“Girl-on-girl culture”

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of sex advice for queer women as it features on the world’s most popular lesbian website, Autostraddle. Based in the United States, the website is a “progressively feminist” online community for lesbian, bisexual and other queer women. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this article explores how representations of sexual and gender identity facilitate the construction of homonormativity on the website. It argues that these representations involve a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, Autostraddle wants to construct an exclusive markedly lesbian subjectivity and a subcultural model of lesbian sex, which is lacking in mainstream culture. On the other hand, it aims to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women, and to deconstruct the idea of sexual homogeneity. Findings show that Autostraddle discursively negotiates these competing goals to construct a distinctly “queer female” normativity centred on young cisgender feminine lesbians.

Lesbians in Modern Day Britain: A Corpus-Based Study of The Discourses Surrounding Lesbians in the Spoken BNC2014 and the British Press

“…While there are plenty of corpus-based studies which analyse the representation of gender in the mass media, corpus analyses which examine the representation of sexuality within this context are comparatively rarer (though, see Bachmann, 2011;Baker, 2005;Motschenbacher, 2018;Bailey, 2019;Wilkinson, 2019; see also Zottola, 2018 for an overview of corpus research into transgender identities). In this section, the current research paper is situated within the broader field of discourses used by and about GSRM individuals.…”

“…There has been a considerable amount of research into lesbian discourse from a linguistic perspective (for example see Koller, 2011;Morrish and Sauntson, 2011;Jones, 2012;Bailey, 2019). However, the nature of "lesbian discourse" is multifaceted and needs to be compartmentalised in order to be more fully appreciated.…”

“…However, the nature of "lesbian discourse" is multifaceted and needs to be compartmentalised in order to be more fully appreciated. Research into "lesbian discourse" encompasses work on multiple topics, including but not limited to: how lesbian groups construct identity (for example, Jones, 2012); how lesbians challenge heteronormative assumptions by making their sexual identity apparent (for example, Land and Kitzinger, 2005), how lesbian characters are written about, especially within erotic literature (Baker, 2005;Morrish and Sauntson, 2011); and how lesbians construct their identity in texts aimed at other lesbians (see Koller, 2011Koller, , 2013Bailey, 2019). A commonality among all this research into "lesbian discourse" is a focus on lesbians as the creators of the analysed texts.…”

“…In particular, there are three closely related studies to the present research. These are Koller's (2011; investigations of magazines specifically written by and aimed at lesbians and Bailey's (2019) research into how lesbians construct homonormative ideals on websites. In Koller's research, specific texts were taken and analysed in depth from a socio-cognitive perspective, as opposed to using a corpus approach.…”

“…Koller argues that the writers of the texts use language to create a collective group identity. Bailey (2019) used both multimodal and corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis in order to explore how lesbian, bisexual, and other queer female writers constructed in-group identities. The research revealed that the language used by these writers typically constructed normativity around young, cisgender, lesbian women.…”