Cover der Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik

This article discusses marginalisation in internet forums and blogging platforms using the example of asexuality blogs and discussion threads. While large corpora of both English and German, such as COCA and DeReKo, contain hardly any mention of asexuality and these few instances of asexuality and related expressions typically refer to plant biology, online communities do discuss aspects of life as an asexual person and their experiences of marginalization even within the LGBTQ community. Definitions of asexuality, including its delineation from other identities, and how asexual people articulate conflicts and other issues on these online platforms are discussed in detail. Particular attention is paid to how this particular group is constructed by others, how they construct themselves as not being part of the mainstream, and the role (self-)marginalisation plays in this context.


Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 2020(73). 213–238.

DOI: 10.1515/zfal-2020-2036

ISSN: 2190-0191

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space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff