HEGEMONY AND FEMALE SUBJECTIFICATION IN THE COPYWRITING OF LOVE AND DEEPSPACE: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Abstract
This study analyses how language operates as an ideological instrument in digital promotional discourse with specifically how lexical choices and transitivity structures in the Instagram captions of the mobile game Love and Deepspace construct hegemony and female subjectification. Amid a post-pandemic condition of liquid love and digital loneliness, women are conventionally positioned in language as objects of romantic discourse. The captions of Love and Deepspace, however, reveal a discursive paradox: through careful linguistic choices, they construct women as agents who appear to hold power over the virtual male characters — inviting, directing, and controlling them. The study employs Fairclough's (2003; 2010) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis integrated with Halliday's (1994) system of transitivity, analysing 54 data items: 32 caption clauses as primary data (18 for diction, 14 for transitivity) and 22 audience comments as secondary data. At the micro level, four diction categories: emotional accessibility; unconditional commitment; experiential realism; and destiny that construct the virtual male as both unconditionally devoted and fully controllable, while transitivity analysis reveals shifting grammatical roles: the same character appears as Actor in some captions and Goal in others, exposing him as a flexible linguistic construction with no autonomous agency. At the meso level, soft-selling and intertextual strategies make promotional discourse feel personal, while audience comments show five patterns of active linguistic reproduction. At the macro level, the discourse rests on the loneliness epidemic, gacha monetisation, and liquid love ideology. These three dimensions produce what Gramsci (1971) termed hegemonic consent that defined as subjectification that feels like empowerment. The language most effective at reproducing power is the language that does not feel like power.