Copyright

Alexis Chapelan

Published On

2024-06-21

Page Range

pp. 75–106

Language

  • English

Print Length

106 pages

3. ‘Pop’ Antisemitism and Deviant Communities

An Analysis of French Social Media Users’ Reactions to the Dieudonné (2020) and Kanye West (2022) Antisemitism Controversies

Chapter of: Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century(pp. 75–106)
Social media platforms and the interactive web have had a significant impact on political socialisation, creating new pathways of community-building that shifted the focus from real-life, localised networks (such as unions or neighbourhood associations) to vast, diffuse and globalised communities (Finin et al. 2008, Rainie and Wellman 2012, Olson 2014, Miller 2017). Celebrities or influencers are often focal nodes for the spread of information and opinions across these new types of networks in the digital space (see Hutchins and Tindall 2021). Unfortunately, this means that celebrities’ endorsement of extremist discourse or narratives can potently drive the dissemination and normalisation of hate ideologies.

This paper sets out to analyse the reaction of French social media audiences to antisemitism controversies involving pop culture celebrities. I will focus on two such episodes, one with a ‘national’ celebrity at its centre and the other a ‘global’ celebrity: the social media ban of the French-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala in June–July 2020 and the controversy following US rapper Kanye West’s spate of antisemitic statements in October–November 2022. The empirical corpus comprises over 4,000 user comments on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (now X). My methodological approach is two-pronged: a preliminary mapping of the text through content analysis is followed by a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis that examines linguistic strategies and discursive constructions employed by social media users to legitimise antisemitic worldviews. We lay particular emphasis on the manner in which memes, dog-whistling or coded language (such as allusions or inside jokes popular within certain communities or fandoms) are used not only to convey antisemitic meaning covertly but also to build a specific form of counter-cultural solidarity. This solidarity expresses itself in the form of “ deviant communities” (see Proust et al. 2020) based on the performative and deliberate transgression of societal taboos and norms.

Contributors

Alexis Chapelan

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8990-6188

Alexis Chapelan is currently a PhD candidate, enrolled in a joint international PhD programme at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) and the University of Bucharest (Romania). In 2019, he graduated with a Master of Political Science degree with a concentration in political theory from the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He also holds a position as a teaching assistant at the University of Bucharest. He is mainly interested in exploring the intersection of intellectual history/history of ideas and sociolinguistics, applied to a broad array of research objects, such as political extremism, far-right ideologies, hate speech, conspiracy theories and populism. His doctoral thesis draws on the Begriffsgeschichte and semantic-history approaches, and undertakes a genealogical survey of the concept of “culture wars” in debates from the nineteenth century to the present day. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Transatlantic Studies and Studia Politica, The Romanian Review of Political Sciences and International Relations as well as in collective-research volumes in Romania and Sweden. In addition, he is a member of the DiscourseNet network, of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR).