TY  - JOUR
A1  - Motschenbacher, Heiko
T1  - Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
T2  - Discourse studies
N2  - This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.
KW  - collocation analysis
KW  - concordance analysis
KW  - corpus-assisted discourse studies
KW  - corpus linguistics
KW  - critical discourse studies
KW  - desire-identity shift
KW  - gay men
KW  - history
KW  - keyword analysis
KW  - language and sexuality
KW  - personal narratives
KW  - sexual normativity
KW  - stonewall
KW  - United States
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53472
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-534720
SN  - 1461-4456
SN  - 1461-7080
VL  - 22
IS  - 1
SP  - 64
EP  - 86
PB  - SAGE Publications
CY  - London [u. a.]
ER  -