Love, Affiliation, and Emotional Recognition in #kämpamalmö:— The Social Role of Emotional Language in Twitter Discourse

Abstract

While emotional language and imagery in protest esthetics are nothing new, emotions have been repressed in modern political discourse at large, as being seen as irrational if not dangerous. As new media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are becoming central media spaces for live online broadcasting of political protests, they have become an important site of discursive struggle for researchers to take into account. This article argues that emotional language use is not merely something excessive but a central discursive resource for participants in communicating their political and social relations. The analysis in this article is based on data collected from the Twitter hashtag #kämpamalmö during an anti-fascist demonstration that took place in Malmö, Sweden in 2014. Methodologically, this article is guided by a critical discourse analytical approach, with a focus on how emotional language use allows participants to form collectivities. Empirically, the article identifies how participants make use of emotional language to negotiate and relate to and identify with objects, with the outcome of different forms of socialites. One example of this is how the city itself became a central object of negotiation, as a contested love object as well as a political “empty signifier.” Another object around which participants negotiate themselves is “love” itself, as in love for the movement and as a political object in itself.