1st Edition

Public Discourses of Gay Men

By Paul Baker Copyright 2005
    280 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    550 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Queer linguistics has only recently developed as an area of study; however academic interest in this field is rapidly increasing. Despite its growing appeal, many books on ‘gay language’ focus on private conversation and small communities. As such, Public Discourses of Gay Men represents an important corrective, by investigating a variety of sources in the public domain. A broad range of material, including tabloid newspaper articles, political debates on homosexual law and erotic narratives are used in order to analyse the language surrounding homosexuality. Bringing together queer linguistics and corpus linguistics the text investigate how gay male identities are constructed in the public domain.

    Acknowledgements 1. What Can I do with a Naked Corpus? 2. Unnatural Actus: The House of Lords debates on gay male law reform 3. Flamboyant, Predatory, Self-confessed Homosexual: Discourse prosodies in the British tabloid press 4. 'True Man' and 'Mc-fairyland': Gay identities in an American sitcom 5. 'No Effeminates Please': Discourses on gay men's personal adverts 6. As Big as a Beercan: A comparative keyword analysis of lesbian and gay male errotic narratives 7. Making Safer Sex Sexy: Border crossing, informalisation and gay identity in sexual health documentation 8. Conclusion Appendix References

    Biography

    Paul Baker is a lecturer at Lancaster University and the author of Polari: the Lost Language of Gay Men.