Nowadays, social media has blurred the boundaries between offline and online reality, affecting every aspect of human experience, including individual and collective identity, as well as group formation and interaction (Zappavigna, 2011; Locher, 2015). Sometimes social media becomes intertwined to such a degree with the social fabric of specific communities that a deeper understanding of the latter requires a close examination of the former. This would be the case of the LGBTQ+ community and Tumblr (Byron et al., 2019). Tumblr, with its jargon and particular use of tags, has left an indelible mark in the current labels of the LGBTQ+ community (Oakley, 2016). In order to explore the semantic dimension of lexical creativity in relation with identity categorization, this article focuses on LGBTQ+ labels from a corpus of 100 Tumblr posts, from a previous study about figurative language and construals of gender on the platform (Filardo-Llamas & Roldán-García, 2024). This work aims at answering these research questions: First, which are the most common word formation processes in LGBTQ+ labels on Tumblr? Second, how do these lexical choices contribute to the characterization of different groups of people? And lastly, how does the activation of various mental images lead to creating inclusive or exclusive views of LGBTQ+ identities? The results seem to point to a tendency toward simple word formation processes to refer to new identities, while those labels, which have already settled in the jargon of the LGBTQ+ community on Tumblr often involve several word formation processes. Moreover, most LGBTQ+ labels entail multiple semantic dimensions triggering rather holistic views of gender and sexuality, as well as occasionally conflicting conceptualizations.
Filardo-Llamas et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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