“You’re not my nanny!” Responses to racialized women leaders during COVID-19

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the early days of the pandemic, public health officials and politicians across the globe relied on Twitter to rapidly communicate COVID-19 information. Although the majority of these authority figures continue to be privileged white men, the number of women and racialized leaders is increasing. We analyze how users responded to public health tweets by Canada’s top public health official Dr. Theresa Tam and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Examining responses to these two racialized women through a critical discourse analysis, we uncover a pattern of users mobilizing gendered and racialized discourses to undermine the message, sow public distrust, and challenge the authority of Tam and Lujan Grisham. This paper documents hostility in the digital public square that, we argue, constitutes intersectional harassing backlash which could have implications for the efficacy of public health messaging on and offline.