Phobia: a corpus study of political diagnostics

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, fueled by the killing of George Floyd, sparked international discussions about racial injustice. The protests were widely supported, yet the acceptance of these demonstrations contrasted sharply with earlier condemnation of anti-lockdown protests. This disparity highlights the entanglement of science and politics. Supporters framed racism as a "pandemic," borrowing medical terminology to legitimize urgent action, blurring the lines between scientific discourse and political advocacy. Conversely, opposing groups often resorted to similar illness metaphors, associating immigration with national disease. This shared vocabulary of illness, particularly the use of "-phobia," is the focus of this study. The term "phobia," while originating in the medical field to describe anxiety disorders, has evolved into a tool for diagnosing and condemning socio-political attitudes. This rhetorical shift is examined through a corpus-based approach, exploring the use and function of terms like transphobia and Islamophobia in online alternative media.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists numerous words ending in "-phobia." Historically, these terms referred to specific physical or psychological conditions. However, more recent coinages such as xenophobia and homophobia have transitioned to describe general forms of prejudice and antipathy, highlighting the growing entanglement of medical and social vocabularies. This study builds upon existing research on corpus linguistics and the study of political discourse, investigating how the suffix '-phobia' is employed as a rhetorical tool in the context of online alternative media, examining who uses it, and for what purposes.

This rhetorical corpus study uses data from the Genealogies of Knowledge (GoK) project's English Internet corpus. This corpus, consisting of over 4 million tokens from over 2900 texts across 35 online outlets (excluding mainstream media), focuses on the intersection of science and politics within Anglophone alternative media, with a bias towards left-leaning perspectives. The analysis employs the GoK concordance browser, utilizing tools like Mosaic (for visualizing collocations) and Metafacet (for analyzing metadata attributes like author and publication). The study uses a regular expression search (*phobi[ac]*) to identify all occurrences of terms ending in "-phobia" or "-phobic." The analysis is primarily qualitative, examining recurrent linguistic patterns (collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody) to understand the communicative purpose and rhetorical strategies behind the use of "-phobia" in the analyzed texts. The study also considers the metadata to identify patterns in the usage of these terms across different publications and authors and identifies recurring linguistic patterns.

The search for *phobi[ac]* yielded 345 concordance lines. Xenophobia and Islamophobia were the most frequent terms, with notable similarities in frequency between noun and adjective forms. Strong collocations were observed, particularly the association of xenophobia/xenophobic with racism. A common pattern involved formulaic lists of prejudices, frequently including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, and ableism, often presented as a "toxic combination" of undesirable attitudes. The analysis showed a tendency to list these terms in a specific, though not always rigid, order (e.g., racism preceding sexism, sexism preceding homophobia). Analysis of the metadata revealed a strong correlation between the use of this vocabulary and left-leaning, progressive, and often activist-oriented online publications. Outlets like Salvage.zone (a communist publication) exhibited high frequency of -phobia terms, while right-wing publications like Amerika.org showed minimal usage. Some exceptions exist; however, contrarian uses were noted in publications like The Risk-Monger and Creation Ministries International where the terms were used polemically or to critique the opposing side. Finally, the study showed that clinical and social uses of "phobia" terms can coexist within the same text.

The findings suggest that the use of "-phobia" in online alternative media is heavily associated with left-leaning discourse and serves as a rhetorical tool for accusation and condemnation. The common listing of various prejudices reflects the emphasis on intersectionality and identity politics prevalent within these online spaces. The study illustrates the close intertwining of scientific and political language, with the framing of prejudice as a "disease" serving to legitimize political arguments and mobilize action. The work of Laclau and Mouffe on hegemony and antagonism provides a framework for understanding the construction of these political identities and divisions around the shared metaphor of prejudice as a disease.

This study demonstrates the rhetorical significance of the suffix "-phobia" in online alternative media, particularly its prevalence in left-leaning discourse and its role in creating condemnatory lists of prejudices. The findings highlight the complex relationship between medical and political vocabularies, the influence of intersectionality, and the role of such terms in shaping political alliances and antagonisms. Further research could explore the evolution of this terminology across different online platforms and investigate its use in other ideological contexts to assess whether the observed pattern is indeed restricted to the left political spectrum. Studying other corpora could test the hypothesis that the current corpus's bias primarily affects the results.

The study's reliance on a specific corpus, biased towards left-leaning online outlets, limits the generalizability of the findings. While the corpus is extensive, the skewed representation might underrepresent the usage of "-phobia" in right-wing or centrist online discourse. Furthermore, the qualitative nature of the analysis limits the ability to make strong quantitative claims about the prevalence and distribution of these terms.