Article published in:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 8:2 (2019) ► pp. 195–220

“Girl-on-girl culture”

Constructing normative identities in a corpus of sex advice for queer women

| University of Nottingham, UK
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.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, multimodal critical discourse analysis, homonormativity, lesbian identity, sex advice
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Heteronormative (mis)understandings of sex between women
  • 2.Theoretical context: Queer linguistics and normativity
  • 3.Advice and Autostraddle
  • 4.Building and analysing the corpus
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1Sexual identity
    • 5.2Gender identity
    • 5.3Visual representation
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 20 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.18013.bai
References
Autostraddle
2018a About. https://​www​.autostraddle​.com​/about/ (August 10 2018)
2018b Advertise. https://​www​.autostraddle​.com​/advertise/ (August 10 2018)
Baker, Paul
2004 “Unnatural acts”: Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 88–106. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 Bad wigs and screaming Mimis: Using corpus-assisted techniques to carry out critical discourse analysis of the representation of trans people in the British press. In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, Piotr Cap & Christopher Hart (eds), 211–236. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
2018 Language, sexuality and corpus linguistics: Concerns and future directions. Journal of Language and Sexuality 7(2): 263–279. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barker, Meg-John, Gill, Rosalind & Harvey, Laura
2018 Mediating Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Billig, Michael
1995 Banal Nationalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Braun, Virginia & Kitzinger, Celia
2001 Telling it straight? Dictionary definitions of women’s genitals. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(2): 214–232. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brookes, Gavin, Harvey, Kevin & Mullany, Louise
2016 “Off to the best start”? A multimodal critique of breast and formula feeding health promotional discourse. Gender and Language 10(3): 340–363. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah & Kulick, Don
2003 Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
CBS News
2010 How Americans view gays and lesbians. https://​www​.cbsnews​.com​/htdocs​/pdf​/poll​_gays​_lesbians​_060910​.pdf (October 17 2018)
Chirrey, Deborah
2007 Women like us: Mediating and contesting identity in lesbian advice literature. In Language, Sexualities and Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Sakis Kyratzis & Helen Sauntson (eds), 223–244. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Duggan, Lisa
2003 The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon.Google Scholar
Gill, Rosalind
2007 Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Hall, Kira
2013 “It’s a hijra!”: Queer linguistics revisited. Discourse & Society 24(5): 634–642. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hegarty, Peter & Buechel, Carmen
2011 “What blokes want lesbians to be”: On FHM and the socialization of pro-lesbian attitudes among heterosexual-identified men. Feminism & Psychology 211: 240–247. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jagose, Annamarie
1996 Queer Theory: An Introduction. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Lucy
2012 Dyke/Girl: Language and Identities in a Lesbian Group. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 “Dolls or teddies?” Constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice. Journal of Language and Sexuality 3(2): 161–190. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kangasvuo, Jenny
2007 Insatiable sluts and almost gay guys: Bisexuality in porn magazines. In Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, Kaarina Nikunen, Susanna Paasonen & Laura Saarenmaa (eds), 139–150. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Baisa, Vít, Bušta, Jan, Jakubíček, Miloš, Kovář, Vojtěch, Michelfeit, Jan, Rychlý, Pavel & Suchomel, Vít
2014 The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography 11: 7–36. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koller, Veronika
2008 Lesbian Discourses: Images of a Community. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leap, William
2012 Queer linguistics, sexuality and discourse analysis. In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, James Gee & Michael Handford (eds), 558–571. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Livia, Anna
2002  Camionneuses s’abstenir: Lesbian community creation through the personals. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts & Andrew Wong (eds), 191–206. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Machin, David
2004 Building the world’s visual language: The increasing global importance of image banks in corporate media. Visual Communication 3(3): 316–336. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Machin, David & Mayr, Andrea
2012 How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Milani, Tommaso
2013 Expanding the Queer Linguistic scene: Multimodality, space and sexuality at a South African university. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2(2): 206–234. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milani, Tommaso & Kapa, Koki
2015 Ready-to-wear sexual politics: The semiotics of visibility on Wits Pride T-shirts. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus 461: 79–103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milani, Tommaso & Levon, Erez
2016 Sexing diversity: Linguistic landscapes of homonationalism. Language & Communication 511: 69–86. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morrish, Liz & Sauntson, Helen
2011 Discourse and identity in a corpus of lesbian erotica. Journal of Lesbian Studies 15(1): 122–139. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2018 Corpus linguistics in language and sexuality studies. Journal of Language and Sexuality 7(2): 145–174. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
forthcoming. Language and sexual normativity. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, Rusty Barrett & Kira Hall eds Oxford Oxford University Press
Motschenbacher, Heiko & Stegu, Martin
2013 Queer Linguistic approaches to discourse. Discourse & Society 24(5): 519–535. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paasonen, Susanna, Nikunen, Kaarina & Saarenmaa, Laura
2007 Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Pornhub
2018 2017 year in review. https://​www​.pornhub​.com​/insights​/2017​-year​-in​-review (June 3 2018)
Potts, Amanda
2015 “Love you guys (no homo)”: How gamers and fans play with sexuality, gender, and Minecraft on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies 12(2): 163–186. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Diane
1992 Constructing lesbian sexualities. In Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Gay and Lesbian Experience, Ken Plummer (ed), 187–199. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sender, Katherine
2003 Sex sells: Sex, class and taste in commercial gay and lesbian media. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9(3): 331–365. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sunderland, Jane & McGlashan, Mark
2012 The linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of two-Mum and two-Dad families in children’s picturebooks. Language and Literature 211: 189–210. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 Looking at picturebook covers multimodally: The case of two-Mum and two-Dad picturebooks. Visual Communication 12(4): 473–496. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Talbot, Mary
1995 A synthetic sisterhood: False friends in a teenage magazine. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, Mary Bucholtz & Kira Hall (eds), 143–165. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Turner, Georgina
2008 “The road to the lesbian nation is not an easy one”: “Us” and “them” in Diva magazine. Social Semiotics 18(3): 377–388. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 “A real lesbian wouldn’t touch a bisexual with a bargepole”: Contesting boundaries in the construction of collective identity. Critical Discourse Studies 12(2): 139–162. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zimman, Lal
2014 The discursive construction of sex: Remaking and reclaiming the gendered body in talk about genitals among trans men. In Queer Excursions: Retheorising Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Jenny Davis, Joshua Raclaw & Lal Zimman (eds), 13–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Jones, Lucy
2021. Queer linguistics and identity. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 13 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.