INEQUALITY, PRIVATION, SOCIAL VULNERABILITY: HATE SPEECH TOWARD BULGARIAN ROMA IN THE CONTEXT OF COVID-19

Abstract

The object of research of this study is hate discourse within the context of the analytic interpretative network of inequality – privation – social vulnerability. Hate discourse is problematized sociologically through ethnomethodology as an unconventional approach in the study of social interactions. The research focus is on utterances marked by hate speech against Bulgarian Roma in the situation of COVID-19. The perspective this approach provides as to tracing the micro-techniques of organizing utterances gives us the possibility – now in the context of a sociology interested in the everyday ways of generating social inequality – to state the thesis that the pandemic ‘awakens’ repressed affectations related to socially inherited stereotypes and prejudices. In everyday relations, there is not only the invasion of the fear of the ethnically other, of her ‘unhygienic’ body that breaks the regulations, a body that the ‘healthy’ and ‘uncontaminated’ body passes by, but the object itself of fear is over-determined: it acts by constructing the other as a danger menacing life itself. Hence, the important questions: 1) how hate speech, having ‘contaminated’ everyday and institutional discourses, entails social actions of exclusion and stigmatization; 2) how a practical logic founded on conceiving the Roma solely through the prism of their privation of what is naturally proper to ‘us’ stands in the basis of their unequal treatment, putting them into a permanent situation of social vulnerability; most generally: how hate discourse ‘does things with words’.

Keywords

• roma
• hate discourse
• inequality
• social vulnerability
• privation
• ethnomethodology
• covid-19