A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Discourses on Twitter/“X” About Gendered Relational Social Actors Who Have Dementia

Understanding public discourses of dementia, particularly those normalised on large social media websites, is an important step towards tackling stigma and stereotypes. Although previous work has explored how dementia is spoken about, this is often in a very general sense, lacking exploration into how gender might influence these discussions. To address this, a corpus of Tweets containing the word dementia (c. 711,000 words) was collected. We identified gendered social actors who were statistically key in our data. We found inequalities in how gendered social actors are represented. Female relational social actors (i.e., moms and grandmas) were more likely to be referenced than male relational social actors (i.e., dads and grandpas). Female relational social actors were more likely to be discussed as being ill and/or vulnerable, while male relational social actors were more likely to be discussed in terms of being dead or compared to celebrities in ways that sustained stigma around dementia. We argue that these different representations of gendered relational social actors who are living/lived with dementia are typically stigmatising.