Article published In: Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 13:2 (2024) ► pp.129–153
Same-sex marriage, gay marriage, or equal marriage?
Category construction in a corpus of 21st century newspaper texts
Published online: 12 July 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00034.pat
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00034.pat
Abstract
Changes to marriage legislation across the globe have received
much academic and public attention. However, the labels used to categorise
different marital configurations are somewhat under researched. In this paper we
analyse the premodification of marriage in a corpus of UK
newspaper articles (2000–2018) to establish which labels are most commonly used
in reference to same-sex marriage. These are gay marriage, same-sex
marriage, homosexual marriage, and equal marriage.
Drawing on the notion of category construction, we emphasise the fact that these
labels are not neutral synonyms, as each encodes a particular understanding
of same-sex marriage. Some labels even linguistically exclude certain groups,
such as those who are bisexual or transgender. We use the tools of corpus-based
discourse analysis to consider the nuanced differences between the category
labels and consider whether the limitations of the labels are ever directly
challenged.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Marriage, identity, and category labels
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1Category label by source
- 4.2Same-sex marriage
- 4.3Gay marriage
- 4.4Homosexual marriage
- 4.5Equal marriage
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
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