Dr Lexi Webster

• interdisciplinary transgender and queer studies
• media, politics, and society
• corpus linguistics, critical discourse studies, and (socio)cognitive linguistics 

My research has primarily focused on explaining the techno-politics of transphobia in global social media contexts and their politicisation offline. I have examined and explained various discursive manifestation of arguments used to legitimise transphobia and anti-trans hostility, including underemployment, sexualisation, antagonism with other social groups, sex essentialist and anti-science ideologies, and the conflation of terms in legislation. This work has largely culminated in my forthcoming monograph with Cambridge University Press, Tweeting While Trans, which traces the development of (anti-)transgender discourses on Twitter since the platform’s inception in 2006 through its re-branding as X under Elon Musk’s leadership in 2023. The book examines the changing interplay between social media discourses, platform regulation, and offline politics in an increasingly digital, datafied, and anti-gender world – a constellation of the most pressing issues of the contemporary moment. 

In addition to examining the techno-discursive realities of ideologies and identities relating to sex and gender in online contexts, my research has extended to other interdisciplinary engagements with qualitative and mixed methods for analysing communication and culture with regards health, media, and gender/sexuality studies. I have collaborated with colleagues in linguistics and psychology on novel methodological approaches for enabling qualitative analyses of large-scale data, including corpus-informed interpretative phenomenological analysis, corpus-assisted appraisal analysis, and analyses of metaphorical projections of selected memories. I have also applied corpus-informed socio-cognitive discourse studies methods to analyse media data from the past, including fan magazines surrounding horror and pop music, to explore their relationship to today’s digital media cultures. 

One final strand of research I am developing in collaboration with colleagues is the relationship between gender, sexuality, and lived experience under techno-capitalism. I am the Principal Investigator for the Queer Joy as a Digital Good project, a collaboration between eight researchers from seven institutions across the UK and Ireland. The project developed a benchmarking standard for policymakers and platforms on how to expressly facilitate queer joy in a mediascape of queerphobic content and international political regress. The collaboration has since extended, developing an international community of scholars invested in co-creating queer-first digital environments as instruments of community resilience amidst heightening anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment manifesting the world over. I am also collaborating with Southampton Digital Humanities colleagues on critical entanglements with 'queer data' and its potentialities for envisioning more just technological futures; the research responds to polycrisis at the conjuncture of technological development and socio-political regress, examining the very human vulnerabilities (re)produced by the cis-hetero-normativity underpinning socio-technical infrastructures.