The semiotics of red-tagging: hateful affects against the community pantry movement

Abstract

This study demonstrates how a red-tagging post on the community pantry movement in the Philippines performs its affective work of hate through the use of diverse modes of meaning-making (composition, representation, and language). It does so by employing a semiotic approach that integrates a multimodal framework that is attentive to materiality and an affective approach to discourse studies. The analysis traces and reveals different affective affordances of the semiotic resources in the chosen red-tagging post. Overall, the study sheds light on how red-tagging practices – in this case, in the form of a poster/Facebook post – are strategically semioticized, thus contributing to a larger political project of constructing an affective discourse of hate against the community pantry movement.