Xenophobia Attitude during Covid-19 Pandemic: A Disease Naming Stigma

Not only has the impact of 2020 global pandemic occasioned the spring of social and economic worries for the worldwide statehood, community response for this stress has also elevated an intercultural issue on the society consequently. The birthplace of this global epidemic has seized the issued stigmatization through the disease naming. This naming disease which is credited to a neutral meaning at the first place, now gainsays the harmful weight of its stigmatization. In response for avoiding stigmatization, in 2015, WHO underlines that naming disease should not refer to a convinced animal, place, people. Therefore, today pandemic has been presented as ‘Covid-19’. On the contrary, instead of following the endorsed plague name, “Chinese Virus” has been plied highly by the communities in a favor of Covid-19 stigmatization. The urgency of this study is to investigate the “Chinese virus” in alliance with the Covid-19 pandemic stigmatization. Several meme websites has been inspected as the sources for the collected data. The descriptive approach has been deployed in this research together with the three dimension framework by Fairclough, namely textual analysis, discursive practice, and socio-cultural practice. Pertaining to the theoretical stand on stigmatization we also reckon to enclose Otherness as an incidental issue in the investigation.After analyzing the data, this study found that: 1) The assumption of "Chinese Virus" is an ad rem naming on the basis of the responsibility for the global pandemic impacts by which China.3) China is attacked with stigmatization of food and product quality, and is creeping into other forms of stigmatization. Xenophobia also occurs based on U.S. political conflict with China where Trump as president of the U.S. voices this naming often