‘You got this!’: A critical discourse analysis of toxic positivity as a discursive construct on Facebook

Abstract

• Toxic positivity is a discursive construct on social media. • Toxic positive responses may come across as paternalistic or dismissive. • Toxic positive discourse is often based on illogical reasoning. • It reflects neoliberal positive thinking ideology. An increasing number of Australian organisations and charities are making use of social media platforms to raise public awareness, gather funds, organise events, and educate and support individuals with invisible chronic conditions (ICCs). During the COVID-19 crisis, the social disconnectedness already experienced by individuals with ICCs led to a rapid rise in their use of social media, mainly for emotional purposes. Although more and more systemic functional linguistic studies of electronically mediated discourse are being carried out, few of them have focused on dialogical interaction and power relationships between organisations engaging with social media, and their followers. The article examines several types of discourse on two public Facebook pages advocating for endometriosis awareness. It adopts a discourse-analytical approach to show how the discursive construct of toxic positivity is enmeshed in power and ideology. Two corpora of posts and comments were extracted from the Endometriosis Australia and MyEndometroisisTeam Facebook pages and analysed combining Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragma-dialectics, and critical theory. The study revealed that both dominant and other interlocutors on the social media platform often engage in discursive moves inspired by neoliberal ‘positive thinking’ ideology, resulting in a less inclusive SNS platform, which may be redressed by an increased use of affirmative discourse.