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Discourse Analysis of LGBT Identities - Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis

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In this article, I focus on misgendering through pronoun use through a case study of news reporting on Lucy Meadows. I collect two corpora of newspaper articles and use these to identify keywords – words that occur more frequently in the Lucy Meadows texts than might be expected from examining the collection of general news texts. I explore patterns of pronoun use in the media representation of Lucy Meadows, and argue that press misgendering can take more subtle forms than the reporter’s use of ‘inappropriate pronouns or placing the person’s identity in quotation marks to dismiss the veracity of the subject’s identity’ (Trans Media Watch, 2011: 11). This article offers a detailed examination of strategies accounting for the majority of male pronoun use: selective quotation of key interviewees, repetition and metacommentary.
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In this article we explore public discourse around one marginalized group in early-modern English society, men who engaged in sexual relations with other males. To do this we use a large corpus of seventeenth century texts, the Early English Books Online corpus. Our exploration leads us to consider a number of methodological issues, notably low frequency data and the classical framing of some words. We consider the historical context which brings this about, the impact of such data on our study and the importance of close reading in understanding words in discourse. In addition, we show that, even where frequency does not seem to be an issue, close reading, guided by corpus analysis, is vital in allowing the analyst to move past a superficial analysis of the data towards an understanding of the conventions attached to the use of words which appear to reference men who have sex with men in this period. Through such analyses, this paper sheds light on the typically negative meanings associated with this group in early modern England, and provides both challenge and refinement to existing lexicography, both modern and early modern, relating to the group in this period.
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In the linguistics literature, “discourse” is often defined in two, not mutually exclusive, ways, namely, structurally, for instance, “language above the sentence or above the clause” (Stubbs 1983: 1) and functionally, for example, “language that is doing some job in some context” (Halliday 1985: 10). We shall privilege the functional viewpoint here, though analyzing the structures of discourses is important for shedding light on the jobs being done. It has to be stressed that discourse is not a special form of language, but a perspective upon it, language described not only as a set of interacting units and systems, but also precisely that implied by Halliday, as an instrument put to work. The work which it does is the attempt by one participant or set of participants to influence the ideas, opinions, and behavior of other participants. Such work can be studied in a single text or in a number of tokens of similar texts to try to infer generalities of behaviors and responses (which may well then in turn serve as background to studying particular language events for particular, special meanings). Most forms of traditional non-corpus-assisted discourse analysis have practiced the close-reading (that is, “qualitative analysis”) of single texts or a small number of texts in the attempt to highlight both textual structures and also how meanings are conveyed. Some types, such as much work in critical discourse analysis (CDA), use few concepts from linguistics proper, tending to rely on the analyst's knowledge and experience (and prejudices) of similar texts, in a manner reminiscent of literary analysis (though with a politically driven purpose). Other traditional discourse analysis is more linguistically grounded. Thompson (1996a: 108-112), for instance, demonstrates the power of functional grammar, in particular transitivity analysis, in displaying how meanings, including what we might call non-obvious meanings, are communicated.
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This paper is aimed at contributing to the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality by investigating collocation patterns in a corpus of Serbian gay teenagers' online personal ads. Lexical collocations of words denoting masculinity and non-masculinity are found to index the dominant values among the ad writers, revealing strong associations of masculinity with positive characteristics, and effeminacy with a range of negative properties. It is argued that in such subtle but salient ways the ideological construct of hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated by these teenagers, while the cultural stigma associated with homosexuality is discursively shifted only to non-masculine gay men. A process here termed recursive marginalization is used to account for these patterns. The article also aims to make a methodological point by demonstrating that corpusbased collocation analysis offers a productive means for understanding ideology, as lexical co-occurrence may shed new light on complex webs of identities, discourses and social representations in a community.
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This paper examines the relationship between language, culture, and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in Hong Kong in the three years before the 1997 transition of sovereignty. Gay personal ads are seen as an "island of discourse," whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in turn reflects issues of marginal- ization in the larger social context. Using Fairclough's (1992, 1993) three-dimensional model for critical discourse analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure and issues of power/ideology in the society that produces the texts. On the level of text, it was found that structural components, particularly the degree of grammatical elaboration, differ according to the stated race or cultural background of the authors and their targets. On the level of discourse practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of "voices" from the larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation of particular classes of individuals. Finally, on the level of social practice, the ads were found to reflect and re-create both the racial stereotypes and heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture.
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This chapter addresses problems encountered during the construction and analysis of a synchronic corpus of computer-mediated discourse. The corpus was not primarily constructed for the examination of the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the online chatting medium; rather it is to be used for corpus-based sociolinguistic inquiry into the language use and identity construction of a particular social group (which in this case could be classed as 'vulnerable'). Therefore the corpus data needed considerable adaptation during compilation and analysis to prevent those idiosyncrasies from acting as noise in the data. Adaptations include responses to spam (in the form of 'adbots'), cyber-orthography, the ubiquity of names, overlapping conversations and challenges of annotation. Diffi culties with gaining participant permis-sions and demographic information also required signifi cant attention. Attempted solutions to these corpus construction and analysis challenges, which are closely bound to the fi elds of both cyber-research and corpus linguistics, are outlined.
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This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.
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CDS is a multifarious field constantly developing different methodological frameworks for analysing dynamically evolving aspects of language in a broad range of socio-political and institutional contexts. This volume is a cutting edge, interdisciplinary account of these theoretical and empirical developments. It presents an up-to-date survey of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), covering both the theoretical landscape and the analytical territories that it extends over. It is intended for critical scholars and students who wish to keep abreast of the current state of the art. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, the chapters are organised around different methodological perspectives for CDS (history, cognition, multimodality and corpora, among others). In the second part, the chapters are organised around particular discourse types and topics investigated in CDS, both traditionally (e.g. issues of racism and gender inequality) and only more recently (e.g. issues of health, public policy, and the environment).
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As an introduction to the special issue, this paper presents an overview of previous corpus linguistic work in the field of language and sexuality and discusses the compatibility of corpus linguistic methodology with queer linguistics as a central theoretical approach in language and sexuality studies. The discussion is structured around five prototypical aspects of corpus linguistics that may be deemed problematic from a poststructuralist, queer linguistic perspective: quantification and associated notions of objectivity, reliance on linguistic forms and formal presence, concentration on highly frequent features, reliance on categories, and highlighting of differences. It is argued that none of these aspects rules out an application of corpus linguistic techniques within queer theoretically informed linguistic work per se and that it is rather the way these techniques are employed that can be seen as more or less compatible with queer linguistics. To complement the theoretical discussion, a collocation analysis of sexual descriptive adjectives in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is conducted in an attempt to address some of the issues raised. The concluding section makes suggestions for future research.
Article
Recent decades have witnessed an increase in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) visibility in the British media. Increased representation has not been equally distributed, however, as bisexuality remains an obscured sexual identity in discourses of sexuality. Through the use of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to uncover how bisexual people have been represented in the British press between 1957 and 2017. By specifically focusing on the discursive construction of bisexuality in The Times, the results reveal how bisexual people are represented as existing primarily in discourses of the past or in fiction. The Times corpus also reveals significant variation in the lexical meaning of bisexual throughout the 60 years in question. These findings contribute to contemporary theories of bisexual erasure which posit that bisexual people are denied the same ontological status as monosexual identities, that is, homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Article
The paradigmatic transgender woman is often negatively oversexualised, pornographised and fetishised in mainstream conceptualisations and discourses. However, self-sexualisation by transgender individuals is often portrayed as a (sex-)positive social phenomenon. Little research has been conducted that analyses the self-sexualisation strategies of the multiple instantiations of gender-variant identity, including transmasculine and non-binary social actors. This paper uses a corpus-informed socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies to identify differences between the self-sexualisation strategies and underpinning cognitive models of different gender-variant user-groups on Twitter. 2,565 users are coded into five categories: (1) transfeminine; (2) transmasculine; (3) transsexual; (4) transvestite; (5) non-binary. Findings show that transvestite- and transsexual-identifying users most closely fit the pornographised and fetishised conceptualisation, whilst non-binary users are the least self-sexualising user-group.
Article
This paper interrogates media representations of same-sex marriage debates in the UK using a combination of corpus linguistics tools and close reading, and drawing on Queer Linguistics. Following related work by Bachmann (2011), Baker (2004), and Love and Baker (2015), we analyse a 1.3 million-word corpus of UK national newspaper texts compiled for the Discourses of Marriage Research Group. Our corpus stretches from September 2011 and the announcement of a government consultation on same-sex marriage, to April 2014 when the first same-sex marriages took place. Using a top-down approach we investigate the discourses drawn upon in same-sex marriage debates (as indexed by keywords and key semantic fields) and uncover the binary social categories used to normalise social structures and hold the same-sex marriage debate in place. We also consider which social actors are (not) given a voice and/or agency and discuss how (same-sex) marriage is constituted.
Article
In this paper I discuss the potential that corpus linguistics approaches have to make in terms of enabling research on language and sexuality. After giving some background relating to my involvement in the development of this approach and discussion of some of the benefits of using corpus linguistics, I then outline some potential areas for concern, including: misconceptions of the field as only quantitative, the danger of reading only concordance lines, over-reliance on the idea of removing bias, the tendency of corpus approaches to focus on difference or easily searchable features and issues with copyright and ethics. I then discuss potential future directions that the approach could take, focussing on work in non-western and non-English contexts, the development of new tools such as Lancsbox, and the integration of multimodal analyses, using examples from my own work and others.
Article
This contribution focuses on the linguistic representation of transgender people in the British press, through the analysis of a corpus of newspaper articles collected between 2013 and 2015. Within the framework of Queer Linguistics and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, this study analyses the linguistic choices retraceable in the corpus under investigation, conveying a given representation of transgender individuals as social subjects. The analysis focuses on naming strategies and the collective representation of transgender identities.
Chapter
The case of homosexual people claiming asylum from persecution poses a difficult question for governments since sexual orientation and gender identity are not explicitly mentioned as some of the grounds upon which an applicant can claim asylum.
Article
In this paper, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles that discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from CDA and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are represented and represent themselves as victims whose moral values, traditions, and civil liberties are being threatened by the state. Specifically, we argue that victimhood is invoked in a way that both enables and permits discourses of implicit homophobia
Article
Queer linguistics has only recently developed as an area of study; however academic interest in this field is rapidly increasing. Despite its growing appeal, many books on 'gay language' focus on private conversation and small communities. As such, Public Discourses of Gay Men represents an important corrective, by investigating a variety of sources in the public domain. A broad range of material, including tabloid newspaper articles, political debates on homosexual law and erotic narratives are used in order to analyse the language surrounding homosexuality. Bringing together queer linguistics and corpus linguistics the text investigate how gay male identities are constructed in the public domain.
Article
This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural ) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I ). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.
Article
This paper deals with the language used in the debates in both Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom that allowed civil partnerships to take place. My aim is to uncover discourses of same-sex relationships which are accessed in British Parliament. For this purpose, a corpus of these debates was compiled and its keywords were taken as a starting point for further analysis. As different keyword lists can be calculated by comparing different data sets, I argue that the best approach in this study is to take the corpus as a whole and to compare it to a reference corpus. I then grouped the keywords thematically and analysed them in context, scrutinising collocations and concordance lines in order to see how (recurrent) uses of language construct gay and lesbian relationships. Different, rather contradicting, discourses are drawn on by different parties in the debates. We can see that discourses are often used to frame a line of argumentation.
Article
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I develop the conceptual frame of homonationalism for understanding the complexities of how acceptance and tolerance for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated. I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation's status as gay-friendly has become desirable in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it.
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This study investigates meetmarket, a South African online community for men who are looking for other men. Utilising a quantitative approach to queer linguistics, the article presents a textual analysis of a large corpus of personal profiles in order to map meetmarket’s ‘libidinal economy’. More specifically, the article seeks to tease out the ways in which the members of this community valorise, and thereby make more desirable, certain identities at the expense of others. This then makes it possible to understand the extent to which these men (re)produce or, conversely, contest and overturn dominant forms of social categorisation in their expressions of same-sex desire.
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