Toxic Discourse Research Articles

“I Can Choose to be a Good Man Even if I Got a Raw Deal”: Neoliberal Heteromasculinity as Manosphere Counter Narrative in r/Stoicism

This article provides findings from our dual-computational/qualitative analysis of r/Stoicism, a large subreddit in which self-presenting boys and men seek Stoic philosophical advice on various life matters. In choosing to investigate this decidedly (hetero)masculinized online space in which users share their anxieties and grievances, we expected to find substantial evidence of “toxic” manosphere-style discourse, while also hoping to uncover counter patterns which, like Maloney et al.’s study of 4chan, complicate assumptions around the discursive practices of boys and men in online spaces such as these. Rather, what we found was a complete absence of toxic discourse, and instead the presence of patterns which complicate the logics underpinning efforts at deradicalization and wider socio-positive masculinity agendas. Thorburn’s work has been important in foregrounding how the “neoliberal emphasis on individualism and a capitalist ‘hustle-culture’” underpin manosphere logics. Here, we see similar, albeit more palatable (to mainstream sensibilities), neoliberal tenets at work across counter logics, and reflect on why economic-structural explanations for boys’ and men’s anxieties are sidelined in such mainstream responses to the manosphere.

Toxicity in the trans debate: what are the psychological phenomena that turn an issue of mental health and social inclusion into a forum for vitriolically vicious social exclusion?

Purpose This study aims to explore and document some of the phenomena that seem to have toxified the trans debate. Design/methodology/approach To create a partial compilation of the phenomena most known to cloud human judgement and reasoning, using the trans debate as the prime example. Findings The trans debate seems to have been increasingly toxified in ways predicted by well-documented psychological phenomena. Research limitations/implications Although much is known about the psychological toxifiers on an individual basis, little is known about how they interact to cause the emergence and amplification of toxic debate. Practical implications It is anticipated by studying the emergence of the toxicity around the trans debate, that the descent into toxic discourse in many other contexts can be better understood. Social implications If lessons can be learnt from the descent into toxicity in the trans debate, and its participants become aware of their behaviour, perhaps they can better work towards a mutually acceptable solution. Originality/value By compiling the factors responsible for the toxification of debate, it is hoped that what appear to be the precursors of all conflict and war can be better understood, prevented or avoided.

TOXICITY AGAINST BRAZILIAN WOMEN DEPUTIES ON TWITTER: A CATEGORIZATION OF DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE

This paper discussed categories of violent discourses and toxicity against Brazilian women deputies on Twitter through a mixed-methods (corpus linguistics approach/discursive analysis) on a dataset of 1400 tweets. Results suggest that toxic discourse in this case is largely based on violence connected to women's behavior and abilities in the political realm, rather than ideology or propositions. Ideological affiliation, while may influence the amount of toxicity created, doesn’t influence the types of toxic discourses.

Toxic Discourse and Indigeneity in Strange as this Weather has Been

Ann Pancake’s novel Strange as This Weather Has Been is a fictional catastrophic disasters novel invoked upon the landscape and its inhabitants by mountaintop removal mining. The author blends elements of her own upbringing in Appalachia to tell the tale of a present-day coal mining family. “Toxic discourse” is a form of environmental literature, which aims to achieve ecological warning by telling the harm of man-made chemical poisons to people and society. In Strange as This Weather Has Been The author describes poisons throughout the whole text. The gradual spread of poisons in geographical space makes the protagonist realize the seriousness of environmental pollution, The severe crisis of surviving environment and the protagonist’s sense of “indigeneity” finally make her realize the awakening of ecological consciousness and take part in the way of environmental protection.

Pandemic discourse and cultural healing

COVID-19 pandemic has brought new social and discursive contexts with the metaphorization and gothification of the virus for many purposes ranging from reporting to politics. This discursive reality is similar to Lawrence Buell’s notion of toxic discourse. The discourse of the pandemic, like toxic discourse, is both useful and harmful in the ‘risk society’ that is exposed to both the infection and economic downslide. While on the one hand this discourse is integral in raising awareness and infection control measures, it also results in the monsterization of virus in press, social media and political rhetoric. This paper attempts to analyze various texts that have emerged in the backdrop of the pandemic to show how the social media humor, advertisement metaphors, masking and sanitizing of language and the serio-comic use of language have evolved as discursive strategies of the contemporary pandemic-hit society. The study also focuses on how literary/poetic use of language becomes a part of cultural healing. Linguistic and literary tropes that have mutated and evolved in the pandemic time are also analyzed.

Humbug and outrage: A study of performance, gender and affective atmosphere in the mediation of a critical parliamentary moment

In a Parliament called back following its unlawful prorogation in September 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson touched a raw nerve by stating that the ‘best way to honour Jo Cox’s memory is to get Brexit done’. Johnson had earlier dismissed concerns about threats to Members of Parliament which echoed his inflammatory language as ‘humbug’. We examine this critical parliamentary moment in the context of broader discussions about emotionality, toxic discourse and polarisation in the United Kingdom. The study combines performance analysis of the Hansard transcripts and UK Parliament YouTube coverage of the debate, with discourse analysis of national and local newspaper coverage from 25 September to 1 October 2019. We contend that in-depth examination of this moment, alongside the subsequent journalistic commentary, contributes an original case study which works to illuminate the intersections of political performance, affective atmospheres and gender in contemporary mediated political culture.

Escrituras tóxicas: cuerpos y paisajes alterados

This article focuses on the recent rural turn in contemporary Argentine literature production. It draws from Laurence Buell’s notion of toxic discourse (1988) in order to analyze two narratives: Distancia de rescate (2014) by Samanta Schweblin, and Las estrellas federales (2016), by Juan Diego Incardona, along with the poetry collection Un pequeño mundo enfermo (2014), by Julián Joven [pseudonym of Cristian Molina]. With the emergence and more frequent use of agrochemicals in the Argentine rural soil, I argue that these writings articulate a discursive toxicity anchored in a transfigured pampa. Furthermore, the cultivation of transgenic soy transforms the space into a contaminated and contaminating landscape, whose agrotoxics inoculate indiscriminately both human and nonhuman bodies. I read these bodily and spatial representations, in both the fictions and poetry, as a textualization that redesigns the relation between subject and the natural environmental, specifically the rural space, displacing a discourse of “buen vivir” for a literary production of what I propose, tentatively, as of “mal vivir” (bad living). This aesthetic production appeals to a reflection on environmental justice that considers the imminent damage and degradation of the contaminated landscape. 

News media representation on EU immigration before Brexit: the \u2018Euro-Ripper\u2019 case

A higher level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU), with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, often fleeing from war and poverty. In the wake of enlargement of the European Union, the United Kingdom (UK) experienced high inward migration. One of the main focuses of UK media coverage was immigration from Eastern European countries. The UK referendum on Brexit on 23 June 2016, was followed by an increase in hate crimes linked to migration issues and, subsequently, a media apparatus of toxic discourse and fear of the criminal ‘Other’. This paper aims to reveal how newspaper articles and personal comments written in response to these articles, represented creative and media-driven anxieties about ‘opening’ borders in the EU. The empirical sample builds on news media coverage of the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case, published in two UK newspapers—the Daily Mail and The Independent. Based on critical surveillance studies and cultural media studies, I elaborate on the notion of moral panic, dramatised by the media, which mobilises specific compositions of ‘otherness’ by constructing suspicion and criminalising inequality by particular social and ethnic groups and nationalities. I argue that the media portrays the dramatisation of transnational narratives of risk and (in)security, which redraws territorial borders and (re)define Britain’s global identity. The analysis shows how the news media in the Brexit vote continually raised and legitimised awareness related to the migration as a vehicle that enables the ‘folk-devil’ to cross borders. This context postulates an ideology that converges on a relationship of intransigence and criminal convictions, in the context of a politics of inclusion and exclusion. I conclude by emphasising how the media intersects different social and geographical spaces in which migration takes place. Media-constructed categories of suspicion targets have been previously created and ‘suspect communities’ have already been socially accepted, thereby confirming and reshaping understandings of their identities and communities.

"Cultivating an Ability to Imagine": Ryan Walsh's Reckonings and the Poetics of Toxicity

For nearly two decades since Lawrence Buell defined and anatomized “toxic discourse” in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (2001), the storying of toxic experience has received fruitful theoretical and literary attention. Throughout the world, citizens have come to terms with the reality that we live on a poisoned planet and the poisons in our environment are also in ourselves—the poisons our industrial activities spew into the air, water, soil, and food are almost imperceptibly (“slowly,” as Rob Nixon would put it) absorbed into all of our bodies (through the process Stacy Alaimo described as “transcorporeality”). Biologist and literary activist Sandra Steingraber stated in Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997) that we must “cultivat[e] an ability to imagine” in order to appreciate the meaning of our post-industrial lives. In this essay, I focus on Ryan Walsh’s new collection of poetry, Reckonings (2019), and on Pramod K. Nayar’s recent ecocritical study, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017), in order to propose and define an evolving “poetics of toxicity.”

How speculative designs produce new potentials for education research in digital culture

ABSTRACT This article reports on a speculative design experiment, wherein the authors produced a critical remix video as intervention into the spread of toxic technocultural discourse on Twitch.tv (Twitch), an online platform in which content creators stream live content alongside a live chat audience. It focuses on the authors’ development of a speculative design process for education research in the context of livestreaming technoculture. This process began with a multimodal discourse analysis showing how specific discourse processes – amplification, waving, and network influencing – on a popular Twitch stream produced agonistic conflict and sometimes toxic discourse stemming therefrom. These findings from the multimodal discourse analysis informed a speculative intervention performed through the production of a critical remix video, which recontextualized the same discourse processes, thereby producing a working critique of potentially toxic agonism on this Twitch channel. The article also illustrates how speculative design experiments in digital culture may help develop new pedagogic potentials that catalyze social change through youths’ expanded and nuanced repertoire of digital practices in the future.

Trust Me, I’m Trolling: Irony and the Alt-Right’s Political Aesthetic

Trust Me, I’m Trolling: Irony and the Alt-Right’s Political Aesthetic

"EVERY WORD YOU JUST SAID IS WRONG": ONLINE RAGE AND INCLUSIVITY IN DISNEY FRANCHISE FANDOM

The months leading up to the release of Disney franchise films The Last Jedi (December 2017) and Black Panther (February 2018) were marked by speculation, concern, and fervor in equal measures from the established fan communities of Star Wars and Marvel. Both franchises have been associated with toxic geek masculinity, a performed, communal hypermasculinity marked by exclusionary practices and rhetoric (Salter & Blodgett, 2017). By centering either non-white or non-male characters as leads in roles traditionally dominated by cisgender white men, both films became centers for toxic discourse and targeted campaigns aimed at disrupting their commercial success. In this paper, we will situate these case studies as emblematic of the changing discourse of geek fandom spaces, and its intersections with white supremacy and misogyny.

The rights of national majorities: Toxic discourse or democratic catharsis?

This paper traces the hazards of a majority rights discourse. It argues that this discourse can become a platform for dominant groups to recognize in policies that disadvantage and exclude minorities a legitimate defense of majority rights. The first section examines two ways in which multicultural frameworks already privilege majority rights and interests. The second section distinguishes between legitimate majority entitlements and the demands of entitled majorities to retain their privilege and dominance. I argue that an entitled majority (1) considers itself to be inherently deserving of special treatment and thereby does not believe that minorities have genuine justice-based entitlements similar to its entitlements and (2) views itself as owed appreciation for the ways in which it waives its putative entitlements to accommodate minority interests. Evidence of these features can be found in current political struggles in Quebec and Switzerland.

Environmental Discourse: A Comparative Ecocritical Study of Pakistani and American Fiction in English

This article is an overview of how language communicates and construes humanity’s relationship to the environment in different cultural contexts. With reference to Moth Smoke (2012), Trespassing (2005), White Noise (1999) and A Thousand Acres (1991) the study explores particularities of American and Pakistani environmental discourse. Informed by interdisciplinary approaches like ecocriticism and toxic discourse the analysis seeks to demonstrate writers’ engagement with issues and concerns on environmental degradation. The purpose of the study is to explore the plurality of perspectives that are required to address the environmental contamination taking place globally. To understand the fundamental premise of how different cultures view and frame ecological crisis especially in the form of toxicity, pollution and contamination, this article briefly examines the selected Pakistani and American writers’ representation of their society’s ecological relationship with the living and non-living world recognising the complex altering relationship between the environment and the social sphere.

“The waste of the empire”: Neocolonialism and environmental justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the politics of “waste” in both the environmental and the socio-economic senses of the word, with a special attention to the outsourcing of toxicity and the “wastification” of disposable, residual bodies. Both toxic discourse, as explored by Lawrence Buell and Cynthia Deitering, and environmental justice, in particular Rob Nixon’s elucidation of the representational challenges posed by slow violence, contribute to a specific approach, Waste Theory, used here to analyse “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”, a 1999 short story by Filipino/Australian writer Merlinda Bobis, in which she grapples with the dirty politics of waste. This narrative constitutes a neocolonial allegory particularly amenable to Waste Theory, in that it allows critics to tease out the ways in which toxic environments act in conjunction and collusion with the toxic configurations of power that transform human beings into literal or figurative waste.

An etiology of metaphors: toxic discourse and poetic form in Andrea Brady’s Wildfire

ABSTRACTAndrea Brady’s long poem Wildfire, begun in response to the second invasion of Iraq, explores the impact of the incendiary on living environments. In formally challenging ways, the poem expresses the reach of the military–industrial complex and its varied mediation in contemporary culture. Combining print and digital modes, Wildfire incorporates a vast range of resources and offers a long historical view on the ethics of warfare. Fundamental to this exploration are questions of scale, and how our distance from the effects of war – both in space and time – limits our understanding of its environmental impact. This essay argues that poetic experimentation is fundamentally a political act, one that uses the resources of language to create new readings of environmental threat for the twenty-first century.

“As If the River Was Not Meat and Drink to You!”: Social Novels as a Means of Framing Nineteenth-Century Environmental Justice

In current popular representations of nineteenth-century society, garbage and pollution seem omnipresent once characters leave the comfortable homes of the middle class and the aristocracy. At least, this is what modern TV productions, often based on contemporary novels, suggest. It is of course questionable whether this is an accurate image, but not only literary fiction confirms that environments in the nineteenths century were socially divided. Yet, rereading Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864), Wilhelm Raabe's Pfisters Mill (1883), Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) from an environmental historian perspective, these can serve as novelistic case studies, providing cultural perspectives on unjust distribution of environmental risks in the context of accelerating industrialization and urbanization. All of these novels enjoyed great popularity at their time, due both to fame of their authors and wide circulation through their serial publication in well-known journals. Furthermore, each of the authors had some journalistic training or at least affinities for journalistic discourse. The novels in question were based on thorough research, inspired by a particular event, giving them a dimension of social reportage. Given their historical context and narratives, they can be situated within a toxic discourse (Buell) arising around the issues of sanitary reform from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.

”När det tar slut och börjar om igen”: Ekokritiska perspektiv på Stefan Castas ungdomsdystopier

The Swedish author Stefan Casta has written several books for children and adults, thematically addressing nature and environment. This paper highlights and discusses ideological and aesthetical aspects in his recent novel, Den gröna cirkeln (2011) and its sequel, Under tiden (2012), from an ecocritical perspective. The novels combine environmental commitment with a dystopian story about four young people who survive a climate catastrophe but get lost in a world they no longer recognize and where ordinary logic does not seem to exist. The paper elucidates this process by a comparison with Buell’s (2001) concept of toxic discourse as there are several parallells, such as elements like a lost paradise, inescapable toxic, and the oppression of powerful societal interests, throughout the story. Simultaneously, ambivalence towards culture and civilization is expressed. Nature and culture become intertwined in a way that differs from the conventional dichotomy and this complexity is the supporting structure of the texts. The four teenagers, and even more so the following generation, become symbols of a new future, a pattern recognized from much dystopian as well as children’s fiction, where the weak and oppressed turn out to be the heroes. The optimistic and didactic ambition in this kind of dystopian stories is often aimed at creating an engagement for environmental issues and a sustainable future among young people. By placing the story in an imagined future as well as adding fantastic elements, Stefan Casta creates a kind of ”Verfremdungseffekt” on phenomena we often do not question in our lifestyle. This could be a liberating relativization to the young readers; the social and cultural drives that rule many of our life choices are not essential and can therefore always be reconsidered. Keywords: Ecocriticism, Stefan Casta, dystopian fiction, nature, environment, climate change

Robert Smithson's Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey

No land artist of the 1960s was more influential at the time than Robert Smithson. If anything, earthworks such as theSpiral Jettyand essays such as “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” have only added to his importance over the years. One of the reasons Smithson still seems so relevant is that his work responded so directly to a nostalgic trend that arose in both American studies and American environmentalism during the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, it was a nostalgia for nineteenth-century pastoralism, but it also led to a revival of interest in such figures as Thomas Cole, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Olmsted himself. To counteract this elegiac tendency Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth. The first fully formed expression of this toxic discourse was an essay he published in 1967, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” It was there that Smithson began to elaborate an aesthetic that treated the open-pit mine, the suburb, and the desert as mirror images of each other.

The Poetics of Waste and Wastefulness: Fatih Akin Films Garbage in the Garden of Eden1

In his 2012 documentary film Müll im Garten Eden Fatih Akin tells the story of the residents of the small village of Çamburnu and their decade-long struggle with the authorities that have turned a former copper mine into a gigantic landfill. In his documentary he engages the parameters of toxic discourse as discussed by Lawrence Buell in response to Rachel Carson’s claims about the toxic nature of chemical pollutants in her seminal book Silent Spring.2 Toxic discourse emerges in response to the destruction of the pastoral. At the same time, it speaks the language of the pastoral. Fatih Akin displaces the toxic scene into a different cultural context, thereby emphasizing the cultural dimension of toxicity and waste. Resorting to the narrative paradigm of toxic discourse allows Akin to engage the tradition of the pastoral, probing the conventions of the genre, and, at the same time, addressing a sensational and emotionally charged subject in a way that is aesthetically challenging. Müll im Garten Eden finds a cinematic language to configure the conflicted nature of toxic discourse and deal with the complexities of waste, society, and culture in a parable of modernity and the systemic patterns of environmental degradation. As Frederick Buell has argued in his essay on oil cultures, energy history and cultural history are intricately intertwined and the material features of oil have significantly shaped cultural production through the recurring motifs of exuberance and catastrophe.3 In my essay on Fatih Akin’s documentary, I discuss the societal and cultural circumstances of this film and tie its poetic practice of exuberance to the principles of production and consumption that create waste in the first place. Sublime still lifes of waste and long takes of protesting shrill voices encourage the viewer to engage critically with the issue of waste through the performance of excess as poetic practice.