Chemsex is a phenomenon in which typically gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and/or related communities of men (GBTQ+ men) take psychoactive drugs while having sex, often without a condom. The practice can lead to increased rates of HIV transmission, sexual assault, and in extreme cases murder. GBTQ+ men are already a stigmatised group so those who engage in chemsex face multiple stigmas. This study examines the ways that two types of media report on chemsex while negotiating these stigmas. We take a large data set of newspaper articles written for the general British public and a smaller data set of magazines aimed at GBTQ+ men to examine how chemsex is represented in the media. We find that the mainstream press focus on extreme criminal cases involving chemsex, while the media aimed at GBTQ + men focus on counselling services and discuss chemsex in relation to gay culture. Chemsex is unlikely to go away, and so we address how information about it is conveyed in different media and call for more research in this area.
Incels, or involuntary celibates, are a community of typically heterosexual young men who wish to, but do not, have sexual and romantic relationships with women. As a community, they have previously been characterised by their hatred for women and violent acts against members of society who they believe prevent them from having relations with women. In this paper, we highlight the pervasiveness of metaphor in incel communication, so far unaddressed in the budding studies of incel language. Specifically, using a sample of circa 22,500 words from the banned incel Reddit forum r/Braincels, we focus on how members of this community use metaphoric expressions to dehumanise gendered social actors, both as individuals and as groups. We discuss our findings against the backdrop of metaphor approaches to language, gender, and sexuality, and the relevance of dehumanising metaphorical rhetoric for online misogynist groups.
Gender in World Englishes presents a new and exciting collection of case studies that utilize corpus linguistic methods to examine different linguistic features in a range of "Outer Circle" Englishes, thereby giving prominence to varieties often overlooked in comparison to British, American, Australian, and Canadian English. Each chapter in the book, edited by Tobias Bernaisch, draws on the International Corpus of English (ICE), looking at the frequencies, dispersions, and usages of a range of grammatical features in these different varieties by speakers' sex (despite the title of the volume, the authors conflate sex and gender, a problem I discuss later in this review).Chapter 1 (Bernaisch) provides a succinct overview of the current literature on language and gender and draws attention to the fact that the edited collection deals with under-researched varieties of English. Chapter 2 (Beke Hansen) analyzes the quotative system in Ghanaian English, focusing on whether women are more likely to use the quotative "be like." Hansen considers findings from previous studies and incorporates an element of diachronic analysis. She finds evidence of increasing usage of quotatives such as "say" and "be like" in Ghanaian English over time-arguing that such features, which are stereotypically associated with young female American-English speakersmight be the by-product of globalization. Chapter 3 (Robert Fuchs) examines the use of intensifiers in Indian English-taking into account the interaction between speaker's gender, the formality of the situation, the age of the speakers, and whether the speaker is in a same-sex group. This analysis is laudable: it resembles an "intersectional" approach, which, importantly, considers how multiple identities (which are treated as variables) might interact to influence language use. Fuchs finds several interesting trends within the data, such as how, in informal registers, women use more intensifiers than men, but in formal contexts, men are more likely to use more intensifiers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.