Turkish Yoke, Red Vampires, and Euro-Genderists:
Strategies of de/legitimization in the debate around the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria
Jullietta Stoencheva
Media and Communication Studies: Culture, Collaborative Media, and Creative Industries One-year Master Thesis, 15 CP Submitted: VT 2021, 2021-05-24 Supervisor: Maria Brock Abstract In July 2018, Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court rejected the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (better known as the Istanbul Convention). This rejection came following a wave of civic activism, which scholars characterized as the first anti-gender campaign in Bulgaria. Three years after the Constitutional Court’s decision, the Istanbul Convention continues to occupy online and offline public space, still provoking controversy and sparking heated debates. Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA), this thesis analyzes comments under Facebook posts mentioning the Istanbul Convention between 2017 and 2021. The posts appear on the Facebook pages of two ideologically opposing civil organizations that actively participated in the debate around the Convention’s ratification. Using Reyes’ (2011) concept of de/legitimization discourse, this paper analyses the online discussion around the Convention, exploring how de/legitimization discourses are utilized by the two ideologically opposing communities. To account for the role of Facebook as a discursive practice, the study further explores how the architectures and affordances of Facebook as a platform contribute to the polarization of the IC discussion. The analysis reveals the instrumentality of de/legitimization discourses for constructing pro- and anti- IC activist groups, for redefining the meaning of ‘gender’ in Bulgarian society, and later for transforming the meaning of the phrase ‘the Istanbul Convention’ to outgrow a reference to one document and become a signifier of values. Additionally, the study highlights three types of Facebook affordances that were found to affect the discussion’s polarization: identity, social, and functional.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, anti-gender movements, discursive strategies, de/legitimization, architectures and affordances, Facebook, social media, Bulgaria, online activism, Istanbul Convention
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Table of Contents Abstract ...... 2 List of Figures ...... 4 List of Tables ...... 4 List of Abbreviations ...... 4 1. Introduction ...... 5 2. The Bulgarian Context: European, post-socialist, post-Ottoman, post-colonial? ..... 7 2.1. Turkey and Islam as the Historical ‘Other’ ...... 9 2.2. ‘Othering’ Different Sexualities and Gender Identities ...... 10 3. Literature Review ...... 11 3.1. Anti-gender Movements and Campaigns...... 11 3.2. The Istanbul Convention Debate in Bulgarian Media ...... 14 4. Theoretical Framework ...... 17 4.1. Architectures and Affordances of Facebook...... 17 4.2. Strategies of De/legitimization ...... 19 5. Methodology ...... 21 5.1. Research Method ...... 21 5.2. Research Paradigm ...... 25 5.3. Sample ...... 25 5.4. Methodological Reflections ...... 26 5.5. Ethics ...... 27 6. Analysis ...... 28 6.1. De/legitimizing Gender ...... 28 6.2. Religion as a De/legitimization Strategy ...... 34 6.3. Gender and National Sovereignty ...... 38 6.4. Past the Debate: IC as a De/legitimization Tool ...... 41 6.5. The Role of Facebook Affordances ...... 43 7. Conclusion ...... 46 Bibliography ...... 50
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List of Figures Figure 1. Bulgarian media bias towards the Istanbul Convention and the EU…. 15
List of Tables Table 1. Criteria for identifying actor- and action-oriented strategies of de/legitimization..…………………………………………………… 22
List of Abbreviations BFW Bulgarian Fund for Women C{#} Comment {Number} CC Constitutional Court CDA Critical Discourse Analysis CEE Central and Eastern Europe EU European Union IC Istanbul Convention NGO Non-Government Organization R{#}.{#} Reply to {Comment Number}.{Reply Number} SVA Society and Values Association
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1. Introduction The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention (IC), is a comprehensive international document outlining clear policies in the fight against domestic and gender-based violence. The Convention sets standards for the operation of institutions, protects the victims, creates conditions for consistent work with the perpetrators, and strengthens the interaction between the competent authorities. When Bulgaria signed IC in 2016, there was barely any public reaction, but when the bill for ratifying the Convention was proposed to the government in January 2018, it initiated a widespread political debate between supporters of neoliberalism and conservative advocates of established traditions. This came as a surprise to the government and media alike, as no one suspected that a treaty targeting such an important issue would be met with opposition. But even more surprising was the opponents’ reasoning against IC, which seemed to touch on problems very different than – and separate from – domestic and gender-based violence. These included resistance to LGBTQ+ rights, ‘gender’ as a concept, and concerns for Bulgaria’s national independence – discourses characteristic of so-called anti-gender movements across the world. The IC debate was the first case of these discourses appearing in an organized interconnected manner in Bulgarian society, characterizing it as the first anti-gender campaign in the country (Kuhar, 2018).
NGOs and civil organizations were at the center of the debate. IC entered the spotlight of Bulgarian media attention in late 2017 with an article by Society and Values Association (SVA),1 who launched a petition against its ratification (“Society and Values Association,” 2017). In response to the petition against IC, Bulgarian Fund for Women (BFW)2 was one of the first feminist civil organizations to issue a public statement defending the Convention (“Bulgarian Fund for Women,” 2018). These activist actions split the government in camps ‘for’ and ‘against’ IC’s ratification. The ruling party GERB, which submitted the proposal for the ratification of IC, was only backed by the liberal party DPS, while GERB’s cabinet partner, the far-right United Patriots, gained the
1 SVA is a social conservative civil organization and a member of the Christian right NGO World Congress of Families, which is famous for its anti-LGBTQ+ activities (Darakchi, 2019). 2 BFW is the only indigenous donor in Bulgaria financing local NGOs who work to advance women’s and girls’ rights, eliminate gender stereotypes, gender-based violence and discrimination, achieve gender equality in all spheres of life and make a social change (Bulgarian Fund for Women, n.d.).
5 support of the main opposition party, the socialist BSP, against the ratification. The situation in the Parliament received a large amount of media attention and the discussions around it were quickly contaminated by the spread of misinformation, fake news, and manipulative statements. The debate escalated into two clashing social movements opposing/supporting IC, and the public pressure caused the government to withdraw the bill ratifying the Convention on March 6, 2018. It was instead brought before the Constitutional Court of Bulgaria (CC), which on July 27, 2018, declared IC unconstitutional for not aligning with the definition of sex as binary in the Bulgarian Constitution (“Constitutional Court of the Republic of Bulgaria,” 2018), thus eliminating any chance for its ratification.
Bulgarian NGOs have a strong history as important and influential actors in political debates. However, in post-communist Bulgaria, civil organizations are often treated with suspicion of being financially influenced by different ideological powers (Vasileva, 2020), so NGOs’ participation in a controversial political issue like the IC debate received a fair share of traditional media reporting. Chadwick (2017) claims that social media, traditional media, and politics are intertwined in a hybrid media system, whereby actors utilize both types of media in ways that allow them to exercise their agency. Additionally, Vaccari et al. (2015) argue that this interconnectedness between traditional and social media leads to increased citizen engagement with political matters, since it enables publics to combine consumption and commentary during media events. Such was the case with the IC debate, where traditional media’s reporting on the controversy perpetuated citizens’ engagement with the topic on social media as well. Traditional media’s focus on activist NGOs directed people to their social media comment fields, which became a battleground of ideologies where citizens on either side of the debate went to voice their stance of dissent, concern, or support for IC, and for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
Now, three years later, IC has not left the media spotlight, the political agenda, or people’s minds. The discussions are still going strong, including on both SVA and BFW’s Facebook pages.3 The posts mentioning the treaty enjoy their usual engagement, provoking controversy and sparking heated debates in the comment sections. Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA), I aim to analyze comments under Facebook posts concerning IC published by BFW and SVA on their public Facebook pages from 2017 to
3 Only since the beginning of 2021 (as of April 27, 2021) IC is mentioned on Facebook 12 times by BFW and 6 times by SVA. 6
2021, pinpointing de/legitimization discourses employed by users on these two pages. The recurring topics and discursive elements in online commenters’ argumentations for or against IC can help shed light on the power struggles at play, as well as provide insight into social media’s role in fueling the debate.
The main research question I address with this study is: How are discursive strategies of de/legitimization utilized in relation to the Istanbul Convention on two ideologically opposing Facebook pages?
Given the media and communications focus of this paper, I also address a sub-question concerning Facebook’s role as a medium in the debate:
➢ How do the architectures and affordances of Facebook as a medium contribute to the polarization of the IC discussion?
IC sparked passionate discussions that engaged politicians, academics, the media elite, and regular citizens. The formal outcome of these debates was the failure for the ratification of the Convention in the country, but their lasting, social outcome, was the birth of new types of discourses in Bulgarian society at large. My personal interest in this topic stems from my national and social identity as a Bulgarian feminist woman. As such, I was naturally saddened by the outcome of the IC debate, but even more so, I was surprised by its emergence. Therefore, I feel the need to understand the reasons for the public outrage against IC, and I believe that exploring the ways in which IC is discussed on social media such as Facebook could help unravel the motivations for users’ engagement with the topic, and the influence of the social media platform itself. Hopefully, insight into this discursive practice could contribute to identifying ways to engage the Bulgarian population in constructive conversation around gender equality.
2. The Bulgarian Context: European, post-socialist, post- Ottoman, post-colonial? While discourses can be studied with the help of global theoretical lenses, it is important to stress that they do remain sensitive to country-specific phenomena. Thus, to fully understand the meanings behind the discourses and practices that took place around the IC debate, we need to situate Bulgaria in the socio-political context it finds itself in today. The discourses that emerged from this event were the result of local specificities, strongly connected to the country’s ‘self-colonializing’ identity-shaping realities (Kiossev, 2011).
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These concern the country’s relationship with three entities: the Ottoman Empire, the Eastern Bloc, and the EU.
Between 1946 and 1989 Bulgaria was a part of the Eastern Bloc. Moore (2001) argues that Russia’s former influence “has had manifest effects on the [...] cultures of the postcolonial-post-Soviet nations” (Moore, 2001, p. 123), and some of these cultural effects in Bulgaria might very well be in the root of the IC debate. The post-1989 transition from a socialist to a market economy and from a one-party state to democracy brought with it economic and cultural challenges, and today, over 30 years past the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the verdict seems to be that the people are the ‘big losers’ of the transition. Trust in the government is low, corruption levels are high, and the ever- increasing feeling that ‘the system’ only benefits criminals plants the seed of disenchantment with democratic politics and Euroscepticism.
The frustration over still lagging behind Western Europe in terms of living standards undermines EU’s image as the bearer of progress in Bulgarians’ minds. Meanwhile, there is no broader conversation about the effects of the totalitarian regime in Bulgarian society beyond close academic circles. The lack of public knowledge about the effects of communism on contemporary issues such as the transition period’s “permanent economic crisis” or the mass emigration from the country, along with these societal challenges coinciding with Bulgaria’s EU membership, allows nationalist actors to reframe them as consequences of democracy (Kelbetcheva, 2019). This, in turn, could have increased citizens’ frustration with the EU as an institution, setting the stage for the emergence of anti-EU discourses.
Kiossev (2011) theorizes that the power imbalance between the EU’s Western members which are former empires and CEE’s post-Soviet young democracies has led to Eastern European countires’ ‘self-colonialization’, manifesting itself in a national complex of ‘inferiority’ to Western Europe’s power and success. In his words, this mindset has had a powerful impact on citizens’ self-esteem:
The implication was that the “our own” fundamentally lacked universality and self sufficiency; the collective imagination adsorbed it through the filters of the absent, defective, hybrid, substandard, branded as “civilization misunderstood,” it was “European but not quite.” This was what made the self-colonizing imagination self-traumatizing, too. (Kiossev, 2011)
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It is this collective self-colonizing imagination, Kiossev argues, that makes nationalist discourses appealing in these countries, as nationalism enables their citizens to reclaim their national identity as something to be proud of. However, Kiossev also stresses these discourses’ preoccupation with Europe as their counterpoint, demonstrating that their very existence is reliant on Europe as an opponent.
As we shall see, this struggle between the desire for an independent national identity and belonging to politically-ideological units such as the Eastern Bloc and now the European Union manifests itself in how Bulgarians negotiate international policies. Krasteva (2016) argues that the increasing importance of symbolic politics and the spread of nationalist and anti-European discourses as effective mobilization techniques are prerequisites for the rise of populism and far-right nationalism.4 These discourses are characterized by an “overproduction of othering” (Krasteva, 2016, p. 179) and the mainstreaming of extremist discourses.
2.1. Turkey and Islam as the Historical ‘Other’ The traditional ‘Other’ for Bulgarians is Turkey. This stems from the fact that the traces of the Ottoman Empire still inhabit Bulgarian consciousness. The public discourse surrounding the nearly 500-year Ottoman rule (1396–1878), the uprisings against it, and the Russo-Turkish War that followed (and in which Russia’s victory led to the liberation of Bulgaria) is characterized by an omnipresent dominating anti-Turkey sentiment and a representation of Turkey and Islam as ‘dangerous Others’. The period under Ottoman rule is often referred to as ‘the Turkish Yoke’ or even ‘the Turkish slavery’ (I. Sotirova, 2011), and freedom is deemed one of the most essential national values. The communist period in Bulgaria further intensified the post-Ottoman inter-ethnic struggles between Bulgarians and Turks,5 filling the history books that the ‘transition children’ studied with stories of Bulgarians and Russians fighting side-by-side for liberation from Ottoman
4 This became evident in recent years with the emergence of nationalist parties on the political scene, such as Ataka, IMRO and others, and the significant portions of voter support that they have gained. The first political party to oppose IC publicly was the United Patriots, a far-right alliance combining Ataka, IMRO, and NFSB. At the time the IC debate began, United Patriots were part of the parliament with 27 seats, ruling together with GERB in the Third Borisov Government. United Patriots party members are notorious for using racist, anti-EU and anti-Turkey rhetorics in their political discourse (Kavalski, 2007; Krasteva, 2016). 5 Not least by the execution of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaign against Turks and Muslims led by Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov in 1984-1985 which forced Turks and other Muslims to change their names to Christian ones, or leave the country (Kamusella, 2019). 9
Turkey’s ‘tyranny’. Growing up with a clearly defined ‘Other’, Bulgarians become prone to adopting post-Ottoman nationalist discourses.
These discourses typically position the Christian Church as a beacon of national virtues. History and literature of the National Revival period, which are studied thoroughly in Bulgarian schools, often highlight the Orthodox religion as an important tool in preserving and re-establishing Bulgaria’s national identity during and after the Ottoman rule. In these stories, Islam, the official religion in the Ottoman Empire and present-day Turkey, is represented as a threat to Christianity and a danger to Bulgarian national identity. Detrez (2001) argues that despite evading the label of ‘orientalism’ by counter-positioning itself as an Orthodox Christian society against the Islamic ‘Other’, the Balkan region’s ‘semi-colonial’ Ottoman past has led to its struggle to fully integrate within Europe.6 Nowadays, this struggle manifests in an increase of anti-EU sentiments, in light of which IC, with a contentious word like ‘Istanbul’ in its very title, became a suitable object of resistance because it allowed for concentrating anti-EU and anti-Turkey discourses towards one common target – the Istanbul Convention. The skepticism towards accepting a foreign document was intensified by the fact that this document was named after a city symbolic of Bulgaria’s historical grievances, which enhanced the already deep-rooted fear of undermining Bulgaria’s national sovereignty.
2.2. ‘Othering’ Different Sexualities and Gender Identities The proliferation of nationalist discourses in Bulgaria has been accompanied by a rise in sexism and homophobia. Bulgaria is currently one of the most LGBTQ+ unfriendly countries in the EU, and one of the few which do not recognize any form of legal partnership between same-sex couples. In recent years, tolerance for LGBTQ+ people in the country has been decreasing even more (Eurobarometer, 2019) and the LGBTQ+ movement has not only been under an escalating attack in public debates and on right- wing media, but also increasingly subjected to hate speech, death threats, and physical violence. As further elaborated in the next chapter, such discourses are typical for so- called ‘anti-gender movements’, particularly relevant in the case of the IC debate, which, scholars argue, was the event that gave birth to anti-gender activism in Bulgaria (Darakchi, 2019; Kuhar, 2018; Stanoeva, 2018).
6 For example, this deep-rooted fear of Islam was a well-used tool for the spread of anti-European discourses in Bulgaria when the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe (Krasteva, 2016). 10
Mole (2016) links CEE’s negative attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community to EU’s support for their equality, arguing that EU’s liberal position on the matter presents an opportunity for nationalist politicians to draw a symbolic line between the ‘decadent West’ and the ‘traditional East’. Nationalist parties gain “symbolic strength” for using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric through framing the traditional family, and specifically – masculinity, as an ideal of the national “body” (Krasteva, 2016, p. 186).
Discourses presenting different sexualities/gender identities as ‘Others’ are also supported by the Church, justified with the Biblical story of male and female creation. Hence, LGBTQ+ people are framed as the common ‘Other’ for nationalists and Christians. Tolerance towards homosexuality has been found to correlate negatively to religiosity (Pettinicchio, 2012) and nationalism (Mole, 2016). This common ground for these two ideologies has led to the emergence of ‘religious nationalism’ – a type of discursive strategy that “locates the agency in the […] self-bound to God” and “constitutes society not through the abstract disembodied individual of the market but through the erotic and gendered flesh of the family” (Friedland, 2001, p. 142). Such discourses contribute to the systematic idealization of the traditional family and hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinity/femininity.
3. Literature Review Departing from the existing literature on anti-gender movements, this chapter presents a brief overview of the current state of anti-gender research to help shed light on how the mobilization against IC in Bulgaria can be understood as an anti-gender campaign. Understanding these campaigns’ systematic international character makes us better equipped to reveal their ideological roots. As the current study has a media-centered focus, the chapter also reviews existing research on the role of Bulgarian media in the IC debate. The highlighted studies provide further insight into the case of the IC debate and present important findings concerning media’s influence on the magnitude and outcome of the discussion.
3.1. Anti-gender Movements and Campaigns The debate around the ratification of IC in Bulgaria joins a broader tendency of discourses around the world classified by Kuhar and Paternotte (2017) as anti-gender movements and campaigns. Anti-gender movements are new types of manifestations of opposition against achieved levels of equality between women and men and LGBTQ+ rights,
11 mobilizing discourses that aim at reaching a wider audience beyond conservative groups (Kováts, 2018). These movements often employ the narrative of the ‘innocent child’, which is portrayed as the target of a huge campaign aimed at its demoralization, driven by corrupted elites whose ‘gender’ ideology is a new totalitarian regime with the goal to undermine the foundations of the traditional family and consecutively of the nation as a whole (Kuhar, 2018).
Anti-gender movements attract a heterogenous mix of activists in different countries. Kováts and Põim (2015) call anti-gender movements’ discourse of ‘gender ideology’ a ‘symbolic glue’, uniting different ideological groups against ‘gender’ as a common target. The terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender theory’ are used strategically to signify different things in different contexts, thus enabling their spread as a common denominator of everything that clashes with three values of the patriarchal system: nature, as defined by religious leaders; nation, defended by nationalists; and normality, which is at the core of conservative ideologies (Kuhar, 2017). This is how ‘gender ideology’ acts as a common frame, grouping different discourses – LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, sex/gender education in schools, religious freedom, etc. – as one ‘common enemy’. This unclarity of meanings carries the phantasmic character of a conspiracy, which feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, and the global elite are accused of successfully introducing into national and EU politics and documents.
Anti-gender movements exist both in the West and the East but employ different strategies depending on where they manifest. In religious Eastern European communities, a popular technique is utilizing the colonial frame. Gender equality, women’s and LGBTQ+ rights movements have long made use of anticolonial rhetoric (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018), however in illiberal politics today anticolonial discourse is used not to talk about colonial history, but for putting an equality sign between totalitarian regimes and today’s Western liberalism. ‘Gender ideology’ is to be understood as a ‘colonializing’ project through which the ‘morally distraught’ West spreads its ‘gender doctrine’ to the rest of the world (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). For example, Pieronek, a Polish bishop, claims that “gender ideology is worse than communism and Nazism together” (Graff & Korolczuk, 2017, p. 176), and Strehovec, a Slovenian priest, classifies ‘gender theory’ as “Marxism 2.0” (Kuhar, 2017, p. 221), claiming that the power struggle is no longer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat but in the relationships between men and women, and that the revolution is no longer about socialism, but about a ‘gender society’.
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Korolczuk and Graff (2018) argue that by playing on Eastern Europeans’ fear of the totalitarian regime, right-wing populists reach further than their traditional supporters and connect with a wider audience.
Anti-gender activism in Bulgaria In Bulgaria, anti-gender activism started relatively late compared to other CEE countries such as Poland and Croatia, where pro-life movements became a natural habitat for development of anti-gender discourses (Darakchi, 2019). The ‘symbolic glue’ for Bulgarians turned out to be the controversy around the translation for the term ‘gender’ in IC. IC’s Article 4, §3 says:
The implementation of the provisions of this Convention by the Parties, in particular measures to protect the rights of victims, shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, gender, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, state of health, disability, marital status, migrant or refugee status, or other status. ("Council of Europe," 2011, emphasis added) There are no separate words for ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in Bulgarian, which is why ‘gender’ in this context was translated literally in Bulgarian to ‘social sex’. This wording gave way for manipulations in the public debate, claiming that ‘gender’ always equals a third, ‘social’ sex, different than cis-male or cis-female. This ‘loss in translations’ allowed for a redefinition of meanings, ascribing a negative connotation to the word ‘gender’ (as pronounced in English, but spelled in Cyrillic) as it was discursively utilized to mean a “homosexual, pervert, sexually confused, degraded person” (United Partners, 2019, p. 6). For people who due to translational issues were unable to grasp the concept of ‘gender’, the word was used as a strategy of persuasion, an ‘empty signifier’ (Mayer & Sauer, 2017) for “a myth-like neologism, which started to accumulate any kind of meanings of fear, rage, and scorn expressed by the populist position” (Bankov, 2020, p. 347).
Darakchi (2019) explores the IC debate in Bulgaria as an anti-gender campaign through a discourse analysis of social media comments. His study demonstrates how the threat of ‘gender’ is presented in heteronormative and anti-feminist political, religious, and nationalistic discourses, as well as how gender equality an LGBTQ+ rights are discursively positioned as a threat to traditional Bulgarian values. Darakchi’s analysis highlights that anti-gender movements mobilize men and women alike and finds links between women’s opposition of IC and socialist nostalgia, as women who expressed anti-
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IC opinions often also believed that socialism had enhanced women’s rights in Bulgaria (and thus, that there was no inequality problem to be solved). Additionally, Stanoeva’s (2018) analysis of the first months of the IC debate in Bulgaria focuses on the relationship between gender and nationalism. She argues for the existence of a ‘nationalist consensus’ against refugee protection, gender equality, and ethnic minority rights across the left-right scale on the post-socialist Bulgarian political terrain. This nationalist consensus, Stanoeva argues, along with the presence of the concept of ‘traditional values’ in political discourse and public tolerance for hate speech, enabled the rapid mobilization of an anti-gender campaign centered around IC, systematically positioning the Convention as a threat to “the health of the nation” with a series of “hypochondriac” arguments (Stanoeva, 2018, p. 731). Furthermore, Stanoeva finds parallels between anti-gender and anti-refugee discourses, as in both prevail fear-inducing messages of danger for Bulgarians’ national identity imposed by threatening ‘Others’.
Being aware of the anti-gender phenomenon provides an additional layer of understanding into which ideological forces meet in the IC debate, and which strategies they employ to stay covert. Stanoeva and Darakchi’s studies trace the beginning of the debate in Bulgaria and provide the groundwork for its exploration as an anti-gender campaign. Following up on their findings, the present study explores the discourses debate participants employ on Facebook over a longer time span, in order to contribute to studying the long-term effects of this anti-gender campaign on dominant discourses.
3.2. The Istanbul Convention Debate in Bulgarian Media The role of the media in the IC debate in Bulgaria has already been the subject of several studies, the results of which have demonstrated the overexposure of the topic and linked the prevalent attitudes towards IC to anti-EU bias in media. One study (Perceptica, 2018) presented a thorough content analysis of the period between December 1, 2017 and January 31, 2018,7 focusing on identifying potential bias for or against the ratification of IC and towards EU. The results showed a clear prevalence of negative attitudes: less than 30% of the analyzed articles were deemed to be pro-IC, while 54% identified negative bias towards the Convention. In Figure 1, 23 media outlets were positioned on an X/Y
7 In the two months’ sample the authors identified 7387 unique articles mentioning IC in Bulgarian media. A detailed analysis was then performed of 10% of the articles in the sample (739 articles) (Perceptica, 2018). 14 graph representing their identified biases.8 From Figure 1, it becomes apparent that the majority of these outlets demonstrated an anti-IC bias, and that a positive correlation was to be found between the bias towards EU and IC.
Figure 1. Bulgarian media bias towards the Istanbul Convention and the EU. Source: AEJ Bulgaria
Two studies (Angelova et al., 2018; United Partners, 2019) set out to explore the role of the media as an influencer in the debate.9 Both studies show that Bulgarian media have overexposed the IC topic and thus contributed to exaggerating the controversies and fueling social tension. United Partners’ report concludes that media played a significant role in creating and propagating a negative social representation of IC and the concept of gender in Bulgarian society, fueling the dominant narrative of the Convention’s opponents. They call this act “a classic textbook example of modern propaganda,” which they define as “simplifying a complex issue and repeating that simplification, often with the help of the media (traditional and social), using massively orchestrated
8 The media were selected for their popularity and/or activity in the IC debate, where the size of the bubbles corresponds to the number of articles from each outlet, the X axis represents their bias towards IC and the Y axis – their bias towards EU. The most popular media outlets in the country are visualized in green. (Perceptica, 2018). 9 A team of European Studies students at Sofia University analyzed 16 media outlets’ communications around IC in the period December 15, 2017 – March 15, 2018 (Angelova et al., 2018), while a report by marketing agency United Partners (2019) performed a social network analysis (SNA) on a sample of 476 articles in major Bulgarian media. 15 communication, and using tricky language to discourage reflective thought” (United Partners, 2019, p. 5). The top three reasons for the tension around the IC debate identified by the student survey were the lack of sufficient understanding of IC’s content, the politicization of the debate, and the prejudgment on the part of the population (Angelova et al., 2018).
To these, a set of linguistic and value arguments should be added. Bankov (2020) picks up on the ‘gender’ thematic and performs a semiotic deconstruction of the term ‘gender’ and its new meanings in Bulgaria, born during the IC debate. Using Barthes’ classical model from 1957, he demonstrates how the word ‘gender’ (pronounced like in English but spelled in Cyrillic – ‘джендър’) started to assume a range of negative connotations on social media, and eventually entered the Bulgarian vocabulary as a neologism carrying all possible pejorative meanings for every emerging collective mood of fear, rage, and scorn against IC, LGBTQ+ people, and European liberal values. What gave way for the birth and growth of such emotions and meanings, Bankov argues, is the ‘e-crowd’ phenomenon that makes for the casual practicing of cyberbullying and hate speech, as the collective use of such discourses online liberates users from socially acceptable norms and legislations and relieves each user reproducing these messages from personal responsibility. Bankov further recognizes the efficiency of humor, ridicule, and parody in bridging populist messages with destructive emotions, not least through spreading hateful and abusive content in easily shareable formats like memes, emojis and GIFs.
Finally, Vasileva’s (2020) discourse analysis of the IC debate in media focuses on power relations in Bulgarian society, which, she argues, are reflected in the making of political decisions in the country, as well as on the quality, expression, and manifestation of the public debate. Vasileva refers to post-truth, post-capitalism, post-democracy, and other ‘post-’categories, explaining how Bulgarians’ experience in the crossfire between ideologies has led to “a rejection of any authority, whereby people prefer to believe lies and the truth becomes a feeling” (Vasileva, 2020, p. 42). Her study finds that those given the power to speak about the IC debate in media are typically men.10 The key topics that the discussion revolves around are found to be the term ‘gender’; if IC would introduce a ‘third gender’ in Bulgarian legislation; whether and how IC would introduce the possibility to choose a gender identity different from the biological one; whether and how
10 With the notable exception of BSP party leader Kornelia Ninova, who is against IC. 16
IC would pave the way for legalizing same-sex marriage; and if IC gives more rights to refugee women than ethnic Bulgarian women. Vasileva’s findings suggest that IC proponents’ participation in the debate is mainly focused on trying to refute the other side’s arguments, rather than introducing new ones. Importantly, she highlights the notable absence of the topic of gender-based violence as a structural problem in the argumentations for the Convention, from both the political parties supporting IC and from media.
The highlighted studies all contribute to understanding why the IC debate gained traction, recognizing both traditional and social media as key factors and hinting at ideological influences. Departing from the existing results, the present study employs a media-centered approach to explore how it unfolded. The use of Facebook as a source of sample both allows us retroactive access into debate participants’ discourses and enables us to account for the platform’s specificities and their potential effect on the conversation. Furthermore, comparing the engagement with two organizations on opposite sides of the debate gives us insight into the most polarized circles within the debate, which can be instrumental in discovering eventual differences in both sides’ strategies for constructing their arguments. The study’s timespan of four years should be fruitful in demonstrating how discourse is affected by, but also how it affects and transforms ideologies and social practices.
4. Theoretical Framework To answer my main research question, I will analyze the Facebook comments in my sample through Reyes’ (2011) concept of de/legitimization discourse. The answer to my sub-question will be informed by the architectures and affordances of Facebook as a platform.
4.1. Architectures and Affordances of Facebook Earlier studies into online activism have explored how different online practices were used to mobilize offline activist actions such as attending protests (Askanius & Gustafsson, 2010; Bakardjieva, 2012; Benford & Snow, 2000; Bennett, 2012; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). But in more recent cases, like the one of the IC debate in Bulgaria, the primary goal of these activist practices seems to have shifted. It is no longer necessary to get people to the streets – online action alone is enough to achieve social change (Sokolov et al., 2018). Although there were organized on-site protests both for and against IC, these
17 invited limited attendance, and more importantly, made insignificant impact (Bankov, 2020). I conform to Trottier and Fuchs’ (2014) claim that the internet and social media enable populist movements to enter mass politics, and I argue that the widespread online activism and civic engagement, which was most notably manifested on Facebook, played a crucial role for the outcome of the IC debate.
Digital technologies have shifted the power balance. It is no longer only traditional print media and government bodies that control the conversation – information spread on the internet has an equal chance to influence public agendas and opinions. The agenda- setting role can be achieved by organizations and human agents alike, by creating easily reproducible messages, framed to seem relatable and allowing for personalization and shareability (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Merrill & Åkerlund, 2018). This freedom has given a voice to traditionally marginalized communities and enabled civic engagements in social movements such as the Arab Spring and ‘Black Lives Matter’, but it has proven equally effective in radicalizing political opinions (Dubow et al., 2017), proliferating and spreading populist messages, fake news, and emotionally incited post-truth claims (Engesser et al., 2017). Therefore, we need to pay attention to the ways in which social media motivates participation in online activism, as well as who and by which means mobilizes and controls this participation.
Merrill and Åkelund (2018) suggest that we consider the influence of social media architectures and affordances on the way discourse is produced, reproduced, and interpreted on these platforms, and in turn, on how power and social relationships manifest, how they are constructed and mediated on social media websites like Facebook. As social media architectures are to be understood the technological characteristics that shape how the platforms are used (e.g., interface elements such as reaction buttons and comment fields), while their affordances are defined as the general logics, the broader capabilities and limitations that allow and influence the production of discourses.
Social media architectures bring about a set of functional affordances that shape participation on social media, identified by boyd (2010) as replicability, scalability, searchability, and persistence. Replicability refers to the possibility to easily reproduce and reuse the same piece of content in different contexts, scalability means the great potential for content visibility that social media offer, searchability concerns social media’s search function which allows users to locate specific content, and persistence
18 refers to online content’s digital footprint, meaning that content is automatically recorded and archived and can be accessed at a later stage. These functional affordances in turn create identity and social affordances that have further implications for online public participation (Moreno & D’Angelo, 2019).
Specifically, we should consider the implications of Facebook’s affordances for identity construction. Bennett and Segerberg (2012) argue that due to their ability to disperse messages which are easily reproducible, easy-to-personalize, and inclusive of diverse individual reasons for joining a cause, social media encourage identity expression in relation to complex social and/or political issues. Facebook has proven to be a particularly fruitful environment for disseminating such discourses (Merrill & Åkerlund, 2018), as users are displayed with their full names and pictures, and thus, by choosing to engage with a sociopolitical cause online, one leaves digital traces linking their persona to said cause. Participation, then, becomes self-motivated, as sharing personally expressive content is rewarded with engagement from one’s social network (Vitak & Ellison, 2013). This is linked to Facebook’s social affordance of group belonging, which also motivates users to engage with content published by others with whom they wish to identify, as sharing ideas and actions within social relationships brings about self- validation (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).
4.2. Strategies of De/legitimization In accordance with CDA, to account for the relationship between social practices and discourse, we need to explore the linguistic elements of the texts under analysis, and more specifically how language is used in discourse and society as an instrument of control and manifestation of symbolic power. Reyes (2011) offers a conceptual framework that explores the discursive strategies of de/legitimization employed by speakers who attempt to gain power or disempower their opponents. Reyes (2011) defines legitimization as the process by which social actors accredit their opinions or actions with the goal of convincing others of its validity. Delegitimization, on the other hand, is understood as reaffirming one’s position by demeaning an opponent. While Reyes’ theory originally focuses on political power, applying his framework to this study demonstrates that the same strategies are employed on the micro level by social actors when practicing activism. Identifying which strategies of de/legitimization are successful in digital settings can help provide insights into how social movements gain traction online. Furthermore, considering the local specificities of the Bulgarian context, exploring the
19 discursive means by which these strategies are employed can be instrumental in illuminating the ideological influences at play.
Al-Tahmazi (2015) argues that de/legitimization is not only an argumentative strategy used to justify actions and opinions but is itself an exercise of power. Building on Reyes’ framework, he defines two categories of discursive de/legitimization practices: actor- oriented and action-oriented. Actor-oriented arguments focus on sorting people into social categories, establishing an in-group and out-group identity. The ideological nature of this act enables the de/legitimization process through means of group belonging. Action-oriented arguments, on the other hand, evaluate politically significant actions based on the interlocutors’ ideological inclinations. De/legitimization is then achieved by endorsing or irrationalizing these actions. Actor-oriented de/legitimization is carried out by portraying social actors as il/legitimate claimants of power, and action-oriented de/legitimization is achieved by recontextualizing social actions to present them as il/legitimate or un/justified.
According to Al-Tahmazi (2015), the use of de/legitimization techniques polarizes sociopolitical discussions on Facebook. Exploring how people use de/legitimizing strategies to perpetuate polarization in the case of the IC debate in Bulgaria can enhance our understanding on the means of operation of ideological communities, and how the discourses they employ reproduce and affect hegemonic power. My analysis steps on Reyes’ (2011) theoretical foundation, which identifies five categories of discursive strategies that social actors use to de/legitimize their positions and actions:
Appeal to emotions The appeal to emotions (particularly fear) is a common discursive practice for skewing the opinion of others in a particular direction. According to Reyes (2011), presenting other social actors or their actions in a negative or threatening way is a particularly effective technique for creating an ‘us-group’ and a ‘them-group’. Wodak (2015) calls this practice ‘politics of fear’.
Presenting a hypothetical future Another tactic for de/legitimizing social actors and actions is claiming that they pose a threat in the future that needs to be prevented by an immediate action in the present. Successfully de/legitimizing actions by presenting a negative hypothetical outcome is a powerful strategy for inciting opposition (Al-Tahmazi, 2015).
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Rationality Rationalization is achieved by legitimizing a claim or action as the result of a careful evaluation and thought. Highlighting the ‘rational’ actions that one has taken to verify their position contributes to perceiving them as trustworthy, informed, and methodical (Reyes, 2011).
Voices of expertise De/legitimizing a position through voices of expertise involves strengthening one’s position by citing experts/other influential actors that support one’s claims. By referring to authoritative voices, speakers are perceived as more persuasive and convincing, and are more attentively listened to (Philips, 2004, cited in Reyes, 2011).
Altruism Reyes (2011) defines altruism as a ‘positive representation of self’ by framing one’s actions and opinions as driven the benefit of a community or society rather than personal interest. By positioning themselves as altruistic, i.e. seeking the well-being of others, speakers appeal to their audience’s system of values and thus pass their ‘moral evaluation’.
5. Methodology The following chapter outlines my methodological choice and research design. It situates this study within the research paradigm of critical realism and presents methodological and ethical reflections and limitations.
5.1. Research Method For this study, I apply critical discourse analysis (CDA). This choice was motivated by my research goal to uncover the ideological influences on the debate around the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria. The concepts of ideology and power are central for CDA, as the framework aims to “analys[e] opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 10). CDA accounts for the relationship between socio-cultural practices and language use, how these practices shape discourse, but also how they are reshaped by it (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997).
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Importantly, Wodak (2014) stresses that CDA is a field, a research program, rather than a single theory or method, and that there are many different approaches to conducting CDA studies. The approach carried out in this study accounts for the relation between social practices and discourse by analyzing linguistic choices employed in Facebook comments to achieve de/legitimization. De/legitimization can be understood as an “argumentation process that aims to undermine/promote certain interpretation of reality as part of the pursuit of power in […] discourses” (Al-Tahmazi, 2015, p. 166), and its effectiveness is highly dependable on the pre-existence of shared beliefs, values, and visions held by certain groups or society at large (Reyes, 2011).
To operationalize the placement of de/legitimization discourses in appropriate categories, I have drawn from Reyes (2011), Wodak (2001, 2004, 2015), and Al-Tahmazi (2015) to formulate a set of questions, the answers to which can help identify and categorize de/legitimization strategies. These criteria are outlined in Table 1:
Table 1. Criteria for identifying actor- and action-oriented strategies of de/legitimization I coded the comments in my sample for de/legitimization strategies by answering the questions from Table 1. Each question points to specific linguistic means, through which these strategies can be revealed:
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Appeal to emotions Wodak (2015) highlights the discursive methods used to instill a sense of danger by appealing to emotions (particularly fear). Among these are practicing politics of exclusion by clearly defining a threatening ‘Other’, categorizing people and actions into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and using a language characterized by dramatization and emotionalization, exaggeration, repetition, and scapegoating. The question “How are persons linguistically named and referred to?” points to referential or nomination strategies used for the construction and representation of social actors. Linguistic devices to look for here include membership categorization, biological, naturalizing, and depersonalizing metaphors, metonymies, or synecdoches (Wodak, 2004). Asking “What characteristics, features, qualities are associated or attributed to them?” can help uncover predicative strategies for assigning evaluative attributions to social actors, which can be explicit or implicit, negative, positive, and/or stereotypical, and are usually communicated through adjectives. “What arguments or argumentation scheme, linguistic structures and rhetorical devices are used to try to justify, legitimize and naturalize the exclusion, discrimination, or demonization of others?” reveals argumentative strategies for triggering an emotional response, linguistically expressed by topoi used to justify inclusion/exclusion, preferential treatment, and/or discrimination (Wodak, 2001).
Presenting a hypothetical future Al-Tahmazi (2015) identifies two ways for achieving de/legitimization through presenting a hypothetical future: proximization, defined as the speaker’s ability to discursively present an event as having a direct (negative) effect on the addressee, and predication, which involves naming a social actor who has the means to change the pending negative outcome. These are typically expressed by conditional sentences and follow one of the following linguistic formulas: ‘If + past [protasis] → would + Infinitive without to [apodosis]’; or ‘If + present [protasis] → will + Infinitive without to [apodosis]’ (Reyes, 2011).
Rationalization By answering the question “How did one come to the conclusion that a certain action was right/wrong?” we are looking to identify instrumentality, i.e., a ‘modus operandi’ accounting for the speaker’s thought process when evaluating the action. A ‘modus
23 operandi’ is typically articulated through expressions signaling that consideration has taken place, e.g., ‘review’, ‘explore’, ‘consult’, or ‘deliberation’ (Reyes, 2011).
Voices of expertise Employing voices of expertise to support or reinforce one’s position on a topic is a discursive strategy that Reyes (2011), referring to Van Leeuwen (2007), calls ‘authorization’ – when a speaker refers to a source to legitimize the validity of their claim. This can be achieved linguistically by naming an authority figure, book, or other source that supports one’s narrative, presenting concrete numbers/statistics, or alluding to one’s own personal experience and/or observation(s).
Altruism Altruism is used as a rhetorical device to construct actions as beneficial to society or a group of people rather than driven by self-interest, or to position actors as ‘selfless’ and caring for others’ well-being. A common linguistic technique for achieving this is the so- called ‘story plot’, whereby villain/s, victim/s, and hero/es are discursively identified (Reyes, 2011). The victim, then, is the person or group of people in need of help or ‘liberation’; the one(s) who will suffer the negative consequences of the proposed action. The villain(s) are those who enable the negative action, and the heroes are those whose counter-actions and/or sacrifices will prevent the action and ‘save’ the victim/s.
As the table suggests, de/legitimization strategies can be both actor- and action- oriented, apart from rationalization, which is typically action-oriented. Appeal to emotions, as well as altruism, rely on clearly distinguishable linguistic features to address social actors vs. their actions, while presenting hypothetical futures and employing voices of expertise can be utilized in similar linguistic manners to refer to both actors and actions.
In CDA, Merrill and Åkelund (2018) suggest, social media platforms with their architectures and affordances can be explored as “meso-level discursive bridges” between the micro level of user-generated texts and the macro level of societal practices. The role of Facebook’s architectures and affordances could further affect de/legitimization discourses’ social and cultural implications, and thus, an analysis of how the Facebook discussion around IC unfolded can provide insight both into ideological influences and into social media’s role in mediating the debate.
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5.2. Research Paradigm This study is grounded within the paradigm of critical realism. Critical realism argues that while we can observe regularities in the world around us, we cannot always see the social structures and fundamental mechanisms and elements that produce them. Therefore, the researcher’s goal is to discover these elements, describe their nature and explain how they play into producing the observed regularity (Blaikie & Priest, 2017). This fits well with CDA’s aim for denaturalization – CDA aims at demystifying ideology and power by systematically analyzing semiotic data (texts) using retroductive logic of inquiry (Wodak, 2014). In combination with CDA, a critical realist approach allows us to account for the influence of real underlying mechanisms and structures, their constant struggle with human agency, and the role of contextual factors (Fairclough, 2005).
Social actors are seen by critical realists as socially produced, contingent, and subject to change, but possessing real causal powers. However, these are in constant tension with the causal powers of social structures and practices, knowledge of which is necessary to analyze concrete events (Fairclough, 2005). Furthermore, critical realism recognizes everyday phenomena as socially constructed but rejects the notion that they can be reduced entirely to discourse. That said, critical realism positions discourse as a key element of all social processes, events, and practices, which in their turn are both influencers of and influenced by discourse (Fairclough, 2010).
5.3. Sample For this paper, I draw from a sample of 3055 comments found under 218 posts on BFW and SVA’s Facebook pages between September 2017 and April 2021. The posts were extracted via a search for ‘Истанбулската конвенция’ (Bulgarian for ‘the Istanbul Convention’) on each of the two pages, filtered on the specified time frame.11 The search query resulted in 103 posts on BFW’s page which had a total of 1376 comments, and 115 posts on SVA’s page with a total of 1679 comments. Coding was done manually.
Facebook as a medium was chosen for this analysis first and foremost due to its popularity among Internet-active Bulgarians. As of 2021, 62,1% of Bulgarians have a Facebook profile, the largest percentage of which (23,7%) aged between 25 and 34 (Kemp, 2021). This age group is interesting as it coincides with what Bulgarians call the ‘transition children’ – the generation that grew up during the ideological and economic
11 The search query was executed on April 27, 2021. 25 transition from communism to a democratic society and experienced its accompanying struggles. These were first-generation EU Bulgarians whose parents still carried socialism’s ideological influence, torn between the nationalistic pride of the Bulgarian identity that they were raised with and their progressive status of Europeans. These ‘transition children’, now adults and members of society, were also first-generation digital natives, so a critical discourse analysis of a platform where they constitute the largest portion of the users would present an opportunity for a valuable insight into ideological influences.
Another platform specificity that motivated me to choose Facebook comments as a subject of research was that typically, Facebook users have their full name and picture connected to their comments. My hope was that the fact that the users knew they could be identified would reduce the cases of ‘trolling’ in favour of more thought-through, elaborated opinions that would be more representative of the commenters’ actual beliefs.
The two organizations were chosen for comparison due to their pivotal role in the IC debate and their belonging to opposing camps in the question. An additional criterion was their engagement with the topic, as both SVA and BFW actively posted about IC on their pages during the entire time frame explored in this study.
5.4. Methodological Reflections I was able to try out my methodological choice during a pilot study I conducted for the “Research Methodology” course earlier this year (Stoencheva, 2021). I found it giving to combine CDA as a method with Facebook as a platform where asynchronous interaction is recorded and can be observed afterwards. The use of CDA allowed me to look beyond what was written and consider the influence of the discursive practice of Facebook comments as a place to express opinions and engage in discussions, as well as of the sociocultural practice with its social, political, and cultural elements, to make sense of the discourses at play.
An advantage of Facebook comments is that they can be understood as “personal accounts”, whose biggest strength is that they can help throw “light on the experiences of particular individuals”, especially on their self-identity development (Layder, 2013, p. 88). An additional motivation for choosing Facebook rather than other asynchronous social media is that it makes anonymity difficult. The fact that users are identifiable with full name and profile picture commits them to their words, as their participation becomes
26 a tool for shaping their social identity. This also helps mitigate trolling. However, a concern here is that we cannot completely eliminate the possibility of fake profiles/comments entering the dataset. To address this, I have excluded from the analysis any comments where I suspected malicious attempts. Another weakness to consider when using Facebook comments as an object of analysis is the fact that users can edit their comments at a later point, and both users and page administrators have the possibility to remove comments from posts. This could somewhat skew the data, as it is not possible to retroactively get the full picture of how the debate unfolded. While I found the data gathered from my sample useful for answering my research questions, as a researcher, it was important to keep this in mind.
Additionally, it needs to be stated that the sample for this study was selected nonrandomly and does not claim to be representative of broader public opinion. This is in line with qualitative research’s aim “to understand the particular in depth, not to find out what is generally true of the many” (Merriam, 2009, p. 223). Therefore, the sampling was entirely motivated by relevance in regard to my research questions.
Last but not least, the entire research process was carried out with reflexivity regarding my own social and cultural identity and my role as a researcher. As a Bulgarian woman, many of the study’s background aspects are just as ‘natural’ to me as to other Bulgarians and explaining them for the contextualization of this project acted as a ‘denaturalization’ process for myself as well. Another aspect that invited reflexivity was my self- identification as a feminist and my clear stance on the debate (pro-IC).
5.5. Ethics The key ethical concerns when analyzing social media data should include privacy, informed consent, anonymity, and risk of harm (Townsend & Wallace, 2016). The first question I considered when selecting my sample was whether the data could be considered private. The Facebook pages of both organizations are public and their content, including users’ comments, is not password-protected and can be viewed without a Facebook account. To comment on a Facebook page, a user needs a Facebook account, and by creating one, users agree to the privacy policies around the visibility of their comments, outlined in the platform’s Terms and Conditions. Therefore, the data was deemed public. However, this still raises the question of the lack of informed consent from the participants. Since acquiring informed consent from hundreds of Facebook users
27 is not feasible, and as mentioned before, their comments are public, I took the decision to proceed without explicit consent from participants, but with special care taken to protect their privacy and anonymity. Therefore, the study does not reveal any names or other personal information that can lead to the identification of an individual user. Anonymity is further guaranteed by the paper being written in English, while the dataset (Facebook comments) is in Bulgarian. Translating direct citations lessens the probability to locate the comment (and consequently, the person writing it) via search engines. Since the condition of anonymity is met, this also mitigates the risk of harm; however, to as effectively as possible eliminate any threat of data leaks and secure GDPR compliance, the raw data used for this study has only been stored locally and destroyed upon completion of the project.
6. Analysis To visualize how different strategies of de/legitimization were utilized in the IC debate, I present a linguistic analysis of pre-selected user comments, where de/legitimization strategies are emphasized in bold. First, I focus on three key subjects of de/legitimization discourses during the IC ratification debate: gender, religion, and national independence, demonstrating their instrumentality for defining ‘us’/‘them’ groups and directing participants towards opposite ideological camps. I then go on to explore how past the debate, IC itself became a de/legitimization tool in the context of other events. Finally, I discuss the role of Facebook as a discursive practice, reflecting on how the platform’s affordances played into polarizing the IC discussion and affecting the outcome of the debate.
6.1. De/legitimizing Gender Given the debate’s character as an anti-gender campaign, discussions around ‘gender’ were prevalent on both pages. A closer look reveals how the gender thematic was used for de/legitimizing different ‘us’/‘them’ groups and inciting action for/against IC’s ratification, as well as how de/legitimization strategies were utilized to validate a new definition of ‘gender’ in Bulgarian society.
Building an us/them group and de/legitimizing action An exploration of the discursive practices around the emergence and use of de/legitimization strategies in the infancy of the debate gives us an insight into the ideological influences that lied at its core. Early posts in the sample already reveal how
28 discourses of de/legitimization were used to establish pro- and anti-IC ideological camps. De/legitimization strategies were instrumental in constructing an ‘us-’ and ‘them-group’, positioning valid/invalid opinions and establishing certain claims as truths and others as deceptions.
Of the two organizations, SVA were first to attempt crowd mobilization. Between September and December 2017, they published nine Facebook posts that mentioned IC, all of them consistently calling for action against its ratification. In each of the posts, the danger was clearly stated: the term ‘social sex’ (as ‘gender’ was originally translated in the Bulgarian version of IC). The organization convincingly argued that ‘social sex’ equals a ‘third sex’, which is unrelated to one’s biological attributes and can be freely chosen and changed at any time. Ratifying IC, SVA stated, would “threaten the safety of women and children,” as legalizing a ‘third sex’ would allow “men [to] claim that they were women to enter female changing rooms” or to “compete against cis-female athletes.” Furthermore, according to SVA, such a definition would allow anyone to claim they identified as the opposite sex to enter a homosexual marriage.12
The initial reactions to these posts came from the organization’s own community. Sympathizers directly mobilized actor-oriented strategies of legitimization to support SVA’s narrative and build an ‘us-group’. Additionally, action-oriented discourses were centered around legitimizing one action: objecting the ratification of IC. In some cases, these were intertwined with each other, and several types of de/legitimization strategies were employed together to increase impact. One such example read:
(C1) My child told me that in their school, at least 30% of the children were homosexual. So how does this happen? Well, thanks to the gay parades, or however they’re called, I don't know the term – the society of lesbians, gays, transgender people and all the other sexes (no offence, but they’re difficult to remember). Anyway, on these parades, these people attract children with colorful pictures and cute rainbow flags and then invite them to become part of their community. Two different discursive expressions of expertise are included right in the beginning of this comment. First, the seriousness of the alleged issue is confirmed by personal account from the author’s child. Reyes (2011) states that personal experience belongs to the discursive technique of legitimization through voices of expertise, in which case these
12 Homosexual marriage is illegal in Bulgaria and SVA is strongly against its legalization (“Society and Values Association,” n.d.). 29 voices are enacted through character. According to Tusting et al. (2002), such expressions perpetuate social and cultural stereotypes (in Reyes, 2011). Then, the expertise is reaffirmed by citing a specific number (“at least 30%”), serving to further intensify the magnitude of the issue. The author then goes on to legitimize the issue through means of rationalization by presenting their chain of argument (‘gay parades are colorful and cute, so that they can appeal to children’). To these, a delegitimization strategy is added when an out-group ‘perpetrator’ is positioned as an actor (“These people attract […] invite…”). Finally, appeal to fear is achieved through positive self-representation (by stressing that the comment is not intended to offend anyone) and (implied) negative other- representation.
Many commenters employed the strategy of presenting a hypothetical future to reinforce the seriousness of the issue and motivate participation. This action-oriented strategy aims at forming a “shared belief” that the action suggested by the author is the only way to proceed (Reyes, 2011, p. 794). The linguistic construction of their arguments follows an if-then structure to present potential consequences of a (non-)action. Two examples of this are shown below. (C2) If we don’t act now, we won’t have grandchildren in the future, as our children will be confused and genderless. With this comment, the author legitimizes anti-IC actions through an imagined scenario of a disastrous future that would affect the ‘us-group’ directly, stressing that the movement (“we”) holds power to affect the outcome. A similar approach is used in the next example:
(C3) If we sign IC, just because I don't remember what somebody identifies as (and there are about 30 genders registered in America) I can be held accountable and fined for not respecting their rights. Apart from the construction of a negatively represented out-group through the choice of pronouns (“I”/“their”), this comment presents IC as posing a direct financial threat to people. Given that Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU, economic arguments have been found particularly effective in spreading panic and fear and manipulating public opinions (Dosev, 2016). Furthermore, referring to a number of “genders registered in America” makes the speaker appear informed and knowledgeable on the matter.
However, there was no full consensus around opposing IC within the SVA community. Some community members questioned both the actuality of the problem and the morality
30 of the tone of the discussion. This small but significant group of commenters attempted to target SVA with actor-oriented delegitimization strategies such as appeal to emotion, as can be seen in this example from late 2017:
(C4) Can someone tell me how many women are attacked by men claiming to be women, versus by men who are drunks, drug addicts, or arrive legally or illegally in Bulgaria? Not to mention all the robbed or killed old people in the villages. Dear SVA, I do not know what values you are fighting for, but at the moment you are spreading hatred, and this does not do you honor. Give an example for our country, not for Turkey. How many women were killed in our country and by whom? Where are you when they kill our children on the sidewalks, when they rape them... And who commits these acts? Is it the people you're talking about? And one more thing – tell me which are these 'safe' places for girls and women in our country? I hope you understand me correctly, and I hope that you really defend the name of your association, and more precisely human values. Several discursive strategies are to be found here. First, there are two clearly defined sides of social ‘Others’ (“men claiming to be women versus […] drunks, drug addicts, […]”). Secondly, there is appeal to fear from gender-based crimes through a series of rhetorical questions addressing both actors and actions, as well as attribution of negative qualities to SVA (“you are spreading hatred”).
Interestingly, however, early dissenting opinions acted as a binding force for the anti- IC community. Interlocutors used Facebook’s ‘Comment Reply’ function to engage with these comments and collectively delegitimize them. Notably, though, these replies largely avoided the topic of gender-based violence, instead employing actor-oriented delegitimization strategies to defend their stand, like in this reply to C4:
(R4.1) If we keep silent while politicians try to impose such policies on us before the holidays... woe to us! This commenter positions “us” (the people) against “politicians,” suggesting that if “we” do not take action, “they” will keep the power. The specific threat(s) that the commenter fears are not named, nevertheless “woe to us” implies that negative consequences await, allowing each reader to fill in their own projections and thus appealing to more people.
BFW and their community were first involved the debate in early 2018, when the escalation of the IC topic in media brought undecided newcomers to both pages. Not having dealt with dissent towards IC before, BFW supporters had a harder time accommodating questions than SVA’s followers who had already practiced their chain of arguments. The pro-IC side’s answers were less provocative and more disorganized;
31 de/legitimization strategies were less frequently employed, and often also less effectively. One exchange went the following way:
(C5) So if what you [BFW] are saying is true, what’s the problem with accepting IC?
(R5.1) That’s what we wonder as well. Someone is abusing their political and social influence to gain likes. R5.1 could be interpreted as a delegitimization attempt, however it is striking that although it contains an allegation for abuse of power, the perpetrator is not named. IC supporters had not yet picked a clear target to organize against, which hindered the community’s mobilization. The consequence of the alleged abuse does not sound too dire, either: that “someone” would “gain likes” (implicitly: on social media) is barely anything for the feminist community to be afraid of or try to stop.
From these examples, it becomes apparent that using de/legitimization strategies to define an ‘us’ and a ‘them’-group was beneficial to anti-IC activists when it comes to mobilizing their community and recruiting newcomers. Together with the advantage of starting the group-building process earlier than their opponents, the use of actor- and action-oriented strategies of de/legitimization helped the anti-IC group achieve a more unified voice of resistance towards a clearly defined ‘Other’ and a better structure of arguments to incite action.
Defining ‘gender’ By mid-January 2018, activists from both sides had started engaging in a conversation on both BFW and SVA’s pages. The discussion escalated quickly, and IC supporters never got the chance to establish a group identity and a proactive strategy for addressing their opposition. By this point the public had understood that the contested formulation in IC’s original text was in fact the term ‘gender’, so the discussion turned to deciphering its definition. Observing the development of the debate through the comments on these two pages, we gain an understanding of how the term transformed its meaning to a derogatory reference to the LGBTQ+ community.
IC opponents employed discourses aimed at putting an equality sign between the English term ‘gender’, unfamiliar to the majority of Bulgarians, and the ‘third sex’ that IC was allegedly introducing. Their arguments for legitimizing this definition closely resembled those observed in anti-gender campaigns in other CEE countries, referring to
32 well-established voices of expertise within the international anti-gender movement. The claims in such comments were often either overly simplified or outright wrong, nevertheless they employed a confident voice, avoiding words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” or “I think”:
(C6) Practically, this is the gender-doctrine “My sex is my choice” by the Hungarian-Russian lesbian Judith Butler.13 She claims that there are no men and women, biological sex is a fantasy. According to her, there are not two, but four sexes and they are defined by sexual orientation: gay, lesbian, bi-, trans-, inter- etc. -sexual.
(C7) Read Gabriele Kuby’s14 “The Global Sexual Revolution.” This book reveals how gender ideology has become dominant in many countries in the last 20 years, and how state-funded gender competence centers are taking care of turning it into politics. The Devil has done his job. In comments like the above, the words ‘third sex’/‘social sex’ were almost completely replaced by ‘gender’ spelled in Cyrillic. It was not long before IC opponents started using the same word to discursively replace terms like ‘homosexual’ and ‘transgender’ with an underlying negative connotation. Memes and jokes using ‘gender’ as a derogatory reference to LGBTQ+ people were reproduced and reshared by different profiles under multiple posts wherever the definition of ‘gender’ was being discussed.
Soon, IC supporters also took to ridicule and humorous/ironic discourse. However, violence is no laughing matter, and what was left for them to joke about was the ‘ignorance’ of those who misunderstood the meaning of ‘gender’. On BFW’s page, the myriad of new definitions was predominantly met with mockery – few commenters attempted to correct the wrong uses of the term or clarify it. Often, the joking tone was combined with delegitimizing different political/cultural actors:
(C8) [Conservative-Right Union party leader Peter] Moskov said something about genders being cannibals… what was it exactly, I forgot?
(C9) If one thinks they’re from the first gender but doesn’t beat the second gender then they’re actually from the third gender – Judith Butler told me that over coffee at [journalist and anti-IC activist] Valeria Veleva’s place. SO THIS IS THE OFFICIAL DEFINITION!!11!
13 Judith Butler is in fact an American-born professor of philosophy, who theorizes that gender is socially constructed, and that traditional notions of gender and sexuality aim to perpetuate the domination of men over women and justify the oppression of LGBTQ+ people (Duignan, 2021). 14 Gabriele Kuby is a German sociologist holding conservative Catholic positions on gender and sexuality, feminism, and sexual freedom (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). 33
(C10) The Grand Mufti’s Office claimed that “gender” means female circumcision in Yemen [link to a source] In a similar fashion, actor-oriented delegitimization was used to mock anti-IC activists’ intelligence, references varying from “misinformed” to “dumb trolls.” This approach, however, was arguably detrimental to IC supporters’ success, as by targeting a large group of actors, they appeared as a closed elitist group, unrepresentative of the entire population.
The strongest voice of expertise for IC opposers came in July 2018, when the Bulgarian Constitutional Court ruled that the definition of ‘gender’ in IC contradicts the definition in the Bulgarian Constitution (“Constitutional Court of the Republic of Bulgaria,” 2018), bringing the ratification battle to an end. The anti-IC side had won; IC was not to be ratified in the country. From then on, references to CC’s decision were added to international voices of expertise, jokes, and memes, and used to completely legitimize the use of ‘gender’ in the Bulgarian language as a synonym of a sexual identity and/or orientation different from cis and hetero.
6.2. Religion as a De/legitimization Strategy Considering that a significant number of SVA’s followers seem to be Christian,15 religion was a red thread in many of the comments. Action- and actor-oriented strategies of delegitimization through religion were frequently employed and often implemented together to achieve broader impact. De/legitimization through emotions was used particularly often, as many IC opposers referred to their Christian faith to legitimize their expressions of anger, fear, or disgust. IC supporters, on the other hand, focused their discourses on delegitimizing religion as an argument in the debate.
De/legitimizing IC resistance through religion From the very beginning, Christianity acted as a common ideological ground for SVA’s followers to organize around, and immediately created a sense of unity among the participants. References to religion to legitimize action against IC, like in the following example, were common:
(C11) This was expected. Let's stop being so naive. We must be clever and good- natured. The government clearly misunderstood our tolerance of the EU presidency and introduced IC without a public debate while they lied that there would be one. Don't you understand that we must act firmly? Daniel [Biblical reference to St. Daniel] did not bow down to the idol! So what if we currently hold
15 Most likely due to SVA leadership’s religious affiliation: one of the founders is a priest and the other – their chairwoman – a prominent Church member (Karaboev & Angelov, 2018). 34
the EU presidency? We are not obliged to accept everything they impose on us, especially sin. If we just sit here and philosophize, we’ll change nothing. As this comment states, Bulgaria held the EU presidency at the time the debate started. Many commenters suspected a connection between this and IC’s proposal for ratification. The biblical reference alludes to the myth of the prophet St. Daniel, who stood up for Christianity in turbulent times, refusing to “bow down to the idol” and renounce his Christian faith. By referring to a Bible story to legitimize the cause, the author of this comment appeals to religious community members, encouraging their participation. Furthermore, IC is discursively replaced with the word “sin” to appeal to readers’ values. This strategy is combined with presenting a hypothetical future (“If we just sit here and philosophize, we’ll change nothing”) and delegitimization of the government’s actions (“clearly misunderstood our tolerance,” “they lied that there would be [a debate]”).
However, early on, some of SVA’s community members also used religion as an argument against SVA’s anti-IC advances. An example of how this was done can be seen in C12:
(C12) Comrades from SVA, please read the Ten Commandments of God, and stop with your toilets and changing rooms already. Instead of instilling fear and panic before the holidays, familiarize yourselves with the many human values in this life, which you deliberately or out of ignorance do not pay attention to! I wish you a Merry Christmas. Actor-oriented delegitimization is attempted here by ironically addressing SVA with “comrades” as a referential strategy laden with negative meaning, nodding towards Bulgaria’s Soviet past when ‘comrade’ was used as a form of address among communists. Practicing Christianity was frowned upon during the communist years, so religious Bulgarians are typically anti-communist. Knowing this, a reference to communism in this context can clearly be interpreted as criticism. Delegitimization, then, is achieved by discursively linking SVA to communist ideologies and practices. An additional delegitimization strategy is questioning the morality of SVA’s actions with a reference to the Ten Commandments, as this commenter argues that spreading fear and panic is inconsistent with the (Christian) values that SVA claims to support.
In this case, too, early dissenting opinions mobilized the SVA community to defend their position. However, delegitimization was mostly attempted through ad-hominem arguments. One commenter used a rhetorical question to construct the actor’s out-group
35 identity among the in-group of faithful Christians, implying that they lack familiarity with the Ten Commandments:
(R12.1) Mrs. [last name], have you read the Ten Commandments? It doesn’t look like you’re familiar with them at all. By formally addressing the author of C12 as “Mrs. [last name],” the author of R12.1 signals their distance from this debate participant, thus placing her in an ‘out-group’ without providing counterarguments to support their claim.
As these examples demonstrate, religion was used as a group-building strategy to incite resistance against IC. Dissenting opinions further facilitated group-building by triggering discussions and provoking interlocutors to defend their beliefs.
De/legitimizing religion as an argument When the two sides started engaging in a debate, they quickly took to delegitimizing the other side’s reasonings. One of the tactics employed by the pro-IC side was to discredit religion as a legitimate argument. This attack on religion per se strengthened the unity among religious Bulgarians, who felt they needed to protect their faith against the out- group of non-believers, thus underpinning their identification with the anti-IC, religious in-group.
Delegitimization strategies employed by IC advocates involved rationalization and appeal to emotion. As can be seen from the following exchange, arguments mentioning religion, God and the Bible were discredited outright by positioning religion as anti- feminist and promoting violence:
(C13) ....and GOD created man, and then woman... Nowhere in the Bible is there any mention of GOD creating a third sex.
(R13.1) “Raped women to marry their rapists.” (Deuteronomy ch. 22, lines 28- 29). In the same chapter (lines 23-24), we see that a woman who cheats on her husband is killed because she did not call for help, and the man is killed because he has defiled his neighbor's wife, in other words – defiled the possession of another (the woman is owned). The Bible preaches murder and violence, so can we not use it in the context of these discussions? A third sex is not mentioned in the Bible, nor is it mentioned in the Convention. [Name], read at least one of the two.
(R13.2) The Bible also says that a male child equals two females. Also, if you are married and the woman is not a virgin, you and the men of the city must stone her in front of her father's house. But apparently you’ve missed these parts of the Bible... Conclusion: The Bible is vomit, do not rely on it and do not quote it
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because it is bullshit. Unless you want to believe that humans and the world were created 6000 years ago and that women are not equal to men. This dialogue demonstrates how religion created an ideological barrier, widening the gap between IC supporters and Christians. Religious newcomers to the IC discussion bonded by defending their beliefs against this type of delegitimization, which helped cement their position as anti-IC activists.
On January 22, 2018, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church made a public statement against IC and a definition of gender independent from the birth one (Bulgarian Orthodox Church, 2018). This gave the religious community an authoritative voice of expertise to employ in their argumentation:
(C14) We’ve watched the officials’ unconstitutional disregard of the opinion of Bulgarian society around nationally important cases for 30 years now. But the tip of their cynicism is Borisov’s [Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister] arrogant attitude that ‘Bulgaria will accept IC at any cost’, without complying with the opinion of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and our centuries-old Christian religion which have always been in defense of the Bulgarian family and in opposition to Bulgarians’ moral degradation! This comment achieves actor-oriented delegitimization of Bulgaria’s PM (and his pro-IC position) by counterpoising him to Christianity and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church through the attribution of a series of negative qualities and challenging his representativeness of the Bulgarian population through de-authorization (“unconstitutional disregard”). On the other hand, the Church is legitimized through altruism (“in defense of the Bulgarian family,” “in opposition to Bulgarians’ moral degradation”) and positive in-group representation (“our centuries-old Christian religion”).
Another source for the anti-IC group was Metropolitan bishop Gavriil, who during a Parliamentary Commission on Religions meeting stated that the word ‘gender’ comes from the Arabic word for ‘hell’ – ‘ğehennem’ (Panev, 2018). This claim, albeit factually completely wrong, received a large amount of publicity in media, and was repeated and reshared by many of the commenters. A counter-strategy of delegitimization for IC supporters was the fact that the Church had previously (in 2015) supported IC’s ratification in Bulgaria (“Dveri,” 2015), but commenters who sided with this approach were fewer than those who employed ridicule or outright delegitimization of religion.
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6.3. Gender and National Sovereignty Opposition to IC and the concept of ‘gender’ was often motivated with the implication that ratifying the treaty would undermine Bulgaria’s national sovereignty. Early into the discussion, this implication was triggered by the word ‘Istanbul’ in IC’s title, as any reference to Turkey – Bulgaria’s historical ‘Other’ – becomes emotionally laden for Bulgarians. Later on, NGO support for IC was discursively delegitimized through questioning these organizations’ economic and ideological independence. Eventually, IC became a catalyst for anti-EU discourses, legitimized through positioning EU (and its legislations) as a threat to Bulgaria’s sovereignty.
The ‘Istanbul’ Convention: Independence from Turkey While SVA’s own anti-IC arguments were centered around the gender thematic, soon enough community members began bringing their own reasons to oppose the Convention into the comments. In the early days of the discussion, there were confusions regarding the nature of IC as a document and why it was to be objected. A recurring discourse was delegitimizing IC on the basis of the incorrect understanding, provoked by the word ‘Istanbul’ in its name, that it was created by Turkey. Therefore, some comments focused on negatively representing Turkey as an ‘Other’:
(C15) Are you expecting something good from a nation that held us slaves for 500 years? A convention? They are the ones who rape in Europe, who apply “anti-discriminatory” laws to protect the rapists. This message appeals to fear through replacing the name ‘Turkey’ with two discursive positionings as a perpetrator – a historical one towards Bulgarians (“a country that held us slaves for 500 years”) and a contemporary one (“They are the ones who rape in Europe”). The ‘us/them’ strategy is used as an actor-oriented delegitimization, further strengthened by using a rhetorical question.
What was interesting here was that while IC is in fact a treaty from the Council of Europe and has no legal relation to Turkey beyond the fact that it was signed in Istanbul, nobody stated this in the comments, as IC opponents benefitted from the negative connotation which made people spontaneously skeptic towards IC and more perceptive of their arguments.
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Financial and ideological independence The distrust towards NGOs and other grant-funded organizations has been ever- increasing in post-socialist Bulgaria, due to the fact that their financing often comes from international agencies and Western states. Public perception is that these organizations work after foreign models and support foreign interests, and, in the case of feminist NGOs – do not take into consideration the local specificities of Bulgarian women’s situation (Ghodsee, 2004). Nationalist groups in CEE have specifically targeted investor and philanthropist George Soros as a symbol of neoliberal power (Rachman, 2017), and Bulgaria is no exception. The word “Sorosoid,” frequently used by anti-IC activists to refer to feminist NGOs and IC supporters such as BFW, is a powerful signifier of foreign influences into national matters:
(C16) There will be a public discussion on IC on January 23rd. Obviously, most of the participants will be representatives of the "organized" civil movement in Bulgaria, who have funding and are completely dependent on whoever pays them. Please, let our like-minded people apply, so that we can send them on behalf of non-Sorosoid civic groups. For the anti-IC crowd, referring to powerful global figures such as Soros was a particularly fruitful strategy, because despite the obvious prevalence of anti-IC sentiments contra pro-IC such, it succeeded in contextualizing anti-IC discourses as counter- hegemonic. This strategy holds mobilizing power for two reasons. Firstly, it implies a strong opponent to rally against, thus maximizing the community’s efforts. Secondly, it secures any outcome’s organizing effect: if the anti-IC side were to lose the debate, they would have an oppressor to blame it on, thus intensifying their bond against a ‘powerful evil’; if they would win, they could increase mobilization towards other causes through discourses of victory by the power of unity and consistent civic actions.
Independence from Europe CC’s verdict that IC was unconstitutional in Bulgaria shocked Europe, and many foreign authorities commented on it in media. The tension that was created between CC’s decision and European experts’ view changed the course of the discussions on BFW and SVA’s pages – the debate was no longer about IC, but between pro- and anti-European attitudes. CC’s decision was used to legitimize anti-EU positions, implying that EU and the Council of Europe practice oppression over Bulgaria by disregarding its Constitution. In some comments, the hardwired fear of once more losing Bulgaria’s independence was combined with the newly emerged fear of ‘gender’ as a threat to the next generation:
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(C17) During the Turkish Yoke they took our children and let islamists teach them, during communism the red vampires taught them, and now Euro- genderists! We’ve had enough! The fear of ‘gender’ assumed a broader meaning symbolizing a threat posed by EU as an institution. By comparing EU to the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Bloc, this comment taps into emotionally laden historical experiences of the Bulgarian nation to legitimize this fear and provoke negative connotations of EU as an oppressor.
After CC’s verdict, a new ‘us-’ and ‘them-group’ were put in discursive opposition – Bulgarians, bearers of traditional values protected by the Bulgarian Constitution, versus Western Europeans, “morally degraded genderists” who “obey perverted laws.” C18 demonstrates some of the discursive strategies for legitimizing this definition:
(C18) Bulgarians love their children and cannot allow their mental abuse by various perverts! And if in some European countries it is a tradition to rape minors and totally normal for their relatives to sexually abuse them, here it is a crime of the highest order! This is what genderists should never forget! With teeth and nails we will fight against vice, pedophilia, and abnormality! To legitimize framing EU as a danger to ‘our innocent children’, the author of this comment uses referential strategies to discursively replace ‘EU’ with several threatening epithets (“various perverts,” “genderists,” “vice, pedophilia, and abnormality”). The here/there distinction is utilized for drawing a line between ‘us’ (Bulgarians) and ‘them’ (Europeans), and the confident voice used when framing “some European countries” as criminals by Bulgarian standards (although no specific countries are named) enhances the fear-inciting rhetoric.
The pro-EU side’s arguments concerned Western countries’ economic success and higher standard of living, as well as the freedom of movement. However, pro-EU comments also often expressed dissatisfaction with Bulgaria’s current socioeconomic situation, drawing a discursive barrier between Bulgaria and Europe, characterized by here/there distinctions and a representation of EU as ‘better’ than Bulgaria:
(C19) This is why I’m out of here as soon as I graduate. Eastern European societies remain supportive of outdated patriarchal norms, and bayganyoism16 cannot be eradicated.
16 Bay Ganyo is a fictional character created by Bulgarian satirical writer Aleko Konstantinov in 1889 as a mockery of the ‘soon-to-be-modern/European’ rural ‘left over’. He is the epitome of “everything one should be ashamed of within Bulgarianness” (N. Sotirova, 2015, p. 34), described as vulgar, impudent, opportunistic and uncivilized, although also a very skillful tradesman, ingenious, energetic and pragmatic. ‘Bayganyoism’ is used in Bulgarian popular culture as a signifier of the Bulgarian inability to change while 40
In this example, the East/West distinction is reinforced through assigning negative characteristics to Eastern Europe and expressing a desire to leave their in-group belonging to join the other (implicitly: better) side.
By positioning Europe and Bulgaria as fundamentally different from each other, both sides contributed to increased polarization in Bulgarians’ opinion of the EU, whereby anti-IC activists tended to exhibit anti-EU sentiments, and pro-IC activists – pro-EU such. While anti-EU rhetorics have not yet proliferated to the same level as anti-IC ones, this discursive shift represents a worrying trend: even though the majority of Bulgarians still hold a favorable view of the EU (Wike et al., 2019), in recent years, an increase in Eurosceptic positions has been observed in the generation of Bulgarians born after the fall of the socialist regime (Nachev, 2019).
6.4. Past the Debate: IC as a De/legitimization Tool If the IC debate succeeded in redefining the term ‘gender’ in the Bulgarian language, then it was another debate, almost two years after the start of the IC one, that succeeded in transforming the meaning of the phrase ‘the Istanbul Convention’ to outgrow a reference to one document and become a signifier of values. This debate concerned The National Child Strategy 2020-2030, and its chronology went like a déjà vu of the IC discussion. Without going into too much detail about this debate which falls outside of the scope of this study, I will briefly mention its outcome: the Child Strategy project was frozen in September 2019, once again a victory for the opposition. By using the same channels and similar rhetorics, both BFW and SVA managed to mobilize the ideological camps that took part in the IC debate to join this discussion as well, bringing many of the active participants back to their comment fields. Given the similarities between the discourses used in both debates, it was not too surprising that over a year past the verdict on IC, many of the comments on both pages during the Child Strategy debate also referred to IC. One example on SVA’s page reads:
(C20) Here’s how a simple document that doesn’t evoke any second thoughts opens doors to things that 90% of people wouldn’t agree with if someone had asked them outright. This is the case with the Child Strategy and the Istanbul Convention... They present them as supposedly good causes, but their real goal is giving rights to perverts.
continuously reproducing the historically situated behaviors that keep Bulgarians in a particular sociopolitical and economical situation (N. Sotirova, 2015). 41
An equality sign between IC and the Child Strategy implied that although their seemingly different areas, both documents had the same end goal (“giving rights to perverts”). The Child Strategy was to be understood as another EU attempt at corrupting the next generation, and IC was used as a trigger word to activate the crowd that helped block its ratification to also support this cause.
The similarities were noticed by BFW supporters as well. They, too, discussed IC and the Child Strategy as interconnected, but for them, the connection lied in the way the opposition to these documents was mobilized. C21 is an example of how the pro-group legitimized their call for support for the Child Strategy by indirectly presenting a hypothetical future, through describing the consequences from IC’s non-ratification:
(C21) When you’re blatantly lied to and fake news spread at the highest level, it's time to get angry! Do you remember when Kornelia Ninova [BSP party leader] said that in an appendix to IC there was “a list of about 14 genders”? So far, this lie has cost the lives of dozens of women in our country, but the highest price we all pay as a society is the lack of prevention of domestic violence. And by the way, similar ugly lies are currently being spread by the same suspicious groups about the Child Strategy. In both C20 and C21, IC is used as a discursive de/legitimization strategy of its own, signifying, for one ideological camp, a threat imposed by the EU on the values and morality of future Bulgarian generations, and for the other – a manipulation campaign driven by nationalist populists through fake news and disinformation.
Past the Child Strategy debate, these definitions remained. An example of this can be seen in the following comment on BFW’s page from late 2020, where IC was used for actor-oriented delegitimization against any BFW activities for women’s rights:
(C22) You’re campaigning against family, culture, and intelligence. You have no right to speak on behalf of all women in Bulgaria. On the one side, there are the people who don’t want IC or any of its variations, and on the other side, there are dozens of NGOs like you funded by various Sorosoid foundations, USAID, the German government, etc. This comment demonstrates some of the long-term effects of the IC debate – delegitimizing women’s rights efforts as “variations of IC,” and discursively removing feminist organizations further from “the people” by highlighting that they have supported IC in the past. History of support for IC then becomes as strong a discursive strategy for delegitimizing BFW’s current activities as labeling them “Sorosoid.”
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When other European countries started rejecting IC,17 the Convention’s opposers took this as further confirmation of the document’s ‘malicious’ goals. Celebratory comments appeared on SVA’s page following each announcement, and BFW’s criticism was consistently delegitimized with comments like “More countries are now seeing the truth.” However, during IC’s most recent appearance on the public agenda in relation to Turkey’s withdrawal from the treaty in March 2021, the lack of reaction from anti-IC activists was striking. This silence could be explained with the fact that this group had previously vilified Turkey as the host and first country to ratify IC, which in addition to Turkey’s discursive status as a historical ‘Other’ for Bulgaria discouraged the anti-IC side from legitimizing their actions. But even though the pro-IC side got the space to be the only voice discussing an IC-related event for the first time, there is no indication of this occurrence making IC any less of a signifier for the “culture wars” (Politico, 2021) between Eastern and Western Europe.
6.5. The Role of Facebook Affordances By observing which technical architectures were used in the IC debate on both pages, three types of Facebook affordances stood out as instrumental for how the discussion unfolded: identity, social, and functional affordances. The analysis below highlights which of these affordances were relevant in different stages of the discussion, and how.
To start with, I addressed one of my sampling method’s limitations by attempting to determine whether and to what extend moderation was at play. This was important to account for, since moderation could skew the public perception of which types of discourses prevail in a certain context. As both Facebook pages in my sample represent ideological organizations, it is likely that their administrators have low tolerance for dissenting opinions and so, the initial hypothesis was that the remaining comments would to a great extent mirror the opinion represented by the organizations themselves. Indeed, both pages were found to experience rigorous moderation: under many posts, there was a mismatch between the number of comments displayed by Facebook and the amount that were actually visible, and in quite a few cases there were replies to comments that no longer existed. While there were indications of the hypothesis to be true (the majority of the comments under most posts were supportive of the posts’ content), both supportive and dissenting opinions could be identified on both pages. However, the total amount of
17 E.g. Slovakia – in February 2020 (Europost, 2020) and Hungary – in May 2020 (Hungary Today, 2020). 43 comments expressing negative attitudes towards IC in the sample was larger than those expressing positive attitudes.
The effects of Facebook’s platform specificities on the IC conversation were visible from the very beginning. By the time the IC ratification bill was proposed in the end of 2017, both BFW and SVA had already made statements on the topic on their Facebook pages. However, it is clear from the dataset that SVA already had the upper hand in generating public engagement. While BFW’s posts about the pending ratification of IC had collected some reactions of support, few of the commenters felt the need to justify their stand. This, of course, was normal – anyone following a feminist organization like BFW was aware of the magnitude of the problem with gender-based violence in Bulgaria, so there was no one to convince. But this delay in gaining traction arguably had negative consequences for BFW, as it gave their opponents a head start with appealing to Facebook’s algorithm. By employing types of discourses characteristic of provoking a debate and inciting resistance, SVA generated a larger amount of engagement from their community. That gave them the chance to reach a wider audience via Facebook’s social affordance of network-informed associations, as users’ engagement with the content made it visible to their networks (Moreno & D’Angelo, 2019). Furthermore, Facebook’s algorithm favors content with larger engagement, so the more users engage with a piece of content, the larger its reach becomes (Cooper, 2021). The provocative, fear-inflicting discourses in SVA’s communication generated reactions, thus allowing their messages to reach more people.
Further, Facebook’s identity and social affordances facilitated and supported group- building. Having started the group-building process first, SVA’s community was able to benefit from these in several ways. Firstly, by replying to comments with supportive statements and emojis, SVA’s community reaffirmed each other’s common fears, civic position, and status as a group. In addition, community members showed support by liking each other’s comments, thus making use of functional affordances of Facebook such as scalability. As ‘popular’ comments with many reactions or replies appear more prominently on Facebook, a first glance at SVA’s page from the beginning of 2018 (when the general public joined in on the IC debate) gave the convincing impression of a consensus that IC was a malicious document redefining the laws around gender identification and having nothing to do with protecting women from violence. This image could make a powerful impact on early newcomers, convincing them of these claims’
44 legitimacy. Later on, BFW’s community started using the same techniques to show support for each other as well, but first after a debate between both groups had begun.
Facebook’s affordances also played a major role for establishing a personal connection with new commenters, especially when it came to responding to questions from newcomers to the debate. As an example, a frequently asked question on BFW’s page was how IC would change existing laws against domestic violence. The replies varied from links to the Constitution, through explanatory texts about IC, to statements in Bulgarian and foreign media. While these do make use of voices of expertise for legitimization, the factual, impersonal language and inconsistent references took information seekers in different directions and sometimes to sources in different languages. Few people answered with their own words, missing an opportunity to appeal to new commenters on a personal level the way SVA supporters did.
Identity and social affordances also contributed to polarizing people’s opinions of IC based on their religious beliefs. By siding against IC, religious interlocutors could underpin their online identity as Christians and strengthen their bond with the Christian community.
Another tool for debate participants to manifest their online identity was memes. As mentioned earlier, memes appeared in the IC debate in relation to the term ‘gender’ and were instrumental for the anti-IC side in establishing the term’s new meaning in Bulgarian society. Memes are a highly spreadable form of social media content, as sharing them allows users to identify with a particular position and receive the benefits of social capital in the form of reactions and comments without producing original content (Jenkins et al., 2013). In the context of my sample, memes were effective for both reproducibility and generating reactions.
Some comments in my sample also point to another interesting social media phenomenon. A combination of Facebook’s social affordances such as group belonging and network-informed associations can result in an ‘echo chamber’ effect,18 whereby users are exposed primarily to information consistent with their beliefs. This further
18 Echo chambers in this context are defined as online environments in which the opinion, political leaning, or belief of users about a topic gets reinforced due to repeated interactions with peers or sources having similar tendencies and attitudes (Cinelli et al., 2021). 45 legitimizes their opinion by account of personal experience. Indications of echo chambers were found on both pages:
(C23) I have never met anyone who supports the ratification of this Convention! The government is trying to impose on the Bulgarian people something that they don’t want.
(C24) No point engaging in a discussion with a few religious fanatics and Putinists. Everybody with common sense knows that IC will get ratified. C23 comes from SVA’s page, and C24 – from BFW’s. As is apparent from C23’s generalization and C24’s referential choice, members of both communities believed they had a majority in the debate.
Facebook’s role in polarizing the pro- vs. anti-EU discussion is particularly interesting. Michailidou (2015) claims that social media are instrumental in the amplification of EU contestation and discontent by perpetually reproducing anti-EU discourses. In her study of online Euroscepticism, Michailidou (2015) finds that Eurosceptic posts provoke more intense online discussions, in which the critical tone towards the EU is amplified. This progressively homogenizes the debate, so that pro-EU comments rarely appear under anti- EU posts. The data from my sample was found to support Michailidou’s findings. The effects of this are yet to be examined, but it is worth noting that the group for which a rise in Eurosceptic position has been observed in recent years, people born after 1989 (Nachev, 2019), is also the age group constituting the largest portion of Internet users in the country (Kemp, 2021).
Lastly, through using the same pages to target the same communities with particular types of discourses, Facebook’s architectural specificities allowed for mobilizing IC activists to take part in other debates (such as the one around the National Child Strategy 2020-2030). Having previously engaged with a page’s content increases the likelihood of seeing its subsequent posts, especially if the posts contain keywords that the user has reacted to before. In addition, continued subscription to these pages indicates a user’s willingness to continue supporting causes driven by the same organizations.
7. Conclusion This thesis has explored through critical discourse analysis how discursive strategies of de/legitimization were utilized in the context of an anti-gender movement, in the case of the public debate on two ideologically opposing Facebook pages around the Istanbul
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Convention in Bulgaria. Using Facebook comments as an object of analysis, the study has further analyzed the Facebook platform as a form of discursive practice, focusing on the role of Facebook’s architectures and affordances in polarizing the discussion. The analysis reveals how a mix of actor- and action-oriented de/legitimization strategies such as appeal to fear, presenting a hypothetical future, and voices of expertise were used to construct pro- and anti-IC activist groups on the basis of ideologies like religion, protection of national independence, and (lack of) support for LGBTQ+ rights. Past the IC debate, the analysis further demonstrates the instrumentality of de/legitimization strategies for permanently linking IC and the concept of ‘gender’ – a discursive link leading to IC becoming an ‘empty signifier’ for an ideological group belonging whereby proponents are automatically pro-European and anti-religious, and opposers – Christian and Eurosceptic.
The findings shed light on how the IC debate’s development as an anti-gender campaign to a large extent mirrors international anti-gender discourses and mobilization strategies, strengthening Kuhar and Paternotte’s (2017) claim that these movements have a transnational character. While mindful of local specificities such as the Ottoman rule and the post-socialist Bulgarian reality, anti-IC activists used similar discourses to anti- gender campaigns in other CEE countries, using the term ‘gender’ as ‘symbolic glue’ to appeal to notions of nature, nation, and normality. These included employing the anticolonial frame to incite resistance against ‘gender’, framing LGBTQ+ people as a ‘dangerous Other’, and referring to the same international sources to position ‘gender’ as a threat to traditional family values. While these findings are not particularly ‘surprising’, the value of this analysis lies in making discursive strategies of de/legitimization ‘visible’ and demonstrating how they were instrumentalized in the context of this debate. Revealing which particular strategies were prevalent in relation to different sub-topics in the debate and putting in focus the arguments that were successful for both sides ensures these discourses’ ‘denaturalization’ and enables their reading with a critical eye. Furthermore, an interesting, and somewhat surprising to me, implication of this study concerns the indication of how far-right and Eurosceptic politics benefit from the nationalist sentiments that anti-gender campaigns perpetuate.
In regard to the sub-question of how the architectures and affordances of Facebook contributed to the polarization of the IC discussion, three types of affordances – identity, social, and functional – were found to affect the conversation. These were at play
47 simultaneously and influenced each other throughout the course of the debate. From the outset, directing people into pro- and anti-IC ideological camps was supported by Facebook’s affordances for constructing an online identity and establishing a sense of belonging to a social group by engaging with like-minded commenters and emphasizing differences from perceived out-group members. The anti-IC side further benefitted from the functional affordance of scalability by gaining traction early, which lead to better visibility for their content and helped them attract supporters. Memes and jokes, due to their reproducible character, played an important role in redefining ‘gender’ as an offensive reference to the LGBTQ+ community in Bulgarian society. Curious was also the indication that discussion participants experienced an ‘echo chamber’ effect, which might have further perpetuated the debate’s polarization. Further research could focus more on the relationship between experienced (levels of) ‘echo chamber’ effect and polarization of opinions and whether causality in either direction could be found. Another interesting implication of this study in need for deeper academic exploration is that Facebook affordances might be favorable for cultivation of Eurosceptic discourses. This also inspires inquiry into the relationship between social media, anti-gender movements, and Euroscepticism.
The fact that past the IC debate, Facebook’s architectural specificities were instrumental in reassembling pro- and anti-IC activists to engage in another debate, indicates their potential for polarizing the online space. Recent findings by Kirkova et al. (2020), demonstrating how a Facebook group whose original purpose was anti-IC activism in Bulgaria is currently being used to spread conspiracy theories around Covid- 19, carry broader implications for anti-gender movements’ long-term consequences, further reinforcing the importance of this research area.
Future studies of the IC debate on Facebook could also explore whether the available demographic statistics for Facebook users are representative of the participants in the debate. A qualitative content analysis could be fruitful for revealing the demographic specificities of participation, and for giving an indication of whether socio-economic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, education level, income, living area, etc. influence either participation or position in the debate. Yet another interesting question for future research is what motivates individual participants to get involved in online activism for or against anti-gender causes. Studying anti-gender activists through ethnographic methods such as interviews would also be an interesting research path to undertake, as it
48 is one that is understudied, and as the motivations for engagement with the topic can be understood on a deeper level through the personal account of the participants themselves.
49
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