“Misery Business?”: The Contribution of Corpus-Driven Critical Discourse Analysis to Understanding Gender-Variant Twitter Users’ Experiences of Employment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.3.1/2.03Keywords:
gender variant, corups linguistics, Twitter, employment, sociocognitive discourse analysisAbstract
This contribution is a corpus-based analysis of gender-variant discourse on Twitter, exploring users’ strategies for organizing their experience and understanding of employment. The data are two specialized corpora: (1) the biographies of each of 2,881 self-identifying gender-variant users; (2) c.4,000,000 tweets posted by those users. The corpora are analyzed using a sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2009, 2015, 2017). The biographies are used to determine the demographic make-up of the sample. An analysis of the corpus of users’ tweets will explore, and attempt to explain, the activated discourses around aspects of employment (i.e. representations of the self-as-employee, co-worker relationships, employers, and experiences in employment). In considering the contribution linguistics can make in understanding gender-variant people’s experiences of employment, the focus of this research is three-fold: (1) I consider the role of gender-variant users’ cognitive organization of employment experience in either perpetuating or challenging marginalization in the workplace; (2) I consider the validity and reliability of a corpus-driven analysis in comparison to the credibility and validity of previous studies on the employment experiences of gender-variant people; (3) I consider the logical and ethical implications of considering only the roles of employers, policymakers, and co-workers in remedying marginalization in the workplace.
References
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Cheng, J. (1996) “The Fundamental Role of Entailment in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning”, Journal of Computing and Information, 2 (1): 853873.
Danieli, A., Woodhams, C. (2005) “Emancipatory Research Methodology and Disability: A Critique”, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8 (4): 281296.
Davis, D. (2009) “Transgender Issues in the Workplace: HRD’s Newest Challenge/Opportunity”, Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11 (1): 109120.
De Cuypere, G., van Hemelrijck, M., Michel, A., Carael, B., Heylens, G., Rubens, R., Hoebeke, P. and Monstrey, S. (2007) “Prevalence and Demography of Transsexualism in Belgium”, European Psychiatry, 22 (3): 137141.
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Gabrielatos, C., Baker, P. (2008) “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 19962005”, Journal of English Linguistics, 36 (1): 538.
Göçmen, İ., Yılmaz, V. (2016) “Exploring Perceived Discrimination among LGBT Individuals in Turkey in Education, Employment, and Health Care: Results of an Online Survey”, Journal of Homosexuality, 64 (8): 10521068.
Golafshani, N. (2003) “Understanding Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research”, The Qualitative Report, 8 (4): 597606.
Grant, J.M., Mottet, L.A., Tanis, J., Harrison, J., Herman, J.L. and Keisling, M. (2011) Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Hardaker, C., McGlashan, M. (2016) ““Real Men Don’t Hate Women”: Twitter Rape Threats and Group Identity”, Journal of Pragmatics, 91: 8093.
Irving, D. (2017) “Gender Transition and Job In/Security: Trans* Un/Der/Employment Experiences and Labour Anxieties in Post-Fordist Society”, Atlantis, 38 (1): 168178.
James, S.E., Herman, J.L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L. and Anafi, M. (2016) The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality.
Khamis, S., Ang, L., Welling, R. (2017) “Self-Branding,‘Micro-Celebrity’and the Rise of Social Media Influencers”, Celebrity Studies, 8 (2): 191208.
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lather, P. (1986) “Issues of Validity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a Rock and a Soft Place”, Interchange, 17 (4): 6384.
Lavrakas, P.J. (2008) Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods, London: SAGE.
Law, C., Martinez, L.R., Ruggs, E.N., Hebl, M. and Akers, E. (2011) “Trans-Parency in the Workplace: How the Experiences of Transsexual Employees Can Be Improved”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79 (3): 710723.
Lemon, M.C. (2003) Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, London: Routledge.
Leskovec, J. and Krevl, A. (2014) SNAP Datasets: Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection. Available online at http://snap.stanford.edu/data (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
McEnery, T. and Hardie, A. (2012) Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mizock, L., Mueser, K. T. (2014) “Employment, Mental Health, Internalized Stigma, and Coping with Transphobia among Transgender Individuals”, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 1 (2): 146158.
Mizock, L., Woodrum, T.D., Riley, G., Sotilleo, E.A., Yuen, N. and Ormerod, A.J. (2017) “Coping with Transphobia in Employment: Strategies Used by Transgender and Gender-Diverse People in the United States”, International Journal of Transgenderism, 18 (3): 282294.
Nadal, K.L., Davidoff, K.C., Fujii-Doe, W. (2014) “Transgender Women and the Sex Work Industry: Roots in Systemic, Institutional, and Interpersonal Discrimination”, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 15 (2): 169183.
Office for National Statistics (2016) Overview of the UK Population: February 2016. Available online at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/february2016 (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
Overton, J., van Diermen, P. (2014) “Quantitative Research”, In Development Field Work: A Practical Guide, R. Scheyvens (ed.), pp. 3958, London: SAGE.
Ozturk, M.B., Tatli, A. (2016), “Gender Identity Inclusion in the Workplace: Broadening Diversity Management Research and Practice through the Case of Transgender Employees in the UK”, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27 (8): 781802.
Paulhus, D.L., Vazire, S. (2007) “The Self-Report Method”, In Handbook of Research Method in Personality Psychology, R.W. Robins, R.C. Fraley and R.F. Krueger (eds), pp. 224239, New York, NY: Guilford.
Rayson, P., Garside, R. (2000) “Comparing Corpora Using Frequency Profiling”, In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparing Corpora, held in conjunction with the 38th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2000), Hong Kong, Japan, October 18.
Richman, W., Kiesler, S., Weisband, S. and Drasgow, F. (1999) “A Meta-Analytic Study of Social Desirability Distortion in Computer-Administered Questionnaires, Traditional Questionnaires, and Interviews”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 84 (5): 754775.
Schilt, K., Connell, C. (2007), “Do Workplace Gender Transitions Make Gender Trouble?”, Gender, Work & Organization, 14 (6): 596618.
Spector, P.E. (1994) “Using Self-Report Questionnaires in OB Research: A Comment on the Use of a Controversial Method”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15 (5): 385392.
Statista (2018) Number of Monthly Active Twitter Users Worldwide from 1st Quarter 2010 to 3rd Quarter 2017 (in Millions). Available online at https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/ (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
United States Census Bureau (2017) National Population Totals and Components of Change: Data. Available online at https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2017/demo/popest/nation-total.html (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
van Dijk, T.A. (2009) “Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach”, In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd edn.), R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), pp. 6286, London: SAGE.
van Dijk, T.A. (2015) “Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach”, In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (3rd edn.), R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), pp. 6285, London: SAGE.
van Dijk, T.A. (2017) “Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies”, In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, J. Flowerdew (ed.), pp. 26–43, Abingdon: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, T. (1995) “Representing Social Action”, Discourse & Society, 6 (1): 81106.
van Leeuwen, T. (1996) “The Representation of Social Actors”, In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, C.R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds), pp. 3270, Abingdon: Routledge.
Volkova, S., Backrach, Y., Armstrong, M. and Sharma, V. (2015) “Inferring Latent User Properties from Texts Published in Social Media”, In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2015), Austin, TX, January 2530.
World Professional Association for Transgender Health (2011) Standards of Care: For the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People (7th Version). Available online at https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyżanowski, M., McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. (2008) “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press”, Discourse & Society, 19 (3): 273306.
Bell, M.P., Özbilgin, M.F., Beauregard, T.A. and Sürgevil, O. (2011) “Voice, Silence, and Diversity in 21st Century Organizations: Strategies for Inclusion of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Employees”, Human Resource Management, 50 (1): 131146.
Bethlehem, J.G. (2010) “Selection Bias in Web Surveys”, International Statistical Review, 78 (2): 161188.
Biernacki, P., Waldorf, D. (1981) “Snowball Sampling: Problems and Techniques of Chain Referral Sampling”, Sociological Methods & Research, 10 (2): 141163.
Brewster, M.E., Velez, B., DeBlaere, C. and Moradi, B. (2012) “Transgender Individuals’ Workplace Experiences: The Applicability of Sexual Minority Measures and Models”, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 59 (1): 6070.
Brewster, M.E., Velez, B.L., Mennicke, A. and Tebbe, E. (2014) “Voices from Beyond: A Thematic Content Analysis of Transgender Employees’ Workplace Experiences”, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 1 (2): 159169.
Budge, S.L., Tebbe, E.N., Howard, K.A.S. (2010) “The Work Experiences of Transgender Individuals: Negotiating the Transition and Career Decision-Making Processes”, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57 (4): 377393.
Cheng, J. (1996) “The Fundamental Role of Entailment in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning”, Journal of Computing and Information, 2 (1): 853873.
Danieli, A., Woodhams, C. (2005) “Emancipatory Research Methodology and Disability: A Critique”, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8 (4): 281296.
Davis, D. (2009) “Transgender Issues in the Workplace: HRD’s Newest Challenge/Opportunity”, Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11 (1): 109120.
De Cuypere, G., van Hemelrijck, M., Michel, A., Carael, B., Heylens, G., Rubens, R., Hoebeke, P. and Monstrey, S. (2007) “Prevalence and Demography of Transsexualism in Belgium”, European Psychiatry, 22 (3): 137141.
Dietert, M., Dentice, D. (2009) “Gender Identity Issues and Workplace Discrimination: The Transgender Experience”, Journal of Workplace Rights, 14 (1): 121140.
Dietert, M., Dentice, D. (2015) “The Transgender Military Experience: Their Battle for Workplace Rights”, Journal of Workplace Rights, 5 (2): 112.
Dispenza, F., Watson, L.B., Chung, Y.B. and Brack, G. (2012) “Experience of Career-Related Discrimination for Female-To-Male Transgender Persons: A Qualitative Study”, The Career Development Quarterly, 60 (1): 6581.
Donaldson, S.I., Grant-Vallone, E.J. (2002) “Understanding Self-Report Bias in Organizational Behaviour Research”, Journal of Business and Psychology, 17 (2): 245260.
Dunson III, M. (2001) “Sex, Gender, and Transgender: The Present and Future of Employment Discrimination Law”, Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, 22 (2): 465506.
Gabrielatos, C., Baker, P. (2008) “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 19962005”, Journal of English Linguistics, 36 (1): 538.
Göçmen, İ., Yılmaz, V. (2016) “Exploring Perceived Discrimination among LGBT Individuals in Turkey in Education, Employment, and Health Care: Results of an Online Survey”, Journal of Homosexuality, 64 (8): 10521068.
Golafshani, N. (2003) “Understanding Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research”, The Qualitative Report, 8 (4): 597606.
Grant, J.M., Mottet, L.A., Tanis, J., Harrison, J., Herman, J.L. and Keisling, M. (2011) Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Hardaker, C., McGlashan, M. (2016) ““Real Men Don’t Hate Women”: Twitter Rape Threats and Group Identity”, Journal of Pragmatics, 91: 8093.
Irving, D. (2017) “Gender Transition and Job In/Security: Trans* Un/Der/Employment Experiences and Labour Anxieties in Post-Fordist Society”, Atlantis, 38 (1): 168178.
James, S.E., Herman, J.L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L. and Anafi, M. (2016) The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality.
Khamis, S., Ang, L., Welling, R. (2017) “Self-Branding,‘Micro-Celebrity’and the Rise of Social Media Influencers”, Celebrity Studies, 8 (2): 191208.
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lather, P. (1986) “Issues of Validity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a Rock and a Soft Place”, Interchange, 17 (4): 6384.
Lavrakas, P.J. (2008) Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods, London: SAGE.
Law, C., Martinez, L.R., Ruggs, E.N., Hebl, M. and Akers, E. (2011) “Trans-Parency in the Workplace: How the Experiences of Transsexual Employees Can Be Improved”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79 (3): 710723.
Lemon, M.C. (2003) Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, London: Routledge.
Leskovec, J. and Krevl, A. (2014) SNAP Datasets: Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection. Available online at http://snap.stanford.edu/data (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
McEnery, T. and Hardie, A. (2012) Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mizock, L., Mueser, K. T. (2014) “Employment, Mental Health, Internalized Stigma, and Coping with Transphobia among Transgender Individuals”, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 1 (2): 146158.
Mizock, L., Woodrum, T.D., Riley, G., Sotilleo, E.A., Yuen, N. and Ormerod, A.J. (2017) “Coping with Transphobia in Employment: Strategies Used by Transgender and Gender-Diverse People in the United States”, International Journal of Transgenderism, 18 (3): 282294.
Nadal, K.L., Davidoff, K.C., Fujii-Doe, W. (2014) “Transgender Women and the Sex Work Industry: Roots in Systemic, Institutional, and Interpersonal Discrimination”, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 15 (2): 169183.
Office for National Statistics (2016) Overview of the UK Population: February 2016. Available online at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/february2016 (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
Overton, J., van Diermen, P. (2014) “Quantitative Research”, In Development Field Work: A Practical Guide, R. Scheyvens (ed.), pp. 3958, London: SAGE.
Ozturk, M.B., Tatli, A. (2016), “Gender Identity Inclusion in the Workplace: Broadening Diversity Management Research and Practice through the Case of Transgender Employees in the UK”, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27 (8): 781802.
Paulhus, D.L., Vazire, S. (2007) “The Self-Report Method”, In Handbook of Research Method in Personality Psychology, R.W. Robins, R.C. Fraley and R.F. Krueger (eds), pp. 224239, New York, NY: Guilford.
Rayson, P., Garside, R. (2000) “Comparing Corpora Using Frequency Profiling”, In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparing Corpora, held in conjunction with the 38th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2000), Hong Kong, Japan, October 18.
Richman, W., Kiesler, S., Weisband, S. and Drasgow, F. (1999) “A Meta-Analytic Study of Social Desirability Distortion in Computer-Administered Questionnaires, Traditional Questionnaires, and Interviews”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 84 (5): 754775.
Schilt, K., Connell, C. (2007), “Do Workplace Gender Transitions Make Gender Trouble?”, Gender, Work & Organization, 14 (6): 596618.
Spector, P.E. (1994) “Using Self-Report Questionnaires in OB Research: A Comment on the Use of a Controversial Method”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15 (5): 385392.
Statista (2018) Number of Monthly Active Twitter Users Worldwide from 1st Quarter 2010 to 3rd Quarter 2017 (in Millions). Available online at https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/ (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
United States Census Bureau (2017) National Population Totals and Components of Change: Data. Available online at https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2017/demo/popest/nation-total.html (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
van Dijk, T.A. (2009) “Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach”, In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd edn.), R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), pp. 6286, London: SAGE.
van Dijk, T.A. (2015) “Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach”, In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (3rd edn.), R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), pp. 6285, London: SAGE.
van Dijk, T.A. (2017) “Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies”, In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, J. Flowerdew (ed.), pp. 26–43, Abingdon: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, T. (1995) “Representing Social Action”, Discourse & Society, 6 (1): 81106.
van Leeuwen, T. (1996) “The Representation of Social Actors”, In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, C.R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds), pp. 3270, Abingdon: Routledge.
Volkova, S., Backrach, Y., Armstrong, M. and Sharma, V. (2015) “Inferring Latent User Properties from Texts Published in Social Media”, In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2015), Austin, TX, January 2530.
World Professional Association for Transgender Health (2011) Standards of Care: For the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People (7th Version). Available online at https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf (last accessed: January 16, 2018).
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Published
2018-10-16
How to Cite
Webster, L. (2018). “Misery Business?”: The Contribution of Corpus-Driven Critical Discourse Analysis to Understanding Gender-Variant Twitter Users’ Experiences of Employment. PuntOorg International Journal, 3(1/2), 25–50. https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.3.1/2.03
