The Twitter Battle over the Trans Law in Spain: Mediatization of rage in the case of the podcast Estirando el chicle

Abstract

Anger has been a part of the public debate in Spain, especially since the 8 M feminist mobilization. This article analyzes whether the mediatized rage surrounding the discursive dispute on Twitter between supporters of the so-called Ley trans (Trans Law) and those that oppose the proposed legislation can open up cracks in the affective injustice suffered by the trans collective in Spain. To this end, we will address the discursive debate generated from a sample of 7734 tweets published on the Twitter account of the Spanish feminist podcast Estirando el chicle. We will analyze the tweets following an analytical model of operationalization of the concept of anger competence (Chemaly, 2018) structured across three dimensions utilized successfully in previous studies (Núñez Puente & Fernández Romero, 2023): (1) the construction of the subject that enunciates the anger, (2) that which the mediatization of the anger allows to emerge, linked to the conception of affective injustice, and (3) the effects of affects. Our analysis of the discursive dispute on Twitter shows diverse discursive positions which inhibits the visualization of a reparation of the systemic violence suffered by the feminist movement, and within it, by trans people.