Russian Language Studies (Dec 2022)
Verbal explication of axiological constants of feminist discourse in the Russian languagein the context of cyberactivism
Abstract
The authors focus on the interconnection between the basic constituents of two phenomena relevant to modern Russian studies - the phenomenon of cyberactivism and the linguistic personality of a feminist activist. The relevance is determined by the object of the study, which is a special form of social and linguo-cultural interactions - the discursive practices of feminist cyberactivism. Being transmitted in the network environment for promoting socio-political activities, feminist cyberactivism represents a substantial part of content nowadays and appears to be one ofthe most important factors in the formation of axiological determinants in the Russian society.The aim of the study is to identify and systematically characterize the specific linguistic features of actual feminist and pro-feminist blogs, demonstrating both the ideological views of the feminismand the peculiar linguistic representation of feminism as a thematic field in the aspect of idioethnic features of the linguistic personality of a feminist activist. Particular attention is paid to the methods of verbal definition of the problematic field of feminist cyberactivism (primarily, the definition of gender inequality index in Russia) as well as to the identification of basic semasiological mechanisms for “modifying” the pragmatic parameters of the Russian-speaking feminist blogosphere. The material was collected from online blogs of feminist activists, text units from thematic feminist communities in social networks, as well as text materials of public organizations whose activities are closely related to feminist ideology. The critical discourse analysis, functional analysis of media texts (blogs), complex structural and contextual analysis of the language system of the Russian blogo-sphere, stylistic analysis of visual resources of the Russian language, linguo-pragmatic analysis of communicative acts, and the method of linguo-culturological interpretations were applied. The authors discovered that blog activism has several characteristic features that are reflected in its verbal and communicative content. The main purpose of most blogs (especially those belonging to personal pro-feminist blogs) is an act of self-presentation. This is the reason why this type of activism often hasan individual, rather than a collective nature, and the authors, as a rule, do not indicate their civil or political goals, which brings this framework of feminist discourse closer to non-political social practices. It is concluded that bloggers rarely use conventional language forms traditionally inherent to ideologized practices. This in turn leads to the evolvement of new communication strategies and, given the expansion pace of modern blogosphere, may have a major social effect in the future. The authors prove that by cultivating “at a certain angle,” the sense-forming component of feminist discourse, which is a critical reflection of female subjectiveness, feminist cyberactivism demonstrates a high degree of civil society involvement in certain political processes since it essentially aims at fulfilling the socio-ethological function (organization of hyperdiscourse through optimizing the reci-pient’s behavior and forming a need to share an actualized standpoint). Further consideration of fe-minist cyberactivism, which is both the primary method for the expansion of feminist community in Russia and its constitutive feature, can answer many questions on the linguo-cultural and, more broadly, civilizational structure of Russian society.
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