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Part of
The Expression of Inequality in Interaction: Power, dominance, and status
Edited by Hanna Pishwa and Rainer Schulze
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 248] 2014
► pp. 239–264

Language, normativity and power

The discursive construction of objectophilia

ORCID logo | Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

The present paper aims to shed light on how social actors orient to sexual normativity in their talk. It relates normativity to (Foucauldian) notions of discourse and power, arguing that local linguistic negotiations of sexuality are generally shaped by a competition between dominant and marginalized discourses. The empirical section focusses on how sexual normativity is linguistically constructed in conversations related to objectophilia, a form of sexual desire that is clearly non-normative. The data consists of telephone calls from the German radio phone-in show Domian. It is shown how speakers co-construct sexual normativity in general as well as more specific forms of it such as humano-normativity and heteronormativity. It can be seen that even the construction of non-normative desires is predominantly structured by normative sexuality discourses.

Published online: 12 June 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.248.10mot
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Coimbra-Gomes, Elvis & Heiko Motschenbacher
2019. Language, normativity, and sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD): A corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Language in Society 48:4 ► pp. 565 ff. DOI logo
Gatzia, Dimitria Electra & Sarah Arnaud
2022. Loving Objects: Can Autism Explain Objectophilia?. Archives of Sexual Behavior 51:4 ► pp. 2117 ff. DOI logo
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2018. Language and Sexual Normativity. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, DOI logo

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