Broadcast: Events
From ‘homosexual offence’ to ‘LGBT community’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis
As far back as 1996, Stuart Hall (facetiously) asked: What, then, is the need for a further debate about identity? Who needs it?
Almost 30 years later I’ll argue that there is indeed still a need to debate identity – a need driven increasingly by a fractured political landscape that, in the UK alone, has facilitated the normalisation of far-right discourse, increasingly draconian immigration and asylum laws, and reactionary policies that have eroded gender affirmative healthcare and the safety of trans and queer people. Within this precarious new political landscape, debates around “identity politics” have become increasingly salient. While the far-right have been successful in resignifying “identity politics” as a threat to the nation, the left have grappled with the tension between redistributive justice and a politics of recognition that risks embracing neoliberal individualism. Emerging from this “identity crisis” (pun intended) is, therefore, a crucial question: Where do identities come from? How do they become normalised? And, perhaps, most importantly, in whose interest?
In this talk, I’ll present my research on the discursive construction of queer identities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in order to argue that identities are constructed within discourse, are historically contingent, and only come to appear as ‘common sense’ categories through the consistent use of certain representations over a sustained period of time. This position is based on a novel combination of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) with poststructuralist (post-Marxist) discourse theory (PDT) (Laclau and Mouffe 2014). With language data collected from The Times between 1957-2017, I’ll show how queer identities, like all identities, are never fixed and tend to change as different discursive formations become hegemonic. Through a combination of keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis, I’ll argue that three discursive trajectories emerged which shaped queer representation – namely, biopolitics, capitalism, and erasure. Through a dialectical relationship, queer representations not only shaped how queer identities were understood, but they also helped to foster consent for the British State as the queer subject was positioned with and against other groups within the population.
In addition to the specific findings from The Times, I’d also like to suggest that corpus-based CDA and CADS would benefit from a greater engagement with theory outside of linguistics. Critical theory, queer theory, and theory from across the academy remain unexplored within much of the current literature – a current state of affairs that I hope to disrupt through this research and others like it.
Co-sponsered by the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence