Wilkinson, Mark and Baker, Paul (2024) From ‘homosexual offence’ to ‘LGBT community’ : A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of queer representation in The Times between 1957-2017. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
From ‘homosexual offence’ to ‘LGBT community’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of queer representation in The Times between 1957-2017 Mark Joseph Wilkinson This thesis presents a novel combination of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) with poststructuralist (post-Marxist) discourse theory (PDT) (Laclau and Mouffe 2014) in order to analyse how The Times has used language to discursively construct queer identities between 1957-2017. The data is comprised of three sub-corpora built from relevant search terms between 1957-1967, 1979-1990, and 2003-2017. The subsequent analysis reveals that representations of queer identities are consistently (re)produced in similar ways such that certain identifications become naturalised, thus obfuscating their historical conditions of emergence. The implication is that queer identities, like all identities, are never fixed and tend to change as different discursive formations become hegemonic. Analysis began by thematically categorising the top 50 keywords and key terms from each of the three sub-corpora. This revealed that the most salient discourses were present across all three time periods, indicating that there were three discursive trajectories that shaped queer representation – biopolitics, capitalism, and erasure. Adapting the concept of the nodal point from PDT, one term was selected to represent each of the three discursive trajectories in each sub-corpus. These nine nodal points served as privileged signifiers, binding together a discursive formation. A combination of collocation and concordance analyses for each nodal point was then conducted. Results demonstrated that there was a dialectical relationship between the discursive construction of a queer Other and the hegemony of the British state during its various socioeconomic and political permutations. This study makes an original contribution by integrating PDT with corpus-based CDA so as to enrich the interpretation of the corpus findings. In addition to PDT, theories such as critical race theory were also introduced where they would enhance the analysis. This thesis, therefore, highlights how a greater engagement with theory benefits corpus-based CDA by combining innovative corpus- linguistic methods with equally innovative critical theory from across the academy.