Law, Linguistics and the Far Right International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups
| Editor | Affiliation | |
|---|---|---|
Oliveira, Ana Larissa | Federal University of Minas Gerais | BR |
| Date | Issue |
|---|---|
2026-08-21 | 2027 |
This book examines how verbal and symbolic aggression and hostility directed at women and LGBT+ people operate across linguistic, multimodal, legal, and institutional domains, and how these practices contribute to discursive, democratic, and constitutional erosion. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from linguistics, discourse and media studies, gender and queer theory, constitutional law, and human-rights scholarship, the volume addresses forms of aggression and hostility ranging from insults, ridicule, and digitally mediated shaming to metaphors of contamination, symbolic erasure, administrative practices, and doctrinal silence. Through comparative analyses of cases from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, China, and the European human rights system, the chapters show how these practices shape political communication, institutional behavior, and legal meaning-making, thereby affecting visibility, dignity, participation, and the practical enjoyment of rights. The volume highlights recurring mechanisms, such as purity and protection narratives, victim-perpetrator inversion, and multimodal amplification, that travel across platforms, political systems, and institutional settings. The book demonstrates how verbal and symbolic aggression functions not only as an isolated speech act but as a cross-contextual mechanism with cumulative democratic and constitutional effects. The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in law, linguistics, media and communication studies, gender studies, political science, and human rights.
Item type:Publication, book part[2026][Y1][S001][18]; Oliveira, Ana LarissaLaw, Linguistics and the Far Right International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups, 2026-08-21, vol. 2027, p. 1-18This Introduction sets out the motivation, conceptual framework, and research context for Law, Linguistics and the Far Right: International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups. It frames the volume’s guiding question: how digitally and institutionally mediated impoliteness and related forms of verbal and symbolic hostility contribute to the erosion of discursive, democratic, and constitutional norms, and how they shape the visibility, dignity, and rights of women and LGBT+ people. Bringing the chapters into dialogue across linguistics, media and platform studies, gender and queer theory, and constitutional and human rights law, it identifies the volume’s cross-cutting mechanisms and synthesizes the shared lessons that emerge across cases from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, China, and European human rights law. The Introduction closes by outlining directions for further research and providing a roadmap of the chapters.
Item type:Publication, book part[2026][Y1][S001][19]; Oliveira, Ana Larissa Adorno MarciottoLaw, Linguistics and the Far Right International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups, 2026-08-21, vol. 2027, p. 21-39Online verbal attacks against a particular group have become a prominent feature of authoritarian and populist political discourse. In this chapter, we offer a fresh look at how creating deep disagreements and employing the language of conflict can work as strategies to gradually erode democracy and rights in the name of a fictional majority. We argue that the models of linguistic impoliteness can offer a valuable and comprehensive perspective for describing and understanding the phenomena of online misogyny, sexism, transphobia, and the attacks on the judiciary system, as well as their repercussions for plurality and the integrity of democracy. This theoretical framework for investigating the digitally mediated far-right discourse context of the rights of women and the rights of LGBT+ people is best supported by case study analysis combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative methodology is based on the use of Google Developer’s API and corpora tools concerning selected social media platforms, a topic we explain in the following Chapter 2. Through the lens of the models of linguistic impoliteness, i.e., adopting the expressions “impolite language”, “shameless normalization of impoliteness” and “shamelessness”, we make the case that the blurred distinction in the threshold of acceptability of verbal aggression suggests the enthroning of a “new online discursive trend”. We test this assumption in Chapter 3.
Item type:Publication, book part[2026][Y1][S001][16]; Peixoto, IsabelLaw, Linguistics and the Far Right International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups, 2026-08-21, vol. 2027, p. 40-55This chapter outlines the methodology employed to collect and analyze data within the theoretical framework established in Chapter 1. It argues that the chosen approach is both suitable and adequate for investigating verbal impoliteness on social media and can serve as a model for future research in linguistics, human rights, and digital media studies. We describe in detail the procedures used to compile the Corpus of Digital Impoliteness (CID – Corpus de Impolidez Digital), an open-access dataset designed to support further research in this field. To demonstrate the relevance and adequacy of this methodology, we explain our rationale for selecting Brazilian Congresswomen Sâmia Bomfim and Erika Hilton, along with Federal Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia, as focal subjects. Their inclusion reflects both their institutional roles and the surge of online verbal attacks following viral videos targeting them on Brazilian social media. The chapter also details the criteria guiding the selection of specific platforms – X/Twitter and YouTube – and discusses their significance in ensuring the representativeness of the dataset. Finally, it presents the initial quantitative results that form the empirical basis for the findings elaborated in Chapter 3.
Item type:Publication, book part[2026][Y1][S001][14]; Miranda, MoniqueLaw, Linguistics and the Far Right International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups, 2026-08-21, vol. 2027, p. 58-71This chapter draws on models of linguistic impoliteness to examine how online verbal attacks relate to the discursive conditions of democracy. Building on the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 1 and the methodological approach detailed in Chapter 2, this chapter presents the findings of a multi-case study centered on Congresswomen Sâmia Bomfim and Erika Hilton and Supreme Federal Court (STF) Judge Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha. These women have been recurrent targets of social media hostility, including insults and insinuations often focused on their physical appearance and gender identity. The analysis addresses a common research question across all cases: how do online verbal attacks on women and LGBT+ public figures shape the democratic and human rights environment in Brazil? We hypothesize that such attacks contribute to the discursive erosion of democracy, which thereby undermines equality, dignity, and individuals’ capacity to participate on equal footing in public debate. Our findings show that linguistic impoliteness is primarily enacted through insults, sarcasm, and playful provocation, intensified by the affordances of digital platforms. These patterns reflect discursive dynamics associated with misogyny, sexism, and transphobia. The analysis also highlights the role of challenging questions in generating conflictual interactions that provoke, threaten, and degrade perceived opponents, and in reinforcing “us versus them” dynamics that fuel polarization. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that hostile discourse targeting these public figures contributes to the erosion of deliberative norms, the undermining of individual rights, and the weakening of democratic discourse by narrowing conditions of inclusion and recognition, distorting deliberative equality, and compromising equality, dignity, and the right to gender expression.