Reichelt: ›Hello, the world is on fire‹. Intersecting affective practices in digital menstruation discourse

Abstract: This paper reports on affective positioning in online discourse on sustainable menstruation practices. Social media, specifically the video-sharing platform YouTube, provides users a space to share their lives, knowledge, and opinions through dynamic multimodal interaction. Through strategic positioning, users can construct, maintain, and negotiate their own identity and belonging within digital communities of practice. This paper taps into the intersection of such positioning as it is expressed in video and comment sections framed within sustainability and climate emergency discourse. The data are based on vlogs explicitly themed around sustainable menstruation and menstruation products. Platform affordances enabling affective stancetaking are investigated and, using corpus-assisted micro analysis, applied to salient shared beliefs across German and English-speaking communities. Observations show that audiences, through sharing personal experiences, collaboratively negotiate their adherence to presupposed sustainable norms as set by the content creators. Further, findings show that sustainable norms intersect with other positionings, such as political activism, gendered interpretations of communities of practice, and visibility in public discourse. Sustainability discourse, it appears, allows for otherwise socially sanctioned positioning, such as the telling of intimate or taboo subjects, to be articulated as it establishes the community within shared values.