‘Unicorns’, ‘Narcissistic Snowflakes’ and ‘Undifferentiated’ Citizens

Gender in YouTube-populism. The Case of Lega Nord and UKIP

Abstract

The present study investigates the transnational discursive representation of gender in YouTube official channels of UKIP (UK) and Lega Nord (Italy). Starting from the chameleon-like nature of right-wing populist ideas that crop up wherever social imbalances and malaise appear, the consequences of highly malleable messages diffused through 2.0 cyber-technologies inflame the opinions and attitudes of the mass audience which, when processing the message, feels legitimized to adopt discriminatory views and uncivil behaviours.
Given the complex layers of discursive formations affecting both political processes and cyber-mediated representations on gender, the methodology draws on SM-CDS (as in Majid KhosraviNik, 2017) and Corpus Linguistics (as in Paul Baker, Corpora to Analyse Gender, 2014), incorporating quantitative investigation of two specialized corpora with close reading of texts to elicit (micro-) linguistic and (macro-)discursive features that construct gender disparity.