Article published In: Corpus Linguistics in Language and Sexuality Studies: Developments and Prospects
Edited by Heiko Motschenbacher
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:2] 2018
► pp. 237–262
Transgender identity labels in the British press
A corpus-based discourse analysis
Published online: 27 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17017.zot
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17017.zot
Abstract
This contribution focuses on the linguistic representation of transgender people in the British press, through the analysis of a
corpus of newspaper articles collected between 2013 and 2015. Within the framework of Queer Linguistics and Corpus-based Discourse
Analysis, this study analyses the linguistic choices retraceable in the corpus under investigation, conveying a given
representation of transgender individuals as social subjects. The analysis focuses on naming strategies and the collective
representation of transgender identities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical framework
- 2.1Queer linguistics: (Non-)heteronormativity in the press
- 2.2Trans identities and language
- 2.3Corpus-based discourse analysis: Combining approaches
- 3.Methodological tools
- 3.1The TransCor: Corpus description and collection
- 3.2Corpus tools: Frequencies, concordances, and collocations
- 3.3Semantic prosody
- 4.The British press on transgender people
- 4.1Combining frequency and concordance analysis: Naming strategies
- 4.2Collocation analysis: Trans people and other groups
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
References
References (56)
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Anthony, Lawrence. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.4m). <[URL]> (December 30, 2016)
Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). 2015. Regional Publications. Combined Total Circulation Certificate. <[URL]> (September 16, 2015)
. 2014. Bad wigs and screaming mimis: Using corpus-assisted techniques to carry out critical discourse analysis of the representation of trans people in the British press. In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, Chris Hart & Piotr Cap (eds), 211–235. London: Bloomsbury.
Baker, Paul, Gabrielatos, Costas, KhosraviNik, Majid, Krzyżanowski, Michał, McEnery, Tony & Wodak, Ruth. 2008. A useful methodological synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society 19(3): 273–306.
Baker, Paul, Gabrielatos, Costas & McEnery, Tony. 2013a. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes. The Representation of Islam in the British Press. New York: Cambridge University Press.
. 2013b. Sketching muslims: A corpus driven analysis of the representation around the word ‘muslim’ in the British press 1998–2009. Applied Linguistics 34(3): 255–278.
Capuzza, Jamie & Spencer, Leland. 2016. Regressing, progressing, or transgressing on the small screen? Transgender characters on U.S. scripted television series. Communication Quarterly 65(2): 214–230.
Doan, Petra L. 2010. The tyranny of gendered spaces – Reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy. Gender, Place & Culture. A Journal of Feminist Geography 17(5): 635–654.
GIRES. 2015. Gender Identity Research & Education Center. <[URL]> (November 17, 2017)
GLAAD. 2017. Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. <[URL]> (November 17, 2017)
Gries, Stefan T. 2008. Dispersion and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(4): 403–437.
Hall, Kira. 1997. “Go suck your husband’s sugarcane!”: Hijras and the use of sexual insult. In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Anna Livia & Kira Hall (eds), 430–460. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Kira & O’Donovan, Veronica. 1996. Shifting gender positions among Hindi-speaking hijras. In Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, Victoria Bergvall, Janet Bing & Alice Freed (eds), 228–266. London: Longman.
Hartner, Marcus. 2015. Imagining transgender: Reinscriptions of normativity in Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
. FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research 8(1): 109–122.
Hess, Linda M. 2017. “My whole life I’ve been dressing up like a man”: Negotiations of queer aging and queer temporality in the TV Series Transparent
. European Journal of American Studies 11(3): 1–19.
Horak, Laura. 2014. Trans on YouTube. Intimacy, visibility, temporality. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1(4): 572–585.
Jones, Lucy. forthcoming. Discourses of transnormativity in vloggers’ identity construction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.
Jucker, Andreas H. 1992. Social Stylistics. Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kirk, John M. 2009. Word frequency use or misuse? In What’s in a Word-List? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction, Dawn Archer (ed), 17–34. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Kulick, Don. 1996. Causing a commotion: Scandal as resistance among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Anthropology Today 12(6): 3–7.
. 1998. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
LexisNexis. 2016. LexisNexis. <[URL]> (May 15, 2016)
Litosseliti, Lia. 2002. ‘Head to head’: Gendered repertoires in newspaper arguments. In Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis, Lia Litosseliti & Jane Sunderland (eds), 129–148. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Louw, Bill. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology.
In Honour of John Sinclair
, Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 48–95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Milani, Tommaso. 2013. Are ‘queers’ really ‘queer’? Language, identity and same-sex desire in a South African online community. Discourse & Society 25(5): 615–633.
McEnery, Tony & Hardie, Andrew. 2011. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morrish, Elisabeth & Sauntson, Helen. 2007. New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010. Language, Gender and Sexual Identity. Poststructuralist Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2011. Taking Queer Linguistics further: Sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2121: 149–179.
Motschenbacher, Heiko & Stegu, Martin. 2013. Queer Linguistic approaches to discourse. Discourse & Society 24(5): 519–535.
NCTE. 2003. National Center for Transgender Equality. <[URL]> (March 10, 2018)
Partington, Alan S. 1998. Pattern and Meaning: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Partington, Alan S., Duguid, Alison & Taylor, Charlotte. 2013. Patterns and Meaning in Discourse. Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schröter, Melani & Taylor, Charlotte (eds). 2018. Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse: Empirical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sinclair, John M. (ed). 1987. Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing and the Development of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. London: Collins.
Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender history, homonormativity, and disciplinarity. Radical History Review 1001: 145–157.
Stubbs, Michael. 1995. Collocations and semantic profiles: On the cause of the trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 2(1): 23–55.
Taylor, Charlotte. 2013. Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(1): 81–113.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. The representation of social actors. In Texts and Practice, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard & Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge.
Webster, Lexi. forthcoming. ‘I am I’: Self-constructed transgender identities in Internet-mediated forum communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.
Women and Equalities Committee. 2016. Transgender Equality. First Report of Session 2015–16. House of Commons. <[URL]> (August 10, 2017)
Zimman, Lal. 2009. ‘The other kind of coming out’: Transgender people and the coming out narrative genre. Gender & Language 3(1): 53–80.
. 2013. Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2(1): 5–43.
. 2014. The discursive construction of sex: Remaking and reclaiming the gendered body in talk about genitals among trans men. In Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis & Joshua Raclaw (eds), 13–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zottola, Angela. 2018. Living as a woman. The British press on trans identities. In Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies, Giuseppe Balirano & Oriana Palusci (eds), 168–189. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
. forthcoming. Being Sophia Burset: Translating transgender identity on Orange is the New Black
. Cultus.
Cited by (25)
Cited by 25 other publications
Castro Mosqueda, Hector
García León, David L., Javier E. García León & Mónica Rodríguez-Castro
Kirey-Sitnikova, Yana
Nguyen, Minh Hieu & Brian Clancy
Song, Qijun
Sreejak, Thanawut
Bracco, Sofia E., Sabine Sczesny & Marie Gustafsson Sendén
García León, David L.
Genovese, Emma
Gillings, Mathew & Gerlinde Mautner
Mohammadi, Ariana N
Paglialunga, Letizia
Rodríguez-Castro, Mónica & Concepción B. Godev
2024. Implicit agent se-constructions. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 37:2 ► pp. 628 ff.
Fitzgerald, Saira
García León, Javier E. & Mónica Rodríguez-Castro
2023. A corpus-based discourse analysis of transgender labels in the Spanish-speaking press. Journal of Language and Sexuality 12:2 ► pp. 227 ff.
Hamouda, Wafya, Umair Munir Hashmi & Abdulfattah Omar
Lawson, Robert & Laura Coffey-Glover
Olveira-Araujo, Rubén
Wilkinson, Mark
Zhang, Ke, Chao Lu & Jingyuan Zhang
Zottola, Angela
García León, David Leonardo & Javier Enrique García León
Jones, Lucy
Konnelly, Lex
2021. Nuance and normativity in trans linguistic research. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 71 ff.
Phillips, Robert
2021. A corpus-assisted analysis of the discursive construction of LGBT Singaporeans in media coverage of Pink Dot. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:2 ► pp. 180 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
