Aim and research questions
Late 2017 saw the emergence of #MeToo, an exceptionally impactful social media-based awareness campaign centered on sexual assault and harassment. Stoking the campaign, both before and during, were a spate of high-profile public statements from prominent public figures – politicians, celebrities, and CEOs – accused of transgressions ranging from inappropriate workplace behavior to outright criminal assault. In both professional journalism and lay commentary in social media settings, such statements were often received as plays at apologizing that were insincere, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate. Especially in informal social media settings, there is a flora of metalinguistic terminology applied to such statements, including terms such as pseudo apologies, fauxpologies, nonpologies, or, simply, non-apologies. In this project, we will refer to these public statements and their reception as non-apology events.
This project will be based on linguistic and discourse analytic case studies of #MeToo-related non-apology events, with cases selected from Anglophone and Swedish contexts. We will examine the public statements themselves and, crucially, their reception in mediated interaction in journalistic and social media. Preliminary work on social media data suggests that metalinguistic, or ‘folk linguistic,’ negotiations of a public statement’s merits as an apology are rarely only that. Rather, the metalinguistic assessments are often interwoven with affectively charged moral and ideological positionings – for instance, in relation to party politics, social justice, feminism, and more (cf. Cameron, 2012). Thus, an investigation of the reception of #MeToo-related non-apologies also becomes an investigation into the language and politics interface as well as the language and gender interface. Accordingly, the aim of the project is to account for how the socially identified metalinguistic notion of a non-apology becomes a members’ method (cf. Garfinkel, 1967) for an everyday, micro-level and public doing of discursive moral assessment and political participation.
The aim is empirically operationalized through a three-part Research Question:
- In high-profile cases where a public figure has i) been accused of sexual misconduct, ii) issued a public statement socially recognized as a public apology event, and iii) had this statement widely rejected as a non-apology,
- How is the statement itself mediated, designed, and delivered as a public, accountable action?
- How is the reception of the statement as a non-apology articulated in journalistic mediated discourse?
- How is the reception of the statement as a non-apology articulated in informal social media discourse?
The project is significant in three main ways. First, it scrutinizes a socially recognized but under-researched discursive phenomenon, contributing novel empirical findings to the linguistic study of (public) apologies and metalinguistic norms pursuant to them. Second, the proposed combination of methods will shed light on micro-level practices and macro-level implications of the everyday doing of political participation. Such practices are also inevitably tied to the everyday and situated doing of morality and accountability (cf. Bergmann, 1998; Linell & Rommetveit, 1998), which in turn promises a contribution to the role of mediated discourse in assigning blame and constructing a sense of the appropriate management of transgressions in the eyes of the public. In light of the empirical case focus selected, the proposed project will especially shed light on political participation in the context of discourses on gender, and the gendering of transgressions and rejections themselves. Third, this discursive doing of politics is explored in the context of a socially mediated phenomenon, and in mediated interaction, contributing to a qualitative and critical understanding of emerging dynamics of civic engagement in the digital agora of an increasingly mediated world (Fuchs, 2017a; Johansson et al., 2017; Lindgren, 2017; Papacharissi, 2015).