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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
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