Cover not available
Part of
Discourse Studies in Public Communication
Edited by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 92] 2021
► pp. 219–242

Chapter 10
Let’s talk about sex in high school

The TV series Sex Education

ORCID logo | Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha , Spain

Although sex has always been a controversial topic, in the last years the taboo surrounding sex and sexuality has progressively relaxed, which has led to the appearance of TV series in which sex plays a fundamental role. A good case in point is Sex Education, a comedy-drama series about teenagers’ sexual issues in the setting of sex-therapy sessions. This chapter’s main aim is to analyse how high school students talk about and conceptualise sexual topics in eight episodes of the series, considered here an instance of telecinematic discourse. The results reveal that the X-phemistic (i.e., euphemistic and dysphemistic) units teenagers use to talk about sex provide good evidence of their beliefs and value judgements related to sexuality.

Keywords: euphemism, dysphemism, metaphor, sexual taboo, sex education
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Abortion
    • 4.2Arousal
    • 4.3Parts of the body and effluvia
    • 4.4People
    • 4.5Sexual acts
    • 4.6Sexual disorders
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.92.10rui
References
Allan, Keith, and Kate Burridge
2006 Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2010 The Language of Fictional Television. Drama and Identity. London and New York: Continuum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Binns, Elizabeth, Alison Carpenter, and Lawrence Till Producers and Alison Newman, and Moira Buffini
(Creators) 2017 Harlots [Series]. Hulu.Google Scholar
Casas Gómez, Miguel
1986 La interdicción lingüística. Mecanismos del eufemismo y disfemismo [Linguistic interdiction. Mechanisms of euphemism and dysphemism]. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Analysing Political Speeches. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer
2005 “Euphemistic Strategies in Politeness and Face Concerns.” Pragmalingüística 13: 77–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Conceptual Metaphors in Taboo-Induced Lexical Variation.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 24: 53–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Sex in Language. Euphemistic and Dysphemistic Metaphors in Internet Forums. London and New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
2018a “Euphemism as a Discursive Strategy in US Local and State Politics.” Journal of Language and Politics 17 (6): 789–811. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018b “Taboo in Discourse: An Overview.” In Taboo in Discourse. Studies on Attenuation and Offence in Communication, ed. by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández, 9–23. Bern: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer, and Carmen Luján-García
2018 Anglicismos sexuales en español. El inglés como recurso eufemístico y disfemístico en la comunicación virtual [Sexual anglicisms in Spanish. English as a euphemistic and dysphemistic resource in online communication]. Granada: Comares. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donen, Joshua, David Fincher, Jennifer Miller, and Tim Miller Producers and Tim Miller
(Creator) 2019 Love Death + Robots [Series]. Netflix.Google Scholar
Ethier, Kathleen A., Patricia J. Dittus, Christine J. DeRosa, Emily Q. Chung, Esteban Martinez, and Peter R. Kerndt
2011 “School-Based Health Center Access, Reproductive Health Care, and Contraceptive Use among Sexually Experienced High School Students.” Journal of Adolescent Health 48 (6): 562–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández Smith, Gérard, and Miguel Casas Gómez
2018 “From Lexicon to Discourse in the Linguistic Expression of Taboo: Configuring New Social Realities.” In Taboo in Discourse. Studies on Attenuation and Offence in Communication, ed. by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández, 25–52. Bern: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Furevold-Boland, Marianne Producer and Julie Andem
(Creator) 2015 Skam [Series]. NRK. Norsk Rikskringkasting.Google Scholar
Gottfried, Jeffrey A., Sarah E. Vaala, Amy Bleakley, Michael Hennessy, and Amy Jordan
2011 “Does the Effect of Exposure to TV Sex on Adolescent Sexual Behavior Vary by Genre?” Communication Research 40 (1): 73–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herrero Ruiz, Javier
2009 Understanding Tropes: At the Crossroads between Pragmatics and Cognition. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Irvine, Janice M.
2002 Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jennings, Jon Producer and Nunn, Laurie
(Creator) 2019 Sex Education [Series]. Netflix.Google Scholar
Kendall, Nancy
2013 The Sex Education Debates. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kiełtyka, Robert
2000 “The Theory of the Great Chain of Being (GCB) Revisited: The Case of GCB-Level-Conditioned Animal Terms.” In The Scots Dialect Dictionary (SDD), comp. by Alexander Warrack, 313–330. New Lanark: Waverly Books.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltán
2003 Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George
1993 (1979) “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed), ed. by Andrew Ortony, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner
1989 More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
López Cirugeda, Isabel
2018 “ Please Like Me: Coming Out of the Closet at the Millenial Generation.” In Taboo in Discourse. Studies on Attenuation and Offence in Communication, ed. by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández, 209–231. Bern: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortiz, María J.
2014 “Visual Manifestation of Primary Metaphors through Mise-en-scène Techniques.” Image [&] Narrative 15 (1): 5–16.Google Scholar
Palen, Lori-Ann, Edward A. Smith, Linda L. Caldwell, Lisa Wegner, and Tania Vergnani
2008 “Inconsistent Reports of Sexual Intercourse among South African High School Students.” Journal of Adolescent Health 42 (3): 221–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piazza, Roberta, Monika Bernadek, and Fabio Rossi
2011 Telecinematic Discourse. Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pragglejaz Group
2007 “MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse”. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramos, Francisco Producer and Carlos Montero, and Darío Madrona
(Creator) 2018 Élite [Elite] [Series]. Netflix.Google Scholar
Regan, Pamela C., and Anupama Joshi
2003 “Ideal Partner Preferences among Adolescents.” Social Behavior and Personality 31 (1): 13–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Romani, Tyler Producer and Sam Levinson
(Creator) 2019 Euphoria [Series]. HBO.Google Scholar
Sandrelli, Annalisa
2016 “The Dubbing of Gay-themed TV Series in Italy: Corpus-based Evidence of Manipulation and Censorship.” Altre Modernità. Rivista di Studi Letterari e Culturali 2: 124–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steen, Gerard
2011 “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor – Now New and Improved!” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1): 26–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thanavanh, Bounbouly, Md. Harun-Or-Rashid, Hideki Kasuya, and Junichi Sakamoto
2013 “Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices regarding HIV/AIDS among Male High School Students in Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” Journal of the International AIDS Society 16: 1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Unger, Johann W.
2016 “The Interdisciplinarity of Critical Discourse Studies Research.” Palgrave Communications 2: 15037. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A.
1998 Ideology. A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond
1977 Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A.
1998 “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies. Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 3–47. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar