Language use before and after Stonewall: A corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives

Abstract

This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.

‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry

“…A measure of keyness indicates which words appear with more frequency in the target corpus when compared to the reference corpus, revealing ‘the basic contour of the ideological field’ (Levon et al 2017:522). In other words, keyword analysis gives us a sense of the ‘aboutness’ of the corpus (also see Motschenbacher 2020; Bogetić 2021). Table 1 lists the top thirty content keywords for the Health and Detox subcorpora.…”

Kuidas suhtub Eesti LGBT kogukond sõnasse kväär?

“…Baker (2005) on uurinud seda, kuidas avalike tekstide vastu olulised homoseksuaalsust käsitlevad diskursused on omavahel kokku põrganud. Motschenbacher (2020) on uurinud USA geimeeste sõnavara enne ja pärast LGBT aktivismi murrangupunktiks kujunenud Stonewalli mässu.…”

We Are Humans: Discourse Representations of Identities in the Tweets of Nigerian LGBT People

“…Although the aspects of investigations and the way researchers regarded the nonheterosexual and marginalized sexual groups vary, it is an undeniable fact that there have been numerous studies on the language of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals in particular [8][9][10]. The breaking point of such a conventional sociolinguistic approach was when lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies emerged within many academic disciplines in the late 1960s [11].…”