Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2018

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.