@inproceedings{muti-etal-2025-blue,
    title = "Blue-haired, misandriche, rabiata: Tracing the Connotation of `Feminist(s)' Across Time, Languages and Domains",
    author = "Muti, Arianna  and
      Gemelli, Sara  and
      Moscato, Emanuele  and
      Francis, Emilie  and
      Cercas Curry, Amanda  and
      Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam  and
      Nozza, Debora",
    editor = "Calabrese, Agostina  and
      de Kock, Christine  and
      Nozza, Debora  and
      Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam  and
      Talat, Zeerak  and
      Vargas, Francielle",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.woah-1.27/",
    pages = "299--311",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-105-6",
    abstract = "Understanding how words shift in meaning is crucial for analyzing societal attitudes.In this study, we investigate the contextual variations of the terms feminist, feminists along three axes: time, language, and domain.To this aim, we collect and release FEMME, a dataset comprising the occurrences of such terms from 2014 to 2023 in English, Italian and Swedish in Twitter, Reddit and Incel domains.Our methodology leverages frame analysis, as well as fine-tuning and LLMs. We find that the connotation of the plural form feminists is consistently more negative than feminist, indicating more hostility towards feminists as a collective, which often triggers greater societal pushback, reflecting broader patterns of group-based hostility and stigma. Across languages, we observe similar stereotypes towards feminists that often include body shaming, as well as accusations of hypocrisy and irrational behavior. In terms of time, we identify events that trigger a peak in terms of negative or positive connotation.As expected, the Incel spheres show predominantly negative connotations, while the general domains show mixed connotations."
}