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Article published In:
Asian Perspectives on Queer Discourse
Edited by Ke Zhang and Chao Lu
[Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 33:2] 2023
► pp. 137–158

Sexual anti-languages on social media

A Chinese case study

| University of Science and Technology Beijing
| University of Science and Technology Beijing
| Shandong University

The past decades have witnessed a growing preoccupation with gay languages across the world. However, little attention has been devoted to gay language in the Chinese context. To address the gap, this article examined the case of gay language used on a Chinese social media. Specifically speaking, we conducted a corpus-based analysis of sexual anti-languages (SA) on Blued, by following Halliday’s concept of anti-language defined as an extreme case of social dialects and the language of an anti-society. Using a total of 1,744 text-headlines collected from Blued users’ profiles, we identified and grouped Chinese SA into six categorizations. The findings reveal that Blued abounds with SA, each of which has undergone a unique formation process. In the end, we concluded by providing several directions for future research.

Keywords: China, gay language, Blued, sexual anti-languages, formation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
  • Method
    • Blued
    • Data collection
    • Analytical procedures
  • Findings
    • Sexual activity related anti-languages
    • Body part related anti-languages
    • Physical appearance related anti-languages
    • Sexual relation related anti-languages
    • Sex role related anti-languages
    • Personality trait related anti-languages
  • Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00101.lu
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

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2023. Discursive representations of sexual minorities in China’s English-language news media: a corpus-based study. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1 DOI logo

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