Public Discourses of Gay Men

Paul Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134271566
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Queer linguistics has only recently developed as an area of study; however academic interest in this field is rapidly increasing. Despite its growing appeal, many books on 'gay language' focus on private conversation and small communities. As such, Public Discourses of Gay Men represents an important corrective, by investigating a variety of sources in the public domain. A broad range of material, including tabloid newspaper articles, political debates on homosexual law and erotic narratives are used in order to analyse the language surrounding homosexuality. Bringing together queer linguistics and corpus linguistics the text investigate how gay male identities are constructed in the public domain.

1 What can I do with a naked corpus?

Introduction

The corridors in the linguistics department where I work tend to become crowded with students at certain periods – sometimes you have to navigate past groups gathered around noticeboards, particularly during exams. Recently, during one such busy period, I overheard a group of young women discussing an exam timetable which had just been posted on one of the noticeboards. ‘I can’t believe we have an exam at nine o’clock in the morning,’ one student complained. ‘That’s so gay!’

How can an exam time be gay? Obviously this was the relatively new negative use of the word gay, a word whose meaning seems to undergo a semantic makeover every few decades. Once gay meant carefree and happy. However, this changed in the 1970s when people who had previously been labelled as sexual deviants started using it to refer to themselves. But now for many young people, gay also means lame or unfashionable.

It is difficult to ascertain whether the new use of gay will enter mainstream language or whether it will burn brightly and die fast as a temporary teenage fad. If it gains wider usage, then people who currently call themselves gay may decide to redefine themselves. Perhaps a more compelling issue is why one of my students would use gay in such a potentially insensitive way in a public space. I’m sure she would have been shocked had she been accused of homophobia (indeed, at the same time I heard this utterance, the university was decorated with posters declaring somewhat paradoxically that ‘homophobia is gay’). However, at the same time, it could be argued that in appropriating one of the few words which positively represents a stigmatised minority group and recasting it as something negative, my student is not particularly helping to further the equal rights movement. Her utterance demonstrates a peculiar ambivalence towards a concept (homosexuality) which, for the past few decades, has been subject to multiple and conflicting representations. It is the intention of this book to examine and address such representations – to tease them apart from each other, and then show how ultimately each one is inter-related.

Homosexuality and discourse

Although sexual and romantic same-sex relationships between humans have existed for millennia, the ways that such relationships and the people who engage in them have been celebrated, normalised, accepted, ignored, problematised or persecuted has been subject to considerable variation over time and across different societies. For example, collections of poems written during the Zhou Dynasty (1122–256 BC) make it clear that court life incorporated open expressions of affection between men, and such relationships were often used as a means of social advancement or for political intrigue. In Ancient Greece, acceptance of male–male relationships as part of a ‘balanced bisexuality’ was viewed as normal (as long as one partner was an adult and the other was aged between twelve and fifteen), although effeminate adult males tended to incur social opprobrium. Attitudes to male–male sex in Hebrew cultures were based around the high value placed on male sexuality in marriage. For example, a man was forbidden to hold his penis even while urinating and the story of God’s punishment of the ‘sodomites’ in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the most notorious passages in the Bible (although some religious scholars argue that the story has been selectively interpreted and that male prostitutes, rapists or even poor hosts were the real targets of God’s wrath). By the thirteenth century, bisexuality in Europe had either been erased or redefined by the Church and state as sodomy or pederasty (Spencer 1995: 156).

In seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Britain, a distinction was made between fops who were viewed as effeminate but promiscuously heterosexual and rakes who took the penetrative role in sex with younger males. However, rakes were viewed as bisexual and were not considered to be effeminate (Trumbach 1991: 105). By 1710, however, a new identity, the Molly, had emerged – one who was effeminate and engaged in anal sex. Such men existed within a subculture based around what were known as Molly Houses; clubs and taverns where working-and middle-class men (sometimes dressed as women) would meet, for the purposes of socialisation and to make sexual contacts (Norton 1992). In eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Western Europe, women formed ‘romantic friendships’ which contained all the elements of ardent love affairs and were accepted by society, although any sexual aspect of these relationships was unacknowledged. Contemporary western understanding of homosexuality is tempered by a medical/legal model of sexual deviance which gained ground during the late nineteenth century. According to Katz (1983: 147–50) the word ‘homosexual’ was first used in 1869, preceding ‘heterosexual’ by several years. Of this, Foucault (1976: 43) writes: ‘We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterised.’¹

For Foucault this was an act of reification – the naming of homosexuality brought about its existence. Sedgwick (1991: 2) points out that with this naming, from that point on, every person could be assigned a homo-or hetero-sexuality as well as a gender. By the 1950s, oppression of homosexual men was de rigueur in the UK, resulting in violent attacks, blackmail, imprisonment, public scandals, suicides and medical treatments involving electric shocks, nausea-inducing drugs (David 1997: 181–4) and female hormones (Jivani 1997: 123). In 1967, homosexuality was partially decriminalised in the UK, which helped pave the way for the rise of a new conceptualisation of homosexuality based around the identity of gay, associated with concepts such as ‘coming out’ and ‘gay pride’. By the 1990s, partly in response to inadequate government responses to AIDS, the concept of queer offered a political, inclusive label, focused on uniting oppressed identities and challenging the concept of ‘normal’. So queer didn’t just mean gay but encompassed a range of minority or stigmatised sexual or gender identities – bisexual, transsexual or transvestite. It could also refer to identities based around specific sexual behaviours: people who used prostitutes or engaged in S/M or a range of other sexual activities deigned to be against the heterosexual, married, missionary-position ‘norm’. In addition, the notion of queer could be expanded even further beyond gender/sexuality in order to refer to and unite other non-sexual yet oppressed identities such as black, working-class, wheelchair-user or single parent.

Sexual identity has often been closely associated with a person’s gender (whether they behave in a masculine or feminine manner) or distinctions within particular sexual activities (to penetrate versus to be penetrated rather than anal sex per se). It is the intention of this book to examine the ways that sexual identity is currently perceived – and in particular to focus on how the sexual category of gay men is constructed via discourse in western society. The ‘problem’ of male homosexuality has dogged governments, churches, armies, opinion formers, medical and teaching establishments, newspaper editorial writers and ‘ordinary’ people since the sexual category was created in the 1860s and, judging by the frequency of mentions of homosexuality in the media, continues to do so.²

Debates concerning the rights and representations of gay people are therefore far from over and I believe that a crucial factor in the outcome of such debates is the way that public discourse regarding homosexuality is shaped. Legal rights are inextricably connected to discourse, or a ‘system of statements which constructs an object’ (Parker 1992: 5). Discourse is further categorised by Burr (1995: 48) as

a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events . . . Surrounding any one object, event, person etc., there may be a variety of different discourses, each with a different story to tell about the world, a different way of representing it to the world.

Discourses are not merely descriptions of people’s ‘beliefs’ or ‘opinions’ and they cannot be taken as representing an inner, essential aspect of identity such as personality or attitude. Instead they are connected to practices and structures that are lived out in society from day-to-day. Discourses are difficult to pin down – they are constantly changing, interacting with each other, breaking off and merging. As Sunderland (2004) points out, there is no ‘dictionary of discourses’. In addition, any act of naming or defining a discourse is going to be an interpretative one. Where I see a discourse, you may see a different discourse, or no discourse. It is difficult, if not impossible, to step outside discourse. Therefore our labelling of something as a discourse is going to be based upon the discourses that we already (often unconsciously) live with.

To give a couple of examples, Holloway’s (1981, 1984) ‘male sexual drive’ discourse constructs male sexuality as a biological drive – men are seen as having a basic need for sex which they cannot ignore and must be satisfied. Such a discourse could be used in law courts to ensure that male rapists receive lighter sentences. A discourse of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1980) would involve practices which involve overlooking the existence of gay and lesbian people by assuming that everyone is heterosexual. The extent to which individuals agree with the existence of a discourse or whether such a discourse reflects an accurate representation of the world depends on how such a discourse impacts on their own identities, experiences and ideological positions.

While discourse is often conceptualised as an intangible, unstable concept which is difficult to quantify, it is tied to the way that society is organised and I believe that legal change can be a direct consequence of the way that a particular subject is discursively constructed. One aim in writing this book is therefore political. As a gay man, I am interested in making sense of how current discourses surrounding the way that a group I identify with are constructed. I also wish to make such discourses more transparent by carrying out an analysis of how language is used to create, maintain and contest them. My own position is that homosexual and heterosexual people should enjoy equal social and legal status. And while discourses affect laws, I also believe that the relationship is two-way: changes in the law can help to shape the course of future discourses around a subject – if something which was previously criminalised is then recategorised as legal, it will eventually come to be conceptualised in a very different way. I therefore approach the subject of analysis from a subjective position, although I am unsure what an ‘objective’ position regarding the subject of homosexuality would be in any case, and even if one were to claim this standpoint, it could be argued that such a person had, in effect, made a subjective choice to be objective, which would in itself have consequences for the way that analysis was carried out. As Parker and Burnman (1993: 159) note, ‘we still do believe that a moral/political sensitivity to the way oppression is maintained in language is required of discourse analysis’, although at the same time, researchers need to ensure that they do not attribute evidence for the existence of a discourse (particularly a prevailing discourse) that is based upon over-sensitivity, reliance on a small number of cases or intuition alone. For that reason, I address the second aim in writing this book: to carry out a number of related corpus-based studies of discourse.

Corpus analysis involves using computers to discover linguistic patterns within large bodies of text, which may then be subjected to more interpretative analyses. For reasons that I outline below, corpus linguistics is not a methodology which researchers who have looked at the relationship between language and sexuality/gender have ordinarily utilised. Similarly, corpus linguists have not tended to focus on sexuality/gender either. This book is therefore an attempt to build a bridge between these two, often incongruent, research areas, by showing that each has something to offer the other and that by working in tangent, they can produce illuminating research outcomes. One way that researchers can be more confident in their claims about the existence of discourses is to highlight the ways in which ‘patterns of association – how lexical items tend to co-occur – are built up over large amounts of text and are often unavailable to intuition or conscious awareness. They can convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement’ (Hunston 2002: 109). A corpus linguistics approach may not allow us to step outside of discourse completely, but it should present the researcher with a perspective based on making sense of quantifiable patterns of language – at least ensuring that we are starting from a less-biased position with a reasonably large road map.

Quality research?

To expand upon the brief definition given above, corpus linguistics is ‘the study of language based on examples of real life language use’ (McEnery and Wilson 1996: 1). However, unlike qualitative approaches, corpus linguistics utilises bodies of electronically encoded text, implementing a more quantitative methodology, for example by using frequency information about occurrences of particular linguistic phenomena. Corpora are generally large (consisting of thousands or millions of words) and representative samples of a particular type of naturally occurring language use, so they can be used as a standard reference by which claims about language can be measured. The fact that they are encoded electronically means that complex calculations can be carried out on large amounts of text, revealing linguistic patterns and frequency information that would otherwise take days or months to uncover by hand, and which may run counter to intuition.

In addition, electronic corpora are often annotated with additional linguistic information, the most common being part-of-speech information, which allows large-scale grammatical analyses to be carried out. Other types of information can be encoded within corpora – for example, in spoken corpora (containing transcripts of dialogue), attributes such as sex, age, socio-economic group and region can be encoded for each participant. This allows language comparisons to be made about different types of speakers. For example, Rayson et al. (1997) have shown that speakers from economically advantaged groups use actually and really more than those from less-advantaged groups, who are more likely to use words like say, said and says as well as numbers and taboo words.

Corpus-based (or equivalent) methods have been used from as early as the nineteenth century. The diary studies of infant language acquisition (Taine 1877, Preyer 1889), or Käding’s (1897) frequency distribution of sequences of letters in an 11-million word corpus of German focused on collections of large, naturally occurring language use. However, up until the 1970s, only a small number of studies utilised corpus-based approaches. Quirk’s (1960) Survey of English Usage began in 1961, as did Brown and Kucera’s work on the Brown corpus of American English. It was not until the advent of widely available personal computers in the 1980s that corpus linguistics as a methodology became popular. Johansson (1991) shows that the number of such studies doubled for every five-year period between 1976–91.

Corpus linguistics has since been employed in a number of areas of linguistic enquiry, including dictionary creation (Clear et al. 1996), as an aid to interpretation of literary texts (Louw 1997), forensic linguistics (Woolls and Coulthard 1998), language description (Sinclair 1999), language variation studies (Biber 1988) and language teaching materials (Johns 1997). However, the corpus linguistics approach has not been without its share of criticism. For example, Widdowson (2000) argues that both corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis are problematic, constituting linguistics applied rather than applied linguistics. Corpus linguistics only offers ‘a partial account of real language’ (2000: 7) because it does not address the lack of correspondence between corpus findings and native speaker intuitions. Widdowson also questions the validity of analysts’ interpretations of corpus data and raises questions about the methodological processes that they choose to use, suggesting that the ones which computers find easier to carry out will be chosen in preference to more complex forms of analysis. Borsley and Ingham (2002) criticise corpus-based approaches because it is difficult to draw conclusions about language based on a finite sample of language – what is not in a corpus may be just as important as what is there. They also argue that language is endowed with meaning by native speakers and therefore cannot be derived from a corpus. See Stubbs (2001a, 2002) for rejoinders to these articles.

Despite these qualms, some discourse analysts have used corpora in order to analyse texts such as political speeches (Flowerdew 1997, Fairclough 2000, Piper 2000), teaching materials (Stubbs and Gerbig 1993, Wickens 1998), scientific writing (Atkinson 1999) and newspaper articles (Caldas-Coulthard and Moon 1999, van Dijk 1991). Such studies have shown how corpus analysis can uncover ideologies and evidence for disadvantage (see ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. What Can I Do With a Naked Corpus?
• 2. Unnatural Acts: The House of Lords Debates On Gay Male Law Reform
• 3. Flamboyant, Predatory, Self-Confessed Homosexual: Discourse Prosodies In the British Tabloid Press
• 4. ‘True Man’ and ‘McFairyland’: Gay Identities In an American Sitcom
• 5. ‘No Effeminates Please’: Discourses of Gay Men’s Personal Adverts
• 6. As Big As a Beercan: A Comparative Keyword Analysis of Lesbian and Gay Male Erotic Narratives
• 7. Making Safer Sex Sexy: Border Crossing, Informalisation and Gay Identity In Sexual Health Documentation
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References