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

  • Nelson Mangaldan Buso ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 18, 2024

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.


Corresponding author: Nelson Mangaldan Buso Jr, Instructor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines, E-mail:

Acknowledgment

I am indebted to Dr. Aileen Salonga (Ma’am Ai)—my thesis advisor, mentor, and fairy godmother—for her invaluable guidance throughout the writing process of my undergraduate thesis, the extended version of this work. Without her "guiding light," this study would not have been possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to those who provided feedback on the earlier draft of my paper during the 7th International Conference on Asian and Philippine Studies (ICAPS).

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Received: 2024-03-04
Accepted: 2024-06-06
Published Online: 2024-07-18

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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