“Girl-on-girl culture”
Constructing normative identities in a corpus of sex advice for queer women
Aimee Bailey | 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.18013.bai
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Jones, Lucy
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