The hate that dare not speak its name?

Abstract

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.3.1.03lov
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
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College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Language Research at Aston (CLaRA)
Additional Information: © John Benjamins Publishing Company This is an open access article under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Publication ISSN: 2213-1272
Last Modified: 27 Mar 2024 08:16
Date Deposited: 12 Mar 2020 16:04
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.jbe ... /jlac.3.1.03lov (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2015-10-02
Authors: Love, Robbie (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-7212-1165)
Baker, Paul

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