Language, normativity, and sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD): A corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the discursive construction of sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) as it surfaces in posts to an online mental health forum. SO-OCD is an anxiety disorder that involves having unwanted, intrusive thoughts as a consequence of conflict with normative sexual beliefs. The study focuses on the way normativity regulates communication about sexual identities, desires, and practices in a corpus of online posts by heterosexual men who pathologically doubt their sexual identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic methods, we investigate how writers linguistically orient to normativity in their posts. More specifically, analyses of keywords, n-grams, and concordances are used to uncover linguistic mechanisms that play a central role in users’ orientation to normativity and in the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with SO-OCD. (Sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD), heterosexuality, masculinity, normativity, heteronormativity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics)

Politics, pronouns and the players

“…Having now discussed Pelagos and where he is situated within the MMORPG, this section turns to discuss the official WoW fora. There is a growing body of research that examines how members of virtual communities of practice construct ideologies of gender and/or sexuality (see, for example, Potts 2015;Mackenzie 2018;Coimbra-Gomes & Motschenbacher 2019;Heritage & Koller 2020;Wright 2020). Given the limitations of space, the research into virtual communities of practice and the construction of gender/sexuality is too vast to fully appreciate in this paper.…”

Name That Community? Critical Reflections on the Ethics About Disseminating Research into Online Fetish Communities

“…Sometimes, researchers might be auditors (i.e., participants who sign up know that their data may be disseminated and read by other academics -as is the case with secondary analysis of data, e.g., the analysis provided and discussed by Long-Sutehall et al, 2010). However, in research which explores extant online data (e.g., content analysis of online I), researchers become either overhearers or eavesdroppers -that is to say, usually researchers are not-ratified and data producers are usually unaware that they will have their data looked at by such people (though, see Coimbra-Gomes & Motschenbacher, 2019).…”

Linguistic and Psychological Features of Autogenous and Reactive Obsessions in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

“…The language used by individuals with OCD has not been studied quantitatively outside of two corpus linguistic studies that looked at sexual orientation OCD (SO-OCD; Coimbra-Gomes, 2020;Coimbra-Gomes & Motschenbacher, 2019). Knapton (2016), in a qualitative study using the autogenous-reactive model, looked at individuals' experiences with OCD and noted the diverse inter-and intra-individual variations of symptoms within the categories of autogenous and reactive obsessions.…”