Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016

The last two decades have witnessed very important economic and legislative changes in the Republic of Ireland, which have contributed to both the reinforcement of national beliefs, and the restructuring of traditional values as well as social practices. In this context, the tendency for some extremist groups to attack minorities such as Asians or Eastern Europeans, along with the allegedly institutionalised exclusion of Travellers, contrasts very much with a slowly but increasingly overall positive perception of an already marginalised group such as the LGBT community. Bearing the latter in mind, in this paper we aim to reveal how otherness is represented in the Irish print media, and the extent to which more or less discriminatory viewpoints are reinforced in the public domain. In particular, we concentrate on the discursive construction of gayness, and the potential homophobic imagery veiled and revealed in a corpus of newspaper articles from the last years of, and after, the so-called Celtic Tiger era. To do this, the detection of topoi will be combined with metaphor analysis.

Because gay male and lesbian couples have broken from the heteronormative binary of cross-sex relationships, it is necessary to examine the conversational practices used by gay men and lesbians to refer to members of same-sex couples. While gay and lesbian couples use typical reference terms for romantic partners, I contend that this use challenges heteronormative language assumptions because these conversationalists apply the terms lover, partner, and boyfriend/girlfriend to reference co-couple members of same-sex couples, not cross-sex couples. They recontextualize terms normatively associated with reference to cross-sex romantic partners. I used conversation analysis to examine the data, which includes transcriptions of video and audio recordings of gay male and lesbian couples interacting in home environments. The findings suggest that reference terms are recontextualized beyond their heteronormative boundaries.

This study analyzes a historical example of how participants in military policy formation within the US Senate harnessed lexicogrammatical resources to legitimate queer exclusion from military service. Intended as a conceptual rather than definitive study, I analyze text taken from a US Senate hearing related to the implementation of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (repealed in 2011). The investigation focuses on how transitivity and phoricity are drawn on to produce homophobic formations. My findings indicate that the text exhibits a process of lexicogrammatical selection that enables homophobic formation to unfold at the discourse-semantic level. I then explore how lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic choice-making flows from the social practice of which the text is part, which in turn reflects the ideological structures that configure the practice. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of my preliminary findings’ implications in terms of analyzing homophobic formation.

Online video pornography websites have grown into a key online industry and location for pornography consumption. While much work has been done investigating reception of online video generally, discourse analysis of comments and interaction around online pornography remains rare. This article focuses on comments on adult videos, comparing and contrasting the comments on adult videos with other online video sites. The goal is to identify and explain differences and similarities in the content of comments and interaction. The article therefore analyses 22,562 comments taken from the 100 most-viewed videos on the popular porn-hosting website, Pornhub. In contrast to studies of non-pornographic online video pages, analysis shows little interaction among users in comments sections and that offense is largely absent. Building on this analysis, I then discuss why offense does not arise in the comments. Findings suggest that the location of the comments at the point of pornography consumption affects the comment content, resulting in a discourse of solitary pleasure and fantasy rather than community engagement.

In this essay, I analyze the speech acts of Farid, a thirty-six year old self-identified same-sex desiring man from my fieldwork, who recounts his trajectory from growing up in Algiers and his eventual migration as an adult to Angers and then Paris. I illustrate how his queer Maghrebi French story in the diaspora does not resonate significantly with the “coming out” (Provencher 2007) or “arrival” narratives (Schehr 2009) of other queer French speakers in the city. Moreover, his speech acts do not heavily echo the “flexible language” (Leap 2003) or the language of queer diasporic speakers analyzed in other contexts (Decena 2011, Manalansan 2003). Furthermore, unlike other queer Maghrebi French interlocutors — who exploit their artistic crafts such as photography, filmmaking, and creative writing to pioneer new scripts or “performative encounters” (Rosello 2005) between France and the Maghreb — Farid struggles to tell a coherent story as he remains caught between the teleologies of the Maghrebi family in Algiers on the one hand and neoliberalism and its concomitant homonormativity in “gay” Paris on the other. The linguistic dimensions of Farid’s impossible “je” [I] are evident in his use of statements that highlight the collective with the subject pronouns “we” and “they” as well as topic sentences that underscore subjects like “my family,” “the country,” and “my religion.” At the same time, he draws on fragmented and unstable identities in a series of disconnected “je” statements, often with conditional clauses and modality shifts that highlight flux instead of the ego-centered, liberated, and individual subject who must learn to say “je” assuredly in the indicative tense in the late modern era. At times, he remains an “impossible subject” in an “impossible location” (Raissiguier 2010) unable to find financial and emotional stability almost three years after leaving Algiers and arriving in France where he fails to imagine a “queer future” for himself. Hence, this study illustrates how the celebration of chaos and subversion (for example, Halberstam’s (2011) “queer art of failure”) is not always readily available to subjects like Farid, who have not (yet) acquired the “flexible language” or the economic and cultural capital in an urban setting.