as un danno (‘a wrong’), una fantasia (‘a fantasy’) and un precedente pericoloso (‘a dangerous precedent’), the latter referencing widely publicized cases in Torino and Rome. While the corpus includes a handful of normative forms, including stepchild adoption10 and la fecondazione artificiale (‘artificial insemination’), the most frequent evocations were blatantly negative: this is especially the case for surrogacy, which, although illegal in Italy, can be undertaken by Italians living or traveling abroad, often at great expense. By far the greatest number of evocations of Alternative Filiation involved this referent, always collocated with the adjective abominevole, as can be noted in (17). (17)  Alternative Filiation desideri capricciosi degli adulti fornitrici di materiale biologico incubatrici a pagamento la pratica abominevole dell’utero in affitto sfruttamento {delle donne, delle povere} la tecnica abominevole per la produzione di bambini ad uso e consumo degli adulti

capricious desires of adults providers of biological material paid incubators the abominable practice of surrogacy [lit. ‘rented uteruses] exploitation {of women, of the poor} the abominable technique for the production of children for the use and consumption of adults

The children of Alternative Filiation are often demonstratively determined (e.g. questi bimbi ‘these kids’) and are referentially established in a no less disparaging light: they are orfani in laboratorio (‘laboratory orphans’), objectified as il bambino-diritto (‘the child-right’) and situated in opposition to the forms in (8), most notably that which represents Children as doni (‘gifts’). If Homosexuality and Gender are constructed as flawed and damaging, concretizing societal harm through specific DDL and Civil Unions, the target of this damage and the root of its degeneration lie in Nature,

130  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

an omnipresent participant explicitly associated with the very concept of humanity and its purpose, essence and capacity. Throughout the corpus, this identità innata or umana (‘innate’ or ‘human identity’) is repeatedly evoked as inseparable from the very essence of l’uomo (‘man, humanity’). The most frequent lexico-semantic representations are provided in (18). (18) Nature il bene oggettivo il bene vero di ogni uomo la coscienza il cuore dell’uomo la (nostra) essenza dell’uomo la natura {dell’uomo, dell’umanità, di ognuno} il patrimonio comune dell’esperienza umana la ragione la realtà delle cose la ricchezza di ciascun individuo lo scopo l’uomo nella sua essenza la/una verità

the objective good the true good of each man conscience the heart of man the (our) human essence/ essence of man the nature {of man, humanity, one and all} the common patrimony of human experience reason the reality of things the richness of each individual the purpose man in his essence the/a truth

Beyond these forms, Nature is explicitly evoked as not being una fregatura (‘a fraud’), notably when contrasted with those participants that are described in this way: Homosexuality and Gender. Although references to Nature are invariably associated with humanity and its purported truth or essence, very little by way of precise denotative description is observed, save for repeated attributions of la dicotomia maschile e femminile (‘the male–female dichotomy’) and la nostra essenza di uomini e donne (‘our essence as men and women’), both repeatedly evoked as being ‘alla base di ogni società normale e sana che non voglia autodistruggersi’ (‘at the base of every normal, healthy society that doesn’t wish to destroy itself’). More frequently, however, Nature is undefined or asserted prioristically. The (traditional, heterosexually normative) Family constitutes a primary object of the Sentinelle’s defensive actions. The unproblematized, unquestioned status of il matrimonio (‘marriage’) and la famiglia

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(‘family’) stands in stark contrast to Alternative Filiation and Civil Unions, as these are rarely modified (cf. lo pseudo matrimonio), except by adjectives reinforcing this status, e.g. naturale and tradizionale (‘natural’ and ‘traditional’), nor are they presented within scare quotes (cf. le cosiddette ‘unioni civili’). Indeed, as can be noted in (19), the Family could hardly be represented in a more prima facie way. (19) Family la cellula {fondante, primaria, a the {foundational, primary, base} della nostra società basic} element/cell of our society i coniugi marriages/spouses i genitori parents l’iscrizione della filiazione the source of filiation padri e madri fathers and mothers l’unica cellula su cui si the only element upon which possa fondare la società society can be established l’unione di un uomo e the union of a [one] man and a una donna [one] woman un’unione stabile e fedele a stable and faithful union uomini e donne (veri/vere) (true/real) men and women

Importantly, the Family is continually asserted to be attaccata (‘attacked’), most often in passive constructions in which the semantic agent is unexpressed. Negative or antonymic representations solidify dissociations by asserting what the Family is not: fondata sul sentimento (‘founded on emotion), l’amore (‘love’), un istituto giuridico (‘a legal institution’), il narcisismo (‘narcissism’). These observations underscore the proximity between the Family and Nature, while also drawing a sharp boundary between other institutions and structures, especially Civil Unions and Alternative Filiation. Similar to the Family, the vast majority of evocations of Biological Sex are striking in their lack of complexity, using the formal pairings maschio/uomo and femmina/donna (‘male/man’) and (‘female/ woman’), alongside il sesso biologico (‘biological sex’). Also frequently noted in the corpus were a series of lexico-semantic constructions that both activate and reinforce an essentialized male–female dialectic, very often modified by adjectives asserting singularity, provided in (20).

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(20)  Biological Sex la complementarietà un’identità fondativa la nostra essenza/identità di uomini e donne l’unica dicotomia l’unica dualità possibile le uniche identità possibili una verità una vocazione

complementarity a foundational identity our essence/identity as men and women the only dichotomy the only possible duality the only possible identities a truth a vocation

In parallel with other traditional constructs, Biological Sex is evoked in a positive relation to Nature, frequently subsuming representations of the Family and Children, as well. Two final moral participants in the corpus are notable not because of their frequency – they are, in fact, among the least observed – but because of the antonymy that emerges through their lexical representation: Free Speech and il Pensiero Unico. The former is represented with forms that call upon ideologies bounded in freedom of opinion and its expression, with la (nostra) libertà di espressione (‘the/our freedom of expression’) most commonly observed. Like the Family and Children, Free Speech is projected as under attack. The possible reato di opinione (‘crime of opinion’) and la censura (‘censorship’) cast this participant within a negatively scoped relation to Homophobia, especially, also asserting that the right to opinion and expression are in pericolo (‘in danger’). In stark contrast to these relatively uncomplicated projections, Pensiero Unico is instantiated through lexico-semantic forms clearly evoking anti-democratic and uncivil frames. While nearly always represented canonically, there are a series of noteworthy predicate attributes in the corpus, given in (21). (21)  Pensiero Unico il compromesso a tutti costi la dittatura del politicamente corretto una gogna mediatica il mainstream dell’ideologia unica pansessualista

compromise at all cost the dictatorship of political correctness media pillory the mainstream of the singular pansexual ideology

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Perhaps most important, at least in the overall representational dynamic of the corpus, is its frequent association with oppressive power (viz. un potere unico ‘a singular power’), situating this firmly in sympathetic relation to the Opposition, the Administration and those who promote ideals the Sentinelle cast as unnatural, dangerous, suspect or flawed. 4.2.2 Deixis, pronominalization and pro-drop

A total of 196 deictics were observed in the corpus, of which 50 had first-, 3 second- and 143 third-person antecedents.11 Only the Sentinelle are projected via first-person pronouns: other participants are brought into a proximal genitive relationship, notably i nostri bambini (Children), la nostra società (Society) and la nostra identità (Nature). At the same time, the Sentinelle and others are distanced from Opposition and the Administration through the repeated use of demonstrative determiners, e.g. questa nuova forma di dittatura or quei figli. This establishes a strict demarcation: ‘we/us’ encompasses individual Sentinelle, the group as a whole and those participants under the umbrella of Nature (Children, the Family, Society), whereas the distal ‘they/them/those’ removes all others from this collective. Like Spanish and many other Romance languages, Italian grammatical subjects needn’t be instantiated, a grammatical constraint known somewhat speciously as pro-(nominal) drop. In such cases, antecedence is established through verbal morphology and contextual cues. Generally speaking, zero-instantiated subjects are relatively active (i.e. established and topical), can be presumed (e.g. from contextual and/or pragmatic cues) or relate to the speaker/author (see Lambrecht, 1994, 2000). Of related interest are the relative rates of pronominal instantiation, regardless of grammatical role (i.e. as subject, complement or adjunct) or person (i.e. first or third), which had one or another participant as its antecedent. Complementary to pro-drop, this testifies to the relative activation or localizability of a given referent – in effect, which participants were always, sometimes or only rarely named. Combined, the corpus contains 390 instances of zero-instantiated subjects and 152 instances of pronominal NP, with all grammatical roles conflated. This is presented in Figure 4.1, distinguishing between zero-instantiation rates (black bar) and pronominal NP (gray bar) ones, arranged with personal participants closest to the horizontal axis. Unsurprisingly, the highest rates of pro-drop and pronominal NP obtain for personal participants, especially for the Sentinelle themselves. Over half of all finite VP with the Sentinelle as subject left this

134  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia PensieroUnico Speech/Opinion BiolSex AltFiliation Gender Homophobia Civil Unions TradFamily DDLs Nature Homsexuality Society Administration Children Opposition Sentinelle 0.00%

10.00%

20.00%

30.00%

40.00%

Pro Drop%

50.00%

60.00%

70.00%

80.00%

NP(Pro)%

Figure 4.1  Grammatical subjects: Pro-drop and referential NP

unexpressed, and a further 20% of occurrences of this participant were instantiated in pronominal NP, especially noi and ci (first-person plural subject and complement, respectively). A majority of third-person zero subject instantiations also had the Sentinelle as antecedent (107 of 164), with this being especially prominent for third-person plural referents (71 of 82). Equally interesting are the distinctions between other personal participants: while the Opposition is far less frequently expressed with zero-instantiated subjects (just over 10% of occurrences), they are pronominalized more frequently than even the Sentinelle, especially via the third-person chi (‘who/whoever’). Conversely, Children, the Administration and Society were far more frequently instantiated within a referential NP. Figure  4.1 thus evidences an important observation with regard to moral subjects, notably those that are always or nearly always named. Biological Sex and il Pensiero Unico are never subject to pro-drop, nor are they pronominalized. Alternative Filiation, Nature, Homosexuality and Civil Unions are rarely subject to pro-drop, whereas Gender, Homophobia and Society are never pronominalized: collectively, and perhaps because of their impersonal conceptualization, these are nearly always evoked by a referential NP.

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Considered collectively, these patterns testify to the relative activation of participants in the corpus, i.e. how often these are activated or reactivated, either as established topics or through contextual cues. The Sentinelle are most frequently non-instantiated subjects, both in first person and third person. They are also the only first-person subjects, whereas others are affiliated to them via genitive constructions: Children, Society and the Family. Surprisingly, Gender and DDL are relatively more frequently subject to pro-drop, but are rarely – if ever – pronominalized; this stands in contrast to Homosexuality, Nature and Biological Sex. These considerations complexify the representational status and pragmatic positioning of different participants, a matter that is taken up in more detail below. 4.3 Participant Relations: Homophobia, Nature and the Clause

The Sentinelle corpus provided a rich source of information pertaining to participant relations actuated in propositional structures. In addition to the three levels of analysis (exchange, message, representation), description here attends to emergent morphosyntactic data, many patterns of which are particular to Italian, notably the expression of modality and voice. Accounting for clausal description at all levels, the corpus yielded over 34,000 data points associated with 2,455 unique participant instantiations. In what follows, each level is considered and pertinent patterns elucidated. 4.3.1 The clause as exchange

Prior to the treatment of sentence-level semantics, it is important to distinguish between the relative frequency of grammatical roles within which each participant was projected: subject, complement (direct or indirect object) or adjunct. Corpus data are strongly suggestive of the divergent association of grammatical role to participant constellations, as shown in Figure  4.2. These patterns demonstrate that not all participants are unequally associated with grammatical roles. Some appear as subject in more than 75% of all occurrences, including the Sentinelle, Civil Unions, Society and Gender. Contrastively, other participants are more frequently complements or adjuncts, notably Biological Sex, Nature, Free Speech, Homosexuality and Pensiero Unico. As explored below, these patterns have important consequences for the development of verbal taxonomies and their association with participants and groupings.

136  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Se nt i O nell pp e os iti on D D L C hi ld H re om n os ex 'y N at ur e Fa C m iv i ly il U ni on s Ad m in . G e H nde om r op Al h 'i a tF ili at io n So ci et y Bi o'S ex Sp e Pe e ns ch ie ro U 'o

0%

adj

comp

sub

Figure 4.2  Participant grammatical roles

4.3.1.1 Personal participants

Reflecting the qualitative and quantitative importance of Sentinelle referential taxonomies, this participant is projected within complex and variable verbal semantic patterns. From these, three interleaved taxonomies emerge: active verbs denoting or connoting opposition and resistance; communicative verbs associated with the upholding of traditional values and the repudiation of non-traditional ones; and psychological verbs. Of course, these are not clearly bounded taxonomies that can be understood in isolation (even if presented this way below for clarity). The most frequently occurring verbs of each subgroup are given in (22a) through (c), also noting participant complements when applicable and instances of negation. (22) Sentinelle (a) Action Verb affiancare alzarsi (in piedi)

Gloss flank stand up

Complement Nature, Family, Children

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  137

difendere

defend

fermare/si – Neg. invadere lottare mobilitarsi occupare opporsi piegarsi – Neg. resistere scendere seguire smascherare

stop/cease invade fight mobilize occupy oppose bend/bow resist descend upon, go into follow unmask/expose

smettere – Neg. soccombere – Neg. vegliare vigilare

stop/quit succumb keep watch monitor/survey

Nature, Family, Children, Bio. Sex

DDL, Gender, Opposition

Nature Gender, Homophobia, Opposition

(b) Communication affermare dare voce a denunciare

affirm give voice to denounce

dire no dissentire rifiutare parlare risvegliare/ svegliare testimoniare

say no, refuse dissent refute speak reawaken/ awaken testify

Nature, Family, Bio. Sex Nature, Children, Family DDL, Administration, Opposition, Gender, Homophobia DDL, Opposition, Gender Opposition, Homophobia Nature Society Nature

(c) Psychology accettare – Neg. accorgersi amare

accept realize love

DDL, Gender, Homophobia Nature, Family, Children

138  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

avere paura – Neg. conoscere discernere incasellare – Neg. riflettere sapere scoraggiare – Neg. valorizzare

fear know/ experience discern pigeonhole reflect know/think dishearten value, appreciate

Nature Nature Homosexuality Nature Bio. Sex, Family

The verbal repertoire provided in (22a) clearly establishes the Sentinelle as physical actors and solidifies their relationship with nearly all other participants, highlighting the group’s positive relation to Nature, Society, Children, Family and Biological Sex, as well as its opposition to those outside of this inclusive boundary. Closely related to these are verbs that explicitly insert the Sentinelle into exchange relations, notably contribuire [a] (‘contribute [to]’), incontrare (‘meet/encounter’) and incrociare (‘come across, intersect’), invariably with Nature and somewhat less frequently the Family as complements. This approximation to traditional morality and distancing from other participants is echoed in (22b), including verbs connoting communicative rather than physical antagonism: here, the group is not the corporal agent of conflict, but the mouthpiece of truth and established morays. A crucial distinction vis-à-vis other physical participants is the frequency with which the Sentinelle are projected as the subject of psychological or mental verbs, as in (22c), often used in a figurative sense and in expressions related to religious practices. These have the effect of asserting the group not only as a physical and communicative arbiter of public and private morality, but as one who is able to tap into the spiritual and rational bases of such cultural schemata: indeed, there are very few instances of psychological or mental verbs not having the Sentinelle as subject. They also serve as the subject of several negated psychological verbs, i.e. those modified by adverbs such as non or mai (‘no’ or ‘never’). Additional verbal data highlight the Sentinelle’s resolute stance with regard to their principles: they do not accept, fear or dishearten – always in relation to Opposition actions or ideals – and refuse to limit themselves or others. Summarily, the Sentinelle accomplish many things, depending upon the

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  139

participant or concept in question: they contest and fight with resolution, and do not cease or stop; they place themselves on the side of normative and traditional constructs and concepts, both communicated and felt; and, crucially, they are the subject of a wide verbal repertoire attesting to what they do and who they are and, equally importantly, are not. There are a number of parallels between the Sentinelle and the Opposition deriving from grammatical exchange patterns: both are frequently expressed as subjects and rarely as complements, and both are frequently situated as the agents of physical or communicative action. However, the semantic content of the verbs onto which each is cast sharply distinguishes between the two, both as this concerns the content and diversity of meanings at play, as can be seen in (23). (23) Opposition Verb affrontarsi annientare arrogarsi

autoridursi conoscere – Neg. considerare – Neg. contestare controllare ingannare insultare offendere privare provocare rimpicciolire

Gloss confront annihilate attribute qualities to themselves [without merit or unjustly] self-reduce/-deprive know, experience consider protest, challenge control deceive insult offend deprive provoke make smaller

rubare schernire smembrare

steal mock dismember

Complement Sentinelle Children, Family

Nature Nature Sentinelle, Nature Society Nature, Society Sentinelle, Nature Sentinelle, Society Children, Family Sentinelle, Society Children, Family, Nature, Society Children Sentinelle, Nature Children, Family, Nature, Society

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sminuire

degrade, lessen

strumentalizzare valere – Neg.

exploit be of value

Children, Family, Nature, Society, Bio. Sex Children

Far from having a nuanced verbal repertoire, the Opposition is identified consistently and unexceptionally as an agent of spiritual damage, public danger and moral decay. When in the scope of a negated VP, they are projected as the subject of psychological verbs projecting them in conflict with the Sentinelle, i.e. as outside the domain of natural spiritual orders. It is noteworthy that the Sentinelle are frequently the complement of communicative verbs in (23), e.g. insultare and schernire, which project the Opposition as anything but contributory to dialogue. At the same time, their physical agency is frequently directed against Children, Society and other inclusive participants. Perhaps most striking are those verbs connoting the destruction or violation of the grammatical object, most notably annientare, smembrare and strumentalizzare, all of which recur throughout the corpus with a high level of frequency. Even the most casual consideration of these leaves little doubt as to the relationship of the Opposition to others: these are not persons seeking to affect beneficial changes, but to extinguish the natural order and all that is within its scope. Summarily, they not only oppose the Sentinelle in principle or tactic, but they also constitute their moral, transitive antithesis. The Administration is projected within a similar, if somewhat less blatantly derogatory verbal semantic, notably in the grammatical subject position that it frequently occupies. As can be seen in (24), and similar to the Opposition, the Administration is an agent of actions having negative or pejorative connotations, as well as those that subsume it under the transitivity of others. (24) Administration Verb aprire la via/ la strada controllare impedire piegare propinare

Gloss open the way [to] control impede bend/submit fob off

Complement Civil Unions, Alt. Filiation, Gender Society, Family, Speech Speech, Nature Pensiero Unico, Opponents Society, Speech

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  141

servire – Neg. smentire tutelare – Neg.

serve deny, contradict protect

vietare

ban, prohibit

Society, Family, Children Nature Children, Family, Nature, Speech Sentinelle, Family, Speech, Nature

Rather than functioning as the guarantors of freedom and defenders of established cultural schemata, the Administration is closely associated with abnegators of these ideals, bending to the demands of Pensiero Unico and the Opposition. Importantly, the Administration is specifically noted to not serve the greater good, as expressed in VP negated by the adverbial anziché (‘instead of’), drawing a strict parallel between the agency and transitivity of this participant (e.g. the destruction of Society or the exploitation of Children) and that of the Sentinelle (who awaken the former and defend the latter). These frequently repeated clause-level structures establish a clear demarcation between the actions of politicians and those who uphold tradition and morality – the purviews of the Sentinelle and Society. Otherwise, projection of the government and its ministers, notably Senator Cirinnà and Deputy Scalfarotto, is overwhelmingly associated with the mundane actions of bureaucracy, e.g. discutere (‘discuss’), promulgare (‘promulgate’), even then having as complement concepts and ideas antithetical to Nature and Society. The two remaining personal participants – Children and Society – present a verbal profile distinct from others, both in terms of their semantic content and the functions into which they are projected. These two are, however, remarkably similar to each other. Although Children appear relatively frequently in the subject position, very little verbal semantic content is associated with their appearance in this grammatical role: most of these instantiations take the form of predicative essere clauses, with the only exceptions being ontological VP, e.g. crescere (‘grow up’) and diventare (‘become’), and the complex attributive VP avere diritto (‘have right to’), invariably with a complement representing the traditional family (e.g. un papà e una mamma ‘a daddy and a mommy’). Children are also the subjects of negated verbs, all of which reinforce their lack of agency, including esprimersi (‘express oneself’) and scegliere (‘chose’). Far more interesting are the taxonomies emerging from this participant’s projection as complement, among which two can be distinguished: those referring to positive actions, always having the Sentinelle or Family as subject, or those with negative actions or outcomes, overwhelmingly

142  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

associated with the Opposition or Alternative Filiation. From this, a distinction emerges involving children born into and raised within the Family, who are closely associated with Nature, and those who are produced or purchased, and who are subsequently exploited by Alternative Filiation and its advocates. A similar dialectic emerges from the verbal repertoire associated with Society, whose projection as a grammatical subject is also mostly limited to essere predicate clauses. A handful of exceptions involve psychological verbs such as riconoscere (‘recognize’) and valorizzare (‘value, evaluate’), having as object a moral participant associated with Nature (especially Family and Biological Sex): when bound to a negative VP, Society is projected in grammatical relation with the Opposition, Homosexuality and Gender. Society is also the subject of a limited number of negated communicative verbs, e.g. esprimersi (‘express itself’), invariably collocated with an adverb such as liberamente (‘freely’), further attesting to the restricted agency of this participant. More telling are its projections as complement, which consistently involve damage or denigration to this participant at the hand of Opponents, the Administration or a non-traditional moral subject (Civil Unions, Alternative Filiation and, especially, Gender). 4.3.1.2 Moral participants

The verbal semantics associated with moral participants are more variable and somewhat more nuanced than those of personal ones, perhaps owing to the less easily delimited denotational field of the former grouping. Of foremost interest is Homosexuality, for which a distinction between positive and negative VP is readily apparent, as in (25). (25) Homosexuality Verb (potere) cambiare – Neg. combattere (-si) esistere – Neg. negare (negarsi) ridurre (autoridursi) strumentalizzare

Gloss (able to) change

Complement Nature

fight (oneself) exist negate (oneself) reduce, self-debase exploit

Nature Nature, Homosexuals Nature, Homosexuals Nature

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  143

Crucially, the existential esistere is repeatedly observed as having Homosexuality as subject, but only when negated, i.e. the corpus does not specify what Homosexuality is, but what it is not, repeatedly establishing the non-existence of Homosexuality tout court. Combined with the predicate constructions projecting this as an impulse or misleading proclivity, these effectively serve to deny naturalness or validity: the substance of Homosexuality is repeatedly repudiated or, in those limited domains in which it must be acknowledged, is associated with deleterious effects, removed from the collective good and situated in conflict with Nature. Equally interesting are the frequent appearances of homosexual persons – or those of ‘homosexual inclination’ – as the complement of their own deleterious agency through reflexive verbal constructs, e.g. autoridursi. Such observations are both reinforced and nuanced by consideration of Homosexuality’s appearance as verbal complement, notably in the case of tutelare (‘protect’), variably associated with explicitly and implicitly negative constructions and almost exclusively in relation to the Opposition, Administration and Civil Unions or DDL. This ‘misleading category’ is protected or defended by the ‘gay lobbies’, but is also damaged by the possibility of legal recognition or inclusion in traditional societal institutions. Such a seemingly counterintuitive dualism is reinforced by other projections of Homosexuality as the complement of utilizzare (‘use’), imporre (‘impose’) and illudere (‘delude’). Thus, even those participants acting on behalf of LGBTQ rights and freedoms are actualized as detrimental to members of this community. This establishes a sort of double bind, by which LGBTQ persons inflict injury on themselves by pursuing their identity and place in society, and in which their supporters further this harm by asserting it as an identity or category of worth and validity. The verbal patterns associated with Civil Unions and DDL are describable in a similar, if somewhat less nuanced light, and may be treated together, given their frequent collocation. As subjects, both are repeatedly positioned alongside verbs having a destructive connotation, a pattern that is evident in (26). (26)  Civil Unions and DDL Verb annientare aprire la strada

Gloss annihilate open the way

Complement Nature, Society, Bio. Sex Homosexuality

144  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

cambiare – Neg. definire – Neg. delegittimare

change define delegitimize

destrutturare distruggere imporre minare nascondere privare ridurre smembrare sovvertire specificare – Neg. toccare zittire – Neg.

de-structure destroy impose undermine hide deprive reduce dismember subvert specify affect quiet, silence

Nature Nature Nature, Children, Family, Bio. Sex Nature, Society Nature, Society Homosexuality, Gender Society, Nature Gender, Pensiero Unico Children Nature, Children Family Nature Society, Family Nature

Civil Unions appear repeatedly as the subject of equiparare (‘compare, equate’), always with traditional marriage as the complement and typically modified by a servile modal verb (e.g. volere ‘want’), highlighting their equation to marriage ‘in all but name’. At the same time, these participants are frequently the subject of negative VP whose meanings serve to undermine any such effect or potential, especially as it concerns the natural order. Finally, Civil Unions are frequently invalidated by the repeated construction non avere niente di civile (‘have nothing civil [about them]’), a play on words that serves to emphasize their asserted incivility and clash with Society. More generally, it is noted that Civil Unions and DDL are negated in both form and content, as proposals that do not or cannot attribuire (‘attribute’) rights or corrispondere (‘correspond’) to the natural order, and are repeatedly stated to be unneeded (e.g. as the negative complement of aver(ne) bisogno). Both similar and distinct are the verbal semantics associated with Homophobia, a participant most typically projected as the subject of negated VP including definire (‘define’) or as the complement of specificare (‘specify’), in the latter instance with the Opposition or Administration as subject. This serves to highlight the Sentinelle’s continual assertion

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  145

that Homophobia is a concept lacking substance or foundation, already noted above. Other subject instantiations are within the valence of verbs connoting deceit or harm, including ingannare (‘deceive’), mandare (in carcere) (‘send [to prison]’), and punire (‘punish’), invariably with Society and the Sentinelle as complements. Far more explicitly pejorative are the verbal semantics associated with Gender and Alternative Filiation as subjects, the most frequent of which are given in (27) and (28). (27) Gender Verb annientare annullare avvelenare cambiare – Neg. confondere danneggiare distruggere fare irruzione minare rendere {fragile, incerta, oscillante} eliminare sovvertire

Gloss annihilate annul, undo poison change confuse damage destroy interrupt undermine make {fragile, uncertain, oscillating} eliminate subvert

Complement Bio. Sex, Family, Nature Bio. Sex, Family, Nature Children, Nature Bio. Sex, Nature Children Children Family, Nature Children, Nature Society, Nature Children, Nature

Gloss poison confuse damage strike, hit homogenize transform violate

Complement Children Children Children Children, Nature Children, Family Children Children, Nature

Bio. Sex, Nature Bio. Sex, Nature

(28)  Alternative Filiation Verb avvelenare confondere danneggiare colpire omologare trasformare violare

146  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

As can be seen in (27), Gender is repeatedly instantiated within VP that cast it as a dangerous agent of harm to wider society and its constituents, e.g. penetrare nelle scuole (‘penetrate into schools’), trasmettersi and avanzare all’insaputa dei genitori (‘be transmitted/advance unknown to parents’). Similarly, the verbal repertoire of (28) establishes Alternative Filiation as harmful to Children, Family and Nature. Here, IVF, stepchild adoption and surrogacy serve as the subject of verbs that realize the complements of these actions (i.e. children raised in same-sex or otherwise non-traditional households) as being not just harmed or endangered, but removed from the fabric of humanity and the natural order. The verbal semantics associated with Nature diverge in many ways from that of other moral participants, especially as this participant is relatively frequently projected as the subject of passive VP and of verbs having constitutive, inchoative or ontological connotations, as can be seen in (29). (29) Nature Verb cambiare(-si) – Neg. cedere – Neg. compiere costruire dare senso emergere generare smascherare

Gloss change (oneself) give up accomplish, fulfill make, construct give meaning emerge engender, beget unmask, reveal

Complement

Society, Family, Bio. Sex Bio. Sex Society, Family Bio. Sex Gender, Homosexuality

Importantly, Nature is projected as immutable and inflexible: it is regularly repeated that this participant cannot be cambiata (‘changed’), reinforcing its stability and permanence in the face of those elements that would alter, undermine or otherwise negatively impact it. A final dichotomous semantic distinguishing traditional from non-traditional moral participants involves Free Speech and the largely unproblematized concept of Pensiero Unico. Both of these are rarely instantiated as subjects, with the majority of such constructions taking the form of either predicate essere clauses or passive attributives, although there are a few occurrences of the former as the subject of negated conoscere (‘know, think’), whereas the latter serves as the subject of imporsi (‘impose itself’) and inventare (‘invent’). More interesting are the VP in which the two appear as complements: these typically include the Opposition or Administration as subject when the verbal semantics connote

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  147

damage or injury, and the Sentinelle or (less frequently) Society in the case of protective or defensive connotations. Free Speech is restricted, menaced and negated, if not overtly criminalized and punished, by the Opposition subject, most frequently when the latter is in conflict with Sentinelle actions or positions. Free Speech and Homophobia are established as grammatical and semantic partners, albeit in a mutually abnegational dialectic: where one is subject, the other is an explicitly or implicitly conflictual complement, and vice versa. Similarly, Pensiero Unico instantiated as a complement imposed by the Opposition and Administration, but one that is refused by the Sentinelle and Society. Thus, while the denotative content of the two participants is far from transparent, their reciprocal antagonism is clear: democracy and freedom are in direct odds with the force and result of single-minded political correctness. Analogously, the lexico-semantic verbal patterns associated with Gender, Civil Unions and Homosexuality put these participants in a conflictual stance vis-à-vis Nature, the Family and Biological Sex, especially when the latter are the internal complements of verbs for which the former are subjects, as can be deduced from (26) through (28). These are the objects of verbs for which the Sentinelle serve as subjects, albeit with vastly opposed meanings, as noted in (22). Alongside Nature and Children, the Family and Biological Sex are woven into positive, affirmative dialectal relations, always involving the Sentinelle and frequently Society, as well as negative and destructive ones, invariably in relation to Gender, Alternative Filiation, Civil Unions and those that are responsible for them – the Opposition and Administration. 4.3.2 The clause as message

A series of additional morphosyntactic forms and structures actuate the pragmatic component of clausal messages, while also affording insight into the place and prominence of participants within these. Three phenomena are particularly interesting in this regard: the use and form of passive VP constructions; the association of impersonal forms to a subset of participants; and modality, most notably patterns emerging from conjunctive (subjunctive) and conditional VP. As in many Indo-European languages, the Italian passive voice is used to promote the semantic patient of an equivalent transitive proposition to the grammatical subject position, consequently demoting the semantic agent, which may optionally appear as a clausal adjunct, e.g. il bambino è tutelato [dai genitori] (‘the child is protected [by her/his parents]’), compared to i genitori tutelano il bambino (‘the parents protect the child’) (viz. Dardano & Triofone, 1999). This has the effect of reinforcing or

148  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

(re-)activating the participant in question and, while not modifying the underlying semantics of a proposition, transforms clausal information structure. In the above example, while still the semantic patient of the protective action, the child is established as topical and, as such, the information conveyed by the verb is expressed as the comment about him or her: the two propositions may hold equivalent truth conditionality, but are pragmatically distinct (see Lambrecht [1994, 2000] for a more thorough discussion). Within the Sentinelle corpus, passive constructions accounted for 209 or just under 14% of all finite VP. The participant association of these is provided in Figure 4.3, which includes aggregate data for all finite active and passive constructions (left vertical axis) and the frequency of passive constructions (right vertical axis). For presentational economy, the left axis is abbreviated, affecting the visual display of Sentinelle frequencies (614 active finite propositions). These data are interesting as they demonstrate that the passive voice is not evenly distributed among corpus participants.12 By far the most frequent association of the passive voice is with Homophobia, a participant that should be recalled is not semantically projected as being hatred or animosity directed at LGBTQ persons, but the purportedly unjust accusation of such leveled at those who do not support DDL Scalfarotto and 50.00% 120

45.00% 40.00%

100

35.00% 80

30.00% 25.00%

60

20.00%

40

15.00% 10.00%

20

5.00% 0.00%

hi

C

Se nt

in el le ld re n Al t. Fi l'n Fa m ily Bi o'S ex N at ur e H om O o pp s'y os iti C iv on il U ni on s D D H L om op h G 'a en de Ad r m in So ci et y Sp ee ch Pe ns ie ro U '

0

tot V(fin)

tot passive

Figure 4.3  Frequency of passive by participant

freq passive

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  149

Cirinnà: over 45% of all finite propositions project Homophobia to the passive subject (topic) position, reinforcing its thematic status. Other participants instantiated in this way with relative frequency include the Family (30.8%), Children (30.7%), Gender (27%) and Nature (25%). On the other hand, the Administration is almost never projected in passive VP (5%), i.e. it is canonically instantiated as topical and agentive or as commentary and patient in nearly all instances. Similarly low rates are noted for the Sentinelle (8.5%), Homosexuality (11.6%), DDL (11%) and Society (11.5%). In comparison to many other languages, Italian is unique in that it has three means of constructing passive VP.13 The canonical passive is formed with the copula essere and the past participle of a lexical verb: other possibilities include the use of tensed auxiliaries andare (literally ‘go’) and venire (literally ‘come’), both of which are excluded from analytical compounds. Andare passives are generally considered to express a necessity and are strongly associated with ergative verbs, e.g. la porta va chiusa ‘the door is [to be, required to be, must be] closed’; venire passives, on the other hand, are associated with a dynamic, inchoative (inceptive) or transformative transitivity, in which the semantic patient-subject receives 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

pass-venire

D D H om L op h' a G en de r Ad m in So ci et y Sp ee ch Pe ni se ro U '

Se nt in el le C hi ld re n Al tF il' n Fa m ily Bi o'S ex N at ur e H om C os iv 'y il U ni on s

0%

pass-andare

pass-essere/stare

Figure 4.4  Passive construction types (andare, essere, venire) by participant

150  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

a temporally non-static action, e.g. la porte viene chiusa ‘the door is [generally, actively] closed’ (Sansò & Giacalone Ramat, 2016). Thus, the particular form of a passive VP conveys rich, if highly nuanced pragmatic information. Figure 4.4 shows the relative distribution of the three passive types by participant, nuancing patterns noted above. Immediately visible in Figure 4.4 is the prominence of Biological Sex and the frequency of andare passives associated with this. This male–female duality va accettato (‘must be accepted’), va conosciuto (‘must be recognized/known’) and va chiamato come uomini e come donne (‘must be called/named men and women’). Such pragmatic constructs reinforce the status of Biological Sex as a pragmatic theme of necessity or urgent inevitability. Less frequently instantiated in such constructs are Homosexuality, the Sentinelle and Children, the latter noted to be a subject that vanno tutelati (‘must be protected’). One other occurrence of the andare passive voice bears specific mention, as it projects Homosexuality – specifically violence directed toward LGBTQ persons – as that which andava e va combattuto (‘had to be and must be combatted’), somewhat ironically, perhaps even cynically reinforcing the Sentinelle’s assertion that they cannot be considered homophobic, as they, in addition to limiting their disapproval to the communicative sphere, explicitly oppose physical acts of violence. Venire passives occur somewhat more often in the corpus and are more heteroclite in their participant association. Whereas the andare passives have the indirect effect of asserting a necessary protection of LGBTQ persons from physical, but not other forms of violence, venire constructions assert their dynamic exploitation: these are chi viene strumentalizzato nelle sue emozioni più intime (‘those being [actively] exploited in their most intimate emotions’), a phrase repeated in one or another variant throughout the corpus, to the extent that it takes on a sloganeering quality. Less frequently noted are assertions in which Homosexuality is overtly instantiated as a grammatical adjunct (i.e. as the semantic agent) of such clauses, e.g. il buon senso viene sommerso da un’ideologia perversa (‘common sense is being [dynamically] overwhelmed by a perverted ideology’). This reflects the relatively frequent occurrences of venire passives associated with Society and Speech, which are spaventati (‘frightened’) and negati (‘repudiated’). At the same time, the Family is distrutta (‘destroyed’) and minacciata (‘menaced)’ and the children of Alternative Filiation are prodotti (‘produced’) and privati (‘deprived’ [of their parents]). On the other hand, the Sentinelle are accusate and punite (‘accused’ and ‘punished’) as homophobes. Finally, and most notably, the lack of dynamicity associated with Nature is particularly telling: while approximately 24% of finite clauses having this participant as an argument are passive, none is constructed with venire

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  151

auxiliaries, an observation that serves to reinforce the static, immutable semantics described above. Additional pragmatic information can be gleaned from impersonal constructions, which permit the manipulation of verbal valences and their arguments for informational finalities. In Italian, these constitute a sort of pragmatic counterpart to passives: in traditional grammatical analyses (e.g. Dardano & Trifone, 1999), so-called true impersonals are limited to atmospheric conditions of the type piovere (‘to rain’), fare predicate expression of the type fare notte (‘be nighttime’) and impersonal verbs of the type bisognare and occorrere (‘must’ and ‘need to’). However, any transitive verb may be used impersonally with the marker si (or ci si for ditransitives), where the semantic patient appears in the canonically complementary, post-verbal position, but functions grammatically (actuated in verbal morphology) as a subject. These impersonal clauses (also called spersonalizzate) are typically understood to express generalization, expectation or inevitability vis-à-vis VP-internal state, e.g. si tutelano i bambini (‘children are [generally or expectedly] protected’). In addition to demoting the grammatical subject to the pragmatic rheme or focus position, impersonal constructions of this type permit the zero instantiation of semantic agents, i.e. the person or entity responsible for the transitive action expressed onto the explicitly instantiated grammatical complement and/or semantic patient is not evoked, but must be inferred, often from the wider discursive context. This structure reflects the pragmatic activation status of the participant-argument or its inferrability within the scope of general knowledge, alluding to a presumptive association involving participant and verb. Impersonal VP are interpretively ambivalent and even potential sites of miscommunication or confusion: they are, however, a powerful tool, allowing the author of a discursive act to allude to causal links and establish or activate shared associations, while situating such as inevitable, natural or otherwise beyond interrogation (see Brunet, 1994). In the example si tutelano i bambini and assuming a wider communicative context in which familial rights and responsibilities are in discussion, several facts may be presumed via the impersonal structure: firstly, that the object-patient of the verb (i.e. children) are naturally, normally or unexpectedly protected; and secondly, that the agents of this protection needn’t be named, but can be assumed without any additional explicitly instantiated lexico-grammatical information. This has the pragmatic result of implicationally establishing a de facto, quasi-naturalistic relationship between the verb and its grammatical complement. Figure 4.5 provides the relative frequency of impersonalized VP associated with different participants, expressed as a percentage of all finite

152  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

PensieroU' Society Gender Homoph'a DDL Civil Unions Homosex'y Nature Bio'Sex Family Alt. Fil'n Children Sentinelle 0.00%

5.00%

10.00%

15.00%

20.00%

25.00%

30.00%

Figure 4.5  Frequency of impersonal VP by participant complement

clauses in which these appear as argument: three participants (Opposition, Free Speech and Administration) were not observed in such constructions. Immediately evident in Figure  4.5 is the exceptional frequency of impersonals associated with Homophobia, accounting for over 29% of all finite clauses within which this participant appeared as a grammatical argument. Collectively, and always preceded by the attenuating adverb se (‘if’), these allow for the Sentinelle to assert their understanding of Homophobia as being the inevitable byproduct of a series of actions: se non si aderisce all’ideologia (‘if ideology is not adhered to’), se si hanno delle riserve sull’adozioni omosessuali [sic] (‘if reservations about homosexual adoptions are had’), se si sostiene che il matrimonio sia solo tra un uomo e una donna (‘if it is upheld that marriage is only between a man and a woman’) and se si legge la Bibbia o Dante (‘if one reads the Bible or Dante’), the latter making references to texts that are commonly believed to condemn homosexual activity. From these, the oppositional dialectic involving Homophobia and notions of freedom and morality can be asserted as inevitable and their association presumptively ascribed to general knowledge, i.e. outside of the scope of inquiry or interrogation. Other participants are framed in a similar manner: Pensiero Unico is something that si sta creando … con la scusa delle ‘libertà’ e dei ‘diritti’ (‘is being created… with the excuse of “freedoms” and “rights”’ [scare quotes in the original]); the Family si fonda sul matrimonio di un uomo

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  153

e una donna (‘is founded on the marriage of a man and a woman’); and Civil Unions are projected as that which si stanno legalizzando (‘are being legalized’). In each of these cases, there is an implicational projection of inevitability within the scope of the VP. Other instances are expressed with explicitly or implicitly negated impersonal VP, having the converse effect, notably involving Homosexuality, which non si può definire una persona (‘cannot define a person’), whereas Biological Sex is defined as that which non si può essere indifferentement uomini o donne (‘cannot be indifferently men or women’), alluding to Gender. A final consideration pertinent to VP grammatical form is that of verbal modality, through which possible stances involving certainty, volition, necessity, hypothesis and realis/irrealis are activated. Modality is distinct from tense and aspect, although the latter are frequently interleaved within verbal morphology, e.g. through forms of the past conditional or imperfect conjunctive in Italian. Patterns concerning three morphological forms involving conditional and conjunctive moods, as well as the future, are particularly noteworthy in the corpus.14 The frequency of occurrence of these is provided in Figure  4.6, expressed as a percentage of all finite VP by participant: it should be noted that the Administration and Biological Sex were not associated with these Alt. Fil'n Speech Society Homoph'a Gender Civil Unions Family Nature Homos'y Children DDL Opposition Sentinelle 0.00%

2.00%

4.00% Future

6.00%

8.00%

Conditional

10.00%

12.00%

Conj/Subj

Figure 4.6  Conditional, conjunctive and future frequency by participant

14.00%

154  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

modalities, whereas Pensiero Unico is excluded, given a paucity of data (one conjunctive and one future occurrence). Like English, Italian conditional VP convey the hypothetical or conditioned association of a verbal predicate vis-à-vis another, explicitly or implicitly coordinated proposition, e.g. il bambino mangerebbe se avesse fame (‘the child would eat if it were hungry [lit. had hunger]’), and as a means of expressing uncertainty or doubt about the content of a proposition in another clause, e.g. la torta sarebbe mangiata dal bambino (contextually, ‘the cake would/might be eaten by the child’). Past conditional forms may also introduce a proposition from which the author/speaker wishes to take distance or insert uncertainty, a formula often used in journalism, e.g. Berlusconi sarebbe stato spiato dalla Cia (‘Berlusconi would/might have been spied upon by the CIA’), when there is not enough factual evidence for this proposition to be asserted with the equivalent indicative form, cf. Berlusconi è stato spiato (‘Berlusconi was spied upon’), a proposition whose content is conceived as factual. Most corpus participants are associated with a small number of conditional VP. Free Speech and Homophobia appear, however, within conditional VP far more than the average: over 8% of all finite VP in the case of the former and nearly 13% for the latter. This cannot be considered mere morphological happenstance: indeed, such uses of the conditional reinforce a dialectic seen in other layers of analysis, whereby the construction and prohibition of communication or opinion, defined as homophobic by the Sentinelle, is hypothesized to be antagonistic to the maintenance of civil liberties and free expression. Importantly, nearly all such VP involve the servile verb potere (‘can, be able’), e.g. quello che potrebbe diventare reato di omofobia (‘that which might become the crime of homophobia’) and un’accusa che potrebbe trasformarsi in reato (‘an accusation that could become [transform itself into] a crime’). Thus, the hypothetical establishment of legal proscriptions targeting homophobic acts, especially those included in DDL Scalfarotto, is evoked in such a way as to suggest that this could result in the eventual criminalization of Free Speech. Uses of the conjunctive (subjunctive) in Italian are much more difficult to translate into English, in large part because the morphological marking of this modality is a phenomenon effectively absent in the latter language: Italian is also distinct from other Romance languages, e.g. French, in which the subjunctive is more restricted in aspectual and temporal distribution. Summarily, conjunctive forms are used to convey irrealis, a concept that refers to the proposition-internal projection of subjective non-reality onto the content of a subordinate clause,

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  155

interpretable as volition, insecurity, doubt, hypothesis and necessity, among much else. Italian conjunctive forms are marked for past and present tenses, as well as perfect and imperfect aspects, with imperfectives often introduced by se (‘if’) (Givón, 1994; Mazzoleni, 1992; Schneider, 1999). Conjunctive forms are also governed by a number of final or restrictive subordinating expressions, e.g. perché (‘so that’) and a patto che (‘provided that’), which may explain their relatively higher frequency of occurrence. Two corpus participants stand out from the others in this regard: Society and Nature. Through its manifestation in conjunctive VP, Society is asserted to be endangered and wanting of protection, specifically from the Sentinelle, e.g. ‘{una, ogni} società normale e sana che non voglia autodistruggersi’ (‘{a, every} normal, healthy society that doesn’t wish to destroy itself’). In other instances, Society non rinneghi (‘does not repudiate, deny’) Nature, but bensì valorizzi (‘rather values’) this participant. At the same time, Nature is projected through conjunctive VP as the finality or goal of Society and, especially, the Sentinelle’s actions: it is asserted throughout the corpus that the group and its members are standing watch perché sia tutelata l’essenza dell’uomo (‘so the essence of man is protected’), alternatively expressed with the object la nostra civiltà (‘our civilization’), perché emerga la voce della verità (‘so that the voice of truth emerges’) and to the benefit of he who voglia seguire la voce della coscienza (‘wish to follow the voice of conscience’). Importantly, the Sentinelle are situated within the matrix clause of all such propositions: their wish, their goal and their resolve are projected onto Society and Nature via volition and necessity. Thus, the group reinforces its status as arbitrator of truth, here as the propositional arbiter of irrealis, a pattern that proves immensely important within the emerging linguistic ecology of this discursive practice. Finally, and no less importantly, are the instances of future constructions. As in English and other languages, the Italian future is used to evoke states or actions within a particular scope of potential or expected realis (as opposed to conjunctive irrealis): propositions actuated with future VP are not yet realized, but are not quite hypothetical or doubtful, i.e. they are asserted to be future realis states.15 Within the corpus, a distinction emerges by which DDL and Civil Unions are consistently projected in contrast to Nature, Children and Society: the former are evoked as damaging and harmful, whereas the latter are damaged or harmed. Importantly, the certainty of these propositions is expressed through the pragmatic scope of a realis future, rather than an irrealis conjunctive or hypothetical conditional. The corpus contains repeated examples by

156  The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia

which Civil Unions or the DDL promoting them saranno equiparate (‘will be equated’) to traditional institutions, such as heterosexual marriage, ricalcherà il modello tedesco (‘will copy the German model [of civil unions]’), trasformerà le donne in fornitrici di materiale biologico (‘will transform women into providers of biological material’) and causeranno la sofferenza (‘will cause suffering’). On the other hand, Nature, Children or Society non potrà mai cambiare (‘cannot be changed’), avremo sul cuore (‘we will have in our hearts’), cresceranno senza mamma o papà (‘will grow up without mom or dad’) and non potrà essere considerati un oggetto prodotto [sic] (‘cannot be considered a manufactured object’). Once again, the Sentinelle establish themselves in the decisive role of positively connoted verbs, appearing as the subject-cum-agent of almost all future VP and, importantly, never as an object-cum-recipient, integrated within and instantiated through a verbal taxonomy largely mirroring that reviewed above.

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

behavioral

existential

Figure 4.7  Participants and processes

material

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mental

relational

verbal

Le Sentinelle in Piedi  157

4.3.3 The clause as representation

The third level of linguistic description considers the nature and semantic content of clause-level representations, i.e. the ideational worlds established by and emerging from complex propositional structures and their ingredients. These are formalized in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a series of processes, within which participants occupy one or more roles (see Chapter  2). The distributional association of processes and participants is given in Figure  4.7, considering both major types (material, mental, relational) and those straddling them (behavioral, existential, verbal). These data evidence an overall preponderance of material, relational and behavioral processes, accounting for approximately 45%, 25% and 15%, respectively, as well as the relative paucity of occurrences of verbal (