cancel culture; Twitter; hashtags; James Charles; felicity conditions; illocutionary force; performatives

While previous studies (e.g., Scott 2015) found that hashtags can be employed in social media posts to guide the readers’ inferential processes, their linguistic role in the context of cancel culture has so far remained unexplored. Therefore, this chapter aims to fill in this gap and show that the hashtags #NameIsCanceled and #NameIsOverParty play an important role in signaling the illocutionary force of the post and that the posts containing these hashtags can—under certain conditions—be analyzed as performative speech acts. To these aims, the study focuses on one of the most intense cases of online shaming, namely the cancelation of beauty YouTuber James Charles. By analyzing a dataset of tweets containing the hashtag #JamesCharlesIsCanceled or #JamesCharlesIsOverParty, the study argues that posters employ these hashtags strategically to perform the act of canceling, while increasing the visibility of their post and garnering attention of other users. Tweeters thereby engage in ambient affiliation (Zappavigna 2011) and bond around a shared goal—to ‘cancel’ Charles. This is reflected in the impoliteness of their tweets and the accompanying (audio-)visual material, which typically depicts the posters’ performance of the cancelation (e.g., unsubscribing from the cancelee’s social media accounts).

While previous studies (e.g., Scott 2015) found that hashtags can be employed in social media posts to guide the readers’ inferential processes, their linguistic role in the context of cancel culture has so far remained unexplored. Therefore, this chapter aims to fill in this gap and show that the hashtags #NameIsCanceled and #NameIsOverParty play an important role in signaling the illocutionary force of the post and that the posts containing these hashtags can—under certain conditions—be analyzed as performative speech acts. To these aims, the study focuses on one of the most intense cases of online shaming, namely the cancelation of beauty YouTuber James Charles. By analyzing a dataset of tweets containing the hashtag #JamesCharlesIsCanceled or #JamesCharlesIsOverParty, the study argues that posters employ these hashtags strategically to perform the act of canceling, while increasing the visibility of their post and garnering attention of other users. Tweeters thereby engage in ambient affiliation (Zappavigna 2011) and bond around a shared goal—to ‘cancel’ Charles. This is reflected in the impoliteness of their tweets and the accompanying (audio-)visual material, which typically depicts the posters’ performance of the cancelation (e.g., unsubscribing from the cancelee’s social media accounts).