Discourses of marriage in same-sex marriage debates in the UK press 2011–2014

Paterson, LL and Coffey-Glover, L ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4432-8177, 2018. Discourses of marriage in same-sex marriage debates in the UK press 2011–2014. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 7 (2), pp. 175-204. ISSN 2211-3770

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Abstract

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 Baker (2004), Love and Baker (2015), and Bachmann (2011), 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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Language and Sexuality
Creators:	Paterson, L.L. and Coffey-Glover, L.
Publisher:	John Benjamins
Date:	September 2018
Volume:	7
Number:	2
ISSN:	2211-3770
Identifiers:	Number Type 676613 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	31 Jul 2018 07:59
Last Modified:	27 Oct 2020 10:37
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/34198

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