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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 12:2 (2023) ► pp.227–257

A corpus-based discourse analysis of transgender labels in the Spanish-speaking press

ORCID logo | University of North Carolina at Charlotte , USA
| University of North Carolina at Charlotte , USA

Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing coverage of transgender people in Latin American and Spanish media. However, there are very few research studies that thoroughly examine the increasing use of terms such as transgender “transgénero” and trans in Spanish-speaking press. This contribution studies the linguistic representation of transgender people in Spanish-speaking quality press produced in Colombia and Spain. Within the framework of Queer Linguistics and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, this article explores the linguistic choices employed by the Spanish-speaking press to name transgender people and examines the main differences in the linguistic choices made by newspapers in the two countries. Unlike in English, the findings suggest that trans and transexual are the most commonly used labels in Spanish. Although the semantic categories of representation are seen to differ between the two countries, the linguistic choices observed seem to be closely linked to sociopolitical and ideological preferences.

Keywords: transgender identity, transgender labels, Spanish-speaking press, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, queer linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Queer Linguistics: Cis-heteronormativity in the press
    • 2.2Trans representation: Bodies that matter on the media
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus description and compilation
    • 3.2Procedure and design
  • 4.Results: Frequencies, concordances and collocations
    • 4.1Frequencies and concordances in identity labels in Colombian and Spanish press
    • 4.2Collocations in transgender labels
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.21023.gar
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