Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Date

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Sage Graham

Committee Member

Emily Thrush

Committee Member

Evelyn Wright

Abstract

This dissertation examines how cancel culture discourse is constructed in Twitter/X interactions related to J.K. Rowling’s transgender-related posts. It focuses on direct engagement with @jk_rowling and explores how users position themselves and Rowling, represent other social actors, and use multimodal resources to construct meaning. In order to do so, the study adopts a qualitative design and combines Positioning Theory, Social Actor Representation framework, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Data were collected from English-language replies and mentions directed at @jk_rowling posted between December 2019 and June 2025 that contained at least one relevant hashtag. The final dataset consisted of 1918 tweets, from which a qualitative sample of 1050 tweets was selected for coding and detailed analysis. This study contributes to existing research by examining cancel culture as a multimodal discursive practice rather than a simple act of public rejection. The findings show that cancel culture in this dataset is not a single act of rejection, but a broader discursive struggle built through positioning, representation, and multimodal meaning-making. Across supportive and oppositional tweets, Rowling remains the most visible social actor. Supportive users tend to represent her as brave, truthful, and unfairly attacked, whereas oppositional users represent her as harmful, intolerant, or morally failed. These competing evaluations also shape users’ own identities, as supportive users align themselves with women’s rights, free speech, and resistance to silencing, while oppositional users align themselves with trans rights, accountability, and moral criticism. In the multimodal tweets, images, GIFs, emojis, screenshots, videos, and links contribute to affect, evidence, authority, ridicule, solidarity, and moral judgment. Taken together, these findings show that cancel culture on Twitter/X is shaped by platform affordances and is best understood as a multimodal discursive practice in which cancellation and counter-cancellation operate at the same time through blame, defense, delegitimation, and reputational repair to shape moral authority, public visibility, and ideological conflict in digital discourse.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.

Notes

Embargoed until 01-08-2036

Download

Available for download on Tuesday, January 08, 2036

Share

COinS