(Another) New Book Announcement

[Baker, Paul]

Apologies for cross-posting.
 
Paul Baker, Lancaster University UK.
 
Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge.
 
Although sexual and romantic same-sex relationships between humans have
existed for millennia, the ways that such relationships and the people
who engage in them have been celebrated, normalised, accepted, ignored,
problematised or persecuted has been subject to considerable variation
over time and across different societies. Particularly over the last
fifty years there has been an inordinate amount of controversy and
negotiation concerning the ways that gay men have been talked and
written about. Public Discouses of Gay Men explores the variety of ways
that gay men are constructed in public settings in order to make sense
of the current set of discourses or 'ways of seeing the world' that
surround this group. 

Taking a corpus-based analysis approach to examine millions of words of
data from a range of contemporary sources, the book investigates how
conflicting discourses have clashed together, resulting in a definition
of homosexuality that is often ambivalent, confusing or contradictory. 

The corpus-based approach allows for the identification of repeated
patterns of language, showing the culmulative effect this has on
discourse in everyday life. The following techniques are used to
demonstrate these patterns: 

*	Collocational analyses - what sort of words tend to regularly
appear next to or near words like "gay" and "homosexual" and how does
this relate to different contexts? 
*	Discourse prosodies - how are gay people regularly constructed
in language use? What are the most common patterns - which patterns are
less frequent or resistant? 
*	Keywords and frequencies - what words, semantic concepts or
grammatical categories tend to occur more frequently than expected by
chance alone in public texts about gay men? What can this tell us about
the ways that discourses of gay identity are currently constructed? 
*	Dispersion - how are terms like "gay" dispersed throughout
particular texts and how do dispersion pattens relate to discourses of
homosexuality? 

>From conceptualisations of homosexuality as 'unnatural behaviour' in the
House of Lords to discourses of shame and outrageousness in tabloid
newspapers, it is still the case that homophobia underpins contemporary
understandings of homosexuality. However, homophobia is only part of the
story - personal adverts and erotic stories show us how desire is
constructed for gay men as intensely masculine and ostensibly
heterosexual. Additionally, sitcoms like Will & Grace reveal a
definition of homosexuality that is weighted in aspirational
class-consciousness and camp humour. The full range of discourses is
demonstrated in the final analysis chapter which examines safe sex
documentation. 

Ordering Information
 
ISBN: 0-415-34973-7. 

Telephone Routledge's Cusomter Hotline on 01264 343071 if calling from
the UK (or 441264 343071 if calling from outside the UK).  Or order at
http://www.routledge.com. 

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