A linguagem neutra no meio digital: perspectivas para uma análise dialógica

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the controversies surrounding so-called gender-neutral language on the social media platforms X and Instagram. As our theoretical and methodological framework, we adopt Dialogic Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2006a; 2006b), in dialogue with the works of the Bakhtin Circle (Bakhtin, 1993; 2016a; 2016b; Volóchinov, 2017; 2019a; 2019b). Our objective is to grasp the possible dialogic meaning relations in the chain of utterances stemming from a journalistic report, as they circulate across distinct virtual environments, where irony emerges as a linguistic resource for meaning making. The theoretical discussion is further supported by Brait's (2008) reflections on irony as a discursive procedure. Based on the analysis of a corpus composed of comments and posts on social media, we observe how irony is frequently mobilized in these spaces as both an argumentative strategy and a form of attack against gender-neutral language and, more significantly, against its users, thereby reinforcing socially ingrained conceptions of gender and language.