Browsing by Author "Hallapaju, Routa"

With gender being omnipresent and an inseparable aspect of our identity, misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions about gender are bound to occur in the anonymous settings of social media, where we spend an increasing amount of time. This thesis investigates how misinterpretations of gender are made on Reddit, as well as the (implicit) attitudes redditors communicate having about gender and its expression. In doing so, this research contributes to an unexplored area of language and gender. The data used consists of a selection of comment threads posted in late 2023, where a misinterpretation of a redditor’s gender occurs. A mixed methods approach with an emphasis on qualitative analysis is adopted through approaching the data with corpus-assisted discourse studies. A sample of the original posts, comments, or a combination of the two were analyzed for such linguistic features which in earlier research have been found to be indicative of either binary gender; the purpose is to see how gendered features are used on Reddit. Further, the distribution of the incorrect assumptions was calculated and the discourse following them analyzed to gain an understanding of how gender and its explicit expression is received on the platform. This thesis also investigates how the assumptions were made in terms of use of gendered words. All threads contained gendered features, and all contained both feminine and masculine features, except for one thread, which only contained masculine features. Most often redditors were incorrectly thought to be male, which reflects the general (jocular) understanding that “there are no women on Reddit.” When a correction of a misinterpretation received a response, it was more likely to be accepting than negative. Even so, it was more common not to see any discourse after a correction had been posted, rather than finding it receive either a positive or a negative response. Assumptions were most often gendered nouns (e.g., ‘man,’ ‘girl’) serving a vocative function. The findings show that while redditors generally are at least not unreceptive to being corrected on misgendering others, they do rely on fairly traditional ideas of what constitutes a man or a woman when making their assumptions. Further research is needed for instance to address a greater number of threads or gendered features, or the effect a user’s L1 may have on how gender is approached in anonymous CMC settings.