Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2026

This study examines how ‘anti-woke’ discourse is drawn upon by French and English-speaking X (formerly Twitter) users to abnormalize gender-inclusive language practices from a Critical Discourse Analytic (CDA) perspective (Fairclough 2010). Using strategies and tools drawn from the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak and Reisigl 2017) and CDA (interdiscursivity and recontextualization), I compare and discuss how ‘woke’ is (re)appropriated within online arenas across both linguo-cultural contexts to other and undermine those invested in challenging gender-based discrimination(s). Responses, therefore, contribute to a broader right-wing (populist) project that substantiates the uncivil and ‘unsayable’ by subverting the civil and ‘sayable’ amid the emergence of borderline discourses (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017). I conclude that ‘anti-woke’ discourse has become a symbolic catch-all discursive strategy to bolster far right attitudes at the expense of abnormalizing the struggles faced by marginalized genders. This analysis thus provides further insight into how discriminatory ideologies become more viable political alternatives through rhetorical and discursive phenomena (Wodak 2015).

In the present study, I investigate the construction of otherness in the Greek anti-racist short film Jafar. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies, I argue that although the film appears to combat racism, it simultaneously reproduces practices of discrimination. This contradiction is achieved via liquid racism, namely a multi-layered and, thus, difficult to detect form of racism (Weaver 2011, 2016). More specifically, by combining Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) grammar of visual design with Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) model for identities-in-interaction, I show that the film allows two different representations of otherness: (i) the caring Other, which resists the stereotype of the criminal migrant (anti-racist positioning) and (ii) the useful Other, which regulates migrant inclusion via eligibility criteria of usefulness (racist positioning).

The burka has become a key symbol of the supposed ‘Islamification’ of Europe and has led to a series of ‘burka bans’ (Bouattia 2019; Bracke 2012; Hancock 2015). In the debate surrounding these bans, a ‘femonationalist convergence’ has been identified by Farris (2012, 2017) in which the nationalist political right, neoliberal policy makers, and some feminist organisations converge in adopting the language of gender equality to argue that the burka is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. In this paper, I relate this femonationalist convergence to the maintenance of hegemonic femininity, which can be broadly defined as the privileging of femininity that is complementary to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2000). Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar 2005), I analyse the representation of Muslim women in an article on the burka written by former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for The Telegraph in 2018. I show how Johnson instrumentalises femonationalist discourse to justify his Islamophobic marginalisation of Muslim women. I conclude that Johnson used this article to lay the groundwork for his Conservative leadership bid the following year and to garner popular support for a shift to the far-right in British politics.

The paper examines the ideological work accomplished by the use of conventionalized impoliteness formulae in third person reference, when the person being criticized or brought into disrepute is not present in the here-and-now of interaction. Drawing on Interactional Linguistics and data from audio-recorded informal face-to-face Greek conversations, the study shows that speakers mobilize conventionalized impoliteness formulae, along with other linguistic resources, in the course of third-party assessments to evaluate sociocultural experience, and establish interlocutors’ shared negative affective stance toward the third party picked on due to their national group membership. This practice reproduces everyday nationalism that unites offenders against national ‘others’. The study enhances our understanding of the recontextualization of conventionalized impoliteness formulae in talk-in-interaction, and the role of affective stance in the discursive formation of (national) identities.

This paper examines autobiographical reports of acts of (non-)verbal aggression against four Greek women pioneers in education, medicine, art and dance. These aggressive acts had been launched by some of their male contemporaries against the women’s efforts to occupy authority or elite positions. The analysis, which falls within the scope of historical (im)politeness research (Kádár and Culpeper 2010), focuses specifically on the rarely addressed issue of how the autobiographers discursively deal with the narrated incidents. The four women’s real-time reactions to, and post hoc appraisals of, the aggressive acts are categorized and discussed by applying and extending Bousfield’s (2007) model of responses to impoliteness. Furthermore, contemporary witness and third-party contributions, offensive and defensive, are analysed in the light of relevant models (Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). It is found that all four women take a dignified and defiant stance towards the recorded female-exclusionary behaviours, evidencing a common, diachronically/intergenerationally consistent self-heroizing disposition.

This paper explores how discourses of discrimination against sex workers are discursively reproduced or challenged in polylogal (multi-participant) interactions in digital environments such as YouTube. Drawing on stancetaking (Du Bois 2007) and the stance dimensions of evaluation and alignment (Kiesling 2018, 2021), we analyze how commenters’ stances towards sex work can be linked to (banal) whorephobia — i.e., the discursive manifestation of discriminations against sex workers. Focusing on two threads of comments found under a YouTube video, we suggest that whorephobia operates along a scalar continuum, with aggression against sex work/ers ranging from explicitly negative stances to more subtle and banalized ones that may even go unnoticed. In our data, (banal) whorephobia was traced in stances that indexed: (a) low evaluation of/low alignment with participants expressing sex-positive views or supporting that sex workers’ rights advocacy can be compatible with feminist agendas; and/or (b) high evaluation of/high alignment with participants who view sex work as inherently immoral or exploitative in line with Christian conservative or radical feminist discourses. We conclude that what makes banal whorephobia particularly concerning is that it manifests through stances that, though not explicitly hostile, may still reinforce sex workers’ stigmatization and social exclusions, often in ways that may seem socially acceptable or well justified.