Discourse and Identity in a Corpus of Lesbian Erotica

Abstract

So far we have used the tools of discourse analysis to explore how sexual identities are constructed across a range of texts and contexts. In this and the remaining chapters, we move to an examination of how sexual identities are represented in a number of written text types. In this chapter, we employ some methods of corpus linguistics to investigate how desires and identities are portrayed in a 60,000 word corpus of lesbian erotica from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The corpus is made up of all the short stories contained in the magazines On Our Backs and Bad Attitude. Both of these publications are produced by lesbians for a lesbian readership and are characterised by sexually explicit stories, many depicting ‘adventurous’ lesbian sexual encounters, sado-masochism (S/M), subordination and domination.