Narrating the moral geography of rape in Swedish newspapers

In the master narrative of rape some women’s testimonies of sexual violence become particularly tainted with doubt and disbelief. Conversely, only some men’s sexually violent acts are unconditionally marked by guilt and blame. The chapter stresses the spatial dimension of this master narrative of rape. With an analysis of two hyper-medialised Swedish gang rape cases, it is highlighted how a moral geography is evoked in news narratives of rape. More specifically, it is argued that location, and narratives of women and men crossing boundaries, walking in line, being in place or invading space are used as proxy for the socio-spatial dimensions of power and morality

Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives

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