GReMS/RECOM seminar : Mélanie Millette

GReMS/RECOM Seminar: Mélanie Millette - Thursday February 29 – 10.45am

The first RECOM cross-disciplinary seminar of this semester will be held on Thursday February 29, from 10.45am to 12.45pm at d.144 (Dupriez).

We are pleased to welcome Mélanie Millette, full professor in the Department of Social and Public Communication at UQAM, and member of the Laboratoire sur la communication et le numérique (UQAM and Université Laval), where she is responsible for the methodological axis. She is a member of the Réseau québécois en études féministes (ReQEF), where she participates in the Chantier sur l'antiféminisme. Her research focuses on the political appropriation of socionumeric media and issues surrounding the online participation of women and minorities. She is also interested in methodological approaches in the social sciences, feminist perspectives, activism, and the phenomenon of the "dataization" of society.

She will be presenting a seminar entitled: "Detransitioners deserve better than to be used as "gotchas" by transphobes": The discourse of gender detransition on Twitter. (The seminar will be held in French.)

Resume: Gender detransition is generally understood as the interruption or reversal of a medical transition. However, this infrequent phenomenon is attracting growing media interest, yet remains little studied. This research analyzes the "interpretive frames" produced in discourses circulating on Twitter (now X) about detransition. From a socioconstructivist perspective, discourses shape social reality, and interpretive frames influence how we understand the phenomena and environment around us. These frameworks are similar to "reading grids", whether conscious or not, and enable us to make sense of the world.

This communication presents the results of the analysis of a corpus of 10,628 tweets, as well as the critical qualitative analysis of a sub-corpus made up of the 2,396 tweets from the most prolific accounts in the corpus, as well as the accounts whose original messages were the most reposted. The analysis reveals three dominant interpretative frameworks crossed by right-wing gender-critical ideology: (1) the initial transition is an error of course; (2) detransition constitutes a return to the sex/gender assigned at birth; (3) the factors explaining detransition are internal and support an anti-transition or pro-gatekeeping position. Finally, as illustrated by the title of the seminar, which reproduces an extract from the corpus, our results show the implementation of deleterious interpretative frameworks not only for detrans people, but also for trans people.

It is possible to attend the seminar online: Link to the Teams meeting.