Doing non-binarism: building non-binary Communities of practice on SNS (Social Networking Sites)

The emergence of non-binary discourse in the public sphere, combined with the rise of social media, has been an enabling factor in the emergence of public displays of non-conforming gender identities. In particular, social networking sites represent virtual loci where gender identities can flourish, and where gender performance (Butler, 1990) can be used for the purposes of community building. To the best of my knowledge, the relationship between social media and collective identity construction of non- conforming gender identities has been the object of limited research. Starting from these premises, the present paper analyzes multimodal texts on different social media platforms to identify salient traits of non-conforming gender identity discourse contributing to interpersonally construed self- and community identities, with special regard for the role played by audience responses in the development of shared discursive traits. In particular, the study investigates to what extent discursive self-representations of non-conforming identities rely on audience engagement, and whether forms of engagement lead to the development of communicative practices that construct recognizable discourse communities. The data analyzed include videos and posts by users from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. The methodology adopted for the research relies on tools from Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2004) and Conversation Analysis applied to virtual environments (Meredith, 2019), as concerns the macro level of analysis, and Systemic 38 Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 2014) as concerns the meso and micro levels of analysis, with particular reference to the interpersonal resources deployed and the way in which identities are verbally construed. While SFL enables the analysis of an individual’s approach to self-representation, and whereas CA enables to investigate interactional practices, CMDA allows to explore the affordances and limits of technology when portraying gender in its social dimension. Preliminary results suggest the presence of distinctive community-building traits associated with interpersonal linguistic strategies, indicating the existence of non-binary Communities of Practice on social media.