Opposition as victimhood in newspaper debates about same-sex marriage

Abstract

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.

Marriage for all (‘Ehe fuer alle’)?! A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the marriage equality debate in Germany

“…In recent years, many analyses have focussed on marriage equality debates in particular, driven by the fact that (proposed) changes in legislation in several countries sparked a fairly wide public discussion. For example, there are studies on discourses of marriage equality in the UK focussing on discussions in Parliament (Bachmann, 2011;Findlay, 2017;Love & Baker, 2015), the radio show Moral Maze (Van der Bom, Coffey-Glover, Jones, Mills, & Paterson, 2015), and the UK press Turner et al, 2018). One of the key observations (made by Love & Baker, 2011;Van der Bom et al, 2015; as well as Turner et al, 2018) is that there has been a shift in strategies used by those opposing same-sex marriage, from explicit to implicit homophobic discourse, attributable to their desire to make their case while not coming across as 'bigoted and prejudiced against LGBT people' (Turner et al, 2018, p. 3).…”

Negotiations Between Chinese Gay Men and Lesbians and Their Parents About Marriage

“…They found that despite their disrupted identity, the gay men tried to approach identity reconciliation by accentuating the indomitable nature of their same-sex desire and downplaying the sinfulness of same-sex relationships in Islam. Another line of research is utilizing CDA to analyze public discourses regarding same-sex marriage to uncover discursive strategies adopted by same-sex marriage opponents (Jowett, 2017;Turner et al, 2018). Drawing on both corpus linguistics and CDA, Turner et al (2018) researched British newspaper articles that discussed introducing same-sex marriage into the United Kingdom.…”

“…Another line of research is utilizing CDA to analyze public discourses regarding same-sex marriage to uncover discursive strategies adopted by same-sex marriage opponents (Jowett, 2017;Turner et al, 2018). Drawing on both corpus linguistics and CDA, Turner et al (2018) researched British newspaper articles that discussed introducing same-sex marriage into the United Kingdom. Via CDA, this analysis showed that the opponents of same-sex marriage represented themselves as victims whose traditions, civil liberties, and moral values were endangered by the state.…”

The Representation of Cina on Indonesian Twitter

“…Thus, the main concept in CDA as discourse, a series of complex communicative events and reflected through written and oral [15]. Therefore, CDA can be applied by examining linguistic features, such as categorizing themes based on collocation [16], the use of pronouns in political rhetoric [17], and systemic functional linguistics [9], [18]. However, those researches have limitations.…”