Xenophobia in Squid Game Series: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The study aims to find out about the types of xenophobia, and its realization as well as the justification of the sentences which appear in some scenes by the characters
of Netflix’s the Squid Game series. The analysis used descriptive qualitative as a method to meet the objectives of the study. The source of the data in this study is taken
from episode 1 to 6 of the Squid Game series aired in Netflix. Xenophobia which mostly happened to the immigrants found in the series due to the existence of the two
immigrant characters. To analyze the data, the theory of types of xenophobia proposed by Harris (2002) and Van Dijk (2009) text dimension analysis are used in this study to
find out that the most type of xenophobia found is the isolation hypothesis. Money, Job, Inferiority, Identity Attack, Feeling, Trust, Vulnerability, Frustration, and Defection are the 9 themes that emerged from the realization of xenophobia. The discourse reveals that there are macrostructure and microstructure. As for the icrostructure, the elements found are semantic, syntactic, stylistic and rhetoric to elaborate the local meaning of text. Social cognition as well as social context are also applied in finding out reasoning of xenophobia.