This zine examines 15,042,470 public tweets containing the word “faggot” posted to Twitter between the years of 2006 and 2022 for the word’s usage in all of its facets — the pejorative, the casual, the consensual — across religion, politics, pop culture, and everyday conversation. Machine learning models have been employed to discover the hidden semantic structures within the texts — as well as to identify the sentiment behind each individual text — to arrive at a visual narrative of the reciprocal relationship between societal attitudes and semantic drift in the direction of reclamation within the microcosm of Twitter.

Author: Ronnie Pence
Publisher: Off Matter
Pages: 60pp
Size: 5.75 x 8.25
Notes: saddle-stitched, b/w & color
Release Date: April 2023