Thesis Title: ‘Sluts’ and ‘shaggers’: media discourse, gender and sexual behaviour
Abstract: In the post #MeToo landscape there is a growing momentum in public discourse to address issues of sexual abuse and predatory behaviour and how measures can be put in place to prevent them happening again.
However, what has so far been overlooked is the role of mass-media language in newspapers, magazines and online in portraying and reinforcing assumed underlying values linked to norms of gendered sexual behaviour. The media act as a “popular tour guide” for the public, fact and opinion mediatising how people should respond (Berns, 2004).
In partnership with The Fawcett Society, my project will investigate the role of mass-media narratives from a linguistic perspective, looking at how media language frames, interprets and linguistically packages such norms when it comes to both men and women. The overall goal is to examine the impact of the media in shaping public attitudes to sexualities and what this may say about encoded cultural misogyny and subsequent predatory sexual behaviour. It will feature media corpora from different time points to examine diachronic linguistic change and interrogate what is deemed “acceptable” modes of behaviour in the contemporary socio-cultural landscape. This will be achieved through the below research objectives:
1. Narrative analysis of sexual behaviour in media discourse: focusing on both male and female depictions through creation of a corpus
2. Public perception survey: analysis of the impact of contrasting media sexual behaviour narratives on readers/consumers through a perception study
3. Media creators survey: interviews with journalists and editors to understand intent and cultural modes of mediatisation
4. Create resources to support media representations: creation of assets for both media and public consumption, which will identify concrete examples of imbalanced sexual-themed discourse. The goal is to support and embed non-gender-biased communication of sexual behaviours.
Primary Supervisor: Dr Sophie Holmes-Elliott