In this article, we examine the way that audiences respond to particular representations of poverty. Using clips from the Channel 4 television programme Benefits Street we conducted focus groups in four locations across the UK, working with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who had different experiences with the benefits system. Benefits Street (2014) is
This article uses thematic qualitative analysis and techniques from corpus linguistics to interrogate the way that listeners interpret and make sense of Blurred Lines. The song was controversial upon its release as many listeners felt that it implied that even if women said they did not want sex, in fact, they did. Such issues of sexual consent are a key issue for feminist analysis, particularly within current debates about 'rape culture'. We investigated listeners' interpretations of the song, distributing an online questionnaire to over 1000 respondents. We found that most listeners either interpreted the song as relating to sexual consent and took offence, or felt that it was simply representative of the genre, and found the song unproblematic. However, a number of listeners expressed conflict in relation to the song, enjoying it musically but finding the lyrics particularly problematic. Our analysis investigates the language that respondents used to negotiate their relationships with the different elements of the song.
In this article, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles that discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are represented and represent themselves as victims whose moral values, traditions and civil liberties are being threatened by the state. Specifically, we argue that victimhood is invoked in a way that both enables and permits discourses of implicit homophobia.
KingdomThis paper interrogates media representations of same-sex marriage debates in the UK using a combination of corpus linguistics tools and close reading, and drawing on Queer Linguistics.Following related work by Baker (2004), Love and Baker (2015), and Bachmann (2011), we analyse a 1.3 million-word corpus of UK national newspaper texts compiled for the Discourses of Marriage Research Group. Our corpus stretches from September 2011 and the announcement of a government consultation on same-sex marriage, to April 2014 when the first same-sex marriages took place. Using a top-down approach we investigate the discourses drawn upon in same-sex marriage debates (as indexed by keywords and key semantic fields) and uncover the binary social categories used to normalise social structures and hold the same-sex marriage debate in place. We also consider which social actors are (not) given a voice and/or agency and discuss how (same-sex) marriage is constituted.
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