Lesbian discourses: images of a community
In: Routledge studies in linguistics 9
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In: Routledge studies in linguistics 9
In: Journal of language and sexuality, Band 4, Heft 2, S. 254-271
ISSN: 2211-3789
This paper addresses the question of what potential queer pornography has to subvert hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. In particular, it engages in the analysis of transitivity and metaphor in an example of queer written online pornography and links this textual analysis to a discussion of the role of text distribution and consumption in realising any subversive potential. The analysis shows that in terms of participant representation, the text reinforces rather than challenges hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality: Although the main protagonists are both ambiguously sexed, patterns of transitivity and use of metaphor construct largely binary gender identities for them, allocating sexual activity to the first-person narrator while casting the Other as passively desiring. In terms of its distribution and consumption, however, the text maintains its subversive potential as it sexualises a public online space and can turn offline public space into a sexual place.
In: Gender and language, Band 3, Heft 2, S. 249-274
ISSN: 1747-633X
This paper analyses an article (Gulston 1980) that constructs a particular lesbian identity position by combining elements of female masculinity/butchness with a camp stance usually attributed to gay men. Beyond the text itself, the analysis also addresses how the article, which was published in a British feminist magazine in 1980, sets this identity in opposition to prevailing discourses on lesbian identity at that historical moment. More generally, the paper is intended to contribute to a data-driven discussion that links claims about the relations between language, gender and sexuality back to concrete textual evidence. Drawing on the discourse-historical approach (Wodak 2002), the analysis includes parameters such as social actors, evaluation, metaphor, as well as intertextuality and interdiscursivity. It shows how the author draws on earlier discourses and practices by setting up 1950s-style butches and femmes as social actor groups, while ironically alluding to 1970s lesbian feminist who criticised lesbian genders as an emulation of oppressive heterosexuality. Irony is a predominant feature in the text, realised by metaphors that draw on biologist notions of gender (e.g. BUTCHES ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES), and by extreme hypotaxis mimicking archaic speech styles. Apart from irony, the text also shows other features of 'camp talk' (Harvey 2000) such as innuendo, Latinate terms, or hyperbole. The text constructs a hybrid butch/camp identity while ironically drawing on essentialist notions of gender and sexuality, and can therefore be regarded as an early instance of queer discourse. How the author parodies and exaggerates lesbian feminist notions of butch/femme as a bygone 1950s cliché shows her as being ahead of her time. An analysis of her text is thus highly relevant for present-day scholars of language, gender and sexuality.
In: Journal of language and politics, Band 7, Heft 2, S. 348-351
ISSN: 1569-9862
In: Journal of language and politics, Band 7, Heft 3, S. 431-450
ISSN: 1569-9862
This paper compares the vision documents for a British borough and a German city to see how the city-as-brand is encoded in different semiotic modes, to draw inferences about the cognitive structure of the brand, to ascertain in how far any global brand values are adapted to local contexts, and discuss what this tells us about the relationship between councils and citizens. As such, the study represents a cognitive critical approach to discourse in which texts are seen as vehicles for their producers' mental representations, disseminated to align recipients' representations with those of producers. This approach leads to the investigation of linguistic and visual parameters such as attribution, actors and processes, modality and tense, and layout and logo elements. Despite local adaptations, both municipal entities are conceptualized as brands with largely generic and interchangeable attributes. Global competition among cities leads to the appropriation of corporate discourses, such as branding, which redefine and ultimately depoliticize the relationships between council and citizens.
In: Journal of language and politics, Band 7, Heft 2, S. 348-351
ISSN: 1569-2159
In: Journal of language and sexuality, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 152-178
ISSN: 2211-3789
Abstract
We present a study of the online forum Reddit, specifically a sub-forum for (typically heterosexual) men who identify as
involuntary celibates or incels. Incels are an online imagined community/community of practice who wish
to, but do not, have sexual relations with women. Owing to this identity, they view themselves as non-normative within broader society and
see women and societal standards of masculinity as the cause of their problems. In this paper, we take a small corpus of 67,000 words
generated from 50 threads created, and commented on, by incels. We analyse keywords, word frequencies, and concordance lines to explore the
representation of gendered social actors. Keyword analysis reveals that references to gendered social actors are particularly salient within
this community, leading to an analysis of all such social actors in the corpus. The findings suggest that incels position different groups
of men in a hierarchy in which conventionally attractive men occupy the top position. Notably, we find that female social actors are not
placed in a similar hierarchy. An additional appraisal analysis of the most frequently occurring male and female social actors shows that
men are judged as incapacitated while women are seen as immoral, dishonest and capable of hurting men. Members of the online community also
seem preoccupied with physical attractiveness. The study opens up a number of avenues for future research, especially into the complexities
with which members of non-normative heterosexual groups simultaneously orient to and reject social norms.
2016 saw the referendum on Britain's continued membership of the EU, in which almost half of the voters went with one option, while just over a half cast their ballot for the other. In this paper, we will investigate what metaphors and scenarios were used in news reports and opinion pieces on the country's most popular national news websites the day after the vote. Using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz, 2007), we identified metaphors for the UK electorate and political establishment and analysed them qualitatively. Results show widespread use of spatial and ontological metaphors (e.g. 'the towns and estates left behind', 'deeply divided opinion'). While the spatial metaphor is used to represent the relationship between the electorate and the establishment, the ontological metaphor serves to construe divides within these groups. What is more, the spatial metaphor is perspectivised by image schemas (e.g. FRONT-BACK) whereas the ontological metaphor is specified by particular source domains (e.g. War/Violence:1 'voters were bombarded with hysterical threats'). Such specific source domains also motivate more dynamic metaphor scenarios (Musolff, 2006, Semino et al., 2016), i.e. mini-narratives featuring actors, actions and evaluations. Our analysis provides a data-driven model of the relations between metaphors, image schemas, source domains and scenarios. As such, it adds conceptual complexity to Musolff's (2006) notion of metaphor scenarios while simultaneously testing Kövecses' (2017) taxonomy of metaphor against discourse data. We thereby demonstrate how the analysis of discourse can benefit from cognitive semantics and how, vice versa, conceptual metaphor theory can be advanced through empirical studies.
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In: Cambridge elements
In: Elements in language, gender and sexuality
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of tables -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on contributors -- Chapter 1: Introduction: context, history and previous research -- Political and historical context: Brexit as a manifestation of right-wing populism -- Previous research: language, discourse and the UK-EU relationship -- The chapters in this volume -- Notes -- References -- PART I: Discursive drivers of the Brexit vote -- Chapter 2: Values as tools of legitimation in EU and UK Brexit discourses -- Introduction -- Legitimation and values in political discourse -- European (Union) values and the UK -- Data collection -- Analysis -- Discussion and conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 3: 'This is about the kind of Britain we are': national identities as constructed in parliamentary debates about EU membership -- Introduction -- Conceptual framework: the discourse-historical approach -- National identity -- Method and data treatment -- Analysis -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 4: Ambient affiliation and #Brexit: negotiating values about experts through censure and ridicule -- Introduction -- Background: 'had enough of experts' -- Dataset -- Method -- Analysis: affiliation through censure and ridicule -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 5: 'Britain is full to bursting point!': immigration themes in the Brexit discourse of the UK Independence Party -- Introduction -- The proto-referendum debate: from sovereignty to immigration -- Proximisation: theory and analysis -- Metaphorisation -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 6: 'The British people have spoken': voter motivations and identities in vox pops on the British EU referendum -- Introduction -- Right-wing populism and voter motivation -- Data and methods -- Findings
In: Accounting Forum, Band 36 No. 3, S. 178-193
SSRN
In: Handbooks of applied linguistics: communication competence, language and communication problems, practical solutions Vol. 4
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, health agencies, public institutions and the media around the world have made use of metaphors to talk about the virus, its effects and the measures needed to reduce its spread. Dominant among these metaphors have been war metaphors (e.g. battles, front lines, combat), which present the virus as an enemy that needs to be fought and beaten. These metaphors have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents, for a variety of reasons. In reaction, #ReframeCovid was born as an open, collaborative and non-prescriptive initiative to collect alternatives to war metaphors for COVID-19 in any language, and to (critically) reflect on the use of figurative language about the virus, its impact and the measures taken in response. The paper summarises the background, aims, development and main outcomes to date of the initiative, and launches a call for scholars within the metaphor community to feed into and use the #ReframeCovid collection in their own basic and applied research projects.
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This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have also been criticized for their potentially negative implications. The use of innovative methodology enables us to undertake a more rigorous and systematic investigation of Violence metaphors than has previously been possible. Our findings show that patients, carers and professionals use a much wider set of Violence-related metaphors than noted in previous studies, and that metaphor use varies between interview and online forum genres and amongst different stakeholder groups. Our study has implications for the computer-assisted study of metaphor, metaphor theory and analysis more generally, and communication in healthcare settings.
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