The Discursive Construction of Victimhood in Anti- and Pro-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric on Malaysian Social Media.

Abstract

While symbolic elites have traditionally monopolized victimhood discourse through discursive power, social media has disrupted these dynamics by enabling ordinary individuals to deploy such discourse, creating a landscape where victimhood emerges as a contested terrain of ideological values. Despite substantial scholarly attention to the invocation of victimhood in justifying dominant ideologies within institutional and top-down contexts, literature on victimhood in bottom-up discourses remains comparatively scarce, particularly LGBTQ+ communities. This study addresses this gap by examining how victimhood is constructed in both anti- and pro-LGBTQ+ discourses on Malaysian social media, utilizing van Leeuwen's socio-semantic approach to Critical Discourse Studies. Our findings reveal competing victimhood discourses constructed through the polarized ways of manipulating LGBTQ+ individuals' sociological agency. Anti-LGBTQ+ discourse amplifies LGBTQ+ individuals' agency through activation in material transactions, passivation paired with negation, activation of their actions, and association with criminal perpetrators, representing them as powerful victimizers. Pro-LGBTQ+ discourse, conversely, diminishes their agency through passivation, reactions, non-transactions, activation in material transactions combined with negation and interrogation, and association with victims of persecution, positioning them as disempowered victims. Our study highlights how multiple discursive strategies and linguistic resources work in tandem to shape agency, establishing victim-victimizer dynamics that legitimize opposing ideological positions.