Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Narrating Girlhood: A Corpus Based Study
Luisa Troncone, Paola Pianese
ABSTRACT:
Among the ongoing online language tendencies, we investigate gendered neologisms (Szymańska 2023), it. neologismi genderizzati, of girl: girl(s)’ girl(s), girl math, girl dinner, girlie, as non-adapted loanwords from English into Italian. We take occurrences from the Italian X (previously Twitter), proposing an investigation of the bottom-up uses of compounds and derivates of girl. We found (01/01/23-30/04/24), 3871 occurrences, as in Figure 1. The contexts/co-texts of -girl- neologisms, used to understand loanwords’ inherent meanings and formal features (gender assignment, syntactic structures, lexical status), are subsequently exploited to perform a discourse analysis of the values they carry. Looking at the use of the term girl as a self-labeling strategy aimed at turning away from a demeaning connotative meaning and thus reclaiming an empowered state for women (Cralley & Ruscher, 2005; Galinsky et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2017), the study focuses on the different features of the discourses these neologisms address. As an example, consider girls’ girl. A girls’ girl is a person showing solidarity with women just because of their gender: see (1), where the list construction (Masini & Arcodia 2018) suggests the importance of shared experiences among women:
(1) girls girl, sorellanza, solidarietà femminile ecc… (25/09/23)
‘girls’ girl, sisterhood, female solidarity, etc…’
While the figure of the girls’ girl is constructed on the value of female solidarity and used to discuss a model of a moral feminine, users employ girlie, girl math and girl dinner to share their everyday life and validate each other’s experiences.
This study discusses how these practices both reshape and reinforce stereotypes on young women.
keywords: discourse analysis, gendered neologisms, girl, language, X