“At Least He Could Shave His Mustasche!”: Linguistic Strategies and Socially Masculine Lexical Items Discrediting and Delegitimizing Female Athletes
Tahvanainen, Anna (2025)
2025
Kielten maisteriohjelma - Master's Programme in Languages
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2025-05-13
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505125341
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505125341
Tiivistelmä
In this thesis the objective was to answer two questions: (1) How are female athletes delegitimized and discredited linguistically on YouTube comments questioning their sex and use of substances and (2) what socially masculine lexical items utilized in the questioning. The data used in the study consisted of a corpus of 200 YouTube comments, altogether 3 247 words, posted under videos of five different female athletes. All comments implicitly or explicitly either questioned the sex of the athlete (claiming they are male) or stated that they use performance-enhancing substances (PES), such as steroids or testosterone.
The comments were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis was conducted by creating and applying a codebook based on MacQueen et al.’s (2008) model, analyzing the linguistic strategies used in discrediting and delegitimizing. The codebook included six main codes: misgendering, dehumanization, PES-use accusations, concern over equality, non-bona fide and deniable questioning. Some of these categories were divided into two or three subcodes, including implicit and explicit forms of discrediting. The data was coded manually, with another coder conducting a second round of analysis on 15% of the data. The frequencies of different linguistic strategies were observed. Further quantitative and qualitative analysis is carried out by the assistance of a software Sketch Engine, determining the corpus’ most frequent nouns and adjectives, keywords and the socially masculine lexical items. The concordance of the most frequent lexical items was investigated, with a span of three words left and right from the node word, ranked by their T-score.
Overall, explicit forms of discreditation were more common in the data. Lexical misgendering through nouns was most frequent, using words such as man, male, brother, mister or guy. Explicit accusations of substance use through medical and technical terms (testosterone, steroids, dope) and use of rhetorical questions were also common. The least frequent subcodes were under dehumanization: implicit dehumanization (4 instances) and explicit lexical dehumanization through nouns (2 instances). The socially masculine lexical items found in the comments were nouns and adjectives targeting the appearance of the athletes, such as handsome, big, strong and mustache. Altogether 11 different socially masculine lexical items were found, used 18 times in total.
The comments were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis was conducted by creating and applying a codebook based on MacQueen et al.’s (2008) model, analyzing the linguistic strategies used in discrediting and delegitimizing. The codebook included six main codes: misgendering, dehumanization, PES-use accusations, concern over equality, non-bona fide and deniable questioning. Some of these categories were divided into two or three subcodes, including implicit and explicit forms of discrediting. The data was coded manually, with another coder conducting a second round of analysis on 15% of the data. The frequencies of different linguistic strategies were observed. Further quantitative and qualitative analysis is carried out by the assistance of a software Sketch Engine, determining the corpus’ most frequent nouns and adjectives, keywords and the socially masculine lexical items. The concordance of the most frequent lexical items was investigated, with a span of three words left and right from the node word, ranked by their T-score.
Overall, explicit forms of discreditation were more common in the data. Lexical misgendering through nouns was most frequent, using words such as man, male, brother, mister or guy. Explicit accusations of substance use through medical and technical terms (testosterone, steroids, dope) and use of rhetorical questions were also common. The least frequent subcodes were under dehumanization: implicit dehumanization (4 instances) and explicit lexical dehumanization through nouns (2 instances). The socially masculine lexical items found in the comments were nouns and adjectives targeting the appearance of the athletes, such as handsome, big, strong and mustache. Altogether 11 different socially masculine lexical items were found, used 18 times in total.